Cellphones have ushered in an age of interruption, with apps that notify you when you’re mentioned on Facebook or Twitter, or even if your favorite ball team scores a run.
But Apple is the ultimate arbiter of what kinds of notifications iPhone users can receive — and some apps just don’t pass muster with the tech giant.
Take Josh Begley’s idea, for example. Begley created an app that sends a push notification — or beep — to an iPhone whenever there is a U.S. drone strike anywhere in the world.
Apple blocked it from its App Store.
“They said the app has excessively objectionable or crude content,” Begley says. “Which I found somewhat curious, because it is literally just a republishing of news — just tracking when strikes happen.”
The app contains no gory pictures or classified information. (Read more)
Of all the things to criticize about Russia, I wouldn’t put this high on the list. It seems like they were trespassing in order to ridicule Orthodoxy.
Imagine how little support they’d get if they had desecrated a synagogue. They’d be called Nazis and Western governments would be falling over each other to condemn them most strongly.
Imagine if they’d desecrated a mosque. They’d be called anti-immigration nationalists. Then a story about their murder would probably appear on the back pages of some newspaper.
Instead, they desecrated a church, and the world weeps over their imprisonment.
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Obama spokesman condemns ‘disproportionate’ prison term for Russian punk band membersThe White House on Friday condemned the “disproportionate” two-year prison sentence a Russian judge imposed on members of the punk band Pussy Riot, found guilty of “hooliganism” for an event mocking Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“The United States is disappointed by the verdict, including the disproportionate sentences that were granted,” spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters. (Read more)
Ecuador’s move to grant Julian Assange political asylum has shown the true face of the current world order, highlighting more clearly than ever the line between the American Empire and the rest of the world, former CIA officer Ray McGovern told RT. (Read more)
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State Department: The U.S. does not recognize the concept of ‘diplomatic asylum’ the State Department declared today that the United States does not believe in the concept of ‘diplomatic asylum’ as a matter of international law.
Ecuador dragged Britain into an emergency meeting of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States Friday at OAS headquarters in Washington, calling for a foreign ministers’ meeting following the British threat to go into the Ecuadoran embassy in London and get Assange, who is wanted for questioning in connection with sexual assault charges in Sweden.
Ecuador formally granted Assange political asylum Thursday, but today the State Department said the United States doesn’t agree that such a thing exists.
“The United States is not a party to the 1954 OAS Convention on Diplomatic Asylum and does not recognize the concept of diplomatic asylum as a matter of international law,” the office of Spokesperson Victoria Nuland said in a Friday statement. “We believe this is a bilateral issue between Ecuador and the United Kingdom and that the OAS has no role to play in this matter.” (Read more)
Ecuador rallies Latin America in Assange battle with UK Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa on Saturday cast the Andean country’s tensions with Britain over asylum for WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange as a menace to Latin America, warning the UK that it should think twice before trampling on the region’s sovereignty.
Incensed by London’s threat to break into the Ecuadorean embassy where the former hacker is taking refuge, Correa’s government has accused Britain of “colonial” bullying and has formally granted the Australian asylum.
Britain says it will not allow the anti-secrecy campaigner from Australia to travel to South America because it is obliged to extradite him to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over rape and sexual assault allegations.
“They’re out of touch. Who do they think they’re dealing with? Can’t they see that this is a dignified and sovereign government which will not kneel down before anyone?” Correa said in his weekly address on Saturday.
“What a mentality, eh? They have not realized that Latin America is free and sovereign and that we’ll not put up with meddling, colonialism of any kind, at least in this country, small, but with a big heart.” (Read more)
Whoever said inquisitions and witch hunts were things of the past? A big one is going on now. The sociologist Mark Regnerus, at the University of Texas at Austin, is being smeared in the media and subjected to an inquiry by his university over allegations of scientific misconduct.
Regnerus’s offense? His article in the July 2012 issue of Social Science Research reported that adult children of parents who had same-sex romantic relationships, including same-sex couples as parents, have more emotional and social problems than do adult children of heterosexual parents with intact marriages. That’s it. Regnerus published ideologically unpopular research results on the contentious matter of same-sex relationships. And now he is being made to pay.
In today’s political climate, and particularly in the discipline of sociology—dominated as it is by a progressive orthodoxy—what Regnerus did is unacceptable. It makes him a heretic, a traitor—and so he must be thrown under the bus.
Regnerus’s study was based on a nationally representative sample of adult Americans, including an adequate number of respondents who had parents with same-sex relationships to make valid statistical comparisons. His data were collected by a survey firm that conducts top studies, such as the American National Election Survey, which is supported by the National Science Foundation. His sample was a clear improvement over those used by most previous studies on this topic.
Regnerus was trained in one of the best graduate programs in the country and was a postdoctoral fellow under an internationally renowned scholar of family, Glen Elder, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Full disclosure: I was on the faculty in Regnerus’s department and advised him for some years, but was not his dissertation chair.) His article underwent peer review, and the journal’s editor stands behind it. Regnerus also acknowledges the limitations of his study in his article, as he has done in subsequent interviews. And another recent study relying on a nationally representative sample also suggests that children of same-sex parents differ from children from intact, heterosexual marriages.
But never mind that. None of it matters. Advocacy groups and academics who support gay marriage view Regnerus’s findings as threatening. (Read more)
A Moscow court Friday ordered three young women on trial for staging an anti-Putin concert in a Moscow church to stay in jail until next year, a surprise move their lawyers branded “repression”.
The Khamovnichesky court ruled that the detention of the members of the Pussy Riot punk rock group should be extended for another six months, satisfying a prosecution request.
The ruling came on the first day of the womens’ trial on hooliganism charges for barging into a landmark Moscow church in February and singing a “punk prayer” calling for the ouster of President Vladimir Putin.
The trio, who face up to seven years in jail, have been held in pre-trial detention since March, and their harsh treatment has become a new rallying cause for the anti-Putin opposition. (Read more)
Another demonstration of what public schools really are: prisons run by goons.
For the past two months, one of my favorite reads has been Never Seconds, a blog started by 9-year-old Martha Payne of western Scotland to document the unappealing, non-nutritious lunches she was being served in her public primary school. Payne, whose mother is a doctor and father has a small farming property, started blogging in early May and went viral in days. She had a million viewers within a few weeks and 2 million this morning; was written up in Time, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and a number of food blogs; and got support from TV cheflebrity Jamie Oliver, whose series “Jamie’s School Dinners” kicked off school-food reform in England.
Well, goodbye to all that.
This afternoon, Martha (who goes by “Veg” on the blog) posted that she will have to shut down her blog, because she has been forbidden to take a camera into school. She said:
This morning in maths I got taken out of class by my head teacher and taken to her office. I was told that I could not take any more photos of my school dinners because of a headline in a newspaper today.
I only write my blog not newspapers and I am sad I am no longer allowed to take photos. I will miss sharing and rating my school dinners and I’ll miss seeing the dinners you send me too.
. . . But as the State Department touts its press freedom record in a press release today and encourages other countries to improve their own laws, it’s also important to critically look at the U.S.’s current approach to press freedom, in particular their statement that “the United States honors and supports media freedom at home and abroad.”
Journalists’ sources in the U.S. have been the hardest hit in recent years. The current administration has used the Espionage Act to prosecute a record six whistleblowers for leaking information to the press—more than the rest of the previous administrations combined. Many of these whistleblowers have exposed constitutional violations such as the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program and the CIA’s waterboarding practices—issues clearly in the public interest—and now face years in prison. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has brought no prosecutions for the crimes underlying the exposed allegations.
In addition, a grand jury is reportedly still investigating WikiLeaks for violations of the Espionage Act for publishing classified information—a practice that has traditionally been protected by the First Amendment and which other newspapers engage in regularly.
. . . .
The U.S. also has repeatedly detained Oscar-nominated filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras at the border. Poitras has received critical acclaim for two films she has produced about the U.S.’ post-9/11 wars, and is in the midst of making her third film on the subject. As Glenn Greenwald reported, “On several occasions, her reporter’s notebooks were seized and their contents copied, even as she objected that doing so would invade her journalist-source relationship,” clearly violating her rights as a reporter.
And while the State Department said today that they “advocate for freedom of expression and raise media freedom issues, including specific cases, in bilateral discussions with other governments and in multilateral bodies,” the administration has come under fire for lobbying the Yemeni government to keep a prominent Yemeni journalist Abd al-Ilah Haydar Al-Sha’i in jail. (Read more)
The state of North Carolina has its own “Board of Dietetics and Nutrition”–of course it does–and it has decided that one bloggers right to free speech ends where the North Carolina Board of Dietetics and Nutrition’s officious overbearingness begins, as I think Oliver Wendell Holmes (or was it Oliver Wendell Douglas?) once wrote.
Here’s the naughty bits, as reported in Carolina Journal:
[When] Steve Cooksey…was hospitalized with diabetes in February 2009, he decided to avoid the fate of his grandmother, who eventually died of the disease. He embraced the low-carb, high-protein Paleo diet, also known as the “caveman” or “hunter-gatherer” diet. The diet, he said, made him drug- and insulin-free within 30 days. By May of that year, he had lost 45 pounds and decided to start a blog about his success.
But this past January the state diatetics and nutrition board decided Cooksey’s blog — Diabetes-Warrior.net — violated state law. The nutritional advice Cooksey provides on the site amounts to “practicing nutrition,” the board’s director says, and in North Carolina that’s something you need a license to do.
Unless Cooksey completely rewrites his 3-year-old blog, he could be sued by the licensing board. If he loses the lawsuit and refuses to take down the blog, he could face up to 120 days in jail.
The board’s director says Cooksey has a First Amendment right to blog about his diet, but he can’t encourage others to adopt it unless the state has certified him as a dietitian or nutritionist.
Seems he came to their attention after contradicting a local hospital’s director of diabetes services at a local meeting, and handing out cards about his site. What did the Board find objectionable about Cooksey’s site? (Read more)
If you thought it was only authoritarian states like China or Iran that imprisoned pesky bloggers and tweeters, think again.
This week, Britain became a fully paid-up member of that clique of illiberal intolerant, tweeter-harassing states.
On Tuesday, at Swansea Magistrates Court in Wales, Liam Stacey, a student, was imprisoned for 56 days for writing offensive tweets.
Fifty-six days. Two months. In an actual jail. For tweeting. It needs to be spelt out like that in order to show how shocking it is that in the 21st century, in a nation that gave us such great warriors for freedom as The Levellers and John Stuart Mill, a young man has now been banged up for expressing his thoughts.
Stacey’s thoughts were far from pleasant ones. In fact they were offensive and repugnant.
On March 17, Fabrice Muamba, a 23-year-old black football player for Bolton Wanderers, collapsed with cardiac arrest during a match against Tottenham Hotspurs. Many people were shocked, and before long a #PrayforMuamba hashtag took off on Twitter.
But Stacey, who claimed he was drunk at the time, didn’t fancy praying for Muamba, and so instead he tweeted:
“LOL. F**k Muamba. He’s dead.”
(Muamba did not die, though he remains critically ill in a London hospital.)
When other tweeters complained to Stacey about his off-colour comments, he started to use racist language. He told his detractors to “f**k off”, and hurled pretty much every racial slur under the sun at them.
The Twitterati reported him to the police. And sure enough he got a visit from the cops, was charged with committing a racially aggravated public order offence, and now finds himself in the clink alongside burglars and rapists. (Read more)
“Obama’s predictable signing of the latest assault on the Bill of Rights — namely — H.R. 347 (and it’s companion senate bill S. 1794); aka the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011.” Sounding more like an appropriations bill authorizing monies for federal grounds landscaping — this bill, better known to those in the DC beltway as the ‘Trespass Bill’ — potentially makes peaceable protest anywhere in the U.S. a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
The legislators responsible for bringing this legislative excrement to life are Representative Tom Rooney (R-Fla.) in the House of Representatives and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT.) leading the Senate version.
H. R. 347 makes protest of any type potentially a federal offense with anywhere from a year to 10 years in federal prison, providing it occurs in the presence of elites brandishing Secret Service protection, or during an officially defined ‘National Special Security Event’ (NSSE). NSSEs , ( an invention of Bill Clinton) are events which have been deemed worthy of Secret Service protection, which previously received no such treatment. (Read more)
Cellphones have ushered in an age of interruption, with apps that notify you when you’re mentioned on Facebook or Twitter, or even if your favorite ball team scores a run.
(Read more)