position:executive

Blizzard is working on #Mobile titles for all its IPs
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-11-15-blizzard-is-working-on-mobile-titles-for-all-its-ips

“We have many of our best developers now working on new mobile titles,” says executive producer Allen Adham

#Canada registers sixfold increase in US citizens seeking asylum in 2017

Americans were the third largest group seeking asylum, spurred by fears they would be deported by the Trump administration

Tiroude and Gislyne are Haitians by birth and migrants by necessity.

The couple’s 18-month-old daughter, however, was born in Fort Lauderdale, and – as an American by birth – she is part of a growing number of US citizens seeking refuge in Canada.

In 2017, some 2,550 US citizens applied for asylum in Canada – an increase of more than sixfold from 2016 and the largest such number since at least 1994, according to data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

Americans were the third largest contingent of asylum seekers in 2017, after Haitians and Nigerians. The vast majority are children born to Haitian parents, according to experts.
Daughter of Haitians, 10, urges Trump to extend families’ protected status
Read more

“Most of the Americans applying for refugee status are the children of non-residents,” says Stéphane Handfield, a Montreal-based immigration lawyer. “They are US citizens because they were born there, but they come across the border with their parents because they don’t want to be separated.”

Trump has repeatedly said he wants to find a way to end birthright citizenship, although legal scholars say this is impossible.

Tiroude and Gislyne fled Haiti for Brazil in 2014, in search of work and safety after Gislyne was targeted for her advocacy.

Two and a half years later, they headed north after Tiroude lost his job, entering the United States in November 2017 – just as the Trump government announced that it wanted 59,000 Haitians living legally in the US to leave the country.

In May, the couple moved again – this time with a newborn baby – becoming some of the roughly 6,000 Haitian asylum seekers who fled the US for Canada last year.

“We left because President Trump said he wanted to deport people,” said Tiroude, who, like his wife, didn’t want his last name used.

The family flew from Florida to Plattsburgh, New York, and crossed into Canada by way of Roxham Road in Quebec, a remote section of the border which has become a well-trodden path for asylum seekers.

Because they crossed the border “irregularly” they were quickly arrested. They claimed asylum and were eventually released to await their hearing in front of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board.
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They chose their destination largely because of a tweet by Justin Trudeau welcoming to Canada “those fleeing persecution, terror and war” – which came just as Trump made his first attempt to bar refugees from majority Muslim countries.
Is this a Muslim ban? Trump’s executive order explained
Read more

Tiroude and Gislyne originally fled Haiti because Gislyne had been targeted by political rivals for her advocacy work. “If I go back to Haiti, I die. It’s that simple,” she said.

But their odds aren’t good; last year, only about one in four Haitian asylum applicants were successful.

They would be compelled to return to an unstable country still reeling from the 2010 earthquake and near-chronic political unrest. For their two children – their son was born in October – Haiti is a foreign country.

“Going to Haiti as a parent is dangerous. For my kids it’s worse because they don’t know it. They won’t know how to speak Creole,” Tiroude said. “We’re very pessimistic, because they’re starting to deport people.”

Since Trudeau’s tweet, his government’s welcome for asylum seekers has cooled notably, with Ralph Goodale, the country’s public safety minister, saying that there was no “free ticket” into Canada.

Canada’s border agency hopes to increase deportations of failed refugee claimants by up to 35%, according to a recent investigation by the CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster.

Meanwhile, Trudeau’s Liberal government – under increasing political pressure over immigration – has dispatched officials to Haiti and Nigeria in an attempt to convince would-be asylum seekers to stay put.

Tiroude said he was aware of the backlash against migrants, though he is facing bigger issues. His immigration hearing was recently postponed for a second time, leaving him and his family in limbo once again. “We are pessimists. We don’t know when our turn will be. We are waiting. We hope it works,” he said.

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/6a905f0a1203d8866b1b5857247491807ff5e8ac/0_277_4266_2560/master/4266.jpg?width=620&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=8b64bf816518e9fb8e0ce6d93839d8c3#.jpg

Former Gameloft exec joins Rovio leadership team
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-11-14-former-gameloft-exec-joins-rovio-leadership-team

Alexandre Pelletier-Normand appointed executive vice president of the games business unit

#Jobs

Trump border wall construction underway in #Chihuahuita in Downtown #El_Paso

Construction of the border wall in the Chihuahuita neighborhood of Downtown El Paso continued Wednesday beneath the Stanton Street International Bridge. The U.S. Border Patrol announced Friday that the new wall would replace existing fencing south of Downtown El Paso and that construction would begin Saturday as part of President Donald Trump’s executive order authorizing construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
The wall starts in Chihuahuita and continues east for four miles. Chihuahuita is El Paso’s oldest neighborhood, with about 100 people currently living in the area. The southern boundary of the neighborhood is the border fence separating El Paso from #Juárez.

The existing fence will be removed, and an 18-foot-high steel bollard wall will be constructed in its place. The construction project is expected to be completed in late April. The estimated cost for the project is $22 million.

https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2018/09/26/PTX1/c8b43ff6-2858-4ece-9796-d9ebb1e2d49f-8_Border_wall_construction_has_begun_in_El_Paso_beneath_the_Stanton_Street_International_Bridge_in_downtown_El_Paso._The_wall_will_be_built_along_four_miles_of_the_border_between_El_Paso_and_Juarez._.jpg?width=1080&quality=50#.jpg

Europe is using smartphone data as a weapon to deport refugees

European leaders need to bring immigration numbers down, and #metadata on smartphones could be just what they need to start sending migrants back.

Smartphones have helped tens of thousands of migrants travel to Europe. A phone means you can stay in touch with your family – or with people smugglers. On the road, you can check Facebook groups that warn of border closures, policy changes or scams to watch out for. Advice on how to avoid border police spreads via WhatsApp.

Now, governments are using migrants’ smartphones to deport them.

Across the continent, migrants are being confronted by a booming mobile forensics industry that specialises in extracting a smartphone’s messages, location history, and even #WhatsApp data. That information can potentially be turned against the phone owners themselves.

In 2017 both Germany and Denmark expanded laws that enabled immigration officials to extract data from asylum seekers’ phones. Similar legislation has been proposed in Belgium and Austria, while the UK and Norway have been searching asylum seekers’ devices for years.

Following right-wing gains across the EU, beleaguered governments are scrambling to bring immigration numbers down. Tackling fraudulent asylum applications seems like an easy way to do that. As European leaders met in Brussels last week to thrash out a new, tougher framework to manage migration —which nevertheless seems insufficient to placate Angela Merkel’s critics in Germany— immigration agencies across Europe are showing new enthusiasm for laws and software that enable phone data to be used in deportation cases.

Admittedly, some refugees do lie on their asylum applications. Omar – not his real name – certainly did. He travelled to Germany via Greece. Even for Syrians like him there were few legal alternatives into the EU. But his route meant he could face deportation under the EU’s Dublin regulation, which dictates that asylum seekers must claim refugee status in the first EU country they arrive in. For Omar, that would mean settling in Greece – hardly an attractive destination considering its high unemployment and stretched social services.

Last year, more than 7,000 people were deported from Germany according to the Dublin regulation. If Omar’s phone were searched, he could have become one of them, as his location history would have revealed his route through Europe, including his arrival in Greece.

But before his asylum interview, he met Lena – also not her real name. A refugee advocate and businesswoman, Lena had read about Germany’s new surveillance laws. She encouraged Omar to throw his phone away and tell immigration officials it had been stolen in the refugee camp where he was staying. “This camp was well-known for crime,” says Lena, “so the story seemed believable.” His application is still pending.

Omar is not the only asylum seeker to hide phone data from state officials. When sociology professor Marie Gillespie researched phone use among migrants travelling to Europe in 2016, she encountered widespread fear of mobile phone surveillance. “Mobile phones were facilitators and enablers of their journeys, but they also posed a threat,” she says. In response, she saw migrants who kept up to 13 different #SIM cards, hiding them in different parts of their bodies as they travelled.

This could become a problem for immigration officials, who are increasingly using mobile phones to verify migrants’ identities, and ascertain whether they qualify for asylum. (That is: whether they are fleeing countries where they risk facing violence or persecution.) In Germany, only 40 per cent of asylum applicants in 2016 could provide official identification documents. In their absence, the nationalities of the other 60 per cent were verified through a mixture of language analysis — using human translators and computers to confirm whether their accent is authentic — and mobile phone data.

Over the six months after Germany’s phone search law came into force, immigration officials searched 8,000 phones. If they doubted an asylum seeker’s story, they would extract their phone’s metadata – digital information that can reveal the user’s language settings and the locations where they made calls or took pictures.

To do this, German authorities are using a computer programme, called Atos, that combines technology made by two mobile forensic companies – T3K and MSAB. It takes just a few minutes to download metadata. “The analysis of mobile phone data is never the sole basis on which a decision about the application for asylum is made,” says a spokesperson for BAMF, Germany’s immigration agency. But they do use the data to look for inconsistencies in an applicant’s story. If a person says they were in Turkey in September, for example, but phone data shows they were actually in Syria, they can see more investigation is needed.

Denmark is taking this a step further, by asking migrants for their Facebook passwords. Refugee groups note how the platform is being used more and more to verify an asylum seeker’s identity.

It recently happened to Assem, a 36-year-old refugee from Syria. Five minutes on his public Facebook profile will tell you two things about him: first, he supports a revolution against Syria’s Assad regime and, second, he is a devoted fan of Barcelona football club. When Danish immigration officials asked him for his password, he gave it to them willingly. “At that time, I didn’t care what they were doing. I just wanted to leave the asylum center,” he says. While Assem was not happy about the request, he now has refugee status.

The Danish immigration agency confirmed they do ask asylum applicants to see their Facebook profiles. While it is not standard procedure, it can be used if a caseworker feels they need more information. If the applicant refused their consent, they would tell them they are obliged under Danish law. Right now, they only use Facebook – not Instagram or other social platforms.

Across the EU, rights groups and opposition parties have questioned whether these searches are constitutional, raising concerns over their infringement of privacy and the effect of searching migrants like criminals.

“In my view, it’s a violation of ethics on privacy to ask for a password to Facebook or open somebody’s mobile phone,” says Michala Clante Bendixen of Denmark’s Refugees Welcome movement. “For an asylum seeker, this is often the only piece of personal and private space he or she has left.”

Information sourced from phones and social media offers an alternative reality that can compete with an asylum seeker’s own testimony. “They’re holding the phone to be a stronger testament to their history than what the person is ready to disclose,” says Gus Hosein, executive director of Privacy International. “That’s unprecedented.”
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Privacy campaigners note how digital information might not reflect a person’s character accurately. “Because there is so much data on a person’s phone, you can make quite sweeping judgements that might not necessarily be true,” says Christopher Weatherhead, technologist at Privacy International.

Bendixen cites the case of one man whose asylum application was rejected after Danish authorities examined his phone and saw his Facebook account had left comments during a time he said he was in prison. He explained that his brother also had access to his account, but the authorities did not believe him; he is currently waiting for appeal.

A spokesperson for the UK’s Home Office told me they don’t check the social media of asylum seekers unless they are suspected of a crime. Nonetheless, British lawyers and social workers have reported that social media searches do take place, although it is unclear whether they reflect official policy. The Home Office did not respond to requests for clarification on that matter.

Privacy International has investigated the UK police’s ability to search phones, indicating that immigration officials could possess similar powers. “What surprised us was the level of detail of these phone searches. Police could access information even you don’t have access to, such as deleted messages,” Weatherhead says.

His team found that British police are aided by Israeli mobile forensic company Cellebrite. Using their software, officials can access search history, including deleted browsing history. It can also extract WhatsApp messages from some Android phones.

There is a crippling irony that the smartphone, for so long a tool of liberation, has become a digital Judas. If you had stood in Athens’ Victoria Square in 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis, you would have noticed the “smartphone stoop”: hundreds of Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghans standing or sitting about this sun-baked patch of grass and concrete, were bending their heads, looking into their phones.

The smartphone has become the essential accessory for modern migration. Travelling to Europe as an asylum seeker is expensive. People who can’t afford phones typically can’t afford the journey either. Phones became a constant feature along the route to Northern Europe: young men would line the pavements outside reception centres in Berlin, hunched over their screens. In Calais, groups would crowd around charging points. In 2016, the UN refugee agency reported that phones were so important to migrants moving across Europe, that they were spending up to one third of their income on phone credit.

Now, migrants are being forced to confront a more dangerous reality, as governments worldwide expand their abilities to search asylum seekers’ phones. While European countries were relaxing their laws on metadata search, last year US immigration spent $2.2 million on phone hacking software. But asylum seekers too are changing their behaviour as they become more aware that the smartphone, the very device that has bought them so much freedom, could be the very thing used to unravel their hope of a new life.

►https://www.wired.co.uk/article/europe-immigration-refugees-smartphone-metadata-deportations
#smartphone #smartphones #données #big_data #expulsions #Allemagne #Danemark #renvois #carte_SIM #Belgique #Autriche

Rainforest destruction from gold mining hits all-time high in Peru
▻https://phys.org/news/2018-11-rainforest-destruction-gold-all-time-high.html

https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/gfx/news/2018/rainforestde.jpg

That’s an area larger than San Francisco and 30 percent more than previously reported.

“The scale of the deforestation is really shocking,” said Luis Fernandez, executive director of CINCIA and research associate professor in the department of biology.

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTUhUZ49v3g

5 Reasons We Need Gender Conscious Responses to Climate Change

Not all climate change victims are created equal. There are communities of society that experience climate change more intensely and destructively than the rest, and it’s not based solely on location.

People of color, poor people, and women are most adversely affected by climate change. They are more likely to be negatively impacted by climate change than men, especially women in developing countries and the global south.

Why? Well, in short, because of the same gender inequality that already persists in our societies. like education and employment discrimination. Climate change only worsens what is already happening.

The burdens of climate change (like displacement, agricultural, and economic loss) disproportionately impact women from low-income communities, particularly in the Global South and Indigenous communities, more than in than in wealthy communities and the western world.

Women from these regions often deal with lacking infrastructure and are more dependent on natural resources in everyday life. And, though studies show that women are most impacted, we are often not involved in the policy and decision making processes for climate change initiatives and solutions.

One of the big takeaways from this year’s UN Climate Summit was the importance of promoting gender equality and women’s leadership in climate policy. One woman in attendance summed it up: “There cannot be climate justice without gender justice.”

Women are as much a part of the solution for climate change impacts as they are the primary victims, but this fact is not being recognized enough. The reality that women are more intensely impacted also means they deserve to be leaders in the climate change movement.

To be sure, our current responses to climate change do not just fail women; they also do not do enough to include the full spectrum of people and genders impacted by the inequalities and impacts of climate change.

Women, more so than their male counterparts, know how dire these environmental changes are firsthand and deserve to be equal stakeholders at every level of our climate movement from grassroots to policy and politics.

Here are 5 reasons we need gender conscious responses to climate change:
1. First of all, not everyone identifies as a man or a woman.

Gender is fluid and goes far beyond your sex. The same inequalities that exist in our greater society — such as those placed on non-binary folks who do not identify as man or woman — also exist in the climate change movements.

Entire communities’ climate experiences, issues, and potential solutions are being routinely ignored.

Relief efforts during natural disasters, which are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change, regularly exclude or fall short of adequately assessing, informing, and aiding queer and trans communities.

Discrimination and stigma leave LGBTQ/GNC peoples especially vulnerable to climate-related displacement and homelessness because emergency shelters are not always equipped to aid their needs. Even worse, this stigma often plays out in how our media rarely covers the experiences and stories of LGBTQ disaster victims.

A more expansive, gender-conscious perspective of climate change would urge organizations — from grassroots to regulatory — to take into account the importance of including all identities when approaching the extent of climate changes impacts and possible resolutions.

“The [climate policy and regulatory] spaces are historically spaces for men,” said Laura Cooper Hall, a former gender and finance Fellow at Women’s Environment & Development Organization (WEDO).

“I think in terms of a real transformative future there really needs for all perspectives and identities need to be included explicitly.”
2. Being the most impacted, women have firsthand experiences that can lead to creative and practical solutions.

Globally, women make up 80% of the world’s climate refugees. They’re 45-80% of the agricultural workforce in rural areas and are responsible (along with girls) for collecting nearly two-thirds of the household water in developing countries.

When natural disasters like hurricanes, cyclones, or droughts hit, women around the world experience the loss in a very real way. For that same reason, they, better than anyone else, will know which solutions will work best.

Better yet, their ideas are directly connected to real-life situations and remedies.

“The thing that really inspires me is so many of the women we work with on the frontlines, they always say we don’t want to be seen as victims,” said Osprey Orielle Lake, Founder and Executive Director of WECAN. “Because we’re also the solutions.”
3. Right now, we don’t have consistent leadership that reflects people of all genders.

Only recently have women increasingly become a part of the mainstream discussion about how best to tackle these climate change. But even in cases when a ciswomen/man gender balance is accomplished, it is rarely consistently maintained, and for trans and gender non-conforming peoples it’s nearly non-existent.

Between 2013 and 2016, six ciswomen delegates were elected as chairs (or co-chairs) at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, but this year only three ciswomen filled those positions, according to a report by the on their annual conference.

You’d be hard-pressed to find any formal LGBTQ/GNC organizations or representation at conferences like the Framework Convention or the UN Climate Talks.

Diverse and varied perspectives and experiences must be a critical and necessary part of any and all climate talks — not just when the world (or Twitter) is watching, but always.
4. Climate change magnifies existing inequalities — including gender inequality.

“Reinforced gender inequality really reduces women’s physical and economic mobility, their voice, their opportunity in many places,” said Lake. “That makes them a lot more vulnerable to environmental stress.”

All those same systems of inequality that function in greater society are at work in the climate change movement.

No, climate cannot be racist or sexist but people can and people — whether in our federal and local government, climate organizations, or world regulatory organizations — decide our climate policy, responses, and solutions.

“Climate change and gender justice, because of its personal effect on people and because people have personal identities, you can’t disconnect them,” said Cooper Hall.

When we solve gender inequality and have achieved true gender justice, then we can will have more well-rounded and genuinely equitable responses to climate change — starting with diverse representation at Climate Change conferences and talks and leading to more specific bottom-up initiatives that put community first and corporations last (Think: The Tiny House Warriors in Canada or low-cost reflective paint by Mahila Housing Trust used to combat heat waves in India)
5. Considering gender as a climate change factor benefits everything!

Keeping gender equality in mind when planning for and implementing our climate future is valuable to everyone, so why wouldn’t we want that?

“It’s a win-win for everyone,” said Atti Worku, founder of Seeds of Africa, a New York-based nonprofit working toward equality in education for children and communities in Ethiopia (hit particularly hard by climate change related droughts) and Africa. “It’s not only because it’s a good thing to include women or whatever, it’s also just beneficial to have women involved.”

More diverse leadership means more diverse ideas and creative solutions. It also means more minds working together to solve our climate challenges.

“Environmental sustainability and gender equality are interdependent,” said Worku. “If you educate girls, for example, then we’re addressing a future where women and girls will be scientists. They will be in government. They will be making decisions that are for the needs of everyone.”

I didn’t always see my gender as being connected to the impacts of our climate. I’ve not felt any more connected to nature than the next person.

I don’t live in a flood zone and though I am a Black woman — and, as such, more likely to be disproportionately impacted — I have been lucky enough to not have had a physical experience with a hurricane, wildfire, or other climate change-related disaster.

I initially drew the connection quite randomly on the subway. I saw an ad with a poem about the Christian Bible’s Eve having named all the animals in nature.

“If Eve were here now, she’d probably be a badass environmental activist or climate change policy-maker,” I thought to myself. “But she’d be terribly overqualified and definitely underpaid.”

I immediately Googled “women in climate change” like the complete nerd that I am and found myself in a wormhole of women fighting for a seat at the table in an uncharted climate future.

They aren’t asking for anything grand. Only that all people — of every gender and identity — be included in how we respond to climate change, how we go about making our future.

I don’t think that’s too much to ask, do you?

▻https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/5-reasons-we-need-gender-conscious-responses-to-climate-change
#genre #changement_climatique #climat #pauvres #pauvreté #inégalités

From refugees to entrepreneurs: How one family started over

With just 30 days notice, the Rawas family was plucked from their temporary home in Jordan, where they’d fled the Syrian civil war, and resettled in Oakland. As refugees, they knew no one, had no job prospects and didn’t speak a word of English.

Three years later, Mohammed Aref Rawas, Rawaa Kasedah and their four children are running a budding catering business that serves authentic Syrian food such as smoked basmati rice, falafel and fattoush salad. They’ve hired their first employee. Their clients include big tech companies. And the days when starting over seemed impossible are far behind them.

They are among a large population of refugees who, after fleeing a homeland overrun by violence and political turmoil, started a business in the U.S., integrating quickly into the economy and life of a country that gave them a second chance. The family’s entrepreneurial approach is common among immigrants, studies show.

An estimated 11 percent of all Syrian immigrants in the labor force are business owners — nearly four times the rate of U.S.-born business owners, according to a study by the New York-based Fiscal Policy Institute and the Center for American Progress. A significant part of that success has been the ability to master the English language, the report said.

Meanwhile, a 2016 study by the Institute that followed Bosnian, Burmese, Hmong and Somali refugees nationwide found that they too moved up the occupational ladder and started businesses after settling in the U.S. Thirty one out of every 1,000 Bosnian refugees in the labor force are business owners, compared with 26 out of every 1,000 Burmese, 22 out of 1,000 Hmong and 15 out of every 1,000 Somalis, the study found.

“There’s a hunger for dignified work,” said Dr. Thane Kreiner, executive director of the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University. Kreiner launched an accelerator program known as Social Entrepreneurship at the Margins, which helps businesses and organizations around the world run by refugees, migrants or victims of human trafficking. “There’s this element of launching businesses, but also of integrating with the new host community so the refugees become part of the community rather than the ‘other.’”

The Rawas family started Old Damascus Fare casually, by happenstance last year though the family has entrepreneurship in their blood. Rawas owned a successful clothing factory in Syria, where he oversaw about 50 employees. The family lived comfortably in a suburb in their native Damascus. But increasing gunfire, kidnappings and the presence of military groups forced them to leave, and their temporary escape to Jordan in 2012 soon became permanent.

More than 500,000 Syrians have died and nearly 6 million have fled during a civil war that began seven years ago with an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. Since the Trump administration’s ban on travel from seven Muslim nations, including Syria, only a handful of Syrian refugees have been resettled in California in the past fiscal year.

As the Rawas family settled into the Bay Area, new friends and acquaintances in the Arab community asked Kasedah to cater birthday parties and other events. By then, the family had noticed the absence of authentic Syrian food, even in Oakland’s diverse neighborhoods. Soon they were catering events for local tech companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

“We got to the point where we realized it’s not only about food,” said Batool Rawoas, one of the couple’s daughters. “We are making new friends, we are hearing about new opportunities. It’s a way to share our culture with the people here.”

They’re a powerful example of the American dream, said David Miliband, a former British foreign secretary and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, which resettled the Rawas family in 2015. “They show that these are people who want to work and not be reliant on welfare,” he said.

Miliband visited the family recently at their catering kiosk on the UC Berkeley campus before he gave a speech, ordering the falafel sandwich and munching on appetizers that the family excitedly prepared for him. Because refugees like the Rawas’ often have to reinvent their lives, he said, that makes them resilient entrepreneurs.

“In a way, being a refugee, having to flee for your life, having to figure out who to trust, having to figure out new ways of survival … there could hardly be a more effective job training program,” he said. “Those qualities of cooperation, determination, courage, trust are important for any entrepreneur. I don’t want to trivialize it, but it makes the point.”

The family admits they’re still struggling. Their expenses regularly exceed their income, and they’re overwhelmed by the painstaking details of operating a business.

“The main challenge for any refugee family is navigating how to survive in the Bay Area because it’s so expensive,” said Rawoas, who is attending community college and hopes to transfer to a four-year university to study psychology and public health. “We lived in Syria, we were from the middle class and we had a very comfortable life. We owned our own house, our own land.”

“But we’re hoping, in the future, this will be a good thing to support us financially,” she added.

Their next goal: to own a restaurant.

https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/SJM-L-REFUGEEBIZ-10XX-1.jpg?w=863#.jpg

Brazil new President will open Amazon indigenous reserves to mining and farming

Indigenous People Bolsonaro has vowed that no more indigenous reserves will be demarcated and existing reserves will be opened up to mining, raising the alarm among indigenous leaders. “We are in a state of alert,” said Beto Marubo, an indigenous leader from the Javari Valley reserve.

Dinamam Tuxá, the executive coordinator of the Indigenous People of Brazil Liaison, said indigenous people did not want mining and farming on their reserves, which are some of the best protected areas in the Amazon. “He does not respect the indigenous peoples’ traditions” he said.

The Amazon and the environment Bolsonaro campaigned on a pledge to combine Brazil’s environment ministry with the agriculture ministry – under control of allies from the agribusiness lobby. He has attacked environmental agencies for running a “fines industry” and argued for simplifying environmental licences for development projects. His chief of staff, Onyx Lorenzoni, and other allies have challenged global warming science.

“He intends that Amazon stays Brazilian and the source of our progress and our riches,” said Ribeiro Souto in an interview. Ferreira has also said Bolsonaro wants to restart discussions over controversial hydroelectric dams in the Amazon, which were stalled over environmental concerns.

Bolsonaro’s announcement last week that he would no longer seek to withdraw Brazil from the Paris climate agreement has done little to assuage environmentalists’ fears.

▻http://www.whitewolfpack.com/2018/10/brazil-new-president-will-open-amazon.html
#réserves #Amazonie #Brésil #extractivisme #mines #agriculture #forêt #déforestation (probablement pour amener ENFIN la #modernité et le #progrès, n’est-ce pas ?) #aires_protégées #peuples_autochtones #barrages_hydroélectriques

Executive accused of harassment at Alphabet ’X’ unit is out
▻https://www.axios.com/executive-accused-of-harassment-at-alphabet-x-unit-is-out-6f583d1e-91e3-4a8b-

Rich DeVaul, a director at X, the moonshot unit of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has left the company following reports of sexual harassment. DeVaul left the company earlier today, according to a source familiar with the matter, and did not receive an exit package. Why it matters : Google has come under fire for paying large severance packages or continuing to employ those found to have engaged in improper conduct. According to a blockbuster New York Times story on Google and sexual (...)

#Alphabet #Google #harcèlement

https://images.axios.com/W_hCIcKUBIo9HrBnaXScWhD2jqM=/0x0:2434x1369/1920x1080/2018/10/30/1540941145361.png

The three types of WhatsApp users getting Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro elected | World news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/25/brazil-president-jair-bolsonaro-whatsapp-fake-news

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7945708288dfb71c83baacccb7f9c817f534d1cd/0_94_3500_2101/master/3500.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&s=03f171368aa290bd4d5e32e821fe4d36

If the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s charge to the White House were jet-propelled by Facebook, the rise of Brazil’s likely next president, the far-right firebrand Jair Bolsonaro, owes much to WhatsApp.

The Facebook-owned messaging app is wildly popular in Brazil, with about 120 million active users, and has proved to be the ideal tool for mobilizing political support – but also for spreading fake news.

To understand the motivations, hopes and fears of Bolsonaro’s tens of millions of supporters I joined four pro-Bolsonaro WhatsApp groups.

After four months of receiving an average of 1,000 messages per group, per day, this is what I found:

There are three key clusters of members, who I classified as Ordinary Brazilians, Bolsominions, and Influencers.

They use sophisticated image and video editing software to create convincing and emotionally engaging digital content. They are smart and know how to manipulate content into memes and short texts that go viral.

They work fast to undermine any person or news outlet that criticizes Bolsonaro. For example, after the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s described some of Bolsonaro’s comments as “extremely unpleasant”, the Influencers quickly published a meme accusing her of being a communist.

Some of the fake news stories are simply astonishing. A group of “movers and shakers” created a bogus flyer claim that Bolsonaro’s leftist rival Fernando Haddad, planned to sign an executive order allowing men to have sex with 12-year-olds.

During the first round of votes they repeatedly circulated fake videos that showed malfunctioning electronic voting machines in order to reinforce the idea that the elections were rigged.

These three groups have different roles, but they have a lot in common: they share a total disbelief in Brazil’s representative democracy and have concluded that the system only serves those at the top.

Despite their support for the idea of military intervention, they don’t want a new dictatorship, arguing instead that Brazil needs someone to end the corruption that has benefited politicians of both the left and the right – and devastated the country’s economy.

#Whatsapp #Brésil #Infox

Tales From The Hood 2 (2018)
▻http://www.vumoo.biz/5851-tales-from-the-hood-2-2018.html

https://www.filmze-streamiz.org/images/media/Tales%20from%20the%20Hood%202%20(2018).jpg

Horror is back in the hood! The sequel to the ground-breaking original film Tales From the Hood reunites Executive Producer Spike Lee (Honorary Academy Award® winner) and Writers/Directors/Producers Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott for an all-new gripping, horrifying and oftentimes devilishly comical anthology. Keith David stars as a contemporary Mr. Simms to tell bloodcurdling stories about lust, greed, pride and politics through tales with demonic dolls, possessed psychics, vengeful vixens and historical ghosts. Mr. Simms’s haunting stories will make you laugh...while you scream.

#movies,_Horror,_USA,_123movies,_putlocker,_2018,_m4ufree

The “Messy Middle” of Big Companies
▻https://hackernoon.com/the-messy-middle-of-big-companies-6891a7f1c5c?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*rUpTr26y2nHEDd8J6jGaqg.jpeg

By Micah Rosenbloom, Managing PartnerI recently had the opportunity to interview Scott Belsky about his new book, The Messy Middle. It’s an outstanding handbook for founders and #startup employees to navigate the challenges of building something from nothing. But in addition to being a successful startup founder and seed investor, Scott is also an executive at Adobe, a 36-year-old software giant with 18,000 employees and a $120B market cap, and it turns out the principles from his book apply in that context as well. During the Q&A of our book launch event, a few big company employees asked interesting questions, and we thought this lightly-edited transcript might be of use to folks trying to find their way in a FAANG company.How can experience at a big company help an (...)

#technology #business #entrepreneurship #venture-capital

The Growth of Sinclair’s Conservative Media Empire | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/the-growth-of-sinclairs-conservative-media-empire

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5bbe3918879c932d31ea7b06/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/181022_r33045.jpg

Sinclair is the largest owner of television stations in the United States, with a hundred and ninety-two stations in eighty-nine markets. It reaches thirty-nine per cent of American viewers. The company’s executive chairman, David D. Smith, is a conservative whose views combine a suspicion of government, an aversion to political correctness, and strong libertarian leanings. Smith, who is sixty-eight, has a thick neck, deep under-eye bags, and a head of silvery hair. He is an enthusiast of fine food and has owned farm-to-table restaurants in Harbor East, an upscale neighborhood in Baltimore. An ardent supporter of Donald Trump, he has not been shy about using his stations to advance his political ideology. Sinclair employees say that the company orders them to air biased political segments produced by the corporate news division, including editorials by the conservative commentator Mark Hyman, and that it feeds interviewers questions intended to favor Republicans.

In some cases, anchors have been compelled to read from scripts prepared by Sinclair. In April, 2018, dozens of newscasters across the country parroted Trump’s invectives about “fake news,” saying, “Some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.” In response, Dan Rather, the former anchor of “CBS Evening News,” wrote, on Twitter, “News anchors looking into camera and reading a script handed down by a corporate overlord, words meant to obscure the truth not elucidate it, isn’t journalism. It’s propaganda. It’s Orwellian. A slippery slope to how despots wrest power, silence dissent, and oppress the masses.”

It’s unclear whether Sinclair is attempting to influence the politics of its viewers or simply appealing to positions that viewers may already have—or both. Andrew Schwartzman, a telecommunications lecturer at Georgetown Law School, told me, “I don’t know where their personal philosophy ends and their business goals begin. They’re not the Koch brothers, but they reflect a deep-seated conservatism and generations of libertarian philosophy that also happen to help their business.”

Sinclair has even greater ambitions for expansion. In May, 2017, the company announced a proposed $3.9-billion merger between Sinclair and Tribune Media Company, which owns forty-two television stations. The merger would make Sinclair far larger than any other broadcaster in the country, with stations beaming into seventy per cent of American households. The proposal alarmed regulatory and free-speech experts. Michael Copps, a former official at the Federal Communications Commission, told me, “One of the goals of the First Amendment is to make sure the American people have the news and information they need to make intelligent decisions about our democracy, and I think we’re pretty close to a situation where the population lacks the ability to do that. That’s the whole premise of self-government.” He went on, “There are a lot of problems facing our country, but I don’t know one as important as this. When you start dismantling our news-and-information infrastructure, that’s poison to self-government and poison to democracy.”

In subsequent years, Smith took measures to deepen Sinclair’s influence among policymakers, apparently recognizing that the company’s profits were dependent upon regulatory decisions made in Washington. One of Smith’s first notable forays into politics was his support for Robert Ehrlich, Jr., a Republican congressman who represented Maryland from 1995 until 2003. Sinclair became a top donor to Ehrlich and, in 2001, Ehrlich sent the first of several letters on Sinclair’s behalf to Michael Powell, who had recently become the chair of the F.C.C. The commission was investigating a request from Sinclair to buy a new group of stations, and Ehrlich protested the “unnecessary delays on pending applications.” The F.C.C.’s assistant general counsel responded that Ehrlich’s communication had violated procedural rules. Ehrlich sent another message, alleging that the delays were politically motivated and threatening to “call for a congressional investigation into this matter.” He added, “Knowing that you have served as Chairman for a few short months, we would prefer to give you an opportunity to address these concerns.” The proposed acquisitions were approved.

A former general-assignment reporter at the station, Jonathan Beaton, told me, “Almost immediately, I could tell it was a very corrupt culture, where you knew from top down there were certain stories you weren’t going to cover. They wanted you to keep your head down and not upset the fruit basket. I’m a Republican, and I was still appalled by what I saw at Sinclair.” Beaton characterized the man-on-the-street segments as “Don’t forget to grab some random poor soul on the street and shove a microphone in their face and talk about what the Democrats have done wrong.” He said that reporters generally complied because of an atmosphere of “intimidation and fear.”

After Trump’s victory, it looked as though Sinclair’s investment in the candidate would pay off. In January, 2017, Trump appointed Ajit Pai, a vocal proponent of media deregulation, to be the chair of the F.C.C. Pai, formerly an associate general counsel at Verizon and an aide to Senators Jeff Sessions and Sam Brownback, was exactly the sort of commission head that Sinclair had been hoping for. He believed that competition from technology companies such as Google had made many government restrictions on traditional media irrelevant—an argument that echoed Smith’s views on ownership caps and other regulations. Sinclair executives quickly tried to cultivate a relationship with Pai; shortly after the election, he addressed a gathering of Sinclair managers at the Four Seasons in Baltimore. He also met with David Smith and Sinclair’s C.E.O., Christopher Ripley, the day before Trump’s Inauguration.

It’s not unusual for business executives to meet with the chair of the F.C.C., but Pai soon announced a series of policy changes that seemed designed to help Sinclair. The first was the reinstatement of the ultrahigh-frequency discount, an arcane rule that digital technology had rendered obsolete. The move served no practical purpose, but it freed Sinclair to acquire many more stations without bumping up against the national cap.

The F.C.C. soon made other regulatory modifications that were helpful to Sinclair. It eliminated a rule requiring television stations to maintain at least one local studio in licensed markets, essentially legitimatizing Sinclair’s centralized news model. Perhaps most perniciously, Pai took steps toward approving a new broadcast-transmission standard called Next Gen TV, which would require all consumers in the U.S. to purchase new televisions or converter devices. A subsidiary of Sinclair owns six patents necessary for the new standard, which could mean billions of dollars in earnings for the company. Jessica Rosenworcel, the sole Democratic commissioner at the F.C.C., told me, “It’s striking that all of our media policy decisions seem almost custom-built for this one company. Something is wrong.” Rosenworcel acknowledged that many F.C.C. policies need to be modernized, but, she said, “broadcasting is unique. It uses the public airwaves, it’s a public trust.” She added, “I don’t think those ideas are retrograde. They are values we should sustain.”

The F.C.C. and the D.O.J. both warned Sinclair about the dummy divestitures, insisting that the company find independent owners in ten problematic markets. According to a lawsuit later filed by Tribune, instead of taking steps to appease regulators, Sinclair executives “antagonized DOJ and FCC staff” by acting “confrontational” and “belittling.” The company offered to make sales in only four of the markets, and told the Justice Department that it would have to litigate for any further concessions. One Sinclair lawyer told government representatives, “Sue me.” There was no tactical reason for Sinclair to take such a combative and self-sabotaging stance. Instead, the episode seemed to reflect how Trump’s own corruption and conflicts of interest have filtered into the business community. One industry expert who followed the proceedings closely told me that the company clearly “felt that, with the President behind them, why would the commission deny them anything?

Then, in April, the Web site Deadspin edited the broadcasts of Sinclair anchors reciting the script about fake news into one terrifying montage, with a tapestry of anchors in different cities speaking in unison. The video ignited public outrage, and Trump tweeted a defense of Sinclair, calling it “far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke.” (In a statement, a spokesperson for Sinclair said, “This message was not presented as news and was not intended to be political—there was no mention of President Trump, political parties, policy issues, etc. It was a business objective centered on attracting more viewers.”)

#Médias #Concentration #Dérégulation #Etats-Unis #Sinclair

The mad, twisted tale of the electric scooter craze
▻https://www.cnet.com/news/the-mad-tale-of-the-electric-scooter-craze-with-bird-lime-and-spin-in-san-fran

https://cnet3.cbsistatic.com/img/519Jm5ueiLs356y73ifHAGzGylk=/970x0/2018/05/30/a13714fc-d883-4a1d-ba7f-d70b05250f2b/img-7394.jpg

Dara Kerr/CNET

For weeks, I’d been seeing trashed electric scooters on the streets of San Francisco. So I asked a group of friends if any of them had seen people vandalizing the dockless vehicles since they were scattered across the city a couple of months ago.

The answer was an emphatic “yes.”

One friend saw a guy walking down the street kicking over every scooter he came across. Another saw a rider pull up to a curb as the handlebars and headset became fully detached. My friend figures someone had messed with the screws or cabling so the scooter would come apart on purpose.

A scroll through Reddit, Instagram and Twitter showed me photos of scooters — owned by Bird, Lime and Spin — smeared in feces, hanging from trees, hefted into trashcans and tossed into the San Francisco Bay.

It’s no wonder Lime scooters’ alarm isn’t just a loud beep, but a narc-like battle cry that literally says, “Unlock me to ride, or I’ll call the police.”

San Francisco’s scooter phenomenon has taken on many names: Scootergeddon, Scooterpocalypse and Scooter Wars. It all started when the three companies spread hundreds of their dockless, rentable e-scooters across city the same week at the end of March — without any warning to local residents or lawmakers.

Almost instantly, first-time riders began zooming down sidewalks at 15 mph, swerving between pedestrians and ringing the small bells attached to the handlebars. And they left the vehicles wherever they felt like it: scooters cluttered walkways and storefronts, jammed up bike lanes, and blocked bike racks and wheelchair accesses.

The three companies all say they’re solving a “last-mile” transportation problem, giving commuters an easy and convenient way to zip around the city while helping ease road congestion and smog. They call it the latest in a long line of disruptive businesses that aim to change the way we live.

The scooters have definitely changed how some people live.

I learned the Wild West looks friendly compared to scooter land. In San Francisco’s world of these motorized vehicles, there’s backstabbing, tweaker chop shops and intent to harm.

“The angry people, they were angry,” says Michael Ghadieh, who owns electric bicycle shop, SF Wheels, and has repaired hundreds of the scooters. “People cut cables, flatten tires, they were thrown in the Bay. Someone was out there physically damaging these things.”

Yikes! Clipped brakes

SF Wheels is located on a quaint street in a quintessential San Francisco neighborhood. Called Cole Valley, the area is lined with Victorian homes, upscale cafes and views of the city’s famous Mount Sutro. SF Wheels sells and rents electric bicycles for $20 per hour, mostly to tourists who want to see Golden Gate Park on two wheels.

In March, one of the scooter companies called Ghadieh to tell him they were about to launch in the city and were looking for people to help with repairs. Ghadieh said he was game. He wouldn’t disclose the name of the company because of agreements he signed.

Now he admits he didn’t quite know what he was getting into.

Days after the scooter startups dropped their vehicles on an unsuspecting San Francisco, SF Wheels became so crammed with broken scooters that it was hard to walk through the small, tidy shop. Scooters lined the sidewalk outside, filled the doorway and crowded the mechanic’s workspace. The backyard had a heap of scooters nearly six-feet tall, Ghadieh told me.

His bike techs were so busy that Ghadieh had to hire three more mechanics. SF Wheels was fixing 75 to 100 scooters per day. Ghadieh didn’t say how much the shop was making per scooter fix.

“The repairs were fast and easy on some and longer on others,” Ghadieh said. “It’d depend on whether it was wear-and-tear or whether it was physically damaged by someone out there, some madman.”

Some of the scooters, which cost around $500 off the shelf, came in completely vandalized — everything from chopped wires for the controller (aka the brain) to detached handlebars to bent forks. Several even showed up with clipped brake cables.

I asked Ghadieh if the scooters still work without brakes.

“It will work, yes,” he said. “It will go forward, but you just cannot stop. Whoever is causing that is making the situation dangerous for some riders.”

Especially in a city with lots of hills.

Ghadieh said his crew worked diligently for about six weeks, repairing an estimated 1,000 scooters. But then, about three weeks ago, work dried up. Ghadieh had to lay off the mechanics he’d hired and his shop is back to focusing on electric bicycles.

“Now, there’s literally nothing,” he said. “There’s a change of face with the company. I’m not exactly sure what happened. … They decided to do it differently.”

The likely change? The electric scooter company probably decided to outsource repairs to gig workers, rather than rely on agreements with shops.

That’s gig as in freelancers looking to pick up part-time work, like Uber and Lyft drivers. And like Nick Abouzeid. By day, Abouzeid works in marketing for the startup AngelList. A few weeks ago, he got an email from Bird inviting him to be a scooter mechanic. The message told Abouzeid he could earn $20 for each scooter repair, once he’d completed an online training. He signed up, took the classes and is ready to start.

“These scooters aren’t complicated. They’re cheap scooters from China,” Abouzeid said. “The repairs are anything from adjusting a brake to fixing a flat tire to adding stickers that have fallen off a Bird.”

Bird declined to comment specifically on its maintenance program, but its spokesman Kenneth Baer did say, “Bird has a network of trained chargers and mechanics who operate as independent contractors.”

All of Lime’s mechanics, on the other hand, are part of the company’s operations and maintenance team that repairs the scooters and ensures they’re safe for riders. Spin uses a mix of gig workers and contract mechanics, like what Ghadieh was doing.
Gaming the system

Electric scooters are, well, electric. That means they need to be plugged into an outlet for four to five hours before they can transport people, who rent them for $1 plus 15 cents for every minute of riding time.

Bird, Spin and Lime all partially rely on gig workers to keep their fleets juiced up.

Each company has a different app that shows scooters with low or dead batteries. Anyone with a driver’s license and car can sign up for the app and become a charger. These drivers roam the streets, picking up scooters and taking them home to be charged.
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“It creates this amazing kind of gig economy,” Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden, who is a former Uber and Lyft executive, told me in April. “It’s kind of like a game of Pokemon Go for them, where they go around and try to find and gobble up as many Birds as they can.”

Theoretically, all scooters are supposed to be off city streets by nightfall when it’s illegal to ride them. That’s when the chargers are unleashed. To get paid, they have to get the vehicles back out on the street in specified locations before 7 a.m. the next day. Bird supplies the charging cables — only three at a time, but those who’ve been in the business longer can get more cables.

“I don’t know the fascination with all of these companies using gig workers to charge and repair,” said Harry Campbell, who runs a popular gig worker blog called The Rideshare Guy. “But they’re all in, they’re all doing it.”

One of the reasons some companies use gig workers is to avoid costs like extra labor, gasoline and electricity. Bird, Spin and Lime have managed to convince investors they’re onto something. Between the three of them they’ve raised $255 million in funding. Bird is rumored to be raising another $150 million from one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, Sequoia, which could put the company’s value at $1 billion. That’s a lot for an electric scooter disruptor.

Lime pays $12 to charge each scooter and Spin pays $5; both companies also deploy their own operations teams for charging. Bird has a somewhat different system. It pays anywhere from $5 to $25 to charge its scooters, depending on the city and the location of the dead scooter. The harder the vehicle is to find and the longer it’s been off the radar, the higher the “bounty.”

Abouzeid, who’s moonlighted as a Bird charger for the past two months, said he’s only found a $25 scooter once.

“With the $25 ones, they’re like, ’Hey, we think it’s in this location, it’s got 0 percent battery, good luck,’” he said.

But some chargers have devised a way to game the system. They call it hoarding.

“They’ll literally go around picking up Birds and putting them in the back of their car,” Campbell said. “And then they wait until the bounties on them go up and up and up.”

Bird has gotten wise to these tactics. It sent an email to all chargers last week warning them that if it sniffs out this kind of activity, those hoarders will be barred from the app.

“We feel like this is a big step forward in fixing some of the most painful issues we’ve been hearing,” Bird wrote in the email, which was seen by CNET.

Tweaker chop shops

Hoarding and vandalism aren’t the only problems for electric scooter companies. There’s also theft. While the vehicles have GPS tracking, once the battery fully dies they go off the app’s map.

“Every homeless person has like three scooters now,” Ghadieh said. “They take the brains out, the logos off and they literally hotwire it.”
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I’ve seen scooters stashed at tent cities around San Francisco. Photos of people extracting the batteries have been posted on Twitter and Reddit. Rumor has it the batteries have a resale price of about $50 on the street, but there doesn’t appear to be a huge market for them on eBay or Craigslist, according to my quick survey.

Bird, Lime and Spin all said trashed and stolen scooters aren’t as big a problem as you’d think. When the companies launch in a new city, they said they tend to see higher theft and vandalism rates but then that calms down.

“We have received a few reports of theft and vandalism, but that’s the nature of the business,” said Spin co-founder and President Euwyn Poon. “When you have a product that’s available for public consumption, you account for that.”

Dockless, rentable scooters are now taking over cities across the US — from Denver to Atlanta to Washington, DC. Bird’s scooters are available in at least 10 cities with Scottsdale, Arizona, being the site of its most recent launch.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, regulators have been working to get rules in place to make sure riders drive safely and the companies abide by the law.

New regulations to limit the number of scooters are set to go into effect in the city on June 4. To comply, scooter companies have to clear the streets of all their vehicles while the authorities process their permits. That’s expected to take about a month.

And just like that, scooters will go out the way they came in — appearing and disappearing from one day to the next — leaving in their wake the chargers, mechanics, vandals and people hotwiring the things to get a free ride around town.

#USA #transport #disruption #SDF

Sen. Collins Calls for Kavanaugh’s Presumption of Innocence – Where...
▻https://diasp.eu/p/7816362

Sen. Collins Calls for Kavanaugh’s Presumption of Innocence – Where is the Criminal Investigation?

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li2s8B9X8NM

October 5, 2018

Our panelists Paul Jay, Dharna Noor, and Dana Vickers Shelley, Executive Director of the Maryland ACLU, and host Marc Steiner discuss the significance of the nomination, why the Democrats didn’t pursue a criminal investigation for perjury, the consequences for women’s rights and whether a fight should be waged to impeach Kavanaugh once he is confirmed. Sanders Calls for Kavanaugh Perjury Investigation – Where are the Democrats?

Dharna Noor and Paul Jay discuss Sen. #Bernie_Sanders ’ call for an #FBI investigation into Kavanaugh’s possible perjury

#Supreme_Court nominee #Brett_Kavanaugh (...)

Rifts Break Open at Facebook Over Kavanaugh Hearing
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/technology/facebook-kavanaugh-nomination-kaplan.html

“I want to apologize,” the Facebook executive wrote last Friday in a note to staff. “I recognize this moment is a deeply painful one — internally and externally.” The apology came from Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president for global public policy. A day earlier, Mr. Kaplan had sat behind his friend, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, when the judge testified in Congress about allegations he had sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford in high school. Mr. (...)

#Facebook #viol #lobbying #harcèlement

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Peter #Gotzsche dénonce l’industrie pharmaceutique - YouTube
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCLZmFgTRyE

Cependant, il y avait déjà eu un financement de Cochrane controversé en mai dernier par la fondation Gates
▻https://healthimpactnews.com/2018/gates-foundation-buys-cochrane-integrity-for-1-15-million-the-deat

Et voilà qu’il y a quelques semaines Gotzsch a été expulsé du conseil de gouvernance. Sur wikipedia :

Quatre membres du conseil de gouvernance ont démissionné à la suite de cela. Certains suspectent que l’organisation a cédé à des pressions de l’industrie pharmaceutiquer. Selon BMJ EBM Spotlight, cette expulsion n’a été possible que grâce à une manœuvre bureaucratique : Peter Gøtzsche a été renvoyé de la salle de conférence avant le vote, ce qui a permis à une minorité, 6 personnes sur les 13 que comportent normalement le conseil d’administration, de voter l’expulsion de Peter Gøtzsche (6 pour, 5 contre, 1 abstention).

Plus d’informations ici, ▻https://www.nouvelles-du-monde.com/collaboration-cochrane-pour-le-dr-peter-gotzsche

Cette décision intervient des semaines après que lui et ses collègues aient sévèrement critiqué une revue Cochrane du vaccin contre le virus du papillome humain (VPH), la décrivant comme incomplète et biaisée.

Gøtzsche a par le passé été un critique virulent du dépistage par #mammographie du #cancer du sein, arguant que les bénéfices sont surestimés et que les risques potentiels sont sous-estimés.
Il a également plaidé contre l’utilisation généralisée des médicaments psychotropes, affirmant qu’ils sont extrêmement nocifs à long terme et n’apportent que peu d’avantages.
Ces dernières années, cependant, il s’est prononcé contre les examens scientifiques du vaccin contre le VPH.
En 2016, son centre a déposé une plainte contre l’Agence européenne des médicaments (EMA) pour son traitement des problèmes de sécurité concernant les vaccins anti-HPV.

Suite à cette éviction il a publié une lettre de 3 pages, qu’on peut lire ici ▻http://healthimpactnews.com/2018/the-end-of-scientific-integrity-cochrane-collaboration-expels-crit

I regret to inform you that I have been expelled from membership in the Cochrane Collaboration by the favourable vote of 6 of the 13 members of the Governing Board.

No clear reasoned justification has been given for my expulsion aside from accusing me of causing “disrepute” for the organization.

This is the first time in 25 years that a member has been excluded from membership of Cochrane.

This unprecedented action taken by a minority of the Governing Board is disproportionate and damaging to Cochrane, as well as to public health interests.

As a result of this decision, and a number of broader issues concerning the inadequate governance of Cochrane, in accordance with its principles and objectives, four other members of the Board have resigned.

As a result, the Cochrane Collaboration has entered an unchartered territory of crisis and lack of strategic direction. A recovery from this dire situation would call for the dissolution of the present board, new elections and a broad-based participatory debate about the future strategy and governance of the organization.

In just 24 hours the Cochrane Governing Board of thirteen members has lost five of its members, four of which are centre directors and key members of the organization in different countries.

Recently the central executive team of Cochrane has failed to activate adequate safeguards, not only technical ones (which are usually very good) to assure sufficient policies in the fields of epistemology, ethics and morality.

Transparency, open debate, criticism and expanded participation are tools that guarantee the reduction of uncertainty of reviews and improve the public perception of the democratic scientific process.

These are conditions and tools that cannot be eliminated, as has happened recently, without placing into serious doubt the rigorous scientific undertaking of Cochrane and eroding public confidence in Cochrane´s work.

My expulsion should be seen in this context.

There has also been a serious democratic deficit. The role of the Governing Board has been radically diminished under the intense guidance of the current central executive team and the Board has increasingly become a testimonial body that rubber-stamps highly finalized proposals with practically no ongoing in-put and exchange of views to formulate new policies. On dozens of issues the Board can only vote yes or no with very little opportunity to amend or modify the executive team´s proposals.

This growing top-down authoritarian culture and an increasingly commercial business model that have been manifested within the Cochrane leadership over the past few years threaten the scientific, moral and social objectives of the organization.

Many Cochrane centres have sustained negative pressure and a lack of productive dialogue with the CEO of the central office.

Upon alerting the Cochrane leadership of these worrisome tendencies that negatively affect the operability and social perception of our scientific work, the Nordic Cochrane Centre has received a number of threats to its existence and financing.

Many of the directors or other key staff of the oldest Cochrane centres in the world have conveyed their dissatisfaction with the senior central staff’s interactions with them.

While the declared aims of interactions with the central office is to improve the quality of our work, the heavy-handed approach of some of the central staff has sometimes created a negative environment for new scientific initiatives, open collaboration and academic freedom.

There has also been criticism in Cochrane concerning the over-promotion of favourable reviews and conflicts of interest and the biased nature of some scientific expert commentary used by the knowledge translation department of Cochrane.

At the same time, Cochrane has been giving less and less priority and importance to its civic and political commitment to promoting open access, open data, scientific transparency, avoiding conflicts of interest and, in general, not promoting a public interest innovation model.

I feel that these issues are intricately related to providing “better evidence” as the Cochrane motto professes.

Recently the Cochrane executive leadership has even refused to comment publicly on new health technology policies, open access policies and other key advocacy opportunities despite the fact that an auditing of Cochrane fulfilment of objectives has shown a total failure to comply with Cochrane advocacy objectives.

There is stronger and stronger resistance to say anything that could bother pharmaceutical industry interests. The excuse of lack of time and staff (around 50) is not credible.

There has also been great resistance and stalling on the part of the central executive team to improving Cochrane´s conflict of interest policy.

A year ago, I proposed that there should be no authors of Cochrane reviews to have financial conflicts of interests with companies related to the products considered in the reviews.

This proposal was supported by other members of the Board, but the proposal has not progressed at all.

The Cochrane executive leadership almost always uses the commercial terms of “brand”, “products” and “business” but almost never describes what is really a collaborative network with the values of sharing, independence and openness.

To the chagrin of many senior leaders in Cochrane, the word “Collaboration”, which is part of our registered charity name, was deleted from communications about Cochrane.

Nevertheless, it is precisely “collaboration” that is the key to what distinguished Cochrane from other scientific organisations where competition is at the forefront.

The collaborative aspect, social commitment, our independence from commercial interests and our mutual generosity are what people in Cochrane have always appreciated the most and have been our most cherished added-value.

Often it is forgotten that we are a scientific, grass-roots organisation whose survival depends entirely on unpaid contributions from tens of thousands of volunteers and substantial governmental support throughout the world.

We make a substantial contribution to people’s understanding and interpretation of scientific evidence on the benefits and harms of medical interventions, devices and procedures that impact the population.

Our work informs government legislation globally, it influences medical guidelines and drug approval agencies. Therefore, the integrity of the Cochrane Collaboration is paramount.

We pride ourselves on being global providers of “trusted evidence” on a foundation of values such as openness, transparency and collaboration.

However, in recent years Cochrane has significantly shifted more to a business – a profit-driven approach.

Even though it is a not-for-profit charity, our “brand” and “product” strategies are taking priority over getting out independent, ethical and socially responsible scientific results.

Despite our clear policies to the contrary, my centre, and others, have been confronted with attempts at scientific censorship, rather than the promotion of pluralistic, open scientific debate about the merits of concrete Cochrane reviews of the benefits and harms of health care interventions.

Because of this moral governance crisis of the Cochrane Collaboration, I decided to run for a seat on the Governing Board and was elected in early 2017, with the most votes of all 11 candidates. It was considered an achievement, especially since I was the only one who had questioned aspects of our leadership.

Regrettably today, I have been expelled because of my “behaviour”, while the hidden agenda of my expulsion is a clear strategy for a Cochrane that moves it further and further away from its original objectives and principles.

This is not a personal question. It is a highly political, scientific and moral issue about the future of Cochrane.

As most people know, much of my work is not very favourable to the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry. Because of this Cochrane has faced pressure, criticism and complaints.

My expulsion is one of the results of these campaigns. What is at stake is the ability of producing credible and trustworthy medical evidence that our society values and needs.

Peter C Gøtzsche
Professor, Director, MD, DrMedSci, MSc
Nordic Cochrane Centre
Rigsho

Ce vaccin contre le HPV est d’ailleurs cité comme vaccin très problématique par le chercheur spécialiste de l’aluminium, dans le documentaire L’aluminium, les vaccins et les deux lapins ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/725164

Il est temps que les gens s’informent de manière indépendante sans céder aux pressions des vendus qui les accusent de complotisme. Il y a un très gros problème de fiabilité sur les vaccins et leurs adjuvants.

#lanceur_d_alerte #Gøtzsche #vaccins #HPV #industrie_pharmaceutique #big_pharma #médicaments #indépendance #recherche #médecine #lobbys

HIDE AND SEEK Tracking NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware to Operations in 45 Countries
▻https://citizenlab.ca/2018/09/hide-and-seek-tracking-nso-groups-pegasus-spyware-to-operations-in-45-cou

In this post, we develop new Internet scanning techniques to identify 45 countries in which operators of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware may be conducting operations. 1. Executive Summary Israel-based “Cyber Warfare” vendor NSO Group produces and sells a mobile phone spyware suite called Pegasus. To monitor a target, a government operator of Pegasus must convince the target to click on a specially crafted exploit link, which, when clicked, delivers a chain of zero-day exploits to penetrate (...)

#NSO #smartphone #Pegasus #spyware #écoutes #exportation #sécuritaire #activisme #web (...)

##surveillance

https://citizenlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Artboard-1-WP.png

No Shots Fired
In coercive control, men use guns to threaten, manipulate, and traumatize their intimate partners, without ever pulling a trigger.
▻https://www.thetrace.org/2018/09/no-shots-fired

https://www.thetrace.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/COS100118WELFEATURE004_small-e1536702943652-2000x0-c-default.jpg

Abusive partners don’t need a gun to govern their victims, but a gun makes a ruthless tool of intimidation. A husband might keep one on the mantel in the living room, where he and his wife watch TV. A boyfriend might polish his weapon during arguments. While asking his partner where she’s been, a guy might casually remove his coat to reveal a pistol clipped to his belt. “This [phenomenon] is almost exclusively male on female,” says Susan B. Sorenson, PhD, executive director of the Ortner Center on Violence and Abuse in Relationships at the University of Pennsylvania. “When you have a gun, you can control someone without touching them, without even speaking a word.”

Indeed, a lethal weapon allows an abuser to easily establish a “regime of domination,” as Stark calls it — and in a country with an estimated 270 million firearms, countless women are at risk. One 2016 study found that some 4.5 million women have been coerced or bullied with a gun by an intimate partner. In a separate (as yet unpublished) survey, Tami Sullivan, PhD, the director of Family-Violence Research at Yale, found that 33 percent of women in the Greater New Haven, Connecticut, area who were victims of abuse had also been menaced with a firearm. “And that doesn’t count the implied stuff, like when he cleans the gun in front of them,” says Sullivan.

While experts recognize coercive control as a legitimate form of domestic abuse, the threat itself can be hard to describe to friends and family, let alone the police. There are no bruises or bullet wounds, and after constant manipulation, a victim may wonder if she’s seeing danger that’s not really there. Or she may become too terrified to act at all.

Je crois qu’il se passe quelque chose d’important par ici :
▻https://twitter.com/jack/status/1026984242893357056
Pas seulement parce que le patron de twitter explique pourquoi #twitter ne va pas clôturer le compte de #Alex_Jones ni de #Infowars, contrairement à la plupart des autres réseaux sociaux, mais parce qu’il réaffirme le besoin de confronter les opinions et surtout de contrer les fausses informations de manière visible, chose que peut se permettre un twitter où les commentaires sont beaucoup plus lus qu’ailleurs...

If we succumb and simply react to outside pressure, rather than straightforward principles we enforce (and evolve) impartially regardless of political viewpoints, we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction. That’s not us.
Accounts like Jones’ can often sensationalize issues and spread unsubstantiated rumors, so it’s critical journalists document, validate, and refute such information directly so people can form their own opinions. This is what serves the public conversation best.

Je suis tombée là dessus grâce à un tweet de #Olivier_Tesquet qui fait un article super complet pour telerama sur la descente aux enfers des #GAFAM de Alex Jones :

La “Big Tech” à l’épreuve du roi des conspirationnistes

En privant Alex Jones, conspirationniste en chef de l’extrême-droite américaine, de ses comptes Facebook, Spotify ou Youtube, les géants de l’Internet prennent le risque d’ouvrir un débat sur la privatisation de la liberté d’expression.

▻https://www.telerama.fr/medias/la-big-tech-a-lepreuve-du-roi-des-conspirationnistes,n5756062.php

#liberte_d_expression #conspirationnisme #complotisme #extreme_droite ...

Streaming will happen, just a matter of when - EA
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-08-07-streaming-will-happen-just-a-matter-of-when-ea

Executive VP of strategic growth Matt Bilbey sees streaming-capable smart TVs eliminating traditional consoles in 10 years, discusses “EA moral compass” after Star Wars: Battlefront 2 loot box backlash

#Hardware #Publishing #E3_2018

#Google_Maps Says ‘the East Cut’ Is a Real Place. Locals Aren’t So Sure.

For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside #San_Francisco Bay here was known as either #Rincon_Hill, #South_Beach or #South_of_Market. This spring, it was suddenly rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the #East_Cut.

The peculiar moniker immediately spread digitally, from hotel sites to dating apps to Uber, which all use Google’s map data. The name soon spilled over into the physical world, too. Real-estate listings beckoned prospective tenants to the East Cut. And news organizations referred to the vicinity by that term.

“It’s degrading to the reputation of our area,” said Tad Bogdan, who has lived in the neighborhood for 14 years. In a survey of 271 neighbors that he organized recently, he said, 90 percent disliked the name.

The swift rebranding of the roughly 170-year-old district is just one example of how Google Maps has now become the primary arbiter of place names. With decisions made by a few Google cartographers, the identity of a city, town or neighborhood can be reshaped, illustrating the outsize influence that Silicon Valley increasingly has in the real world.

The #Detroit neighborhood now regularly called #Fishkorn (pronounced FISH-korn), but previously known as #Fiskhorn (pronounced FISK-horn)? That was because of Google Maps. #Midtown_South_Central in #Manhattan? That was also given life by Google Maps.

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Yet how Google arrives at its names in maps is often mysterious. The company declined to detail how some place names came about, though some appear to have resulted from mistakes by researchers, rebrandings by real estate agents — or just outright fiction.

In #Los_Angeles, Jeffrey Schneider, a longtime architect in the #Silver_Lake_area, said he recently began calling the hill he lived on #Silver_Lake_Heights in ads for his rental apartment downstairs, partly as a joke. Last year, Silver Lake Heights also appeared on Google Maps.

“Now for every real-estate listing in this neighborhood, they refer to it,” he said. “You see a name like that on a map and you believe it.”

Before the internet era, neighborhood names developed via word of mouth, newspaper articles and physical maps that were released periodically. But Google Maps, which debuted in 2005, is updated continuously and delivered to more than one billion people on their devices. Google also feeds map data to thousands of websites and apps, magnifying its influence.

In May, more than 63 percent of people who accessed a map on a smartphone or tablet used Google Maps, versus 19.4 percent for the Chinese internet giant Alibaba’s maps and 5.5 percent for Apple Maps, according to comScore, which tracks web traffic.

Google said it created its maps from third-party data, public sources, satellites and, often most important, users. People can submit changes, which are reviewed by Google employees. A Google spokeswoman declined further comment.

Yet some submissions are ruled upon by people with little local knowledge of a place, such as contractors in India, said one former Google Maps employee, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly. Other users with a history of accurate changes said their updates to maps take effect instantly.

Many of Google’s decisions have far-reaching consequences, with the maps driving increased traffic to quiet neighborhoods and once almost provoking an international incident in 2010 after it misrepresented the boundary between Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

The service has also disseminated place names that are just plain puzzling. In #New_York, #Vinegar_Hill_Heights, #Midtown_South_Central (now #NoMad), #BoCoCa (for the area between Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens), and #Rambo (Right Around the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) have appeared on and off in Google Maps.

Matthew Hyland, co-owner of New York’s Emily and Emmy Squared pizzerias, who polices Google Maps in his spare time, said he considered those all made-up names, some of which he deleted from the map. Other obscure neighborhood names gain traction because of Google’s endorsement, he said. Someone once told him they lived in Stuyvesant Heights, “and then I looked at Google Maps and it was there. And I was like, ‘What? No. Come on,’” he said.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/07/28/business/00GOOGLEMAPS-3/00GOOGLEMAPS-3-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp#.jpg

In Detroit, some residents have been baffled by Google’s map of their city, which is blanketed with neighborhood monikers like NW Goldberg, Fishkorn and the Eye. Those names have been on Google Maps since at least 2012.

Timothy Boscarino, a Detroit city planner, traced Google’s use of those names to a map posted online around 2002 by a few locals. Google almost identically copied that map’s neighborhoods and boundaries, he said — down to its typos. One result was that Google transposed the k and h for the district known as Fiskhorn, making it Fishkorn.

A former Detroit city planner, Arthur Mullen, said he created the 2002 map as a side project and was surprised his typos were now distributed widely. He said he used old books and his local knowledge to make the map, approximating boundaries at times and inserting names with tenuous connections to neighborhoods, hoping to draw feedback.

“I shouldn’t be making a mistake and 20 years later people are having to live with it,” Mr. Mullen said.

He admitted some of his names were questionable, such as the Eye, a 60-block patch next to a cemetery on Detroit’s outskirts. He said he thought he spotted the name in a document, but was unsure which one. “Do I have my research materials from doing this 18 years ago? No,” he said.

Now, local real-estate listings, food-delivery sites and locksmith ads use Fishkorn and the Eye. Erik Belcarz, an optometrist from nearby Novi, Mich., named his new publishing start-up Fishkorn this year after seeing the name on Google Maps.

“It rolls off the tongue,” he said.

Detroit officials recently canvassed the community to make an official map of neighborhoods. That exercise fixed some errors, like Fiskhorn (though Fishkorn remains on Google Maps). But for many districts where residents were unsure of the history, authorities relied largely on Google. The Eye and others are now part of that official map.

In San Francisco, the East Cut name originated from a neighborhood nonprofit group that residents voted to create in 2015 to clean and secure the area. The nonprofit paid $68,000 to a “brand experience design company” to rebrand the district.

Andrew Robinson, executive director of the nonprofit, now called the East Cut Community Benefit District (and previously the Greater Rincon Hill Community Benefit District), said the group’s board rejected names like Grand Narrows and Central Hub. Instead they chose the East Cut, partly because it referenced an 1869 construction project to cut through nearby Rincon Hill. The nonprofit then paid for streetlight banners and outfitted street cleaners with East Cut apparel.

But it wasn’t until Google Maps adopted the name this spring that it got attention — and mockery.

“The East Cut sounds like a 17 dollar sandwich,” Menotti Minutillo, an Uber engineer who works on the neighborhood’s border, said on Twitter in May.

Mr. Robinson said his team asked Google to add the East Cut to its maps. A Google spokeswoman said employees manually inserted the name after verifying it through public sources. The company’s San Francisco offices are in the neighborhood (as is The New York Times bureau), and one of the East Cut nonprofit’s board members is a Google employee.

Google Maps has also validated other little-known San Francisco neighborhoods. Balboa Hollow, a roughly 50-block district north of Golden Gate Park, trumpets on its website that it is a distinct neighborhood. Its proof? Google Maps.

“Don’t believe us?” its website asks. “Well, we’re on the internet; so we must be real.”

▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/technology/google-maps-neighborhood-names.html
#toponymie

Mozilla executive claims that Google has made YouTube slower on Edge and Firefox - Neowin
▻https://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-executive-claims-that-google-has-made-youtube-slower-on-edge-and-fir

https://cdn.neow.in/news/images/uploaded/2014/11/google-dont-be-evil_story.jpg

Comment les détails techniques peuvent jouer sur la question de la neutralité de l’internet...

Early last year, YouTube received a design refresh with Google’s own Polymer library which enabled “quicker feature development” for the platform. Now, a Mozilla executive is claiming that Google has made YouTube slower on Edge and Firefox by using this framework.

In a thread on Twitter, Mozilla’s Technical Program Manager has stated that YouTube’s Polymer redesign relies heavily on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API, which is only available in Chrome. This in turn makes the site around five times slower on competing browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Mozila Firefox. He went on to say that:

The executive has also mentioned a couple of workarounds for users on Edge and Firefox, which involve the use of extensions to restore the pre-Polymer version of YouTube.

Peterson has also suggested that another way to fix the problem would be to offer the older version of YouTube to users on affected browsers, which is what Google does for Internet Explorer 11.

Another rather interesting aspect to note is that Polymer’s latest versions support both Shadow DOM v0 and v1 APIs, but for some reason, Google still uses Polymer 1.0 with the deprecated API. Google is yet to comment on these claims.

#YouTube #Neutralité_internet #Google

The Soviet Propaganda Fabrics We Probably Shouldn’t be Lusting After
▻http://www.messynessychic.com/2015/03/10/the-soviet-propaganda-fabrics-we-probably-shouldnt-be-lusting-after

http://static.messynessychic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/soviet1.jpg http://static.messynessychic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/soviet13.jpg http://static.messynessychic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/soviet22.jpeg

CC @simplicissimus @reka

via : ▻http://www.messynessychic.com/2018/07/19/things-the-soviets-made