What goes through my my mind when I read the news with my morning coffee. …Or for the Simon's Rockers in the group, this is my response journal.
Her comments came after a number of female members of parliament in Britain announced they would not stand for re-election at a Dec. 12 general election, citing abuse on social media including rape and death threats.
…Female politicians are facing a backlash over women’s rights which has been fueled by social media that rewards abusive posts and conspiracy theories.
Hillary Clinton says abuse of female politicians on social media is ‘viral’ – Reuters
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More than two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, according to one current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple employee.
Under that plan, primarily designed to thwart hackers, Apple would no longer have a key to unlock the encrypted data, meaning it would not be able to turn material over to authorities in a readable form even under court order.
…Apple dropped plans to let iPhone users fully encrypt backups of their devices in the company’s iCloud service after the FBI complained that the move would harm investigations, six sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
…It shows how much Apple has been willing to help U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite taking a harder line in high-profile legal disputes with the government and casting itself as a defender of its customers’ information.
Exclusive: Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained – sources – Reuters
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He focuses on people who need interpreters or speak Spanish, have international connections or are accused of serious drug crimes.
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Journalists are wary of Alden because of its cut-to-the-bone management strategy. In 2018, a group of writers and editors at the Alden-owned Denver Post published a special package devoted to attacking the company, which had enacted deep staff cuts at the paper.
…Their attempts to woo new investors are unusual in an industry that has traditionally tried to keep business and journalism separate.
…After having bought up roughly 32 percent of Tribune Publishing in recent years, Alden is the company’s largest shareholder. It can buy more Tribune Publishing stock as soon as July. This month, the company asked journalists at newspapers across the country to volunteer for buyouts.
…In 2018, Tribune Publishing cut the newsroom staff of The Daily News in New York in half. The layoffs at the formerly brawny tabloid, which once had the highest circulation of any daily newspaper in the country, came a year after Tribune Publishing bought it.
…“The days of journalism being held publicly by Wall Street should be over,” said Rebekah L. Sanders, the consumer protection reporter at The Republic who helped lead the union drive. “We have a public service mission, which used to be propped up by crazy ad margins. That’s all gone, so we need to make a transition in our business model.”
Worried Reporters Make a Plea: Please Buy Our Paper – The New York Times
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With new routes and faster and more efficient service, the number of Amtrak trains operating in Virginia is expected to double by 2030.
…The state exemplifies Amtrak’s growth strategy of focusing on adding short-haul trips that compete with car rides and flights in dense urban corridors, they say.
…In recent years, Amtrak has been beefing up short-distance service across the country, advancing its vision to connect major metropolitan areas in regions undergoing significant growth and where there is little to no rail service, while fulfilling Americans’ growing desire for cost-efficient and more environmentally friendly travel options.
…Virginia, one of 18 states that sponsors Amtrak service, has some of the best-performing routes, officials said. Combined ridership for the four routes connecting Richmond and other major cities to Washington and the Northeast grew to 971,415 in 2019, from 844,698 the previous year — a 15 percent increase. That’s well above the average 2.4 percent increase among all state-supported lines and the 2.5 percent growth of Amtrak’s entire network.
“In just the 10 years since 2009, ridership has more than doubled on our Virginia corridors,” Anderson told members of Congress at a Nov. 13 hearing. “What these and our other very successful state-supported corridors have in common is that they offer multiple daily frequencies with trip times that are competitive with driving and flying.”
…In 2011, Virginia became one of only a few states to create a dedicated funding source for rail projects. The Virginia Intercity Passenger Rail Operating and Capital Fund gets .005 percent of the state’s retail sales and use tax, which equals about $50 million to $60 million annually.
…Increasing train service in the state makes sense, both for reducing traffic congestion and from an economic standpoint, officials and transportation experts say. A recent state study of the I-95 corridor estimates it would cost $12.5 billion to build one additional travel lane in each direction for 50 miles in the corridor.
How Virginia’s $3.7 billion rail plan fits Amtrak’s long-term vision – The Washington Post
cool
When an entire train covered in graffiti suddenly appeared out of nowhere the other day, The New York City Police Benevolent Association lost its shit.
The PBA posted a video on social media showing the train entering a station with a dire warning about impending social collapse.
…As of this writing, the PBA post has gotten close to 14,000 comments, the majority of which think the mural rules big time. …Others pointed out the hypocrisy of condemning a train covered in graffiti, but not one that’s been wrapped in advertising, as the shuttle between Times Square and Grand Central frequently is.
It’s reasonable to suspect that many of the sentiments expressed were colored by the generally negative reaction to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s decision to flood stations with 500 additional police officers who seem to think that arresting churro vendors and tackling people on the platforms makes the public safer.
Stunning video shows a subway car completely covered in graffiti
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The revised water rule eliminates protections for more than half of America’s wetlands, along with many rivers and streams that were once protected under the Clean Water Act — threatening drinking water for millions of people and national park waterways across the country.
The administration’s revised water rule paves the way for more pollution from mining, manufacturing and large farms to flow into waterways, which will ultimately impact water that we all depend on for drinking, fishing and swimming. Today’s announcement comes just two weeks after the administration’s rollback of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that requires government agencies to carefully consider public health and our environment before permitting proposed projects on federal lands, while also giving the public a voice in the process.
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The alleged attack on a Georgia election server was first discovered by Logan Lamb, an election security expert who suggested that hackers may have been able to significantly interfere with state voting data.
If the hackers successfully broke into the server, Mr Lamb said in his report that they likely obtained “almost total control of the server, including abilities to modify files, delete data, and install malware”.
….“What Logan’s findings show us,” she added, “is that vulnerabilities were not just hypothetical as the state had been claiming. Now we know that it was a very real risk, but what we don’t know is just how bad did it get. And the public deserves to know.”
….The alleged attack has added fuel to an ongoing debate about the integrity of Georgia’s elections. The state uses paperless voting machines, a process the activist groups behind the lawsuit are hoping to put an end to, and the election server had previously faced security issues before the 2016 elections.
The Centre for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University, which was tasked with overseeing the programming of Georgia’s elections, then erased all of the data on the server in question. Mr Lamb was later able to assess a copy of the server collected by the FBI in March 2017 after state officials lost a years-long battle to prevent it from being examined in 2019.
“I can think of no legitimate reason why records from that critical period of time should have been deleted”, Mr Lamb wrote in the affidavit.
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Asked to name media companies in which they have trust, 65% of Republicans named Fox News. One in 3 named ABC. And that’s it. Not a single other news source was trusted by even 33% of self-identified Republicans in the Pew poll.
…A majority of Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) don’t trust ANY media company other than Fox News. And two thirds don’t trust ANY media companies other than Fox News and ABC.
…Combine those numbers with Fox News’s overwhelming viewership numbers among Republicans (60% get their election news from Fox; no other outlet gets above 30%), and the marked difference between its content and that of all the other mainstream media outlets, and you see a major reason for why we are where we are, politically speaking.
If you only trust one news outlet and that news outlet is telling a very different …version of current events, a massive disconnect is created.
…And it is into that disconnect, that information void, that Trump has leaped — and now resides. …Trump regularly tweets and retweets Fox News segments to his 71+ million Twitter followers. He often directly quotes from Fox personalities. He works to create a totally closed information ecosystem for his supporters — and largely succeeds.
This 1 chart explains how bad Fox News is for our politics – CNNPolitics
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US public opinion on Trump’s impeachment is sharply divided between Democrats and Republicans with a slight tilt in favour of removing the president from office.
A new Emerson College national poll showed 51 percent of respondents favour Trump’s conviction and removal from office while 49 percent oppose impeachment.
A strong majority of 59 percent of voters want the Senate to call witnesses in the trial, according to the survey conducted January 21-23 with a 4.1 percent margin of confidence.
Trump impeachment trial: Will Democrats get their witnesses? | USA News | Al Jazeera
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“Every witness with knowledge of this issue testified that Biden was following official U.S. policy in calling for Shokin’s removal,” said Garcia, who noted that the move was supported by a bipartisan group of senators, including Republicans Rob Portman and Ron Johnson.
She added that there is “Simply no evidence…in the record to support” the “baseless allegation” that Biden did anything wrong by pressing for Shokin’s removal.
…“President Trump asked Ukraine for something that benefited only himself,” said Garcia, D-Texas. “In putting himself above our country, he put his country at risk, and that is why his actions are so dangerous,” she added.
WATCH: Rep. Garcia explains why Democrats believe Biden did nothing wrong | PBS NewsHour
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“The impeachment trial will not result in President Trump’s removal,” [conservative Washington Post opinion writer Jennifer] Rubin writes, “but it could well result in Republicans’ removal from the Senate majority.”
The Never Trump conservative notes that a “slew of Republican incumbents,” according to Morning Consult, “were below 45% approval even before the trial began….. In their refusal to allow new witnesses and documents, their determination to acquit even before the trial began and their conduct during the trial, they are creating a plethora of opportunities for opponents’ ad makers.”
The incumbent GOP senators Rubin specifically mentions include Maine’s Susan Collins, Iowa’s Joni Ernst, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, Arizona’s Martha McSally, Colorado’s Cory Gardner and Texas’ John Cornyn.
…“In behaving as they have, Republicans are managing not only to deprive the president of a legitimate acquittal in the eyes of Americans — who overwhelmingly want a real trial — but also, to convince voters that Republicans should not be entrusted with power.”
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The FRA should never have been asked to oversee the project, said Thomas Hart Jr, president of the pro-rail consulting group Rail Forward. It was inexperienced, needlessly bureaucratic, and had “neither the experience, the staff, nor the regulations” in place to make high-speed rail work. To Hart’s mind, the largest problems were strategic: The FRA “tried to do too much with too little” by spreading the money across the nation rather than targeting the best possible projects, while simultaneously shutting out small or minority-owned businesses. He also believes the federal government made a fatal misstep in allowing Amtrak to run the projects, rather than opening it up to more experienced foreign competitors.
…“The question really is, for us as an industry and as a company, in being pragmatic,” he said. All over the country, there are underserved segments of around 300 miles which are ripe for high-quality rail, he added. “We don’t even need to spend money on necessarily expensive high-speed trains—just getting what we have today working well at a hundred miles an hour, which is very feasible, is really viable.”
Europe might have some of the world’s best high-speed rail, but it also had a great network of slower, 80-mile-per-hour trains, said Harris. “We should aspire to that first. We can deliver that and make a lot of people happy, without spending $100 million.”
This is why the US still doesn’t have high-speed trains — Quartz
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Only four months earlier, McCarthy had delivered an inflammatory speech claiming 205 people working in the State Department were secretly communists. Since then, Smith had been closely following his words and actions, meant to undermine the Democratic party and seed suspicion everywhere.
…“Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” Smith said, in another thinly veiled jab at McCarthy’s tactics.
…“It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life,” said Smith.
It was a remarkable moment, not only because Smith was a woman, or the first person to speak out against McCarthy, but because she was willing to speak out against her fellow Republicans.
The Senator Who Stood Up to Joseph McCarthy When No One Else Would | History | Smithsonian Magazine
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The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its symbolic Doomsday Clock closer to midnight, indicating that the likeliness of a human-caused apocalypse has increased since last year.
The Bulletin adjusted the clock to reflect looming threats from nuclear weapons and accelerated global warming.
The clock is now set at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to symbolic doom and the first time the hands have been within the two-minute mark.
Scientists move Doomsday Clock closer to midnight
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