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Blue_Tires

Blue_Tires's Journal
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April 20, 2016

Harriet Tubman on $20 bill?

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Wednesday will announce a decision to keep Alexander Hamilton on the front of the $10 bill and put leaders of the movement to give women the right to vote on the back of the bill, sources tell POLITICO.

Treasury will also announce that it plans to replace former President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman, the sources said. There will also be changes to the $5 bill to depict civil rights era leaders.


Lew's decision comes after he announced last summer that he was considering replacing Hamilton on the $10 bill with a woman. The announcement drew swift rebukes from fans of Hamilton, who helped create the Treasury Department and the modern American financial system. Critics immediately suggested Hamilton take Jackson off the $20 bill given the former president's role in moving native Americans off their land. Jackson may remain on the $20 bill in some capacity.

Lew told POLITICO last July that Treasury was exploring ways to respond to critics. “There are a number of options of how we can resolve this,” Lew said. “We’re not taking Alexander Hamilton off our currency.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/treasurys-lew-to-announce-hamilton-to-stay-on-10-bill-222204

April 19, 2016

‘She got caught up in the likes’: Teen accused of live-streaming friend’s rape for attention

Source: WaPo

An Ohio teenager accused of live-streaming the rape of her 17-year-old friend has pleaded not guilty to multiple charges stemming from the alleged incident in February.

“She’s in the habit of filming everything with this app called Periscope,” Shamansky acknowledged, according to ABC affiliate WSYX. “She does everything possible to contain the situation even to the point of asking while it’s being filmed to these Periscope followers, ‘What should I do now? What should I do now?'”

A judge set Lonina’s bond at $125,000. Her co-defendant, Raymond Gates, 29, also pleaded not guilty and his bond was set at $300,000, according to CBS News.

The pair has been charged with rape, kidnapping, sexual battery and pandering sexually oriented matter involving a minor, according to NBC affiliate WCMH-TV. If convicted, each faces up to 40 years in prison.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/19/she-got-caught-up-in-the-likes-teen-accused-of-livestreaming-friends-rape-for-attention/



This is the generation we've raised...
April 19, 2016

Right on cue, we have now achieved peak Greenwald

Dilma's impeachment? Why of course it's Obama's fault!!

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/18/after-vote-to-remove-brazils-president-key-opposition-figure-holds-meetings-in-washington/

I mean this shit practically writes itself

April 19, 2016

Europe Tried to Rein In Google. It Backfired.

Google is a top target for European regulators and privacy watchdogs, who openly fear and distrust its dominance. The American tech giant’s search engine alone gobbles up roughly 90 percent of the European market. But a landmark court ruling intended to rein in Google has instead put it at the forefront of Europe’s enforcement of Internet privacy. That has upended conventional wisdom about the company and raised questions about the role of commercial interests in protecting people’s privacy, often with little or no transparency.

In the almost two years since Europeans gained the “right to be forgotten” on the Internet, Google has passed judgment in over 418,000 cases — roughly 572 a day — from people wanting links of certain search results to be removed, according to the company's records. It has approved fewer than half of those requests, all behind closed doors. Google’s total number of privacy-related judgments is double those of most of Europe’s biggest individual national authorities over the same period, even though these public agencies address a wider range of data protection complaints.

Despite a history of animosity toward the company, national regulators have handed over the review powers to Google with few complaints, saying they are merely following Europe’s complex data protection rules. Other search companies, including Microsoft, have been given the same authority, though their number of judgments pales by comparison.

Some consumer groups and privacy experts are not satisfied with that arrangement. They have sounded alarm bells over a for-profit company — one that relies on tapping into people’s digital lives to make billions of dollars and that is the subject of multiple privacy and antitrust investigations — playing such a central role in protecting individuals’ data, and doing so in such a secretive manner.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/19/technology/google-europe-privacy-watchdog.html?smid=tw-nytimesbusiness&smtyp=cur&_r=0

(Snowden was unavailable for comment)

April 14, 2016

A man impersonating Ukraine's president called the NYT

A man impersonating Ukraine's president called the NYT. Soon journalists found themselves in a propaganda war.




The intrigue began last week when The New York Times received a letter on official-looking stationery marked “President of Ukraine.”

The letter was addressed to the paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet (though he was referred to as Mr. Baquet Dean), and complained about an editorial that faulted President Petro O. Poroshenko for failing to make good on pledges to prosecute corruption. The letter was forwarded to the newspaper’s editorial board, which writes editorials.

“I would like to respectfully request a telephone conference with you personally in order to attempt to convince you that opinions published in the article are without merit,” the letter read, finishing with the neat, curlicued signature of Mr. Poroshenko.

A conference call with the editorial board was set up on Monday. The complainer’s comments were so suspect that the Times participants, including some newsroom journalists listening in, declined to publish an article on the matter, but instead began to investigate.

On Wednesday, however, edited audio of the call was mysteriously posted on YouTube, and the Times participants found themselves caught up in an apparent propaganda war between Russia, which is backing separatist forces in Ukraine, and Ukraine’s government.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/14/world/europe/a-hoax-plot-cloaked-in-a-ukrainian-interview.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
April 12, 2016

The Assad Files

The Assad Files
Capturing the top-secret documents that tie the Syrian regime to mass torture and killings.


The investigator in Syria had made the drive perhaps a hundred times, always in the same battered truck, never with any cargo. It was forty miles to the border, through eleven rebel checkpoints, where the soldiers had come to think of him as a local, a lawyer whose wartime misfortunes included a commute on their section of the road. Sometimes he brought them snacks or water, and he made sure to thank them for protecting civilians like himself. Now, on a summer afternoon, he loaded the truck with more than a hundred thousand captured Syrian government documents, which had been buried in pits and hidden in caves and abandoned homes.

He set out at sunset. To the fighters manning the checkpoints, it was as if he were invisible. Three reconnaissance vehicles had driven ahead, and one confirmed by radio what the investigator hoped to hear: no new checkpoints. Typically, the border was sealed, but soldiers from the neighboring country waved him through. He drove until he reached a Western embassy, where he dropped off the cargo for secure transfer to Chris Engels, an American lawyer. Engels expected the papers to include evidence linking high-level Syrian officials to mass atrocities. After a decade spent training international criminal-justice practitioners in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Cambodia, Engels now leads the regime-crimes unit of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, an independent investigative body founded in 2012, in response to the Syrian war.

In the past four years, people working for the organization have smuggled more than six hundred thousand government documents out of Syria, many of them from top-secret intelligence facilities. The documents are brought to the group’s headquarters, in a nondescript office building in Western Europe, sometimes under diplomatic cover. There, each page is scanned, assigned a bar code and a number, and stored underground. A dehumidifier hums inside the evidence room; just outside, a small box dispenses rat poison.

Upstairs, in a room secured by a metal door, detailed maps of Syrian villages cover the walls, and the roles of various suspects in the Syrian government are listed on a whiteboard. Witness statements and translated documents fill dozens of binders, which are locked in a fireproof safe at night. Engels, who is forty-one, bald and athletic, with a precise, discreet manner, oversees the operation; analysts and translators report directly to him.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/bashar-al-assads-war-crimes-exposed


Those of you here who have defended Assad (and you know who you are), I dedicate this thread to you...
April 10, 2016

LOL -- Yeah, keep on telling me Snowden isn't a Kremlin stooge...

Has the balls to call for Cameron's resignation(!) while ignoring Putin's laundering of $2 billion...

https://twitter.com/RT_com/status/718858538701836288

https://www.rt.com/uk/338913-snowden-cameron-resign-tax/

I know you Snowdenstans out there would sooner jump off a cliff than address this, so just let it drop -- That's all you know how to do anyway.

March 30, 2016

Malawi's fearsome chief, terminator of child marriages

Mtakataka, Malawi - The mild-mannered woman who zips around a farmhouse packed with knick-knacks and insists her guests eat a meal before any introductions, presents a character at odds with her fearsome reputation of being Malawi's top marriage terminator.

Thirteen years ago, Theresa Kachindamoto could not have conceived of ever leaving her job of 27 years as a secretary at a city college in Zomba, another district in Southern Malawi.

She had no desire to return home to Monkey Bay, a stunning cluster of mountains in Dedza District around Lake Malawi. Although she had the blood of chiefs - Malawi's traditional authority figures - running through her veins, as the youngest of 12 siblings, a woman, and a mother of five, Kachindamoto never expected to become a senior chief to the more than 100,000 people...

...She was shocked when she saw girls as young as 12 with babies and teenaged husbands, and was soon ordering the people to give up their ways

"I told them: 'Whether you like it or not, I want these marriages to be terminated.'"

Last year, Malawi's parliament passed a law forbidding marriage before the age of 18. But under customary law of the traditional authorities, and the constitution, Malawian children can still marry with parental consent.

A 2012 United Nations survey found that more than half of Malawi's girls were married before the age of 18. It ranked Malawi 8th out of 20 countries thought to have the highest child-marriage rates in the world.


http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/03/malawi-fearsome-chief-terminator-child-marriages-160316081809603.html

March 29, 2016

Marco Muzzo sentenced to 10 years in prison for Vaughan crash that killed 4

Source: Yahoo via CBC.ca

Convicted impaired driver Marco Muzzo has been sentenced to 10 years in prison today in connection to a Vaughan, Ont., crash that killed four people and seriously injured two others. Muzzo, 29, pleaded guilty to four counts of impaired driving causing death and two counts of impaired driving causing bodily harm. Ontario Superior Court Justice Michelle Fuerst is expected to announce Muzzo's sentence in Newmarket.

"I'm tortured by the grief I caused," Muzzo told the court at his sentencing hearing on Feb. 24.

The crash on Sept. 27, 2015, killed three young Neville-Lake children, Daniel, 9, Harrison, 5, Milly, 2, and their grandfather, Gary Neville, 65. Two other extended family members, the children's grandmother and her mother, were injured in the crash.

"You killed all my babies," Jennifer Neville-Lake, mother of the three children, said in her victim impact statement on Feb. 23. "I miss my kids. I miss my dad."

...Muzzo's family owns the drywall company Marel Contractors and is worth nearly $1.8 billion, according to Canadian Business magazine.

Read more: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/marco-muzzo-sentenced-tuesday-vaughan-050000872.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=tw



Thank god the "affluenza" defense wasn't in play...

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