● 09.11.17

● Links 11/9/2017: GNU/Linux Preinstalled (Many New Options), New Stable Kernels, Mesa 17.1.9, Oracle Linux 7 Update 4

Posted in News Roundup at 11:14 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• ​In the past, to get Linux on your laptop, you needed to get a laptop that shipped with Windows and then install your Linux distro on top of them. This usually means two main issues. The first being that you paid about $100 extra for Windows and then also, support in terms of drivers for the laptop were up in the air as your hardware may be supported fully, partially or not at all. But these days things are changing. There are many laptops that ship with Linux preinstalled. Meaning you get better hardware support and then save some bucks off for not paying for Windows. THANK YOU! So what are your options if you wanted a laptop with Linux preinstalled? Read along.

• We’ve previously supported the work of the folks at Raptor Engineering. This time, rather than a crowdfunding effort, we are asking you to support their work by pre-ordering the Talos II. The system comes in a variety of forms to meet your needs, from a workstation to rack-mounted to the board by itself. Raptor Engineering has put in a great deal of effort researching and prototyping this system, and now it is ready for prime time. The Talos II is great for any hacker who needs a powerful machine, perfect for developing even more free software.

• Last month Raptor Engineering announced the Talos II POWER9-powered workstation that is cheaper than the original Talos Workstation while still aiming to be very free software friendly. The Free Software Foundation will be exploring the possibility of “Respect Your Freedom” certification on this hardware when it’s ready to ship.

• Google’s Chromium evangelist François Beaufort is back with more goodies for Chromebook owners, recently revealing the fact that future versions of Chrome OS will allow users to rename attached USB flash drives.

• A new “Rename” option has been added to the right-click context menu of the Files app on Chrome OS, which allows you to rename an attached USB flash storage devices, be it either a USB stick or an external drive. The renaming feature, which is currently available on the Chrome Canary experimental channel, can also be enabled using the CTRL+Enter keyboard shortcut on your Chromebook.

• About four years ago (Nov 2013) I bought a used, refurbished Lenovo T400 laptop computer and docking station. It was already about four years old at that time (most of the original product announcements and hands-on reviews I can find are from 2009), and another four years have gone by now, so I think it would be useful to have another look at it and see how it is holding up.

• At OpenSourcePC you can customize your computer and hardware as much as you can customize your software. They offer wraps, laser etching, custom paint, custom branding, and hydro dipping to get that exact look you want and upgrades for Ram, CPU, GPU, solid state drives, storage, cooling, and overclocking. OpenSourcePC uses Linux based operating system Ubuntu. Linux gives the user complete control while Ubuntu is secure and user friendly offering the best of both worlds. In the future, OpenSourcePC will be adding Linux based desktops and servers to their line-up, so make sure to check in for new product updates.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Today I solicit help from the YouTube chat room (in my LIVE stream) for help playing Brutal Legend. I’ve made it up to just before meeting with Ozzy. Thankfully, the chat room offers up helpful advice that gets me farther than ever before!

Kernel Space

• The KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and Xen updates have been submitted for the Linux 4.14 kernel merge window.

• Besides the separate pull request that brought Zstd compression support for Btrfs with the in-development Linux 4.14 kernel, the main Btrfs pull request was also submitted on Friday for updating this Linux file-system.

• Besides the Zstd compression support, there isn’t a whole lot more of end-user exciting work for Btrfs in Linux 4.14. But there is lots of prep work for future features as well as fixes.

• While Oracle recently laid off a ton of SPARC staff (and Solaris), not everyone was let go and it’s still not instantly a dead platform. With Linux 4.14 there are some SPARC improvements for those relying upon this ex-Sun hardware.

• The Piper mouse configuration interface to libratbag is one of the success stories from this year’s Google Summer of Code and fortunately the involved student developer has continued contributing to the project.

• Jente Hidskes has turned Piper into a very capable mouse configuration UI for Linux desktops / gaming systems powered by libratbag, which for now is largely limited to Logitech gaming mice.

• The 4.13.1, 4.12.12, and 4.9.49 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set of important fixes. There is no 4.4.x stable update this time around.

Graphics Stack

• Mesa 17.1.9 is now available.

• In this release we have:

• In Mesa Core we include a fix for a rendering problem detected while using GoogleEarth with the VMware driver.

• The state tracker received a couples of patches, one for handling properly the vertex array double inputs and another for a redundant initialization of the view template in the PBO downloads for ReadPixels implementation.

• Mesa 17.1.9 is now available for those sticking to the 17.1 stable releases and aren’t yet comfortable moving to the just-released Mesa 17.2.

• AMD developer Nicolai Hähnle has published a set of patches today for adding out-of-order rasterization support to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Long story short, this can boost the Linux gaming performance of GCN 1.2+ graphics cards when enabled.

Applications

• It’s been a while since last having anything to report on with VLC with the VLC 3.0 release still not available, but thanks to this year’s Google Summer of Code, there was an interesting project around working on 3D format support.

• Mohammed Huzaifa is the student developer who spent the summer working on 3D support for libVLC.

• Jonathan Thomas, the creator of the open-source and cross-platform OpenShot video editor, announced OpenShot 2.4, a major release that adds new freeze and freeze & zoom presets, improves stability, as well as undo/redo history.

• First and foremost, OpenShot 2.4 wants to be a stability release that fixes a bunch of bugs and issues reported by users since previous versions of the applications. Most importantly, it addresses a nasty issue that was apparently the leading cause of numerous crashes. Therefore, it is recommended that all users update to OpenShot 2.4 or later as soon as possible.

• OBS Studio is a free and open source cross-platform app with which you can create video records of your desktop screen and also live stream directly.

• You can use it to conveniently share your gaming, art, entertainment activities with Twitch.tv, YouTube, Hitbox.tv, DailyMotion, Connectcast.tv, CyberGame.tv, CashPlay.tv along with custom streaming servers free of charge!

• Caffeine is pretty famous utility designed for Linux to disable screen-lock and screensaver temporarily so you can focus on what you are doing on your system. It stays in the panel and fairly straightforward application. It can be useful either you are working or listening or watching something that players don’t prevent computer from going into sleep mode or prevent screensaver.

• Without caffeine you need to go to power management in the system settings then disable sleep and also screensaver, Caffeine solves this issue and it comes in handy as well because you can activate/deactivate it right from system tray just with a single click.

• The bugfix release of KStars 2.8.3 is available for all major platforms. In this version, we finally managed to release translations for Windows & MacOS users, thanks to the efforts of Hannah and Kevin over at Craft, and the KDE translation team.

• A new version of Pithos, the open-source Pandora Radio client for Linux desktops, is available to download. Pithos 1.4.0 introduces a number of new plugins that extend its feature set, including a 10-band equalizer, a screensaver/lock screen inhibiter, and a volume normalizer.

Instructionals/Technical

• With these fake 4 router hops, I can fit 4 small sentences in the reverse DNS entries of the IP addresses. I opted to show a Haiku since they are small, typically 3 sentences, and we can find lots of them

• Are these tweaks necessary? Nope. And in an ideal world, one should never have to tweak their desktop any which way. But if you are using the Xfce environment, and you’d like to make it ever so slightly friendlier and better suited for everyday days, these tips, in addition to my previous pimping guides, ought to help you get the best from it.

• Today, we focused mostly on the panel and system area, some desktop icon tweaks, but mostly, on how to work with configuration files and make special changes that are not necessarily reflected through any GUI tool. In the end, modern desktops are like web pages, so you become a creator slash artist. Well, that would be all for today.

Wine or Emulation

Games

• Shortest Trip to Earth [Official Site], a top-down spaceship simulator inspired by FTL and Firefly that’s currently funding on indiegogo will come to Linux.

• Neckbeards: Basement Arena [Steam], a 2D indie game inspired by retro titles like Robotron 2084 from Soiree Games released a Linux version yesterday.

• Regions Of Ruin [Steam, Official Site], a 2D pixel side-scrolling RPG with town-building that the developers say is what you would get if the game Kingdom met a broad, skill based open world RPG. It seems they are in need of a bit of Linux user help.

• Apocalypse: The Game [Official Site, Steam], another survival game built with Unity will have Linux support. It’s built by one developer and it will have Vulkan support.

• A “funky, four-wheeled shoot ‘em up” is how independent game-developer Chasing Carrots describes its newest game release Pressure Overdrive for Linux, Mac OS, Windows and Xbox. Shifting to a higher gear from its high-octane 2013 predecessor, Pressure, Pressure Overdrive seeks a wider audience with a fast-paced mix of humor and action, classic couch co-op fun and constant car crashes in colorful environments.

• Following a rather short beta, Super Blood Hockey [Steam, Official Site] is now officially available for Linux. People who helped to test it will even be added to the credits.

• Farming! Zombies! Maybe a little Tower Defense? Dead Acres [Steam, Official Site], an Early Access game from Glowstick Entertainment has Linux support.

• There’s a lot of arcade shooters around, but Vulture [Steam, Official Site] mixes the genre up with more modern systems like a block-based upgrade system to customize your fighter.

• For those that don’t follow Ryan “Icculus” Gordon on Patreon, a little hint was dropped in a recent post and it could mean “The End Is Nigh” [Steam] is heading to Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This weekend on the Fedora mailing list a debate has begun over whether Fedora’s KDE desktop spin is too bloated and what could be done about it.

• As most longtime Linux users know, Fedora is mostly centered around the GNOME Shell desktop with its Fedora Workstation, but it does have a vibrant community of maintainers keeping the Fedora KDE spin among other desktop spins active.

• Initiated this weekend on the Fedora development list is a debate about A less “bloated” KDE spin.

• Yesterday we went shopping to nourish some Free Software enthusiasts next week.

• best kde linux distributions for your desktop KDE remains one of the most popular desktop environments available for Linux users. KDE prioritizes aesthetics and modernity with a user-friendly computing experience. It also comes with a host of applications and features that complete the experience. But which distro does KDE best? I certainly do not know the right answer but what I can do is share some of KDE’s best distros in the market now. Some distros certainly do KDE better than others and if you’ve been burnt before, I bet one of these might change your mind. In no particular order, let’s go.

• This is Kubuntu 17.10 Beta 1 “Artful Aardvark”, a pre-release version available for development/testing purpose. For you regular users, you are not supposed to install Beta 1 version, unless you want to simply try it and report bugs to Kubuntu Developers. For you not installing I made this short review to see how amazing Kubuntu Artful is already!

• I’m happy to see KDEnlive Joseph and Grace again, and the PIM dudes (although they seem to have slunk off to one of the meeting rooms for Serious Talks already).

• Tomorrow starts at 7:02, when I have kitchen duty to roll out breakfast for 20-or-so Free Software hackers who are hungry from the fresh mountain air, and then after that it’s time to self-organize and sit down to work.

• After launching the first point release of the KDE Applications 17.08 software suite, the KDE project announced this week the release of KDE Frameworks 5.38.0, the monthly update to the open-source collection of add-on libraries for the latest Qt 5 technologies.

• Right on the schedule, the latest stable KDE Applications 17.08 software suite got its first point release, versioned 17.08.1, this week, fixing more than 20 recorded bugs and improving support for several KDE apps.

• As expected, KDE Applications 17.08.1 is a bug fix release, addressing various of the bugs, crashes, and other issues reported by users since the launch of the KDE Applications 17.08 stable series in mid-August 2017. Numerous KDE apps received improvements, including bug not limited to Akonadi, Minuet, Akregator, Kdenlive, Ark, Cantor, Cervisia, Gwenview, JuK, Umbrello, Okular, Konsole, and Kontact.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.26 is the project’s latest six-month update to this open-source desktop environment to be used now by Ubuntu 17.10, Fedora 27, and others. I have been testing out the near-final GNOME 3.26 packages via the Fedora 27 repository over the weekend. Overall it’s been a stable and good experience. Some of the new features or changes of GNOME 3.26 are outlined below.

• One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects this year associated with the GNOME project was on reworking the Mutter compositor from requiring X11/XWayland code-paths for starting the Wayland compositor.

• Student developer Armin Krezović worked to address the issue that even when Mutter is acting as a Wayland compostior rather than just an X window manager, the X11 support is still present and there’s a hard dependency on XWayland being present, even if it goes unused. Armin was partially successful in his summer work in allowing Mutter to act as a Wayland-only compositor, free from any XWayland support if so desired.

• WebDriver is an automation API to control a web browser. It allows to create automated tests for web applications independently of the browser and platform. WebKitGTK+ 2.18, that will be released next week, includes an initial implementation of the WebDriver specification.

Distributions

Reviews

• Parabola GNU/Linux-libre is one of a few Linux distributions that meet the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) guidelines for free operating systems. The distribution is based on Arch Linux and ships with the Linux-libre kernel, which doesn’t include software for which no source code is available (or which is otherwise proprietary). On top of that Parabola removes any non-free packages from the system.

• The distribution is available for the armv7, i686 and x86_64 architectures. The main ISO boots to a command line from where we can manually install the operating system, while a live ISO gives us the MATE desktop and access to a basic graphical installer. Interestingly, it is also possible to migrate from Arch Linux to Parabola.

New Releases

• The minimalist Tiny Core Linux independently developed GNU/Linux distribution has been updated recently to version 8.1, a release that brings the latest BusyBox with extra functionality.

• GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton is informing us about the release and immediate availability of his CRUX-based CruxEX 3.3 distro, a release that bumps the Linux kernel to the 4.12 series and revamps the LXDE desktop environment.

Arch Family

• Linux users who’ve dreamed of buying a laptop that runs Manjaro Linux can wake up happy — one has just been announced. The ‘Station X Spitfire Manjaro Special Edition’ is the first Manjaro-based laptop from UK-based computer sellers Station X.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• SUSE, through Raj Meel, was pleased to announce the release and general availability of the third Service Pack of the SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 commercial operating system designed for enterprises.

• The SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 release has a 13-year life cycle, and SUSE promises to offer ten years of general support, as well as three years of extended support for all customers. And SP3 is here to boost the efficiency and security of the operating system, on which the free and open-source OpenSuSE Leap OS is based, as well as to add several new features and the latest GNU/Linux technologies.

Red Hat Family

• Now that Red Hat launched the fourth point release of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating system series, Oracle is pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle Linux 7 Update 4 for its customers.

• Shipping with its optimized Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK), as well as the Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK) ,Oracle Linux 7.4 adds various improvements and new features that promise to improve the security and performance of your Oracle Linux 7 operating system, as well as to enhance the support for cloud- and container-based environments.

• Red Hat Inc. an open source solutions provider on Monday announced that cloud and managed services providers in India, Indonesia, Japan, and Singapore have joined its ‘Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program’, helping them to better meet customer needs for cloud-based technologies.

Finance

Fedora

• FWD stands for Fedora Women’s Day and our main goals is to attract more women in the FLOSS world, by using Fedora and GNOME.

• Everything looks great for the upcoming Fedora 27 operating system, which is expected later this fall, and it looks like Beta Freeze stage is already in effect since early this week, as announced by Red Hat’s software engineer Mohan Boddu.

• For those not aware, Fedora 27 is the first release of the popular GNU/Linux distribution to drop Alpha builds from its development cycle. Therefore, Fedora 27 will only get a Beta milestone during its entire development cycle, which is currently in freeze and it’s expected to land at the end of the month.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical announced the release of Snapd 2.27 Snappy daemon for Ubuntu Linux and other supported GNU/Linux distributions. This is a major release that adds significant improvements and new features.

• The biggest new feature implemented in the Snapd 2.27 release is Android boot support, which should bring the Ubuntu Snappy technologies to a wide range of devices that are powered by Google’s Linux-based Android mobile operating system, implementing support for transactional updates.

• The Vorke V2 Mini PC is the latest to hit the market to compete with other mini PCs in the mini arena.

• If you are looking for a mini PC that can get the job done, then take a look at the Vorke V2 Plus PC. This mini PC packs a lot of premium components into an ultra-portable housing that can fix right in the palm of your hand. The Vorke V2 Plus has support for stunning 4K resolution thanks to the onboard Intel HD 620 graphics which deliver 1.5x better pixel production over the previous model. You can even tuck Vorke securely behind any monitor or TV that supports a VESA bracket.

• Ubuntu developers are debating whether to enable compressed apt index files for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, a move that could free up disk space.

Flavours and Variants

• Earlier this summer we heard how System76 might make their own distribution installer. They indeed are moving forward in this effort to construct their own installer from scratch and it’s written in Rust.

• System76 has been wanting a basic installer for their Pop!_OS Ubuntu derivative. They want a simple installer and where much of the work can be punted off to the GNOME Initial Setup stage. Following their research of Ubiquity and friends, they have decided to move ahead and write their own installer.

• Their new installer consists of “Distinst” as the distribution installer back-end and and then there’s the Elementary OS project hosting the installer’s GUI frontend. Elementary has been helping the System76 crew construct their distribution.

• Linux Lite 3.6 has been released and announced by Linux Lite developer Jerry Bezencon. This release based on Canonical’s latest Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS (Xenial Xerus), features Xfce desktop 4.12 as default desktop, powered by long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel, though users can install a wide range of kernels from the distro’s stable repositories.

• Wondering when the Linux Mint 18.3 release date is? I was, so I figured I’d write a short post about it.

• Turns out that, officially, there isn’t a specific release date or release schedule for Linux Mint 18.3.

• Unlike Ubuntu, which issues a new release every 6 months, Linux Mint does not release to a fixed schedule.

Devices/Embedded

• Crowdfunding for the Purism 5 Linux phone has soared past $200,000 — and is on course to succeed.

• The campaign for a secure, privacy-focused Linux phone has an overall goal of $1.5 million.

• In a campaign update Purism say this puts them “…way ahead of the expected trend line to succeed.”

Tizen

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Catastrophe (cat) risk models are fundamental tools for insurers, reinsurers, emergency planners, urban planners, and every business or government entity impacted by natural catastrophes. Since their creation by commercial vendors, computerized models have been essential for risk selection, assessing capital adequacy and measuring profitability, and are critical in both the public and private sectors for catastrophe and emergency response management.

• “For over 25 years, these models have led us on a journey toward increased risk understanding,” says Peter Hearn, President and CEO, Guy Carpenter, “a journey that now continues with the availability of open source model environments. Clients and regulators alike want to bring transparency, increased competition, and lower costs to the existing ‘black box’ model so companies can develop their own view of risk.”

• “The challenge with the ‘black box’ model is people don’t understand the input and output, which are key decision-making variables for insurers and reinsurers.” He explains, “Insurers and reinsurers have a fiduciary obligation to understand their risks and the models used to evaluate that risk. Insurers must also be empowered to better communicate their risk management decisions to shareholders, policyholders and regulators. When companies can make more informed decisions, they are better stewards for the industry and can potentially offer more products and protection to the marketplace.”

• The 5-member, newly formed Open Source Voting System Technical Advisory Committee (OSVTAC) has now held two meetings at SF City Hall, and things are moving along quickly. The committee now has its own website (hosted on GitHub).

• At its second meeting, the committee approved the first iteration of its document of recommendations for the open source voting project. You can read the document online. Just like the committee’s website, the recommendations are also hosted on GitHub. The recommendations are being developed in a way similar to how open-source software is developed. In addition to conventional methods like email, members of the public can also submit comments or suggested wording on GitHub, just like with open-source code. The committee will be able to discuss and vote on these suggestions at monthly meetings.

• One key difference from an open source project though is that because of state and local open meeting laws, committee members aren’t allowed to collaborate as a group outside of noticed meetings. This approach of soliciting public feedback on GitHub is a bit like how the Whitehouse solicited feedback on its draft source code policy last year.

• I suppose with the rise of Google and especially Facebook, this has changed: Free software has lost the battle for nothing less than electronic communication between human beings to a proprietary behemoth, and it is already – exemplified in a very minor and random way by the Guaraní – doing serious damage to democracy, to freedom of speech and to civil society in general.

• Presearch is a Canadian crypto-startup building a blockchain-based search engine to take on Google. It is officially described as a decentralized search engine powered by the community.

• As with crypto-starttups, the company is giving everybody the opportunity to get in on the ground floor by way of a token sale. Actually, this is the Lot 3 token sale, and each token is going for $0.15 USD, and you can get those after you create an account using BTC, ETH, or USD.

• What we need is a new industry norm, that project leaders will always be compensated for their time. We also need to bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer.

Events

• Free Software Melbourne, a collaboration between regional free software activist groups in Australia, will organise a function on 16 September to mark Software Freedom Day.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle is pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle Linux 7 Update 4 for x86-64 servers.

• The Oracle Linux operating system is an open foundation for the cloud. It is developed and extensively tested with demanding enterprise workloads like Oracle Database as well as many third-party applications in public and private clouds.

• While Oracle is slashing Solaris and SPARC jobs, their RHEL-derived Oracle Linux operating system continues getting pushed forward. Oracle Linux 7 Update 4 is now available as their re-based version off Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4.

• Besides incorporating the changes made by Red Hat in RHEL 7.4, Oracle Linux 7 Update 4 has finally added UEFI Secure Boot support with keys signed by Microsoft. Other additions in the name of security include OpenSSH now using SHA-2, a GPG check payload for Yum, NBDE security packages have been added, and USBGuard has also been added to protect against intrusive USB devices.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Cloudera has announced the acquisition of AI research form Fast Forward Labs, which it says it will use to help large scale businesses adopt cloud technologies.

• Fast Forward Labs, as US-based AI startup founded in 2014, offers advice to businesses about how to apply machine learning technologies to their organisation to solve “real world business problems.”

• Data Artisans, the business arm of open source tool, Apache Flink, announced an early-access release of the commercial version of their platform today that includes a new tool for managing streaming applications.

• Kostas Tzoumas, CEO at Data Artisans, says managing applications on a real-time streaming product presents some serious challenges for customers, and the new Application Manager is designed to solve this.

BSD

• One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects within the BSD realm this summer was working on a new boot management tool and library for ZFS on FreeBSD. It’s still in the works, but progress is being made.

• A Google developer has begun work on extending LLVM Clang’s CUDA support to cover CUDA 9.

• CUDA 9 is currently in release candidate stage and focuses on next-gen Volta GPU support, library optimizations, and more.

• The fourth BETA build of the 10.4-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

• Why did the schedule change to weekly? Reading code on IRC in the format I devised proved to have some drawbacks that I didn’t anticipate. It’s very challenging to read code you see for the first time in your life, make sense of it and constantly update other people via short text messages and links to the code you are looking at.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The The Digital Freedom Foundation is very happy to announce that its fourteenth edition of Software Freedom Day will be celebrated this coming Saturday on September 16, 2017. If you haven’t registered your team yet it’s time to do it now!

Programming/Development

• Python, which ranks consistently as one of the most popular programming languages, is the fastest growing major programming language, according to coding community site Stack Overflow.

• Stack Overflow’s metric here is visits to website posts tagged “Python” compared to posts tagged with other programming languages – specifically JavaScript, Java, C#, C++ and PHP.

• “June 2017 was the first month that Python was the most visited tag on Stack Overflow within high-income nations,” said David Robinson, a data scientist at Stack Overflow, in a blog post. “This is especially impressive because in 2012, it was less visited than any of the other 5 languages, and has grown by 2.5-fold in that time.”

Leftovers

• His reasoning for the steep investment (the system cost him $12,000) were entirely practical: it offered the means to enhance his productivity. It allowed him to correct typos and edit quickly and electronically, rather than performing edits by hand and retyping the entire manuscript for publication while using a typewriter. “I earned back the $12,000 investment in under a year just with increased sales,” he recalled.

• During the international break a mini-spat over the England players’ supposed lack of pride in wearing the three lions shirt and playing for their country, provided a helpful starting point towards the remaking of football as a social movement.

• England’s inability to go even 1-0 up against the proverbial minnows of the Maltese football team until well into the second half was blamed on the lack of emotional commitment from Harry Kane et al to end the half-century’s worth of years of hurt. But it was more to do with their actual inability to play.

• Death toll of Egyptian pilgrims performing Hajj in Saudi Arabia’s city of Mecca has risen to 78, said the Egyptian Health Ministry on Saturday.

• Ranging from the age of 60-80, most of the dead pilgrims had suffered heart attacks and breathing failures, Head of Egypt’s medical Hajj mission Ahmed al-Ansary said in a statement.

• Interesting research from the Nielsen Group shows that a flat web design is harder for people to understand. The usability study was conducted against web pages, but the results apply equally well to graphical user interfaces.

• First, let me define the “flat” web design: Websites used to use colors on links (usually blue) with underline, and 3D-style buttons. Web designers really didn’t have to do anything to make that happen; the standard web styles defines blue as a link color (purple as a visited link color) and any button element will appear in a 3D style (such as beveled edges).

Hardware

• For my use of laptops this doesn’t change the conclusion of my previous post. Now the T420 has been in service for almost 4 years which makes the cost of ownership about $75 per year. $1.50 per week as a tax deductible business expense is very cheap for such a nice laptop. About a year ago I installed a SSD in that laptop, it cost me about $250 from memory and made it significantly faster while also reducing heat problems. The depreciation on the SSD about doubles the cost of ownership of the laptop, but it’s still cheaper than a mobile phone and thus not in the category of things that are expected to last for a long time – while also giving longer service than phones usually do.

Health/Nutrition

• After Tori was arrested on drug charges in 2015, she began suffering from heroin withdrawal in jail. She was denied medical treatment, and her cellmate was threatened with punishment for attempting CPR when Tori collapsed. By the time medical staff arrived, Tori hadn’t been breathing for 10 minutes.

• We can do better than that, and we have been trying to do better than that. To cite one specific example, under the Affordable Care Act, mental health services finally received a decent inclusion in medical insurance. If this provision is now to be discarded, we are entitled to object on grounds of public safety and national security. There are no perfect defenses against terror and derangement, but if we know what fight we are in, we can see where to stand in it. Surely, for this struggle, we cannot justify disarming our community’s mental health capacity any more than we could justify disbanding the police or the intelligence services.

Security

• The Apache Struts Project Management Committee (PMC) would like to comment on the Equifax security breach, its relation to the Apache Struts Web Framework and associated media coverage.

• We are sorry to hear news that Equifax suffered from a security breach and information disclosure incident that was potentially carried out by exploiting a vulnerability in the Apache Struts Web Framework. At this point in time it is not clear which Struts vulnerability would have been utilized, if any.

• Or before.

• Consumer data breaches have become so frequent, the anger and worry once associated with them has turned to apathy. So when Equifax revealed late Thursday that a breach exposed personal data, including social-security numbers, for 143 million Americans, public shock was diluted by resignation.

• Equifax should have seen this coming from miles away, analysts and security researchers say.

• Credit monitoring company Equifax has been hit by a high-tech heist that exposed the Social Security numbers and other sensitive information about 143 million Americans. Now the unwitting victims have to worry about the threat of having their identities stolen.

• [...] and then, in the five weeks between discovering the breach and disclosing it, the company allowed its top execs to sell millions of dollars’ worth of stock in the company, while preparing a risibly defective and ineffective website that provides no useful information to the people whom Equifax has put in grave financial and personal danger through their recklessness.

• “The card was never intended to serve as a personal identification document,” the Administration says on its website. “The universality of SSN ownership has in turn led to the SSN’s adoption by private industry as a unique identifier. Unfortunately, this universality has led to abuse.”

• Commenting on the incident, Dr Richard Ford, chief scientist of Forcepoint, told iTWire: “The unfortunate Equifax breach is just another embodiment of the threat environment that organisations face every day – this is the new normal.

• According to a person familiar with the breach investigation, Equifax appears to have been targeted initially because the company keeps on file millions of active cards, belonging to people who pay $19.95 or more per month to have Equifax monitor their credit reports and alert them to potential fraud. The hack, which the company says took place in late July, put as many as 143 million consumers — or half the U.S. population — at risk.

• There’s a bigger elephant in the room. “By my calculation it’s been 960 hours (40 days) between Equifax finding out about the breach and warning the public,” wrote Cluley on his blog.

• Equifax, one of the three major consumer credit reporting agencies, said on Thursday that hackers had gained access to company data that potentially compromised sensitive information for 143 million American consumers, including Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers.

• The flaw has been patched in recent versions of Google Chrome and WebKit-based browsers (such as Apple Safari for macOS and iOS), but not in Microsoft’s Edge for Windows 10.

• “After digging into the matter, what started as a seemingly random issue proved to originate from a coding error in the Windows kernel itself. This flaw exists in the most recent Windows 10 release and past versions of the OS, dating back to Windows 2000.”

• [...]

• “We [also] contacted MSRC [Microsoft Security Response Center] about this issue at the beginning of this year. They did not deem it as a security issue.

• Former NSA employee and information security expert Jake Williams has told the FBI to either provide proof to the public that Kaspersky Lab products are unsafe for use or keep mum.

• “The goal of the exercise is to highlight a number of strategic concerns and topics that arise in connection with any hypothetical cyber crisis. This exercise should serve as a forum for discussion at ministerial level and provide strategic guidance to address future crises,” it said.

• After a series of global cyber attacks disrupted multinational firms, ports and public services on an unprecedented scale this year, governments are seeking to stop hackers {sic} from shutting down more critical infrastructure or crippling corporate and government networks.

• One of the leading exponents of the method is Gary Miliefsky, the CEO of breach prevention firm SnoopWall and a founding member of the United States Department of Homeland Security.

• The US Industrial Control Systems (ICS) CERT has issued out an alert, which details that Medfusion 4000 wireless syringe infusion pumps, manufactured by Smiths Medical was found riddled with not one or two, but eight vulnerabilities.

• The popular Tettegouche State Park on the North Shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota said its computer systems have been infected with malware, authorities confirmed on Friday (8 September). The malware was discovered on 25 August after security specialists noticed a spike in “unusual activity” around 4pm.

• Once customers signed up for the free service, many were perturbed to find in the small print a clause that prevented them from suing Equifax or entering into a class-action lawsuit.

• The board decided to phase out the machines this year after the Virginia Department of Elections recommended that the touchscreen voting machines be decertified. The recommendation came after security experts breached numerous types of voting machines with ease at the DEF CON cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas in July, according to The Richmond Times-Dispatch.

• The Virginia State Board of Elections voted Friday to discontinue use of all touch-screen voting machines throughout the state because of potential security vulnerabilities, forcing 22 cities and counties to scramble to find new equipment just weeks before voting begins for the November gubernatorial election.

• American multinational consumer electronics corporation Best Buy has pulled products made by Kaspersky Lab from its shelves and is offering customers assistance if they want to get rid of installed software from the company.

• The decision was prompted by media reports, congressional testimony and industry discussion raising questions about Moscow-based Kaspersky, a respected cybersecurity firm. The Richfield-based retailer, which has not conducted its own investigation, felt there were too many unanswered questions and so has decided to discontinue selling the products, according to a person familiar with the decision.

• Initial software development for the F-35 fighter jet is coming to an end, while future tweaks to the aircraft’s onboard systems will be rolled out like smartphone app updates, according to reports.

• “Envision a little window that pops up that says, ‘Your latest [electro-optical distributed aperture system] software update is ready for download: yes or no’?” Vice Admiral Mat Winter, of the US Navy, told aerospace industry magazine Aviation Week.

• Another week, another revelation of a massive breach with potentially far-reaching consequences. Well, two of those this week, actually. First, Symantec revealed that hackers—probably based in Russia, although the security firm didn’t go so far as to name names—had hacked more than 20 power companies in North America and Europe, and in a handful of cases, had direct access to their control systems. And then Equifax confessed it had been the target of a breach that stole 143 million Americans’ data, one of the worst data spills ever, and one that raises questions about data centralization, particularly for Social Security Numbers.

Defence/Aggression

• There is a curious fallacy that continues to persist among arms control groups rightly concerned with reducing the threat of the use of nuclear weapons. It is that encouraging the use of nuclear energy will achieve this goal.

• This illogical notion is enshrined in Article IV of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which rewards signatories who do not yet have nuclear weapons with the “inalienable right” to “develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.”

• Now comes the international low-enriched uranium bank, which opened on August 29 in Kazakhstan, to expedite this right. It further reinforces the Article IV doctrine— that the spread of nuclear power will diminish the capability and the desire to manufacture nuclear weapons.

• [...]

• The problem with this premise is that, rather than make the planet safer, it actually adds to the risks we already face. News reports pointed to the bank’s advantages for developing countries. But developing nations would be much better off implementing cheaper, safer renewable energy, far more suited to countries that lack major infrastructure and widespread electrical grid penetration.

• Instead, the IAEA will use its uranium bank to provide a financial incentive to poorer countries in good standing with the agency to choose nuclear energy over renewables. For developing countries already struggling with poverty and the effects of climate change, this creates the added risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident, the financial burden of building nuclear power plants in the first place, and of course an unsolved radioactive waste problem.

• Syria is the backdrop of this series, and although it is not listed among the cast, it is one of the most memorable characters with its pulverised and pillaged cities and villages and its civilians enduring a brutal proxy war with no end in sight. Glimpses of the horrors inflicted on the Syrians on a daily basis punctuate the drama, and shows why ordinary Syrians are risking their lives to cross to Europe.

• The issue of copy-cats or echoing is also dealt with, when prisoners wearing the Guantanamo orange jumpsuits are kept in cages similar to those used by the Americans on the Cuban island. ISIS hijacks the cause of Muslims detained in the American base and presents itself as their avenger and saviour, which complicates matters. For a corrupt regime like ISIS to champion the cause of Guantanamo Bay detainees taints them and hardens resolve against them.

• The Bolivarian Revolution led by Hugo Chávez did not promise a liberal democracy. Its purpose was to establish a majoritarian democracy that would have led to a participatory democracy. In a popular and anti-elitist turn, it was taking up what Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, a Venezuelan journalist and politician, described in his 1919 book Cesarismo Democrático. Facing what he considered a disabled populace, Vallenilla defended the country’s need for an ideal, charismatic caudillo who should concentrate power and guarantee order. Or, to put it from another angle, and in Antonio Gramsci’s terms, in the face of the very severe instability derived from the 1989 Caracazo, Chávez appeared to many as the very expression of “progressive Caesarism.”

• Under Nicolás Maduro’s administration, the uncertain aspiration for a majoritarian democracy led by a “good Caesar” turned into a “regressive Caesarism” and became an ochlocracy led by a “bad Caesar”. According to Polybius (2nd century BC), an ochlocracy distorts democracy with its resort to demagoguery and illegality. In a more modern interpretation, what happens in an ochlocracy, rather than strengthening an organized people and the popular power, is that the masses are manipulated through different means as a tool and as the support base for the survival of the dominant group at the top of the government. As a result there is a setback in terms of some basic components of democracy – such as the protection of human rights – and authoritarian practices arise. In Venezuela, this has happened in the midst of an overwhelming economic crisis that is sweeping away the achievements that benefited the popular sectors, exacerbating social confrontation, and reinforcing an oil-based economy.

• The showdown with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a seminal event that can only end in one of two ways: a nuclear exchange or a reconfiguration of the international order.

• [...]

• That leaves option number two: reconfiguration. The two people who know best about the subject are Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Both have been chafing for years under a new world order in which one nation gets to serve as judge, jury, and high executioner. This, of course, is the United States.

• If the U.S. says that Moscow’s activities in the eastern Ukraine are illegitimate, then, as the world’s sole remaining “hyperpower,” it will see to it that Russia suffers accordingly. If China demands more of a say in Central Asia or the western Pacific, then right-thinking folks the world over will shake their heads sadly and accuse it of undermining international democracy, which is always synonymous with U.S. foreign policy.

• There is no one – no institution – that Russia or China can appeal to in such circumstances because the U.S. is also in charge of the appellate division. It is the “indispensable nation” in the immortal words of Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, because “we stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.” Given such amazing brilliance, how can any other country possibly object?

• As our summer draws to a close and ushers in a cool and rainy September, there is a solemn chill in the air marking the approaching anniversary of the infamous attacks on the World Trade Center that took place September 11th, 2001 – nearly sixteen years ago. The memories are still fresh for the survivors and the family members of victims who are to this day living with their losses while continuing to fight for accountability through both the military court in Guantanamo, where individuals involved in the attacks have been tried or are still facing painstakingly slow trials. This upcoming sixteenth anniversary of 9/11 will be the first time since the attacks that the families now have another legal recourse for seeking accountability not only from individuals but from a nation involved in the attack: Saudi Arabia.

• Introduced in the Senate on September 16th, 2015, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) removed a major roadblock to justice by opening the way for private US citizens to file suit against the Saudi government, which was previously protected by the blanket immunity given to foreign governments. There is much that we do not yet know about what went on behind closed doors with regard to the orchestration of the 9/11 attacks, but the declassification of the portion of the 2002 Congressional Joint Inquiry known as the 28 pages on July 15th, 2016, after 14 years of secrecy, offered the preliminary hope of some much-needed answers. Of the 19 total hijackers who carried out the attacks, 15 were from Saudi Arabia, and evidence contained within the 28 pages pointed to financial connections between these individuals and members of the Saudi government.

• Few people have ever heard of Myanmar’s Rohingya people. Not many more could find Myanmar on a map – particularly after its name was changed some years ago from Burma to Myanmar.

• The exception is Burma’s sainted lady leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who became a worldwide celebrity and Nobel Prize winner. The media loved her, a sort of Burmese Joan of Arc versus its brutal military junta.

• But now, tragically, the Rohingya are headline news thanks to Myanmar’s brutal ethnic cleansing of one of the world’s most abused, downtrodden people.

• Almost as revolting is the world’s failure to take any action to rescue the Rohingya from murder, rape, arson and ethnic terrorism. In recent weeks, over 270,000 Rakhines have been driven from their homes in Rakhine State in western Myanmar and now cower in makeshift refugee camps just across the border in Bangladesh in the midst of monsoon season.

• So insistent was Canada in pushing for nuclear disarmament that we became known among top NATO generals as the “nuclear nag.”

• Make no mistake — that was meant as an insult. But it gives me a shiver of pride to think that Canada was smeared because of our insistence on challenging NATO’s top brass over its determination to keep the world armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons.

• There have been impressive moments in our history when Canada, under previous Liberal governments, asserted itself as a feisty middle power by supporting, even occasionally leading, the push to get nuclear disarmament onto the global agenda, which makes the retreat by our current Liberal government all the more disappointing.

• The draft resolution would also block the country’s exports of textiles and ban employment of its guest workers by other countries, Bloomberg reports. The resolution also seeks to freeze North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s assets, according to the report.

• Such a dramatic tightening of the economic vice is likely to meet resistance from China, which is anxious to avoid driving its embattled neighbor to the point of complete collapse; and Russia, which is promoting itself as a broker in the Korean standoff and has suggested that a new set of sanctions is “premature,” according to the Observer.

• “Up to now, the Chinese and the Russians have tried to keep on giving the US just enough to keep Trump playing the UN game,” said Richard Gowan, an expert on the UN at the European Council for Foreign Relations. “The question is what happens with an extraordinarily hardline resolution and US pressure to do something quickly.”

• The US will embark on an aggressive effort to tighten North Korea’s isolation on Monday with a call for an oil embargo and a partial naval blockade.

• A draft United Nations resolution seen by the Observer would also block textile exports and the hiring of North Korean labour by foreign countries. The American delegation has called for the UN security council to debate the draft, in an attempt to force decisive action following last Sunday’s massive nuclear test of a bomb, Pyongyang’s sixth.

• A pivotal moment in the “war on terror” was George W Bush’s state-of-the-union address to Congress in January 2002. Almost five months after 9/11, and two after the the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was terminated, the United States president here declared the global expansion of this war against an “axis of evil”. The three rogue states to be targeted were Iraq, Iran and North Korea. His graduation address at the West Point military academy in June 2002 made it abundantly clear that the US had every right to pre-empt threats from such regimes (see “Iran, and a diplomacy deficit”, 1 September 2017).

• Those speeches were infused with the outlook of the neoconservative right, especially the Project for a New American Century. The powerful backing from these quarters which fuelled Bush’s victory in 2000 was animated by an outlook almost identical to Trump’s “make America great again”.

• In a speech last week at the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank in Washington, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley said President Donald Trump “has grounds” to decertify the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, if he so chooses. In a speech laying out the Trump administration’s objections to the agreement, Haley said that the Islamic Republic of Iran had been “born in an act of international lawbreaking,” and suggested the very nature of the Iranian government itself made any deal undesirable. Haley added: “It is unwillingness to challenge Iranian behavior, for fear of damaging the nuclear agreement, that gets to the heart of the threat the deal poses to our national security.”

• The timing of Haley’s remarks is significant. Next month, Trump must decide whether to re-certify to Congress that the Iranians are complying with the terms of the deal, as per a law passed by Congress that requires the president to affirm compliance every 90 days. Trump has already signaled his own desire to kill the deal, saying last month, “I think they’ll be noncompliant.”

• The Arab world’s poorest state has been enduring a bloody civil war since 2015, heavily compounded by the world’s largest cholera outbreak. The nation has been bombed ruthlessly by the warring parties, with the Saudi-led coalition backing government forces in their fight against Houthi rebels. These extreme circumstances have had catastrophic results.

• Over the past few days, the United States and North Korea have become locked in nuclear brinkmanship. After North Korea declared that its ballistic missiles could hit anywhere in the United States, President Trump vowed that continued North Korean provocations would be “met with fire and fury and — frankly — power.” North Korea responded by threatening to attack the tiny island of Guam, a U.S. territory.

• But it was another tiny island that set the United States and North Korea down this path. Few Americans will recall the 1983 invasion of a small Caribbean nation thousands of miles from North Korea. But in fact, this conflict set the stage for the nuclear standoff today. It intensified the animosity between the two countries, sending North Korea on a quest for nuclear weapons to combat what it saw as a looming U.S. threat.

• The New York Times and other Western media have learned few lessons from the Iraq War, including how the combination of a demonized foreign leader and well-funded “activists” committed to flooding the process with fake data can lead to dangerously false conclusions that perpetuate war.

• The world watches as the natural disasters of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma and the earthquake off Mexico wreak their devastation, waiting for their final tolls of death, destruction and devastation. Yet on a daily basis the world faces a far greater manmade threat, that of nuclear war, as tensions between the U.S. and North Korea, the U.S., its NATO Allies and Russia over Ukraine and Syria, and between India and Pakistan play out. The actuality of nuclear war which has grown since the Cold War, would dwarf the devastation of these natural disasters, potentially bringing about the extinction of humans. Even a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan, who are always on a war alert, using half of their arsenals, about ½ percent of the global nuclear arsenals, could kill up to two billion people, or a third of the world’s population, from the dramatic global climate change that would follow.

• With a sweeping and detailed account of how the US rose out of World War II to become the reigning empire, Alfred W. McCoy connects dots that reveal how the role of covert action and torture enhanced its powers. However, McCoy ponders that these may be the last days of US global hegemony. Truthout asked McCoy to talk more about these issues.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Various scribbles have started to pepper the conversation started by the adventurous Mike Pompeo after he branded WikiLeaks a hostile intelligence agency before the Center for Strategic and International Studies. (This would have generated a wry smile of content from Julian Assange.)

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• And tens of millions in the rest of the country were glued to TVs, watching it all.

• When news emerged from the Keys, there were reports of ferocious winds and buildings submerged in floodwaters and of power and mobile phone services being down, but Key West, at least, seemed to have escaped anticipated catastrophe.

• All the same, Irma is likely to be an historic storm in terms of its damage throughout the Caribbean Sea and Florida. Everyone should be ready to help those in need in the days ahead.

• Before Hurricane Irma made landfall in Key West, FL on Sunday morning, Floridians hustled to make final preparations in case the storm severed an of the critical transportation, communication, and power lines that keep modern life humming. That sent much of the state driving to gas stations to top off tanks in the event an escape was required. But many stations couldn’t meet the sudden demand, so fuel shortages and miles-long lines fast became a reality.

• It has been downgraded from category three to one but still has maximum sustained winds of 85mph (137km/h). More than 3.4 million homes in the state are without power, with parts of the city of Miami are under water.

• Miami International Airport will close Monday after sustaining “significant water damage” Sunday from Hurricane Irma.

• The airport’s director, Emilio González, noted MIA had endured wind gusts of nearly 100 mph during the storm.

• The centre of Hurricane Irma has hit mainland Florida, just south of Naples, amid warnings of storm surges as high as 15ft (4.5m). Irma made landfall on Marco Island off Florida’s west coast with winds of up to 105mph (169km/h) but has since been downgraded to a category two storm.

• With ports mended and weather cleared, officials sent in more aid and arranged stepped-up evacuations Monday in remote Caribbean islands devastated and cut off by Hurricane Irma.

• Many in the chain of Leeward Islands known as the playground for the rich and famous have criticized governments for failing to respond quickly to the disaster caused by the Category 5 hurricane.

• At least five people are dead as Hurricane Irma batters Florida with devastating winds, heavy rain and catastrophic storm surges.

• The monster Category 2 storm is packing 110mph winds as it churns north along the state’s west coast, where it made a second landfall near Naples.

• There are fears that the life-threatening storm surge could reach 15ft above ground, flooding entire communities.

• In Capitalism: A Ghost Story, 2015, Arundhati Roy writes, “the middle class in India live side-by-side with spirits of the nether world, the poltergeist of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains and denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000 debt ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for them”.

• As a longtime environmental justice activist and resident of Port Arthur, Texas, where Hurricane Harvey recently flooded neighborhoods and several large oil refineries, Hilton Kelley has a lot on his mind.

• When Truthout reached Kelley on Tuesday, he had just finished posting a crowdfunding appeal for people affected by Hurricane Harvey and was turning to the next task at hand: his own flood-damaged home. Like his neighbors up and down the street, Kelley’s belongings were spread across the driveway as he waited with his granddaughter for FEMA officials to arrive and assess the damage.

• “I’m right in the mix of this thing,” Kelley said. “I rushed to come back here to assist others and also to check on my home that had two feet of water in it.”

• Whenever there is another mass shooting in the United States, the National Rifle Association (NRA) always says that now is not the time to talk about Americans’ easy access to guns. Of course with them, it’s never time. And just like the NRA, climate deniers like Kellyanne Conway, Scott Pruitt, everyone else in the White House and the Republican Party in general, don’t think that during the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, likely the most costly weather event in US history, is the time to talk about the human-caused climate crisis. They condescendingly sneer that to do so “politicizes” the tragedy. Never mind that it is the Republican Party that politicized science in the first place by denying it, delegitimizing it and demonizing its messengers. But the charge of “politicizing” is as perverse as proclaiming that, as water is rising up to their necks, now is not the time to rescue Harvey’s victims.

• The American idea was that the military’s zest for battle would be curtailed by a civilian-led government. Now generals Mattis, McMaster, Kelly et al. are seen internationally as the last ditch guarantors of common sense. They have their work cut out for them as King Goofus the Tweet launches adolescent taunts at potential enemies from the Oval Office and calls real national security threats like climate change a “hoax.” The experience of the mad dogs of war often breeds caution and an instinct for danger. Colin Powell warned George W. Bush privately against the crazy invasion of Iraq though he later betrayed his own good sense and joined the gang bang.

• Our myopic politicians see Kim Jong-Un, Vladimir Putin, and Bashar al-Assad as the biggest threats facing the nation and the world. It would be so consoling if those nasty people were actually our biggest threat. Those leaders and their nations all have needs that the lost art of diplomacy could find and use that reality constructively.

• No, the biggest threat, the biggest threat our species has faced in 10 thousand years, is global warming and the military are again out front. They don’t call it a hoax. In the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review they call the dramatic climate change “an accelerant of instability” and a “threat multiplier.” In October 2015 three former defense secretaries joined other experts saying the climate change is “shaping a world that is more unstable, resource-constrained, violent, and disaster-prone.”

• The startling landfall of two giant hurricanes – feasting on especially warm water off Texas and Florida – crashes into the climate change denialism that has been politically popular on the Right, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

• And what lies in that path? We can’t say for sure, but within the so-called cone of uncertainty for Irma, there are 11 nuclear power plants, hundreds of hospitals and a slew of hazardous waste containment sites that could become sources of environmental contamination.

• Tesla has pushed an over-the-air update to some of its vehicles in Florida [...]

• One way or another, Florida is due for a reckoning. We can only hope that it will not be too grievous, and that whatever happens it will help transform the political culture of a state whose governor is a climate-change denier despite Florida’s extreme vulnerability to natural disasters, a place where solar power is essentially banned despite its fame as the Sunshine State.

• The unrestricted flow of cheap natural resources from the global south to the rich industrialized north, maintains a profoundly unjust international division of labour.

• Weeks ago, Trump spoke of fire and fury regarding North Korea. But this supercharged hurricane and fire season is unleashing its own fire and fury on the U.S., while Trump remains impervious to the facts of fossil fuels’ contributions to these disasters.

• Our hearts are with those whose lives and families were devastated by Harvey, and those who are currently battling Irma in the Caribbean and bracing for it in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. Our thoughts are also with the communities fighting to protect their homes and critical infrastructure from blazing wildfires. And we stand with communities of color and low-income communities, who bear the brunt of these impacts and who disproportionately bear the burden of environmental pollution.

• First Nations and allies in British Columbia, Canada, are protesting an expansion of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline by building 10 tiny houses in its proposed path, which runs through more than 300 miles of Secwepemcul’ecw, unceded tribal territory.

• “We, the Secwepemc, have never ceded, surrendered, or given up our sovereign title and rights over the land, waters, and resources within Secwepemcul’ecw,” tribe leaders said in a statement, adding that they “have never provided and will never provide our collective consent to the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline Project. In fact, we hereby explicitly and irrevocably refuse its passage through our territory.”

• As Hurricane Irma, one of the strongest storms ever recorded in the Atlantic, bears down on South Florida, the state is bracing for the worst. “We can rebuild your home, but we cannot rebuild your life,” Republican Gov. Rick Scott said Wednesday. Mandatory evacuations are in place in a number of Florida communities. The state is preparing for extraordinary damage at the hands of the 400-mile-wide hurricane.

• Scott, however, took action six years ago that means preparation for the storm must be all the more intense: The Republican governor prioritized development over ecological restoration of wetlands. Scott cut funding for the state’s water management districts in 2011, leading to staff reductions and less funding for ecosystem restoration projects. Around the same time, Scott signed the state legislature’s repeal of the state’s 1985 growth management law, leading to a spike in development. Scott would tell the Palm Beach Post in 2016 that the economic benefits from more building meant Florida was “on a roll.”

• We hear about the record-setting amounts of water that Hurricane Harvey dumped on Houston and other Gulf cities and towns, mixing with petrochemicals to pollute and poison on an unfathomable scale. We hear too about the epic floods that have displaced hundreds of thousands of people from Bangladesh to Nigeria (though we don’t hear enough). And we are witnessing, yet again, the fearsome force of water and wind as Hurricane Irma — one of the most powerful storms ever recorded — leaves devastation behind in the Caribbean, with Florida now in its sights.

• Yet for large parts of North America, Europe, and Africa, this summer has not been about water at all. In fact it has been about its absence; it’s been about land so dry and heat so oppressive that forested mountains exploded into smoke like volcanoes. It’s been about fires fierce enough to jump the Columbia River; fast enough to light up the outskirts of Los Angeles like an invading army; and pervasive enough to threaten natural treasures, like the tallest and most ancient sequoia trees and Glacier National Park.

• It’s an eerie experience. You’ve just heard that another hurricane has formed in the Atlantic, and that it’s headed toward land. You search for NOAA’s National Hurricane Center website so you can see the forecast path for the storm. You’re horrified at the implications, and you bookmark the site. You check in every few hours to see forecast updates. You know in general terms what’s coming—devastation for the lives of thousands, maybe millions of people. Then a few days later you begin to see the sad, shocking photos and videos of destruction.

• Thanks to modern science and technology—satellites and computers—we have days of warning before a hurricane hits. That’s extremely helpful: while people can’t move their houses and all their possessions, they can board up windows, stock up on food and water, and perhaps get out of town. Huge storms are far less deadly than they would be if we didn’t have modern weather forecasting.

• Hurricane Irma dipped in intensity as it passed over Cuba, with maximum sustained wind speeds falling to 130 miles per hour (215 km/h), but is forecast to regain strength as it moves away from the island, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said on Saturday.

• The storm will reach the Florida Keys on Sunday morning and is expected to be near the southwest coast of Florida on Sunday afternoon, the NHC said. Irma would remain a powerful hurricane as it approaches Florida, it said.

• Florida’s state governor has told residents ordered to leave their homes to go to shelters and avoid the roads as Hurricane Irma approaches. Rick Scott said it was now too late to drive away from the danger areas. After devastating several Caribbean islands, Irma is lashing Cuba with strong winds and heavy rain, and is due to make landfall in Florida on Sunday.

• Earlier this week, while residents of south Texas wondered whether dangerous chemicals from the chemical plants, refineries and toxic waste sites that flooded during Hurricane Harvey were floating in their air and water as they returned home, Republicans in the House were working to eliminate funding to a federal program that identifies health hazards posed by chemicals in the environment.

• On Friday, soon after passing a bill that would raise the federal debt ceiling through December and provide $15 billion in relief for communities impacted by Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, the House considered a number of budget riders that would slash environmental protections established under the Obama administration. Those protections included rules designed to curb to pollution that scientists say contributes to a changing climate and intensifying storms.

• When one envisions the US Pacific Northwest, one thinks of green ferns, moss-covered trees in Olympic National Park, or the Hoh Rainforest, where annual rainfall is measured in the hundreds of inches. Moisture, greenery, evergreens, abundant rivers. It’s a large part of the reason why I live here.

• But thanks to abrupt anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD), this region is shifting at a rapid pace. On the Olympic Peninsula where I live, this has been the summer of wildfire smoke.

• As I write this, Puget Sound, Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula, are all engulfed by thick wildfire smoke and ash from fires burning in Eastern Washington and Montana. A local Seattle weatherman remarked that he had “never seen a situation like this.”

• In advance of Hurricane Irma, officials from Florida Power and Light (FPL) announced on Thursday that the utility would start shutting down the state’s only two nuclear power plants—Turkey Point, just south of Miami, and St. Lucie, north of West Palm Beach—as a safety measure.

• The Turkey Point plant seems to be closest to the hurricane’s probable path according to the latest models. It has two reactors, each capable of 693 megawatts of output while operational. The plant was built in 1972, so Irma won’t be its first Category 5 hurricane. In 1992, the eye of Hurricane Andrew passed right over Turkey Point.

• As of Saturday morning, Hurricane Irma is moving westward, with its center just inland over the northern coast of Cuba. It is nearing the western periphery of a ridge of high pressure, which should force it into a northwest turn soon. Although the forecast models have been struggling with precisely when this turn is likely to occur, we have pretty high confidence it will turn west-northwest later today, and then northwest tonight. The Florida Keys will be hit very hard later today and Sunday.

• The more westward track over Cuba has weakened the storm’s maximum winds to 125mph, and additional weakening is possible before Irma moves back into the Straits of Florida later today or tonight. This movement will also keep the center of Irma away from the greater Miami area, sparing the heavily populated southeastern coast of Florida from the worst effects of winds and storm surge. Hurricane force wind gusts are still likely, but they will probably not cause widespread damage in Miami.

• With the window closing fast for anyone wanting to escape, Irma hurtled toward Florida with 125 mph winds Saturday on a new projected track that could put the Tampa area — not Miami — in the crosshairs.

• The Tampa area has not taken a direct hit from a major hurricane in nearly a century.

• “You need to leave — not tonight, not in an hour, right now,” Gov. Rick Scott warned residents in the evacuation zones ahead of the storm’s predicted arrival on Sunday morning.

• Equally disappointing was his decision to bring in my organisation, the think-tank Demos, which has nothing to do with this article, nor with my book on which the article is based. At any rate, Demos does not undertake environmental research. He bemoans me as an example of how the centre ground of politics is very narrow. It’s a shame he’s not read any of my work, which repeatedly argues exactly that. I have been a critic, for example, of the government’s Prevent scheme, and how it targets extreme groups. My book Radicals, on which this essay was based, is almost entirely about the way radical groups shouldn’t be dismissed.

• After battering Cuba on Saturday morning, the eye of Hurricane Irma has its sights set on Florida as a Category 3 storm with maximum sustained winds of 120 mph, a slight slowdown from a few hours ago, according to the National Hurricane Center. The NHC’s latest forecast shows the storm’s center shifting west from Miami, and even Tampa, to target St. Petersburg.

• Take it from the hurricane historian: There has never been a tropical cyclone quite like Irma.

• “You’ve had storms this strong,” said Phil Klotzbach, a meteorologist at Colorado State University who specializes in the history of Atlantic tropical cyclones. “But the thing that sets [Irma] apart is she stayed strong for a really long time—and she’s still incredibly strong.”

• As the storm loomed on Saturday, Klotzbach said two things stood out to him about Irma as historically notable: its longevity and its point of origin.

• As of Saturday evening, Irma has been a hurricane for 10 days, becoming the longest-lived Atlantic hurricane since Ike in 2008. It has stayed remarkably powerful over that time: When it makes landfall on Sunday, it will likely rank among the 10 lowest-pressure cyclones ever to encounter the continental United States.

• Meteorologists say damaging winds from Irma’s outer bands were already arriving in South Florida. The storm was expected to reach the Florida Keys on Sunday morning before moving up the state’s Gulf Coast.

• After being devastated by Hurricane Irma, the tiny Caribbean island of Barbuda braced for its second major hurricane in four days as Hurricane Jose barreled toward its direction.

• What was left of Barbuda was spared from the worst of Hurricane Jose, as the Category 4 storm skirted just north of the island on Saturday.

• Hurricane Irma began lashing the Florida Keys and parts of Southern Florida Saturday, knocking out power to tens of thousands and causing flooding as the center of the large and powerful storm approached landfall.

• “Major hurricane force winds” were expected over the Keys at daybreak Sunday, the National Hurricane Center said. The storm is expected to cause life threatening storm surges of up to 15 feet along parts of southwestern Florida and other storm surges along the coast, forecasters warned.

• More than 201,000 customers were without power in Southern Florida late Saturday, Florida Power & Light said on its website.

• As Hurricane Irma rapidly approaches the southern coast of Florida, it is important to focus some time on how our citizens will handle the survival of what, is now believed, will be a Category 4 storm.

• More than 315,000 are without power in Florida as deadly Hurricane Irma continues its approach, packing the potential to make a catastrophic Category 4 hurricane strike.

• Hurricane Irma uprooted trees and tore off roofs in Cuba on Saturday with 125-mile-per-hour (200-km per hour) winds that damaged hotels in the island’s best-known beach resorts and forced evacuations as far along the coast as low-lying areas of the capital Havana.

• Power was out and cellphone service was spotty in many regions as Irma neared the end of a 200-mile (320-km) trek westwards along the top of the island. It was forecast to head north toward Florida in the evening.

• Strung like beads along the northeast edge of the Caribbean, the Leeward Islands are tiny, remote and beautiful, with azure waters and ocean breezes drawing tourists from around the world.

• The wild isolation that made St. Barts, St. Martin, Anguilla and the Virgin Islands vacation paradises has turned them into cutoff, chaotic nightmares in the wake of Hurricane Irma, which left 22 people dead, mostly in the Leeward Islands. Looting and lawlessness were reported Saturday by both French and Dutch authorities, who were sending in extra troops to restore order.

• The Category 5 storm snapped the islands’ fragile links to the outside world with a direct hit early Wednesday, pounding their small airports, decapitating cellphone towers, filling harbors with overturned, crushed boats and leaving thousands of tourists and locals desperate to escape.

• The storm-ravaged islands of Barbuda, St. Martin and Anguilla were spared a direct blow Saturday from Hurricane Jose, as its eye passed north of the chain but still threatened the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico with potential “life-threatening” surf, forecasters said.

• The group of islands, known as the Leeward Islands, had braced for a second round of driving rain and destructive winds just three days after Hurricane Irma flattened buildings and left thousands homeless. At least 23 people have died as Irma continued ravaging the Caribbean.

• Tampa and the surrounding area, whose population is about four million, is not prepared for a storm of this magnitude. Too many homes and businesses are too close to the water, and coastal defenses are too few, for catastrophic damage to be avoided.

• Hurricane Irma’s leading edges whipped palm trees and kicked up the surf as it spun toward Florida with 125 mph winds Saturday on a projected new track that could subject Tampa – not Miami – to the storm’s worst fury.

• British police officers will be deployed as part of the UK’s efforts to support the Caribbean islands left devastated by Hurricane Irma, the government announced yesterday as it scrambled to deflect criticisms over its handling of the disaster.

• The UK’s response to Irma, which devastated the British overseas territories of the British Virgin Islands and Anguilla, has been found wanting, according to two influential MPs.

• At least 35 hospitals in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina have either closed entirely or ordered partial evacuations in advance of Hurricane Irma.

• The decisions come as officials have ordered nearly 7 million people to leave their homes, causing a mass exodus north before the storm begins to lash the Florida coast.

• Throughout this week, Irma’s projected course has changed multiple times. That uncertainty has forced hospitals from the Florida Keys all the way to the coastal barrier islands of South Carolina to move patients.

• In Gainesville, we are nearly out of gas. So is Orlando. So is Florida — half of Miami’s gas stations closed. Scott has ordered highway patrols to escort fuel trucks to gas stations as people scurried to refill their empty tanks. Shelves of water have been empty for days. Work and school is canceled at least through Monday. Twelve shelters have opened in my town in preparation.

• My wife and I started preparing for Irma’s arrival around Labor Day. Usually, that’s a big tourist weekend around here — so there was already a shortage of gas at some service stations. So, when we went to get gas, we were only able to obtain the high-priced stuff. And that was just the beginning. Using FEMA’s emergency supply kit list, we bought at least 14 gallons of water and enough food for two weeks. I’m set to eat Chef Boyardee for a long while if need be, and I hope that I am able to do that over an extended period of time, instead of eating it all during the aftermath of Hurricane Irma.

• Concern is growing for residents in the most vulnerable areas of Florida who have not yet evacuated, as Hurricane Irma edges closer to making landfall.

• Despite authorities begging residents of the Florida Keys to evacuate since Thursday, some have opted to remain.

• The low-lying coral cay islands are scattered off Florida’s southern coast, with a population of 70,000.

• Hurricane Irma is expected to pose at least a temporary setback to Florida’s sizzling economy as it takes aim at the heart of the nation’s citrus production and batters its robust tourism industry.

• But if the storm causes extensive damage that discourages incoming retirees and tempers runaway population growth, the economic effects could be more substantial, analysts say.

• In the last 50 years there have been more than 15 deadly hurricanes, many of which were at some point as strong as Irma, but none of which sustained winds the way Irma did for so long. Many of the most deadly hurricanes in the United States over the last 50 years have happened since 2005, according to storm data from the National Hurricane Center.

• The relief operation was “well under way”, the Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon said.

• Five people died in the British Virgin Islands as a result of the hurricane.

• Prime Minister Theresa May said the government was working with US authorities to ensure Britons were protected as Irma approaches Florida.

• With Hurricane Irma barreling towards the southeastern United States, millions of Florida residents are being forced to evacuate. And while evacuation can be complicated and potentially dangerous for many people, for Floridians who are homeless, getting to safety during a storm can be especially challenging. Fortunately, a number of organizations are working to help the homeless during Hurricane Irma, and you can assist them by donating your time, money, or even your home.

• Some communities in Irma’s path have already taken preventative measures to ensure the safety of their homeless populations. In Miami, the estimated 1,100 homeless individuals in the city were told to enter storm shelters, or be forcibly detained for a mental health evaluation. While shocking, institutionalizing individuals against their will is in fact legal under the Baker Act, which allows authorities to detain people who present a danger to themselves or others.

• Hurricane Irma continues to hurtle toward Florida’s doorstep, threatening to ravage the state with destruction not seen in a generation.

• As the weather forecasts and warnings from officials grew increasingly dire, hundreds of thousands of people across Florida fled their homes before the rapidly closing window to escape Irma’s wrath slammed shut. Forecasters said Irma, a hurricane of remarkable size and power that already has battered islands across the Caribbean, would approach South Florida by Sunday morning and is likely to slam into the state’s southern tip before tracking north across a heavily populated area.

• The only reason the naturally swampy terrain of South Florida can sustain more than six million people today is because its previous residents dredged and drained it. The operations started in the late 1800s, and by the 1970s Floridians had built an expansive network of canals, levees, and pumping stations to keep water at bay. The system, which was designed to let gravity drag groundwater downstream to the ocean, was based on 1930s sea levels, as Frederick Bloetscher, a water-management expert, pointed out during a 2014 US Senate hearing on Florida’s changing coastline.

• People on the Dutch-French Caribbean territories of Saint Martin and Saint Barthelemy were bracing on Saturday for Hurricane Jose, a Category 4 storm expected to swipe the region after fellow storm Irma headed towards Florida.

• Dozens of inmates have reportedly escaped a Caribbean prison that was ravaged by Hurricane Irma.

• Between 100 and 120 prisoners are said to have fled the facility on the British Virgin Islands, Sky News reported.

• More than 100 prisoners are said to have escaped from a prison in the British Virgin Islands.

• Between 100 and 120 prisoners are said to have fled after the site was partially destroyed by Hurricane Irma, according to Sky News.

• Battered and weary after being pummelled by Hurricane Irma, terrified residents were on Saturday gearing up to face a second monster storm which was heading for the Caribbean.

• “Return to the safest shelters before the hurricane arrives, and avoid areas which could flood,” police in the French part of St Martin pleaded, only three days after it was ravaged by Irma.

• Jose, a Category Four storm, will bring heavy rains and winds of 130 to 150 kilometres per hour (up to 93 miles per hour), meteorologists said.

• But it is possible the storm could miss the islands of St Martin and St Barts when it hits later Saturday, and veer about 100 kilometres to the north.

• Hurricanes are atmospheric machines that consume heat from the ocean and expel it as extraordinary wind speed. Over the last three days, Irma, Jose, and, to a lesser extent, Katia have been working overtime.

• Forecasters use many metrics to describe the severity of a storm—wind speed, sea surface temperature, barometric pressure—but the most dramatic may be the accumulated cyclone energy index (ACE). The calculation is a function of wind speed measurements sampled every six hours. It provides an overall sense of a storm’s power. Tropical Storm Bret, for example, the second named storm of 2017, reached winds of 46 miles per hour and had an ACE of 0.7. Hurricane Harvey hit southeastern Texas as a Category 4 storm on the wind scale, with top winds above 130 mph, and finished with an ACE of 11.1.

• Just two weeks after Hurricane Harvey barreled into the Gulf Coast of Texas, residents in Florida are bracing for Hurricane Irma, the biggest storm the state has faced in more than 20 years.

• Cellular service held up better during Harvey than in past storms, which is surprising given the scope and size of the disaster. But it’s unclear if the networks will be able to stand up to the larger, and potentially more destructive, Irma.

• Curfews are being issued across South Florida as the region prepares to clear roads ahead of Hurricane Irma: 8 p.m. for portions of Coral Gables, 10 p.m. in North Miami, 8 p.m. in Homestead, 7 p.m. in Key Biscayne, 8 p.m. in North Miami Beach, 4 p.m. in Broward County, 7 p.m. in the city of Miami and 8 p.m. in Miami Beach.

• Coral Gables said it would start a curfew at 8 p.m. for portions of the city until 7 a.m. Sunday. Unlike other curfews in the county, the Coral Gables curfew only applies to areas covered by a mandatory evacuation order from the county targeting storm-surge-prone areas ahead of the hurricane.

• North Miami issued a curfew starting 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. Sunday, prohibiting people from traveling outside by car or foot, according to a statement from city manager Larry Spring, Jr.

• Palm Beach County officials said they imposed a 3 p.m. curfew on Saturday to protect residents from criminals who might want to use Hurricane Irma to their advantage — and by 9 p.m., police had made at least one arrest and may have made as many as five.

• The curfew is in place “to protect Palm Beach County from looters and other individuals,” County Administrator Verdenia Baker said. It will be lifted after the threat of the storm is over and law-enforcement officials agree traffic can move safely.

• A Delray Beach police spokeswoman confirmed that Ricky Burns, 57, was arrested Saturday afternoon and is facing a charge of violating a municipal ordinance. Burns, of Delray Beach, was booked into the Palm Beach County Jail around 2 p.m. and remains there. The spokeswoman did not provide details of Burns’ arrest.

• The outer bands of Hurricane Irma lashed Florida on Saturday, with millions ordered to evacuate and high winds and tens of thousands of power outages already reported from a storm that threatened to ravage the state with destruction not seen in a generation.

• More than 5 million people across Florida have been ordered to evacuate and thousands crammed into shelters. Gov. Rick Scott (R) sounded dire warnings about the storm, urging residents in evacuation zones to leave their homes immediately.

• Currently packing maximum sustained winds of 130 mph, the deadly storm is expected to hit the US mainland around 7 a.m. Its outer rain bands lashed the Florida Keys late Saturday, accompanied by winds of 74 mph — hurricane force, the National Weather Service said. A 79 mph gust was recorded early Sunday as Irma drew closer.

• The course change from Florida’s east coast caught many off guard and triggered a major round of evacuations. Many west coast businesses had yet to put plywood or hurricane shutters on their windows, and some locals grumbled about the forecast.

• Saturday, the National Weather Service issued tornado watches lasting through Saturday night for nine counties in Florida — Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Charlotte, Collier, Glades, Hendry, Lee and mainland Monroe.

• [...]

• Officials and forecasters reiterated Saturday that large storm surges along Florida’s west coast could cause major flooding.

• After Hurricane Andrew destroyed more than 125,000 of Florida’s homes in 1992, state authorities realized that structures needed to be built stronger. Since 1994, southern Florida homes have had to meet new requirements that ensure they withstand the winds and flooding risks of at least a category 3 hurricane. More sweeping statewide legislation was added in 2001.

• In what will be the greatest test of the new homes’ strength, Hurricane Irma, expected to be the strongest hurricane since Andrew, is projected to hit Florida early Sunday morning. But since these regulations only apply to buildings constructed since the law took effect, a majority of southern Florida homes may not be equipped to handle Irma’s havoc.

• One thing’s for sure, 2017′s Atlantic hurricane season is an abnormal one, and climate change has a part to play in the ferocity of Irma.

• Hurricane season has been particularly destructive in 2017, as Hurricane Irma, which arrived a week after Hurricane Harvey struck the Gulf Coast, has been accompanied by Jose and Katia. All three hurricanes emerged almost simultaneously from the Atlantic Ocean.

• The U.S. National Hurricane Centre (NHC) had issued storm watches for Jose and Katia earlier in the week, but Irma has posed more of an immediate and serious threat.

• “3 hurricanes threatening land simultaneously in the W Atlantic Basin. Never seen anything like this in the modern record,” NHC Scientist Eric Blake posted on Twitter Thursday.

• Hurricane Irma ripped roofs off houses and flooded hundreds of miles of coastline as it raked Cuba’s northern coast after devastating islands the length of the Caribbean in a trail of destruction that has left 22 people dead so far.

• As Irma left Cuba late Saturday and directed its 120 mph (195 kph) winds toward Florida, authorities on the island were assessing the damage and warning of staggering damage to keys off the northern coast studded with all-inclusive resorts and cities, as well as farmland in central Cuba.

• British tourists in Cuba have been speaking of the impact of Hurricane Irma, with one saying the storm had led to the “honeymoon from hell”.

• Irma has made landfall on the island, having claimed at least 20 lives as it churned across the Caribbean.

• Beasley said he is also keeping an eye in Hurricane Jose, which is a Category 4 far out in the Caribbean.

• Six dolphins have been spared from the destruction of deadly Hurricane Irma when they were airlifted to safety.

• The dolphins – who are from a dolphinarium in Cayo Guillermo, a small island north of Cuba’s mainland – were wrapped in wet towels and put in helicopters.

• The dolphins were flown to Cienfuegos, a southern province of Cuba where they were placed in swimming pools upon arrival.

• With Hurricane Irma forecast to begin buzz-sawing its way up the Florida Peninsula early Sunday, here’s hoping you have taken full advantage of days of advance warnings from saturation news coverage and Gov. Rick Scott’s regular storm updates to get yourself and your family ready. Or, here’s hoping you seize the opportunity to do whatever you still can safely in the hours before high winds make going outside hazardous.

• Tens of thousands of people huddling in shelters watched for updates as the storm swung to the west, now potentially sparing Tampa as well Miami the catastrophic head-on blow forecasters had been warning about.

• The edge of the storm has already bent palm trees and lashed heavy rain across the south of the Sunshine State, causing more than 170,000 homes and businesses to lose power.

• Hurricane Irma ripped roofs off houses and flooded hundreds of kilometres of coastline as it raked Cuba’s northern coast after devastating islands the length of the Caribbean.

• As Irma left Cuba late on Saturday and directed its 195kmh winds towards Florida, authorities on the island were assessing the damage. They warned of staggering damage to keys off the northern coast studded with all-inclusive resorts and cities, as well as farmland in central Cuba.

• More than 70,000 Americans are in shelters in Florida as they brace for the killer hurricane that cut a swathe through Cuba.

• Hurricane Irma regained strength as it closed in on the Florida Keys early Sunday (Sunday night NZT) and forecasters monitored a crucial shift in its trajectory – just a few more miles to the west – that could keep its ferocious eye off the southwest Florida coast and over warm Gulf water.

• Hurricane Irma got stronger Sunday morning as it moved very close to the Florida Keys, which could take a direct hit from the now Category 4 storm.

• Irma’s forecast track from the National Hurricane Center takes the major hurricane right up Florida’s west coast, bringing the potential for “catastrophic” storm surge to the Keys and southwest peninsula.

• As of the last advisory from the National Hurricane Center, at 4 a.m. CDT Sunday, Hurricane Irma was located about 40 miles south-southeast of Key West and was moving northwest at 8 mph.

• Irma had winds of 130 mph, making it a Category 4 hurricane.

• Forecasters said there is the potential for Irma to strengthen more over the next few hours before wind shear is expected to increase.

• That shear, combined with part of the storm moving over land in Florida, is expected to weaken Irma, although the hurricane center still expects it to be a major hurricane when it makes its closest approach to the Tampa area later today.

• The sheriff’s office, which is in the Tampa Bay-area, was responding to a Facebook event page created two Florida men inviting people to shoot at Irma.

• More than a decade of budget cutting and a rash of government job vacancies are taxing Washington’s ability to cope with a one-two punch of epic storms.

• The fiscal belt-tightening has coincided with an American migration to job-abundant coasts, where people are building bigger houses and taller condos while shunning flood insurance. Storms, fires and other disasters are hitting with more frequency and fury, forcing the federal government to cope with overlapping catastrophes.

• Hurricane Irma’s projected path scrapes Florida’s Gulf Coast with chances of a last-minute turn “near zero,” but the East Coast shouldn’t put its guard down yet.

• Much of the state is positioned directly in the storm’s northeast quadrant — boosting the threat of squalls, heavy rains and potential tornadoes.

• [...]

• “The conditions that favor tornadoes will really increase before sunrise on Sunday, and that threat will continue through much of the day on Sunday,” he said.

• Announcing itself with roaring 130 mph winds, Hurricane Irma plowed into the mostly emptied-out Florida Keys early Sunday for the start of what could be a slow, ruinous march up the state’s west coast toward the heavily populated Tampa-St. Petersburg area.

• With an estimated 127,000 huddling in shelters statewide, the storm lashed the low-lying string of islands with drenching rain and knocked out power to over 1 million customers across Florida.

• The eye of Hurricane Irma has hit Florida’s southern islands as a category four storm, forecasters say. The storm is lashing the low-lying Keys with winds reaching 130mph (209km/h). Florida Governor Rick Scott said he was “very concerned” about the state’s western Gulf Coast, where the storm is expected to head next. More than 6.3 million people were told to evacuate Florida, with warnings of a huge storm surge that would be “life-threatening” to anyone in its path.

• A Florida sheriff has pleaded with citizens not to shoot at Hurricane Irma, saying they “won’t turn it around”.

• The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office warned that shooting weapons at the most dangerous Atlantic hurricane to hit the US since records began “will have very dangerous side effects”.

• The National Weather Service says that a crane has collapsed in Miami as strong wind from Hurricane Irma blows in. It’s one of two-dozen in the city.

• The weather service’s Miami office said in a Tweet that one of its employees witnessed the crane boom and counterweight collapse in downtown Miami. The employee captured video of the collapse.

• After long days of anxious preparations and waiting, Hurricane Irma is arriving in South Florida on Sunday morning, still a dangerous Category 4 storm even though Miami-Dade and Broward counties will be spared the worst. The Florida Keys, however, will not be so lucky: Irma’s eye made landfall on Cudjoe Key at 9:10 a.m. and the storm is expected to move northwest up Florida’s Gulf Coast. More than a million households and businesses have no power in South Florida, and dangerous flooding and tornadoes are possible.

• All hurricanes are brutal, but geology, geography and good old-fashioned capitalism have conspired to make Florida hurricanes particularly damaging events. South Florida, in particular, is a kind of paradise for many people who live there, but as far as Mother Nature is concerned, it’s a fragile kind of paradise.

• The National Weather Service in Miami warned that gusts could reach 100 mph at the upper floors of high-rise buildings, and an isolated gust hit 100 mph at the University of Miami, according to the Weather Channel. Nearly 1.1 million customers were without power, mostly in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.

• Video from NBC News showed water pouring through Miami’s streets, in between high-rises.

• As the storm’s spiral bands walloped South and Central Florida, the potential for tornadoes arose in the swirling air, and the Weather Service issued watches and warnings. Witnesses captured photographs of a twister moving off the ocean toward Fort Lauderdale on Saturday evening.

• Hurricane warnings cover all of Florida except the western Panhandle, where a tropical storm warning was in effect.

• South Floridians woke up Sunday to Hurricane Irma as the monster storm made landfall in the Florida Keys, hurling street signs, downing trees and knocking out power for more than 750,000 residents.

• The National Hurricane Center said Irma is expected to remain powerful as it heads north along the state’s Gulf coast.

• With the arrival of what is potentially one of the most devastating storms to ever hit Florida, officials have set aside 3.2 million liters (0.85 million gallons) of water, filled 67 trailers with meals, and amassed 24,000 tarps. They also have asked the federal government to kick in 11 million meals and millions more liters (gallons) of water, plus nearly 700 cases of baby supplies.

• When it is finally safe for emergency officials to fan out across the peninsula, they will find out whether that is enough.

• Irma is forecast to remain a major hurricane as it approaches the densely populated Tampa Bay area, which experts say is woefully ill-equipped to confront a storm of this size. Many people from Florida’s eastern coast had sought refuge around Tampa in recent days before the storm’s path shifted westward.

• As Irma moved north and closer to Florida, the number of hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities evacuating their buildings increased from 340 on Saturday to 415 on Sunday, including 30 hospitals and 59 nursing homes.

• Scott said that a vast majority of the state is experiencing storm-force winds and that the eye of the storm was approaching the Naples-Fort Myers area.

• Irma is currently roughly 80 miles south-southeast of Naples, Florida. It is moving northwest at 9 mph and currently sports sustained winds of 130 mph with gusts up to 161 mph.

• Irma’s forecast track from the National Hurricane Center takes the major hurricane right up Florida’s west coast, bringing the potential for “catastrophic” storm surge to the Keys and the southwest part of the peninsula.

• The National Weather Service in Key West said on social media that the water level was 3 feet higher than normal as of 9:36 a.m. on Key West, with the storm pummeling the Keys with wind gusts exceeding 100 miles an hour.

• Gov. Rick Scott said Sunday he has requested a federal major disaster declaration for the state because of Hurricane Irma.

• U. S. Sens. Bill Nelson and Marco Rubio sent a letter to the president supporting the governor’s request.

• After long days of anxious preparations and waiting, Hurricane Irma has landed in South Florida, still a dangerous Category 4 storm even though Miami-Dade and Broward counties will be spared the worst. The Florida Keys, however, will not be so lucky: Irma’s eye made landfall on Cudjoe Key at 9:10 a.m., and the storm is expected to move northwest up Florida’s Gulf Coast. More than a million households and businesses have no power in South Florida, and dangerous flooding and tornadoes are possible.

• Hurricane Irma landed in Florida Sunday morning, making landfall in Cudjoe Key in the lower Florida Keys, bringing with it torrential rains and howling winds, wreaking havoc across South Florida and within the next few hours, the Marco Island and Naples areas will see the strongest winds. The immense 400-mile wide storm’s leading edge bent palm trees and spit rain across South Florida, knocking out power to about 2 million people, toppling two construction cranes in downtown Miami, and giving cover to a band of looters in Fort Lauderdale.

• Hurricane Irma’s punishing winds and life-threatening storm surge have already left an imprint, and there is more catastrophic damage to come as Irma takes a projected path up Florida’s west coast.

• Irma has killed at least 22 people and left devastation over parts of the Caribbean.

• Stateside, the extent of the damage may not be known for days — until the storm dissipates and emergency workers can fan out to assess and provide aid.

• Yet by Sunday, the day the eye made landfall in the Florida Keys, a picture of the destruction was already becoming clear: more than a million Florida homes and businesses were without power, more than 6 million Floridians were warned to evacuate and more than 100,000 people were holed up in emergency shelters.

• The center of the hurricane was nearing Naples, said an update from the National Hurricane Center at 3 p.m. ET. Sustained winds of 55 mph and a gust of 82 mph were observed at Naples Municipal airport.

• [...]

• Thousands of flights on four continents have been grounded as well.

• Hurricane Irma landed in Florida Sunday morning, making landfall in Cudjoe Key in the lower Florida Keys, bringing with it torrential rains and howling winds, wreaking havoc across South Florida before landing in Marco Island just before 4 p.m.. The immense 400-mile wide storm’s leading edge bent palm trees and spit rain across South Florida, knocking out power to about 2 million people, and toppling two construction cranes in downtown Miami.

• As Irma marches up Florida’s Gulf Coast toward Tampa Bay, residents fear what the storm will do to an area that hasn’t taken a direct hit from a major hurricane since 1921.

• From punishing winds to catastrophic storm surge, the area is bracing for devastation. Vulnerable structures range from the towering Sunshine Skyway Bridge to toxic waste sites from the state’s phosphorous mining industry.

• A 2013 World Bank study that ranked cities according to their vulnerability to major storms placed Tampa at number seven — among all cities in the world.

• “We’re going to be inundated with unprecedented amounts of water,” Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn said Sunday. “It’s going to stress our storm water and sewer capacity. There’s going to be overflows. There’s no two ways around it.”

• Photos of Tampa Bay’s waters drifting away from shore have left locals there a bit befuddled as Hurricane Irma takes aim at the Gulf Coast city.

• “Hours before Irma hits, the water is literally being sucked out of Tampa Bay. I took this photo at the end of my street,” tweeted Dana Young, a former Florida state representative.

• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has downgraded Hurricane Irma to a category 3 hurricane from category 4, as winds slacken slightly and the storm picks up speed to move north at 12 miles per hour. However, NOAA warns that the storm is still life-threatening as it moves towards Tampa Bay, thanks to sustained winds as high as 120 miles per hour and the threat of storm surges of between six and 15 feet.

• Hurricane Irma’s extraordinary strength has caused a seemingly unusual meteorological phenomena: the eerie pushing of water away from shorelines in the Bahamas and the Gulf Coast of Florida.

• Jason Beisel, a spokesman for the Florida city of Clearwater, described the scene in a tweet on Sunday: “Creepy site – water in Tampa Bay is already being sucked out. This is view from downtown St. Pete waterfront.”

• Spokesman Rob Gould said Sunday that an estimated 3.4 million homes and businesses will lose power once the worst of Irma reaches the Florida mainland. He expects thousands of miles of poles and lines will need to be replaced, particularly on the Gulf coast.

• Officials warned residents to get off coastlines where water levels were extremely low because of the power of Hurricane Irma.

• Fifty police officers are flying to the UK’s overseas territories to help restore order after Hurricane Irma, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson says. The situation across the Caribbean is “very grim indeed”, he said, following an emergency government meeting.

• From Cuba to Antigua, Caribbean islanders began counting the cost of Hurricane Irma on Sunday after the brutal storm left a trail of death, destruction and chaos that could take the tourist-dependent region years to recover from.

• The ferocious Category 5 storm, which killed at least 28 people across the region, devastated housing, power supplies and communications, leaving some small islands almost cut off from the world. European nations sent military reinforcements to keep order amid looting while the damage was expected to total billions of dollars.

• The fierce eye of Hurricane Irma made its second landfall in Florida on Sunday as the full intensity of the storm began battering the state’s Gulf Coast.

• After long days of anxious preparations and waiting, Hurricane Irma has landed in South Florida, still a dangerous Category 4 storm even though Miami-Dade and Broward counties will be spared the worst. The Florida Keys, however, will not be so lucky: Irma’s eye made landfall on Cudjoe Key at 9:10 a.m., and the storm is expected to move northwest up Florida’s Gulf Coast. More than a million households and businesses have no power in South Florida, and dangerous flooding and tornadoes are possible.

• At the time, it was the most destructive hurricane to ever strike the US, causing up to $32bn of damage in the day’s valuation of the dollar and killing 65 people.

• Irma is already much larger than Andrew, swelling to more than 800 miles across and as big as a hurricane can physically get.

• Julieann Fernandez and Jonathan Thomson went to Cayo Coco island, off Cuba. The couple, from Erskine, Renfrewshire, spent £5000 for two weeks at the Memories Flamenco Beach Resort. They are now being evacuated.

• A Scottish family on holiday in the Caribbean are being evacuated to the Cuban mainland as Hurricane Irma approaches.

• Martin McCreadie, from Giffnock, East Renfrewshire, was staying on Cayo Coco along with his wife and young daughter.

• Two Hull families have spoken about their worry at not being able to get hold of their young families who are currently trapped on Cuba in the wake of Hurricane Irma.

• Melanie Young, of James Reckitt Avenue, east Hull, says she has spent two days “frantic with worry” as her 18-year-old daughter, Emily, has been told to “put a mattress against the window and hide in the bathroom” of a hotel in Cuba.

• The U.S. military has evacuated over 5,000 people from a base in the Florida Keys in advance of Hurricane Irma, but military personnel and the 41 detainees at the Guantanamo Bay naval station are staying put.

• In the first of what will likely be many, many such instances, CNN’s man in Havana, Patrick Oppmann took on the mantle of battered weatherman, bravely facing the fury of Hurricane Irma as it swiped the island on its march to Florida.

• CNN posted a video montage of Oppmann’s defiance in the face of nature, Saturday. At various points during the footage, Oppmann struggles to keep his coat off his face and can be seen dodging debris.

• Hurricane Irma is nothing to sneeze at. The storm, which has ravaged island after island in the Caribbean, is now bearing down on Florida, where thousands of people have escaped to safer ground.

• But for those who aren’t convinced that man is not in control of the weather, just take a look at CNN reporter Patrick Oppmann, who is in Cuba covering the storm. Watch out!

• As Hurricane Irma barrels toward Florida, an analysis conducted by the Associated Press shows a steep drop in flood insurance across the state, including the areas facing the greatest threat by what could be devastating storm surge.

• The Sunshine State’s total number of federal flood insurance policies has fallen by 15 percent in just five years, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency data.

• Property owners in Florida still buy far more federal flood insurance than any other state, with 1.7 million policies, covering about $42 billion in assets. However, most residents in hazard zones are badly exposed.

• While Miami was mostly evacuated by Saturday, one group still had a noticeable presence: the homeless.

• “I’ll be all right,” Terry Donald, who estimated he had been living on the streets here for two years, said as he shuffled barefoot down a deserted downtown street. “I think I’ll make it through.”

• In the hours before Hurricane Irma was expected to pummel Florida, authorities were urging homeless people to go to shelters.

• State troopers turned Interstate 16 into a one-way escape route for a few hours Saturday as evacuees packed cars and fled the Georgia coast ahead of Hurricane Irma. Projections included widespread damage, from storm surge near Savannah to toppled trees and power lines far inland into Alabama.

• The latest forecast from the National Weather Service on Saturday say Irma could continue to have hurricane-force winds well into Georgia and Alabama after traveling up the Gulf coast and sweeping over the Florida panhandle. Hurricane warnings were issued for several southern counties in Georgia, with tropical storm warnings for other sections to the north.

• Life-threatening storm surge is expected for parts of Florida, especially if Hurricane Irma’s winds push seawater ashore at high tide.

• “This will cover your house,” Gov. Rick Scott said Saturday. “It flows in fast, very fast. You will not survive all this storm surge.”

• The National Hurricane Center forecast water levels up to 15 feet (4 meters) above ground for the Florida Keys island chain and parts of the state’s Gulf coast, along with up to 25 inches (63 centimeters) of rain in the Keys.

• The evacuation at Zoo Miamai took 12 seconds. As bands of Hurricane Irma started making their arrival, Diesel was led from his rain-soaked cage, walked a few feet into a nearby reinforced building and settled in next to another cheetah in their new temporary home with a hay-covered floor. Until Irma passes, that’s where they’ll stay. “We’re as ready as we can be,” Zoo Miami spokesman Ron Magill said when the move was complete.

• Officials say about 265 Canadians have reached out to the Canadian government for help as Hurricane Irma turns its force on Florida after cutting a path of destruction through the Caribbean.

• “We have people who are stuck in a country or an island who just can’t get out,” said one Global Affairs Canada official. “There are no flights getting in or out. They’re frustrated. They’re trying to see if there are other ways of getting out

• Several Canadians settling into university in the Caribbean have been trapped by Hurricane Irma as the storm weaves a deadly path through the region, and the father of one trapped student says the Canadian government needs to do more to help.

• With Hurricane Irma rapidly approaching, a few curious storm watchers in Jacksonville, Florida, spent the morning trying to catch an early glimpse of the fury that’s set to descend on their state.

• While still a Category 5, Irma caused catastrophic damage in Barbuda, St. Barthelemy, St. Martin, Anguilla and the Virgin Islands before heading to Cuba and the Florida Peninsula.

• “The storm surge is what really scares me,” he said on a different morning show. “Potential 12 feet of storm surge.Think about that. … You cannot survive this.”

• He added: “You have got to understand: This is different than something like [Hurricane] Andrew. We didn’t get the storm surge in Andrew. This is going to impact both of our coasts. It’s a big, big storm.”

• Hurricane Irma will plow into south Florida this weekend, hitting a region that is home to 7 million people with some of the worst a hurricane can bring—150 mile an hour winds, devastating storm surges and heavy rains.

• Hurricane Irma’s outer bands and strong winds lashed the Florida Keys on Saturday, causing potentially deadly storm surge and devastating gales.

• An Irish couple on their honeymoon have found themselves stranded in Florida with little access to food and water, as Hurricane Irma closes in on the east coast state.

• Alison Desmond and her husband Leigh arrived in Miami last Monday, where locals warned them of the “bad weather” on the way.

• The couple, from Youghal Co Cork, had booked to leave Miami on an MSC cruise, but discovered it had been cancelled on Wednesday.

• In a video appeal, former presidents Barack Obama, George W Bush and his father George HW Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter recorded messages urging people to donate to the newly-created One America Appeal.

• In August of 1992, the most destructive hurricane ever to hit Florida made landfall. Hurricane Andrew, a category 5 storm, was the costliest hurricane ever in the US, with $26.5 billion in damage, until Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. In Miami-Dade County, Andrew killed 65 people, destroyed more than 63,500 homes, and damaged almost 125,000 others. In fact, the hurricane was so destructive that the World Meteorological Organization retired the name “Andrew” after the 1992 hurricane season.

• In 2015, ten full years after Hurricane Katrina, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) finallybegan making projections in advance regarding potential storm surge. This even though “[s]torm surge is often the greatest threat to life and property from a hurricane,” according to NHC [pdf]. In fact, the “fatalities that we saw in Sandy [117] and in Katrina [1,800+] were mostly, not exclusively but mostly, seawater from storm surge.” Currently, NHC is projecting that many areas along the coast in southern Florida, including in and around Miami, have a 10% or greater chance of a strong storm surge. The worst areas, particularly just north of the Everglades and in Homestead, have a chance to hit the top category (red) of 9+ feet. But is 9+ feet a reasonable high end category?

Finance

• The internet giant is expected to file the response to the European Commission’s €2.4bn (£2.2bn) penalty on Monday, the deadline for submitting an appeal.

• Unfortunately, the Trump administration and its corporate allies are planning an end-run around such pesky laws blocking full-scale deregulation. Because binding rules of international trade agreements can require changes in domestic laws and exact penalties if countries do not comply, they can force policy changes that lack popular and political support. A recent example is Congress acting to repeal broadly supported requirements for country of origin labeling of meat after Canada and Mexico challenged the rules as an unfairly discriminatory trade measure, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreed.

• On September 5, the administration of Donald Trump formally announced that they won’t try to save Obama’s overtime rule, effectively killing a potential raise for millions of Americans. This disturbing development has largely slipped under the radar during a busy news week, marked by Trump’s scrapping of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

• Twenty-one states and a number of business groups sued the Obama administration last September, after the Department of Labor (DOL) announced the new rule, accusing the former president of overreach.

• axpayers’ money is being used to fund an influential group of hard-line pro-Brexit Conservative MPs who are increasingly operating as a “party-within-a-party”, openDemocracy can reveal today.

• Despite expenses rules stating that MPs cannot claim for research or work “done for, or on behalf of, a political party”, the European Research Group has received over a quarter of a million pounds from MPs who claimed the public cash through their official expenses.

• The ERG, according to its current chair, MP Suella Fernandes, exists to ensure that Brexit will not be rendered “meaningless”. The group, regarded as an 80-strong private Tory caucus, wants Britain out of the EU single market and customs union. Its previous head, Steve Baker, now a minister in the Department for Exiting the European Union, said his group aimed to end EU’s “despotism” and give Britain back its borders.

• Forty MPs have paid money to the ERG and claimed it back as ‘research’ over the period covering the David Cameron and Theresa May governments. These include current ministers and members of May’s cabinet.

• Where there is no vision, the people perish, says the Book of Proverbs. As the slow-motion car crash of Brexit advances, we need a plan for stopping it.

• Here goes. Brexit is a revolution which devours its children. Most of those who spawned or supped with it have already vanished (Cameron, Hague, Osborne) or are disappearing beneath the waves (May and the three Brexiteers: Fox, Davis and Johnson).

• How hard can it be to be the chief executive of a privatised British water company? Your customers are determined by geography, your prices set by a regulator and designed to offer ample scope to fund both capital expenditure and to pay returns to your investors. Pretty much all you have to do is to make sure your sewage plants work and to keep the public waterways clear of human waste.

• Yet even this bare minimum seems to have eluded Martin Baggs, the former boss of Thames Water. He, you might recall, was the man at the corporate stopcock when the utility’s malfunctioning plants spilled so much excrement into the Thames that locals in the Berkshire town of Little Marlow took to referring to the scum-covered surface as “crappucino”. The company was this year fined a record £20m for venting 4.2bn litres of raw sewage into the rivers Thames and Thame between 2012 and 2013.

• UK-based companies are ramping up efforts to combat slavery in their overseas supply chains. But companies also need to be working harder to address the severe labour exploitation taking place at home.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Steve Bannon, in his first major interview since stepping down as Donald Trump’s chief strategist, lashed out at the mainstream media, saying it’s trying to destroy Trump, and defended the president’s use of Twitter as a necessary way of going over their heads.

• Facebook can shift elections. That’s why, with rumors swirling that the social media CEO might run, transparency is needed now more than ever

• So, how much did Russia’s political ad buys matter? The people in the best position to answer this question work at Facebook, which alone has access to the relevant data. But Facebook’s inconsistent statements, its history of errors in reporting on its own ad platform, and its reluctance to share relevant data about Russian hacking have added to its credibility gap.

• The letter in question, known as an amicus brief, had been submitted to the Supreme Court in advance of a case regarding politically motivated gerrymandering in Wisconsin. The court has long held that racially motivated redistricting is unconstitutional. But this could be the first time the nation’s highest court sets a standard for whether politically motivated redistricting can go too far.

• Even today, Le Carré said, Ang Sang Suu Kyi is speaking of “fake news” in Burma.

• After having lived in the United States, intermittently, twenty-three years, I left the country once and for all in 1998, during the Clinton era. I had been hired by the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, and I stayed in the Netherlands for ten years, until I qualified for early retirement. By this time, I had put my daughter through college, and I was eligible to receive a small pension. During The Hague years I had gone back to the U.S. every two years, for visits lasting no more than two weeks. And, having lived in five countries in my life, I decided I didn’t want to go back to the U.S., and retired in Portugal.

• [...]

• My last exchange took place at Denver airport. My ticket was being handled by an African-American woman in her thirties. That week, the dominant news story was Charlottesville white supremacist rally and the truck that ploughed into the crowd, killing Heather Heyer. What did she think of these events and the political situation in the country with Trump as President? “We’re in a shitload of trouble,” she responded. “It all started with the tweets. But I think he’s crossed the line now when he blamed both sides.” I thanked her and said: “Good luck!” “God help us all!” was her answer.

• There has never been one moment, not one, when I believed Donald J. Trump would develop even marginal leadership skills once he became president. I never expected the much-ballyhooed “pivot” that would come just as soon as he realized how serious his job is and that we all might die if he screws up. The thought frankly never occurred to me. Waiting for a 71-year-old plutocrat to “mature” is not a high-yield use of my day. This is the guy who shouted, “Have a good time, everybody!” at a building filled with Harvey refugees.

• Which is what made Wednesday so thoroughly fascinating. The man with the political instincts of a lobbed brick somehow closed out the day with a multi-dimensional checkmate maneuver that took down a number of large birds with one throw. The fact that Trump’s motives were entirely self-involved only adds frosting to the cake.

• Catalonia does not have the right to impose secession upon Spain. Nor does Spain have the right to impose unity upon Catalonia. Should a conflict such as the one that is now being played out in the Principality of Catalonia arise, the only solution is negotiation, as the Supreme Court of Canada made clear in its opinion on the now widely celebrated referendum on the question of independence for Quebec.

• Such a negotiation could have taken many forms and could have centered on many different aspects of the impasse. After the first September 11th (Catalan National Day) protests in 2012, the Catalan government proposed that the two sides engage in a renewed dialogue about fiscal matters and cultural rights. This proposal was not only rejected, but treated with open disdain. Catalan political forces have appealed on nearly twenty occasions for a negotiated solution to the celebration a referendum designed to clarify the true political will of the Catalan people. As is the case today, the party that has always refused to negotiate in the recent past has been Madrid. The Spanish state has consistently disdained the core democratic principle that disagreements should be resolved through good faith negotiations that respect the democratic expression of all political projects. This consistent pattern of disdain delegitimates the arguments of the Spanish government.

• [...]

• While the European Union has no provision spelling out what is to be done in the case of the secession of a part of a member state, there is a consistent practice when it comes to recognizing the results of referendums on self-determination. For example the EU took important decisions in response to the referendums of the Saar (1955), Greenland (1982) and Brexit (2016), and did not block the referendum in Scotland (2014). All of these referendums were held within the territory of the Union. And as we have seen, it accepted as member 7 states born of unilateral processes while also giving support to the practice of self-determination in cases such as that of Kosovo. This, in clear contradiction to Spain’s current posture in regard to Catalonia.

• Now, in it’s latest survey, it says two-thirds (67%) of U.S. adults are reporting getting at least some of their news on social media. While a fifth (20%) report doing so “often”.

• And while it’s not a huge increase, it is nonetheless a rise (Pew terms it a “modest” increase).

• Parliament will need to approve the release of £1bn in funding for Northern Ireland promised to the Democratic Unionist party by Theresa May to secure its support after the general election, the government has conceded.

• Challenged by the campaigner Gina Miller about the legal basis for releasing the funds, which have not yet been made available, the Treasury solicitor, who heads the Government Legal Department, said it “will have appropriate parliamentary authorisation”, adding: “No timetable has been set for the making of such payments.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• Togo’s netizens are currently in the midst of an internet shutdown. Internet and mobile SMS service in the small African country of Togo has been shut down as of September 7th. Connection issues started on September 5th, when some users started having trouble connecting to social media sites without the help of a VPN. The internet blocking intensified in the days following. The internet block is a result of the ongoing protests during elections in the country. A government spokesperson, Gilbert Bawara, confirmed on FM radio that the internet had been cut for security reasons.

• Spontaneous rallies erupted in cities and towns across India on Wednesday. Protesters demanded the government do more to protect free speech in the secular, South Asian democracy.

• This interview with Mark Lewis, the lawyer suing me, is headlined “UK’s Foremost Libel Lawyer Sets His Sights on Israel’s Enemies.” It characterises opponents of Israel as “Nazis” and opines “I am quite happy to take their homes off them… at least they can be a homeless Nazi.” I sincerely hope he does not consider me a Nazi, though plainly this case is started by my falsely being smeared as an anti-Semite. But no matter how objectionable somebody may find my views on Israel/Palestine, how does it serve justice that “at least my” wife and 8 year old son “can be homeless.” That is however precisely what Mr Lewis seeks to achieve and to be plain, he has threatened me in person with bankruptcy. The money, of course, would go to Mr Lewis and his team still more than to Mr Wallis Simons.

• English libel law is recognised throughout the world as a draconian affront to democracy. Its survival is due not only to the fact that it is an invaluable tool for the wealthy to use against poor radicals, but also to the fact that libel is a very wealthy industry, feeding money to rich and influential individuals, including of course not only the libel lawyers but also the judges and court system which are all part of this massive vested interest, which is extremely well represented in the Westminster parliament.

• Being a black constitutional and civil rights attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) can be more emotionally unsettling than I am sometimes willing to admit.

• And over the years, I have struggled with decisions we’ve made to defend those who foment hate, who proselytize against my very existence and openly long for a return to the days when people like me were legally considered less than human. Because it means that as an ACLU attorney, I am defending them, too.

• The organization that fought alongside the NAACP Legal Defense Fund for school desegregation in the 1950s and that helped overturn extreme voter ID laws in Pennsylvania and Arkansas in 2014, also intervened on behalf of the white nationalist who organized the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, three weekends ago in which one woman was killed and many others injured.

• In Kyrgyzstan, independent publications are being shuttered left, right, and centre on far-fetched and often absurd pretexts. The authorities frequently bring criminal cases against human rights activists and journalists — in other cases, the state slams them with huge fines or seizes their property.

• The unlucky ones who haven’t yet managed to flee the country end up behind bars or are banned from travelling abroad. We might as well rename the country — Absurdistan, perhaps?

• Cambridge University Press is heading for a showdown with Chinese authorities after it refused a renewed request to block academic articles, following an outcry last month when it was revealed the publisher has restricted certain content in China.

• A Chinese state-owned importer asked CUP, the world’s oldest publisher, to block articles from the American Political Science Review.

• A recent article in Ars Technica is titled: “Tech companies declare war on hate speech—and conservatives are worried.” I take issue with it, because it is not only conservatives who should be worried. Everyone should be worried. It’s similar to the contentious net neutrality wars in which the liberals (by and large) and their liberal friends in Silicon Valley are outraged at the prospect of net neutrality being dismantled by uncaring conservatives – the group presently in control of the agenda.

• On the net neutrality issue, conservatives too should be worried about the prospects of throttling and paid prioritization, among other things. They will suffer along with everyone else. Similarly, the knee-jerk reaction to far-right demonstrations – most notably in Charlotteville – of websites deciding what kind of “free” speech should be allowed, is equally unnerving – or should be.

Privacy/Surveillance

• How private are your medical records? You’d think they’d be pretty damn private, considering Congress specifically passed a law regulating the disclosure of these sensitive records. Some states feel the same way, extending even greater privacy protections to things like prescription records. Not only are medical entities prevented from passing on sensitive info without patients’ consent, local law enforcement agencies aren’t allowed to obtain third-party records like prescription data without a warrant.

• The decision means that the ECJ will have the final say as to whether the UK’s collection of bulk communications data, granted under the Investigatory Powers Act, is legal.

• Privacy International, the UK-based privacy and online rights charity, first brought a case against MI5, GCHQ and MI6 in 2014 in an attempt to strike down the ability for agencies to use blanket hacking warrants, a key element of the Investigatory Powers Bill.

• The group previously argued that the collection of bulk communications data (BCD) had no basis in UK law, and that spy agencies had breached articles eight and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which guarantee the rights to privacy and free speech.

• Because ageism is allegedly rampant in Hollywood, California legislators have decided to address the problem head on not at all. Instead of enforcing on-the-books laws against employment discrimination, the legislature — backed by the Screen Actors Guild — has decided some of the First Amendment has to go. It has crafted a new law to fight ageism in Hollywood studios… by targeting a popular movie database. In California, A + B = WTF.

• The law — currently blocked by an injunction — forbids third-party sites with paid subscribers from publishing certain facts about actors and actresses. The only fact at issue is their age. And, despite lawmakers pretending the stupid, unconstitutional law targets a variety of websites, it’s really only having an effect on one: IMDb.

• The revelation was made during a Parliamentary committee hearing on proposed legislation to give police more powers to combat terrorism.

• The scientists found that these “collusion networks” run by spammers have managed to harness the power of one million Facebook accounts, producing as many as 100 million fake “likes” on the systems between 2015 and 2016.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The English-language newspaper is just one outlet forced to close in recent weeks. Analysts view a surge of restrictions as part of long-time Prime Minister Hun Sen’s increasingly authoritarian game plan ahead of elections next year.

• According to Arkansas police, the couple recorded homemade adult films in and around the city of Trumann, which they then marketed using a Twitter account run by Calloway.

• The Massachusetts Supreme Court has reaffirmed the fact that students (and other people on school campuses) don’t have location-based Constitutional rights. A pat-frisk of a nonstudent by a police officer on a school’s campus resulted in the warrantless search of his backpack and the discovery of marijuana, a scale, and a handgun. All of these items may as well have never existed at all, thanks to the officer having zero reasonable suspicion to perform the frisk, much less the probable cause to search the backpack.

• Antifa is not a gang. Antifa is not a danger. That is, unless you are a white supremacist and/or a fascist. Despite the best efforts of the right wing, most of the liberal media and way too many supposed leftists, antifa is one of the few left-anarchist phenomena actually performing a public service. By chasing nazis and other white supremacists out of places like Boston, Berkeley, San Francisco and by fighting back against them in many others, including Charlottesville, Virginia, antifa and others opposed to the poison of white supremacy have put its advocates on notice—they are not welcome. Furthermore, their protests and actions have made millions of US residents aware of the ugliness within their society. Of course, if one is to read the aforementioned right-winger and liberal media, they might believe that it is antifa who are the danger to society and not the nazis and their cohorts.

• Last semester, the university police pulled a Black student from a Black Visual Culture class and arrested him, for allegedly painting anti-racist graffiti in response to racism on campus.

• Sexual assaults are on the rise at UW, with no clear plan from the university to take action. State legislators threaten the accreditation of the medical school with no push back from the university administration.

• As students return to school across the country, we continue our look at the resegregation of schools—particularly in Alabama. A new article in this week’s New York Times Magazine titled “The Resegregation of Jefferson County” by Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at how predominantly white towns in Alabama are increasingly pulling out of regional school districts and creating new schools that are overwhelmingly white. Critics say this is a new form of segregation. For more, we speak with Nikole Hannah-Jones. Her article about choosing a school for her daughter in a segregated school system won a National Magazine Award this year.

• A young mum is about to face being torn apart from her newborn baby boy just weeks after giving birth.

• Pregnant Wanwan Kiff, 27, was recently refused permission to stay in the UK with her British husband by Home Office officials earlier this year.

• This week she gave birth to healthy baby boy Oliver – but will have to leave him in four months time and return to her native China.

• [...]

• A spokesperson from the Home Office said: “Ms Qiao’s application was refused on this occasion as it did not meet the immigration rules.

• “However, given Ms Qiao’s circumstances we have granted her four months exceptional leave to remain so she can give birth in the UK. Any further visa application from Ms Qiao once she has given birth will be considered.”

• Ever since Charlottesville, I have seen repeated references to how Nazism could have been stopped by street-fighting with almost no attention paid to the concrete socio-political conditions of Germany between 1920 and 1933, when Hitler took power. For many of those who think that physical force was the key to stopping Nazism, the viral video of Richard Spencer getting punched in the face was far more important as a guide to action than understanding the tragic history of the German left. On January 22, 2017 Natasha Lennard wrote a Nation magazine article titled “Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer Got Punched—You Can Thank the Black Bloc” that saw little need for tame mass actions. All we had to do was passively applaud the self-appointed saviors: “You don’t have to fight neo-Nazis in the street, but you should support those who do that day.” Unfortunately, Lennard had little to say about the consequences of the black bloc adventurism that day. The cops arrested innocent bystanders who are now facing up to 75 years in prison, all because some people felt the need to take part in a empty ritual as if capitalism could be undermined by a broken bank window.

• I would ask CounterPunch readers to forgive me for the length of this article that will try to tell the story of the German left’s failure to stop the Nazis from taking power. As a survivor of what Alexander Cockburn called a Trotskyist groupuscule, this was a topic that all new members paid close attention to, especially since Hitler’s triumph was one of the primary motivations for Trotsky founding a new International. For him, the key to understanding Hitler’s triumph was disunity on the German left. In some ways, despite the entirely different set of circumstances we face in 2017, this remains our continuing problem. My hope is that this bit of history might have some provide some insights on the kind of movement that needs to be built today since punching Nazis in Charlottesville was not the solution to an intractable problem that will take millions of Americans acting on their own class imperatives to solve.

• To ally campaigns for women’s rights with racism is to accept the very logic that, at its ideological core, feminism seeks to destroy.

• In a speech at George Mason University, one of the few universities where she can speak without student protests, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced a retreat from the guidelines protecting victims of sexual assault on campus. She devoted equal time in her speech to the rights of the victims of rape and the rights of those accused of rape.

• Her stance seems likely to discourage rape victims from coming forward, since doing so is already hazardous and puts them at risk of ostracism, especially when the alleged perpetrator is a popular athlete on campus.

• Given that she was appointed by a man who has boasted of sexually assaulting women without their consent–just “grabbing them by” their genitals–her indifference to victims of sexual assault is not surprising.

• Rhis is a story about how the airport became the setting for the Great American Freakout. Once an icon of progress, then another stale waiting room of modern life, the airport has now entered a third phase.

• We know from the work of Lawrence Lessig, Jane Mayer and others the extent to which US politics has been skewed by a smallish number of fabulously rich reactionaries, led by the Koch brothers. And in a sense, the influence of these actors is predictable because they use their wealth to obtain the political results that best further their economic interests. So one of the most interesting things about the Silicon Valley elite revealed by the new research is that its members don’t conform to this template: their political views are not wholly aligned with their corporate interests.

• On the eve of the EU referendum, I happened to find myself in a showing in London of David Bernet’s quintessentially European film, ‘Democracy’, about the heroic struggle within the European Parliament to secure key digital laws protecting citizens and consumers from big data mining. Katarzyna from whom we heard earlier, stars in this epic tale, alongside the heroic German Greens Jan Philipp Albrecht and Ralph Bendrath and Joe McNamee, Director of European Digital Rights. This David and Goliath story is actually a rare, gripping account in all its multilayered complexity, of a triumphant democratic law-making process.

• In the wake of the unrest in Charlottesville a few weeks ago, where a sizable contingent of white supremacists, Nazis, and other self-described “alt-right” provocateurs gathered to “Unite the Right” and to promote their agenda of hate, President Trump had an opportunity to demonstrate some much-needed moral leadership. Unsurprisingly, he once again failed to do so. Instead of immediately denouncing white supremacist ideology in clear and unequivocal terms (as, to their credit, many prominent conservatives and Republicans did), he took two days to produce a half- hearted statement that alt-right leader Richard Spencer deemed “not serious.” Proving Spencer correctly, it only took the president one more day to backpedal, once again claiming that “both sides” were to blame for the troubles in Virginia, and even suggesting that there were “very fine people” among the people leading the racist gathering, people who counted among their supporters the man who, in what can only be described as a terror attack, murdered with his car a young woman, Heather Heyer, who was counter-protesting in Charlottesville.

• This past week, Trump further provided proof of his willingness to abuse his power and to give aid and comfort to white supremacists, human rights abusers, and other right wing extremists by pardoning the notoriously cruel Maricopa (AZ) County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt for, among other things, targeting and profiling U.S. citizens suspected of being undocumented immigrants based on their ethnic appearance.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Abbott, as another example, “analyses the evolution of provisions contained in United States trade treaties since the adoption of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and their impact on pharmaceutical products,” the editors say. “The trend described is clear. While old agreements focused on intellectual property protection, more recent treaties broaden the scope and include regulatory standards. Likewise, they also include investor-to-state dispute settlement mechanisms that all private actors to initiate claims against host governments.”

Trademarks

• The Kodi team, operating under the XBMC Foundation, is taking a stand against ‘trademark trolls’ who abuse the Kodi name for personal profit. They accuse the Canadian trademark owner of actively blackmailing hardware vendors and removing content from Amazon. If needed, the foundation says that it may have to take legal action to keep its software freely accessible.

Copyrights

• On October 10, the European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) will vote on a proposal to change EU copyright law.

• The outcome could sabotage freedom and openness online. It could make filtering and blocking online content far more routine, affecting the hundreds of millions of EU citizens who use the internet everyday.

• WordPress has published new data revealing that the number of piracy takedown notices it receives has doubled in a year. Interestingly, this increase is not caused by legitimate complaints. Of all the DMCA requests copyright holders sent, a massive 78% were rejected due to mistakes or abuse.

• YouTube doesn’t have to hand over the IP-addresses of infringing uploaders to a German filmmaker, the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt has ruled. The Court argues that IP-addresses can not be used to send a written message to people, so under local law the video streaming platform only has to share their email addresses.

• This week, citing a crackdown on torrent sites, numerous articles declared Google Drive and similar cloud storage services to be “The New Pirate Bay”. While such platforms can indeed facilitate the distribution of content, there should be no illusion that they offer anything like the decentralization and corporate detachment offered by BitTorrent-based sharing.

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