● 06.07.17

● Links 7/6/2017: KaOS 2017.06, Mesa 17.1.2

Posted in News Roundup at 6:01 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• While the options for Linux computers from commercial vendors are still needles in the proverbial haystack of OEM Windows equipment out there, there are more and more options available to a consumer who wants a good, solid device that’s ready-to-use with no messing around.

• Still, there are more Linux OEM computers than I could look at for one article—and the options tend to be different in Europe than they are in the United States, with providers like Entroware that don’t ship to the latter at all.

• In this article, I look at offerings from three of the most well-known Linux OEMs on the western side of the pond: ZaReason, System76, and Dell.

Server

• Summary? Now both Docker and CoreOS rkt containers can be started in actual VMs, for additional isolation and security – whereas a Linux distro vendor is offering a container system that aims to look and work like a hypervisor. These are strange times. Perhaps the only common element is that it’s bad news for both VMware and Microsoft.

• CoreOS is extending its Tectonic Kubernetes container management and orchestration system with new deployment options and security capabilities. The new capabilities were announced at the CoreOS Fest conference in San Francisco held on May 31 and June 1.

• A core theme for CoreOS with the new updates and the overall platform is to enable flexibility and choice for users.

• “Cloud services have a big secret—after using the services for a year or two, the bill will be through the roof and you’ll be completely locked in,” Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, told eWEEK.

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) on Monday turned its focus to small and medium size businesses (SMBs) with news of a partnership with ClearCenter to bring ClearOS, a Linux-based operating system, to HPE Proliant servers. The vendor also announced that it’s refreshing and broadening its Proliant server portfolio.

• HPE is making a SOHO and SMB server play as it bundles ClearOS Linux on ProLiant servers and unveils several new servers targeting small and midsized business customers.

• HPE’s networking division is going right to the core, with new Aruba 8400 switching platform and Linux powered network operating system.

Kernel Space

• The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), a project managed by The Linux Foundation that collaboratively works to improve the security and resilience of critical open source projects, today announced that Thales is joining as a new gold member.

Graphics Stack

• It’s not as exciting as a new feature release, but Mesa 17.1.2 is now available as the latest stable point release.

• Mesa developer Juan A. Suarez Romero is proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the second maintenance update to the Mesa 17.1 3D Graphics Library stable series.

• Mesa 17.1.2 is here only two weeks after the release of the Mesa 17.1.1 update, and it looks like it brings quite a number of changes. According to the changelog attached at the end of the article, a total of 70 changes are included in this new point release of Mesa 17.1 that would benefit all Linux gamers using AMD Radeon and Intel graphics cards.

• With the big Dawn of War III release getting closer, one Mesa developer has put some serious effort into getting Mesa ready to game on.

• Samuel Pitoiset sent in a set of 23 patches that should “save few CPU cycles for this not yet released game”. Any performance improvement is welcome and I’m sure when these are pulled into a Mesa release, it will make for some happy Linux gamers using Mesa.

• What better way to celebrate the Phoronix birthday than a new Vulkan update!

Benchmarks

• With the Ethereum cryptocurrency generating lots of buzz recently due to its rising valuation and being excellent for mining on GPUs, here are some Ubuntu Linux benchmarks when testing many different GeForce and Radeon graphics cards with the Ethminer OpenCL support, including performance-per-dollar and performance-per-Watt metrics.

• GL_vs_VK is self-described as a “comparison of OpenGL and Vulkan API in terms of performance” and offers multiple test-cases for directly comparing OpenGL and Vulkan in different environments. Here are some benchmarks on several different drivers and GPUs.

• GL_vs_VK is being written by a university student, Damian Dyńdo, for his master thesis project looking at the OpenGL and Vulkan APIs in terms of API-related overhead by implementing nearly identical tests in both OpenGL and Vulkan. Where available are also multi-threaded test-cases for each scene. Damian was open to making GL_vs_VK automated benchmark friendly so I’ve added a test profile for it so it can be benchmarked via the Phoronix Test Suite.

Applications

• One of the things that many users love about Apple MacOSX is the dock at the bottom of their screen.

• But docks are not exclusive to Mac users, rather Windows, GNU/Linux, and even BSD users can all have the handy tool on their desktop.

• GNU/Linux users have quite a few at their disposal, so I thought perhaps a comparison might be in order.

• The dtrx tool is an universal archive extractor for many archive types. dtrx stands for “Do The Right Extraction”. It is a free, open source archive extraction tool. You don’t need to have multiple extraction tools for handling different types of archive files. dtrx will take care of almost all types of archive files such as tar, zip, cpio, deb, rpm, gem, 7z, cab, lzh, rar, gz, bz2, lzma, xz, and many kinds of exe files, including Microsoft Cabinet archives, InstallShield archives, and self-extracting zip files. dtrx will extract the archives into their own dedicated directories. Also, it makes sure you can read and write all the files you just extracted, while leaving the rest of the permissions intact. And also, it can find the archives inside the archive and extract those too.

Proprietary

• Last week, we reported that Kingsoft would halt the development of WPS Office for Linux, following tweets that they would open source the code of the office suite later this year and let the community continue work on the software. Kingsoft has now backtracked on what it had said earlier.

Instructionals/Technical

• Caml is a general-purpose, powerful, high-level programming language with a large emphasis on speed and efficiency. A dialect of the ML programming language, it supports functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming styles. Caml has been developed and distributed by INRIA, a French research institute, since 1985.

• There is a numerous number of terminal-based games to play on Linux. Yes, sometimes you need to move away from the configuration files, monitoring tools and so on – get your mind refreshed for a few minutes with games on the terminal even when your working.

Games

• Super God, a Finland-based indie game company released Mac and Linux builds for their well-received retro sword-swinging roguelite, Riptale.

• THQ Nordic has a little present for us today, as Silver, an RPG from the Dreamcast days has released on Steam with Linux support.

• The game originally released in 1999 and here we are nearly two decades later with a Linux version, good things come to those who wait I guess? It’s not the first older title they’ve given to Linux, as they also put out an updated version of Imperium Galactica II which had Linux support added recently as well.

• The latest Steam Hardware Survey has been released and this time around Linux has actually increased the share by a small amount.

• Tokyo 42 [Steam, Official Site] recently released with Windows support, but the developers have said Linux is on their roadmap. Good news, as it does look incredible.

• For as long as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has been around, there have been cheats. Though, their prevalence has fluctuated over the years, impacted by occasional ban waves that stop a small population of cheaters dead in their tracks, and make others think twice about taking the risk.

• LandTraveller [Steam, Official Site] was pointed out to me today and I must say I am intrigued by it. It’s a colourful 2D action RPG with sandbox elements and it even has online play.

• In the mood for a more relaxing game? Well klocki [Steam, Official Site] might be what you need for those Monday blues. It’s a simple puzzle game about fitting shapes together. I grabbed a key from the developer when they posted some on reddit and finally found some time to check it out today.

• Riptale [Steam, Official Site], a black & white challenging 2D roguelike that lights up with blood has officially released for Linux. It had a beta release last month which seems to have gone well, since it released on June 1st.

• Brace yourself, games are coming. Steam Greenlight has been officially closed as of today and Valve has announced Steam Direct will launch on June 13th.

• StarFlint [Official Site] is a new comedy point and click adventure in the style of old Lucas Arts titles, it’s on Kickstarter and it actually has a Linux demo (demo link) to check out.

• Last year, UK studio Codemasters blew my nomex racing socks off with DiRT Rally. The achievement was all the more notable because—while I tend to stick almost exclusively to racing games—I haven’t really enjoyed off-road or rally games very much in the past. Now, Paul Coleman and his team at Codemasters have a new game for us that builds on the success of DiRT Rally, but it should entice a far wider audience. Enter DiRT 4, available starting June 6 on Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Steam.

• Six months after the release of the SteamOS 2.98 stable version, Valve promoted today SteamOS update 2.117 to the Brewmaster channel as the new stable build of the Linux-based operating system for Steam Machines and GNU/Linux PCs.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Just one week after the launch of the KDE Plasma 5.10 desktop environment, the first point release has arrived today, and it’s already available for installation from the stable software repositories of Arch Linux and other GNU/Linux distributions.

• This is an overview of some of my favorite KDE applications that are specifically made for people who would like to learn new skills or cultivate existing ones. All of them are free software (not just gratis, but free as in freedom, just like everything that is part of KDE), and they can be installed on your computer running GNU/Linux (even if you use a desktop environment other than KDE Plasma) so that you can access them offline anytime.

• ​We all love paintings. Paintings are a sort of art that are mystically beautiful, exploring and blazing. Nowadays on Linux, there are many powerful applications that are available for painting and drawing purposes but Krita is one of them that stands out of everything.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Arc Menu is an alternative menu application based on the app menu in Zorin OS which is reminiscent of Windows 7 app launcher menu, designed to replace the default ‘Activities‘ button in system tray with the traditional ‘Start Menu’ icon and launcher.

• How would you like it if you could view Gmail alerts in your notifications tray? If you have GNOME shell running on your workstation then you’re in luck because there is a pretty handy gnome extension that lets you do just that.

• Gmail Message Tray is a GNOME extension that auto-syncs your Gmail account and lets you see notifications for all your unread emails in system’s tray as an indicator applet.

• Tiling window managers have always interested me, but spending a lot of time tinkering with config files or learning how to wrangle them? Not so much. What I really want is a dead simple way to organize my windows and still use a friendly desktop. And I found it, finally: the gTile extension for GNOME.

• If you are using GNOME, pop open Firefox and head to the extension page. Click “on” and go ahead and install the extension.

Distributions

• 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki‏ informs Softpedia about the availability of the third point release to the 4MLinux 21.0 stable series of the independently developed GNU/Linux distribution.

• 4MLinux 21.3 is a minor update that brings the latest version of the Linux 4.4 LTS kernel series, namely Linux kernel 4.4.70, and updates various components and applications, including but not limited to VLC Media Player, GRUB bootloader, and SMTube video player for YouTube videos. At the request of many users, it also adds an RDP client, specifically rdesktop 1.8.3.

New Releases

• Just days after Qt 5.9.0 and Plasma 5.10.0 were announced, can you already see both on this new release. Highlights of Plasma 5.10.0 include Task Manager gaining options for middle mouse click such as grouping and ungrouping applications, media controls and virtual keyboard on lock screen, revamped password dialogs for network authentication, performance optimizations in Pager and Task Manager, the security of the lock screen architecture was reworked and simplified and file copying notifications have a context menu on previews

• A new monthly ISO snapshot of the KaOS operating system has been released for those who want to install the GNU/Linux distribution on their personal computers or have planned to reinstall.

• Being built around the latest KDE Plasma desktop environment, KaOS 2017.06 launches with the KDE Plasma 5.10 release, which means that KaOS users can enjoy all of its exciting new features, along with the recently unveiled Qt 5.9 cross-platform application framework. On top of that, the new ISO snapshot includes KDE Frameworks 5.34.0 and KDE Applications 17.04.1 packages.

Gentoo Family

• After long discussion with the sparc team and other developers, the Security Team has decided to drop SPARC as a security supported architecture. This decision follows the council decision on 2016-12-11, “The council defers to the security team, but is supportive of dropping security support for sparc if it is unable to generally meet the security team timelines.”

• The list of security supported architectures is maintained in the [Security Vulnerability Treatment Policy]

Arch Family

• Arch Linux fans or those trying to discover the powerful GNU/Linux distribution should be aware of the fact that there’s a new ISO snapshot out there packed with all of the latest software versions and technologies.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• You all know the amazing SUSE Studio and love how it abstracts the complicated process of appliance building.

• Since changing to a rolling development version model for the eventual release of openSUSE Leap 42.3, challenges have arisen to get more people testing it.

• There is no milestone releases (Alpha or Beta) for openSUSE Leap 42.3, but snapshots of the development version are constantly being released.

• openSUSE Project’s Douglas DeMaio is today informing Softpedia about the promotion of the upcoming openSUSE Leap 42.3 operating system to the Release Candidate (RC) state.

• According to the roadmap, openSUSE Leap 42.3 was supposed to enter Release Candidate phase today, June 6, 2017, and the latest snapshot that will soon be released for public testing appears to equate to the RC version. But it looks like there’s little interest from the community for testing the upcoming openSUSE Leap 42.3 operating system, possibly because of the new rolling development process.

Slackware Family

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat announced its lead software-defined storage program, Red Hat Ceph Storage, has a new release: 2.3. This latest version, based on Ceph 10.2 (Jewel), introduces a new Network File System (NFS) interface, offers new compatibility with the Hadoop S3A filesystem client, and adds support container deployment storage.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is using Red Hat Ceph Storage to support the growing needs of its research community. UAB selected Red Hat Ceph Storage because it offers researchers a flexible platform that can accommodate the vast amounts of data necessary to support future innovation and discovery.

Finance

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical today announced the availability of its Kernel Livepatch service for users of the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system series, now that it supports the Snappy technologies.

• It’s official, the Unity desktop environment is now gone and has been removed from the daily build ISO images of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.

• While updating our Ubuntu 17.10 testing machine, we couldn’t help but notice that many GNOME packages have been installed, so after a restart we’ve discovered that the Unity desktop environment was replaced with a GNOME session, though a GNOME on Wayland session is also available from the LightDM login manager.

Flavours and Variants

• Linux Mint 18.2 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2021. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

• It has been quite long since I covered Peppermint in any of my articles. But that does not mean I don’t love it. I fell in love with this distro when I used it for the first time(Peppermint OS 6). Peppermint presents ‘Ice’, a web application management tool which let us use our favorite web applications right from the application menu or desktop. The Peppermint 8 release comes with some system tweaks and improvements. So let’s see more about it.

Devices/Embedded

• Olimex has released its first 64-bit hacker board with the $56 A64-OLinuXino, featuring a quad -A53 SoC plus HDMI, GbE, USB, WiFi, and Bluetooth.

• The A64-OLinuXino is Olimex’s first 64-bit ARMv8 OlinuXino board and the first to be designed entirely with open source CAD software (KiCad). The quad-core, Cortex-A53 driven board arrived a few days too late for our 2017 hacker board survey, but OLinuXino fans can write it in as a favorite.

• ProtoCentral’s HealthyPi is a $195, open source HAT add-on for vital sign monitoring, including ECG/respiration, pulse oximetry, and temperature.

• Bangalore, India-based ProtoCentral has gone to Crowd Supply to launch a multi-parameter patient monitoring HAT add-on for the Raspberry Pi 3. The open source Healthy Pi v3 is a highly affordable solution for DIY home health monitoring or healthcare in emerging nations, and can also be used in education, research, and medical device prototyping.

• Nearly two years ago, Toyota stunned much of the auto world when it revealed that it had no plans to offer Apple CarPlay or Android Auto on any of its vehicles. Instead, Toyota said that it was going to build an infotainment system of its own.

• DFI’s “Ali17x” industrial Apollo Lake Mini-ITX offers triple displays plus PCIe, mini-PCIe, M.2, and serial expansion, and optional 15-36V and -40 to 85°C. DFI’s Ali171 and Ali173 boards, which provide 12V and 15-36V power supplies, respectively, build on Intel’s latest Apollo Lake Atom, Celeron, and Pentium system-on-chips.

Phones

Android

• The decision to buy any Android Watch is dependent on multiple factors, but in the ZTE Quartz’s case, there are two main ones to consider: Do you need Android Pay? Are you a T-Mobile customer?

• If the answers to those questions are no and yes, respectively, then the ZTE Quartz is a no-brainer purchase (assuming it fits your wrist). At just $192, you’re not likely to find a better deal for a 3G Android Wear watch, even if you opt for one of the marked-down first-gen versions. All-day, independent connectivity is quite a feat for a sub-$200 2017 watch, and if that’s one of the features you crave, there’s very little reason reason not to pick one up.

• It might not be the flashiest watch around, but with the money you save you can buy a real fancy band to go with it.

Free Software/Open Source

• Even though I write for a living, I rarely use a word processor these days; I do most of my work in a text editor. When I do need to use a word processor, I turn to LibreOffice Writer. It’s familiar, it’s powerful, and it does everything that I need a word processor to do.

• It’s hard to dispute LibreOffice Writer’s position at the top of the free and open source word processor food chain—both in popularity and in the number of features it has. That said, Writer isn’t everyone’s favorite word processor or their go-to application for writing.

• Today, if you’re building a new product or service, open source software is likely playing a role. But many entrepreneurs and product managers still struggle with how to build a successful business purely on open source.

• The big secret of a successful open source business is that “it’s about way more than the code,” says John Mark Walker, a well-known voice in the open source world with extensive expertise in open source product, community, and ecosystem creation at Red Hat and Dell EMC. “In order to build a certified, predictable, manageable product that ‘just works,’ it requires a lot more effort than just writing good code.”

• I am sure that the line would have continued rising toward the sky if Google hadn’t tired of scanning books in 2008.

• Anyway, we succeeded. As both an concept and a practice, open source is embedded in technology, business, culture, government—you name it. In fact, it is so widely uttered, you might even call it mature.

• But it’s not, because making full sense of open-source development is still an uphill struggle, especially if you’re an organization trying to manage it—especially in a world that still doesn’t fully understand it, even though it gets talked about constantly.

• Igalia is an open source development company offering consultancy services for desktop, mobile, and web technologies. The company’s developers contribute code for several open source projects, including GNOME, WebKit, and the Linux kernel.

• The company was founded in September 2001 in A Coruña, Spain, by a group of 10 software professionals, who were inspired by Free Software and shared the goal of creating a company based on cooperation and innovation.

Events

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• There’s something that Americans of varied political affiliations — Democrats, Republicans and Independents — largely agree on: the need to protect net neutrality.

• A recent public opinion poll carried out by Mozilla and Ipsos revealed overwhelming support across party lines for net neutrality, with over three quarters of Americans (76%) supporting net neutrality. Eighty-one percent of Democrats and 73% of Republicans are in favor of it.

Funding

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GNU General Public License, or GPL, played a key role in the development of free and open source software. Today, however, many programmers and companies are passing on the GPL in favor of alternative open source licenses. Are they relegating the GPL to the past?

• The GPL is designed to ensure that the source code of a program will always be available. It also requires that programmers who make changes to a GPL-licesned program and release that program publicly share the source code of their modifications.

• Free software dominates modern computing, from smartphones to supercomputers — only the desktop remains a stronghold of proprietary code. Most of that free software has the Linux kernel at its heart, and a key element in the success of Linux — and of thousands of other coding projects — is the GNU General Public License. Although the first version of the GNU GPL was released by Richard Stallman back in 1989, and version 3 was issued in 2007, there have been surprisingly few court cases examining it and other open source licenses, and whether they are legally watertight.

• A key case is Jacobsen v. Katzer from 2008. As a detailed Groklaw post at the time explained, the US appeals court held that open source license conditions are enforceable as a copyright condition. Now we have another important judgment, Artifex v. Hancom, that clarifies further the legal basis of open source licenses. It concerns the well-known Ghostscript interpreter for the PostScript language, written originally by L. Peter Deutsch, and sold by the company he founded, Artifex Software. Artifex was a pioneer in adopting a dual-licensing approach for Ghostscript. That is, you could either use the software under the GNU GPL, or you could avoid copyleft’s redistribution requirements by taking out a conventional proprietary license.

• Open source software is regularly used as a way of leveraging the collective knowledge of the software development community by allowing anyone to improve and contribute to the code, provided they ‘pay it forward’ and allow their improved code to be used by the community. Open source software is often incorporated into proprietary software to avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ – why develop from scratch what has already been prepared and improved upon by the collective wisdom of developers worldwide? This can, however, create a risk of “infection” (requiring the proprietary software to be released on open source terms) – the risk varies based on the terms of the open source licence under which the software is released.

Programming/Development

• It’s no secret that the tech industry has long had a problem attracting women employees. Oddly, this has been even more of a problem in open source (I know, you’d think with all that sharing we’d be a bunch of kumbaya tree huggers), where the problem is compounded by the fact that women who do join projects tend leave very quickly.

• Not only is this not good for career minded women, it’s not good for the business of tech. Good developers are in short supply — and since women make up somewhere around 50 percent of the population, they represent a huge demographic that’s not being properly leveraged.

• The results of a recent survey conducted by GitHub sheds light on this problem, by putting some numbers on already known issues.

• The open source community is nasty in many ways, according to a survey of over 6,000 contributors to open source projects.

• The 2017 Open Source Survey was hosted on GitHub, which “collected responses from 5,500 randomly sampled respondents sourced from over 3,800 open source repositories” and then added “over 500 responses from a non-random sample of communities that work on other platforms.” The questionnaire was also made available in Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Russian.

• The full data dump is available here.

Leftovers

• Recorded June 4th in Los Angeles, Dylan’s lecture finds the rock legend discussing both his musical influences like Leadbelly and Buddy Holly alongside literary works that informed his songwriting, including Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and Homer’s The Odyssey.

Hardware

Health/Nutrition

• The California proposal still must be approved by the California state Assembly and, eventually, by Governor Jerry Brown. Budget plans must be developed. The fight is far from over. But a hurdle has been cleared and DeMoro is right to say that: “This is a banner day for California, and a moral model for the nation.”

• On Wednesday evening, the Public Broadcasting Service’s (PBS) weekly science program “NOVA” aired a segment on the Flint water crisis, titled “Poisoned Water.” An hour-long format, the program roughly follows the chronological sequence of events after the button was pushed three years ago to switch the city’s water supply from treated water provided by the Detroit system to water from the heavily polluted Flint River, treated by the local, archaic water treatment plant.

• A Muslim man is suing Little Caesars Pizza for $100 million after he said he was given and accidentally ate a pizza containing pork pepperoni, despite ordering halal pepperoni.

• Islamic law prohibits Muslims from eating pork.

• The class action lawsuit filed in Wayne County Circuit Court on Thursday claims the restaurant violated Michigan State Law 750.297f, which it referred to as the “Wayne County Halal and Kosher Anti-Fraud and Truth-in-labeling ordinance.”

• The World Health Organization’s new list of essential medicines, those which should be available to everyone, anywhere, was issued today. To answer the rising concern about antimicrobial resistance, the antibiotics on the list have been divided in three groups, the last of which are to be used as a last resort. The list includes the first combination therapy to treat all six types of hepatitis C. However, no second line treatment for breast cancer has been added this year.

• Hospitals face further ward closures, job losses and axed operations after cash-strapped bosses were secretly ordered to draw up yet more cuts.

• NHS chiefs have been warned to “think the unthinkable” in a bid to slash costs as the Tories continue their assault on health.

• Proposed measures also include shutting A&Es, theatres and maternity units, scrapping funding for certain treatments such as IVF and drawing out waiting times for planned care.

Security

• If you want your Linux server to be really secure, you defend it with SELinux. Many sysadmins don’t bother because SELinux can be difficult to set up. But, if you really want to nail down your server, you use SELinux. This makes the newly discovered Linux security hole — with the sudo command that only hits SELinux-protected systems — all the more annoying.

• In a sensational claim, Kaspersky says that a customer in France was told by a Microsoft representative that “Windows 10 is incompatible with third-party antivirus. It’s a shame that you’ve spent money on a Kaspersky Lab product, but you can’t reinstall it without running the risk of the appearance of new bugs.”

• Kaspersky sent a formal complaint to European Union and German antitrust regulators, saying “hurdles” created by Microsoft limit consumer choice and drive up the cost of security software.

• Representative Tom Graves, R-Ga., thinks that when anyone gets hacked {sic} — individuals or companies — they should be able to “fight back” and go “hunt for hackers {sic} outside of their own networks.” The Active Cyber Defense Certainty (“ACDC”) Act is getting closer to being put before lawmakers, and the congressman trying to make “hacking {sic} back” easy-breezy-legal believes it would’ve stopped the WannaCry ransomware.

• Ransomware attacks will be regarded as data breaches under Australia’s new data breach legislation that comes into force on 22 February next year, according to the chief cyber security adviser at RSA.

Defence/Aggression

• Spanish voters turned against the incumbent conservative party after the 2004 Madrid bombings.

• It was a brief moment of cheer, but over the next few hours the militants took control of most of the city, attacked the police station and stole weapons and ammunition, and set up roadblocks and positioned snipers on buildings at key approaches. The assault has already led to the death of almost 180 people and the vast majority of Marawi’s population of about 200,000 has fled.

• Victoria state Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton said on Tuesday the gunman had been implicated in a thwarted suicide attack at a Sydney army barracks in 2009.

• To nobody’s surprise also the London Bridge assassins were known to the authorities. One of them has been in a tv-documentary about jihadism. And he was reported trying to convert children he met in a park to Islam. According to himself, he would be prepared to kill his own mother in the name of Allah.

• Alongside two notorious extremist preachers, the man was seen unfurling the ‘black standard of Isis’ in public. The preachers were already well known to police and intelligence officials because of their extremist views.

• The coordinated move dramatically escalates a dispute over Qatar’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s oldest Islamist movement, and adds accusations that Doha even backs the agenda of regional arch-rival Iran.

• Was that really the best Theresa May could do? It was the same old tosh about “values” and “democracy” and “evil ideology”, without the slightest reference to the nation to whom she fawns – Saudi Arabia, whose Wahhabist “ideology” has seeped into the bloodstream of Isis, al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

• Tony Blair used the same garbage language when he claimed – untruthfully, of course – that the 7/7 London bombings had nothing to do with Iraq. He, too, like George Bush, claimed that they were perpetrated because the bombers hated our values and our democracy, even though Isis would have no idea what these values were if they woke up in bed next to them.

• And then there was the patronising monomorphic language that our wretched Prime Minister used, as if everything she says is false. Which it is.

• As Londoners, we are relieved that we do not know anyone who has been directly affected. It is also genuinely shocking, as it was for some of us during the 2005 bombings, to have personal connections with the places involved in brutal terrorist killings. It is a reminder of the personal trauma that is also being felt by our friends and colleagues in Manchester. Many of us feel very exposed in the face of terrorism and violence.

• As part of the agreement, the people of Papua were to be given an Act of Free Choice at the end of seven years of Indonesian rule.

• [...]

• So 65 years on, what has happened? It depends who you ask.

• Several politicians from across four political parties signed the Westminster Declaration, which calls for West Papua’s right to self-determination to be legally recognised through a vote.

• Kashmir has been in turmoil in recent months, but what is worrying security forces in particular is the emergence of south Kashmir as the hotbed of home-grown militants.

• Intelligence inputs suggest the presence of 200 active militants in the Kashmir Valley comprising 10 districts. Ninety of these militants are from south Kashmir.

• Jeremy Corbyn has said the “difficult conversations” Theresa May wants to have about Islamist extremism should start with “Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states [which] have funded extremist ideology”.

• He’s a draft-dodger and the grandson of a draft-dodger. It’s always someone else who has to suffer for Trump’s stupid choices.

• When Theresa May moved to the Home Office in 2010, she was its sixth occupant in six years. It was a political graveyard for others, but she lasted six years, making her the longest-serving Home Secretary in modern times, before becoming Prime Minister 11 months ago.

• Most media reviews then about her record as Home Secretary were positive. But now it has been cast in an unflattering light after moving to the centre of the election agenda following the terrorist attacks in Manchester and London.

• “What would Donald Trump have to say for you to criticise him?” a room of frustrated journalists asked Theresa May.

• Not everyone is ready to rename Theresa “Trumpesa”, but there are good reasons to do so: the package is different, but the contents are the same.

• He screams that greed is good. She whispers that gluttony is a sin. He’s Wild West. She’s Middle England. But, just like he wants to “Make America Great Again” she wants to “Make Britain Strong and Stable Again”.

• Sources told DNA that during this period, eight women from the Mumbai Metropolitan Region and neighbouring areas in the state, many of whom are converts to Islam, have gone through the ATS’s deradicalisation programme. They were finally weaned away from the clutches of the terror outfit, but continue to be watched by security agencies.

• Qatar is the most politically liberal of the Gulf states (admittedly a low bar). It hosts Al Jazeera TV and the Doha Debates. You can drink in its hotels and women can walk around uncovered, drive cars, and associate comparatively freely. Its universities are western in feel and appearance. There are of course many things to criticise, above all the treatment, conditions and lack of rights of migrant workers, lack of women’s and LGBT rights and freedom of speech, and the absence of meaningful democracy. But Saudi Arabia it isn’t.

• For Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Co-operation Council states to claim Qatar is the main sponsor of state terrorism, and put it under potentially crippling blockade, is the most monstrous example of the pot calling the kettle black. Qatar has indeed financed violent groups in the Middle East and participated in the war in Yemen, but in both cases on a far less grand scale than Saudi Arabia.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Overfishing and depleted fish stocks? The answers are relatively clear, and in many places, we’re already headed in the right direction.

• Marine pollution and plastics? Trickier, and we’re farther from enacting solutions.

• Warming seas and increased acidification? Complex, daunting, and impossible to solve without addressing climate change itself.

• Former Secretary of State John Kerry harshly criticized President Donald Trump for taking the United States out of the Paris climate deal and mocked the commander in chief’s vow to negotiate a better agreement for the country. “When Donald Trump says, well, we’re going to negotiate a better deal, you know, he’s going to go out and find a better deal? That’s like O.J. Simpson saying he’s going to go out and find the real killer,” Kerry said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Everybody knows he isn’t going to do that because he doesn’t believe in it.”

• Throughout the interview, Kerry repeatedly criticized Trump for the decision, saying the president “unilaterally ceded global leadership on this issue” that had bipartisan consensus in the past. He even pointed out that his successor at the State Department, Rex Tillerson, also wanted to keep the United States in the agreement. “I mean, what does Donald Trump know that Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, doesn’t know?” he asked.

• Surveys taken throughout 2016 show escalating impact from north to south, with 70% of shallow water corals dead north of Port Douglas

• Indonesia’s fire and haze crisis in 2015 not only produced emissions on a daily basis exceeding that of the entire EU economy, but it also cost the country 16 billion USD in terms of damages to its economy.

• A well-known South African big game hunter died last week after he was crushed by an elephant during a hunt in Zimbabwe.

• Theunis Botha was leading a group of hunters when they happened upon a herd of breeding elephants near Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe — the same park where Cecil the Lion was killed in July 2015. Three elephants charged the group, and Botha opened fire on them. But a fourth elephant caught the group by surprise and rammed Botha from the side, picking him up with her trunk, according to the South African outlet News 24.

• One of the other hunters in the group fatally shot the elephant, which then collapsed and fell on top of Botha.

• The rising and falling of the sea is a phenomenon upon which we can always depend. Tides are the regular rise and fall of the sea surface caused by the gravitational pull of the moon and sun and their position relative to the earth. There are some factors that cause the tides to be higher than what is “normally” seen from day to day. This bulletin tells you when you may experience higher than normal high tides for the period of time between June and August 2017.

Finance

• In an announcement that included near-verbatim quotes from several aviation Big Four lobbyists, Donald Trump announced plans to shut down the FAA and let the incumbents regulate themselves.

• Blockchain — distributed ledger technology — is on the cusp of disrupting the world as much as the fledgeling Internet did in the 90s, only faster.

• Another reason why these stocks can become proxies for bitcoin is due to Japan’s relatively loose listing laws, some of which require no income and a market value of as little as $10 million before a company can go public. That’s made the Tokyo Stock Exchange home to hundreds of small companies.

• In our ongoing series of responses to “My Family’s Slave,” we’ve heard from a number of readers who saw aspects of their own lives in Eudocia “Lola” Pulido’s situation, as well as some who recognized her story in arrangements made by their own families.

• She told him the NHS could learn from the painful cuts to the Home Office and Ministry of Defence budgets that she and Philip Hammond, the chancellor, had overseen when they were in charge of those departments, according to senior figures in the NHS who were given an account of the discussion.

• Analysts at research firm Incrementum wrote in a report last week that worries about a sluggish economy, coupled with the highly uncertain and volatile political landscape in Washington should push gold even higher.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• My reading was no longer deliberate but curated by external forces that may or may not have aligned with my interests. I’d ceded control of my most valuable currency: my attention.

• Alex Abdo, the institute’s senior staff attorney, likened Twitter to a modern form of town hall meeting or public comment periods for government agency proposals, both venues where U.S. law requires even-handed treatment of speech.

• By blocking certain people on Twitter, President Trump has made it impossible for them to speak directly to him. They can’t see his Tweets. He can’t see theirs. And they can’t participate in the reply threads that are open to the general population. But the biggest issue, Fallow says, is that Trump is specifically blocking people based on how critical they are of him. Other people on Twitter may do that regularly, but when you’re a government official, Fallow argues, different rules apply. “One of our major missions is to be committed to free speech in the digital age and make sure traditional First Amendment principles apply to new technology,” she says.

• The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in New York wrote to Donald Trump demanding he unblock a number of users, because when the President blocks a citizen of the United States it’s a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment protecting freedom of speech.

• “It’s a phenomenon unknown apart from war and pestilence,” Chomsky said. “They have an updated current analysis where they attribute the increase in mortality to despair and loss of status of working people under the neoliberal miracle, which is concomitant [with] heightened worker insecurity.”

• The Intercept’s leaked document alleges Moscow’s military intelligence services attempted cyber-attacks on at least one US voting software supplier days before last November’s US presidential election.

• It also accuses them of sending spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials.

• Within an hour of the story’s publication, the FBI announced the arrest of the alleged source of the leaked report. Reality Leigh Winner was arrested at home in Augusta, Georgia, after an NSA audit identified her as the person who printed and removed the report from a secure facility. The Intercept had turned over a copy of the report to the NSA to verify its provenance while asking for comment. After analysis of the document showed that it had been folded up, suggesting it had been printed, the NSA determined only six employees had access to the document, and only Winner had been in e-mail contact with The Intercept.

• Reality Leigh Winner, 25, has been arrested over charges she leaked top secret National Security Agency documents referenced in this Intercept story about Russia’s cyberwar on U.S. voting infrastructure. She is identified as an NSA contractor.

• An anonymously leaked Top Secret NSA report on Russian state hackers interfering with the US elections has been published by The Intercept, which had the documents independently analyzed by a who’s-who of America’s leading security experts.

• A top-secret NSA report claims that Russian military intelligence carried out a cyber attack on a US voting software supplier and sent phishing emails to 100 local election officials shortly before the US presidential elections in 2016.

• Leakers of classified material and national security journalists alike know that publishing government secrets carries risks. But rarely have the revelation of a bombshell leak and the criminal charges against its source come in such quick succession—in the latest exposé of Russian election hacking {sic}, not much more than an hour apart.

• CNN has denied staging a crowd of protesters for a news shot in the wake of the London Bridge attacks, after conservative Twitter users accused the broadcaster of manufacturing “fake news”.

• The ban came after lead singer Natalie Maines, upset as the White House prepared to invade Iraq, said during a March concert in London that she was ashamed that President Bush was from her home state of Texas.

• Stephen Hawking, regularly referred to as the world’s smartest man, has backed Jeremy Corbyn.

• The Conservatives would be a “disaster” for public services, the world-renowned astrophysicist said.

• “I’m voting Labour because another five years of Conservative government would be a disaster for the NHS, the police and other public services,” he said, after a meeting with Cambridge MP Daniel Zeichner.

• There has been some drop in Tory support among the elderly in the election, but only in line with the drop in the general population. The abandonment of the triple lock, the dementia tax and the end of winter fuel allowance have not particularly dented the loyalty of the Tory grey army.

• So if younger people want to stop the Tories, they have to get themselves to the polling booth at all costs. As for campaigning, almost certainly more effective than attending rallies or sticking leaflets through strangers’ doors, would be to sit down and have a real heart to hear with elderly family members and acquaintances.

• May started the campaign with a 20-point lead and the expectation of gaining a huge majority with which to negotiate Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. But it hasn’t worked out that way. And Britain’s near-term future hangs in the balance.

• Francis Collins, until now a temporary holdover from the Obama administration, will continue to serve as the National Institutes of Health director under President Trump.

• Collins has broad support among Republicans who control the medical research agency’s purse strings. In fact, four key Republicans urged Trump to keep him in his role in a letter in December, writing that “his distinguished scientific experience, effective leadership skills, and long standing relationships with members of Congress, researchers, and advocates will service the nation and your administration well.”

• Jeremy Corbyn is now London’s favourite candidate for Prime Minister, according to a newly released poll.

• The YouGov survey for the Evening Standard sees Mr Corbyn overtake Theresa May as the preferred choice to lead the country among Londoners.

• The poll also points to a broader Labour surge in the capital – boosted in large part by young voters – giving Mr Corbyn’s party a 17 point lead over the Tories and potentially condemning a handful of London Conservatives to defeat.

• Labour’s lead among voters under 50 is growing, marking an increasing generational divide ahead of June’s election, according to a poll by YouGov.

• The party is 57 points ahead of the Conservatives among voters under 25 years old, according to the poll, compared to 28 points shortly after the snap vote was called in April.

• The great question is whether the anti-establishment mood in the country has been irretrievably captured by populist xenophobia masking the intentions of the neo-liberals, or whether a return to an older tradition of genuine social radicalism under Corbyn can halt this trend. So on both sides of the equation this election is pivotal. Britain will become a nasty, uncaring, closed country to an extent I would never have believed possible. Or it will adopt policies of communal solidarity and public provision which I had almost lost hope people would have a chance to vote for again.

• The first minister of Scotland, who is also leader of the Scottish National party, said she did not know the prime minister well enough to know “whether I like her or not” but claimed that in professional dealings May compared unfavourably with her predecessor as Conservative leader.

• “Now OK, we’re miles apart politically but then so too were David Cameron and I, but we still managed to find a way of working that respected each other’s positions. We found a way of being civil,” she said.

• Sturgeon said she believed the public were now witnessing the types of frustrations she had felt in recent meetings with May, in which she found the prime minister very difficult to engage with. “You literally go into a one-to-one with her and it’s like she’s reading from a script than having a conversation.”

• Theresa May’s threat to rip up human rights laws to fight terror has been condemned by Opposition politicians as a cynical attempt to revive her failing election campaign.

• Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats insisted there was no evidence that human rights legislation had allowed the Manchester and London attacks to take place – or prevented action against terrorists.

• Instead, Keir Starmer, Labour’s Brexit spokesman, accused Ms May of a “diversion” from criticism of huge police cuts – while Nick Clegg said she was trying to revive her “lacklustre, flagging election campaign”.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Yes, you read that right. Take a moment to read it again. In order to fight terrorism, it must be hard to access pornography.

• UK Prime Minister Theresa May is standing straight and pushing a package that introduces censorship of pornography on the Internet, and is justifying it as absolutely necessary to fight terrorism. She is even doing this with a straight face, apparently serious.

• This is reality. A lying president aspiring to become a tinpot dictator is making his move. It’s time to be afraid, but not too afraid to be prepared.

• White House chief of staff Reince Priebus on Sunday said that President Donald Trump’s administration has “looked at” changing the law so that Trump can sue the press, though Priebus offered few details.

• As we reel from the third terror attack in Britain in as many months, politicians are scrambling to come up with strategies to make the public feel safer. Amid rows over police cuts, the old debate about online safety has inevitably been revived.

• The news that the film was banned came just two hours before its scheduled release in 15 theaters across Lebanon. Israeli products are officially boycotted in Lebanon, and anyone who has visited Israel, let alone is a citizen of the country, is barred from entry.

• The German cabinet on Wednesday decided to abolish the crime of lese majeste almost a year after a comedian was accused of offending a foreign leader after reciting an obscene poem about Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.

• To ensure that the bill passes parliament before the end of this legislative period it will be treated as urgent, which will allow it to come into effect on 1 January 2018.

• ‘Religion should not dictate what is allowed and what is forbidden to say publicly,’ says Danish MP

• A Danish man who filmed himself burning the Koran before posting a video of his act on Facebook in 2015 would have faced a blasphemy trial next week, but the case was dropped after the law was revoked.

• An elderly German woman was fined 1,350 euros for sharing and liking an anti-migrant joke on Facebook.

• The 62-year old woman , who lives in Berlin, has been identified as Jutta B. She had her home raided and was arrested by police for the ‘crime’ of sharing an image on Facebook captioned “Do you have anything against refugees?”

• Breitbart has sacked an editor who made a number of inflammatory anti-Muslim remarks in the wake of the London Bridge terror attack which left seven dead and dozens injured.

• Katie McHugh, who has written hundreds of articles for the far-right news site, sparked fierce criticism after she argued terrorist attacks would not take place in Britain if there were no Muslim residents.

Privacy/Surveillance

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says that a 25-year-old government contracter accused of sharing National Security Agency (NSA) documents with a media outlet “must be supported.”

• “Alleged NSA whistleblower Reality Leigh Winner must be supported,” he tweeted Monday alongside a picture of Winner. “She is a young woman accused of courage in trying to help us know.”

• [...]

• Prosecutors earlier Monday announced that the Department of Justice had charged Winner with sharing top secret material with a media outlet.

• Court documents filed by the government did not specify which outlet received the materials, but NBC News reported Monday that the information went to The Intercept online news outlet.

• The Intercept published a top secret NSA report Monday that alleged Russian military intelligence launched a 2016 cyberattack on a voting software company.

• Details on The Intercept’s report suggest that it was created May 5, 2017 – the same day prosecutors say the materials Winner is charged with sharing were created.

• Yet most experts agree that these repeated calls to be tougher on technology are poorly thought through. Undermining cryptography simply could not work.

• “In the choice between cuts to corporation tax and properly funding our police, we should fund our police,” he said.“Let’s be clear – fewer police on the beat means fewer conversations, less information being passed on and less knowledge about who’s who and who needs to be kept under surveillance.”

• Visa applicants hoping to travel to the United States of America (aka a Trip to Trumpton) can now be asked for their social media history going back up to five years.

• A contractor who leaked a top-secret document to The Intercept was identified because the NSA was able to track who had printed out the document, using the yellow dot pattern that many printers place on documents, giving the time and date when the document was printed.

• Those dots allow the document’s origin and date of printing to be ascertained, which could have played a role in the arrest of Reality Leigh Winner, accused of leaking the document. EFF has previously researched this tracking technology at some length

• The watermarks, shown in the image above—an enhancement of the scanned document The Intercept published yesterday—were from a Xerox Docucolor printer. Many printers use this or similar schemes, printing faint yellow dots in a grid pattern on printed documents as a form of steganography, encoding metadata about the document into its hard-copy output. Researchers working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation have reverse-engineered the grid pattern employed by this class of printer; using the tool, Ars (and others, including security researcher Robert Graham) determined that the document passed to The Intercept was printed on May 9, 2017 at 6:20am from a printer with the serial number 535218 or 29535218.

• Privacy International, which has long fought back against the so-called Snoopers’ Charter, took its argument to court on Monday. It called out the government for failing to implement an ECJ ruling last year. This followed a case brought by Labour MP Tom Watson and Conservative MP David Davis, in which the ECJ ruled that “only the targeted retention of that data solely for the purpose of fighting serious crime” was permissible.

• Important metadata has shared to help UK officers

Civil Rights/Policing

• A UN special rapporteur was shocked to find abusive employers, anti-protest bills, and other signs of a weakening of democracy.

• Cut to June, Rubeena’s trip has metamorphosed into a nightmare not just for her but her family as she has become yet another victim of torture, sexual harassment and forced captivity in an alien land after being allegedly sold for Rs3 lakh.

• Today, only five per cent of those surveyed this year have said that they are not in favour of the Sharia being imposed on society.

• A man responsible for a car-and-knife attack at Ohio State University last year left behind a torn-up note in which he urged his family to stop being “moderate” Muslims and said he was upset by fellow Muslims being oppressed in Myanmar, The Associated Press has learned.

• But now, thanks to the shaming of girls murdered in a terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande concert as “whores”, the split has spilled out into the open.

• The Trump administration’s move means it could be more difficult for the full, 6,700-page report to be made public, because documents held by Congress are exempt from laws requiring government records to eventually be made public.

• A teenager has reportedly been sentenced to death by a village council in Pakistan’s Punjab province for having a sexual relationship with her cousin.

• The 19-year-old denied having consensual sex with him, saying her relative had raped her at gunpoint.

• Make no mistake; these Islamists are very clear in their goal: eradicating Christians not only from Mosul, as they did in 2014, but also uprooting Christians from Manchester, where churches are already converted to Islam. The pumped-up forces who drove Christians out of their ancestral lands rightly thought: Why not continue in the West the work begun so well in the East?

• The idea that Muslims must first invite non-Muslims to convert to Islam and then only kill them if they refuse is not a twisted, hijacked version of Islam; on the contrary, it is based upon Muhammad’s instructions as recorded in a canonical hadith.

• According to a number of people who have spoken to Trending, Lasloom was attempting to escape an arranged marriage. In the video, she claimed the authorities in Manila prevented her from boarding a connecting flight, and took her passport.

• In traditional interpretations of Islam, apostasy — the act of leaving one’s religion — is punishable by death or imprisonment. Across the globe, apostasy from Islam remains a capital offense in 13 Muslim-majority countries.

• Tragically, Europe, when Muslims are the perpetrators, seems to be adopting the sharia approach to rape.

• The sculpture of Themis – the goddess of justice – wearing a sari was less than six months old, but Islamist groups demanded its removal by Friday.

• “As Indonesian cleric, Abu Bakar Bashir recently put it, “If the West wants to have peace, then they have to accept Islamic rule.””

• Against this backdrop, it’s difficult not to see this attack as having a deeply political purpose: to encourage the exodus of Christian Egyptians from their homeland. Through attacks like these, the perpetrators appear to be indicating that they don’t simply want to make life difficult for Christians—they want Egypt to be Christian-free. In a radical extremist vision for Egypt, it seems, there is no room for this ancient and rooted Egyptian community.

• But viewers were left questioning if the whole thing was some kind of sick joke after noticing her burka was emblazoned with the word “love” – spelled out in weapons.

• Munir al-Adam, 23, was beaten so badly he lost hearing in one ear during demonstrations in the Shia dominated east of the country in 2012.

• [...]

• Mr Adam was sentenced to death in a secretive trial in the country’s Specialised Criminal Court last year. Now, an appellate court has decided the sentence should be carried out, despite international criticism.

• “Islam’s religious texts call upon its followers to commit violence and to fight to a much higher degree than any other religion. The texts in Islam are clearly distinct from those of other religions’ texts as they to a much higher degree call for violence and aggression against followers of other faiths. There are also direct incitements to terror. This has long been a taboo within research in Islam, but it is a fact we have to acknowledge,’ says Tina Magaard.

• During their research Magaard and her team found hundreds of calls to fight against followers of other faiths in the Quran.

• “If it is true that many Muslims view the Quran as God’s own words that can not be rephrased or non-literal interpretted , we have a problem,” Magaard warns.

• The U.S. is likely this week to warn the United Nations Human Rights Council that it may withdraw due to “anti-Israel bias,” Reuters reported Monday.

• U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley is visiting Geneva this week for the council’s sessions, where she plans to call for reforms.

• “Our understanding is that it is going to be a message of engagement and reform,” John Fisher, who leads Human Rights Watch in Geneva, said.

• Writing to Colombo Telegraph yesterday, Shreen Abdul Saroor, founder member of Mannar Women’s Development Federation and Women’s Action Network said: “She faced serious physical abuse and psychological trauma after the marriage and had reached out to a colleague a month ago asking for information in obtaining a divorce via the Quazi courts, but never came back again. Later it was learnt that she also went to the police who mediated and reconciled she and her husband and sent her back to him, despite grave danger of further abuse.

• Defense lawyers plan to argue that religious freedom is at the core of the case in which two physicians and one of their wives are charged with subjecting young girls to genital cutting. All three are members of the Dawoodi Bohra, a small Indian-Muslim sect that has a mosque in Farmington Hills.

• If you think the cases of little-girl genital mutilation that made national headlines last month after a flurry of arrests in Detroit is a one-off event, think again. The CDC estimates that more than 513,000 girls and women — most of them living in New York, DC and Minneapolis — are now at risk of such disfigurement across the country, a threefold increase since 1990. What’s behind the sickening trend? Muslim immigration.

• If it’s “Islamophobic” to say that, blame the US government.

• Prior to the court’s verdict, Islamist groups called for the governor to be jailed or executed and held large opposition rallies, including one that turned violent.

• The fortunes of the once hugely popular Purnama turned last September, when he was seeking re-election. He said his political rivals were deceiving people by using a verse from the Koran to say Muslims should not be led by a non-Muslim.

• Oil giant Saudi Aramco said it signed 16 accords with 11 companies valued at about $50 billion. One initial deal — worth $15 billion — was signed with General Electric Co. across the power, healthcare, oil, gas and mining industries. The U.S. and Saudi Ministry of Defense also negotiated a package totaling about $110 billion, according to a White House transcript on Friday.

• Indonesian police have arrested more than 100 men in a weekend raid on a gay sauna in the capital Jakarta, a day before two men are to be publicly flogged for having same sex relations.

• Authorities raided what they said was a sex party promoted as ‘The Wild One,’ held at a sauna and gym venue in Jakarta’s north on Sunday evening.

• In the Bible it says: “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be quiet.” (1 Timothy 2:11-14) This is also evident in Hinduism, Buddhism …

• For those who only see the surface, there is an apparent contradiction that is often not understood. On the one hand, Islamic law and states are the beginning of the end of women’s rights. A pillar of Islamist rule is the attempt to erase women from the public space. On the other hand, women are everywhere – making sure they are seen and heard.

• Every morning before dawn, Rosario Perez checks to make sure her sons are still alive. The three brothers, all in their 20s, sleep at the houses of friends and relatives, moving regularly, hoping that whoever may have been assigned to kill them won’t catch up with them.

• They are not witnesses on a mob hit list, or gang members hiding from rivals. They are simply young men living in the Philippines of President Rodrigo Duterte.

• “How could I not send them to hide?” said Ms. Perez, 47, after peeking in on two of her sons and phoning the third. “We can barely sleep out of fear.”

• Gen. Ronald dela Rosa, chief of the Philippine National Police, knows the value of a public display of remorse. He has been forced to apologize more than once.

• He was wrong, he acknowledged before the Philippine Senate as TV cameras rolled, to have trusted undisciplined policemen who killed a small-town mayor suspected of dealing drugs, as the mayor lay defenseless on a jail-cell floor.

• “I cannot blame the public if they’re losing their trust and confidence in their police,” he told the Senate panel, accepting a tissue from the mayor’s son to wipe away his tears.

• At a time when an ever-larger share of national income is going to the richest 1 percent, and large segments of the working class population are seeing rising mortality rates, the Washington Post naturally turns to the country’s most pressing problem: the number of people receiving disability payments from the government.

• Its second piece on the topic profiled a family with multiple generations receiving disability benefits. It seemed to go out of its way to include every possible negative aspect of their lives in order to give an unfavorable view of the family, and leave readers with the impression that the country has a serious problem of families who do nothing but collect disability checks generation after generation.

• On Monday, the state of Qatar was accused of sponsoring terrorism and is in the process of being completely isolated by its neighbors. In Sweden, though, the Mid-Eastern Monarchy is engaged with building a mega-mosque.

• Elsayed’s comments during a lecture on child rearing and family life last month sparked a brief controversy last Friday after a right-wing watchdog group circulated a video clip of his speech online.

• I am concerned for the maelstrom which may ensue when the case goes to trial. At that moment, will women’s rights be asserted or will they be diluted in favor of political correctness? In the past, I’ve witnessed the disintegration of women’s rights in favor of political correctness: my film Honor Diaries was censored (in Michigan, actually) when certain groups deemed it “Islamophobic” for bringing up FGM, forced marriage and honor killings. Instead of focusing on the inherent misogyny of these practices, my film was vilified for having difficult conversations about cultural and religious practices.

• All 20 victims were pregnant when the FGM was identified by and the majority of cases – 15 – were discovered by a medic carrying out an examination.

• The data shows that all of the victims underwent a surgery called deinfibulation to treat some of the problems associated with FGM.

• Corbyn’s blinkered belief that foreign policy motivates terrorists ignores the ugly strain of misogyny in modern Islam

• Interestingly, a study of Ariana Grande’s lyrics provides insight on what extremists loathe most — particularly about women and sexual freedom

• Saudi Arabia should immediately quash the death sentences of 14 members of the Shia community for protest-related crimes, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said today. The Court of Appeal of the notorious Specialized Criminal Court upheld the sentences in May 2017, after they were handed down a year ago on June 1, 2016, following a grossly unfair trial of 24 Saudi Shia citizens. The Specialized Criminal Court is Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism tribunal.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Double poles occur when “Verizon has failed to move its equipment from an old pole that was replaced with a new one by another utility (e.g., the electric company),” the CWA said. “In many cases, these are dangerous conditions—poles are falling, leaning, rotting, partially cut off, etc.”

• On July 12, the companies and organizations are expected to change their websites to raise awareness of the FCC effort, which is aimed at deregulating the telecom and cable industries. Mozilla, for example, will change what users see on their screens when they open a new browser window.

• At stake are the government’s net neutrality rules, which prohibit Internet providers from blocking or slowing websites or charging them special fees in order for their content to be displayed to consumers.

• On July 12th, Private Internet Access will join other technology companies in a day of action to save net neutrality. Companies supporting the Battle for the Net day of action include Github, Mozilla, Kickstarter, Etsy, Amazon, Vimeo, BitTorrent, and many more. July 12th was chosen because it is days before the end of the first FCC comment period. The day of action is being organized by Fight for the Future (FFTF). FFTF commented:

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The Journal’s experience could have implications across the news industry, where publishers are relying more on convincing readers to pay for their articles because tech giants like Google and Facebook are vacuuming up the lion’s share of online advertising.

• Article 13 effectively makes online services responsible for what users post to them, imposing a new intermediary liability on Internet companies. That’s not just bad news, it contradicts an earlier EU directive on e-commerce, passed in 2000, which laid down that companies acting as a “mere conduit” – that is, simply providing a platform – should not be held responsible for material posted to their sites. The new copyright directive would overturn nearly two decades of law and practice.

• The cable TV business is in trouble—in fact, it is “failing” as a business due to rising programming costs and consumers switching from traditional TV subscriptions to online video streaming, according to a cable lobbyist group.

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