Scientists certain that drilling is causing earthquakes
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Arizona Quietly Sells Land to Freeport-McMoRan for Mining Waste
The Arizona State Land Department this month sold nearly 17,000 acres of pristine desert land to Freeport-McMoRan, a Phoenix-based international mining company, which plans to use the property to store waste from its Bagdad copper mine.
…It is nearly seven times the size of a pending land acquisition by a British-Australian company for a mining operation near Superior. That project, Resolution Copper, would involve extracting copper from beneath Oak Flat, an area that Native American opponents consider sacred, and until a land swap, was protected from mining.
…”That is habitat that will be lost for the rest of our lives and probably hundreds of years into the future, if not forever,” Trudeau said. “This is a tremendous impact of almost unprecedented scale in Arizona.”
As with most large mining operations, Freeport-McMoRan’s waste storage proposal also raises concerns of water contamination. The Bagdad area, which is about 65 miles west of Prescott, sits close to several watersheds, including for the Santa Maria River, the Big Sandy River, and the Bill Williams River.
Freeport-McMoRan has a track record of water contamination.
…And a recent rollback of Clean Water Act regulations by President Trump’s administration removed protections for smaller bodies of water, including those found in the Bagdad-area property, like seasonal rivers, groundwater, and “ephemeral streams” that only flow after rain. According to Trudeau, the Trump decision took away environmentalists’ sole avenue for challenging Freeport-McMoRan’s proposed tailings site.
Arizona Quietly Sells Land to Freeport-McMoRan for Mining Waste | Phoenix New Times
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Want to double world food production? Return the land to small farmers
A recent comprehensive survey by GRAIN, examining data from around the world, finds that while small farmers feed the world, they are doing so with just 24% of the world’s farmland – or 17% if you leave out China and India.
…Only 1% of all farms in the world are larger than 50 hectares, and that these few farms control 65% of the world’s farmland.
…The confusion stems from the way FAO deal with the concept of family farming, which they roughly define as any farm managed by an individual or a household. (They admit there is no precise definition. Various countries, like Mali, have their own.)
Thus, a huge industrial soya bean farm in rural Argentina, whose family owners live in Buenos Aires, is included in FAO’s count of ‘family farms’.
What about sprawling Hacienda Luisita, owned by the powerful Cojuanco family in the Philippines and epicentre of the country’s battle for agrarian reform since decades. Is that a family farm?
Looking at ownership to determine what is and is not a family farm masks all the inequities, injustices and struggles that peasants and other small scale food producers across the world are mired in.
It allows FAO to paint a rosy picture and conveniently ignore perhaps the most crucial factor affecting the capacity of small farmers to produce food: lack of access to land.
…Small food producers’ access to land is shrinking due a range of forces. One is that because of population pressure, farms are getting divided up amongst family members. Another is the vertiginous expansion of monoculture plantations.
In the last 50 years, a staggering 140 million hectares – the size of almost all the farmland in India – has been taken over by four industrial crops: soya bean, oil palm, rapeseed and sugar cane.
…Other pressures pushing small food producers off their land include the runaway plague of large-scale land grabs by corporate interests. In the last few years alone, according to the World Bank, some 60 million hectares of fertile farmland have been leased, on a long-term basis, to foreign investors and local elites, mostly in the global South.
While some of this is for energy production, a big part of it is to produce food commodities for the global market, instead of family farming.
…The data show that the concentration of farmland in fewer and fewer hands is directly related to the increasing number of people going hungry every day.
According to one UN study, active policies supporting small producers and agro-ecological farming methods could double global food production in a decade and enable small farmers to continue to produce and utilise biodiversity, maintain ecosystems and local economies, while multiplying and strengthening meaningful work opportunities and social cohesion in rural areas.
Want to double world food production? Return the land to small farmers!
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U.S. farm bankruptcies hit an eight-year high: court data – Reuters
U.S. farm bankruptcy rates jumped 20% in 2019 – to an eight-year high – as financial woes in the U.S. agricultural economy continued.
…According to data released this week by the United States Courts, family farmers filed 595 Chapter 12 bankruptcies in 2019, up from 498 filings a year earlier. The data also shows that such filings – known as “family farmer” bankruptcies – have steadily increased every year for the past five years.
…Chapter 12 is a part of the federal bankruptcy code that is designed for family farmers and fishermen to restructure their debts. It was created during the 1980s farm crisis as a simple court procedure to let family farmers keep operating while working out a plan to repay lenders.
The increase in cases had been somewhat expected, bankruptcy experts and agricultural economists said, as farmers face trade battles, ever-mounting farm debt, prolonged low commodity prices, volatile weather patterns and a fatal pig disease that has decimated China’s herd.
U.S. farm bankruptcies hit an eight-year high: court data – Reuters
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Climate change: Wine supply threatened due to global warming
If the global temperature rises by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, the regions of the world that are suitable for growing wine grapes could shrink by as much as 56% , according to the study.
And with 7.2 degrees of warming, 85% of those lands would no longer be able to produce good wines.
Climate change: Wine supply threatened due to global warming
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Food Security and Economics in Newfoundland
Ask people about buying food in Newfoundland and Labrador, and you’ll start hearing a few consistent comments: that fresh produce can be very expensive, that storm-related shipping delays can cut off the supply of food, and that the island of Newfoundland has, at any given time, [only] three days of fresh food on the shelves.
…Food security, conceptually, isn’t limited to the idea of running out of food on the shelves. It can mean that you just can’t afford the spinach that is on the shelf, and are left to other, less nutritious options. It can also mean that there is nowhere from which to procure food, or that the shipments can’t make it. All of these conditions can apply to Newfoundland and Labrador.
And as climate change advances, such circumstances can change—and get worse.
…“There’s a high rate of unemployment, and there’s a high correlation between suicide ideation and addiction issues when there’s nothing to do during the day. There’s no job, there’s no fisheries and you’re home,” Halley says.
The garden project, which began last year with help from a grant from Eastern Health, would give Halley’s clients the chance to work the land and eat the produce they grew. Eight raised beds were installed at the cathedral.
…“The population I work with… they can go to soup kitchens, they can get some assistance from the government,” Halley says. But “the quality and the standard of food that they’re able to buy is very poor.”
The social worker says she supports people from all walks of life, including those with lucrative professions, but those who struggle economically were most interested in the garden project “because they don’t have access to the quality of food that their bodies want.” She cites the example of one person who can’t work and feels constant stress from bills. He found comfort in the garden, being able provide himself with fresh vegetables.
The garden project has also built community, Halley says.
…On the coast, iorn places like Rigolet, Brace says—an area connected to larger cities by warm-weather ferry service and fair-weather flights. She says that while there is a government subsidy for food, quality goes down as winter comes. Despite best efforts, the weather can destroy fresh, sensitive produce—even exposure between the airport and the store is problematic. “Greens won’t make it, like lettuce—it’s too far, too cold. When I go to the grocery store, even in some of the best times of the year, it’s produce that wouldn’t be left on the shelf here.”
Nevertheless, “prices go up in the winter, but they never seem to get back to the prices before the winter months. It’s just steadily climbing, and jobs are not as plentiful.”
…In communities like Hopedale and Rigolet, the high costs of shipping food have prompted people to consider alternatives old and new: keeping traditional means of hunting and gathering alive while exploring gardening and hydroponics.
…Problems with food availability in Rigolet, combined with traditional views on living off the land, have spurred this involvement. “We have one supplier, one grocery store. In this town there’s no competition,” Michelin says. “The prices are really high. Very often, too, we have low-quality foods, when it comes to produce and frozen meat.”
And with one airline serving the town, sometimes food from afar is just not available, she says. Ships come in the summer—but summer weather can be long delayed. “That hasn’t even started yet, and it’s almost July—it’s a very short shipping season,” she explains.
…The Good Food Box project was born, Brace says, as a way of addressing a quandary particular to coastal Labrador: the only people who can afford grocery store prices are also the only ones who can afford to buy their food in advance at wholesale prices, leaving others to fend for themselves. The Good Food Box project pooled money together, allowing Rigolet residents to bulk order frozen meat and share the discount.
…The economic realities in places like Rigolet help dictate their need for self-sufficiency. In a globalized world of international trade, tiny Rigolet doesn’t exactly fit into grand economic schemes. “One thing about Rigolet, unfortunately, is our lack of economic development—we have none,” Michelin says. “We’re a town that doesn’t export anything, we don’t process anything. So, it’s poor.”
Michelin, who is Inuit, says the people of Rigolet have been living off the land for many years—but increasing modernization has meant increasing prices. Seaworthy watercraft and outboard motors can cost many thousands of dollars. Guns are expensive, ammunition is expensive, snowmobiles are expensive.
…She says she would like to see a shift in political rhetoric around how to respond to food insecurity in places like Newfoundland and Labrador. After hearing a politician promise to fly food via helicopter and plane to Labrador following “storm after storm,” she wondered why politicians haven’t suggested more empowering approaches to the problem.
“I’m thinking, people in Labrador are really smart, and they’ve been hunting and fishing for years,” she says. “Why aren’t we supporting them with a hydroponic green house? We provide employment, they become self-sufficient. We’re flying in food for people when they can grow it here, and it gives them something to do.”
However, she says, approaches have to be practical. Halley cited the infamous case of Newfoundland’s ill-fated cucumber greenhouse. Advanced by former Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Brian Peckford and Philip Sprung’s Enviroponics, the Mount Pearl-based project consumed more than $13 million from taxpayers—and $22 million in total—before Enviroponics went bankrupt and the facility was sold for a dollar. The greenhouse shut down soon afterward. The story is so infamous that CBC Archives wrote about it again last year.
Halley says she remembers the project and its unearthly orange glow, visible from St. John’s at the time. The problem, she says, is that the hydroponic greenhouse wasn’t used to grow produce of local interest. Instead, Peckford proposed that Newfoundland might position itself to dominate the world cucumber market. The plan failed, and cows ate many of the 800,000 cucumbers grown—at a cost of $27.50 per cucumber to taxpayers. The problem, as the CBC reported at the time: Newfoundlanders ate, on average, half a cucumber per capita per year.
‘Nothing’s like it used to be’ – Anglican Journal
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American Farmers Are in Crisis. Here’s Why
In the American imagination, at least, the family farm still exists as it does on holiday greeting cards: as a picturesque, modestly prosperous expanse that wholesomely fills the space between the urban centers where most of us live. But it has been declining for generations, and the closing days of 2019 find small farms pummeled from every side: a trade war, severe weather associated with climate change, tanking commodity prices related to globalization, political polarization, and corporate farming defined not by a silo and a red barn but technology and the efficiencies of scale. It is the worst crisis in decades. Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies were up 12 percent in the Midwest from July of 2018 to June of 2019; they’re up 50 percent in the Northwest. Tens of thousands have simply stopped farming, knowing that reorganization through bankruptcy won’t save them. The nation lost more than 100,000 farms between 2011 and 2018; 12,000 of those between 2017 and 2018 alone.
Farm debt, at $416 billion, is at an all-time high. More than half of all farmers have lost money every year since since 2013, and lost more than $1,644 this year. Farm loan delinquencies are rising.
Suicides in farm communities are happening with alarming frequency. Farmers aren’t the only workers in the American economy being displaced by technology, but when they lose their jobs, they also ejected from their homes and the land that’s been in their family for generations.
…Small farms, defined as those bringing in less than $350,000 a year before expenses, accounted for just a quarter of food production in 2017, down from nearly half in 1991. In the dairy industry, small farms accounted for just 10 percent of production. The disappearance of the small farm would further hasten the decline of rural America, which has been struggling to maintain an economic base for decades.
…After boom years in the beginning of the 21st century, prices for commodities like corn, soybeans, milk, and meat started falling in 2013. The reason for these lowered prices are the twin forces upending much of the American economy: technology and globalization. Technology has made farms more efficient than ever before. But economies of scale meant that most of the benefits accrued to corporate farmers, who built up huge holdings as smaller farmers sold out. Even as four million farms disappeared in the United States between 1948 and 2015, total farm output more than doubled. Globalization brought more farmers into the international market for crops, flooding the market with soybeans and corn and cattle and milk, and with increased supply comes lower prices. Global food production has increased 30 percent over the last decade, according to John Newton, the chief economist of the American Farm Bureau. If that’s a good thing for feeding the planet, it also reduces what comes back to producers, whose costs don’t fall with prices.
…Smaller farms have found it especially hard to adapt to these changes, which they blame on government policy and a lack of antitrust enforcement. The government is on the side of big farms, they say, and is ambivalent about whether small farms can succeed. “Get big or get out,” Earl Butz, Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, infamously told farmers in the 1970s. It’s a sentiment that Sonny Perdue, the agriculture secretary under President Trump, echoed recently. “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out,” Perdue said, at the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin in October. The number of farms with more than 2,000 acres nearly doubled between 1987 and 2012, according to USDA data. The number of farms with 200 to 999 acres fell over that time period by 44 percent.
Many small American farmers are routinely selling their crops for less than it costs to produce them.
…One farmer called Rosmann to say he was considering suicide — floods destroyed the corn he had already harvested and stored in a grain elevator, but neither crop insurance nor flood insurance would cover it, since he had already harvested the crop.
…Rural America has been shrinking for decades, and the Great Recession accelerated that contraction as rural manufacturing jobs disappeared and people moved to cities and suburbs seeking work.
…As farmers sold to bigger operations, the local businesses that were dependent on small farmers went belly-up, too. The place where the Kalbachs buy chemicals is now 75 miles away. Her county’s lone pharmacy closed earlier this year. There is no longer a local place where she can get farm equipment repaired. “All the thousands of farmers that have left the land—all the businesses have gone with them,” she says.
…So have the institutions that make a community. Around 4,400 schools in rural districts closed between 2011 and 2015, the most recent year for which there is data available, according to the National Center for Education Statistics; suburban districts, by contrast, added roughly 4,000 schools over that same time period. In Wisconsin’s dairy country alone, the Antigo School District, in north central Wisconsin, closed three elementary schools this year, and 44 schools have closed since 2018.
…“We have to think about what we really want rural America to look like,” says Jim Goodman, president of the National Family Farm Coalition. “Do we want it to be abandoned small towns and farmers who can’t make a living, and a lot of really big farms that are polluting the groundwater?” (Large farms, which have more animal waste to deal with because of their size, have been found to pollute groundwater and air.)
Most family farmers seem to agree on what led to their plight: government policy. In the years after the New Deal, they say, the United States set a price floor for farmers, essentially ensuring they received a minimum wage for the crops they produced. But the government began rolling back this policy in the 1970s, and now the global market largely determines the price they get for their crops. Big farms can make do with lower prices for crops by increasing their scale; a few cents per gallon of cow’s milk adds up if you have thousands of cows.
…Smaller farmers warn that a country without local farmers can create problems in the food supply chain. If one company is providing all the milk or cheese to an entire region, what happens when that plant gets contaminated or a storm isolates it from the rest of the country?
…Family farmers say concentrating farmland among a few big companies is akin to feudalism, and un-American. It also diverts whatever profits might come from farming to faraway investors, aggravating the economic and geographic divisions that feed the nation’s political divide. “There’s a strong reason to be deeply concerned when instead of having 10 mid-sized dairy farms producing income whose owners spend it in town, you replace that with a large farm owned by a set of investors whose profits go running off to New York and Chicago.”
…Farmers say the best solution is government policy that cracks down on consolidation of the grocery stores and food processing facilities that buy food from farmers. Existing antitrust law would allow the government to prevent big mergers that mean farmers have fewer places to sell their crops and that supplies are more expensive, but those laws go largely unenforced, says Carstensen.
…There were more than 14,000 certified organic farmers in 2016, up 58 percent from 2011. But switching to organic is expensive, and for farmers like the Rieckmanns who are already deeply in debt, not an option. They haven’t gotten a cent of aid from the government, Rieckmann says, since the assistance goes to the farms with the most farmland and animals. [emphasis: peanut gallery]
American Farmers Are in Crisis. Here’s Why | Time
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Hillary Clinton says abuse of female politicians on social media is ‘viral’ – Reuters
Women in the public eye still face scrutiny over their looks and pressure to behave politely and meekly in a way that men do not.
…An international study last year by Atalanta, a social enterprise dedicated to advancing women’s leadership, found female lawmakers were three times more likely than men to receive sexist comments than their male colleagues.
…“There’s almost an ancient DNA imprinting about ‘This is what women are supposed to do and this is what they are supposed to look like’ and you are not supposed to be so pushy and aggressive … it is maddening how much that still operates.”
Hillary Clinton says abuse of female politicians on social media is ‘viral’ – Reuters
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Bernie Sanders isn’t facing enough scrutiny
To be sure, Sanders’ signature idea — Medicare for All — has been dissected and debated. And the staggering total cost and severe political liabilities of Sanders’ full agenda is now beginning to be examined, as my CNN colleague Ronald Brownstein wrote recently.
However, there has been far too little discussion of Sanders’ 50-year record, nor have we seen a real view of how he would defend that record against a Republican onslaught.
He’s been lucky to avoid such an inquiry, because, for whatever reason, the media has discounted his ability to win the nomination. Press scrutiny moves on a sliding scale — the closer you get to the nomination, the more intense the spotlight becomes. And opponents of Sanders have been reluctant to take him on given the intensity of support from his voters and their knowledge of how important those voters will be in the fall.
…Sanders’ support for Fidel Castro came up during a 2016 presidential debate when Hillary Clinton questioned him about remarks he made in a 1984 video in which he said, “Everybody was totally convinced that Castro was the worst guy in the world…They forgot that he educated …kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society.” Although Sanders agreed that Cuba was undemocratic and authoritarian, he seemed to refuse to take back his comments. The 1984 video and his refusal to disavow his comments could be a vulnerability for Sanders in 2020.
In the 1970’s, Sanders called for the abolition of the CIA, reducing the military, and returning to local militias, and the Coast Guard, to defend the homeland. Once in Congress, he called for spending cuts of 50% in the Pentagon’s budget.
Sanders has also made statements that will cause problems with key Democratic constituencies. The allegations of sexual harassment by members of his 2016 campaign team were covered (Sanders said he didn’t know about the allegations during his campaign but apologized), but little attention was paid to an article he wrote in 1969, exploring studies on stress and wondering if there could be a link between what parents taught their daughters about sexual mores and their child’s likelihood of developing breast cancer.
…It’s well-known that Sanders has flipped his position on guns. He now says he supports gun safety, but in Congress, he initially voted against the Brady Bill, which requires prospective handgun buyers to wait up to five business days while a background check is conducted before completing a purchase, and later supported legislation immunizing the gun industry from several types of lawsuits.
Few are aware that before he got to Congress, he was even more radical. In 1972, he backed a political platform’s call for the abolition of all laws that interfere with the constitutional right of citizens to bear arms.
Opinion: Bernie Sanders isn’t facing enough scrutiny – CNN
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Russian documents reveal desire to sow racial discord — and violence — in the U.S.
The documents — communications between associates of Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Kremlin-linked oligarch indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for previous influence operations against the U.S. — laid out a new plot to manipulate and radicalize African Americans. The plans show that Prigozhin’s circle has sought to exploit racial tensions well beyond Russia’s social media and misinformation efforts tied to the 2016 election.
…One document said that President Donald Trump’s election had “deepened conflicts in American society” and suggested that, if successful, the influence project would “undermine the country’s territorial integrity and military and economic potential.”
…The documents contained proposals for several ways to further exacerbate racial discord in the future, including a suggestion to recruit African Americans and transport them to camps in Africa “for combat prep and training in sabotage.” Those recruits would then be sent back to America to foment violence and work to establish a pan-African state in the South, particularly in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.
…The blueprint, entitled “Development Strategy of a Pan-African State on U.S. Territory,” floated the idea of enlisting poor, formerly incarcerated African Americans “who have experience in organized crime groups” as well as members of “radical black movements for participation in civil disobedience actions.”
The goal was to “destabilize the internal situation in the U.S.”
…The Mueller report exposed how Russian trolls, employed by associates of Prigozhin, deliberately inflamed racial tensions by spreading false and incendiary stories to African Americans via social media. Among the objectives was to suppress black turnout in the 2016 U.S. election.
Another of the newly obtained documents is a map of the U.S. overlaid with information about African American population size in seven southern states. Also included are the number of subscribers to websites and social media accounts that were set up by Russian trolls at the IRA to spread race-baiting rhetoric, the latter of which were later removed by the social media companies.
Russian documents reveal desire to sow racial discord — and violence — in the U.S.
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‘Online and vulnerable’: Experts find nearly three dozen U.S. voting systems connected to internet
While the voting machines themselves are not designed to be online, the larger voting systems in many states end up there, putting the voting process at risk.
That team of election security experts say that last summer, they discovered some systems are, in fact, online.
“We found over 35 [voting systems] had been left online and we’re still continuing to find more,”
…The three largest voting manufacturing companies — Election Systems &Software, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic — have acknowledged they all put modems in some of their tabulators and scanners.
…The largest manufacturer of voting machines, ES&S, told NBC News their systems are protected by firewalls and are not on the “public internet.” But both Skoglund and Andrew Appel, a Princeton computer science professor and expert on elections, said such firewalls can and have been breached.
…Earlier this week, Skoglund showed NBC three election systems were still online even after officials had been told they were vulnerable.
…The online systems were found in 11 states, in at least some precincts, as well as in the District of Columbia. The states were: Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, Rhode Island, Illinois, Indiana. Kentucky, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Nebraska and Mississippi.
While the company’s website states that “zero” of its voting tabulators are connected to the internet, ES&S told NBC News 14,000 of their DS200 tabulators with online modems are currently in use around the country.
…“ES&S has repeatedly advertised its DS200 with internal modem — a critical component to ES&S’s voting systems — as being EAC certified when, in fact, it is not,” the letter said.
‘Online and vulnerable’: Experts find nearly three dozen U.S. voting systems connected to internet
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Hackers may have gained ‘almost total control’ of an election server in Georgia, report says
An election security report has revealed evidence of a possible hacking on a Georgia server that …compromised the state’s voting machines in both 2016 and 2018.
The …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.
…“We know there was no way to audit” the results of the previous elections, Ms Marks said. “There was no … attempt at accountability by the secretary of state, and the entire programming of elections was outsourced.”
“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.
…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.
…He reportedly found a vulnerability dubbed “Shellshock” that allowed the server to be compromised in December 2014, as well as a separate, unpatched vulnerability in its Drupal software that could have allowed the hacking to take place prior to the 2016 elections.
Tip ‘o the proverbial iceberg.
Overview and history | The Rollright Stones
Overview and history | The Rollright Stones
It would a crime against culture and history to destroy these for a road.
[ahem]
‘Clog the lines’: Internet trolls deliberately disrupted the Iowa caucuses hotline for reporting results
Users on a politics-focused section of the fringe 4chan message board repeatedly posted the phone number for the Iowa Democratic Party, which was found by a simple Google search, both as screenshots and in plain text, alongside instructions.
…Several officials at caucuses attended by NBC News reporters struggled with lengthy hold times that made it impossible for them to report results.
4chan, which hosts an anonymous and often extremist politics board called /pol/ whose users have largely supported Trump since 2015, is known for extensive online political trolling and targeted harassment campaigns.
On debate nights, 4chan users often direct one another to swarm and manipulate specific online polls on other websites with repeat votes, a practice known as “brigading” in online communities. The polls would then be used by politicians and partisan websites to claim shocking upsets.
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Trump Fans Flooded Iowa Caucus Hotline, Democrats Say
On Thursday morning, the Iowa Democratic Party confirmed it “experienced an unusually high volume of inbound phone calls to its caucus hotline,” which included “supporters of President Trump who called to express their displeasure with the Democratic Party.”
“The unexplained, and at times hostile, calls contributed to the delay in the Iowa Democratic Party’s collection of results, but in no way affected the integrity of information gathered or the accuracy of data sets reported,“ the party statement said.
Trump Fans Flooded Iowa Caucus Hotline, Democrats Say – Bloomberg
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Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained
Apple Inc dropped plans to let iPhone users fully encrypt backups of their devices in the company’s iCloud service after the FBI complained.
…Behind the scenes, Apple has provided the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation with more sweeping help, not related to any specific probe.
…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.
…That person told Reuters the company did not want to risk being attacked by public officials for protecting criminals, sued for moving previously accessible data out of reach of government agencies or used as an excuse for new legislation against encryption.
“They decided they weren’t going to poke the bear anymore,” the person said, referring to Apple’s court battle with the FBI in 2016 over access to an iPhone used by one of the suspects in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.
…The agency relies on hacking software that exploits security flaws to break into a phone. But that method requires direct access to the phone which would ordinarily tip off the user, who is often the subject of the investigation.
…Apple’s iCloud, on the other hand, can be searched in secret. In the first half of last year, the period covered by Apple’s most recent semiannual transparency report on requests for data it receives from government agencies, U.S. authorities armed with regular court papers asked for and obtained full device backups or other iCloud content in 1,568 cases, covering about 6,000 accounts.
The company said it turned over at least some data for 90% of the requests it received. It turns over data more often in response to secret U.S. intelligence court directives, which sought content from more than 18,000 accounts in the first half of 2019, the most recently reported six-month period.
Had it proceeded with its plan, Apple would not have been able to turn over any readable data belonging to users who opted for end-to-end encryption.
Exclusive: Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained – sources – Reuters
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Virginia Declares State of Emergency After Armed Militias Threaten to Storm the Capitol
Law enforcement had intercepted threats and “extremist rhetoric” similar to what was observed prior to the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017. “We will not allow that mayhem and violence to happen here,” he said.
The decision to ban all weapons, including firearms, won’t sit well with the thousands of gun lovers who are expected to descend on Richmond to participate in what was billed as an open-carry affair and an opportunity to flex Second Amendment rights.
“No weapons will be allowed on Capitol grounds,” said Northam, a Democrat. “Everything from sticks and bats to chains and projectiles…. The list also includes firearms. It makes no sense to ban every other weapon but allow firearms when intelligence shows that armed militia groups plan to storm the Capitol.”
Virginia Declares State of Emergency After Armed Militias Threaten to Storm the Capitol – VICE
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Groundbreaking South Carolina Bill: Compensate People for Forcing Them to Give Birth
The bill, SB 928, demands that anti-choice lawmakers in South Carolina who have proposed banning abortion at six weeks into pregnancy put their money where their mouth is: If lawmakers are going to force people to carry their pregnancies to term, and if they are going to deem the development of an unborn embryo as more important than the life and rights of pregnant people, then South Carolina should compensate them for acting as a gestational surrogate for the state of South Carolina.
…just as South Carolina may not constitutionally use a citizen’s rental property without just compensation, it may not constitutionally require a woman to incubate a child without appropriate compensation.”
…The compensation suggested in the legislation includes reasonable living, legal, medical, psychological, and psychiatric expenses that are directly related to prenatal, intrapartal, and postpartal periods. In addition, upon detection of a fetal heartbeat, a pregnant person may claim the fetus as a child for purposes of federal or state income tax credits or deductions.
….Compensation also includes automatic eligibility to participate in a program that would pair a pregnant person with a specially trained nurse to provide home visits from early pregnancy through the child’s second birthday. …Pregnant people would also be automatically eligible for any public assistance like TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), and WIC, and the law would prohibit reducing or suspending those benefits until the child is 18 years old.
…If the pregnant person becomes disabled as the result of carrying the fetus to term, then the state must cover all medical expenses associated with the disability. Similarly, if the child is born with a congenital abnormality or disability, the state must cover all medical expenses associated with that disability for the rest of the child’s life.
Also, South Carolina would be required to cover all costs associated with health, dental, and vision insurance until the child turns 18. And if the biological father of the child is unknown or unable to provide support, then the state must provide child support in the biological father’s stead.
….South Carolina must fully fund a college savings plan for the benefit of the child.
Groundbreaking South Carolina Bill: Compensate People for Forcing Them to Give Birth #ABLC
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Comments From The Peanut Gallery 