● 06.07.15

● Links 7/6/2015: Steam Machines, KDE Applications 15.04.2 in Chakra

Posted in News Roundup at 10:30 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• cannot lie: learning Linux took a lot of time. I spent approximately 3 years as a daily linux user before landing my first full-time Linux-based position. However, my time was not as well spent as it could have been. Knowing then what I know now (and what I’m attempting to share with you), I could have been in a Linux position within 6 months.

Desktop

• Clearly, there is still a lot of work to do spreading GNU/Linux desktops but a lot of progress has been made.

• Whenever I’m not at home, I’m taking my ThinkPad laptop with me hat I installed Linux Mint on. While I could run a flavor of Windows on the device as well, I made the deliberate decision to install Linux on the device to discover what it has to offer.

• I discovered the window customization settings recently on the system and have to admit that I wish that Windows would offer similar options. While it is certainly possible to use third-party programs for that on Windows, at least for some functionality, there is nothing comparable when it comes to native Windows customization options.

Kernel Space

• The Linux 4.2 kernel will bring to mainline two prominent new Direct Rendering Manager drivers.

Benchmarks

• One of the biggest limitations of Nouveau remains and that’s the lack of proper re-clocking support. In today’s testing, I attempted to re-clock the graphics cards that support it with Nouveau, but most of the time they couldn’t be statically re-clocked to their highest performance state. Most Kepler GPUs can be re-clocked to the mid-level (0a) but would lock-up and produce artifacts as illustrated above when attempting to hit the highest performance state for the video memory. Of the GPUs tested, only the GeForce GTX 650 was able to hit the 0f (highest) state and run without failing. Nouveau developers have been working on re-clocking for years but it’s an incredibly large task without support or technical documentation from Nouveau. It seems unlikely that this year the feature will be accomplished, especially for seeing any dynamic re-clocking out-of-the-box.

Applications

• The first week in Google Summer of Code was longer than expected (previous week I celebrated my birthday and was not available to program a lot :D). But now I’m writing this first report to present initial results that have been obtained in the LabPlot project under the supervision of Alexander Semke during the beginning of this hot (even in Amsterdam) summer season.

• Kovid Goyal has had the great pleasure of announcing earlier today, June 5, the immediate availability for download of Calibre 2.30.0 open-source and cross-platform ebook library management software.

Proprietary

• Plex, Inc. has announced earlier that a new version of its cross-platform and acclaimed Plex Media Server software has been released for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The popular Lovecraftian action platformer from developer Spooky Squid Games has been released for Linux with a massive content update, including two new bonus levels and a new “gamepad preserving” novice mode. An awesome new trailer has also been released in collaboration with photographer Paul Hillier…

• In addition to the Steam Linux news this week that the Steam Controller and Steam Machines is up for pre-order and the Steam Linux usage has dropped to an all-time low, I noticed the Linux game count is well past 1,200 titles.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE’s second update of its 15.04 series of Applications is now available in Chakra. With this release kde-workspace has also been updated to version 4.11.20 and kdelibs and kdepim to 4.14.9. Have in mind that the applications that have been ported to Frameworks 5 will not be updated in the stable repositories but remain at their previous versions. The new versions of these packages are available in the [kde-next] repository which provides Plasma 5.

• Today we have some awesome news for all Chakra GNU/Linux users, as its developers announced the immediate availability of some of the latest Linux technologies in the main software repositories of the Arch Linux-based distribution.

• Sorvig Morten of The Qt Company has announced that the cross-platform high-DPI support for the Qt tool-kit has entered a tech preview state.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• While GNOME 3.1.7.2, which is a milestone towards the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment due for release on September 23, 2015, was announced last week, there are still some core components that receive updates as part of this development snapshot.

Distributions

• Once again, Arne Exton has had the great pleasure of informing us about the availability of a new build for his Fedora-based Exton|Defender Linux distribution, which is now based on the recently released Fedora 22 operating system.

Gentoo Family

• The developers behind the Gentoo-based Sabayon Linux distribution has had the great pleasure of announcing that the latest monthly update ships with next-generation technologies.

• Alexander Tratsevskiy has had the great pleasure of informing Calculate Linux users about the immediate availability for download of a new maintenance release for the 14.16 series of the distribution.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat’s latest instalment of open source development tools, Software Collections 2, is now available.

• The collection includes web development tools, dynamic languages and databases which are delivered on a separate lifecycle from the company’s Enterprise Linux.

• With just a couple of weeks to go before Red Hat Summit in Boston, the firm is clearly not holding back on news to save it for the event itself.

• This week sees the firm come forward with new web development tools, extensions to dynamic languages and databases — and support for multiple language versions.

• Red Hat has announced that it is bringing together components in its software portfolio to create a suite of software that makes it easier to build private clouds. Red Hat Cloud Suite for Applications mashes up the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform with the OpenShift by Red Hat platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment with Red Hat CloudForms IT management software allowing for a complete private cloud stack.

• Red Hat Summit 2015 will feature keynote presentations by several Red Hat executives, including: Jim Whitehurst, president and chief executive officer; Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies; Craig Muzilla, senior vice president, Application Platform Products Business Group; and Marco Bill-Peter, vice president, Customer Experience and Engagement.

Fedora

• DigitalOcean is a cloud provider that provides a one-click deployment of a Fedora Cloud instance to an all-SSD server in under a minute. After some quick work by the DigitalOcean and Fedora Cloud teams we are pleased to announce that you can now make it rain Fedora 22 droplets!

• One significant change over previous Fedora droplets is that this is the first release to have support for managing your kernel internally. Meaning if you dnf update kernel-core and reboot then you’ll actually be running the kernel you updated to. Win!

• Jan Kirik, the Fedora Program Manager as of this week, announced the call for nominations for positions on FESCo, the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee and for one of the elected postions on the Fedora Council, our top-level leadership and governance body. If you’re interested in helping lead Fedora’s technical and/or strategic direction, add your self-nomination.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• PC gaming has historically been a Windows-affair. For the most part, this works rather well. After all, Microsoft’s operating system is easy to use and has incredible hardware compatibility. With that said, Windows does have a fair bit of overhead both from a performance and price perspective.

• For many people, a Linux-based operating system makes more sense as it is free in cost while being lightweight from a performance perspective. In other words, the modular nature makes Linux ideal for focusing on gaming. Valve’s long-promised Steam Machine concept was designed with this in mind, and after a long wait, you can finally order one.

• For anyone that didn’t get a chance yesterday to look at the Steam Machines up for pre-ordering, these SteamOS loaded devices all come with Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GeForce graphics.

• The lines are blurring between gaming PCs and traditional consoles. Valve’s Steam Machines, gaming PCs designed to express the best of both worlds, are ostensibly the prototype for this awesome future, and they’re now available for preorder. Too bad they’re not something you should buy — yet.

• Valve, along with its hardware partners Alienware and Cyberpower, plans to release the first Steam Machines starting Oct. 16. That’s when people who preorder should start receiving the first units. Retailers, however, won’t start stocking Valve’s SteamOS-powered PCs until Nov. 10. The PC gaming boxes start at $450. That is also when the Steam Controller and Steam Link in-house game-streaming device debut. After this first wave, other Valve hardware partners should start releasing their take on the Steam Machine. This is all part of Valve’s attempt to create a viable ecosystem for gaming that stands apart from Microsoft’s Windows while simultaneously giving consumers an easy-to-understand alternative to buying a console or building a PC.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Overall, I’m very happy with the Inspiron 14 Ubuntu Edition. In my original blog post, I said that I wanted a notebook that cost $300 to $450, and Dell delivered a pretty solid computer for significantly less! Even if I upgraded to an SSD, I’d still be well within a reasonable price range.

• I’m incredibly thankful to Dell for taking a chance on selling Ubuntu to mainstream US consumers. They are potentially putting Ubuntu in the hands of many new users who might just call them for support, and supporting Ubuntu is a pretty big investment on their part. I wish Dell all the luck in the world with this project and hope that other Linux enthusiasts will support Dell the next time they’re looking for a laptop. I also hope that Dell’s offerings will help push Ubuntu further into the mainstream in America.

• Dell has been expanding their line of Linux laptops in recent months, offering Ubuntu editions of a MacBook Pro competitor and the XPS 13 thin – and – light ultrabook.

• But those two particular notebooks are pricey. If you’re looking for something cheaper, you’re in luck—Dell recently rolled out several inexpensive Ubuntu laptops that compete with Chromebooks and cheap Windows laptops.

• Kevin Gunn has sent his regular report on the new features and under-the-hood improvements that have been implemented in the last couple of months in the Unity8 and Mir projects for Ubuntu Linux.

• Canonical announced earlier today, June 6, on its Twitter account that you can win a BQ Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition smartphone, and many other prizes, is you take a short, 10-minute survey.

• The UK- based computer software company Canonical in partnership with Spanish manufacturer BQ has announced the second Ubuntu smartphone, Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition. Canonical said that the Aquaris E5 HD will be available for sale from mid June 2015.

Flavours and Variants

• As the name implies, Ubuntu MATE is using the MATE desktop, so giving back upstream to the MATE team is not actually all that surprising. It’s not a large sum of money, but that is not the point. The Ubuntu MATE project doesn’t gather a lot of money from donations, but they made a point of donating a part of those proceeds to other projects, mostly to make a point.

• After reporting last month that the first Alpha version of the upcoming Mangaka Nyu Linux distribution is available for testing, we’re now informing you about the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta release.

Devices/Embedded

• Believe it or not, more and more hardware companies are making waves by selling all sorts of computers powered by a GNU/Linux distribution, such as Ubuntu, which is the world’s most popular free operating system.

• Nexcom launched a 3.5-inch SBC and COM Express Type 6 module featuring Intel’s 4K-ready, 14nm “Braswell” SoCs, and offering extended temperature operation.

• Nexcom’s 3.5-inch EBC 356 SBC and ICES 621 COM Express Type 6 computer-on-module are part of a new wave of embedded devices running Intel’s Braswell SoCs, including the Congatec Conga-QA4 Qseven COM we covered earlier this week.

• With the release of Lumenera’s Linux software development kit 2.0—which supports the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system—the company’s line of USB 3.0 cameras now feature Linux support.

Phones

Android

• Smartwatches are all the rage these days, but what happens when you put the Moto 360 head to head against the Apple Watch? Well a writer at Tech Republic did just that and came away with some interesting insights as to the pluses and minuses of each smartwatch.

• Smartwatches are the most overhyped new category in tech. I wore Android Wear and Apple Watch for a month to see if there are productivity benefits for professionals. Here’s what I found.

• [...]

• Plenty of people claim to be blown away by the design of the Apple Watch, but I’m not one of them. It’s thicker and heavier than I expected. I also don’t like the square shape, which reminds me of the calculator watches of the 1980s. I generally find the circular design of the Moto 360 more appealing–if it wasn’t so massive.

• Slack introduced its updated Android app today with a new design and a host of new features including emoji support, notifications for teams and tabs.

• Google has demonstrated how its Android Pay mobile payments service will work for making in-store and in-app purchases, for payments made through a banking partner mobile app, and how users will be able to pay for items such as a Coca-Cola from a vending machine using just the points stored in a customer loyalty account.

• In Google’s attempt to be a part of almost every aspect of your life, they are now moving into the automotive realm, and while it took more than a year, if the recent mention at Google I/O 2015 is any indication, we can expect to find Android Auto in a slew of vehicles by the end of 2016. Last week, Hyundai announced that they were the first car manufacturer to feature Android Wear on production vehicles, starting with the Hyundai Sonata 2015, which is what we have on hand today.

• The Android vs. iPhone debate is a tedious one, but don’t expect it to slow down anytime soon. While this endless debate can often be boring for those of us who aren’t overly enthusiastic users — “fanboys” — there are some aspects of the iOS vs. Android rivalry that are pretty interesting.

• Google recently announced Android M alongside other products, revealing the most important new features of the upcoming Android update. Additionally, the company also listed several other new features heading to Android M devices, even though it didn’t have time to demo them on stage.

• One of the best parts of cutting out pay TV is getting rid of the clunky, costly set-top box. Instead of paying stiff monthly fees for that living-room eyesore, you can swap in a streaming media player for glorious living-room minimalism.

• Android gamers are used to being second-class citizens, as games tend to hit the platform long after they debut on iOS, if they get an Android port at all. Things are getting much better, but they’re not perfect, and this might be the worst offender yet: four years after Final Fantasy Tactics hit iOS, it’s now available on Android devices.

• Android launcher apps comprise something of a niche category. Launchers take over your Android phone’s home screen and replace it with a different interface and, often times, new functionality.

• To use Android Auto, you’ll need two things: an Android smartphone and a car that runs the Android Auto software. (Sorry, iPhone fans — you’ll have to wait for roadsters that support Apple CarPlay later this year and in 2016.)

Free Software/Open Source

• Renater, France’s research and education telecom network, is probably the first public administration outside of Spain to use LibrePlan, an open source project management solution, assumes Jeroen Baten, involved in the tool’s development. The French network connectivity agency started using LibrePlan in early 2014, says Baten.

• In order to build its wide range of products – more than 80 in total – the organisation relies heavily on bespoke development and open source technologies. This offers BMJ greater agility, as well as the cost benefits, said Cooper.

• “Open source has always been really important to us and probably why we have a reasonably big in-house team to manage all of that open source technology and to tie it all together. And I think it will become increasingly important,” she said.

• The answer, said Stirman, lies in open source. “The only way to move the needle is with an open-source strategy. First, get massive adoption. Then, figure out how to monetize it.”

• The freemium model has been a good way for companies to build businesses around open-source projects. Offer the community-built software for free, and then offer advanced security, support and tooling as a high-value, commercial edition.

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise has launched an open source UX that allows IT pros to provide a familiar user experience across different enterprise applications.

• Between the new storage systems and management software announced at its annual customer conference this week, Hewlett-Packard sneaked in a small present for developers that promises to take some of the work out of building complex corporate applications. But what the framework perhaps lacks in disruptive potential it more than makes up for in strategic significance.

• I’ve been saying for some time now that open source was not about innovation, but rather freedom. It was the freedom to deploy what you want, when you want it that led to the massive global adoption of open source platforms. I get more than a little peeved, then, when I still see references in mainstream media circles about ragtag groups of conscientious hippies who don’t care about money and sing about sharing software. Don’t get me wrong, I *love* singing about sharing free software, but the false implication of this narrative is that there’s no money in free software. This is what Paul Krugman would call a “zombie lie” – an argument that just won’t go away no matter how many times you kill it with facts.

• Within a few days after its launch, over 1000 BTC has been stored on Copay already and the open source code on GitHub is being contributed by hundreds of bitcoin developers worldwide, offering improvements in the code and new features that could increase the east of use of the Copay wallet.

• Capgemini are currently working on Apollo, an open source application platform built on top of the Apache Mesos cluster manager, which is designed to power next generation web services, microservices and big data platforms running at scale.

• Support for two in-development Rockchip motherboard designs have been added to Coreboot for possible use in Chrome OS devices.

• Day two of HP Discover 2015 kicked off on a fun note, with Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Meg Whitman announcing the company has signed a five-year agreement with 20th Century Fox and James Cameron-owned production company Lightstorm Entertainment to integrate HP’s technology into the AVATAR movie franchise.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The lack of apps are a common problem for operating systems challenging the two dominant mobile platforms, Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. Without crucial software like WhatsApp for text messaging, customers steer clear and head for better supported operating systems from the big two.

• Mozilla’s PR cordon have not let me speak with Gal in several years, the last time I had the opportunity to speak with him was in January of 2013 as part of a FirefoxOS consumer push.

SaaS/Big Data

• A year to the week after launching its homegrown in-memory stream processing platform into general availability, DataTorrent Inc. is releasing the code for the core execution engine under a free license. The move levels the playing field against the open-source alternatives that have hit the scene since then.

• Manila isn’t restricted to deployment in traditional storage arrays, and there is currently supplier development activity on the Ceph and GlusterFS open-source storage platforms. This includes support for protocols outside of traditional NAS (NFS/SMB), for example using device drivers built into the KVM hypervisor that use the native Ceph protocol. The open-source project NFS-Ganesha that implements an NFS server in user space can also be used to abstract underlying NFS server hardware, although this does introduce latency and more complexity into the data path.

• Real-time processing of streaming data in Hadoop typically comes down to choosing between two projects: Storm or Spark. But a third contender, which has been open-sourced from a formerly commercial-only offering, is about to enter the race, and like those components, it may have a future outside of Hadoop.

• Those platforms, VMware in particular, have attained an air of unassailability as virtualisation has swept the world’s datacentres. But there is another virtualisation environment beginning to gain significant attention – the open-source, modular cloud platform OpenStack.

Databases

• At the MongoDB World 2015 conference this week, MongoDB outlined forthcoming additions to the open source document database that cover everything from connectors to business intelligence applications that enable MongoDB to respond to SQL read requests to the ability to join data sets.

• One of the primary reasons IT organizations adopt NoSQL databases is because their current relational database can’t scale to meet their existing needs. But that makes the cost of migrating a database substantial. Given an option, most IT organizations would rather put off that expense as long as possible—if not forever.

Business

Semi-Open Source

BSD

• The FreeBSD release engineering team has laid out plans for the next FreeBSD 10 release.

• FreeBSD 10.2 is planned to debut on 31 August. The newly-published release schedule pegs the code freeze to begin on 3 July, weekly betas to begin on 10 July, release candidates from the end of July through August, and then the official 10.2-RELEASE at the end of August.

• Similar to the Linux functionality of the past several years for having beautiful virtual terminals at the native monitor resolution, etc, DragonFlyBSD’s syscons is receiving the KMS treatment when the i915 and Radeon drivers are loaded.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNUzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla suite, and GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license restricts distribution in several ways incompatible with freedom 0.

• Two years ago today, Edward Snowden tipped the first domino in a chain that led to a historic international conversation about the role of surveillance in modern life. One year ago today, we launched Email Self-Defense, an infographic and guide to encrypting your email with free software to protect your privacy and resist bulk surveillance.

• In modern times social networking is a double edged sword. While it enables us to spread the word quickly, it also puts way much information on us in hands of companies like Facebook or Twitter. It also enables law enforcement authorities to crack down on activists.

Public Services/Government

• The government of the autonomous region of Galicia (Spain) is inviting the region’s universities to nominate open source projects for its annual Best Project award. The first prize is EUR 1500 and the second EUR 750.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• Reading, writing, arithmetic, and RepRap 3D printing. These will be the new and revised fundamentals of learning for a number of lucky kids in Asia soon. While the world of manufacturing is being revolutionized by 3D printing, so are many of the educational practices and tools for children in science and technology as digital design and 3D printing enter the scene and take hold of the younger generation’s interest.

Programming

• SourceForge is a long established web-based service that offers source code repository, downloads mirrors, bug tracker and other features. It acts as a centralized location for software developers to control and manage free and open-source software development.

• Version 3.0 of the Open Computer Vision library is now available. The release announcement reads, “With a great pleasure and great relief OpenCV team finally announces OpenCV 3.0 gold release, the most functional and the fastest OpenCV ever. And yet it’s very stable too – all the thousands of tests that we created during the project + many new tests pass successfully on Windows, Linux and Mac, x64 and ARM.”

Standards/Consortia

• Sweden’s governmental procurement specialists at Statens inköpscentral are fine-tuning the list of ICT standards that public authorities may use as mandatory requirements when procuring software and ICT services. The procurement agency is working with standardisation specialists at the University of Skövde, to check which ICT standards are truly open.

Leftovers

• Four rollercoasters at three theme parks have been closed, following a crash at Alton Towers in which 16 people were injured, four seriously.

• The Smiler, which crashed, and Saw, a similar ride at Thorpe Park, will both be shut “for the foreseeable future”, owner Merlin Entertainment confirmed.

Science

• It seems an innocuous task that many of us complete every morning, but toasting a single slice of bread takes a lot of energy.

• In fact, the effort to power a toaster for that breakfast snack takes enough effort to leave former Olympic track cyclist lying on his back panting.

• German athlete, and Olympic medal winner, Robert Forstemann battled a 700w toaster to bring attention to how much energy we use without realising.

Health/Nutrition

• Fighting drug-resistant bacteria is becoming an urgent national public health priority.

• The film never fully examines the causes of that resentment (though rationales shift). Early in the campaign, Islamist conservatives were rankled that many health workers were women. But the opposition reached its new, murderous level after Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad. In the aftermath, it was reported that the C.I.A. had used a vaccination program (for hepatitis) as a ruse to help locate Bin Laden. Thus, Taliban leaders claimed that all vaccination programs were fronts for Western spying, banning them in their spheres of influence.

Security

• Let’s Encrypt will issue certificates to subscribers from its intermediate CAs, allowing us to keep our root CA safely offline. IdenTrust will cross-sign our intermediates. This will allow our end certificates to be accepted by all major browsers while we propagate our own root.

• Any human with an email address likely has gotten thousands of spam messages that look like delivery notifications, invoices, or other alleged communications from shipping companies such as UPS or DHL. They typically contain malicious attachments with exploits for a browser or plug-in vulnerability, but a researcher at the University of Cambridge has run across a novel twist on this kind of spam that turns out to be a completely different kind of attack.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• A majority of Americans say the U.S. military mission has failed in Afghanistan, and U.S. President Barack Obama’s global war of “targeted killings” by drones has raised deep concern among the U.S. public, a latest poll showed.

• According to a national survey by the Pew Research Center in late May, 56 percent of Americans say the United States has mostly failed in achieving its goals in Afghanistan, while 36 percent say the U.S. mission has mostly succeeded.

• War has directly resulted in the deaths of 149,000 people in Afghanistan and Pakistan between 2001 and 2014, according to estimates in a new report released by Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute. That figure includes U.S. military members, contractors, and opposition fighters – as well as at least 26,270 civilians in Afghanistan, and 21,500 in Pakistan.

• In 2012, the entrance to John Marshall High School in Los Feliz was closed to protect students from falling debris. The gothic tower above the entrance was crumbling, so a wooden platform was built atop a tunnel of scaffolding to catch falling brick and concrete.

• Three years later, the scaffolding is still there. The district earmarked roughly $1 million for the job long ago, and the principal told me last week that she’s hoping it won’t be much longer now.

• Eight hundred years ago this summer, King John and a group of feudal barons gathered at Runnymede on the banks of the Thames River. There he agreed to the Magna Carta, which for the first time limited the absolute power of the monarch and established a contract between ruler and ruled. The mother of modern treaties and law, the Magna Carta began a global conversation about the responsibility of the powerful toward people under their control.

• A scant four decades ago, also this summer, another gathering in the Finnish capital of Helsinki produced a second series of accords. While far less well known, the signing of the Helsinki Accords was a critical juncture in the long struggle of the individual against state authority. Building on some of the same ideas that undergirded the Magna Carta, the Helsinki Accords codified a broad set of individual liberties, human rights, and state responsibilities, which remain strikingly relevant today, whether the subject is China’s Internet policy, the Islamic State’s latest outrage, or the American “war on terror.” The language of human rights has become the lingua franca for criticizing misbehavior by states or quasi-governments.

• An Iraqi security source says a US unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has crashed in the country’s southern province of Basra as it was supposed to join the US-led air campaign against the so-called ISIL positions in the restive western Iraqi province of Anbar.

• The German Federal Prosecutor is reported to have begun investigating a US base in Germany that is used as a ‘hub’ for drone strikes, days after a Yemeni man testified in a Cologne court about the 2012 strike that killed his relatives.

• Reports of the number of Yemenis killed in the fighting range from 2,000-4,000 with many more injured and displaced. Yemeni-Americans who have been attempting to leave the country since late March have been abandoned by Washington.

• America has learnt the hard way that it cannot fix the problems of the Middle East.

• Six years ago, President Barack Obama gave a historic speech to the Muslim world from Cairo. He called for “a new beginning” and apologized for the injustice and misunderstanding that have stained relations in the past. Though Obama faced skepticism from many corners, the speech was generally well-received, and many Muslims, from the Middle East to Indonesia, hoped that his election would mark a clear departure from the mistrust that characterized the years of the Bush administration.

• A Green Beret officer who raised questions on Capitol Hill about U.S. hostage policy and was placed under criminal investigation by the Army has been called to testify in a Senate hearing examining reprisals that government whistleblowers can face, congressional officials said.

• Hani Mujahid chose to tell his story to Al Jazeera because he felt trapped: When the al-Qaeda operative-turned Yemeni government informant tried to brief the CIA on his allegations that Yemen had been playing a double game in the fight against al-Qaeda, he found himself detained and badly beaten by Yemeni security personnel.

• No longer able to trust any of the stakeholders, he turned to the media to tell his story. If his allegations prove true, they will be deeply embarrassing to the US.

• The United States confirmed that an American envoy has held talks in Oman with Iran-backed Yemeni rebels to convince them to attend a Geneva peace conference in mid-June.

• The news of the talks came with a conference on Yemen having been scrapped just days before it was due to be held on May 28, dealing a blow to UN efforts to broker peace in a country where at least 2,000 people have been killed since March.

• May 25 was Memorial Day, when Americans are supposed to remember military veterans, particularly those who made sacrifices — lives, lives, sanity — fighting our wars.

• As usual, rhetoric was abundant. People hung flags. Some placed flowers on military graves. There were parades, including one in which a reporter got hit by a drone. President Barack Obama added an oddly pacifist twist to his annual speech, noting that it was “the first Memorial Day in 14 years that the United States is not engaged in a major ground war.”

• Excuse me while I puke.

• Talk is nice, but veterans need action. Disgusting but true: when it comes to actual help — spending enough money to make sure they can live with dignity — talk is all the U.S. has to offer.

• These figures suggest that Daesh-bigots are being killed at the rate of around 50 a day though each mission is responsible for only 2.4 deaths. This latter figure can be explained by the reality that mission planners have been more likely to detect and attack supply vehicles than concentrations of terrorist fighters. There have also been intelligence-led precision bombings on gatherings of the Daesh leadership.

• When one reads Papillon or views the film, one should be ever mindful that what our government is doing to others in our name is actually worse than what the French did to their criminals… and these were actual criminals, tried and convicted in courts of law, unlike the majority of those we kept and still keep in our foreign prisons. Most of them have had no ‘ day in court ‘ with proper legal representation. How sad this empire has become!

• The U.S. military continues to explore long-range conventional prompt strike capabilities to strike “time-sensitive” targets across the globe on very short notice. Known as Conventional Prompt Global Strike (CPGS), the programme has not yet translated into operational weapon systems because of technological and political challenges. Yet, it makes sense to start thinking about the possible introduction of conventional prompt strike systems, including intermediate range, into the Asia Pacific theatre.

• The Israel Trade Fairs and Convention Center was bustling with military personnel. Tall, broad-shouldered soldiers donning masks and sunglasses had their guns at the ready, and a mini-drone built at Ariel University, an Israeli school located in the occupied West Bank, went up in the air, flying high as the press snapped photos.

• This was not war, but one of the many demos held at the ISDEF expo, an annual June event that attracts thousands of security officials and professionals interested in weapons. Arms fairs in Israel showcase the latest products the profitable Israeli weapons industry manufactures — and the demos are the perfect place to show those products off.

• In 2009, a U.S. State Department diplomatic cable gave one of the first glimpses of a burgeoning alliance between Israel and the Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The cable quoted Israeli Foreign Ministry official Yacov Hadas saying, “the Gulf Arabs believe in Israel’s role because of their perception of Israel’s close relationship with the United States,” adding that GCC states “believe Israel can work magic.”

• Israel and the Gulf states also shared an interest in countering what they saw as rising Iranian influence in the Middle East. So while the two sides sparred in public — Israel’s “Cast Lead” military operation had just claimed more than 1,400 lives in the Gaza Strip and was condemned by Saudi Arabia, in a letter to the United Nations, as “fierce aggression” — they enjoyed “good personal relations” behind closed doors, Hadas said, according to one cable. Hadas reportedly added that the Gulf Arabs were still “not ready to do publicly what they say in private.”

• A former US Central Intelligence Agency officer Larry Johnson claims that a FBI program that deploys small aircraft to carry out video and cellphone surveillance violates the constitutional rights of US citizens.

• Members of Congress are demanding that the FBI turn over more information about its use of airplanes to conduct surveillance of Americans.

• The FBI is using at least 50 planes to conduct surveillance operations over U.S. cities and rural areas, the Associated Press reported earlier this week. The planes, registered under fake company names, are equipped with high-tech cameras and, in some circumstances, technology that can track thousands of cell phones below.

• Freedom of Information Act requests to the FBI and CIA for the records of Cynthia Lennon, who died in April after a short battle with cancer, yielded exactly two pages of results, yet still somehow spoke volumes.

• The FBI, which hosted voluminous files on John, replied that it had nothing on Cynthia, and refused to confirm (or deny) if she was on any sort of watch list before she died.

• Using somewhat subjective definitions of “at war” — Korea counts but Kosovo doesn’t in our analysis, for example — we endeavored to figure out how much of each person’s life has been spent with America at war. We used whole years for both the age and the war, so the brief Gulf War is given a full year, and World War II includes 1941. These are estimates.

• Western governments no longer hide the fact that they’re using jihadists…

• The rally was attended by several key figures in Britain, including Jeremy Corbyn, a parliamentarian running to lead the U.K’s Labour Party

• Transferring control of the US drone programme away from the CIA could paradoxically result in less accountability, author and investigative journalist Chris Woods told this week’s Drone News.

• It recounts more than a decade of CIA efforts to support Tibetan resistance movements against the People’s Republic of China during the 1950s and 1960s.

• This relationship between Washington and Beijing has existed somewhat uneasily since the early 1970s after the PRC broke with the Soviet Union mainly over intense ideological differences within the communist movement. In effect the Communist Party of China (CPC) joined with capitalist America in an informal tacit alliance against Russia. This was a geopolitical triumph for the U.S. but not for China. In the last couple of years Beijing and Moscow have developed a close relationship, largely as a repost to Washington’s expressions of hostility toward both countries.

• China was considered a revolutionary communist country from the 1949 revolution until the deaths of party leader Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai in 1976. The left wing of the CPC was then crushed, and the leadership in 1977 went to “paramount leader” Deng Xiaoping, a long time revolutionary and high government official in many posts who had earlier been purged twice “for taking the capitalist road.”

• Deng set about in 1980 to develop a dynamic capitalist economy under the slogan of “using capitalism to build socialism.” By 1990, after the U.S. and others imposed sanctions against China for the Tiananmen Square confrontation with students seeking certain democratic changes, Deng issued the following instruction to the CPC: “Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership.”

• The Chinese economy after 35 years is one of the wonders of the capitalist world, particularly since it is still maintained by the CPC, as are all other aspects of Chinese society. The PRC’s political system is officially described as being “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” though the socialist aspect has been abridged.

• Last week, the National Smokejumpers Association released a list of former jumpers who served in the dangerous activities of the CIA in what were once secret U.S. government operations.

• In any event, whether or not you believe the West created ISIS, the U.S. is now trying to blame the single most unlikely entity imaginable for ISIS … the Syrian government.

• The Justice Department is worried that the office of the CIA’s top watchdog could be left vacant for a year, or possibly longer.

• The previous inspector general for the CIA resigned in late January after it was revealed that the spy agency hacked into computers used by Senate staffers right under his nose. The position is still empty. “Far too often, the process for selection and appointment of IG candidates takes too long,” complained Michael E. Horowitz, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, in a statement today to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

• “As of today, there are eight IG positions that remain vacant,” he said, urging senators to confirm presidential appointees faster. “As of the end of this month, all of these IG positions, with the exception of the CIA IG position, will have been vacant for over 1 year.”

• The Islamabad High Court (IHC) has issued a notice to the federation and summoned all records of the transfer of an investigation against former CIA chief, and drones, was moved to FATA.

• The President of Ecuador Rafael Correa praised the book The CIA Against Latin America – Special Case – Ecuador. Over 30,000 copies are in circulation. Written by Jaime Galarza Zavala and Francisco Herrera Aráuz the book tells a story about the dirty tricks the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was engaged in during the 1960s in Ecuador. The authors offer interviews with Phillip Agee recorded at different times. Agee was a retired CIA operative who turned against the Agency.

• A 1976 document declassified Wednesday by the State Department shows concerns about the CIA’s links with extremist groups within the Cuban exile community and points to Luis Posada Carriles as the most likely planner of the bombing attack against a Cubana Airlines plane that year.

• The memorandum was sent to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger by two high ranking State Department officials who evaluated the accusations made by Fidel Castro on the alleged U.S. involvement in the downing of a Cubana plane traveling out of Barbados on Oct. 6, 1976, in which 73 people were killed.

• “We have now pursued in detail with CIA (1) what we know about responsibility for the sabotage of the Cubana airliner and (2) how any actions by CIA, FBI, or Defense attache´s might relate to the individuals or groups alleged to have responsibility,” states the report.

• The memorandum concludes that the CIA had previous ties to three of the people “supposedly” involved in the downing of a Cuban airliner, “but any role that these people may have had with the demolition took place without the knowledge of the CIA.”

• On May 29, as part of its stated intentions to improve relations with Cuba, the United States formally removed the island nation from its list of “State Sponsors of Terrorism,” even as it maintained its decades-old illegal blockade.

• For most people around the world, the fact that Cuba was on a list that should not even exist represents a high in imperialist arrogance and hypocrisy, coming as it does, from the biggest sponsor of terrorism in the world. Over 3,000 Cubans have been killed in U.S.-sponsored terror attacks since 1959, while the perpetrator of a terrorist bombing that brought down a Cuban airliner walks around freely in the United States.

• On May 29, the United States removed Cuba from the list of “state sponsors of terrorism” as one more step toward normalization of relations between the two countries. But, historically, it is the United States that has sponsored terrorism against Cuba.

• The U.S. designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terror dates back to the early 1980s due to Cuban support of guerrilla movements in Central America. The label was ironic, since the United States engaged in a program of extralegal paramilitary operations as part of failed attempts at Cuban regime change all through the early 1960s. These efforts included the Bay of Pigs invasion, scores of assassination attempts against Cuban leaders and years of covert operations.

• While at the time I vehemently opposed his conclusions that Iraq was free of WMD, some of his arguments resonated.

• A top US military commander has revealed that the US-led airstrikes nearly targeted Iraqi forces instead of terrorists of the ISIL group.

• Lt. Gen. John Hesterman, the US commander of the air campaign in Iraq, said on Friday that aircraft nearly launched airstrikes 100 times on friendly Iraqi forces because they were indistinguishable from ISIL from the air, Stars and Stripes reported.

• The exact identities were not known but initial reports suggested that all those killed were Afghan Taliban rebels.

• Guantánamo prison management has expanded its rule forbidding dining with detainees to include Red Cross meetings and other legal visits, a continuing change in policy that began with a ban on defense lawyers breaking bread with their clients.

• The former Afghan President Hamid Karzai has strongly condemned a deadly US drone strike in southeastern Khost province of Afghanistan.

• The former Afghan President Hamid Karzai has strongly condemned a deadly US drone strike in southeastern Khost province of Afghanistan.

• The U.S. intelligence community needs to take steps to maximize effectiveness and knock off the fearmongering — whether that means eliminating redundant roles or positions, firing and replacing incompetents, re-establishing operational boundaries, or reaffirming priorities that aren’t vulnerable to the media cycle and assorted whims.

• All the hyperventilation does little more than lend credence to Snowden’s claims of misplaced priorities and resources in the intelligence community. Americans deserve to have the quietly confident security services that they’ve paid for, without the endless opportunistic public posturing.

• If you listened to some of the politicians in the United States, you would think that the country is encircled by enemies. Grave threats emerge regularly, posing danger to everything the US has ever stood for. Islamic State is portrayed as the immediate peril for Washington – and yet, before it, Al-Qaeda was painted the same. However, the United States remain the safest country in the world – and yet, it’s not too eager to cut back on its gigantic military budget. Are the dangers that Washington sees even real, or is the threat coming from White House cabinets? We pose these questions to a professor of political science: Christopher Fettweis is on Sophie&Co today.

• Such fully autonomous weapons, or “killer robots,” are under development in several countries. But the robots’ use of force would undermine the fundamental legal and moral principle that people should be held responsible for their wrongdoing. Countries and nongovernmental groups around the world have been working for two years now to figure out how to deal with these weapons before they are in production. In April, representatives from 90 countries met at the United Nations in Geneva for their second round of talks on what to do about “lethal autonomous weapons systems.”

• Fifteen-second television commercials condemning United States drone attacks will begin airing in Niagara Falls and Western New York on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, TWNS, and on YES Network during Yankees games during the month of June.

• The commercials show images from video screens of drone operations; an explosion; and civilians searching through rubble after a drone attack; and states: “Thousands, including women and children, have been murdered by US Drones.”

• On Friday, US drones attacked a funeral in Afghanistan’s Khost Province, tearing through a crowd of mourners and leaving at least 34 of them dead. The funeral was reportedly for a Taliban fighter, and the Afghan government insisted that by extension, all the mourners must’ve been Taliban too.

• At least 34 Taliban insurgents have been killed in Afghanistan’s southeastern Khost province in a U.S. drone attacked a funeral ceremony held for a slain Taliban commander Friday, Afghan authorities said.

• American drone strikes killed roughly 50 people in Afghanistan, Pakistan in Yemen in May, according to a Tuesday report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ).

• The Air Force has gone on the offensive in an attempt to dispel what it calls myths about the community of remotely piloted aircraft pilots as Hollywood and Broadway both have produced works highlighting the lives of drone pilots.

• With the release of the Ethan Hawke movie “Good Kill” and the recent Anne Hathaway play “Grounded,” the Air Force has sent RPA pilots and commanders into the public to try to tell the real story of the airmen who operate the aircraft.

• What does drone warfare say about the direction our country is headed in? I believe it’s a broader symptom of how quickly we resort to violence. Someone is a threat? Shoot ’em. Someone looks like they might be a threat? Shoot them, too. It’s no different than how the police in our country deal with black men — use extreme force. Maybe it’s time we wake up, slap ourselves upside the soul, and ask how we can ever hope to achieve a durable peace by sitting at computers and “unintentionally” killing people thousands of miles away with Hellfire missiles.

• We might be destroying our enemies, but the fallout from the “collateral massacre” will impact us for years to come.

• The entire “kingpin strategy” first used during the “drug wars” to kill high value individuals, has backfired. After cartel leaders were eliminated, more ruthless groups took over, competition flourished and drug prices declined. Taking out kingpins actually increased supply. In fact, America’s addiction to illicit drugs increased due to this failed strategy.

• Scenes in which Muslim civilians are deliberately killed in a cold-blooded and ruthless manner, being regarded as “collateral damage,” and in which the order to fire is given directly given by the CIA are particularly striking. CIA administrators collecting intelligence about the location of terrorists in the region are linked up to the military base in Las Vegas from Langley and watch the images sent back by the UAVs in real time. When the image of the target appears, the officers are able to give the order to fire disregarding warnings that ‘women, children or elderly people’ are also present in the terrorists’ location.

• Recently the Pentagon admitted to killing two Syrian children in a drone attack last fall when they bombed a group of al Qaeda fighters in the suburbs of the Syrian city of Aleppo. At the time they claimed this group was a critical target because they were high level operatives associated with Al Qaeda who were planning attacks on the United States mainland.. No one that I know had ever heard of this group, but their name, Khorasan, is the name of a province in Iran, which is an odd choice for an Al Qaeda affiliate. So they bombed this small group of 50 or less foreigners, holed up in a suburb of Aleppo, Syria, in a civilian neighborhood in the middle of a war zone, plotting to kill Americans in America. It is a stretch to to wrap the mind around this rather incredible story.

• Twenty-nine faith leaders from Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh traditions have sent an Interfaith Letter on Drone Warfare to President Barak Obama and the U.S. Congress.

• The signers say it is morally unacceptable that thousands of innocent people have been killed by US lethal drone strikes. The letter also raises concerns that targeted killings by drones lack transparency and accountability. Finally the letter argues that drone strikes do not make Americans safer, but rather aid recruitment by extremist groups.

• Roy Medley, general secretary of the American Baptist Churches USA, and Carole Collins, director of finance and operations for the Alliance of Baptists, were among signers of the letter coordinated by the Interfaith Network on Drone Warfare, a group of 150 faith leaders formed at a recent conference on drone warfare at Princeton Theological Seminary.

• Thousands of deaths, both intended and unintended, have resulted from the military use of lethal drones technology, the faith leaders maintained. One, the recent death of Warren Weinstein, a U.S. citizen killed accidently in a counterterrorism operation targeting an al Qaeda compound in Pakistan, they said, illustrated the risk of drone warfare.

• “Despite the prevailing notion that drones are precise, the recent tragedy involving the death of a U.S. citizen demonstrates this is not the case,” the letter said. “Indeed, such tragedies seem to happen frequently.”

• Reports of a secret “kill list” containing potential drone strike targets created and maintained by the Obama administration, the religious leaders said, “are alarming to us, and counter to our notions of human dignity, participatory processes and rule of law.”

• The faith leaders voiced concern about secrecy and lack of accountability surrounding targeted drone strikes and disputed the assumption that drones save American lives.

• A small group of protestors lined up outside the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station on Wednesday. They were speaking out against the use of drones by the U.S. military, flown overseas and used in attacks while operated from domestic sites including the local air base.

• The protestors, nearly ten in all, included a Vietnam Veteran and a clergyman. The veteran was Russell Brown, who served in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967. He said President Obama and Congress won’t stop military actions overseas, so it’s time to reach out to those in control of the drones.

• The CIA’s then-secret weapon missed the Taliban’s leader, starting a 14-years-and-counting fight over who controls the U.S. drone program.

• During a foreign policy talk at John’s Hopkins University Friday, the father of a man killed in Afghanistan railed against Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) for his pro-war posturing.

• In recent months, he’s suggested that U.S. elections are controlled behind the scenes by a cabal of a few dozen wealthy donors. He’s implied that the president has the authority to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil using drones without judicial process, and that the military should invade Syria.

• The timing was surprising because there have hardly been incidents of human rights abuse in Rwanda for a while. Instead the hearing took place against the backdrop of widespread demonstrations in the US against police brutality meted out against African American males.

• Why would the US congress be bothered by human rights in Rwanda, a country 15,000 miles away, when many of its own citizens are being killed by a run-amok police while others are being sent to jail in droves? In the mid-late 1990s and early 2000s, the government of Rwanda used to be highhanded. It relied on the systematic use of force to consolidate power to a significant degree.

• “The Somalia theatre is no longer of interest to the Shebab,” a Western security source told AFP.

• I came to know Okot years ago when I looked after him and dozens of other kids at a home for orphans in South Sudan. He was hardened by the time we met, thin as one of the papyrus reeds that grows along the Nile River, and smarter than just about anyone else, child or adult, whom I encountered during my first months in one of the poorest places on earth.

• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs scientists have discovered signs of early aging in the brains of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans exposed to roadside bomb explosions, even among those who felt nothing from the blast, according to a story in USA Today.

• You can add actor John Cusack to the list of liberals unimpressed by President Obama’s time in office.

• In an interview with the Daily Beast published Thursday, Cusack said Obama is “as bad or worse than Bush” when it comes to “drones, the American Empire, the NSA, civil liberties, attacks on journalism and whistleblowers.”

• Yet the extensive spying program and invasive military excursions are following the same strategies and policy narratives that have prevailed in the United States for decades. The point is not which president is better or worse than the other, but rather that these same “Big Brother”, imperialist and Wall Street-kissing policies remain the driving status quo in American presidential politics. Obama and Bush are merely figureheads governing a system that caters to corporations, terrified enough by terrorism to strip the American public of their privacy and secure its world power status through unnecessary and exploitative foreign invasions. Obama ran a campaign of change and “hope”, but change cannot happen with one leader, rather when the problems inherent in our system are eradicated, when those underlying systemic forces are reversed, then change within the American political system can finally have freedom to flourish.

• “Well, Obama has certainly extended and hardened the cement on a lot of Bush’s post-9/11 Terror Inc. policies, so he’s very similar to Bush in every way that way,” Cusack said. “His domestic policy is a bit different, but when you talk about drones, the American Empire, the NSA, civil liberties, attacks on journalism and whistleblowers, he’s as bad or worse than Bush. He hasn’t started as many wars, but he’s extended the ones we had, and I don’t even think Dick Cheney or Richard Nixon would say the president has the right to unilaterally decide whom he can kill around the world. On Tuesdays, the president can just decide whom he wants to kill, and you know, since 9/11 there are magic words like ‘terror,’ and if you use magic words, you can justify any power grab you want.”

Transparency Reporting

• Fresh from offering $100,000 to anyone that leaks the still-secret parts of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Wikileaks has published large chunks of the related Trade In Services Agreement (TiSA).

• A union representing Walt Disney World performers is challenging a policy forbidding them from revealing online or in print media what characters they portray. The company has long discouraged its entertainers from advertising which princesses or animated animals they play in the theme parks.

• This week, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform devoted two hearings to understand the state of the government’s compliance to the Freedom of Information Act. As originally intended, the act first passed in 1966 was designed to allow U.S. citizens to request government documents in order to understand what their government was doing. Think of any major Washington scandal and most likely you’ll see FOIA as the tool that uncovered that story. It was how Judicial Watch continues to gather information about the 2012 Benghazi attack and the IRS’s decision to target conservative nonprofits. The act, as wielded by journalist Jason “FIOA terrorist” Leopold, pried loose information about the inner workings of Guantanamo Bay and the CIA’s justification for using drones to kill U.S. citizens.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A large protest in Minnesota this weekend is designed to show that the resistance to tar sands goes well beyond Keystone XL, as numerous environmental and social justice groups come together with Indigenous communities across the region to make their unified demands clear to all: “keep toxic tar sands out of America’s Heartland, fight for clean water, clean energy, and a safe climate.”

• Is a 100% renewable energy future possible? According to Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, the answer is yes. Jacobson has developed plans for all 50 states to transform their power infrastructure to rely on wind, water and solar power. This comes as California lawmakers have approved a dozen ambitious environmental and energy bills creating new standards for energy efficiency. Dubbed the California climate leadership package, the 12 bills set high benchmarks for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and petroleum use. We speak with Jacobson and Noah Diffenbaugh, Stanford University Associate Professor and a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

• Gelderland provincial council has given a EUR 22,000 contract to a small pest control company to kill 1,600 geese using a controversial method of breaking the birds’ necks. Despite the cost of EUR 13.75 per bird, no one has seen if or how the method works and the province does not plan to check up on the work or animal welfare issues, the AD reports. The contract has been awarded to a company named V&T, based in Leerdam but details about how the neck breaker will work are sketchy.

Finance

• Green MEPs Bart Staes and Molly Scott Cato today openly denounced the lobbying tactics of Mr Beyrer, Director-General of leading business advocate group BUSINESSEUROPE, over the contentious Investor-state Dispute System (ISDS) in TTIP. Both got hold of a lobby email sent by Beyrer to Mr Pittella, chairman of the S&D group as well as other S&D-members. The S&D are in expected to reintroduce anti-ISDS language into the final TTIP resolution, having lost the crucial language opposing ISDS in a compromise with the centre-right group the EPP, last week.

• The talks about the EU-U.S. Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) should be completed under U.S. President Barack Obama’s term of office, which ends in January 2017, EU Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmström said at a press conference after a meeting with Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka in Prague.

• The three British banks were among more than a dozen named in a 164-page indictment by the FBI but there is no allegation of any wrongdoing from the institutions.

• They are, however, understood to be reviewing the transactions as a precaution to make sure they complied with anti-money laundering and “know your customer” rules.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Hendin did mention two categories of guests that Schieffer showcased who were outside the world of Beltway politics, “sports figures and celebrities,” and mentioned three of these: Bill Cosby, Morgan Fairchild and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. So much for “all segments of American life.” Apparently there are some parts of the nation CBS doesn’t want to face.

• The U.S. political/media system is awash in propaganda drowning any rational debate about crucial foreign policy issues. But how did that happen? A key turning point was the Reagan administration’s pushback against public skepticism over Vietnam and CIA scandals of the 1970s, Robert Parry wrote in 2010.

Censorship

• I spent months investigating how Chinese publishers slice out material — and how Western writers respond with a shrug.

• A video supposedly depicting “baby yoga” started circulating around Facebook recently, causing an internet uproar and calls for the social media site to be more responsible for user content. The company eventually relented, taking down (some) posts, but the debate over social media censorship is still raging.

• A disturbing video of a screaming baby being roughly dunked in a bucket of water is at the centre of a row over internet censorship.

• The two-minute film appeared on Facebook and showed a woman in a kitchen, believed to be in Indonesia, repeatedly plunging a crying young baby into a vat of water while holding the child upside down and spinning it around.

• Facebook refused to take it down and the video spread around the world, with some people claiming it was an example of “baby yoga” – and child protection activists arguing it was straightforward abuse.

• Plans to empower Ofcom to vet and censor broadcasts for extremist content have been labelled “bonkers” by one of the BBC’s most senior and recognised personalities.

• Alan Yentob, the BBC’s creative director, said the proposal implied broadcasters were “reckless” and went against the tradition of freedom of speech.

• The ACLU has threatened legal action against the Alhambra Unified School District on the heels of student journalists’ concerns that an administrator allegedly censored student journalists’ publication of an article on the dismissal of a popular high school teacher.

• THE TRAGIC sinking of a cruise ship on the Yangtze River on Monday night produced a reflexive reaction from China’s communist authorities: censorship. Within hours of the disaster, which left more than 440 people dead or missing, authorities were scrubbing the Internet of questions or comments about the Eastern Star and its passengers. News media were ordered not to send journalists to the scene, to recall those already there and to rely on the official state news and television agencies for their information. Instead of providing detailed accounts, those outlets focused their coverage on Premier Li Keqiang, who was portrayed as resolutely leading rescue efforts.

• As expected, the death toll from the capsizing of a cruise ship on China’s Yangtze River began rising dramatically late Wednesday, as Reuters reported that the number of bodies recovered had jumped to 65.

• More than 370 people remain missing from the ship. Rescuers have cut holes in the upturned hull of the ship and are continuing to hunt for survivors in potential air pockets, Reuters reported.

• As Arab citizens, we have always been surrounded by seemingly uncrossable borders and boundaries. Unless of course you have wasta—that is when you know someone that knows someone (that knows someone) who can help.

• China’s government is cracking down further on the use of virtual private networks to circumnavigate its Great Firewall, as part of the ongoing game of whack-a-mole between censors and an increasingly tech-savvy population.

• Charlie Smith, co-founder of the censorship in China monitoring site GreatFire.org, said there has been a significant increase in the usage of VPN services over the last year.

• It would be an understatement to say that Imgur users — also known as “Imgurians”– freaked out when the image-based social network started to enforce censorship guidelines this week. Community manager Sarah Schaaf even received death threats over the rules, but it doesn’t mean she has given up on the Internet.

• The Russian communications oversight authority has put Facebook, Twitter and Google on notice. In May the agency, known by its acronym Roskomnadzor, sent a letter to the companies reminding them that they need to comply with the country’s Internet laws.

• The university also prohibited the group from distributing fliers outside one of the school’s eight “speech zones,” which together are limited to less than one percent of the entire campus.

• As for Holocaust denial, for all its absurdity and offensiveness, criminal penalties are the wrong way to combat it, as The Economist has always argued. “In civilised countries, the truth is best policed by scholars, not criminal prosecutors,” we wrote when the British writer David Irving was convicted by an Austrian court.

• Indian authorities have blocked Sikh24 social media pages, including Sikh24’s Facebook page on Thursday. Users report that some internet service providers do allow the sites, while most in the north-western states, such as Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir have blocked Sikh24 completely. While still spottily enforced, the blocking has seemed to become stricter following the shooting death of a Sikh who was protesting peacefully.

• On March 5, 2015, the Indian Censors declared that the film Unfreedom couldn’t be certified for public viewing in India. In the following satiric piece by the film’s director, Raj Amit Kumar, based on actual statements made by the Indian Censors about his film, he is questioning not just their decision about his film, but the validity of their authority to censor any film.

Privacy

• One thing rarely understood about espionage, as it has come to be in the 21st century, has been the shift out of the field and into the office. There aren’t may British Government employees roaming the world with false identities and licences to kill. Rather, increasingly, the desk-jockeys have been hiring people such as “Steak Knife”, Britain’s top spy inside the IRA. Our government agents are now “spymasters” who recruit or “handle” spies; they are career professionals employed by agencies such as the CIA and Britain’s SIS (also known by its one-time codename, MI6) or Military Intelligence.

• Congressional leaders are warning the latest major government data hack proves the Senate should hand the US government greater cybersecurity powers – even as the stalled legislation to do so would place even more consumer data into the hands of the same government that could not secure its existing information.

• An estimated 4 million federal employees had their personal data compromised after what was reported by authorities on Thursday to be a previously unknown software intrusion, known as a “zero day” attack, accessed networks operated by the Office of Personnel Management, the federal human resources department that houses high-level security clearances and government employee records.

• The latest documents to be released from the Snowden archive show that the NSA was secretly authorized to carry out warrantless surveillance on US internet traffic in the name of cybersecurity.

• Two memos released by ProPublica in cooperation with The New York Times show that in May 2012, the US Justice Department authorized the NSA to monitor domestic internet traffic as part of investigations into foreign hacking attacks. That authority was later extended to allow monitoring of IP addresses and “cybersignatures.”

• The US government has the power to gather a vast amount of information from American citizens, including those from private emails, after the National Security Agency (NSA) expanded its Internet surveillance efforts in 2012, without public notice or consultations.

• Surveillance reformers, fresh off a week of tenuous victories, have vowed to ensure there are further overhauls to the National Security Agency’s vast dragnets after a new report detailed another stretch of legal authority by the US government to stop malicious hackers.

• New documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden claim the US National Security Agency had its power to spy on US internet connections secretly expanded under the Obama administration.

• The Obama administration has stepped up the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program on U.S. soil to search for signs of hacking.

• Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified NSA documents.

• In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad—including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show.

• ‘Librarians were the original search engine’ and long before Edward Snowden, thousands campaigned against the government violating privacy rights

• A “profound difference” has occurred over the past two years, following the leaking of NSA documents that led to revelations about US surveillance on phone and internet communications, whistleblower Edward Snowden has said.

• According to a joint investigation between the New York Times and Pro Publica, the Justice Department authorized the NSA to hunt for hackers without a warrant, even when those hackers were present on American soil. Initially, the DOJ authorized the NSA to gather only addresses and “cybersignatures” that corresponded to computer intrusions, so that it could tie the efforts to specific foreign governments. The NSA, however, sought permission to push this envelope. These new slides also note, incidentally, that Dropbox was targeted for addition to the PRISM program.

• After the U.S. Congress approved what critics have called modest limits on the National Security Agency’s collection of domestic telephone records, many lawmakers may be reluctant to further change the government’s surveillance programs.

• Today is a big day for privacy in the United States: each of us can now call our mom, our best friend, or a pizza delivery service without the NSA automatically keeping a record of who we called, when, and how long the conversation lasts.

• Becoming an “international fugitive” was worth it because of the benefits it brought to the public, according to US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

• The former National Security Agency (NSA) worker said progress had been made since he released thousands of documents about global surveillance records two years ago.

• For quite some time now, we’ve been warning about the government’s questionable attempts to pass “cybersecurity” bills that focus on “information sharing” with names like CISA and CISPA. Defenders of these bills insist that they’re “just voluntary” and are necessary because it would enable private companies to share threat information with the US government, so that the US government could help stop attacks. Of course, we’ve been asking for years (1) why, if this is so useful, companies can’t already share this information and (2) what attacks these bills would have actually stopped? No one ever seems to have any answers.

• The two-year fight to overhaul the National Security Agency ended this week with President Barack Obama’s signing of the USA Freedom Act. But it will take months of tough negotiations with telecom companies for the White House to actually implement the required reforms, and privacy groups are still smarting over what they consider watered-down changes to how the NSA does business.

• Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the tea party-linked Freedom Works Foundation filed a legal motion Friday with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court seeking to stop the government from restarting the program run formerly by the National Security Agency. The previous program expired June 1, along with certain authorities under the Patriot Act.

• Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the tea party-linked Freedom Works Foundation filed a legal motion Friday with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court seeking to stop the government from restarting the program run formerly by the National Security Agency. The previous program expired Monday, along with certain authorities under the Patriot Act.

• A new joint report from the New York Times and ProPublica that cites classified documents reveals that the Obama administration secretly granted the National Security Agency additional authorities to spy on the international Internet communications of Americans in order to seek out hacking attacks from abroad. The expanded powers, which aimed to help the agency seek out and squelch foreign-born cyber intrusions, had not been previously disclosed to the public.

• If you have a telephone number that has ever been called by an inmate in a federal prison, registered a change of address with the Postal Service, rented a car from Avis, used a corporate or Sears credit card, applied for nonprofit status with the IRS, or obtained non-driver’s legal identification from a private company, they have you on file.

• This agency is called the National Security Analysis Center (NSAC). This is a shadow branch of the US Justice Department. The agency employs more than 400 people, of whom 300 are analysts and has the annual budget of more than $150 million.

• With the passage of the USA Freedom Act, we’ve gained important reforms of the intelligence community, but there’s still a lot to do, including reining in the NSA’s warrantless mass surveillance of Americans’ Internet communications under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). That’s why EFF yesterday filed an amicus brief along with the ACLU and the ACLU of Oregon in United States v. Mohamud, a criminal case currently on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit involving Section 702 surveillance.

• Two secret Justice Department memos, written in mid-2012, deemed as legal the search of Internet communications, without warrants and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions emanating from abroad, including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the publications reported on June 4, citing the Snowden documents leaked two years ago.

• So what did the NSA or any of our other intelligence agencies do to stop any of those attacks?

• It doesn’t look like they actually did anything.

• I suppose one could hypothesize that the NSA did detect some of these attacks but decided not to do anything because it would confirm to the world that the NSA was poking their noses in places that they shouldn’t have been. But the entire world already know the NSA breaks U.S. and international laws on a daily basis so it’s not like it would surprise anyone.

• Encryption should stay strong, says one privacy-minded member of Congress.

• Not more than 72-hours after the NSA’s controversial bulk phone records collection program was brought to an end on Sunday night, the Obama administration has confirmed it will seek to temporarily reinstate the operation through a provision found in the USA Freedom Act.

• By exploiting a six-month transitional grace period afforded to the NSA in the freshly-passed Act, the administration says it will petition a secret surveillance court to revive the program while its data and repositories are prepped to transfer from the servers in Fort Meade to the hands of US telecoms.

• A smartphone app going live this month claims to be the ‘dark Internet tunnel’ that thwarts snooping on calls and texts.

• Former Gov. Martin O’Malley said that recent reforms to the Patriot Act did not go far enough in curtailing the National Security Agency, arguing that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court should include a public advocate.

• It’s been about two years since we first discussed the NSA plan for “bulk metadata” monitoring of phone calls. At the heart of that information and so many revelations since, is Edward Snowden, the man who leaked documents to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras about exactly what was being done in the name of national security. Still living in Russia to avoid prosecution for that act, he’s published an op-ed in The New York Times, titled “The World Says No to Surveillance.”

• A federal judge is investigating allegations that the government may have improperly destroyed documents during the high-profile media leak investigation of National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake.

• A federal judge is investigating charges that the United States government may have illegally destroyed possible evidence during the high-profile media leak investigation of National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake.

• McClatchy reports that U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephanie Gallagher launched her inquiry after Drake’s lawyers in April accused the Pentagon inspector general’s office of destroying documents during Drake’s criminal prosecution. The case against Drake ended almost four years ago.

• The United States government is under investigation following allegations that the Pentagon inspector general’s office destroyed documents during the investigation of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake.

• Lawyers for Drake, including Jesselyn Radack, made the accusation in April. They allege that the government improperly destroyed documents relating to Drake’s work with a group of whistleblowers from 2002-2003, who legally cooperated with congressional and inspector general inquiries relating to NSA programs.

• Halbrooks did not respond to messages, and the Pentagon IG’s office declined to comment. The Justice Department also gave no comment on the current judicial probe.

• [...]

• Tom Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project, told Government Executive that “Drake and the other NSA surveillance whistleblowers followed all the rules and worked within the system, to a letter. But the Pentagon inspector general responded by violating their rights, referring them for criminal investigations and beginning nightmares that devastated Mr. Drake’s and others’ lives.”

• NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden should be thanked for sparking the debate that forced Congress to change US surveillance law, Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, said Monday.

• In their continuous efforts to create the impression that the government is doing something to keep Americans safe, politicians in Washington have misled and lied to the public. They have violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution. They have created a false sense of security. And they have dispatched and re-dispatched 60,000 federal agents to intercept the telephone calls, text messages and emails of all Americans all the time.

• [...]

• The NSA is a military entity that utilizes the services of military computer experts and agents, employs civilians, and hires companies that provide thousands of outside contractors. After nearly 14 years of spying on us — all authorized by a secret court whose judges cannot keep records of what they have ordered or discuss openly what they know — the NSA now has computers and computer personnel physically located in the main switching offices of all telecom and Internet service providers in the United States. It has 24/7 access to the content of everyone’s telephone calls, emails and text messages.

• The Guardian on Wednesday reported that the Obama administration “intends to use part of a law banning the bulk collection of US phone records to temporarily restart the bulk collection of US phone records.”

• Obama administration sees unconventional legal circumstance as means to temporarily reinstate bulk collection using same law that banned practice

• The National Security Agency can once again access your phone records. That power lapsed for almost two days. It is back under new rules. Data about calls can only be stored by phone companies, and the government will need a court order to get it. It’s a system laid out in a congressional bill that the House passed weeks ago. The Senate approved it yesterday after days of delay. Here’s NPR’s Ailsa Chang.

• The surveillance law enacted this week stands as the most significant curb on the government’s investigative authorities since the 1970s. But it’s practically inconsequential in the universe of the National Security Agency’s vast digital spying operations, a technical overhaul of a marginal counterterrorism program that some NSA officials wanted to jettison anyway.

• A federal judge is investigating allegations that the government may have improperly destroyed documents during the high-profile media leak investigation of National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake.

• A federal judge is investigating allegations that the US government may have destroyed documents during the investigation of National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake, who leaked information about the agency’s surveillance programs.

• It’s established fact at this point in time that the NSA has conspired with a number of the largest providers of social networking to extract information for use in on-going investigations. The real question is we don’t know the extent to which that is happening. What we do know, however, is that buried in this US Freedom Act are several clauses – one of which will pay private companies to collect information about its users, and a second that provides liability protection even if sharing that information is found by a court to have been illegal. So one of the reasons why a lot of companies are right now pushing for the passage of the US Freedom Act is that they get money and they get liability protection if what they are doing actually breaks the law.

• Before the war on terror was born, there was the war on drugs — and despite the recent erosion in punitive drug laws across the US, the federal war on drugs is still expanding. USA Today reports that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) conducted 11,681 electronic intercepts in 2014, up from 3,394 just a decade earlier. This sharp increase has been made possible, USA Today reports, because the DEA has circumvented federal judges in favor of state courts that may have less rigorous requirements for obtaining warrants.

• “Section 215 helps us find a needle in the haystack,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last month, referring to the PATRIOT Act provision that the National Security Agency (NSA) says allows it to scoop up everyone’s telephone records. If Congress imposes limits aimed at preventing such mass snooping, the Kentucky Republican warned, “there might not be a haystack at all.”

• For those who wonder how McConnell lost his battle to renew Section 215 without changes, a plausible answer is that he and his allies picked the wrong metaphor. What they meant to say (I think) was that the NSA needs all the help it can get in the challenging task of identifying terrorists before they attack. What the public heard was a defense of indiscriminate and invasive yet ineffective data collection.

• While Congress took steps Tuesday to curtail unbridled government surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA), solution providers said the efforts fall short of restoring damaged client trust in cloud services.

• The U.S. Senate voted 67-32 on Tuesday to pass a bill proposed by the U.S. House of Representatives, known as the U.S.A. Freedom Act, that would reinstate surveillance but provided for more controls, such as requiring a warrant for records stored at phone companies such as Verizon or Comcast. The bill is a replacement to the controversial Patriot Act, which expired Monday.

• “Alleged” NSA email hacker, that is, although he seems plenty eager to discuss it publicly. On May 15, we brought you the exclusive story of a hack of the NSA’s backup email server, a server maintained, ironically, not by the NSA but by Qwest, an IT services company against which the NSA had previously battled (spoiler: the NSA won). Back then, a softer, gentler age mere months before 9/11, the NSA wanted permission to access your data, and it asked Qwest for that permission. Qwest refused. The NSA pressed the issue, soon armed with the newly-minted Patriot Act. Qwest’s federal contracts began to dry up as it continued to resist the fond embraces of the NSA. Four years later its CEO was sentenced to prison for insider trading, which he considers to be no coincidence.

• Despite the diplomatic fallout over NSA spying, it has emerged in recent months that Germany’s own BND intelligence service spied on European targets – at the NSA’s request.

• The reality is that the NSA’s surveillance has proven far less effective than traditional investigative methods. More than half of the 294 cases that New America examined were initiated by such techniques as reliance on tips from members of a suspect’s community or family, tips from suspicious members of the public, the use of informants, routine law enforcement, intelligence from sources other than the NSA, or followup after a militant made a public statement regarding their extremist beliefs or actions.

• US lawmakers are battling over how far its spy agencies can go to collect Americans’ phone records and other data after controversial parts of the Patriot Act expired at midnight on Sunday.

• [...]

• Opponents of the law seem to have run out of options and the new law is expected to pass sometime this week, though the debate will probably continue as the US heads into a presidential election.

• Whistleblower Edward Snowden has criticized the UK for playing an active role in the worldwide surveillance network set up by the US National Security Agency (NSA), saying the rights and needs of British citizens are being sacrificed.

• After 30-plus years as an official in the National Security Agency (NSA), William Binney has been speaking out about what he sees as the “very ugly path” his former employer, along with the FBI and CIA, are currently following.

• At a lunch presentation on April 29 in midtown New York, Binney didn’t hold back detailing the extent of the surveillance as well as the workarounds the agencies use to gather data and apply it in prosecutions. And the practices will only get bigger, Binney said, owing to the money flowing into the departments based on lies being told to Congress and an uninformed public.

• Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) may be on opposite sides of the aisle, but they do see eye to eye on the issue of government surveillance.

• Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul may not have much in common. But there is one thing the Vermont socialist and Kentucky libertarian agree on: the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.

• In an interview with Katie Couric for Yahoo News on Monday, Sanders said “in many respects” he agrees with Paul when it comes to opposing the government’s collection of people’s phone records.

• One thing Orange schools are doing right is being honest about using this program. Orange County might not be the first school system to use this surveillance device, but the software company is unwilling to disclose who else is using it. Certainly, it’s at least better to tell students and their parents up front that social media messages posted at school will be monitored rather than doing it without their knowledge.

• Former NSA Director Michael Hayden confirmed that the US Congress cast a vote of approval for the National Security Agency’s ability to collect US citizen’s metadata.

• Former NSA Director Michael Hayden claims that the NSA bulk data collection authority, which expired on Monday, was the sole mechanism the agency had for accessing US citizens’ phone data.

• Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez held talks with U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden during a visit to Russia in April. The two hour-long meeting took place after intelligence documents provided by Snowden, revealed Britain spied on Argentine military and political leaders from 2006 to 2011.

• Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Cindy Cohn said that the major American telecommunications companies will continue to cooperate eagerly with the US government and carry out its wishes just as during the past 14 years.

• The surveillance methods under review in Congress only involve phone records. National security expert Richard Clarke, who recently served on President Obama’s task force that recommended changes on NSA surveillance programs, told Here & Now host Jeremy Hobson that messages sent over apps like WhatsApp, iMessage and Facetime cannot be deciphered by the government.

• As many as 93 percent of such police requests are approved. The number of data requests peaked in 2014 with 250,000 requests in total.

• The Associated Press reports today that the FBI has been operating a small air force all its own on the domestic front, registered under at least 13 fake companies – and hidden from the public.

• That comes from Aral Balkan, a well-known developer in the UK, who put the Snooper’s Charter as one of four key reasons why he and his team at ind.ie will be seeking another country that still values freedom and privacy. Sadly, it seems more likely that others will be decide to follow their example than that the UK government will heed Berners-Lee’s warning and change direction here.

• The 11-year-old company develops a combination of software and hardware security solutions that help clients in industries like finance, healthcare, and government manage data and digital assets in the cloud more securely.

• Speaking on CBS News, Brennan stressed that there is a “very, very strong relationship between United States and Israel on the intelligence, security and military fronts.”

• He also attacks Canada, France and Australia for expanding their surveillance powers

• Cooperation between the intelligence agencies of two countries is nothing new. Even during the Cold War, the CIA and KGB maintained communications. But the recent Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the spy agencies of Afghanistan and Pakistan – for long at loggerheads – is a first.

Civil Rights

• Shaker Aamer, the last British resident detained at Guantanamo Bay, has spoken out about his treatment at detention centers in the US and Afghanistan, claiming he was tortured in the presence of British soldiers and MI5 agents.

• Aamer has been held at Guantanamo for 13 years without trial. His lawyers claim the extended detention without charge is to prevent him from speaking out about his ordeal. Now newly released transcripts reveal the complicity of British officers in the CIA torture program.

• The last ‘Briton’ in Guantanamo Bay has given the first detailed account of how he was tortured in the presence of British agents.

• Shaker Aamer says his head was repeatedly slammed against a wall while a British officer was in the room.

• On another occasion, a young British officer in a red beret visited him in a ‘cage’. Both alleged incidents took place on US bases in Afghanistan shortly after his 2001 capture.

• A longtime anti-eviction activist has just been elected mayor of Barcelona, becoming the city’s first female mayor. Ada Colau co-founded the anti-eviction group Platform for People Affected by Mortgages and was an active member of the Indignados, or 15-M Movement. Colau has vowed to fine banks with empty homes on their books, stop evictions, expand public housing, set a minimum monthly wage of $670, force utility companies to lower prices, and slash the mayoral salary. Colau enjoyed support from the Podemos party, which grew out of the indignados movement that began occupying squares in Spain four years ago. Ada Colau joins us to discuss her victory.

• Secretary-General to decide whether Israel will be included on final list of violators of children’s rights due to the large number of children killed in the war in Gaza last summer.

• The witness reported men being hung by the feet or the thumbs, waterboarded, given electric shocks to the genitals, and suffering from extended solitary confinement in what he said were indescribably inhumane conditions. It’s the sort of description that might have come right out of the executive summary of the Senate torture report released last December. In this case, however, the testimony was not about a “black site” somewhere in the Greater Middle East, nor was it a description from Abu Ghraib, nor in fact from this century at all.

• The first revelation from the Snowden documents, less than two years ago, exposed systematic storage and analysis of all Americans’ telephone records by the National Security Agency and the FBI. As of midnight last night, that programme – launched in secrecy soon after 9/11 by the then vice-president, Dick Cheney – is over. Congress refused to sanction the continuation of domestic mass surveillance in the guise of collecting “business records”. The clear mood was that substantial restrictions on NSA surveillance had become inevitable.

• A senior U.S. congressman on Tuesday accused the Iranian government of spitting in America’s face by holding U.S. citizens while negotiating an end to sanctions in return for curbing its nuclear programme.

• At a House of Representatives committee hearing, relatives of three detained Americans, Saeed Abedini, Amir Hekmati and Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, said they should not be forgotten in the effort to seal a nuclear deal with Iran by a June 30 deadline.

• In a report to the Nation, Lisa Hajjar, a professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara has said that human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA’s torture program and that no one has been eld accountable for the grisly tortures that were detailed in the Senate report on the CIA’s post-9/11 detention and interrogation program.

• A British human rights nonprofit turns up evidence that CIA planes refueled at Scottish airports, prompting Scottish police to open an investigation into Britain’s role in the U.S. post-9/11 torture program.

• A report by psychologists and human rights workers released at the end of April charged officials of the American Psychological Association with collaborating with Bush administration officials, including members of the CIA, in furthering the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” torture program. The report, titled “All the President’s Psychologists,” drew upon emails from a deceased RAND Corporation researcher, Scott Gerwehr, who evidently worked in some capacity with the CIA.

• Majid Khan said interrogators poured ice water on his genitals, twice videotaped him naked and repeatedly touched his “private parts” – none of which was described in the Senate report. Interrogators, some of whom smelled of alcohol, also threatened to beat him with a hammer, baseball bats, sticks and leather belts, Khan said.

• Majid Khan, a former inmate turned government-cooperating witness, told Reuters that interrogators poured ice water on his genitals, videotaped him nude and repeatedly touched his private parts.

• The CIA’s use of torture was far more “brutal and sadistic” than was disclosed in last year’s controversial US Senate report into the agency’s interrogation techniques, according to new information from a Guantanamo Bay detainee.

• The newly declassified accounts of the torture of Majid Khan, a so-called “high value detainee”, describe in graphic detail how he was sexually assaulted, hung from a beam for several days without a break and half-drowned in tubs of freezing water.

• A former Maryland resident imprisoned at Guantanamo was subjected to mistreatment while in CIA custody far in excess of what has previously been disclosed, including being hung from a wooden beam for three days and kept in total darkness for nearly a year, a legal organization that represents him said Wednesday.

• The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency used a wider array of sexual abuse and other forms of torture than was disclosed in a Senate report last year, according to a Guantanamo Bay detainee turned government cooperating witness.

• In fact, the government’s own sentencing memorandum for Abdulmutallab cites this statement, and points out that trying “to retaliate against government conduct” is part of the legal definition of terrorism.

• The former deputy CIA director made a series of factual misstatements while defending the agency’s harsh treatment of detainees in his recent book, Senate intelligence committee staffers assert in a 54-page document filed with citations from CIA records.

• The detailed critique of the memoir by Michael Morell shows the extent to which critics and backers continue to try to shape public perceptions of the CIA’s post 9/11 detention and interrogation program, even months after the release of a Senate report that sought to render a final judgment on it.

• The classified version of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report was issued Dec., 9, 2014. Among other things, it showed that during the Bush administration the CIA used torture to obtain information from suspects and the torture was useless. The report also showed secret prisons (called “black sites”) were used in foreign countries to carry out torture. One of the black sites was in a remote part of northeastern Poland (“‘Black site’ gives Poland a black eye,” May 16).

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