Source: Washington Post

Midge Decter, an intellectual leader of the neoconservative movement whose acerbic, stylishly written essays and books assailed Soviet communism as well as American liberalism, denouncing feminism and other progressive movements while calling for unwavering support for Israel, died May 9 at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.

...

Mrs. Decter was the matriarch of a formidable neoconservative family that included her second husband, Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary magazine; their son John Podhoretz, a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan and now editor of Commentary; and son-in-law Elliott Abrams, who served in foreign policy positions in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations.

Along with her husband and other New York-based intellectuals — including editor and essayist Irving Kristol and his wife, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb — Mrs. Decter was considered one of the founders of neoconservatism. The intellectual movement emerged in the 1960s out of the pages of Commentary, a previously liberal magazine founded by the American Jewish Committee.

Like many of her peers, Mrs. Decter was raised in a Jewish family of New Deal Democrats who grew disaffected by what she saw as an alarming tear in the American social fabric. Finding fault in welfare programs and moral relativism, she and other neoconservatives shifted rightward and became anti-communist hawks, championing a muscular foreign policy that saw peaks of influence during the Reagan White House and later under Bush.

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/midge-decter-social-critic-and-leader-of-neoconservative-movement-dies-at-94/ar-AAX4YfJ

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Good riddance to bad philosophy.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-police-extremism

Source: Reuters

WASHINGTON, May 6 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden signed a new $150 million weapons package for Ukraine on Friday, providing additional artillery munitions, radar and other equipment in the latest in a series of transfers to help Kyiv repel Russia's invasion.

"Today, the United States is continuing our strong support for the brave people of Ukraine as they defend their country against Russia's ongoing aggression," Biden said in a statement.

The United States has rushed $3.4 billion worth of armaments to Ukraine since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, including howitzers, anti-aircraft Stinger systems, anti-tank Javelin missiles, ammunition and recently-disclosed "Ghost" drones.

The new package will be worth $150 million and include 25,000 155mm artillery rounds, counter-artillery radar, jamming equipment, field equipment and spare parts, a U.S. official said.

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/world/exclusive-biden-expected-sign-new-100-million-weapons-package-ukraine-officials-2022-05-06/

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating 109 cases of severe hepatitis in children, including five deaths, to determine a cause, with adenovirus infection as a primary line of inquiry, the public health agency said Friday.

More than 90% of the children were hospitalized and 14% required liver transplants, according to the CDC. The cases under investigation occurred over the past seven months across 25 states and territories. A majority of the patients have fully recovered and have been discharged from the hospital, according to the CDC.

Hepatitis is an inflammation of the liver that is often caused by viral infections, but environmental factors can also play a role. It is not uncommon in children but usually isn’t severe.

More than half of the kids had a confirmed adenovirus infection. However, CDC officials said they don’t know yet if adenovirus is the actual cause. Adenovirus is a common virus that normally causes mild cold or flu-like symptoms, or stomach and intestinal problems. It is not a known cause of severe hepatitis in otherwise healthy children, though it has been linked to the illness in kids with weak immune systems.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/06/cdc-investigating-severe-hepatitis-in-children.html

Source: Vice

A location data firm is selling information related to visits to clinics that provide abortions including Planned Parenthood facilities, showing where groups of people visiting the locations came from, how long they stayed there, and where they then went afterwards, according to sets of the data purchased by Motherboard.

The data sale is obviously more important in the context of a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion in which Justice Alito indicated that the court is ready to repeal the decision in Roe v. Wade, the decades-old precedent that has provided federal protections to those seeking an abortion. If that draft does become a formal decision, it would immediately fully or partly ban abortion rights in at least 13 states.

How data collecting intersects with abortion rights, or the lack thereof, is likely to gather more attention in the wake of the draft. The country may also see an increase in vigilante activity or forms of surveillance and harassment against those seeking or providing abortions. With this aggregated location data available to anyone on the open market, customers could include anti-abortion vigilantes as well. Anti-abortion groups are already fairly adept at using novel technology for their goals. In 2016, an advertising CEO who worked with anti-abortion and Christian groups sent targeted advertisements to women sitting in Planned Parenthood clinics in an attempt to change their decision around getting an abortion. The sale of the location data raises questions around why companies are selling data based on abortion clinics specifically, and whether they should introduce more safeguards around the purchase of that information, if be selling it at all.

“It's bonkers dangerous to have abortion clinics and then let someone buy the census tracks where people are coming from to visit that abortion clinic,” Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher who closely tracks the data selling marketplace, told Motherboard in an online chat after reviewing the data. “This is how you dox someone traveling across state lines for abortions—how you dox clinics providing this service.”

Read more: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vzjb/location-data-abortion-clinics-safegraph-planned-parenthood

Source: Vice

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more general CDC purposes.

Location data is information on a device’s location sourced from the phone, which can then show where a person lives, works, and where they went. The sort of data the CDC bought was aggregated—meaning it was designed to follow trends that emerge from the movements of groups of people—but researchers have repeatedly raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people.

The documents reveal the expansive plan the CDC had last year to use location data from a highly controversial data broker. SafeGraph, the company the CDC paid $420,000 for access to one year of data to, includes Peter Thiel and the former head of Saudi intelligence among its investors. Google banned the company from the Play Store in June.

Read more: https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vymn/cdc-tracked-phones-location-data-curfews

Source: Bloomberg

The FBI searched emails, texts and other electronic communications of as many as 3.4 million U.S. residents without a warrant over a year, the nation’s top spy chief said in a report.

The “queries” were made between December 2020 and November 2021 by Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel as they looked for signs of threats and terrorists within electronic data legally collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to an annual transparency report issued Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The surge came as the FBI made a push to stop hacking attacks.

The American Civil Liberties Union called it an invasion of privacy “on an enormous scale.”

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-29/fbi-searched-the-data-of-millions-of-americans-without-warrants

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Okay, doom-ish implications, incorrect information and Olympic competition-level handwringing have been the order of the day on DU today, so here's your chance to actually articulate it: what is your worst-case fever-dream of what Twitter will become that it is not now?

Dictators and wannabees seem to rot from the inside. Let's hope his body completely fails him before he can do much more damage.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/u9788j/this_is_the_clearest_clip_where_you_see_putins/

Source: Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden signed papers to appoint Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month even though she can’t begin work until Justice Stephen Breyer retires this summer.

Biden signed Jackson’s commission on April 8, the day they appeared together at the White House to celebrate her confirmation by the Senate, White House spokesman Andrew Bates said Tuesday.

Jackson’s precise status has been the subject of online discussion stemming from the unprecedented timing of her Senate confirmation, more than two months before a vacancy was expected to arise. Typically, a new justice is sworn in almost immediately after the president signs the commission.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded in an April 6 opinion that the president could “prospectively appoint” Jackson before Breyer steps down. That opinion relied on a 1970 memo written on a related issue by future Chief Justice William Rehnquist, then the head of the OLC.

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/biden-signs-jacksons-supreme-court-commission-early-in-unusual-move/ar-AAWnybP