● 03.27.16

● Links 27/3/2016: Mageia 6 and Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 on Their Way

Posted in News Roundup at 10:05 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• As you may know, Google has created its own laptops, named Chromebooks, using Chrome OS as the main operating system, instead of Windows or Mac OS X. Like the Nexus devices, the Chromebooks are manufactured by different vendors, including HP, Samsung and Dell and have different hardware configurations, to suite the user’s necessities.

Kernel Space

• With KDBUS having faced a large uphill battle in its attempt to be mainlined in the Linux kernel, systemd developers continue working on the new BUS1 project as a new, in-kernel IPC mechanism for Linux.

• Now that everyone is enjoying Linux kernel 4.5, though the reality is that we haven’t seen any production operating system using it until today, the time has come for early adopters to take Linux kernel 4.6 for a test drive.

• Yes, you’re reading it right, the merge window for Linux kernel 4.6 is now closed, and Linus Torvalds has just announced a few minutes ago (March 26) the release and immediate availability for download, and testing, of the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone.

• These past few days I’ve been studying signals in Linux. While there are plenty of individual details the overall theory of signals is relatively simple. A signal is generated by some event such as when you press CTRL-C on your terminal window or you try to access uninitialized memory. These signals interrupt the normal flow of execution for a given process. Through the Linux API a programmer has the ability to register a signal handler which is just a programmer defined function that is called when a given event occurs. The programmer also has the ability to block and unblock signals. As you mite expect SIGKILL and SIGSTOP cannot be blocked or handled, these signals are guaranteed to interrupt the running process.

• Compiling a Linux Kernel for the first time can take around 30 minutes on my desktop with a quad AMD chip clocked at 3.6Ghz. This time to compile is reduced to about 1/4th on subsequent compiles with the use of ccache. However, that wasn’t enough for me I wanted to go beyond using a ccache and setup a distributed compiler with distcc.

• Before I get started describing how I setup distcc please make sure that both the host and client are running the same or very similar versions of gcc. You will save yourself hours of hacking around and headaches. I’m running 5.x on both of my machines and this seems work.

• Linus Torvalds ended up tagging the Linux 4.6-rc1 kernel on Saturday night rather than opting for Sunday. While we tend to get excited about every major update to the Linux kernel, Linux 4.6 is coming in particularly heavy with new functionality and notable improvements to existing features. Linux 4.6 is arguably looking like the most exciting release in a few kernel cycles.

• The new file-system present for Linux 4.6 is OrangeFS, a project that’s been in development for a long time. The origins of OrangeFS dates back to the 90′s. The project is self-described as “an LGPL userspace scale-out parallel storage system. It is ideal for large storage problems faced by HPC, BigData, Streaming Video, Genomics, Bioinformatics. Orangefs, originally called PVFS, was first developed in 1993 by Walt Ligon and Eric Blumer as a parallel file system for Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) as part of a NASA grant to study the I/O patterns of parallel programs.”

Graphics Stack

• Patches are out for yet another OpenGL 4 extension that may soon be supported by the Gallium3D drivers as another item to mark off the list for OpenGL 4.3.

• The latest extension to talk about is ARB_framebuffer_no_attachments. The ARB_framebuffer_no_attachments extension is mandated by OpenGL 4.3 and already supported by core Mesa and the i965 Intel driver.

• Mesa 11.2 was supposed to be released in early March but that milestone has yet to be reached.

• There are many new features to Mesa 11.2 for those wishing to use stable versions of Mesa over routine Git snapshots. Unfortunately, after the 11.2-RC3 release three weeks ago, there’s been nothing new at all.

• Keystroke fingerprinting works by measuring how long keys are pressed and the time between presses. Its very high accuracy poses a serious threat to anonymous users.

Applications

• Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 615 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by more than sixty packages from the last release in January!

• On March 26, 2016, Moritz Bunkus had the pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of MKVToolNix 9.0.0, the newest, most advanced and stable branch of the open-source MKV (Matroska) manipulation software.

• Most importantly, I packaged all these files into a shiny new git repository. I figured that if I tossed it up on Github, my peers would be able to collaborate with me on improving it.

• As you may know, Double Commander is an open-source two panel (placed side by side) file manager, similar to the good old Total Commander.

• As you may know, Albert is an open-source Launcher for Linux, written in C++ and Qt5, with features similar to Synapse. The user is capable of configuring a hotkey for opening the launcher and can easily find software via the searchbar. It can also search on Google and among Chrome and Chromium’s bookmarks.

• As you may know, Blender is a powerful suite for animation, modeling, interactive creation, post-production with support for a lot of file formats.

• The latest version available is Blender 2.77, which has been recently released, coming with a bunch of changes only.

• As you may know, GhostWriter is a free and open-source, distraction-free, markdown editor for Ubuntu.

• The latest version available is GhostWriter 1.3.2, which comes with changes.

• Mailnag is a desktop-independent email notifier for Linux. The application supports both POP3 and IMAP servers and on email arrival, it performs various actions like visual or sound notifications, allows executing a script and more.

• For Unity and GNOME Shell, there are two Mailnag extensions that further integrate the application with the desktop.

• Are you a music producer and use Linux as your primary operating system, then music production is going to become easy for you after reading this article. There are good music production software in Linux just as it is in Windows and Mac OS, though a few features may vary but the underlying functionalities mostly are the same.

• The Nmap 7.10 free security scanner and network mapper software was announced last week with dozens of new features, but it looks like it already received its first point release.

• Nmap 7.11 has been announced this week and it promises to add two new features, such as support for diffie-hellman-group-exchange-* SSH key exchange methods to ssh2.lua, which lets the ssh-hostkey NSE script to run on servers with support only for custom Diffie-Hellman groups.

• In January and February of 2016 I ran an Obnam user survey. I’m not a statistician, but here is my analysis of the results.

• Executive summary: Obnam is slow, buggy, and the name is bad. But they’d like to buy stickers and t-shirts.

Proprietary

• My recent review of Opera 12 was received with mixed feelings. Some people criticized me for using the highly outdated version available in Ubuntu/Mint repositories, while others used it as an opportunity to affirm their belief that this was the last true Opera.

Instructionals/Technical

• No problem! You can use Station307 to send from your terminal and download files with the browser. If you are looking to send files from your browser you’ll need to enable JavaScript.

• Stream all the players in a multi-player game like a Pro with OpenBroadcaster Multiplatform on Linux. Take a look at the teksyndicate setup we use.

Wine or Emulation

• We are happy to announce the release of Wine Staging 1.9.6. This version adds support for Vulkan and fixes for various other bugs.

Games

• Valve has recently released Steam OS 2.67 Beta, which is their Debian-based Linux system created by Valve to conquer your living room.

• This release contains mostly bug-fixes, but it has also received an update for the PulseAudio sound server, received better support for profiles that change their availability when HDMI EDL.

• I’m really excited to see Albion Online progress, as it’s really our only proper MMORPG on Linux. It has literally removed any need I had for something like WoW, but I’m not putting proper time into it any more until they do the final progress wipe.

• This big update has focused a lot on the PvE content, adding in a lot more of it to the mix which is awesome. Not everyone will want to always do PvP combat, so it’s pleasing to see them flesh it all out some more.

• I know a few people who have been waiting for this! Discord, a newer chat app used by gamers now has an experimental Linux app ready for some testing.

• UNIGINE is a pretty advanced game engine that never really gets much attention from anyone it seems. They recently released UNIGINE 2.2 with major new features.

• It’s randomly generated, so you don’t have the same monsters to hunt each time, which helps the replay value of the game rather a lot.

• The environments can all be smashed up too, which is great fun to boost through some weird space tree to get near the space frog you want to kill. What a weird sentence that was…

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Plasma 5.6 plasma has been released and anounced by KDE Development Team. This release a feature-packed new version of its desktop user interface, Plasma 5.6.

• Qt 5.6 has just been released! Packed with incredible new features, 5.6 is also the first long term support release of Qt: it will be supported for the next 3 years, giving developers a solid foundation for their current and upcoming projects. Once more, KDAB is confirmed to be the largest independent contributor to Qt, as clearly demonstrated by the commit activity graph in Qt (KDAB is the green one)…

• Recently I found some time again for Marble development, and today Sanjiban and me made some nice progress on vector rendering. This can easily be explained with pictures, so let’s look at an example rendering.

• The KDE meta sprint at CERN (of groups WikiToLearn, Plasma, VDG, techbase wiki cleanup) at begin of this March, where I mainly went for techbase wiki cleanup work, of course was a great occasion to also work face-to-face with Plasma developers and VDG members on issues around the Weather widget, and so we did. Marco helped me to learn more about Plasma5 technologies which resulted in some small bugs fixed in the widget still in time for Plasma 5.6 release.

• Cutelyst the Qt web framework just got a new release, I was planning to do this a while back, but you know we always want to put in a few more changes and time to do that is limited.

• This work is now owned by a team on Launchpad, you are welcome to join if you want to co-maintain the packages. I deleted my own unmaintained PPA, and invite users to switch to one of the above.

• If daily builds are available on other distributions, maintainers are welcome to advertise their work on our wiki, and will be glad to relay the info here!

• In Ubuntu regular version, we use Ubuntu Software Center (USC for short) to install applications. In Kubuntu (Ubuntu KDE version), we use Muon Discover (Muon for short). USC and Muon are two same functional things, but with different details. While USC created specially for Ubuntu, Muon created for any Debian-based distribution using KDE, thus Kubuntu uses Muon. For those don’t know, Muon Discover as desktop application is similar with Google Play Store as mobile application in Android, or App Store in iOS, or Mac App Store in OS X. Here, we explain how to use Muon as Kubuntu Software Center.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Offering a comprehensive set of widgets as well as facilities for creating your own widgets, GTK+ is suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites.

• Both KDE and GNOME have had major milestone releases this week, providing the Linux desktop with a healthy refresh.

• After the usual 6-month development cycle, GNOME 3.20 was released today and it includes changes such as updated Software app, which can now handle operating system upgrades, image editing capabilities for the Photos app, a new shortcuts window which displays the available keyboard shortcuts in most GNOME apps, and much more.

Distributions

• The most important step is to simply increase your font size up from its default or whatever you have it set at to something that’s about 30% larger. This should be good for most people, but you may need to set it a bit higher depending on your personal preferences. This will also vary depending on the pixel pitch of your monitor. Monitors with a smaller pixel pitch may need to set it higher. Once you do this most of the time you’ll be good to go, there are however a few ‘gotchas’ that you will run into.

New Releases

• As you may know, OpenWrt is a Linux based operating system for routers, simulating a powerful OS present on modern and expensive routers.

• The latest version available is OpenWrt 15.05.1, which updates the main components. Among others, it adopted Kernel 3.18.23, OpenSSL 1.0.2f, Samba 3.6 netifd, uhttpd, rpcd, uci, procd, ubox, and hostapd.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• It’s been a while since last having anything to report on the Mandrake/Mandriva-derived Mageia Linux distribution while this weekend they finally managed to put together their first development release of Mageia 6.

Arch Family

• The release of pacman-5.0 brought support for transactional hooks. These will allow us to (e.g.) run font cache updates a single time during an update rather than after each font package installation. This will both speed up the update process, but also reduce packaging burden for the Developers and Trusted Users.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat in fiscal year 2016 became the first open source company ever to reach $2 billion in revenue, only four years after it reached the $1 billion mark.

• Barclays analyst Raimo Lenschow reiterated a Buy rating on Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) on March 23 and set a price target of $90. The company’s shares closed last Thursday at $73.24.

• In the last month, Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) shares have moved up, giving investors a nice push. Shares of the company have been up 12.06% over the last month. Looking at the past five days of trading, shares are changed 0.69%. Since the beginning of the year, the stock has performed -11.56%. With increased volatility in the markets, stockholders may be choosing whether to take some profits or hold onto company shares.

• Red Hat Inc(NYSE:RHT) announced the earnings results for Fiscal Year 2016 and Q4. The results came in during After-hours on Mar 22, 2016. Company reported revenue of $543.50M. Analysts estimated a revenue of $537.20M. Earnings per share were $0.52. Analysts had estimated an EPS of $0.47.

Fedora

• Recently, I’ve been hammering out a bunch of Fedora-related articles, and this is because I happen to be using this distro more and more, and liking it more and more. I have sort of tamed it, and while Gnome 3 still remains a challenge, it is no longer a painful nuisance.

• We discussed Skype setup, extensions, and more. But the problem you are facing is as follows. You recently installed Nvidia drivers in your Fedora 23. Now, Steam no longer launches. It complains about libGL error: No matching fbConfigs or visuals found. What do you do now? This is a very important tutorial, so please pay attention. After me.

• Fedora and I have recently had a breakthrough. We started talking again, and this happened because Gnome 3 decided to become an okay desktop environment that can be used, especially when pimped up with some extra extensions.

• In my review, I used some third-party repos, and eventually easyLife, a tool for managing proprietary software under Fedora, to beef up the basic and rather boring installation. We crammed some fresh stuff into the system, including media codecs, GIMP, VLC, and even Steam. The one thing missing was Skype. We shall do that shortly.

• One of my favorite parts of doing… whatever it is that I do… is that I get to spend so much time talking with some truly interesting people in the Free and Open Source Software world. Leaders of the projects that create the things we use every day – Linux distributions, desktop environments, office suites, and the like.

• Some years back, I had the good fortune to meet Matthew Miller – who has been the Fedora Project Leader since 2014 – and immediately liked the guy. Very easy to chat with. Opinionated… but reasonable. Friendly as all get out.

• Now, I’m an openSUSE guy. I use openSUSE for my primary systems, have a collection of green chameleon plushies, and sit on the board for openSUSE. (If I could fit the word “openSUSE” into this paragraph anymore, I absolutely would.) But I like and respect a great deal of what the Fedora Project does – and, in the open source world, even competitors are friends. Plus, their project leader is an interesting guy.

Debian Family

• The Debian Project Leader (DPL) is the project’s democratically elected leader; each year, the Debian Developers vote, and whichever of the candidates comes out on top is deemed the winner. At least, that is the way it usually works; this year, the process is a bit different, due to the fact that there is only one candidate. Unless something peculiar happens, then, candidate Mehdi Dogguy will take over as DPL on April 17. It may sound a tad unusual from the outside but, apart from the actual vote, the election process has proceeded as normal, with Dogguy publishing a candidate platform and taking questions from project members on the election mailing list. Some are beginning to worry that the paucity of candidates indicates that the burden of serving as DPL has become too burdensome, however, which is a problem that Debian will need to address in the long term

Derivatives

• Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 (code name Erik) ships with stable GNOME 3.20 desktop environment and an updated kernel. This version has been synchronized with Debian Jessie repositories as of March 17 2016. Parsix Erik ships with GNOME 3.20 and LibreOffice 4.3.3 productivity suit by default. Highlights: GNOME Shell 3.20.0, GRUB 2, Firefox 45.0.1, GParted 0.19.0, Empathy 3.12.11, LibreOffice 4.3.3, VirtualBox 4.3.36 and a kernel based on Linux 4.1.19 with TuxOnIce 3.3, BFS and other extra patches. Live DVD has been compressed using SquashFS and XZ.

• We were the first to report a few of days ago that the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 operating system is launching later this year with the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment and Linux kernel 4.4 LTS.

• And now the time has come for us to take the first test release of the upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux distro for a test drive, as its developers have just announced earlier today (March 26) the availability for download of Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 TEST-0.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• The world’s first Ubuntu Tablet will go on pre-sale this coming Monday, March 28.

• The Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet will be available to pre-order in two versions: a HD (1280 x 800) model and a high-spec FHD (1920 x 1200) model.

• Pricing will be announced on Monday. The tablet will, as with the phone, be sold direct by Bq through its international website.

• As you may know, Ubuntu Touch is the mobile version of the Ubuntu desktop, specially created by Canonical to compete with Android and iOS. Unlike the two mobile operating systems, Ubuntu Touch gets updated a lot more frequently.

• Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus LTS final beta is available for download, and it includes quite a few changes, including an option to move the Unity Launcher to the bottom of the screen, the replacement of Ubuntu Software Center with GNOME Software and more.

• Ubuntu 16.04 is just a month away. Many of you already looking for downloading of your own ISO image of the system. Yes, that’s the next long-term support version, codenamed Xenial Xerus.

• Built by Spanish company BQ, who was the first to release an Ubuntu phone, Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition is both the first Ubuntu tablet and the first Ubuntu device to provide a converged experience.

• The device features a dynamically adaptive interface, capable of providing both a tablet experience as well as a full Ubuntu desktop experience, when using the micro HDMI port to connect it to an external monitor, along with a keyboard and mouse connected via Bluetooth.

• Ubuntu 16.04 will ship with an option to move the Unity Launcher (dock) to the bottom of the screen.

• The feature that allows moving the Unity Launcher / Dash to the bottom of the screen, landed in Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus (to be released on April 21st) on Friday.

Flavours and Variants

• We are preparing Kubuntu Xenial Xerus (16.04 LTS) for distribution on April 21, 2016. With this Beta 2 pre-release, you can see what we are trying out in preparation for our next stable version. We would love to get some testing by our users.

Devices/Embedded

• eInfochips has opened pre-orders on a tiny, wireless-rich “Eragon 820” COM and development kit that run Linux or Android on a Snapdragon 820 SoC.

• The eInfochips Eragon 820 is the second computer-on-module we’ve seen based on Qualcomm’s high-end quad-core 64-bit Snapdragon 820 system-on-chip after Intrinsyc’s 82 x 42mm, SODIMM-style Open-Q 820 COM, which similarly comes with a development kit. The Linux- and Android 5.1.1 ready 53 x 25mm module and 110 x 85mm carrier are aimed at “next generation designs in Ultra HD/4K camera and connectivity solutions,” says the company.

• I spent today working on getting aarch64 working on the Raspberry Pi 3.

• This is good news! Since last September our assets were frozen (the “WikiLeaks Syndrome”) as our “case” was going through a Kafkaesque process that finally ended on January, 25th, 2016.

• After blocking Neo900′s account, PayPal had to decide whether Neo900 is a crowdfunding project or a pre-selling project.

Phones

Android

• Many smartphone and tablet users are already relishing the use of the upcoming Android N. While this is happening, users of Android TV platform can also put a smile on their faces as this OS also brings quite some great abilities as well.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Foundation’s commitment to fostering a collaborative approach to development has long served as a model for producing consistently high quality software and helping advance the future of open development. The ASF’s collaborative leadership, robust community, and meritocratic process serve as best practices widely embraced by organizations and individuals alike.

Web Browsers

• This NoScript Beginner’s Guide has been designed to provide new Firefox or NoScript users with information on how the browser add-on works. I have published a guide for regular users in 2014 which you may find useful as well.

• NoScript is a long standing security add-on for Firefox that is rated highly on Mozilla AMO and quite popular with more than 2.3 million users.

• It is often confused with ad-blockers, and while it does that to, it is much more than that and the ad-blocking is more of a side-effect of the extension’s functionality than something it has been designed for.

Databases

• Dalmatimer DB is an open source time series database built on top of riak-core and ZFS. It re-uses the logic from riak-core to handle the logic of where data is located but implements its very own database optimised for metrics

BSD

• This is an interim release between the 9.3 series and 10 (which is still a few months away), using the same UI and middleware that everyone is used to from 9.3 but with new OS underpinnings, specifically FreeBSD 10.3-RC3.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• As you may know, G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic Image Converter) is a editing tool, that can be used with GIMP or as a standalone application, being available for both Linux and Windows. G’MIC provides a window which enables the users to add more than 500 filters over photos and preview the result, in order to give the photos some other flavor.

• I’m very pleased to announce the release of a new version of GNU PSPP. PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS.

Licensing

• My Free Software journey starts with The Cuckoo’s Egg. Back in the early 90s a family friend suggested I might enjoy reading it. He was right; I was fascinated by the world of interconnected machines it introduced me to. That helped start my involvement in FidoNet, but it also got me interested in Unix. So when I saw a Linux book at the Queen’s University bookshop (sadly no longer with us) with a Slackware CD in the back I had to have it.

Programming

• An ultra-common and generally bullshit theme that can be found across the internet from Business Insider to coder forums to anywhere else that aspiring programmers and coders may lurk is that of the “most profitable” programming language. Where should “you,” as the stereotypical case of just-anyone wanting to get into code to make better and easier money, be best off spending your limited attention and financial resources? It is a bogus question that gets at sickly heart of programming hype—a phenomenon that rests mostly on the notion that a few weeks of online learning or a code bootcamp will make someone into a coveted resource.

• If you use Node, you’ve probably been following this week’s story between Azer Koçulu, Kik and npm.

• A brief rundown: Azer made an npm module called “kik”, which shares its name with a company. Kik asked him to rename the module, and Azer refused, so npm intervened and reassigned it to Kik.

• Perl 6 has been 15 years in the making, and is now due to be released at the end of this year. We speak to its creator to find out what’s going on.

• Larry Wall is a fascinating man. He’s the creator of Perl, a programming language that’s widely regarded as the glue holding the internet together, and mocked by some as being a “write-only” language due to its density and liberal use of non-alphanumeric characters. Larry also has a background in linguistics, and is well known for delivering entertaining “State of the Onion” presentations about the future of Perl.

Leftovers

Science

Health/Nutrition

• The major industrial enterprise E. I. du Pont de Nemours has been hiding studies on the deleterious effects the chemical C8 has on health for decades. C8 is a major surfactant component of Teflon, used in hundreds of different products including clothing, and furniture. C8 and other perfluorooctonoic acids (PFOA) are associated with a wide range of severe health problems from low levels of exposure like ulcerative colitis, high cholesterol, thyroid disease, testicular cancer, as well as kidney cancer. DuPont continued producing C8 despite knowing its toxicity.

• Monsanto’s use of a toxic pesticide, glyphosate, has been linked to rampant kidney disease in farmers and, according to a Vice News article, the death toll “has reached the tens of thousands.” Glyphosate, commonly known as RoundUp, is a weed killer that is made and used by Monsanto that “can become highly toxic to one’s kidneys when mixed with ‘hard water’” wrote Neha Shastry of Vice News.

Security

• One of the major failures of the Stuxnet operation was its designer’s inability to maintain control of the computers that were infected by the self-replicating malware. What’s more, the Stuxnet code was also easily dissected by researchers, allowing them to eventually figure out it targeted industrial control systems. Gauss, another piece of malware spawned from at least some of the same developers as Stuxnet, didn’t make the same critical mistakes. Its mystery warhead was encrypted using a key derived from a single computer that has yet to be publicly identified.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• In recent years the US has quietly ramped up its military presence across the African continent, even though “officially” the US has only one permanent base, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. Since the US opened that base, shortly after September 11, 2001, it has grown from 88 acres with 900 military personnel to around 500 acres with 5,000 military personnel. Camp Lemonnier is currently undergoing a $1.4 billion upgrade, expanding everything from aircraft maintenance hangars, ammunition shelters, and runway extensions to accommodation facilities.

• William Celli, a 55-year-old man from California, will spend 90 days in jail after being caught in possession of an explosive device and threatening to kill Muslims. Celli took a plea deal that places him on probation for a further three years and bans him from operating an active Facebook profile.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• In Fort Davis, Texas, in the Davis Mountains, the McDonald Observatory, a “multi-million dollar facility” (Santoro), is being threatened, as light pollution from hydraulic fracturing and fossil fuels, has been increasing the sky’s brightness by up to 30%. The “Trans-Pecos Pipeline” project, if implemented early in 2016, is expected to contribute further to that trend. As a result, some of the darkest skies in the United States are being endangered. Furthermore, the projected pipeline project would negatively impact “one of the largest intact bioregions in the country,” according to Alyce Santoro’s report. It would also run through one of the few remaining areas in Texas that is unscathed by fossil fuel extraction and exploration.

• Asia, the world’s biggest coal market by far, is showing signs of turning its back on what is the most polluting of fuels, shelving or cancelling a large number of coal-fired power plant construction projects.

• Four Asian countries – China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam – together account for about 75% of an estimated 2,457 coal-fired power stations at present planned or under construction around the world.

• It seems like every few weeks there’s some new measurement of how successful solar power is in the United States. In early March, industry analysts found that solar is poised for its biggest year ever, with total installations growing 119 percent by the end of 2016. This week, federal government analysts reported that in 2015, solar ranked number three (behind wind and natural gas) in megawatts of new electricity-producing capacity brought online. That rank is even more impressive when you consider that each individual solar installation is fewer megawatts than a wind turbine, and far fewer than a natural gas plant; that means solar panels are popping up like crazy across the country.

• Polish ecological organizations are up in arms over plans to reintroduce large-scale logging in the protected Bialowieza forest in the east of the country, in response to a massive spruce bark beetle infestation there.

• Climate change has reached the point where it may outstrip the quickening efforts to slow it by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, scientists say.

• First, the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that the company has to allow shareholders to vote on a climate change resolution. Then, the Rockefeller Family Fund announced it would divest from fossil fuels — and took the opportunity to hit Exxon specifically for misleading investors about the risks of climate change.

Finance

• A SUPREME COURT order this week forces the Obama administration to make a decision: either save consumers tens of billions of dollars at the expense of debt collectors, car loan specialists, and student lenders, or defend those financial entities.

• The UK government’s recent attempts to legislate against Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions are reminiscent of Thatcher during South African Apartheid.

• The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is taking a beating in the ongoing U.S. presidential election cycle, leaving some observers to wonder if it can survive such a political backlash against trade agreements. But as the leading candidates seem to compete for who can bash U.S. trade policies the hardest, other countries have been pressing forward to ratify the TPP since the deal’s signature in February.

• In the U.S., chances are close to nil that the TPP could get ratified anytime soon. The White House is still seeking congressional support for the massive 12-country deal but the political environment could not be any more unfavorable. Presidential candidates are pointing to trade agreements as the root cause of economic inequality. For the Obama administration, things look grim in Congress as well. More and more lawmakers are coming out against the TPP, while others who had long championed the deal are now holding back their support over their stance that some of the provisions do not go far enough to protect certain industries. The soonest the TPP’s ratification vote may happen is during the “Lame Duck” period after November’s election.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The nuances of foreign policy do not feature heavily in the ongoing presidential campaign. Every candidate intends to “destroy” the Islamic State; each has concerns about Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korea, and China; every one of them will defend Israel; and no one wants to talk much about anything else — except, in the case of the Republicans, who rattle their sabers against Iran.

• In that light, here’s a little trip down memory lane: in October 2012, I considered five critical foreign policy questions — they form the section headings below — that were not being discussed by then-candidates Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. Romney today is a sideshow act for the current Republican circus, and Obama has started packing up his tent at the White House and producing his own foreign policy obituary.

• Journalist Ben Bagdikian died March 11 at age 96. He was a crucial influence on FAIR’s work, not only for his classic book The Media Monopoly, now called The New Media Monopoly and in its seventh printing, but also for the spirited journalism that preceded that work, including pushing the Pentagon Papers into print and going undercover as an inmate at a maximum security prison, and all the thoughtful, humanistic work that followed. He was a friend to us, and we’ll miss him.

• Who are these Democrats, imbued with such power? Reason TV put together this instructional cartoon to help sort it all out.

• Bernie Sanders won caucuses in Washington and Alaska by wide margins on Saturday to close the delegate lead against Hillary Clinton. Sanders captured 73 percent of the vote in Washington, which had 101 pledged delegates at stake, and 82 percent of the vote in Alaska, which had 16 pledged delegates.

Censorship

• A “cultural war” in the United Kingdom has been kindled when the word “Easter” was quietly removed from the chocolate egg candies being manufactured by companies such as Cadbury and Nestlé.

Privacy

• Policymakers who understand those themes will reject reported legislation that would mandate backdoors in your technology, or otherwise force tech companies to ensure the FBI’s access to everyone’s communications. Senators Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, and Richard Burr, R-NC, have threatened to introduce a proposal along those lines, which would place millions of people at risk, overlook several key facts, and resign a need for long overdue—and increasingly vital—transparency into law enforcement excesses.

• Web-exclusive interview with Glenn Greenwald on the debate over encryption and the Apple-FBI battle.

• RIVAL politicians are working in parallel to solve the ongoing parking issue in streets around GCHQ in Cheltenham.

• People who live in Hester’s Way and Fiddlers Green, and the councillors who represent them, are unhappy about employees and external contractors parking cars in residential roads causing disruption and congestion.

• “It’s high time that someone in the US Congress took some direct action against the NSA for their intrusion into Americans’ privacy and violation of their Second Amendment rights,” said Mike Harris, the financial editor at Veterans Today.

• “The NSA was never meant to be a domestic spy organization; the NSA was meant to gather foreign intelligence, not to spy on the American citizenry,” Harris told Press TV on Saturday.

• “This is in direct violation against the Second Amendment of free speech and the Fourth Amendment to be safe and secure in one’s housing,” he added.

• A couple of US lawmakers have called on the NSA to abandon its planned expansion of domestic spying.

Civil Rights

• Saudi Arabia sentenced a journalist to five years in prison over a series of tweets, in what human rights organizations are calling the latest crackdown on free expression by the oil-rich kingdom.

• In addition to spending five years in prison, Alaa Brinji was sentenced to an eight-year travel ban and a 50,000 Saudi Arabian riyals (about U.S. $13,300) fine. Brinji is a prominent Saudi journalist who was arrested in May 2014 and initially held in solitary confinement and without access to a lawyer. According to Amnesty International, Brinji’s crimes don’t fit the bill.

• Historically, a government that can, without due process, throw a citizen into a dungeon or summarily execute him is considered to be a tyranny, not a democracy. By any historical definition, the United States today is a tyranny.

• We, professors and researchers from Brazilian universities, hereby address the International Academic Community to report serious breaches in the rule of law currently taking place in Brazil.

• Our American president’s long-overdue visit to Cuba was a great thing for many reasons.

• But maybe our elected officials should cease their hypocritical yapping about the human rights situation in Cuba until they come clean about what’s happening here in the United States.

• To be sure, there is much to say about how this authoritarian regime has handled dissent. The details abound in the corporate media.

• But the idea of the United States lecturing Cuba or any other country on this planet about human rights comes down somewhere between embarrassing and nauseating.

• American workers have it hard. We put in more hours at work than any other workers in the industrialized world, and we are given — and take — fewer vacation days.

• At the same time, we’re also one of only three countries across the globe (the other two are Papua New Guinea and Suriname) that does not provide paid family leave. For American workers, being unable to leave work to care for a newborn baby or a seriously ill family member is an all too familiar scenario.

• When Nancy Markham called 911 multiple times between March and August 2014 because of her abusive ex-boyfriend, the single mother didn’t know that her calls for help would only lead to more fear and insecurity. Instead of serving and protecting her, the police department of Surprise, Arizona, tried to silence and get Markham evicted from her rental home — all because of an ill-conceived nuisance ordinance the city passed in 2010.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Megaupload’s legal team was back in court this week in an effort to reclaim an estimated $67 million in assets previously seized by the U.S. Government. Megaupload’s appellate counsel refuted the claim that Kim Dotcom and his former colleagues are fugitives, noting that the District Court ruling violates due process.

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