Tag: USA

Saudi Crown Prince Boasted That Jared Kushner Was “In His Pocket”


UNTIL HE WAS stripped of his top-secret security clearance in February, presidential adviser Jared Kushner was known around the White House as one of the most voracious readers of the President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified rundown of the latest intelligence intended only for the president and his closest advisers.Kushner, who had been tasked with bringing about a deal between Israel and Palestine, was particularly engaged by information about the Middle East, according to a former White House official and a former U.S. intelligence professional.

Source: Saudi Crown Prince Boasted That Jared Kushner Was “In His Pocket”

Betsy DeVos Is Helping Puerto Rico Re-Imagine Its Public School System. That Has People Deeply Worried.


PUERTO RICO, IN the midst of the chaos and instability following Hurricane Maria, is moving quickly forward with plans to institute a wide swath of education reforms, with the help of the aggressively ideological federal education department, helmed by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.Puerto Rico’s governor and education secretary have expressed openness to the concerns raised by parents, teachers and community members, and stress they are not looking to implement an extreme version of privatization. Yet at the same time, they have stoked fears by pushing forward a notably vague charter law that does little to address what people are most worried about. This “trust us” mentality has not been helped by the engagement of DeVos, nor by Gov. Ricardo Rosselló’s recent visit to a notorious charter chain in Philadelphia last week — a prime example of the kind of low-performing, fiscally reckless charter that school advocates warn about.At a time when the island is starved of investment and inching slowly through a storm recovery, many Puerto Ricans worry that the government is treating this more as an opportunity to disrupt education, rather than stabilize it — while also potentially opening the doors for supercharged corruption.

Source: Betsy DeVos Is Helping Puerto Rico Re-Imagine Its Public School System. That Has People Deeply Worried.

Lawsuit Reveals How Paid Expert Helped 3M “Command the Science” on Dangerous Chemicals


While some of 3M’s history will remain secret as a result of the settlement deal, documents already made public in the Minnesota case point to one critical tool the Minnesota-based company used to defend itself — a scientist named John Giesy, who helped 3M spin the science on PFCs chemicals in the company’s favor even as he presented himself as an independent scientist.Giesy and 3M did not respond to requests for comment.Giesy has worked as a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, Michigan State, and at least 11 other universities, and received grants from 3M for “selective funding of outside research.” That funding was a key part of 3M’s strategy around PFCs, which according to one internal document was guided by the dictum “command the science.” The studies the company produced through this effort, as slides 3M prepared about its research program make clear, were intended partly as “defensive barriers to litigation.”

Source: Lawsuit Reveals How Paid Expert Helped 3M “Command the Science” on Dangerous Chemicals

The NCAA Says Student-Athletes Shouldn’t Be Paid Because the 13th Amendment Allows Unpaid Prison Labor


College sports is a business – a very lucrative business.That very obvious dynamic undergirds a lawsuit filed by former NCAA athlete Lawrence “Poppy” Livers asserting that scholarship students who play sports are employees and deserve pay. The Livers case argues that student-athletes who get scholarships should at least be paid as work-study students for the time they put in. What the NCAA did in response to the lawsuit is as vile as anything going on in sports right now. I had to see it for myself before I believed it. At the root of its legal argument, the NCAA is relying on one particular case for why NCAA athletes should not be paid. That case is Vanskike v. Peters.Only there’s an important detail: Daniel Vanskike was a prisoner at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois, and Howard Peters was the Director of the state Department of Corrections. In 1992, Vanskike and his attorneys argued that as a prisoner he should be paid a federal minimum wage for his work. The court, in its decision, cited the 13th Amendment and rejected the claim.

Source: The NCAA Says Student-Athletes Shouldn’t Be Paid Because the 13th Amendment Allows Unpaid Prison Labor

Did Congress Really Expect Us to Whittle Our Own Personal Jailbreaking Tools? | Electronic Frontier Foundation


DMCA 1201 allows the Copyright Office to grant “use” exemptions, but not “tools” exemptions. That means that if the Copyright Office likes your proposal, they can give you permission to jailbreak your gadgets to make some use (say, install third-party apps on your phone, or record clips from your DVDs to use in film studies classes), but they can’t give anyone the right to give you the tool needed to make that use (law professor and EFF board member Pam Samuelson argues that the Copyright Office can go farther than this, at least some of the time, but the Copyright Office disagrees).

Source: Did Congress Really Expect Us to Whittle Our Own Personal Jailbreaking Tools? | Electronic Frontier Foundation

US state legal supremos show lots of love for proposed CLOUD Act (a law to snoop on citizens’ info stored abroad) • The Register


The attorneys general of 35 US states on Wednesday signed an open letter calling for the quick passage of the Clarify Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act – with some qualifications.The proposed legislation, if passed by Congress, will allow the Feds to demand people’s emails and other personal communications from overseas computers with a simple subpoena issued by a US judge.In effect, it means the FBI can ask, say, a California court for a subpoena to obtain files from a San Francisco upstart’s servers hosted in France, sidestepping French privacy laws and legal system. The act’s wording also does not limit the Feds to serving orders for communications on US companies and entities – agents would be able to demand information from whomever they wished, if a US judge approved.

Source: US state legal supremos show lots of love for proposed CLOUD Act (a law to snoop on citizens’ info stored abroad) • The Register

How Goodyear Hid Evidence Of ‘The Worst Tire Made In History’ Linked To At Least 9 Deaths


In October 2003, Billy Wayne Woods and his family packed into a luxury $181,000 motorhome for a fun getaway to Florida. Call it a textbook American vacation: their destination was Disney World, and with his wife, Shirley, his son and daughter-in law and two grandchildren in tow, the trip would surely be one to remember. But on the return home for the Alabama family, the vacation took an abrupt turn for disaster.

Source: How Goodyear Hid Evidence Of ‘The Worst Tire Made In History’ Linked To At Least 9 Deaths

Shipyard Brewing Sues The Brewery It Is Trademark Bullying Over The Public Backlash To Its Trademark Bullying | Techdirt

You may recall that the middle of last summer saw us reporting on a somewhat odd trademark dispute between two breweries, Shipyard Brewing Co. and Logboat Brewing Company. Chiefly at issue was the fact that both breweries used images of schooners on their respective labels, except that the images used were laughably different. Also at issue was that Logboat’s “Shiphead” beer used the word “head”, which Shipyard says it uses in a variety of other beers, such as Pumpkinhead, Melonhead and other variations. Shipyard, notably, does not have a beer called “Shiphead”, making this all the more eyebrow-raising.Well, after we and others reported on this silly lawsuit, it seems that many within the craft beer fanship and community, a passionate group to be sure, felt a desire to let Shipyard Brewing know what they thought of this behavior. This is a common result when passionate fanbases get wind of bad actions taken within an industry. Despite that, Shipyard had apparently decided that all of this backlash was the fault of Logboat Brewing, and added a defamation charge to its lawsuit.

Source: Shipyard Brewing Sues The Brewery It Is Trademark Bullying Over The Public Backlash To Its Trademark Bullying | Techdirt

Psychiatrist Sues A Bunch Of Redditors For Criticizing His Therapy Services | Techdirt


For reasons only known to the plaintiff, an American psychiatrist offering unlicensed services in Japan is suing a whole bunch of Redditors for defamation. The underlying reason for this lawsuit is obvious: searches for Dr. Douglas Berger or psychiatrists in Japan tend to return lots of links presumably owned by Dr. Berger, but more prominently, a bunch of warnings from Redditors at Japan-focused subreddits to steer clear of his psychiatric services.

Source: Psychiatrist Sues A Bunch Of Redditors For Criticizing His Therapy Services | Techdirt

Under penalty of perjury: Copyright troll Malibu Media gets caught serving up falsified attorney’s fees declarations | Fight © Trolls

Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in. Harr…

Source: Under penalty of perjury: Copyright troll Malibu Media gets caught serving up falsified attorney’s fees declarations | Fight © Trolls