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MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
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Aaron Blake's big picture analysis countering a lot of common narrative:
Article gets into how Covid is affecting NGO's work against child marriage in many places like Nepal. Nepal actually has a legal marriage age of 20, but they're not enforcing it and lots of families are lapsing into old ways against girls' dreams and getting away with off-loading the daughters much earlier.
By Chloee Weiner @ NPR.org, Sept. 24
Two Louisiana state senators will go head-to-head in a runoff election Saturday that will determine who will succeed a White House adviser in the U.S. House.
State Sens. Karen Carter Peterson and Troy Carter, both Democrats, will compete for the 2nd Congressional District seat left vacant by Cedric Richmond, whom President Biden tapped to serve as the White House's director of public engagement.
The majority-Black district includes most of New Orleans.
Carter and Peterson were the top two finishers in a crowded open primary last month. In that contest, Carter received about 36% of the vote, while Peterson finished second with 23% of ballots cast, narrowly edging out Baton Rouge activist Gary Chambers Jr. for a spot in Saturday's runoff.
Both candidates have previously made unsuccessful bids to represent the 2nd District.
Carter won an endorsement from Richmond earlier this year, just before the former congressman left his position for the Biden administration. Carter, a former New Orleans City Council member, has also received the backing of Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., and other notable members of Congress [....]
After decades of not using a huge chunk of the Internet, the Pentagon has given control of millions of computer addresses to a previously unknown company in an effort to identify possible cyber vulnerabilities and threats
By Craig Timberg & Paul Sonne @ WashingtonPost.com, April 24
While the world was distracted with President Donald Trump leaving office on Jan. 20, an obscure Florida company discreetly announced to the world’s computer networks a startling development: It now was managing a huge unused swath of the Internet that, for several decades, had been owned by the U.S. military.
What happened next was stranger still.
The company, Global Resource Systems LLC, kept adding to its zone of control. Soon it had claimed 56 million IP addresses owned by the Pentagon. Three months later, the total was nearly 175 million. That’s almost 6 percent of a coveted traditional section of Internet real estate — called IPv4 — where such large chunks are worth billions of dollars on the open market.
The entities controlling the largest swaths of the Internet generally are telecommunications giants whose names are familiar: AT&T, China Telecom, Verizon. But now at the top of the list was Global Resource Systems — a company founded only in September that has no publicly reported federal contracts and no obvious public-facing website [....]
By Toby Green @ Aeon.com, March 30
Abolition in Africa brought longed-for freedoms, but also political turmoil, economic collapse and rising enslavement
I highly recommend this historical analysis, skillfully written to be easy to read, which readjusts the whole frigging standard "narratives" with nuance of reality.
Green is professor of precolonial and lusophone African history and culture at King’s College, London. He is the author of A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019) and The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality (forthcoming, April 2021)
Four of the world's five top executioners in 2020 were Middle East states, Amnesty International says.
Iran, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia accounted for 88% of the 483 reported executions worldwide, according to a report by the human rights group.It accuses them of displaying "a ruthless and chilling persistence" in putting people to death despite the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The global total was the lowest in a decade, but it did not include China. China is believed to execute thousands of people each year, but the true extent of its use of the death penalty is unknown as the data is a state secret [....]
By Elura Nanos @ LawandCrime.com, April 20
The Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments Tuesday in companion cases involving illegal gun possession and the fallout from a recent SCOTUS precedent. The cases are Greer v. United States (on appeal from the Eleventh Circuit) and United States v. Gary (on appeal from the Fourth Circuit).
Both cases ask the justices to clarify the impact of the 2019 landmark case Hamid Rehaif v. United States. In Rehaif, the Court ruled 7-2 in favor of an immigrant who was caught illegally possessing a handgun. Under the federal gun law, Hamid Rehaif would only have been guilty if he “knowingly violated” firearm laws. The case turned on whether the statute required Rehaif to be aware that his gun possession had been illegal [Rehaif had been using a gun at a firing range, ostensibly believing that he was entitled to do so].
Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the Court, remarking, “Assuming compliance with ordinary licensing requirements, the possession of a gun can be entirely innocent.” Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, however, disagreed. In Alito’s dissent, he warned that the Court’s ruling promises practical effects that “will be far reaching and cannot be ignored.” According to the dissenters, “tens of thousands of prisoners” would now have cause to appeal their convictions, even though many of them had pleaded guilty.
Gregory Greer and Michael Andrew Gary may be just two of those “tens of thousands.” Both cases involve facts markedly different from those in Rehaif, but what those differences mean for these defendants remains to be seen [....]
What I do know is that Yang’s big ideas are demonstrably wrong. Shouldn’t that be cause for concern? Yang’s claim to fame is his argument that we’re facing social and economic crises because rapid automation is destroying good jobs and that the solution is universal basic income, a monthly check of $1,000 to every American adult. Many people find that argument persuasive, and one can imagine a world in which both Yang’s diagnosis and his prescription would be right. But that’s not the world we’re living in now, and there’s little indication that it’s where we’re going any time soon.
Found via Hate Crimes Task Force account; they retweeted with this intro Meet our Chief of Detectives, James Essig, and please follow him @NYPDDetectives
PREVIOUS CRIME NEWS and discussion thread HERE, April 1 thru 14.
Feds turn into cyberfirefighters and hose down the web shell bonfire raging on hundreds of unpatched Exchange servers.
By Chris Duckett @ zdnet.com, April 14
[....] "Today's court-authorized removal of the malicious web shells demonstrates the department's commitment to disrupt hacking activity using all of our legal tools, not just prosecutions," Assistant Attorney General for national security John C. Demers said [....]
It's both personal and objective - Murdoch set out to destroy people and societies, including ours