The woman protecting Tunisia’s cultural heritage | Tunisia News | Al Jazeera
cool
Category: Media and Culture,
Alton Sterling case: No charges for La. officers in black man’s shooting death
Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, was shot to death July 5, 2016, as two white officers pinned him to the pavement outside a Louisiana convenience store where he had been selling CDs.The officers were responding to the report of a man with a gun. Officer Blane Salamoni shot and killed Sterling during the struggle. Officer Howie Lake II helped wrestle Sterling to the ground, but Lake didn’t fire his gun.
The killing was captured on cellphone video and circulated widely online, sparking demonstrations across Baton Rouge.
Alton Sterling case: No charges for La. officers in black man’s shooting death – CBS News
Apparently murdering black men is legal in Louisianan, as long as it is done by a police officer.
Cambridge Analytica is an ‘example of what modern day colonialism looks like’
The firm’s work on Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta’s successful 2013 and 2017 election campaigns was described in the report.
“We have rebranded the entire party twice, written their manifesto, done two rounds of 50,000 (participant) surveys,” Mark Turnbull, managing director of Cambridge Analytica Political Global, said in the undercover video.
“Then we’d write all the speeches and we’d stage the whole thing — so just about every element of his campaign,” Turnbull added.
Cambridge Analytica is an ‘example of what modern day colonialism looks like’
hmmmmm
EPA drops rule requiring mining companies to have money to clean up pollution
Trump’s administration announced Friday that it won’t require mining companies to prove they have the financial wherewithal to clean up their pollution, despite an industry legacy of abandoned mines that have fouled waterways across the U.S.
The move came after mining groups and Western-state Republicans pushed back against a proposal under former President Barack Obama to make companies set aside money for future cleanup costs.
…The U.S. mining industry has a long history of abandoning contaminated sites and leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for cleanups. Thousands of shuttered mines leak contaminated water into rivers, streams and other waterways, including hundreds of cases in which the EPA has intervened, sometimes at huge expense.
The EPA spent $1.1 billion on cleanup work at abandoned hard-rock mining and processing sites across the U.S. from 2010 to 2014.
EPA drops rule requiring mining companies to have money to clean up pollution – Chicago Tribune
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr
State Police pay higher than reported, data hidden for years
Revelations about an alleged overtime scam, a wave of suspensions, and hefty pay for Massachusetts State Police troopers have sparked scrutiny of the state’s largest law enforcement agency.
…Payroll records for an entire 140-trooper State Police division — including some of the department’s highest earners — have been hidden from public view and weren’t filed with the state comptroller for several years, the Globe has found.
…The records also show that 393 troopers normally assigned to other State Police divisions worked detail and fill-in shifts for Troop F, collecting another $6.4 million.
In the entire department, at least 299 troopers — about 14 percent — made more than $200,000 last year.
…On Tuesday, Colonel Kerry A. Gilpin revealed that 20 active troopers and one retiree face sanctions in an overtime abuse scandal in Troop E. The troopers allegedly logged hours they did not work, with some alleged violators putting in for as many as 100 no-show shifts.
On Friday, State Police said nine of those troopers were suspended without pay, nine more retired, and one was kept on active duty.
…There has also been infighting within the State Police, with unionized troopers arguing that higher-ranked nonunion workers should not be assigned to work overtime shifts.
…At least 79 percent of Troop F made more last year than Governor Charlie Baker, who earned $151,800. The percentage would be even higher if you included the pay that some workers received in 2017 for time spent in other State Police divisions.
Fourteen Troop F members earned more in overtime than in base pay.
State Police pay higher than reported, data hidden for years – The Boston Globe
Oi…..
Army veteran deported to Mexico after drug conviction
A veteran who did two tours of Afghanistan has been deported to Mexico after his citizenship was denied due to a felony drug conviction.
…Perez-Montes was sentenced to 15 years in prison and had his green card taken away after he was found guilty of delivering cocaine to an undercover cop, CNN reported. He served half of his sentence when deportation proceedings took place.
…“This case is a tragic example of what can happen when national immigration policies are based more in hate than on logic and ICE doesn’t feel accountable to anyone,” Duckworth said in a statement on Saturday.
Perez-Montes reportedly arrived in the U.S. when he was 8-years-old with his parents and sister who are now naturalized U.S. citizens. He has another sister who is an American citizen by birth.
Perez-Montes said his conviction was the result of his PTSD, according to CNN.
Army veteran deported to Mexico after drug conviction | TheHill
Sigh….
Gun maker Remington files for bankruptcy protection
Remington, among the nation’s oldest gun manufacturers, said last month it had reached a deal with lenders that would grant them ownership of the 200-year-old company. Remington would continue operating and making guns while in bankruptcy.
The Journal says Remington’s bankruptcy filing comes “in the face of a heavy debt load, falling sales and lawsuits tied to the Sandy Hook school shooting.”
…”Remington makes the Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle that was used in the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut that left 20 first-graders and six educators dead in 2012. The company was cleared of wrongdoing in the shooting, but investors distanced themselves from the company’s owner, investor Cerberus Capital Management.”
Gun sales overall have slowed since the election of President Trump, the thinking being that gun control regulations would be less likely. Gun sales had risen during President Obama’s presidency and in anticipation of a win by Hillary Clinton.
American Outdoor Brands’ (AOBC), up until 2016 known as Smith & Wesson, saw its profits slide 90 percent in 2017, Mr. Trump’s first year in office. Sturm Ruger (RGR) in October reported a 35 percent decline in quarterly profits.
Gun maker Remington files for bankruptcy protection – CBS News
hmmmm
Cambridge Analytica Sent Foreigners To Work On U.S. Elections, Former Employees Say
Cambridge Analytica, the data firm at the center of a scandal about misused Facebook information, sent dozens of foreign nationals to work on U.S. elections in 2014, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.
Three of the firm’s former employees, including whistleblower Christopher Wylie, said the company was mostly staffed with non-U.S. citizens as it worked across several states to help elect Republicans.
…“Its dirty little secret was that there was no one American involved in it, that it was a de facto foreign agent, working on an American election,” Wylie told the Post.
Earlier this week he told NBC News that “it was not just me.”
“Like 20 other people were. We had Canadians, British, Eastern Europeans, Lithuanians, Germans, Romanians, Greeks,” Wylie said. “We weren’t just working on messaging. We were instructing campaigns on which messages go where and to who.”
Cambridge Analytica Sent Foreigners To Work On U.S. Elections, Former Employees Say | HuffPost
hmmmm
Cambridge Analytica misled MPs over work for Leave.EU
Cambridge Analytica conducted data research for one of the leading Brexit campaign groups and then misled the public and MPs over the work the company had undertaken, according to a former employee who has spoken to the Guardian.
In an exclusive interview, Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge Analytica’s business development director until two weeks ago, said the work with Leave.EU involved analysis of data provided by Ukip.
Cambridge Analytica misled MPs over work for Leave.EU, says ex-director | News | The Guardian
hmmm
Facebook logged phone records from Android users with older devices
Recent reports indicate that the social media giant has also scraped records of phone calls and SMS data from its users with Android devices without explicit permission.
…So far, just under 900 people have responded to the poll, and more than 20 per cent confirmed they found call records and/or text metadata in their Facebook data archive. Another 74 people responded to the poll saying that MMS data was collected, 106 people responded saying that SMS data was collected, and 104 responded saying that cellular calls were collected.
…In recent years, the company has updated this process to clarify that when requesting access to your contact list, it intends to access all call logs and SMS text messages as well, but Android users in the past may have unknowingly given Facebook access to this data.
hmmmm
How Could Facebook Have Been So Careless?
How Could Facebook Have Been So Careless? – WSJ
Careless? All of this stuff was part of their business plan.
Bolton Was Early Beneficiary of Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook Data
“We are producing ads specifically designed for voters of a certain personality and demographic profile. So if you’re a young woman in New Hampshire with a specific kind of personality and a particular set of issues that you care about, our research allows us to connect with that voter in a way that truly resonates with her.”
…The political action committee founded by John R. Bolton, President Trump’s incoming national security adviser, was one of the earliest customers of Cambridge Analytica, which it hired specifically to develop psychological profiles of voters with data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook profiles, according to former Cambridge employees and company documents.
…In the two years that followed, Mr. Bolton’s super PAC spent nearly $1.2 million primarily for “survey research,” which is a term that campaigns use for polling, according to campaign finance records.
…The contract broadly describes the services to be delivered by Cambridge as “behavioral microtargeting with psychographic messaging.”
…“The Bolton PAC was obsessed with how America was becoming limp wristed and spineless and it wanted research and messaging for national security issues,” Mr. Wylie said.
“That really meant making people more militaristic in their worldview,” he added. “That’s what they said they wanted, anyway.”
Using the psychographic models, Cambridge helped design concepts for advertisements for candidates supported by Mr. Bolton’s PAC, including the 2014 campaign of Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina.
…The firm took the psychographic profiles it was building off the Facebook data at the time and combined them with voter databases and other sets of data.
…The profiles would be used to “identify the personality traits of individuals” in states to be targeted by the Bolton PAC.
Bolton Was Early Beneficiary of Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook Data – The New York Times
hmmmm
Marijuana Arrests Outnumber Those for Violent Crimes, Study Finds
Marijuana Arrests Outnumber Those for Violent Crimes, Study Finds – The New York Times
Because that’s a good use of tax pay dollars?
…Um, no.
Santorum: the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.
Santorum: Instead of calling for gun laws, kids should take CPR classes – CNNPolitics
Santorum: the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.
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