We should return to the debate formats of Lincoln's day.



Since presidential debates started in 1960, the journalists who are supposed to “moderate” them have increasingly set the agenda and determined the substance of what the public sees. In the first 2016 presidential debate, Fox News’ “moderators” focused on what might embarrass candidates rather than on their record or proposals. Also, they indulged the Republican Establishment’s animus against its least favorite candidate. Though this made for an exciting show, the biggest loser was the public’s interest in understanding candidates and issues. The public interest would be best served were candidates to question one another. That’s how it was done in Lincoln’s day. We could and should get back to that.

Choosing the president of the United states on the basis of short answers to questions formulated or chosen by journalists was always a bad idea. It has only gotten worse. Limited to two minutes, as in the League Of Women Voters debates (Fox’s limit was one minute answers and 30 second rebuttals) the candidates can only reprise their canned talking points or the cleverish ads that are the foul staples of modern campaigns. Such parodies of debates demean the candidates, and all of us who watch. Along with the candidates, we the people become pawns in a game between the political consultants, the “moderators,” and the commentators who then tell us who played best.

The Myth Of The Moderator
Because no one ever doubted that “moderators” would influence the outcome of presidential debates, much effort went into giving the impression that the persons chosen were such as whom all would consider objective and super partes. Trust in the media’s impartiality, however, had vanished long before “moderator” Candy Crowley helped Barack Obama sustain a lie in 2012’s second presidential debate by instantly and counterfactually “fact checking” Mitt Romney. How, not whether, Mainstream Media “moderators” push the agendas of the Democratic Establishment they represented is the only question. Indeed, by 2012 it was difficult to avoid the sense that the media, Fox News included, was focusing negative coverage on the most conservative candidate who happened to be leading in the polls at any given time.


So, as Megyn Kelly’s team prepared for the first debate of the 2016 cycle, and as trumping Donald Trump’s challenge to the Republican Establishment became that Establishment’s overriding concern, it was clear that Fox’s “moderators” would be the most intrusive ever, and that their push of their employers’ agenda and their “take down” of their least favorite candidate would be explicit. In both regards, the Fox team broke new ground and established precedents that should lead us to scrap the post 1960 format.

The team began by demanding that whoever might not support the Republican Party’s eventual nominee raise his hand. Who, one wonders, empowered these “moderators” to demand an oath of loyalty to the Party hierarchy? A public official’s oath, after all, is to “the Constitution of the United States,” not to party bosses. Then came questions to the candidates that were one version another of “when did you stop beating your wife?” Donald Trump, first target for elimination, was baited particularly. Next time, it will be someone else’s turn. The time after that, yet PAGE 1 another’s. Fox News’ treatment of presidential candidates has less to do with public policy than with the extent to which they match the Republican Establishment. This differs from the rest of the media’s treatment of politics only to the diminishing extent to which the Democratic and Republican Establishments differ.

Why ‘The Establishment’ Doesn’t Matter Anymore
Meanwhile, as the American people have become increasingly estranged from both Establishments, they look for someone, anyone, who takes seriously their concern with issues that these Establishments, jointly, have taken out of political play. These issues are big, heavy, and not articulable in sound bites.

What shall we do about immigration laws, many of which are not even enforced, that are changing this country’s way of life? What shall we do about a financial system that manufactures literally trillions dollars and channels them through banks and other institutions in ways that benefit a few while putting us all at risk? Is it a good idea to redefine marriage? That seems to have happened. Shouldn’t we have a say in that? Did any of us vote to treat unborn babies as humans for the purposive harvesting their hearts and livers but not human for the purpose of letting them be killed in the first place? Why and how have such questions been taken out of our hands as citizens? Is it not our right and duty to take them back? Such questions demand consideration in depth ­ jointly by candidates and by citizens.

The Fox News debate showed the depths to which our political discourse has sunk and that its epitome, the presidential debates ­sound bites orchestrated by inevitably biased “moderators”­ is irremediable.

Any candidate possessed of enough testosterone could distinguish himself by withdrawing from any further such shows and declaring his intention of challenging opponents to Lincoln-­Douglas style debates for the broadcast of which he would raise the cash. Might enough citizens support restoring American politics to the intellectual and moral level of 150 years ago?


http://thefederalist.com/2015/08/13/megyn-kelly-shows-how-low-our-political-discourse-has-sunk/

QADIYA, Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

“I kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity.


The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets.


The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets.

The trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held, viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated fleet of buses used to transport them.

A total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery, including sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run Islamic courts. And the practice has become an established recruiting tool to lure men from deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual sex is taboo and dating is forbidden.

A growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last month. Repeatedly, the ISIS leadership has emphasized a narrow and selective reading of the Quran and other religious rulings to not only justify violence, but also to elevate and celebrate each sexual assault as spiritually beneficial, even virtuous.

“Every time that he came to rape me, he would pray,” said F, a 15-year-old girl who was captured on the shoulder of Mount Sinjar one year ago and was sold to an Iraqi fighter in his 20s. Like some others interviewed by The New York Times, she wanted to be identified only by her first initial because of the shame associated with rape.

“He kept telling me this is ibadah,” she said, using a term from Islamic scripture meaning worship.


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/middleeast/isis-enshrines-a-theology-of-rape.html?_r=3&utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=prbuexperts


-----------------------------------------
Difficult to read.

[The IKEA superstore near Stockholm which witnessed a double murder this week by Eritrean asylum seekers has responded by ending the sale of kitchen knives in-store, and the government has stepped up its policing at asylum-lodgings to defend against a backlash.]

The IKEA superstore near Stockholm which witnessed a double murder this week by Eritrean asylum seekers has responded by ending the sale of kitchen knives in-store, and the government has stepped up its policing at asylum-lodgings to defend against a backlash.



The response of the Swedish authorities to the ‘stabbings’ which killed what is reported to be a Swedish native mother and son shopping in the Västerås branch of IKEA – the largest in the country – has mystified some international observers.

Immediately after the attack by the newly arrived migrants, who shared a room in a government asylum shelter and had only arrived in the country less than four weeks before, Swedish police rushed to protect migrant communities from “dark forces in society”.

“Local police across the region have been tasked with taking these measures, to be there for safety purposes for everyone there – those who work there and those who live there,” Vastmanland police spokesman Per Agren said, as quoted by Reuters.

IKEA itself has now joined in with Västerås store manager telling local media that knives will be removed from shelves, a “temporary” move the chain presumably hopes will neuter the desire some in society feel to murder strangers.

After the stabbing on Monday, the store reopened this morning. News Agency AFP reports Swedish police have been “tight-lipped” over what precisely happened in the store, and have refused to confirm various claims in the local and global media, from the identity of the victims and perpetrators, the exact nature of the murder weapons, to whether it was a beheading. There are unconfirmed suggestions in the fringe press that the killers shouted “Allah Akbar” as they struck.

As reported by Breitbart News last year, IKEA stores are gun-free zones, with even uniformed police officers asked to leave premises by security guards for carrying firearms.

Department of Justice figures show over 500 people a year in the United States are murdered with ‘blunt objects’. Whether IKEA will now seek to take rolling pins and cast-iron frying pans off the shelves on the strength of this data is presently unknown.


http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/08/12/first-it-was-gun-control-now-its-knife-control-ikea-stops-selling-knives-after-store-stabbing/

[The government email accounts assigned to the officials, however, were not hacked because they are more secure, says the senior U.S. intelligence official.]

China's cyber spies have accessed the private emails of "many" top Obama administration officials, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official and a top secret document obtained by NBC News, and have been doing so since at least April 2010.

The email grab -- first codenamed "Dancing Panda" by U.S. officials, and then "Legion Amethyst" -- was detected in April 2010, according to a top secret NSA briefing from 2014. The intrusion into personal emails was still active at the time of the briefing and, according to the senior official, is still going on.

In 2011, Google disclosed that the private gmail accounts of some U.S. officials had been compromised, but the briefing shows that private email accounts from other providers were compromised as well.

The government email accounts assigned to the officials, however, were not hacked because they are more secure, says the senior U.S. intelligence official.


The senior official says the private emails of "all top national security and trade officials" were targeted.

The Chinese also harvested the email address books of targeted officials, according to the document, reconstructing and then "exploiting the(ir) social networks" by sending malware to their friends and colleagues.

The time period overlaps with Hillary Clinton's use of a private email account while Secretary of State from Jan. 21, 2009 to Feb. 1, 2013. The names and ranks of the officials whose emails were actually grabbed, however, were not disclosed in the NSA briefing nor by the intelligence official.

A different NSA document leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that in late 2010 China had attempted to spy on the emails of four U.S. officials, including then Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead. The document, posted on-line by Der Spiegel earlier this year, said the Chinese spies had tried to insert malicious software into their computers.


http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/china-read-emails-top-us-officials-n406046

Cancer patients who report more religiousness or spirituality may also experience fewer physical symptoms of cancer and treatment and more social connection, several new papers suggest.

The new analyses reviewed previous studies of spirituality involving more than 44,000 cancer patients altogether. The studies varied in many ways, but religion and spirituality were associated with better health regardless of specific religion or set of spiritual beliefs.

Some previous research has found this connection while others have not, said Heather Jim of the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, who led one of the new studies.

“Patients should not be pressured into adopting religious or spiritual beliefs,” Jim said. “Although our data suggest that patients with greater religion/spirituality tend to have better perceived physical health, these are aggregate-level data.”

“Patients who are not religious or spiritual can also experience good health outcomes,” she said.

These studies relied on patients to report on their health, so they did not address objective cancer outcomes, she told Reuters Health by email.

For the impact of spirituality on physical health, the studies included more than 32,000 adult cancer patients with a range of cancer types and stages. Higher religious or spirituality scores were generally associated with better overall health.

A sense of connection to a being larger than oneself was associated with better physical function and fewer, or less severe, symptoms of cancer or treatment, according to patient reports.

Intrinsic religious belief was also tied to better physical function.

Actual practice of religion, like church attendance, prayer, or meditation, was not related to physical health.

“Cancer patients who reported higher meaning, purpose, and spiritual connection in life also reported better physical health, as did patients who reported more positive religious or spiritual explanations for the cancer (versus a sense of fatalism or anger towards God),” Jim said.

Religious people may engage in more healthy behaviors, avoiding things like alcohol and drugs, and religious communities may provide social support, transportation to appointments, provision of meals and other basic needs, she said.

Spirituality may enhance positive emotion such as love, forgiveness, and comfort and reduce stress, she added.

“Conversely, spiritual distress is associated with greater depression and decreased adherence to medical recommendations among cancer patients,” Jim said. “However, we can’t say for sure that religion/spirituality causes better perceived health.”

Patients with cancer may question their religious and spiritual beliefs and those with worse health may also experience greater spiritual distress, she said.

In an analysis of studies with more than 14,000 cancer patients, the researchers found that religiousness and spirituality were associated with better social health, stronger roles and relationships in the community.

Spiritual well being, having a benevolent image of God, and holding religious beliefs were all associated with social health, regardless of demographics like age, race or gender, as reported in Cancer.

John M. Salsman, senior author on both the physical and social health analyses, stressed that religiousness and spirituality are multidimensional. He conducted the research while at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, but is now at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Religious “beliefs” were linked to health outcomes, but often not as strongly as other concepts like daily spiritual experiences and spiritual well being, Salsman told Reuters Health by email.

Most religions involve group meetings and carry a social element, which might explain part of the link to social health, he said. But it is still not certain whether religiousness or spirituality causes symptom relief or better physical function during cancer treatment, he said.

“One plausible explanation is that when patients view God as a loving, benevolent being, that may provide a source of comfort and strength to the patient, allowing him or her to manage the distressing nature of their symptoms even if the frequency of symptoms did not change,” Salsman said.

“An alternate example from personality research is that people who are more likely to be religious are more agreeable in nature,” he said. “They would also be less likely to complain about their physical health, even in the midst of treatment for cancer.”

Cancer treatment specialists should keep in mind that patients who are experiencing spiritual distress may benefit from talking with a chaplain or a member of their religious or spiritual community, Jim said.


http://news.yahoo.com/spirituality-may-tied-easier-cancer-course-144350920.html

https://twitter.com/sarasidnerCNN/status/630600817695961089

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xe8swJVGVE&spfreload=10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q6Wb5CGS1w&spfreload=10


St. Louis County police said a gun battle in Ferguson, Mo. late Sunday climaxed when one of the suspects involved opened fire on plainclothes detectives before being pursued and shot by the officers after a day of peaceful demonstrations in Ferguson marking the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death.

Chief Jon Belmar did not identify the suspect, whom he said was in “critical, unstable” condition at a local hospital. However, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch identified the man as 18-year-old Tyrone Harris Jr. Harris’ father, also named Tyrone, told the paper that his son had just come out of surgery early Monday, and noted that his son and Brown “were real close.”

In a statement released Monday morning, St. Louis County police said the suspect was one of at least two people who exchanged gunfire at around 11:15 p.m. local time along West Florissant Avenue. Belmar said that between 40 and 50 shots were fired in an exchange that lasted approximately 45 seconds, an amount he described as “remarkable.”

Belmar said that officers had been tracking the suspect, whom they believed to be armed, during the protest. As the gunfire began, the unmarked van the officers were driving in turned on its emergency lights and began moving toward the suspect. Authorities said the man opened fire, striking the van multiple times.



http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/08/10/shots-fired-at-police-during-late-night-ferguson-protest/?intcmp=hpbt1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkTitIAthjA&spfreload=10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1FiaPxRCFE&spfreload=10

 

North Korea is to switch to a new time zone to mark its liberation from the Japanese at the end of World War Two, says state media.

North Korea is currently in the same time zone as South Korea and Japan, which are nine hours ahead of GMT.

But Pyongyang Time will see the clocks put back by 30 minutes on 15 August.

State news agency KCNA said “wicked Japanese imperialists” had “deprived Korea of even its standard time” by changing the clocks during occupation.

The entire Korean peninsula – then one country – was 8.5 hours ahead of GMT until Japan colonised it in 1910.

KCNA quoted officials as saying the decision to adopt Pyongyang Time reflected “the unshakeable faith and will of the service personnel and people on the 70th anniversary of Korea’s liberation”.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-33815049

The Environmental Protection Agency, the federal agency committed to protecting “human health and the environment,” jeopardized both Wednesday by accidentally releasing one million gallons of wastewater into Colorado’s Animas River.

EPA bureaucrats were using heavy machinery to nose around the Gold King Mine near Durango, Colorado, when they triggered the release of wastewater containing heavy metals like zinc, iron, and copper.

The Denver Post reported that residents of Durango “gathered along the Animas River to watch as the blue waters turned a thick, radiant orange and yellow just after 8 p.m., nearly 34 hours after the spill started.”

“The river looks pretty nasty,” Deputy Stephen Lowrance of the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office told the Post. “It doesn’t look like water; it just looks like sludge.”

The EPA was reportedly investigating small leaks of toxic chemicals into the river near the mine when they triggered the million-gallon leak of toxic chemicals into the river.


http://freebeacon.com/issues/epa-dumps-one-million-gallons-of-wastewater-into-colorado-river/



------------------------------------------------------
Always trust the EPA.

[Liberty Institute sues the city for violation of Texas’ religious freedom laws]

Liberty Institute sues the city for violation of Texas’ religious freedom laws




Today’s edition of Why local governments can be the absolute worst takes place in my home breaks. If you haven’t had your coffee yet, this story is enough to get your blood pumping.

Two churches nestled in what used to be one of Houston’s roughest neighborhoods are fighting back against the city. The Latter Day Deliverance Revival Center was established in the fifth ward in 1965 by Bishop Roy Lee Kossie. A few years later, Pastor Quinton Smith began pastoring at the Christian Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church, also in the fifth ward. Both churches have grown and have had a positive impact on their community in each year since their establishment. Building a youth ministry center, a church-run food bank, and creating outreach programs for gang members, drug addicts, and alcoholics, the churches continue their work to transform the fifth ward.

“When we moved in to this area, it was considered the highest crime rate area in the city of Houston. People shot first and asked questions later. But we loved these people. We loved this community. We knew this was exactly where we needed to be,” said Kossie.

The fifth ward is located just outside of downtown. Property values in the area have skyrocketed and continue to climb. The City of Houston offered to purchase the churches. When the churches refused, the city came back with threats of using eminent domain to acquire the property as part of an urban development plan.

The Liberty Institute, an organization that has over forty years of experience fighting for religious freedom jumped in to help. Monday, the Liberty Institute filed suit against the City of Houston.

On August 4, 2015, Liberty Institute filed a lawsuit against the City of Houston, asserting that the city is violating Texas’ religious freedom law, including the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act. They note that the churches have served as pillars in the Fifth Ward’s spiritual and social community for decades and that the City’s actions would force the churches out of the community they have served for over half a century.

Liberty Institute Deputy Chief Counsel Hiram Sasser says, “These churches have served this community for decades. They’ve held the neighborhood together through a lot of hard times. It’s tragic that the City of Houston wants to take the churches’ property away and give it to someone else, just so they can make money. The government cannot take a church’s property and give it to some other business in violation of the law. These churches, their congregations, and this neighborhood are not for sale.”

The suit argues, “HHA’s exercise of eminent domain to condemn the Churches’ properties violates their rights as defined by The Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Texas Constitution. The HHA’s looming condemnation of the Churches’ properties would substantially burden their free exercise of religion. The HHA cannot justify this substantial burden: it lacks a compelling government interest and its plan is not narrowly tailored. Furthermore, the threatened takings are improper as the properties are not intended for “public use” as required by Article 1, Section 17 of the Texas Constitution.”

Neither church is planning to walk away without a fight.

“We’ve been here for years. We’ve watched the children grow up. We’ve been a safe place for them when things are bad at home. If the city makes us leave the Fifth Ward, what will happen to the children? We just want the City to leave us alone so we can keep helping these kids,” said Pastor Smith.

Bishop Kossie added, “This is our home. This is where the Lord called us to serve and this is where we want to stay. We aren’t giving up without a fight.”

If ever there was an example of government at its absolute worst, this is certainly it.


http://legalinsurrection.com/2015/08/city-of-houston-threatens-to-steal-land-from-decades-old-churches-using-eminent-domain/

U.S. officials tell NBC News that Russia launched a "sophisticated cyberattack" against the Pentagon's Joint Staff unclassified email system, which has been shut down and taken off line for nearly two weeks. According to the officials, the "sophisticated cyber intrusion" occurred sometime around July 25 and affected some 4,000 military and civilian personnel work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Sources tell NBC News that it appears the cyberattack relied on some kind of automated system that rapidly gathered massive amounts of data and within a minute distributed all the information to thousands of accounts on the Internet. The officials also report the suspected Russian hackers coordinated the sophisticated cyberassault via encrypted accounts on social media.

While the officials say its not clear whether the attack was sanctioned by the Russian government or conducted by individuals given the scope of the attack, "It was clearly the work of a state actor."
The officials stress that no classified information was seized or compromised and that only unclassified accounts and emails were hacked.

Almost immediately after the cyberattack was detected the Pentagon took the aggressive step of shutting down the entire Joint Staff unclassified email system and Internet during its investigation. The system should be back on line before the end of this week.

This story is developing. Please check back for further updates.



http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/06/russia-hacks-pentagon-computers-nbc-citing-sources.html?__source=newsletter|breakingnews

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- The dream of a free and open Internet is slowly being killed by overregulation, censorship and bad laws that don't stop the right people, a top computer crime defense lawyer says.

The annual Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas kicked off Wednesday with a keynote address from Jennifer Granick, director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Granick said that while the Internet needs to be reasonably safe in order to be functional, it's no longer the revolutionary place it was 20 years ago.

No one is murdering the dream of an open Internet, she said, but it's withering away because no one is prioritizing its protection. On top of that, new Internet users are coming from countries whose citizens aren't protected by a Bill of Rights or a First Amendment.

"Should we be worrying about another terrorist attack in New York, or about journalists and human rights advocates being able to do their jobs?" she asked.

Granick also railed against the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which carries sentences of up to 10 years in prison for a first-time offense. It does nothing to prosecute countries like China that launch state-sponsored attacks against the U.S. government and major companies, along with other dangerous hackers based overseas, she said. But, she added, it often hits small-time American hackers with unfairly harsh prison sentences.

In a separate briefing later Wednesday, Leonard Bailey of the Department of Justice's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property section, said that in most cases, prosecutions of computer crimes are very "reasonable" and not "prosecutors gone wild."

"But all it takes is one flogging in the public square and there's a chilling effect," he says. "So, we have to try to get this right."

A slew of hackers and information security professionals took the stage at Black Hat later on Wednesday.

One of the most popular talks featured Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, who gained fame recently by hacking into and taking control of a Jeep Cherokee, prompting Fiat Chrysler to recall 1.4 million vehicles to fix the problem.

In a light-hearted talk in a packed ballroom that was often interrupted by applause, the pair detailed how they spent a year hacking into the Jeep, before ultimately infiltrating it through the cellular connection in its radio and then connecting to its controls.

Wednesday's later talks were set to include sessions on the cloning of contactless payment devices such as Apple Pay and Google Wallet, along with the hacking of gas pumps, new research on the prevalence of Internet scams and the hacking of Square Inc.'s mobile credit card-reading devices.

The conference continues on Thursday with sessions featuring the hacking of an Internet-connected sniper rifle, a look at ransomware and a discussion of the hidden risks of biometric identification.


http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_BLACK_HAT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-08-05-17-19-03

Jon Stewart has been a major cultural and political commentator for the past 16 years. He liked to take down the powerful—at least, when his head wasn’t shoved up Uncle Sam’s ass.

As The Daily Show host ends his run, reminisce with Reason TV the top five ways Jon Stewart was full of shit.



http://reason.com/reasontv/2015/08/05/5-ways-jon-stewart-was-full-of-shit

Q. What is WWF's position on trophy hunting
Sparsely wooded grassy plain with mountains in the background Kunene Province, Damaraland, Namibia
WWF does not promote or support hunting generally and is opposed to hunting that threatens species or habitat sustainability. At the same time, WWF recognises that communities use their wildlife and these uses include hunting and fishing.

As a leading conservation organisation, WWF works to address illegal or unsustainable exploitation of wildlife. Within this framework, WWF accepts or supports hunting in a very limited number of contexts where it is culturally appropriate, legal and effectively regulated, and has demonstrated environmental and community benefits.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/11785785/Cecil-the-lion-legal-hunting-can-help-conservation-says-Rory-Stewart.html


--------------------
If the country gives you a licence then its... fair game!

Drone have been used to drop bombs, spy on foreign countries and monitor how farmers work their fields. Now they could help hack into personal computers.

According to e-mails posted by WikiLeaks, military contractors may want to do just that. Boeing and Hacking Team — a Milan-based company criticized for selling surveillance software to repressive governments — were in talks earlier this year to plant malware on drones to perform such activities, according to the e-mails, which were stolen from Hacking Team in July.

According to an e-mail that summarizes the contents of a meeting between the two companies, Boeing was searching for a "ruggedized" network injector "transportable by drone (!)."

Drone and network analysts offer a scenario about how this type of technology could work:

A highly desired al-Qaeda operative is on the lam, hiding out in a bungalow in the foothills of some not-so-allied country, which may or may not be protecting him from U.S. detection. The American military could try hacking into that government's computer network to look for intelligence, but reaching across the globe through a keyboard is pretty hard and time-consuming.

Or, the military could put an unmanned drone in the air equipped with malware to fly over the highly desired operative's bungalow and conduct some surveillance.

That kind of hardware on an unmanned aircraft would give its user the ability to conduct cyberwarfare and espionage in ways that formerly required close proximity with the target, according to those analysts.

"You want to be able to place yourself in the middle of traffic to surveil it or gain access to it," said independent network researcher Collin Anderson. "What this gives you is the ability to be in the same room as all the other machines you’re tying to look out for."

A Hacking Team spokesman said Boeing and Hacking Team have "no business relationship at all."

Boeing, which makes the ScanEagle drone for the military and is pitching the Phantom Eye drone as well, declined to comment on its communication with Hacking Team but said in a statement that it is important to understand new hardware and software capabilities in order to offer them to clients.


"Understanding the payload technologies available to our customers in this market is essential to providing them with the services they require," Boeing said.

The ability to hack someone using a drone may be attractive for the military, said Michael Blades, a senior aerospace and defense industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan.

"We’re used to drones getting information from their sensors and cameras and stuff, but there’s nothing that says they can’t get information from a data link, or use malware in a drone to corrupt a system," he said. "Military clients would want that."

The kind of hacks drone operators would be able to conduct aren't incredibly advanced, say industry analysts, but they do give users a whole other suite of options to gather "signals intelligence," or information scraped from electronic signals or networks.

Disabling a WiFi network — which would curb an enemy's ability to communicate or fly their own drones — or creating a false network called a "honeypot" — which would allow hackers to access devices that connect to it — require proximity but not a lot of technical skill.

"Putting it on a drone sounds science fiction, but these tools are something that any high school student with a little technical knowledge can use," Collins said.

That means they could be more attractive to military-industry buyers, analysts say.

"There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of beneficial economic applications that drones can do," said Colin Snow, chief executive and founder of Drone Analyst, a California-based civilian aircraft consultancy. "It replaces a lot of the dull, dirty and dangerous jobs."

And now, perhaps, they might also be able to help hack into your computer.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/08/04/hacked-e-mails-boeing-wants-its-drones-to-hack-computers-from-the-sky/

In the weeks leading up to a critical annual U.S. report on human trafficking that publicly shames the world’s worst offenders, human rights experts at the State Department concluded that trafficking conditions hadn’t improved in Malaysia and Cuba. And in China, they found, things had grown worse.

The State Department’s senior political staff saw it differently — and they prevailed.

A Reuters examination, based on interviews with more than a dozen sources in Washington and foreign capitals, shows that the government office set up to independently grade global efforts to fight human trafficking was repeatedly overruled by senior American diplomats and pressured into inflating assessments of 14 strategically important countries in this year’s Trafficking in Persons report.

In all, analysts in the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons - or J/TIP, as it’s known within the U.S. government — disagreed with U.S. diplomatic bureaus on ratings for 17 countries, the sources said.

The analysts, who are specialists in assessing efforts to combat modern slavery - such as the illegal trade in humans for forced labor or prostitution - won only three of those disputes, the worst ratio in the 15-year history of the unit, according to the sources.

As a result, not only Malaysia, Cuba and China, but countries such as India, Uzbekistan and Mexico, wound up with better grades than the State Department’s human-rights experts wanted to give them, the sources said. (Graphic looking at some of the key decisions here: reut.rs/1gF2Wz5)

Of the three disputes J/TIP won, the most prominent was Thailand, which has faced scrutiny over forced labor at sea and the trafficking of Rohingya Muslims through its southern jungles. Diplomats had sought to upgrade it to so-called “Tier 2 Watch List” status. It remains on “Tier 3” - the rating for countries with the worst human-trafficking records.

The number of rejected recommendations suggests a degree of intervention not previously known by diplomats in a report that can lead to sanctions and is the basis for many countries’ anti-trafficking policies. This year, local embassies and other constituencies within the department were able to block some of the toughest grades.

State Department officials say the ratings are not politicized. “As is always the case, final decisions are reached only after rigorous analysis and discussion between the TIP office, relevant regional bureaus and senior State Department leaders,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said in response to queries by Reuters.

Still, by the time the report was released on July 27, Malaysia and Cuba were both removed from the "Tier 3" blacklist, even though the State Department’s own trafficking experts believed neither had made notable improvements, according to the sources.

The Malaysian upgrade, which was highly criticized by human rights groups, could smooth the way for an ambitious proposed U.S.-led free-trade deal with the Southeast Asian nation and 11 other countries.

Ending Communist-ruled Cuba’s 12 years on the report’s blacklist came as the two nations reopened embassies on each other’s soil following their historic détente over the past eight months.

And for China, the experts’ recommendation to downgrade it to the worst ranking, Tier 3, was overruled despite the report’s conclusion that Beijing did not undertake increased anti-trafficking efforts.

That would have put China alongside the likes of Syria and North Korea, regarded by the United Nations as among the world’s worst human right abusers.

Typically, J/TIP wins more than half of what officials call “disputes” with diplomatic sections of the State Department, according to people familiar with the process.

“Certainly we have never seen that kind of an outcome,” said one U.S. official with direct knowledge of the department.

ABILITY TO EMBARRASS

The Trafficking in Persons report, which evaluated 188 countries and territories this year, calls itself the world’s most comprehensive resource of governmental anti-human trafficking efforts. Rights groups mostly agree.

It organizes countries into tiers based on trafficking records: Tier 1 for nations that meet minimum U.S. standards; Tier 2 for those making significant efforts to meet those standards; Tier 2 "Watch List" for those that deserve special scrutiny; and Tier 3 for countries that fail to comply with the minimum U.S. standards and are not making significant efforts.

While a Tier 3 ranking can trigger sanctions limiting access to aid from the United States, the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, such action is frequently waived.

The real power is its ability to embarrass countries into action. Many countries aggressively lobby U.S. embassies to try to avoid sliding into the Tier 3 category. Four straight years on the Tier 2 Watch List triggers an automatic downgrade to Tier 3 unless a country earns a waiver or an upgrade.

The leverage has brought some success, including pressuring Switzerland to close loopholes that allowed the prostitution of minors and prompting the Dominican Republic to convict more child trafficking offenders.

President Barack Obama has called the fight against human trafficking “one of the great human rights causes of our time” and has pledged the United States “will continue to lead it.”

But the office set up in 2001 by a congressional mandate to spearhead that effort is increasingly struggling to publish independent assessments of the most diplomatically important countries, the sources said.

The rejection of so many recommendations could strengthen calls by some lawmakers to investigate how the report is compiled.  After Reuters on July 8 reported on the plans to upgrade Malaysia, 160 members of the U.S. House and 18 U.S. senators wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry urging him to keep Malaysia in Tier 3, based on its trafficking record. They questioned whether the upgrade was politically motivated.

Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat, has threatened to call for a Senate hearing and an inspector general to investigate if top State Department officials removed Malaysia from the lowest tier for political reasons.

The final decision on disputed rankings this year was made in meetings attended by some of the State Department’s most powerful diplomats, including Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman and Kerry’s Chief of Staff, Jonathan Finer, according to the sources.

Sarah Sewall, who oversees J/TIP as Undersecretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights, presented the experts’ recommendations, the sources said.  The State Department declined to make any of those officials available for comment.

“NO, NO, NO”

The unprecedented degree of discord over this trafficking report began to become clear after Reuters early last month revealed plans to upgrade Malaysia from the lowest Tier 3 rank to Tier 2 Watch List.

The improved ranking came in a year in which Malaysian authorities discovered dozens of suspected mass migrant graves and human rights groups reported continued forced labor in the nation’s lucrative palm oil, construction and electronics industries. As recently as April, the U.S. ambassador to Malaysia, Joseph Yun, urged the country to take prosecution of human trafficking violations more seriously.

U.S. officials have denied that political considerations influenced Malaysia’s rankings.

“No, no, no,” said Sewall, when asked by reporters last Monday whether Malaysia was upgraded to facilitate trade negotiations. She said the decision was based on how Malaysia was dealing with trafficking.

Representative Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican who authored a 2000 law that led to the creation of J/TIP, said in an interview that the office’s authority is being undermined by the president’s agenda. “It’s so politicized,” he said.

If Malaysia had remained on Tier 3, it would have posed a potential barrier to Obama's proposed trade pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That deal is a crucial part of his pivot to Asia policy. Congress approved legislation in June giving Obama expanded trade negotiating powers but prohibiting deals with Tier 3 countries such as, at that time, Malaysia.

Congressional sources and current and former State Department officials said experts in the J/TIP office had recommended keeping Malaysia on Tier 3, highlighting a drop in human-trafficking convictions in the country to three last year from nine in 2013. They said, according to the sources, that some of Malaysia’s efforts to end forced labor amounted to promises rather than action.

The analysts also clashed over Cuba’s record with the State Department’s Western Hemisphere Affairs Bureau, whose view took precedence in the final report.

Human rights groups and people with knowledge of the negotiations over the rankings said an unearned upgrade for Cuba, especially at a time of intense attention due to the historic diplomatic thaw between Washington and Havana, could undermine the integrity of the report.

Cuba had been on the “border line” for an upgrade in recent years, a former State Department official said. And although Cuba ended up with an upgrade, the final report remained highly critical, citing concerns about Cuba’s failure to deal with a degree of alleged forced labor in medical missions that Havana sends to developing countries.

China was another source of friction. J/TIP’s analysts called for downgrading China, the world’s second-biggest economy, to Tier 3, criticizing Beijing for failing to follow through on a promise to abolish its “re-education through labor” system and to adequately protect trafficking victims from neighboring countries such as North Korea. The final report put China on Tier 2 Watch List.

SHOWING DEFERENCE

But the candor of J/TIP can run afoul of other important diplomatic priorities, particularly in countries beset by instability or corruption where U.S. diplomats are trying to build relationships. That leads every year to sometimes contentious back-and-forth over the rankings with far-flung embassies and regional bureaus – the diplomatic centers of gravity at the State Department.

“There is supposed to be some deference to the expertise of the office,” said Mark Lagon, J/TIP’s ambassador-at-large from 2007 to 2009 and now president of Freedom House, an advocacy group in Washington. If the office is now losing more disputes over rankings than it is winning, that would be “an unfortunate thing,” he said.

Most U.S. diplomats are reluctant to openly strike back at critics inside and outside of the administration who accuse them of letting politics trump human rights, the sources said.

But privately, some diplomats say that J/TIP staffers should avoid acting like “purists” and keep sight of broader U.S. interests, including maintaining open channels with authoritarian governments to push for reform and forging trade deals that could lift people out of poverty.

From the start, J/TIP has tried to be impartial. It is based in a building a few blocks away from State Department, adding to the sense of two separate identities and cultures.

But establishing genuine independence has been difficult. At first, the heads of regional bureaus, representing the business and political interests of U.S. embassies, would join the J/TIP team around a table and have almost an equal say in deciding country rankings in the final report.

John Miller, a former Republican congressman from Washington state named by President George W. Bush to head the bureau from 2002 to 2006, overhauled that structure.

“I said ‘no way’,” Miller said in an interview. By 2004, decisions on how to rank countries were made by his office. Diplomats who objected could appeal to then deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage. “He rarely overruled me,” said Miller. Armitage, who is no longer in a government job, did not respond to a request for comment sent through his office.

Laura Lederer, who helped set the office up as senior human trafficking adviser from 2002 to 2007, said its job was “to assess and rate countries solely on their progress in addressing the prevention of trafficking, the prosecution of traffickers, and protection and assistance of victims.”

But officials who worked in the office over the past 15 years acknowledge that countries with sensitive diplomatic or trade relationships with the United States sometimes received special treatment following pressure from local embassies and other constituencies within the department.

One such country is Mexico – a key trading partner whose cooperation is also needed against drug trafficking and illegal immigration. It was kept at Tier 2 despite the anti-trafficking unit’s call for a worse grade, according to officials in Washington and Mexico City.

The controversy over this year’s report comes at a time when J/TIP lacks a congressionally confirmed leader.

The prior chief, ambassador-at-Large Luis CdeBaca, left in November of last year. His deputy, Alison Friedman, then resigned to join a non-profit anti-slavery organization. And then it took until mid-July for Obama to nominate Georgia federal prosecutor Susan Coppedge as the next ambassador-at-large.

The lack of a director can increase the unit’s exposure to political influence, said Lederer.

Some say the perceived hit to the integrity of the 2015 report could do lasting damage.

“It only takes one year of this kind of really deleterious political effect to kill its credibility,”  said Mark Taylor, a former senior coordinator for reports and political affairs at J/TIP from 2003 to 2013.


http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/04/us-usa-humantrafficking-disputes-special-idUSKCN0Q821Y20150804

Did I say "Lion"? Sorry about that...
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Children stand among a crowd of laughing men as depraved Islamic State militants throw a man accused of being gay from the top of a building in northern Iraq.

Shocking new photographs show the man, who is blindfolded and has his hands tied behind his back, pushed off the top of a silo.

It is the latest proof of ISIS’ ambition to hunt down and execute anyone they believe is gay.




http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3184744/ISIS-fighters-throw-man-building-Iraq-gay.html#ixzz3hqV2opUr

['Gene drive': Scientists sound alarm over supercharged GM organisms which could spread in the wild and cause environmental disasters]

'Gene drive': Scientists sound alarm over supercharged GM organisms which could spread in the wild and cause environmental disasters



A powerful new technique for generating “supercharged” genetically modified organisms that can spread rapidly in the wild has caused alarm among scientists who fear that it may be misused, accidentally or deliberately, and cause a health emergency or environmental disaster.

The development of so-called “gene drive” technology promises to revolutionise medicine and agriculture because it can in theory stop the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses, such as malaria and yellow fever, as well as eliminate crop pests and invasive species such as rats and cane toads.

However, scientists at the forefront of the development believe that in the wrong hands gene-drive technology poses a serious threat to the environment and human health if accidentally or deliberately released from a laboratory without adequate safeguards. Some believe it could even be used as a terrorist bio-weapon directed against people or livestock because gene drives – which enable GM genes to spread rapidly like a viral infection within a population – will eventually be easy and cheap to generate.

“Just as gene drives can make mosquitoes unfit for hosting and spreading the malaria parasite, they could conceivably be designed with gene drives carrying cargo for delivering lethal bacterial toxins to humans,” said David Gurwitz, a geneticist at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

A group of senior geneticists have called for international safeguards to apply to researchers who want to develop gene drives, with strict security measures placed on laboratories to prevent the accidental escape of “supercharged” GM organisms that are able to spread rapidly in the wild.

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A powerful new technique for generating “supercharged” genetically modified organisms that can spread rapidly in the wild has caused alarm among scientists who fear that it may be misused, accidentally or deliberately, and cause a health emergency or environmental disaster.

The development of so-called “gene drive” technology promises to revolutionise medicine and agriculture because it can in theory stop the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses, such as malaria and yellow fever, as well as eliminate crop pests and invasive species such as rats and cane toads.

However, scientists at the forefront of the development believe that in the wrong hands gene-drive technology poses a serious threat to the environment and human health if accidentally or deliberately released from a laboratory without adequate safeguards. Some believe it could even be used as a terrorist bio-weapon directed against people or livestock because gene drives – which enable GM genes to spread rapidly like a viral infection within a population – will eventually be easy and cheap to generate.

There is no compelling evidence to suggest that genetically modified crops are any more harmful than conventionally grown food There is no compelling evidence to suggest that genetically modified crops are any more harmful than conventionally grown food (Getty)
“Just as gene drives can make mosquitoes unfit for hosting and spreading the malaria parasite, they could conceivably be designed with gene drives carrying cargo for delivering lethal bacterial toxins to humans,” said David Gurwitz, a geneticist at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

A group of senior geneticists have called for international safeguards to apply to researchers who want to develop gene drives, with strict security measures placed on laboratories to prevent the accidental escape of “supercharged” GM organisms that are able to spread rapidly in the wild.


Last week the US National Academy of Sciences initiated a wide-ranging review of gene-drive technology in “non-human organisms” and in this week’s journal Science a group of 27 leading geneticists call on the scientific community to be open and transparent about both the risks and benefits of gene drives.

“They have tremendous potential to address global problems in health, agriculture and conservation but their capacity to alter wild populations outside the laboratory demands caution,” the scientists say.

The researchers have drawn up a minimum set of safety rules to protect against laboratory escapes and have called for a public debate on the potential benefits as well as risks of a technology that allows geneticists to rapidly accelerate the inheritance of GM traits throughout an animal population within just a few generations.

Researchers have likened gene-drive technology to a nuclear chain reaction because it allows GM genes to be amplified within a breeding population of insects or other animals without any further intervention once the trait has been initially introduced. This is the case even if the trait is non-beneficial to the organism.

Laboratory experiments on fruit flies have shown that a modified gene introduced into one individual fly can take just a few generations to “infect” practically every other fly in the breeding population, in defiance of the normal rules of genetics which dictate a far slower spread.


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-sound-alarm-over-supercharged-gm-organisms-which-could-spread-in-the-wild-and-cause-environmental-disasters-10434010.html

Calls for more gun control almost always follow a public crime or terror attack in which the attacker–or attackers–use a gun. Yet many of the most infamous attacks take place in gun free zones–places where law-abiding citizens disarm themselves to comply with the rules while criminals take advantage of disarmed masses and open fire.

What follows are just a few of the many examples of shootings in gun free zones that could be listed. There is not one type of firearm that can be blamed–the weapon used was sometimes a handgun, sometimes a rifle, other times a shotgun–nor is there one specific race that can be pinpointed–the attackers come from various races/ethnicities. Nor is this a situation where expanding background checks would have made even the slightest difference–all the attackers listed but one, Adam Lanza, passed a background check for their firearms. Lanza opted to steal his guns instead.

The common thread is that the attacks took place in areas where the gunman knew he could inflict damage at his own pace, without the threat of reprisal from armed citizens:

Lafayette Grand Theatre: On July 23 John Russell Houser allegedly opened fire with a .40 caliber pistol, killing two people–Mayci Breaux and Jillian Johnson–and injuring nine others in a gun free zone.

Chattanooga: On July 16 Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez opened fire on two military locations–one a recruitment office, the second a Navy Operational Support Center. The attack killed five people–USMC Gunnery Sgt. Thomas Sullivan, USMC Lance Corporal Squire K. Wells, USMC Staff Sgt. David Wyatt, USMC Sgt. Carson Holmquist, and US Navy Petty Officer Randall Smith–in a gun free zone.


http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/08/02/heres-how-many-lives-were-taken-in-just-8-armed-attacks-in-gun-free-zones/

[The Canadian researchers who created hitchBOT as a social experiment told The Associated Press that someone in Philadelphia damaged the robot beyond repair on Saturday, ending its first American tour after about two weeks.]

A hitchhiking robot that captured the hearts of fans worldwide met its demise in the U.S.

The Canadian researchers who created hitchBOT as a social experiment told The Associated Press that someone in Philadelphia damaged the robot beyond repair on Saturday, ending its first American tour after about two weeks.

The kid-size robot set out to travel cross-country after successfully hitchhiking across Canada in 26 days last year and parts of Europe. It is immobile on its own so gets from place to place by relying on the kindness of strangers.

It started in Marblehead, Massachusetts, on July 17 with its thumb raised skyward, a grin on its digital face and tape wrapped around its cylindrical head that read “San Francisco or bust.”

It bounced around the Boston area and was briefly taken to sea. One day, it took in a Red Sox game. But hitchBOT never made it off the East Coast.

The creators were sent an image of the vandalized robot Saturday but cannot track its location because the battery is dead. They said they don’t know who destroyed it or why. But co-creator Frauke Zeller said many children who adored the robot are now heartbroken.



http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/08/01/hitchhiking-robot-cross-country-trip-in-us-ends-prematurely-in-philly/