Will Drabold @WillDrabold

I drove 500 miles around Alabama in three days to report this. I hope you'll check it out: https://mic.com/articles/186790/black-women-fueled-a-grassroots-movement-in-alabama-and-may-remake-state-politics#.4XiHnRkY6 …

Euston station will open its doors to 200 homeless people on Christmas Day to offer them dinner and a place to sleep.

The concourse will be filled with decorations and tables will be laid out to serve guests a full Christmas dinner for the first time.

Around 30 volunteers from Network Rail will team up with homelessness charity St Mungo’s and Streets Kitchen to help run the event.

The station was set to be empty, with no trains running across the network until after Boxing Day.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/12/euston-station-become-massive-homeless-shelter-christmas-day/

David Davis’s claim that the UK’s concessions in an agreement to move on the Brexit negotiations were merely a statement of intent has damaged trust and will see a hardening of positions in Brussels, the European parliament’s coordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, has said.

The former Belgian prime minister claimed the Brexit secretary’s comments over the weekend were “unacceptable”, and undermined confidence in the British government’s trustworthiness.

The member states will now agree a tougher wording in their guidelines about the next stage of the talks, due to be signed off at a summit of leaders on Friday, Verhofstadt said.

...

“As someone said, it’s an own goal,” Verhofstadt said. “It is clear that the European council will be more strict now. It is saying: ‘Yeah, OK, these are our intentions, our commitments, we want these commitments translated into legal text before we make progress in the second stage.’ That is now the position of the council. I have seen a hardening of the position of the council and there will be a hardening of the position of the parliament.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/12/david-davis-has-damaged-trust-in-the-uk-for-brexit-talks-says-verhofstadt

We’ve all gone a bit bot-mad in the past few weeks. Automated accounts have invaded our civic life – especially pesky Russian ones – and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have woken up to the fact that a new propaganda war is taking place online.

Bots – which is of course short for robot – are essentially accounts which can be programmed to automatically post, share, re-tweet, or do whatever the programmer chooses. Creating a bot is extremely easy, and huge amounts of cheap bots are available on dark net markets for next to nothing. There are millions of harmless bots out there doing all sorts of helpful and funny things, including breaking news stories. But Russia twigged early that bots can also be usefully deployed to influence public opinion. It has been using them for years. During the Senate investigation into Russian meddling in the US election, Twitter revealed the handles of some 36,746 Russian-linked bots. They had tweeted a total of 1.4 million times in the two months before the election, and the accounts had been viewed almost 300 million times.

This new world of pseudonyms, virals, and digital public opinion is becoming murky. It’s not always easy to tell humans and bots apart, because some bots behave like humans; and some humans behave like bots. One academic report earlier this year tried to measure Labour bots during the election. It estimated that any account which tweets over 50 times a day on a single hashtag is a bot. Myself and colleagues at Demos took a closer look at this – and it turned out that many of these ‘bots’ were in fact fanatic Labour supports who were tweeting so frenetically they looked machines. Equally, improvements in machine learning mean bots are looking more and more human. Soon, it will be very difficult to tell them apart.

Far more worrying than bots though are the paid content producers. A decent amount of the Russian interference appears to emanate from the Russian ‘troll factory’ based in St Petersburg where hundreds of people work 12-hour shifts spreading information that supports the Kremlin’s line. (Salaries of around between £575 – £830pcm). My guess is that a lot of the accounts they run are cyborg – which are half bot, half human. A human operator runs thousands of accounts, adding the odd bit of human content to bots in order to evade standard spam filters.

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/11/can-you-distinguish-between-a-bot-and-a-human/

I, (Insert full name), do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.

I, (Insert full name), do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.

Al Franken wrote a bill to help rape survivors like me. He can’t lead on it now.

In November 2014, I was raped.

I’m certainly not the only one something this awful has happened to, but afterward, I felt as though I was. I was a 19-year-old college student. My life changed overnight. I faced an incredibly long fight to bring my attacker to justice: Daniel Drill-Mellum was wealthy, well-connected, and willing to throw me and my reputation under the bus. The #MeToo culture I’ve seen develop publicly over the last month wasn’t around to help me then. I was nearly harassed off the University of Minnesota campus for reporting. I was turned away by the Minneapolis Police Department despite the mountain of evidence in my case.

Over the next two years, I learned how to hold my frustration in, because I had an end goal in mind. I knew that my attacker belonged in prison, and I was determined to get the justice system on my side. I made mental notes about everything that was going wrong. I tried to have patience that someday I could make a different world. When my rapist was sentenced in August 2016 to six years in prison, I finally had my chance.

I sought help from Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.). He took up my cause without hesitation, and he worked with his aides to draft legislation to pay for training to help police departments treat assault survivors with more concern for what we’ve been through. But now that allegations have come out that Franken himself assaulted a woman years ago, I want another lawmaker to sponsor the bill we worked so hard on. This work deserves to be led by those without a history of sexual harassment or assault.

The news this week was especially disappointing for me because of how effective an advocate Franken has been for my cause. I felt my heart sink when I saw the news, but I was prepared to support the woman involved. I remember what it was like to be shamed and not believed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/11/18/al-franken-wrote-a-bill-to-help-rape-survivors-like-me-he-cant-lead-on-it-now/

Aiden Benjamin @Feisal_Hagi

BREAKING NOW:

Al Franken photo staged according to photographer who took the photo.

Photographer: [S]he was playing dead and SHE wanted him to ‘revive’ her. I took the picture it was a funny moment everyone was smiling having a good time

Leeann Tweeden is a trump supporter.

Aiden Benjamin @Feisal_Hagi

Al Franken’s accuser Leean Tweeden is a Fox News regular and best friends with Sean Hannity. She also has donated THOUSANDS to the Trump/Roy Moore campaign.

This is politically convenient?

I think yes!#fakenews
Dozens of interviews with Sean here:

An outdated photo wrongly suggests Barack Obama is at a food shelter in Houston



As Tropical Storm Harvey rocks Houston, Texas, a Twitter user decried President Donald Trump’s response in comparison to former President Barack Obama’s purported on-the-ground efforts using an outdated photo.

Twitter user Aiden Benjamin (@Feisal_Hagi) posted a picture of Obama and his family serving food at a shelter, which he captioned with the hashtags #HurricaneHarvery and #prayfortexas.

"Something youll never see trump do: Obama is in texas serving meals!" he wrote in the Aug. 26, 2017 tweet.

Here’s the thing. The picture isn’t from Houston nor from this year. It’s from a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C., where Obama and his family served Thanksgiving dinner to homeless veterans on Nov. 25, 2015. Both tweets have since been deleted.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/aug/28/blog-posting/outdated-photo-wrongly-suggests-barack-obama-food-/