● 04.04.19

● Links 4/4/2019: Sparky 5.7.1 and AV Linux 2019.4.10 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 4:55 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• I’d like to point out a few things in this image. First, check out that leet green-on-black theme! Second, notice the GNOME foot in the top-left corner. This was early GNOME 1, back when it used Enlightenment as its window manager. Next, notice the top Netscape Navigator window open to Slashdot. If you are new to the FOSS community, Slashdot was the Hacker News of its time (or Reddit, or Digg, or Fark—depending on when you started arguing about technology news on the internet). Check out the specs on the server for sale in the banner ad: 266MHz processor, 32MB RAM, 2GB storage and 2GB of bandwidth.

• The window below the top Netscape window is another Netscape window with a full chat application implemented inside the browser with Java. I know what you are thinking: that server in the ad only had 32MB of RAM, and you need two or three gigabytes of RAM to run a JavaScript chat application inside a browser, but I assure you, it was possible with Java.

• Back in the 1990s, you would install Linux from a set of three or four floppy disks (unless you used SUSE, which required about a dozen). The user interface for the install was a curses terminal console that you would navigate with a keyboard. This install assumed that you were well familiar with disk partitioning, OS internals, networking and Linux overall. When you completed the install, you normally would reboot into a console. If you wanted to get a GUI, you then needed to configure obscure X11 configuration files by hand—that is, if your graphics hardware worked under Linux at all.

• Because of how much deep Linux knowledge you needed to install and use Linux back then, a number of Linux Users’ Groups (LUGs) sprung up around the country. These groups would meet and share tips and overall knowledge about Linux, and they started a new phenomenon: Installfests. During an Installfest, new Linux users would bring their computer to the LUG, and the experts would try to get Linux installed and working on it. Often experienced users also would bring their own computers to get help with that one piece of stubborn hardware they couldn’t get working.

• I’ve been predicting for a while that Microsoft is moving us away from its PC-centric Windows operating system to a cloud-based rental version of Windows. Now, with the Windows Virtual Desktop beta finally showing up, we’re a step closer to the death of the PC. I’m old enough to remember how the PC changed everything. Before it, computer users depended on time-sharing systems and dumb terminals, and the companies or schools that owned the centralized computing power called all the shots. After it, we all had our own computing power right on our desks, to do with as we pleased. The arrival of the beta Windows Virtual Desktop is a harbinger of the end of the PC era. We’re about to take a big step back to the centralised/controlled past. And maybe that’s OK for most people. I’ve noticed that, even as our lives become ever more centred around technology, fewer people actually are interested in the technology itself. Oh, they love using it, but understanding it at a deep level? Not so much. Of course, at one time, to get any work done with a computer, you first had to learn a lot, about computers, operating systems, commands and more. Eventually, “friendly” became the most important adverb in computing circles, and we’ve reached the point in user-friendliness that people don’t even talk about it anymore. Today, Google has shown with its Chrome OS that most of us can pretty much do anything we need to do on a computer with just a web browser.

• Basically, GNU Project wanted to make an operating system similar to Unix, but at the same time separate from it. Like it shouldn’t contain any code from Unix so that it could be further modified and distributed without limitations as free software. Since their own kernel was incomplete, the GNU Project accepted the Linux kernel, and they generated operating system GNU/Linux.

Desktop

• I am more than happy with the outcome of this experiment. I really didn’t know what to expect, and I thought the MX Linux would give pretty much the same results as the rest. But no. This is a true old-device Linux, and this is where it shines when the rest don’t even dare step out into the sunlight. And there are no compromises. The frugality does not impact usability in any way. You still get great looks, excellent modern software, and solid hardware compatibility. Plus, of course, blazing nimble for a 10-year relic.

• MX Linux MX-18.1 Continuum has restored life to my netbook. It runs beautifully fast, it’s elegant, loaded with real, practical goodies. The tremendous part is really the speed. This mini-laptop was weak even when I bought it, but to be able to keep using it in a nice fashion a decade later is truly an achievement. I want to thank all of you for your suggestions, and the MX Linux team for their excellent little product. Powerrr!

• There are old laptops in each house that can no longer function fully. Using standard operating systems, for example, Windows or Linux becomes almost impossible. However, you can still use the old laptop effectively.

• Now many distribution packages will make Linux for a slow laptop the best option in comparison with other operating systems.

• Several Linux distribution packages will work effectively on slow laptops. We will consider the most successful ones.

Server

• Docker’s popularity has been driven in large part by its promise of letting admins build an application once and then deploy it anywhere. But this promise can be misleading when you are trying to use Docker on Linux and Windows hosts at the same time.

• That’s because there are important differences between Docker on Linux and Docker on Windows. Although Docker runs natively on both operating systems, the approach you to take to using Docker in both platforms isn’t the same. What’s more, the rationales for using containers don’t apply equally to both Linux and Windows.

• Let’s take a look at the key differences between Linux and Windows when it comes to containers.

• [...]

• Docker on Linux is ‘Pure-Play’

• In the Linux world, Docker is a (mostly) open source platform that works with any Linux distribution from any vendor. Docker didn’t work closely with any particular company in the Linux space to develop containers or make them work with Linux.

• The same is not true of Windows. Docker and Microsoft worked closely to bring containers to Windows.

Audiocasts/Shows

• With Dann Washko, Linc Fessenden, Pat Davila, Allan Metzler

• EteSync offers secure, end-to-end encrypted, and privacy respecting sync for your contacts, calendars and tasks.

• Easy to use and open source – it seamlessly integrates with your existing apps so you won’t even notice you are using it.

Kernel Space

• Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds thinks ‘anonymity is overrated’ and only important for true whistle-blowers.

• The always opinionated and notoriously blunt creator of the Linux kernel made the claim during an interview with the Linux Journal when asked if there was “one thing he’d fix” in the world of networking published on Tuesday.

• “I’m actually one of those people who thinks that anonymity is overrated. Some people confuse privacy and anonymity and think they go hand in hand, and that protecting privacy means that you need to protect anonymity,” he said.

• “I think that’s wrong. Anonymity is important if you’re a whistle-blower, but if you cannot prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn’t be visible, and you shouldn’t be able to share it or like it.”

• Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system that secretly runs the internet and is the basis for Android, was recently asked what he would change about the tech world that his technology helped create, if he could.

• His answer: social media.

• “I absolutely detest modern ‘social media’ — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It’s a disease. It seems to encourage bad behavior,” Torvalds told the Linux Journal’s Robert Young.

• This is interesting criticism from a man who has often been accused of being uncivil to other programmers on Linux email lists. Torvalds is known as a brilliant, funny, and speaks-his-mind kind of guy who is generally fair-minded but doesn’t tolerate fools.

• NVIDIA released a security update for the Jetson TX1 and TX2 to patch vulnerabilities discovered in the Linux for Tegra (L4T or Linux4Tegra) driver package that could enable local attackers with basic user privileges to elevate privileges and to perform privilege escalation, denial-of-service (DoS) or information disclosure attacks.

• As described by NVIDIA, Jetson TX1 and TX2 are high-performance and low-power embedded AI supercomputers on a module designed to be used for compute-intensive deep learning and computer vision projects.

• The high resolution scrolling support in Linux 5.0 has been a headache to say the least. After being ejected from Linux 4.20 following early fall-out, the support was merged for Linux 5.0 but the user-space support has yet to stabilize.

• Red Hat input expert Peter Hutterer who has been involved in this high-resolution scroll wheel support for the likes of Logitech and Microsoft mouse referred to the situation as “a bit of a struggle to say the least.”

• The product page does list Linux support that comes as little surprise these days. In fact, back in January we wrote about Linux support for these new Intel adapters within the “IWLWIFI” driver and that enablement is now present in the Linux 5.1 kernel.

Linux Foundation

• LF Networking (LFN), which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across networking projects, today announced continued community momentum, including further collaboration with Standards bodies, evolution of compliance programs, new project milestones, and increased integration with adjacent communities. Formed in January 2018, LFN is focused on nurturing integration, efficiencies and member engagement across FD.io, OpenDaylight, ONAP, OPNFV, PNDA, Tungsten Fabric, and SNAS as well as the broader open source networking ecosystem. As the projects are hosted under the same umbrella, LFN builds upon synergies to enable rapid innovation and adoption. “We are thrilled to have recently celebrated our first year as an umbrella organization, bringing continued growth across the ecosystem supporting the end-to-end open source networking stack,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Automation, Edge & IoT, the Linux Foundation. “The LFN community — along with other ecosystem partners, including standards bodies — has truly come together to evolve the future of open source networking.”

• Open Networking Summit North America — April 3, 2019 — LF Networking (LFN), which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across networking projects, today announced expansion of its OPNFV Verification Program (OVP) to include Virtual Network Function (VNF) compliance testing. The expanded OVP, created in conjunction with the ONAP testing community, now includes publicly-available VNF compliance test tooling based on requirements developed within ONAP, as well as a Verified Labs Program and the induction of the University of New Hampshire-Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL) as the first OPNFV Verified Lab.

• Initially developed to simplify validation testing of commercial NFVI/VIM products based on OPNFV, the expanded program now covers interoperability with ONAP-compliant on-boarding requirements using both Heat and TOSCA package validation. The first of its kind, OVP combines open source-based automated compliance and verification testing for multiple parts of the NFV stack specifications established by ONAP, multiple SDOs such as ETSI and GSMA, and the LF Networking End User Advisory Group (EUAG). Demonstrating the readiness and availability of commercial products based on these requirements improves time-to-market, reduces costs, and improves the overall quality of NFVI and VNF deployments.

• The O-RAN Alliance and the Linux Foundation announced the creation of the O-RAN Software Community (O-RAN SC), to help develop open source software for the O-RAN Alliance’s open network architecture. The initial set of software projects may include near-real-time RAN intelligent controller, non-real-time RAN intelligent controller, cloudification and virtualization platforms, open central unit, open distributed unit, and a test and integration effort to provide a working reference implementation.

• Working with other adjacent open source networking communities, the O-RAN SC will enable collaborative development across the full operator network stack, the groups said. It will be sponsored at the Linux Foundation by the O-RAN Alliance.

Graphics Stack

• A UK-based software development Collabora has come up with an “experimental containerized Android environment,” which allows Android apps to run in a Linux operating system.

• Dubbed SPURV, the software is an open source and available to everyone. It will help users run Android apps in the same graphical environment as a system running native applications alongside on desktop Linux.

Applications

• It wasn’t too long ago that we published a list of 10 cool command line tools for your Linux terminal. Today, we turn our focus to encryption methods as we bring you a list of the best file and disk encryption software for your Linux machine.

Proprietary

• File sharing software is one of the important elements for the modern online world. This sort of programs is required to share necessary files and documents among the team members, similar organizations or individuals. So despite being various user groups, documents or file transfer software is quite necessary nowadays. There are lots of offline and cloud-based file sharing platform available for all the major platforms including Linux, Windows OS, Mac OS, etc. But today here we will focus on only Linux system. Here you will get a resourceful list of top-notch file sharing software for Linux.

• WPS office for Linux 2019 was released with numerous new features and performance improvements. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 18.04.

• WPS Office for Linux version 11 (or 2019) was released the other day with new features and improvements, including support for high resolution screens, skin support, and interface updates.

• WPS Office, formerly known as Kingsoft Office, is an office suite for Windows, Linux, Android and iOS, that includes three components: WPS Writer, WPS Presentation and WPS Spreadsheet. The suite is compatible with Microsoft Office formats PPT, PPTX, DOC, DOCX, XLS and XLSX, for both reading and writing.

Instructionals/Technical

• Not all audio files are created equal. Sometimes, they’re too quiet, too loud, or just off. When you find yourself with a problematic audio file, you aren’t stuck just dealing with it. FFmpeg, a powerful open-source audio utility can help. It can adjust the volume of your files and normalize them to get rid of unpleasant fluctuations in volume. What’s even better, it’s fully scriptable and even baked into Python scripts that streamline the whole thing.

• Samsung has brought Linux support to its DeX ecosystem. DeX was already a great way to get a full-screen desktop experience without the need of a standalone computer. However, it was not an actual desktop. Samsung is changing that by bringing Linux support which will allow users to use a full blown Linux operating system. Samsung has brought Linux support with almost all the features you will need to get started with Linux. With Linux on DeX, you will be able to carry your whole computer in your pocket. Whether you are developer or just a user who prefers Linux OS, this is a great news. In this article, we are going to show you how you can install Linux on Dex on supported devices so that you can live the future right now.

Games

• I’ve been Windows-free for about 8 months, and I recently published a rather controversial article outlining my experience. Those impressions, however, were largely based on using Ubuntu as my daily driver. I received constructive feedback from the community and challenged myself to start exploring and contrasting the user experience on several other popular Linux distributions like Fedora, Manjaro and Linux Mint.

• Currently I’m 4 distributions deep in a study that spans a total of 9 and I can already report a sobering reality: it’s remarkably elegant on some (at times easier than Windows), but it’s also notably inconsistent.

• Civilization 6 is a modern take on the classic concept introduced in the series of the Age of Empires games. The idea was fairly simple; you would start off in the very basic era where farming and agriculture were the biggest keys to survival and your army was not well equipped to handle situations as well. Then as your base focused on research, your knowledge advanced and with enough research, you could transition into a different era of civilization which would bring numerous wonders for your base and your people.

• Civilization VI takes that concept but with many twists to it. Where Age of Empires was a real-time strategy game, Civilization is a turn-based game. Both games have single player and multiplayer modes as well to offer a lot more incentive to the player to keep coming back to them. Civilization also makes use of various leaders in the game. Leaders are specific to different computer-controlled civilizations and each has different personalities. You have the freedom to decide whether you would like team up with different leaders, fight against them or remain neutral with them and keep a distance from their conflicts and battles.

• The goal of the game is to become the most powerful and influential civilization on the game map that you can be and the path you choose to make that happen is up to you. You can either be diplomatic in your approach or be ready for conflict every single time. Each path you choose will have its consequences and advantages and that is what makes the game so fun and interesting to play over. You are put in different situations each time you play and having the same situation replay has a very low chance of happening. The game offers various expansion packs that bring a lot more elements into the mix. Each expansion costs a decent price and is hence optional. Even without them, you can fully enjoy the game.

• For those who think they have some fast finger-work, Quaver is an open-source competitive rhythm game and it’s coming to Steam. Linux support is confirmed by the developer on the official website, a demo available on GitHub and Linux/SteamOS system requirements being up on Steam.

• Renaine is one I don’t remember hearing about before, originally funded on Kickstarter this absolutely gorgeous pixel-art platformer is coming out this year and you need to take a look.

• The Doom Series originated in the 90s after the release of the original Doom. It was an instant hit and from that time onwards the game series has received numerous awards and the original Doom has been a staple game in every gamer’s collection who grew up in the ‘90s era. The subsequent releases of the series were no strangers to tremendous acclaim and the games just got better as technology improved with every release. When Doom 3 came out, it was an instant success just like its predecessors but this game had certainly tested the technologies of the time as it was revered as one of the best games of its time in terms of technology, gameplay, and the story.

• The series then remained pretty dormant for about the next 10 years with only an expansion pack released for Doom 3 and its HD re-master in 2012. In 2016, the series attacked the gaming industry with a shooter game that did not forget its roots from the era of ‘shoot first, ask later’ kind of games. The 2016 edition of Doom was a welcome addition to the series and the modern game market because it brought back something that had been missing from games for a long time and that was some good old fashioned shooting enemies with lots of gore and no element of realism that would otherwise make games boring. Now that we have discussed Doom and its history, let us move on to actually getting the game to run on your Linux system.

• Risk of Rain 2 from Hopoo Games and Gearbox Publishing recently entered Early Access, it’s already become massively popular and thanks to Steam Play we’re not missing out.

Distributions

New Releases

• This release is basically an update of the ISO that fixes a couple of annoying bugs from the 2018.6.25 release with some notable updates and additions. It will mark the last release based on Debian Stretch and sadly it will also be the last release of the 32bit version. Future AVL development will focus on Debian ‘Buster’ and 64bit only. In the meantime I think this 2019.4.10 version will provide a fast, stable well prepared platform for AV Content creation for quite some time.

Screenshots/Screencasts

• In this video, we look at Sabayon 19.03.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Raspberry Pi single-board computers are wildly popular with makers, kids, and anyone who likes hands-on computing. But, in enterprise business? Industrial sites? Not so much. Or, are they? At SUSECon in Nashville, Tenn., SUSE executives revealed that three customers are already deploying SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) on Raspberry Pi computers.

• To be precise, these companies are all using Raspberry Pi Compute Modules. This is a Raspberry Pi 3 in a form factor that’s designed for industrial applications,

• The first customer, Knorr-Bremse, is a German manufacturing company. This business has old equipment with no built-in monitoring. It’s using a SLES-powered Raspberry Pi device to track what its gear is doing. Not bad for a 1.2GHz ARM BCM2837 processor with a 1GB RAM and 4GB eMMC Flash device instead of an SD card.

Fedora

• just installed the Fedora Workstation 30 Beta yesterday and so far things are looking great. As many others have reported to, with the GNOME 3.32 update things definitely feels faster and smoother. So I thought it was a good time to talk about what is coming in Fedora Workstation 30 and what we are currently working on.

• Fedora 30 Beta Released, Chef Releasing All of Its Software as Open Source, elementary Adopting Flatpak for AppCenter, Unreal Engine 4.22 Now Available and VMware Lawsuit Dropped

• A few months ago I posted a blog story with a walkthrough of systemd Portable Services. The example service given was written in C, and the image was built with mkosi. In this blog story I’d like to revisit the exercise, but this time focus on a different aspect: modern programming languages like Go and Rust push users a lot more towards static linking of libraries than the usual dynamic linking preferred by C (at least in the way C is used by traditional Linux distributions).

• Static linking means we can greatly simplify image building: if we don’t have to link against shared libraries during runtime we don’t have to include them in the portable service image. And that means pretty much all need for building an image from a Linux distribution of some kind goes away as we’ll have next to no dependencies that would require us to rely on a distribution package manager or distribution packages. In fact, as it turns out, we only need as few as three files in the portable service image to be fully functional.

• So, let’s have a closer look how such an image can be put together. All of the following is available in this git repository.

• The recent F30 beta release is an good opportunity to look back. What have we achieved?

• When we set out to turn Atomic Workstation into an every-day-usable desktop, we had a list of items that we knew needed to be addressed. As it turns out, we have solved most of them, or are very close to that.

• Here is an unsorted list.

• Fedora Toolbox has been renamed to just Toolbox. Even though the project is obviously driven by the needs of Fedora Silverblue and uses technologies like Buildah and Podman that are driven by members of the wider Fedora project, it was felt that a toolbox container is a generic concept that appeals to a lot many more communities than just Fedora. You can also think of it as a nod to coreos/toolbox which served as the original inspiration for the project, and there are plans to use it in Fedora CoreOS too.

Debian Family

• In March 2019, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for 14 hours (of 10 hours planned plus 4 hours pulled over from February) and on the Debian ELTS project for another 2 hours (of originally planned 6 hours) as a paid contributor.

• In February I had requested to join the Debian LTS project, which extends the security support for past Debian releases, as a paid contributor.

Derivatives

• New live/install iso images of SparkyLinux 5.7.1 “Nibiru” are available to download.

• This is a minor update of live images of Sparky 5 based on Debian testing “Buster”.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• snapcraft 3.1 is now available on the stable channel of the Snap Store. This is a new minor release building on top of the foundations laid out from the snapcraft 3.3 release.

• If you are already on the stable channel for snapcraft then all you need to do is wait for the snap to be refreshed.

Devices/Embedded

• Mer, the fork of MeeGo that aimed to provide a free alternative to Maemo for Nokia devices, is now finally merging with Sailfish OS.

• Jolla’s Sailfish OS already was based on Mer albeit with the proprietary UI and other components added in. Mer meanwhile hasn’t seen too much work recently and now mostly in name is merging with Jolla’s Sailfish OS.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Project management applications for Linux offer an overlapping range of features and user interfaces. I deliberately avoided ranking these Linux products. I also suspended the usual star rating for each one in this roundup.

• Project Management software for Linux, much like Time-tracking, Task Management and To-Do List software for Linux, is increasingly overshadowed by cloud services. That is one reason open source applications available for the Linux platform lack many new non-cloud contenders.

• The Chef automation tool, a popular solution for DevOps IT management scenarios, has announced that it will be become a 100% open source platform. In the past, the basic Chef application was available in open source form, but the company also provided several enhancements and add-on tools with proprietary licenses. Rather than building proprietary tools around an open source core, Chef will now open source all of its software under an Apache 2.0 license.

• According to Chef CEO Barry Crist, “Over the years we have experimented with and learned from a variety of different open source, community, and commercial models, in search of the right balance. We believe that this change, and the way we have made it, best aligns the objectives of our communities with our own business objectives. Now we can focus all of our investment and energy on building the best possible products in the best possible way for our community without having to choose between what is “proprietary” and what is “in the commons.”

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• As you may already know, last Friday March 29th – we held a new Testday event, for Firefox 67 Beta 6.

• Thank you all for helping us make Mozilla a better place: amirtha V, Shanthi Priya G, Rok Žerdin, Aishwarya Narasimhan, Mohamed Bawas.

• From Mozilla Bangladesh Community: Maruf Rahman, Sayed Ibn Masud, Reazul Islam.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• We are pleased to announce the release of GNUnet 0.11.1.

• This is a bugfix release for 0.11.0, mostly fixing minor bugs, improving documentation and fixing various build issues. In terms of usability, users should be aware that there are still a large number of known open issues in particular with respect to ease of use, but also some critical privacy issues especially for mobile users. Also, the nascent network is tiny (about 200 peers) and thus unlikely to provide good anonymity or extensive amounts of interesting information. As a result, the 0.11.1 release is still only suitable for early adopters with some reasonable pain tolerance.

Licensing/Legal

• Linux developer Christoph Hellwig has announced that he is discontinuing his lawsuit against VMware for non-compliance with the terms of the GPL. Hellwig and the Software Freedom Conservancy accused VMware of including GPLed code associated with vmklinux into VMware’s proprietary vSphere product. A German appeals court dismissed the case on February 28. Hellwig and the Software Freedom Conservancy have decided they will not appeal the case further in German courts.

• The judge appears to have decided the case on procedural grounds without taking on the larger questions related to the GPL and the power of the copyleft protection. The questions hinged around whether the plaintiffs had successfully proven that the code was present in VMware’s code base and that the use of the code was non-compliant. VMware maintains that the vmklinux code is a separate component that does not force release of vSphere under the copyleft requirement.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

Programming/Development

• PyCharm is the first JetBrains IDE to ship with the new JDK 11. This brings us improved performance and better rendering for our Jupyter Notebooks. Unfortunately, it also means that we ran into a couple of teething issues with the new JDK.

• Not available quite yet, it is being designed in the UK by eCosCentric – the source of the eCosPro RTOS. Physically, it mates with the Raspberry Pi IO header, but extends away from the Pi (unlike a typical HAT which site over the Pi) to allow probing access to Pi components. Its stacking header allows further HATs to be connected over the Pi in the normal orientation. To use Tap-Hat, certain Pi IO pins have to be re-allocated for JTAG use – the firm’s own Redboot SD Card boot-loader supports this configuration of Pi JTAG pin map, and configures the CPU’s alternate pin mappings to match the Tap-Hat board’s jumper settings. Supported external JTAG debuggers include Lauterbach TRACE32, Ronetix PEEDI and Segger J-Link.

• IBM i shops that are wondering how to maintain their Java environments following Oracle’s recent decision to restrict access to Java runtimes and development tools should pay close attention to some recommendations that IBM is making concerning Java, particularly how it impacts Access Client Solutions (ACS).

• Oracle is slated to ship a critical security update for Java Standard Edition (SE) 8 in a week and a half. But unless you have bought a commercial license for Java SE 8, your business won’t be getting that update, which could leave your systems vulnerable. That’s because in late 2018, Oracle made some rather large changes to the way customers will receive patches and updates for the aging Java environment.

• We are supposed to finish the previous Forex and Stock application project already but because it has been a while I am not writing anything on this website, therefore I would like to include another feature into the previous project just to let you know that this site is still active.

• The feature I am going to include in the ongoing project is the balance of power graph. The Balance of Power indicator measures the market strength of buyers against sellers by assessing the ability of each side to drive prices to an extreme level. The calculation is: Balance of Power = (Close price – Open price) / (High price – Low price) The resulting value can be smoothed by a moving average.

• This is the fifth article in the series of articles on NLP for Python. In my previous article, I explained how Python’s spaCy library can be used to perform parts of speech tagging and named entity recognition. In this article, I will demonstrate how to do sentiment analysis using Twitter data using the Scikit-Learn library.

Leftovers

• Orange Coast College has developed a program allowing students to attain a certificate in architectural design without spending any money on textbooks.

• The government of Chechnya has posted a landscaping contract for the residence of its leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, on its official purchases website. MBK Media first reported on the deal.

Science

• Russia and the United States have set out scientific objectives for their joint mission “Venera-D,” which is scheduled to begin at the end of the 2020s.

• Ludmila Zasova, the manager of the project’s bilateral work group and a lead contributor at the Russian Space Research Institute, explained that Russia will produce an orbiter and a lander, while NASA will contribute a long-lived surface station. The Russian spacecraft will enable offloading, after which it will continue to work for two to three hours, and the American station will be fully functional on the surface of the planet for up to 60 Earth days.

Health/Nutrition

• The case is called Edwin Hardeman v. Monsanto, which sounds something like David v. Goliath. Hardeman is a 70-year-old man who says using Roundup, Monsanto’s weed killer, for nearly 30 years caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

• And Monsanto is, well, Monsanto. Recently acquired by German drug and crop chemicals company Bayer for some $66 billion, the corporate behemoth commands more than a quarter of the combined world market for seeds and pesticides, with a famously active PR machine.

• And yet Goliath lost. The jury in US District Court in San Francisco returned the necessary unanimous decision, finding that Roundup caused, or was a substantial factor in causing, Hardeman’s cancer. And that Monsanto should be held liable, because the herbicide is not labeled to warn of that risk.

• The company, naturally, is appealing. But with more than 11,000 other cases in the wings, this story isn’t going away anytime soon.

• When Taylor Lytle began fainting every morning when she stood up, she had to make a decision: Should she seek medical care or should she save her hard-earned wages to buy soap, shampoo, deodorant and feminine hygiene products?

• People across the United States struggle with similar concerns. But Lytle shouldn’t have had to make that decision. That’s because in a country without universal or even a nationalized health care system, one group of people has a constitutionally guaranteed right to medical care — people behind bars. In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Estelle v. Gamble, that jails and prisons have a constitutional obligation to provide health care to those in custody. Failing to do so could be considered deliberate indifference, violating the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Incarcerated people do not have access to jobs that pay minimum wage, meaning that they are dependent upon jails and prisons to provide for their basic needs, including health care needs.

• That doesn’t mean that jails and prisons haven’t put up other barriers to essential care. In 41 states, if a person in prison wants medical care, they need to cough up a co-pay. These co-pays – which typically range from $3 to $5, but can be as high as $8 per visit typically range from $3 to $5, but can be as high as $7.50 per visit — may not seem like an exorbitant expense, especially when compared to co-pays in the outside world. However, for people behind bars, even those few dollars may put basic care out of reach. Prison jobs pay pennies per hour, meaning that even a $3 co-pay might mean working anywhere between 12 to 23 hours to be able to pay that amount. In California, where Lytle was incarcerated, she was paid 8 cents an hour to work in the prison kitchen. The prison’s medical co-pay was $5.

• The first bill that banned abortion at 20 weeks — that’s 20 weeks post-fertilization, or 22 weeks based on last menstrual period – was passed in Nebraska in 2011. Since then, dozens of states have introduced similar laws banning abortion just at the edge of fetal viability, and they all hope to nudge the Supreme Court into reconsidering Roe v. Wade. Yet in almost every state where these 20 week bans have been challenged, state or federal courts have ruled them unconstitutional.

• Now it has happened again, this time in North Carolina.

• The North Carolina 20-week ban was signed into law decades earlier just after Roe was decided, but it was amended in 2015 to be even more strict on the exceptions under which an abortion could still be allowed. By removing the ability to obtain a termination for any reason short of risk of death or “medical emergency,” the new restriction even more directly contradicted Roe, which states that later abortion must be available in cases where a person’s physical or mental health are in danger.

• The bill was allowed to go into effect despite that fact, but it was challenged in 2016 in the light of successes in the Supreme Court after Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt.

• Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Tuesday directly confronted an influential health policy aide for attempting to undercut the Democratic caucus’s push for Medicare for All.

• Jayapal, author of the Medicare for All bill H.R. 1384, demanded to know at a meeting of the Congressional Progressive Caucus why Wendell Primus, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s top health policy adviser, derided her proposal in discussions with insurance executives.

• “I think it’s really inappropriate for staff representing the Speaker’s office to be undercutting members of our caucus,” Jayapal told Politico after the meeting.

• As multiple outlets including Common Dreams reported, Primus spoke with executives and health policy experts on November 30 at a meeting where he called proposals like Jayapal’s and the broader push toward Medicare for All an “unhelpful distraction.”

• While last year’s meeting was private, attendees told Politico in reporting published Tuesday that Primus had given the impression that those present should work to steer public sentiment away from a single-payer system and toward propping up the for-profit health insurance sector.

Security

• All browsers are not the same when it comes to online security. There has been a lot of discussion in the past couple of years about how to stay safe online, and people have begun wondering just how secure their web browsers are.

• One of the most important components of browser security is how quickly vulnerabilities are fixed. Any browser is liable to being hacked using new exploits, so it’s important that fixes are made promptly and sent out to users before they risk being exposed.

Defence/Aggression

• The February edition of Armeisky Sbornik (Army Collection), the Russian Defense Ministry’s official magazine, features a strange article titled “Super Soldier for the Wars of the Future” that describes the military’s work with “combat psychics.” The magazine RBC noticed the text, which says the Russian military supposedly uses paranormal tactics to help soldiers learn foreign languages, treat wounded troops in battle, detect ambushes, hideouts, and weapons caches, crash computer programs, burn crystals, eavesdrop on conversations, and disrupt telecommunications, including television and radio waves. Russia also apparently has specialists who use telepathy to question prisoners and give orders to dolphins.

• In February 2019, the New Humanitarian published an overview of the “causes and humanitarian consequences of the violent extremism in West Africa.” The group’s report on extreme violence in northeast Nigeria, northern Cameroon, north and central Mali, and southern Niger is the result of a year of fieldwork in those areas, surveying not only the violence, but also sustainable peace efforts based on the interconnected roles of economics, politics, and faith in sparking militancy and, potentially, creating peace. The detailed report covers root causes, recruitment, motivations, security forces, reducing the ranks of fighters, reintegration of former fighters, and humanitarians.

• Peer pressure, community identity, and the impact of trauma and humiliation from security forces play a huge role in recruitment. A United Nations Development Program study found that the arrest or killing of family members was “the tipping point” in decisions to join for seventy percent of jihadists. The power of faith provides a significant motivation for these groups as well, helping, for example to frame conflict in ways that create a narrative and meaning for militants.

• The statement by the Pontiff came in an interview that aired Sunday on the weekly Spanish news show “Salvados.”

• When presenter Jordi Évole asked him about Spain’s selling of weapons to the kingdom—which is leading the coalition waging catastrophic war on Yemen—Pope Francis expressed sorrow but promptly added that “it’s not the only government” doing that.

• Spain is just one among the numerous nations that supply arms to Saudi Arabia, and continues to do so despite accusations of the coalition committing war crimes and increased attention on the kingdom’s vast human rights abuses following the killing of journalist Jamal Khahoggi.

• The amount of arms Spain sells to the kingdom, howerver, is dwarfed by the amount of weapons sold to Saudi Arabia by the United States and the United Kingdom, with the U.S. being the biggest supplier of arms to the Saudis.

• The story of the February 22 break-in at the North Korean embassy in Madrid gets more intriguing by the day.

• The brazen daytime attack, involving 10 men (some of whom escaped via Uber), is rather more shocking (and entertaining) than parsing the Talmudic texts of Barr and Mueller. (Plus, Rachel Maddow doesn’t have a theory, Glenn Greenwald doesn’t have an opinion, John Brennan is mum. And Anderson Cooper isn’t on the scene, at least not yet.)

• The North Korean embassy attack is not another elite journo-spat but a real-life Hollywood thriller screenplay that is being written in media clichés in real time. As a historian of the CIA I’m all too familiar with the agency’s many cock-ups and crimes, and I have to ask myself, is this one of them?

• El Pais, the most reliable newspaper in Spain, can bring you up to speed on the incident, which North Korea is now suddenly calling a “terror attack.”

• At least six people were killed after a suicide bomber attacked a protest site in Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul, according to a November 2018 report by Al Jazeera. Twenty more were wounded in the blast that happened in downtown Kabul in front of a high school. Attempting to reach the protestors on foot, the suicide attacker was stopped at a checkpoint about 200 meters from the site. This particular explosion came as additional security had been called out across Kabul for the protests. The blast took place close to the city’s Pashtunistan Square, where hundreds of people had been protesting over ongoing and mounting insecurity in the country, especially since the US invasion of 2001.

• The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS) claimed responsibility, as they have for many of the suicide attacks in Kabul during the past year. Many of the casualties have been security forces. Hundreds of community members gathered to demand action against the ongoing Taliban assaults in three districts of central Afghanistan. It is said that the rally had ended before the explosion. Many believe the Afghani government has been failing to deliver on its promises of safety for its people. The Afghani government has been struggling to regain control of districts lost to the Taliban while casualties among security forces reached record levels. The government has influence over 65 percent of the population, but only 55 percent of Afghanistan’s 407 districts. They are greatly falling behind in their long struggle against attacks.

• British soldiers in Kabul, Afghanistan, used an image of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as target practice, drawing criticism from United Kingdom progressives and triggering an internal investigation.

• Video of the soldiers firing weapons at a large picture of Corbyn went viral early Wednesday morning.

• I spent last week at Angelo State University in remote central Texas as a panelist for the annual All-Volunteer Force (AVF) Forum. It was a strange forum in many ways, but nonetheless instructive. I was the youngest (and most progressive) member, as well as the lowest-ranking veteran among a group of leaders and speakers that included two retired generals, the chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a few former colonels and several academics. Despite having remarkably diverse life experiences and political opinions, all concluded that America’s all-volunteer military is not equitable, efficient or sustainable. The inconvenient truth each of the panel participants had the courage to identify is that the end of the draft in the U.S. had many unintended—and ultimately tragic—consequences for the republic.

• The oft-praised U.S. military is, disturbingly, the most trusted public institution in the country. These days, active service members and veterans are regularly paraded before an otherwise apathetic citizenry at nearly every sporting event. Public figures and private citizens alike fawn over and obsessively thank the troops at every possible opportunity. It seems strange, however, that Americans are so hyperproud of their military, seeing as it neither reflects society nor achieves national objectives overseas. After all, the military only accounts for about 0.5 % of Americans and, as recent statistics indicate, the Army is falling well short of its recruiting goals. Not to mention that for all the vacuous pageantry and celebrations of a military that is increasingly divergent from civil society, few seem to ask an important question: When was the last time the AVF won a war?

• The AVF is ultimately an unfair, ineffective and unsustainable organization charged with impossible, ill-advised missions by policymakers and a populace that actually care rather little for the nation’s soldiers. As the AVF nears its 50th anniversary, there’s no better time than now to assess the model’s flaws and its effect on American democracy.

• Way back when the U.S. military was bogged down in an unwinnable, immoral and ill-advised war in Vietnam, newly elected President Nixon faced a serious problem. Tricky Dick, as he is sometimes known, wanted to prolong and escalate the war into Cambodia and Laos in order to achieve “peace with honor”—in other words, seem tough and save some American face. Only the growing domestic anti-war movement that was gaining influence in Congress stood in his way. No doubt cynically, but also astutely, Nixon surmised that fear of individual conscription largely motivated youthful anti-war activists. Thus, in a Faustian devil’s bargain, he helped end the draft and usher in a brand-new all-volunteer force. Surprisingly, his gambit worked, and the steam blew out of the anti-war movement over time. Today, it is with the same all-volunteer force Nixon left us with that the U.S. wages war across the breadth of the planet.

• The House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed the director of White House personnel security after a whistleblower revealed senior Trump officials overturned 25 security clearance denials, despite “serious disqualifying issues.” We speak with California Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna, who says, “Congressional oversight is not a choice—it’s the law.” We also speak to him about the latest congressional actions around Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

• On October 31, 2018, a 17-year-old technical student triggered an explosive device in the local Federal Security Service (FSB) building in Arkhangelsk, Russia. According to Znak.com, more than two hundred official searches targeting anarchist circles have recently taken place around the country in connection with the case, which is being investigated as a terrorist attack.

• According to the latest estimate from the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, the US “War on Terror” has killed at least half a million people in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan since 2001. However, the report does not include the half million that have also been killed in Syria since 2011, which the United States joined in 2014, as well as indirect deaths. More specifically, deaths are also caused by the war’s impact on public health, especially regarding food and water shortages as well as limited electricity and access to hospitals. According to the report, the need to keep the public fully informed on issues in the Middle East could help empower demands to shift US foreign policy, stating that, “Too often, legislators, NGOs, and the news media that try to track the consequences of the wars are inhibited by governments determined to paint a rosy picture of perfect execution and progress.”

• The direct deaths accounted for in the most recent estimate include “United States military soldiers, contractors, and Defense Department employees as well as the National military and police, and other allied troops, civilians, journalists, opposition fighters, and aid workers.” A majority of those killed were civilians, “between 244,000 and 266,000 across Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Up to 204,000 of them were Iraqis.”

• Since 2009, the United States has been conducting drone strikes in Yemen to target Al Qaeda. Problematically, these strikes have proven to repeatedly be off-target. Writing for the Associated Press, Maggie Michael and Maad Al-Zirky write that civilian deaths account for “around a third of all those killed in drone strikes so far in 2018.” While the data is sparse, the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, one of the few organizations that covers these issues extensively, estimates that there were “up to 1,020 killed by strikes from 2009 to 2016, under President Barack Obama … Another database, by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, counted 331 killed [in] the past two years.”

• Both Democrats and Republicans favor drone strikes to target potential terrorists in the Middle East, but the reality is that these strikes are doing more harm than good in the affected region. The strikes have killed hundreds of innocent people – including children – as a result of overworked drone pilots in confined spaces, bad intelligence which comes from widespread torture tactics, and simply misjudging benign behavior as evidence of terrorism. Yemeni locals say they constantly “live in fear” because “drones don’t leave the sky.” For years, US drone strikes have turned Yemen into a catastrophic war zone.

• While the Trump Administration has fought to keep nationals of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen from traveling to the US for fear they are terrorists, white supremacists who vow violence in this country go and come freely to Ukraine, where they train with the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion militia.

• The US government has directly funded the Azov Battalion, which began as a volunteer militia but has now been officially assimilated into Ukraine’s national guard as a “contract” unit.

• A federal, criminal conspiracy and rioting complaint filed in Los Angeles in 2018 includes an affidavit stating four American white supremacists from the Rise Above Movement (RAM) trained with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion. The training took place after the white supremacist gang participated in violent riots in Huntington Beach and Berkeley, CA, and Charlottesville, VA in 2017.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The following day, Foreign Minister Jose Valencia said that the WikiLeaks tweet was “an absurd lie to harm the dignity of our country… we will not tolerate… inventions and insults… I cannot anticipate when and when we will take action in relation to this, but we will take action for certain.”

• On 28 March, Communications Minister Andrés Michelena told CNN Español that the INApapers were part of a plot of Julian Assange, Venezuelan President Maduro and former Ecuadorian President Correa to bring down Moreno’s government. He added, “You have to understand how these people are connected, Mr. Assange is the Troll Center, the hacker for former President Correa, [Assange] handles the technological and social media side.”

• That same day, the national assembly, in which Moreno’s party and other right parties command a majority, passed a resolution inviting the Foreign Ministry to take action against Assange’s asylum on the basis of the INApapers leak “in the national interest” if it considers it pertinent to do so.

• In March 2019, Moreno’s approval ratings dropped to 17%. Statements by the government of Ecuador deliberately implicate WikiLeaks in the INApapers leak. For example, Ecuador’s Vice President Otto Sonnenholzner said in a local radio interview, “What Wikileaks and other political actors have done, to publish private photos of the President of the Republic, of his family, is a despicable, repugnant, and odious act.”

• On June 1, 2013, I joined a thousand people on a march through Fort Meade, Maryland calling for Chelsea Manning’s release. Manning, a former soldier in the US army, was scheduled to be court martialed for passing US war logs and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. The collection of documents painted a shocking portrait of US empire and the brutal realities of its wars.

• At the end of the march, we hung “Nobel Prizes” for Manning on the gates of the military base where she would soon go on trial. The symbolic gesture stemmed from tongue-in-cheek calls for Barack Obama to “give” his Nobel Peace Prize to Chelsea Manning. It nonetheless seemed like a fitting gesture. Manning’s intent was to spark a debate on US foreign policy by exposing its dark truths. Instead she was swept up in a larger Obama-era crackdown on whistleblowers. While the powerful that committed heinous crimes went largely unpunished, those who dared expose them, like Manning, were thrown in jail.

• Manning had already pled guilty to charges carrying twenty years in prison. It wasn’t enough for prosecutors. The military went ahead with a court martial that alleged she had violated the Espionage Act and aided the enemy. They sought a life sentence. A military judge acquitted Manning of aiding the enemy, but found her guilty under the Espionage Act. She received an unprecedented thirty-five-year prison sentence.

• Throughout her incarceration, Manning was subjected to harsh conditions, including a pretrial detention that most likely constituted torture and denials of gender-affirming medical treatment. Manning pursued both litigation and a hunger strike to fight for her health rights as a trans woman. While relenting on medical treatment, the military continued to hold Manning in a men’s prison.

• Chelsea Manning is urging an appeals court to let her out of jail while she fights a contempt ruling, a challenge that won support Tuesday from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

• Manning was jailed three weeks ago by an Alexandria federal judge for refusing to participate in a grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy website with which she shared classified information in 2010. Like other high-profile inmates, including Paul Manafort, she has been separated from the rest of the jail population and is confined to her cell for all but a couple hours a day.

• She is now seeking to be released both from jail and from the requirement to testify.

• “Solitary confinement is torture,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “Chelsea is being tortured for whistleblowing, she should be released on bail.”

• Chelsea Manning’s legal team submitted a motion on Monday to the US Eastern District Court of Virginia for her immediate release pending her appeal of the decision that sent her to jail indefinitely on March 8. Manning was imprisoned by District Judge Claude Hilton on civil contempt charges for courageously refusing to testify before a secret grand jury preparing a frame-up case against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. The latest motion argues that the judge’s decision to remand Manning to the Alexandria Detention Center was in violation of her constitutional rights and should be reversed. It says, “Ms. Manning timely filed her notice of appeal, and now requests that this court grant bail pending the resolution of the appeal.” On Friday, March 29, Manning’s legal team filed an appeal of her imprisonment for contempt with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. US law provides that release must be granted as long as the appeal is neither frivolous nor a delay tactic.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• As climate change worsens and Kenyan farmers struggle to make a reliable income from food crops alone, agroforestry—the practice of growing trees in fields to protect the crops and soil from harsh weather – is bringing life back to the Kibwezi village, thanks to the Melia Volkensii tree. Called mukau by the locals, this thrives in drylands while its leaves and branches also protect the fields from scorching sun and winds, and provide crops with moisture from nightly dew.

• US president Donald Trump relaxed restrictions for oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in April 2018, in an effort to appease fossil fuel interests. This act of corporate favoritism was deceptively hidden under the “National Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” giving citizens of surrounding areas no opportunity to voice opposition until after the change in policy regarding leasing for drilling in ANWR.

• The move came after Russia’s Vladimir Putin announced plans to start drilling in the Arctic. After sanctions on Russian oil oligarchs in 2016, US oil companies have been wary to invest in Russian mining, and now put more of their resources into developing new oil mining in places like Alaska. Competition among oil companies may prompt both countries to further open up protected areas for mining, but so far, the move, along with sanctions against Russia, has caused companies like ExxonMobil to pull out of major Russian oil initiatives to explore new possibilities in the Arctic.

• A group of activists, experts, and writers on Wednesday launched a bold new campaign calling for the “thrilling but neglected approach” of embracing nature’s awesome restorative powers to battle the existential crises of climate and ecological breakdown.

• Averting catastrophic global warming and devastating declines in biodiversity, scientists warn, requires not only overhauling human activities that generate planet-heating emissions—like phasing out fossil fuels—but also cutting down on the carbon that is already in the atmosphere.

• In a letter to governments, NGOs, the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Natural Climate Solutions campaign calls for tackling these crises by not only rapidly decarbonizing economies, but also by “drawing carbon dioxide out of the air by protecting and restoring ecosystems.”

• Environmental pollution around the world is negatively affecting children’s health. According to Cesar Chelala at CounterPunch, children comprise almost half of the population of developing countries and most of the deaths reported among youth involve children under five, mostly due to intestinal and respiratory infections. Chelala wrote, “It has been widely demonstrated that children are more susceptible than adults to environmental factors because, among other reasons, they are still growing and their immune systems and detoxification mechanisms are not yet fully developed.” Many contributing factors are at play, including “pollution, ultraviolet radiation, occupational factors, as well as climate and ecosystem changes.”

• Millions of children die each year as a result of environmentally-related diseases that could be prevented. Chelala writes, “Their deaths could be prevented by using low-cost and sustainable tools and strategies for improving the environment. In some countries, more than one-third of the disease burden could be prevented by environmental changes.” A World Health Organization study carried out in 23 countries stated that more than ten percent of deaths are due to contaminated water, indoor air pollution, cooking fuel, and other unsafe environmental conditions. Around the world, from local communities to national governments, some are beginning to take the matter seriously, even taking initiatives worldwide with the aim of improving the environment and children’s health.

• The electricity powering your computer or smartphone that makes it possible for you to read this article could come from one of several sources. It’s probably generated by burning natural gas or coal or from operating a nuclear reactor, unless it’s derived from hydropower or wind or solar energy. Who gets to choose?

• A third chemical fire in the Houston area in less than three weeks has Texans and environmentalists questioning the safety of energy corporations and calling for strict reforms.

• On Tuesday morning, an explosion at the KMCO chemical plant in Crosby, roughly 25 miles northeast of Houston, killed one worker and began a fire at the plant. Two other workers were injured in the blast.

• Due to severe pollution of the Litani River, on November 8, 2018, Lebanon’s Minister of Industry officially shut down 75 factories “operating without a valid license” that were contributing to the river’s pollution. The Litani River is Lebanon’s longest river, and the country’s main water source. Over the years it has been filled with so much waste that it has become a serious health hazard.

• At a National Republican Congressional Committee event Tuesday night, President Donald Trump took his war on wind power to the next level.

• “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 per cent in value,” Trump said, as The Independent reported. “And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay? Rerrrr rerrrr!”

• 30 years after he first graced the Sunday Telegraph’s comment pages, Christopher Booker has at last put down his pen. With the death of his column goes one of the last remaining regular outlets for outright climate science denial in the UK’s mainstream press.

• Of course, he wasn’t going to go quietly. In his final column, he runs down what he sees as his greatest achievements, which of course he says includes challenging mainstream climate science and the UK’s decarbonisation project.

• The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will no longer conduct a controversial experiment that led to the deaths of thousands of cats beginning in 1982, NBC News reported.

• The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) announced Tuesday that it was stopping an experiment that used cats to study the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Its announcement comes weeks after a report from the White Coat Waste Project detailed experiments in which the USDA had bought unwanted cats and dogs from Asia, Africa and Latin America, killed them, and fed them to laboratory cats and other animals.

• “We are elated that after a year of campaigning we have relegated the slaughter of kittens to the litter box of history,” White Coat Waste Project Vice President Justin Goodman told NPR.

• In order to succeed, we need the best tools at our disposal. We need to understand whether decisions will lead to success or failure, and we need policymakers and investors to have access to that information. Remarkably, almost all energy decision-making is based on assumptions that we will fail in meeting the Paris climate goals. This includes the go-to source for descriptions of our energy future: the International Energy Agency (IEA). Today, over 40 business leaders, investors, and energy experts found remarkable alignment around demanding more from the IEA. In a letter covered by the Financial Times, a broad collection of signatories called on the IEA to develop a truly Paris-aligned scenario (including a reasonable chance at staying within 1.5 degrees Celsius with a precautionary approach to Negative Emissions Technologies), and make this the central scenario in the World Energy Outlook (WEO), replacing the current dominant business-as-usual scenario.

• The South West’s Green MEP, Molly Scott Cato, has said it is time for Devonport to ‘move beyond the nuclear age’ and transfer hundreds of nuclear submarine and weapons related jobs into jobs supporting the green economy, particularly renewable energy technologies.

• The call comes following revelations that Devonport in Plymouth and Rosyth in Fife are storing decommissioned nuclear submarines at a cost to the tax payer of £500m [1]. The Ministry of Defence has been storing the submarines for dismantling, but the disposal has been beset by lengthy delays and spiralling costs.

• Two and a half years ago, Dr Scott Cato produced a report which outlining how Devonport could sever its links with nuclear defence but maintain employment by transferring investment into sustainable jobs, making use of the skills and resources available at the base [2].

• This month corals in Lord Howe Island Marine Park began showing signs of bleaching. The 145,000 hectare marine park contains the most southerly coral reef in the world, in one of the most isolated ecosystems on the planet.

• Following early reports of bleaching in the area, researchers from three Australian universities and two government agencies have worked together throughout March to investigate and document the bleaching.

Finance

• Every day, county and state child services agencies remove children from their parents’ care. Responding to maltreatment complaints for more than seven million children, in 2016 child services agencies across the US found that four million children met initial criteria for abuse, abandonment, or neglect. At least one-fifth were removed from their parents’ care. As Elizabeth Brico reported for Talk Poverty, child protective service agencies’ use of “safety plans”—informal agreements between parents and protective agencies—often punish parents for poverty with unintended consequences.

• As Brico reported, safety plans are “widely used” in child protective services investigations to attempt to resolve “perceived threats to a child’s health and safety without judicial involvement.” Though informal, such plans are “considered binding” and it is left to the department to determine “what happens if a family violates an agreement.” In extreme cases, as Brico described in her article, a police officer shows up with a court order to remove the child.

• Since 2000, US suicide rates have shockingly increased by 25%, calling for an urgent national discussion on depression, suicide prevention and more importantly, the factors underlying mental-emotional illness. Some call for developing new antidepressants, noting the inefficacy of current medical therapies. But developing better drugs buys into the mainstream notion that the collection of human experiences called “mental illness” is primarily physiological in nature.

• However, research has shown that, to the contrary, economic inequality could be a significant contributor to mental illness. Disparities in wealth and income are associated with increased anxiety and stress, with poverty having a negative impact on children’s development—including social, emotional, and cognitive impairment. A society designed to meet everyone’s needs could help prevent many of these problems before they start.

• Every year, the Coalition on Human needs compares funding for well over 150 human needs programs starting in fiscal year 2010 and continuing to the current fiscal year (this year, 2019).

• CHN uses 2010 as a benchmark because that is the year before the Budget Control Act passed Congress and was signed into law by President Obama. That law called for automatic cuts in spending if Congress could not curtail spending on its own.

• This year, CHN tracked spending for 184 human needs programs. CHN found that 131 of the programs, or 71 percent, lost ground since 2010. And 54 programs were cut by 25 percent or more.

• Further cuts could happen, and soon. Unless Congress acts this year, harsh spending caps will go into effect for fiscal years 2020 and 2021, reducing all domestic/international appropriations by $55 billion in 2020 (or $70 billion, adjusting for inflation) below 2019 levels.

• Looking back to 2010, and in more recent years, we can ask, what are the human impacts of reduced spending for human needs programs? Let’s examine just three areas of support that are crucial to helping low-income families improve their economic situation—child care, affordable housing, and job training.

• The U.S. is suffering from excessive wealth disorder.

• This isn’t your parents’ inequality influenza, but a more virulent strain of extreme disparities of income, wealth, and opportunity.

• Just 400 billionaires have as much wealth as nearly two-thirds of American households combined. And just three individuals — Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates — have as much wealth as half of all U.S. households put together.

• Since the economic meltdown of 2008, the lion’s share of income and wealth growth hasn’t gone just to the top 1 percent — it’s gone to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. This 0.1 percent includes households with annual incomes starting at $2.2 million and wealth over $20 million.

• This group has been the big winner of the last few decades. Its share of national income rose from 6 percent in 1995 to 11 percent in 2015. But their biggest gains are in wealth, increasing their share from 7 percent in 1978 to over 21 percent today.

• That’s 210 times their share of the population.

• When you have over $20 million, you’ve easily taken care of all your needs and those of the next generation of your family. You’re living in comfort, probably with multiple homes, and don’t want for anything.

• The scientist and businessman Alexander Plekhov was mentioned in the Panama Papers in connection with offshore accounts belonging to Sergey Roldugin, a friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now, the investigative outlet Proekt has learned that Plekhov’s companies are also closely tied with a business owned by another friend of Putin’s, Yury Kovalchuk. Proekt found that Plekhov may be helping Kovalchuk avoid the effects of international sanctions. Alexander Plekhov appeared in the Panama Papers as Sergey Roldugin’s legal representative in an offshore company called Sonnette Overseas. He also owned another offshore called Sunbarn Ltd. Journalists from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the independent Russian outlet Novaya Gazeta reported that both companies were involved in suspicious business operations.

• According to Heiner Flassbeck, former head of UNCTAD, there are many factors pointing to a convergence in a normal cyclical downturn, deepening recession in Europe, complicated by potential hard Brexit–With host Paul Jay

• On Monday of this week, 315 civil society organizations (CSOs)—including global union federations, development advocates, consumer organizations, and environmental groups—from more than 90 countries delivered a letter (available in English, Spanish, and French in PDF) to members of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In it, they express their “profound and urgent opposition to these proposed negotiations which, if concluded, could result in the full liberalization of the entire (digital) economy, and thus represent back door attempt to achieve a ‘WTO 2.0’.”

• The WTO membership rejected displacing the “development agenda” in the WTO for a new agenda on digital trade at the last Ministerial meeting in December 2017 in Argentina. In spite of this, a number of countries decided to launch negotiations in March 2019.

• The new project, led by progressive advocacy group Tax March, will consist of on-the-ground organizing in crucial battleground states like Wisconsin and Iowa.

• Tax March also plans to spend seven figures on digital, print, television, and radio ads “to educate the public about taxing the rich.”

• “Taxing the rich isn’t just good policy, it’s good politics—and this campaign will prove that,” Maura Quint, executive director of progressive advocacy group Tax March, said in a statement. “Raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy is wildly popular with a majority of both Democratic and Republican voters.”

• To underscore this point, Tax March released new polling data (pdf) Wednesday showing that 75 percent of likely 2020 voters—including 60 percent of Republicans—support raising taxes on the wealthy.

• “This important poll provides a detailed look at how voters feel about taxes and the overwhelming message is that they want the wealthy and corporations to pay their fair share,” Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, said in a statement.

• Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation Wednesday that would make it easier to imprison corporate executives whose companies commit crimes or “harm large numbers of Americans through civil violations.”

• “Corporations don’t make decisions, people do, but for far too long, CEOs of giant corporations that break the law have been able to walk away, while consumers who are harmed are left picking up the pieces,” the 2020 Democratic presidential contender said in a statement.

• The one silver lining in the nomination of political hack Stephen Moore to the Federal Reserve is that it might spur a productive discussion on the benefits (or lack of them) of monetary policy as an instrument of economic growth. This is principally because it’s just one ingredient for what is necessary to instill economic growth, and not a particularly good one at that. A more direct approach is via appropriately targeted and sufficiently large fiscal actions.

• In regard to monetary policy, low interest rates kept in place for a long time can actually constrain economic growth unless they are coupled with sensible compensating fiscal policy, due to the adverse income impact to savers emanating from a resultant lower income stream. There is also a problem of political legitimacy when so little of the funding is explicitly approved by Congress, and is left instead to the discretion/creation of the Federal Reserve (which has historically tended to prioritize the narrow interests of finance over the rest of the economy). And Stephen Moore, a leading advocate of cutting rates to promote additional economic growth (even as he has historically championed spending cuts), will simply perpetuate the (unfortunately) widely held notion of monetary policy as an effective cure-all, if his ideas gain policy traction within the Powell-led Federal Reserve.

• In fact, what is truly required is well-formulated fiscal policy and less monetary policy activism, precisely the opposite of today’s prevailing trends. Solvency per se is not the issue. The key here is how the money is spent, lest fiscal policy become as diffuse in its effects as monetary policy has become, as well as discredited politically because of perceived ineffectiveness when long-standing structural issues (such as inequality) remain unaddressed.

• As America rapidly urbanized in the 1920s and ’30s, nearly every burgeoning city gave rise to a jumbled, boisterous side of town that lay somewhere between exciting and dangerous. One such place in my state, known as “Deep Ellum,” was a stretch of Elm Street in East Dallas. A predominantly African American community, it also hosted a freewheeling mix of immigrant laborers, rural migrants, musicians, saloonkeepers, preachers, fortune-tellers and assorted hustlers. It was both bedazzling and dicey — the sort of place where the blues lay in wait for innocents. As a popular song of the day warned:

• “If you go down in Deep Ellum,

• “Keep your money in your shoes

• “Or you’ll go home

• “With the Deep Ellum blues.

• “Oh, sweet mama,

• “Your daddy’s got them Deep Ellum blues.”

• A 1937 article in a black weekly described it as a rollicking scene “where business, religion, hoodooism, gambling, and stealing goes on at the same time without friction.” The writer told about seeing a Bible-thumping street preacher mesmerize a crowd by prophesizing that “Jesus Christ would come to Dallas in person in 1939.” As the evangelizer grew louder, “a pickpocket was lifting a week’s wages from another guy’s pocket, who stood with open mouth to hear the prophecy.”

• “Community has to be intended, not as a gated reality, a grouping of people joined by exclusive interests, and separating them from others, but rather as a quality of relations, a principle of cooperation and of responsibility, to each other and the health of the forests, the seas, the animals.”

• So writes [feminist] Silvia Federici. But how can we get there from here? The practice of commoning, and the idea that we might hold and manage land and assets together in common, holds a lot of appeal these days. To help us think forward as we do on this show, we have two world-renowned experts on commoning in the house. Federici’s latest book is Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Its foreword is written by historian and “Laura Flanders Show” regular, Peter Linebaugh, who is the author of, among other classics, The Magna Carta Manifesto. In this interview, Federici and Linebaugh discuss the history of the commons and how we might apply some of the ideas central to commoning to rebuilding our communities.

• The teachers’ strike wave began in West Virginia and spread across several red states, and then into blue states with work stoppages in Los Angeles, Denver and Oakland.

• Leading teacher militant Gillian Russom has been a high school history teacher in Los Angeles for 18 years. She’s been an activist-member of the United Teachers Los Angeles for most of that time and currently serves on the union’s board of directors. She is a contributor to the book Education and Capitalism, published by Haymarket Books.

• She spoke to Truthout about the causes of the new teachers’ movement and how labor activists must move toward social justice unionism. The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• In recent years, the media giant Pierre Omidyar has been strengthening his network and influence by funding multiple media companies to manipulate public opinion in service of his own businesses, Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal report for Mint Press News. Omidyar’s numerous conflicts of interest—from funding for pro-war media, to organizations purportedly committed to fact-checking, and more—reflect the powerful tools available to him for pushing his own agenda. His end goal is to establish a vast, integrated information network “to give technocrats, business executives, and government officials a God’s-eye view of the world- to manage society more efficiently.”

• The Omidyar network includes networked media companies from around the world that work in the interests of western corporations and spread fear of Russian and Chinese meddling. Additionally, Omidyar works to purchase leaked information, such as the Panama Papers, to disseminate and spin it strategically.

• We can’t even. If you’ve wisely stayed in your cave the last couple of days, the stable genius has threatened to get rid of judges, said his New-York-born-and-bred father was “born in a very wonderful place in Germany,” claimed the noise of windmills causes cancer, urged House Republicans to be more paranoid because he didn’t like how votes were tallied, promised a phenomenal health care plan that doesn’t exist, explained why he cut off aid to several of the Mexicos, ranted he’ll close the border ’cause brown people keep traveling into his fever dreams – “They arrange these caravans. And they don’t put their best people in those caravans. And they put people you don’t want to have in the United States” – and told NATO’s secretary general it’s great Mueller found no collusion or obstruction, nope none nada, but he sure wishes the report would look into the oranges of the investigation, which in a baffling twist became, in the White House transcript, “oringes.”

• Chicago voters made history Tuesday when Lori Lightfoot won a landslide victory as both the city’s first African-American woman mayor and openly gay mayor. This comes after a February runoff election that pitted her against Toni Preckwinkle, a former alderperson who is president of the Cook County Board. While Preckwinkle had been viewed as a highly formidable candidate, Lightfoot is a political outsider who has never held elected office. We are joined by Barbara Ransby, professor of African American studies, gender and women’s studies and history at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her article for The Nation is headlined “The Rising Black Left Movement Behind Chicago’s Historic Elections.”

• Chicago Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot’s resounding victory was a clear call for change at City Hall and a historic repudiation of the old-style, insider politics that have long defined the nation’s third-largest city.

• Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor who’d never been elected to public office, defeated Cook County Board President and longtime City Council member Toni Preckwinkle on Tuesday with backing from voters across the city. Late results showed Lightfoot, 56, winning every one of the city’s 50 wards.

• After securing more than 73 percent of the vote—per the latest tally reported by the Chicago Tribune—Lightfoot will be the second city’s first black female and openly gay mayor.

• The faceoff between Lightfoot and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, both black women and self-styled progressives, garnered national attention for its historic nature.

• NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson, and many others across the country, took to Twitter to congratulate Lightfoot for her “groundbreaking win.”

• The election of Chicago’s first black female and openly gay mayor—Lori Lightfoot—grabbed national headlines, but it was not the only noteworthy outcome of the city’s runoff election Tuesday.

• Voters chose three—possibly four —democratic socialists to be part of the Chicago City Council, potentially raising the number of ideologically aligned left-wingers on the council to six.

• Their victories, coupled with those of two other democratic socialists in the first round earlier this year, mark “the largest socialist electoral victory in modern American history,” wrote author and Jacobin managing editor Micah Uetricht.

• News industry leaders are fighting back against the charge by President Donald Trump and his supporters that the administration’s summation of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report proved that journalists were “so wrong for so long” in their coverage of the Russia investigation.

• The latest to weigh in was Steve Coll, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, who wrote in a New Yorker magazine essay this week that it’s wrong to conclude journalism failed because Mueller did not charge Trump with conspiring with Russians to influence the 2016 election. The New York Times and The Washington Post shared a Pulitzer Prize, awarded by Columbia in 2018, for their reporting on the issue, a prize Trump says should be taken away.

• Complicating the issue is the broad definition of the news media circa 2019, encompassing everything from painstakingly sourced investigative stories to overheated tweets to opinionated pundits.

• Donald Trump is the first president since Jimmy Carter not to release his tax returns to the public. He and his surrogates have deployed a battery of ever-shifting excuses for this, most commonly that he is under some audit. An audit, of course, doesn’t prevent anyone from releasing their return, and audits hardly ever take three years. There may never have been an audit in the first place.

• It’s obvious Trump will not release his tax returns, ever. The only way the American public will get them is if someone forces them out. House Democrats have the clear legal authority to get those returns. So far they have inexplicably failed to even try. They — in particular House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.) — need to stop being such babies and get it done.

• Here’s the legal background. As Steven Rosenthal of the Tax Policy Center writes, a section of 26 U.S. Code § 6103 states that if the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee submits a written request for any tax return, the treasury secretary “shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request.” Documents that identify an individual taxpayer just have to be seen in closed executive session. From there, the committee can decide to send them on to the full House: “Any return or return information obtained by or on behalf of such committee pursuant to the provisions of this subsection may be submitted by the committee to the Senate or the House of Representatives, or to both.” The House can then vote to release them publicly, if they wish.

• Moreover, oversight of conflicts of interest is literally the entire reason this law came about in the first place. It was passed in 1924, in response to the Teapot Dome scandal and then-Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s refusal to reveal his possible conflicts of interest.

• A House committee chairman on Wednesday formally asked the IRS to provide six years of President Donald Trump’s personal tax returns and the returns for some of his businesses as Democrats try to shed light on his complex financial dealings and potential conflicts of interest.

• The request by Massachusetts Rep. Richard Neal, who heads the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, is the first such demand for a sitting president’s tax information in 45 years. The move is likely to set off a huge legal battle between Democrats controlling the House and the Trump administration.

• Neal made the request in a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, asking for Trump’s personal and business returns for 2013 through 2018. He asked for the documents in seven days, setting an April 10 deadline.

• Trump told reporters Wednesday he “would not be inclined” to provide his tax returns to the committee.

• There were plenty of scandals among the presidencies before Richard Nixon and Watergate, but probably the most serious was the Teapot Dome scandal in 1924. It was a bribery scheme involving government officials taking payoffs to lease oil on public land. One of the ancillary scandals that emerged from that investigation was the suspicion that Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who did not divest himself of his vast private holdings, was benefiting from his position. Congress was rightly concerned that the tax legislation Mellon was proposing was designed to benefit his personal interests So it demanded to see Mellon’s tax returns and also determine if the IRS had given him special treatment.

• Have you noticed how often Donald Trump prefaces his comments and tweets with phrases like “frankly,” “to tell the truth,” and “believe me”?

• More than a verbal tic, these qualifiers subliminally admit that being frank, truthful, and believable are not normal for him. So, like a carnival flimflammer selling snake oil, he strains to convince us rubes that he’s not flimflamming.

• Among those who’re learning about the “truthy-ness” of The Donald are farmers who voted for him, having bought his campaign promise to restore farm prosperity.

• Once in office, though, he quickly sold them out, throwing a hissy-fit of a trade war with China that ended up slapping U.S. farmers by lowering the already low prices they get for their crops. Instead of prosperity, the average farm profit last year was minus $1,500!

Censorship/Free Speech

• In the end, the court finds the school’s punishment of B.L. was unconstitutional. While it recognizes students engaging in extracurricular activities may be subject to more rules governing their behavior, the rules cannot infringe on their protected rights. Speech that occurs outside of the school walls is not completely out of reach of the school’s disciplinary policies, but the school needs to show the severely disruptive effect this extracurricular speech caused. In this case, all the district could point to were claims by cheer coaches the f-bombs had the potential to be disruptive.

• If teens dropping F-bombs on or off school property were enough to disrupt schools, approximately 0% of the nation’s high schools would be operational for more than a few hours at a time, much less the entire school year. “Fuck cheer” is protected expression. The fact that the school doesn’t like hearing its activities criticized doesn’t budge the free speech needle.

• Many of us are still getting over the insanity of the EU’s Copyright Directive decision, and already we need to worry about the next awful EU regulation on the horizon: the EU’s Terrorist Content Regulation which is significantly worse than even Article 13/17 of the Copyright Directive, and will create a massive stifling effect on free speech on the internet.

• Over at Stanford, Daphne Keller has put together a depressing, but thorough, look at how the Terrorist Content Regulation will allow the most censorial government officials to silence speech across the EU, and possibly around the world.

• We’ve discussed some of the details in the past (and on a podcast), but one of the key parts of the law is that it will require any website to take down content deemed to be terrorist content within one hour, based on demands from “competent authorities” within countries (don’t even bother trying to figure out who is a “competent authority,” it’ll drive you crazy.)

• Another, perhaps equally (or more) concerning, is that the regulation seeks to promote platform terms of service over the rule of law. As I’m sure you know already, platform terms of service do not need to match up with local laws, and platforms can be much more free to block or ban any kind of content as a violation of a particular term. The EU’s plan here elevates the power of the terms of service, by allowing “competent authorities” (those guys again!) to tell platforms that certain content is in violation of their terms, requiring companies to review the content and potentially remove it or face liability. And you know what that will lead to: widespread censorship.

• On Monday 8 April, the draft regulation on anti-terrorist censorship will be voted in the LIBE Committee in the European Parliament. While the vote has already been postponed several times, MEPs, still under pressure from the European Commission and some Member States, are expected this time to adopt the text. There are only a few days left to call and ask them to reject it.

• Introduced in September by the European Commission, and supported intensively by the French and German governments, this text has gone through the stages of the European legislative procedure at an extremely fast, if not an expeditious, pace: introduced last September by the EU Commission, adopted by the EU Council at the beginning of December, it is now in the hands of the LIBE Committee (for Civil Liberties) at the EU Parliament, after the publication of the (disappointing) opinions of the CULT (Culture) and IMCO (Internal Market) committees.

• But, wait, you say: how does this work? Apparently the idea is that adults are allowed but kids are magically put on time delay. Well, now we’ve massively scaled back the proposal such that a very small percentage of the userbase is effected (which, is certainly better, but…). Of course, there’s no indication that the problem of streaming these videos live was that any kids watched them. Indeed, I’ve heard no such reports.

• So this “time delay” plan wouldn’t have stopped nearly all of the people who did see the video.

• Second, this whole plan assumes that (a) the only reason these attacks occurred was because of the ability to live-stream, and (b) that there aren’t other live-streaming options out there (there are many). It also ignores that even if “adults” were able to view the content first, there’s no indication that they would report it. Indeed, Facebook noted that less than 200 people viewed the initial live-stream, and no one reported it. So, that would mean that this video still would have gone out to anyone after the “time delay” even if Grygiel’s plan was in place.

• Over the last few years, Russia has been one of the most aggressive countries in using claims of copyright infringement to push for full site blocking at the ISP level. Of course, that has resulted in tens of thousands of innocent sites getting blocked (collateral damage!), not to mention a corruption scandal and… no meaningful decrease in piracy. Apparently, the answer for the Russians: head deeper into the infrastructure to push site blocking even further.

• Now, apparently, beyond just demanding ISPs engage in massive site blocking, various VPNs have been ordered to start blocking full sites as well.

• A gravestone inscribed with Vladimir Putin’s name and portrait above the words “He betrayed the Russian people” has appeared on a lawn near St. Petersburg’s historic St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Similar graves had previously appeared in Naberezhnye Chelny as an act of protest against the Russian government’s attempts to isolate Russian Internet traffic.

• In a “cartoonishly evil” move that critics warned could set a worrying precedent for corporate regulation, the Washington Post reported Tuesday that Trump appointees at the Consumer Product Safety Commission blocked a recall of jogging strollers that agency staff believed had injured both adults and children.

• “Beyond the TV headlines, this is the damage that the Trump administration is doing,” tweeted Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) “It’s simply heartless.”

• In late 2017, Dr. Albert Ponce, a political science professor at Diablo Valley College (DVC) in Northern California, received violent threats via email, phone calls, and social media following a public lecture on history and white supremacy, which was allegedly recorded and edited by a student and posted on the internet without Ponce’s knowledge or consent. Ponce is one of many educators and colleges and universities that are being targeted by organized right-wing groups for their liberal or leftist views on political, sociological, and historical topics. These groups are using students to film and expose teachers lecturing in class or giving pubic talks that challenge conservative orthodoxy, often encouraging some type of action against them, which causes concerns for the safety of the faculty members, their families, and their jobs. The right to academic freedom and freedom of speech is now an instrument of battle between the left and the right at US college campuses, which has led some educators to fear teaching about important but controversial topics, especially in the social sciences.

• The Red-Elephants, a far-right group, started a Facebook page called “FILM Your Marxist Professors,” and persuaded students to post videos of their professors. Ponce’s video is the first posted on the site, and is still viewable as of March 28, 2019. The video is made of edited and mashed up clips from the public lecture, which takes many statements out of context and leaves the viewer to make their own inferences. Over 4.5 thousand comments of hate and threats are posted to the video, including, “Hang the prick” and “… (He’s at) Diablo Valley College…Go get him killer!” These comments remain posted, despite Facebooks policy against hate speech and violence. The “Film Your Marxist Professors” Facebook page continues to recruit students to film and post their teachers, offering anonymity to those who submits footage.

Privacy/Surveillance

• DNA is without doubt one of the new frontiers for privacy – and for the loss of it. As we wrote last year, genetic privacy is becoming a thing of the past thanks to relatives using DNA testing services. Drawing on this new pool of genetic data, police forces are starting to apply big data techniques to DNA sequences in order to resolve cases – sometimes long-standing ones. Given this power of DNA to pinpoint criminals, it’s no surprise that there have been calls for everyone’s DNA to be collected and stored permanently in order to facilitate the fight against crime. That’s been feasible for a while, but so far no government has gone ahead and created a mandatory nationawide DNA database. In 2016, Kuwait announced plans to require DNA from every citizen and visitor, but later backtracked on the idea.

• Security researchers have uncovered more instances of Facebook user data being publicly exposed on the internet, further underscoring its struggles as it deals with a slew of privacy and other problems.

• The researchers from the firm UpGuard said in a blog post Wednesday that the data, which included user names and passwords, came from two different Facebook apps that stored their data publicly on Amazon’s cloud services. Facebook said the databases have been taken down.

• But the episode illustrates Facebook’s issues with controlling its users’ data, especially once it is in the hands of third-party developers.

• The databases were from a Mexico-based media company called Cultura Colectiva, which included more than 540 million records — like user comments and likes — and from an app called At the Pool. The researchers said passwords stored for At the Pool were “presumably” for the app and not for Facebook. Still, storing them publicly could put people at risk if they used the same passwords across different accounts.

• There goes the DMCA, being wielded as a tool of censorship again. The EFF is currently battling for a Redditor’s anonymity — something threatened by a bogus DMCA takedown and a subpoena seeking to unmask this supposed infringer.

• It’s about much more than simply disappearing content from the internet one party didn’t want exposed. It’s about targeting an individual to deter them from ever posting content like this again. Behind the subpoena is a powerful religious entity — one that’s seeking to shut down criticism of its means and methods.

• Today, we’re happy to see WhatsApp fixing the long-standing group messaging problem that we called on them to address: allowing users to decide who can add them to groups without their express consent. This puts users in a better position to control their WhatsApp chats and personal phone number privacy, and we’d like to see other messengers that offer groups follow suit.

• Last month, we launched Fix It Already, a new way to show companies we’re serious about the attainable, high-impact privacy and security issues they need to fix. On social media, users are joining in to share why these issues are important to them with the hashtag “#FixItAlready”. WhatsApp is the first company to roll out a fix in response to our (and your!) demands.

• In a victory for users, WhatsApp has fixed a long-standing privacy problem in group messaging, where users could be added to a group without their permission. The issue was one of the targets of “Fix It Already!,” a campaign from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) demanding repair of privacy and security holes that disrespect user control and put us all at risk.

• “Without this kind of control, an unwanted group invite would expose your phone number to all the members of a group and even have the potential to make you part of someone else’s disinformation campaign,” said EFF Associate Director of Research Gennie Gebhart.

Civil Rights/Policing

• For years, most of the U.S. has been changing death penalty laws in the direction of phasing it out, or at least applying it in a more humane way. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled that people with intellectual disabilities cannot be executed. In 2005, another ruling held that the U.S. cannot execute anyone for committing a crime as a minor. Twenty states have banned capital punishment. The most recent to ban it are Washington in 2018, Delaware in 2016, Maryland in 2013, Connecticut in 2012, and Illinois in 2011. Unfortunately, our newly right wing-dominated Supreme Court recently made a move in the opposite direction. The Eighth Amendment bans cruel and unusual punishment. Capital punishment has been becoming more unusual over the past decade or so. Now, with the court’s help, it’s becoming more cruel. The state of Missouri is set to execute Russell Becklew, a man who suffers from a rare condition that will make death by lethal injection unbearably painful. He’s requested to be executed by a different method that will be quicker. Established precedent was that inmates contesting their method of execution must provide an alternative that would cause less pain. Becklew has. In the two previous cases that established this precedent, the court ruled that states should try to minimize pain when carrying out executions. In a new decision, Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch has just accepted an interpretation of this — promoted earlier by Justice Clarence Thomas — that it only means that states should not “intentionally” make executions more painful than necessary.

• As Senate Republicans rammed through a rules change enabling faster approval of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees, two advocacy groups released reports on Wednesday showing the far-reaching and long-lasting damage his confirmed federal judges have already inflicted on the nation.

• People for the American Way (PFAW) and Alliance for Justice (AFJ) both published studies Wednesday about Trump’s success in appointing 92 judges to district courts, federal appeals courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court—with PFAW writing that the president’s effort to remake the judicial branch in his own image could be disastrous for a number of marginalized groups.

• New Islamic criminal laws that took effect in Brunei on Wednesday, punishing gay sex and adultery by stoning offenders to death, have triggered an outcry from countries, rights groups and celebrities far beyond the tiny Southeast Asian nation’s shores.

• The penalties were provided for under new sections of Brunei’s Shariah Penal Code. Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah instituted the code in 2014 to bolster the influence of Islam in the oil-rich monarchy of around 430,000 people, two-thirds of whom are Muslim.

• Even before 2014, homosexuality was already punishable in Brunei by a jail term of up to 10 years. The first stage of the Shariah Penal Code included fines or jail for offenses such as pregnancy out of wedlock or failing to pray on Fridays.

• But under the new laws — which also apply to children and foreigners, even if they are not Muslim — those found guilty of gay sex can be stoned to death or whipped. Adulterers risk death by stoning too, while thieves face amputation of a right hand on their first offense and a left foot on their second.

• With Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expected as early as Wednesday to use the so-called “nuclear option” to speed up the confirmation process for President Donald Trump’s right wing judicial nominees, progressives raised alarm and urged Americans to pressure their senators to stop the “reckless court packing” by the Republican Party.

• “McConnell has signaled he is ready to use the so-called ‘nuclear option’ to further pack the courts with Trump’s lifetime judicial appointments,” tweeted the progressive advocacy group 5 Calls. “Tell the Senate to block McConnell and stop further erosion of our democratic norms!”

• Courts are supposed to deliver justice, not act as debt collectors. Minnesota is one of more than 40 states across the country that suspends people’s driver’s licenses for outstanding tickets and fees, a practice that disproportionately harms low-income people. But the Minnesota Legislature may act to end this wealth-based penalty through legislation introduced in both chambers. If it becomes law, more than 50,000 Minnesotans will have their licenses restored.

• The bill would repeal the provision of Minnesota law that allows for a person’s driver’s license to be suspended if they fail to pay a fine for a traffic violation or fail to appear in court in response to a ticket. These types of suspensions create a two-tiered system of justice where rich and poor people with otherwise identical records receive different punishments solely because of their ability to pay.

• And that’s punitive public policy that can have long-term consequences for those who can’t afford to pay, while wasting taxpayer dollars.

• On April 3, Ruslan Mutsolgov told Znak.com that law enforcement agencies in Ingushetia had begun searching the homes of the republic’s opposition leaders. Mutsolgov leads the local branch of the opposition Yabloko party. Later in the day, Kavkazsky Uzel reported that Malsag Uzhakhov, the chair of the republic’s Council of Teips, had been given 10 days of jail time along with Musa Malsagov and Akhmed Barakhoyev, two members of the Ingush Committee for National Unity. Barakh Chemurziev, the leader of the Opora Ingushetii movement, received 10 days of administrative arrest, according to Mediazona.

• For the past seven years ago, the United Nations has issued a report titled the World Happiness Report. While this report may sound somewhat lightweight, it actually ranks countries by serious measures including income, freedom, trust in government, social support, life expectancy and how happy citizens perceive themselves to be. The highest-ranking countries are those, we learn, that have “strong social welfare systems and an emphasis on equality.”

• I was not surprised to learn that in 2019 our country fell in rank from 18th to 19th in the report. Despite our high employment, millions of working people hold 2 jobs to pay bills and are an illness away from bankruptcy. Moreover, we have seen a steady increase in the number of hate groups, the majority being white male supremacist groups, over the past 3 years coinciding with President Trump’s campaign and presidency. In his recent manifesto, the Australian-born murderer of 50 New Zealand Muslims at worship in mosques attributed Trump as the “symbol of renewed white identity.”

• While some may protest that the United States is a more complex society with a higher rate of immigrants, Canada, which has a higher percent of foreign-born residents than the US, ranks higher in the recent UN report. So also do Britain and Germany with comparable percentages of foreign-born residents as the US.

• It’s a frigid December morning when I meet Chairman Joseph Holley at the Te-Moak tribal headquarters in Elko, Nevada, seven hours north of Las Vegas. Holley, tall and round-faced, offers me a cup of coffee. He has the burly build of a man who worked 37 years in the area’s gold mines, drilling aboveground and digging below the surface.

• Holley’s a relatively new tribal chairman, having served since November 2018. “I’m still catching up with a lot of things,” he tells me. He’s following in the footsteps of father, activist Glenn Holley, Sr., who fought for aboriginal title to restore Te-Moak lands starting in the 1970s.

• That heritage of activism may need to be invoked for the struggle that Chairman Holley and the Te-Moak now face. A major plan to lease drilling rights near the Ruby Mountains, including land bordering the Ruby Lake Wildlife Refuge, threatens not just the local ecosystem but the tribe’s very existence.

• Rachel Herzing joins Beyond Prisons for a conversation on political education, transformation, and more.

• Rachel is the co-director of Center for Political Education, a resource for political organizations on the left, progressive social movements, the working class and people of color. She has been an organizer, activist, and advocate fighting the violence of policing and imprisonment for over 20 years.

• The United States Supreme Court issued a decision that expressly undermines the Constitution’s protections against “cruel and unusual punishment” in the Eighth Amendment.

• Russell Bucklew was convicted of murder and other crimes in Missouri about twenty years ago. He received a death sentence, and in 2014, Bucklew alleged his Eighth Amendment rights would be violated if the state executed him because he suffers from a congenital condition called cavernous hemangioma.

• Bucklew’s condition is rare, but regardless, it causes “tumors filled with blood vessels to grow throughout his body, including in his head, face, neck, and oral cavity,” according to the Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who dissented.

• He raised evidence that “executing him by lethal injection will cause the tumors that grow in his throat to rupture during his execution, causing him to sputter, choke, and suffocate on his own blood for up to several minutes before he dies. That evidence establishes at this stage of the proceedings that executing Bucklew by lethal injection risks subjecting him to constitutionally impermissible suffering.”

• Yet, the majority, led by Justice Neil Gorsuch, held that the state of Missouri may execute him anyway. “In my view, that holding violates the clear command of the Eighth Amendment,” Breyer declared.

• Gorsuch reasoned, “The Eighth Amendment forbids ‘cruel and unusual’ methods of capital punishment but does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death.”

• Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s latest maneuver to push federal judges onto the bench will facilitate their quick approval in the Senate, a move that has his critics in the chamber concerned for the institution and the courts.

• The latest in McConnell’s scheme to pack the courts come hell or high water would limit debate on district court appointees from 30 hours to two.

• Russia’s Internal Affairs Ministry has prepared a bill that, if passed, would introduce stricter requirements for migrants who are deported from Russia to reimburse the costs of their own deportation.

• A Pennsylvania judge has delivered an earful to the York County Drug Task Force and its handling of property forfeitures. Christopher Hawkins, represented by Korey Leslie (who was kind enough to email me the ruling the York Dispatch couldn’t be bothered to post with its article), challenged the seizure of two vehicles and a bunch of electronics from his house. Hawkins was arrested after a controlled heroin purchase. There appears to be no question Hawkins participated in drug dealing. But that doesn’t excuse the government’s decision to take two cars and some TVs from him as “evidence.”

• Judge Craig T. Trebilcock doesn’t like anything about the Task Force’s seizures, since it appears to be more concerned with taking things with resale value, rather than property with an actual nexus to drug distribution. The opinion [PDF] repeatedly calls Task Force detectives out for their lack of credibility and the dollar signs continually dancing in their eyes. The Task Force originally seized four vehicles from Hawkins before returning two of them for a lack of drug nexus. But it still couldn’t connect the two it kept.

• On August 29, 2018, Pennsylvania’s 25 prisons instituted a lockdown that lasted twelve days. Pennsylvania Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel, backed by Governor Tom Wolf, claimed the lockdown was an emergency measure in response to widespread infection of prison staff from physical contact with synthetic drugs, in particular K2, a synthetic cannabinoid which can be dried onto paper. The lockdown put into effect conditions similar to solitary confinement, with inmates locked inside their cells up to 24 hours a day with no access to the world outside. However, some are claiming that the pretense for this shutdown is something other than a health scare.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• For the better part of the last decade, some Wall Street analysts have quietly been pointing out that the current pay TV business model is unsustainable. As it stands, broadcasters increasingly impose giant price hikes for the same programming to cable companies, who in turn pass those higher costs on to consumers. Those consumers are, in turn, increasingly “cutting the cord” by moving to cheaper streaming alternatives. And when those streaming alternatives don’t provide what they want or raise rates (as AT&T recently did with its DirecTV Now service), subscribers then shift toward free options like over the air antennas or piracy.

• Smaller cable providers have been warning for years that unless you enjoy the size and leverage of being a giant ISP and broadcaster combined (AT&T/Time Warner, Comcast/NBC Universal), you’re not going to be able to survive this new tight-margin market. Some, like CableONE, have opted to get out of TV entirely and focus on broadband. It’s a trend that’s only likely to accelerate.

• The Save the Internet Act would lock into law the protections for net neutrality that came in the 2015 Open Internet Order and require the FCC to take action when ISPs give unfair preferential treatment to certain types of content or content sources.

• In 2017, despite a clear mandate from the people to protect net neutrality, the FCC abandoned its responsibility to enforce net neutrality principles. The move was highly unpopular among Americans of all political stripes as well as experts in how the Internet works. In fact, the only people it was really popular with were the big vertically integrated ISPs who seek to leverage their dominance to raise their profits at the expense of the free and open Internet.

• H.R. 1644 restores the FCC’s ability to police unjust and unreasonable conduct by ISPs. Unfair ISP practices recently took center stage nationally when Verizon was found throttling the wireless service of the Santa Clara Fire Department while the department was fighting a massive fire. The bill also reinstates the competition policies of the Telecommunications Act for the broadband access market, a measure that’s widely supported by the small competitors to incumbents like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon.

• Yesterday we plowed through a large and varied selection of HTTP topics in the Workshop. Today we continued. At 9:30 we were all in that room again. Day two.

• Martin Thomson talked about his “hx” proposal and how to refer to future responses in HTTP APIs. He ended up basically concluding that “This is too complicated, I think I’m going to abandon this” and instead threw in a follow-up proposal he called “Reverse Javascript” that would be a way for a client to pass on a script for the server to execute! The room exploded in questions, objections and “improvements” to this idea. There are also apparently a pile of prior art in similar vein to draw inspiration from.

• With the audience warmed up like this, Anne van Kasteren took us back to reality with an old favorite topic in the HTTP Workshop: websockets. Not a lot of love for websockets in the room… but this was the first of several discussions during the day where a desire or quest for bidirectional HTTP streams was made obvious.

Intellectual Monopolies

• We are somewhere around the 20th anniversary (give or take) of invention of the term “patent troll.” A term that even has its own Wikipedia page. Which means, for me at least, that the term has been around for the duration of my career to date as a patent litigator. Technology has changed a lot in that time, of course. Yet the use of “patent troll” endures. In fact, the term has been part of the popular conception of patent litigation across at least three generations of current practitioners.

• First, the generation that preceded mine, where partners struggled with the big question in the mid-2000s within Biglaw IP groups — should we represent “patent trolls”? My firm at the time said no, as did many of our competitors. Not a surprising decision when the targets of the patent trolls in those days were the very potential clients my firm was constantly trying to get defense work from. Even then, however, getting a precise definition of what was an acceptable patent plaintiff versus what type of entity was a pariah “patent troll” was a difficult task.

• More than a decade later, my generation of patent litigators continues to deal with the “patent troll” question in some capacity — including the question of what a patent troll is in the first place. As with anything subjective, one’s perspective on the question is likely shaped by their practice and professional motivations. Those who get paid by defending companies against patent assertions are more likely to espouse an expansive definition of “patent troll.” While those who represent patentees, whether they be universities, inventors, or patent assertion entities, are likely to deny that their clients are trolls under any rational definition of the term. The sad thing is we are still discussing the definition, even if only in the context of whether the term should continue to have any weight.

• A key point of argument and policy over the past decades has been the level of authority given to the USPTO as the government’s expert patent law agency. When the USPTO makes a decision — is that decision respected by other tribunals? At times the agency is given substantial deference (factual conclusions made by the PTAB), but other agency decisions are also regularly reviewed de novo without deference. With regard to interpretation of substantive patent law, PTO determinations are often simply ignored.

• [...]

• Over the years, the PTO has shifted policy. In the old eligibility cases like Diehr and Chakrabarty, the agency was refusing to issue patents that it saw as crossing-the-eligibility-line. However, the new statements by Dir. Iancu go the other-way, with the USPTO creating a policy of issuing patents that the courts would find invalid (if given the opportunity).

• The statement from the court here is important although buried in a non-precedential opinion. One reason for its importance is its clear tension with the Federal Circuit’s recent decision in Natural Alternatives that called for Skidmore deference to be given to the PTO statement on eligibility.

• An article from Prof. Chris Beauchamp, newly published in the Vanderbilt Law Review and titled “Repealing Patents”, examines the history of Founding-era patent revocation. It’s a complex story, influenced by the changing character of the pre-1836 patent system, and reveals that there did seem to be a belief in a public interest in the invalidation of patents that shouldn’t have issued.

• In fact, the first patent lawsuit in the United States was a suit for the revocation of a patent on processing whale oil. The surviving records are unclear as to the rationale, the process, and the outcome of both this case and later revocation actions. But however the case proceeded, the earliest known U.S. litigation over a patent was over whether the patent should have been issued at all.

• Beauchamp also identifies a portion of the history that bears on a modern debate—that of whether petitioners for post-grant review should have constitutional standing or whether post-grant review should be available more broadly to the public. Examining the function of courts in the early Republic, Beauchamp ties early patent revocation suits into the more general class of “popular actions”, where an informer with “knowledge of a wrong but no interest in the controversy other than that given by statute” could bring a revocation case without any constitutional concern over standing. This should lay to rest any constitutional concerns about universal standing for petitioners for post-grant review.

Trademarks

• Many seasoned trade mark practitioners will have come across Mr Michael Gleissner at some point during their careers. Mr Gleissner is well known for his companies’ enthusiastic [some might say overenthusiastic] filing of trade mark applications, oppositions and cancellation actions, particularly in relation to well-known trade marks and high-profile companies. Popular consensus suggests that Mr Gleissner does this with commercial gain in mind [and not for the sheer, heady love of trade mark procedure].

Copyrights

• Yesterday the Free Democratic Party (FDP) group in the German Bundestag (federal parliament) made the decision to bring a motion calling on the German government to prevent the adoption of the EU copyright reform bill in its current form by the EU Council. The government coalition parties (CDU/CSU and SPD) have already decided to refer a similar motion by the Left Party to the committees in an apparent attempt to stall the process in the federal parliament while the government would allow the bill to be adopted by the Council in the meantime. That shows just how uncomfortable they are. They don’t want to come clean and take a position. With respect to the FDP motion, however, the decision on whether or not to hold an immediate vote will be made tomorrow, Thursday (April 4), right after the debate.

• In-house counsel within the digital sector have told Managing IP that they intend to defeat or alter the EU Copyright Directive, which was passed last week

• Meanwhile copyright and royalty collection bodies have hailed the decision as a victory for creatives and an opportunity to close the so-called value gap between user-upload and other online streaming platforms.

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