Browsed by
Author: From elsewhere

Roger Stone can’t stop claiming he was poisoned by polonium

Roger Stone can’t stop claiming he was poisoned by polonium

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: For more than a year, Roger Stone has asserted that he spent Christmas 2016 trying to survive an assassination attempt — most likely radioactive polonium poisoning — by someone trying to frame Russia. Tests were conducted; doctors were baffled, the longtime political operative and adviser to Donald Trump told journalists. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was contacted. But from the moment he made the claims, Stone has deflected questions when asked to back…

Read More Read More

Regulating the invisible ecosystem where thousands of firms possess data on billions of people

Regulating the invisible ecosystem where thousands of firms possess data on billions of people

Comments 0 Comment

Jonathan Zittrain writes: Currently there is no way for us to retract information that previously seemed harmless to share. Once tied to our identities, data about us can be part of our permanent record in the hands of whoever has it — and whomever they share it with, voluntarily or otherwise. The Cambridge Analytica data set from Facebook is itself but a lake within an ocean, a clarifying example of a pervasive but invisible ecosystem where thousands of firms possess…

Read More Read More

Palestinian video journalist was among the nine people killed during the ‘Great March of Return’

Palestinian video journalist was among the nine people killed during the ‘Great March of Return’

Comments 0 Comment

The Observer reports: Hashem Zakout should have been at his local hospital yesterday doing the voluntary work as a clerk that he hopes will lead to a paid full-time job. Instead the 24-year-old was a patient in the emergency room at another northern Gaza hospital, shot in the left knee after throwing “little stones” at Israeli troops across the border, east of the Jabaliya refugee camp where he lives. Zakout was wounded on Friday when he was 10 metres from…

Read More Read More

Rights of the dead and the living clash when scientists extract DNA from human remains

Rights of the dead and the living clash when scientists extract DNA from human remains

Comments 0 Comment

Who gets to decide for the dead, such as this Egyptian mummy? AP Photo/Ric Feld By Chip Colwell, University of Colorado Denver The remains of a 6-inch long mummy from Chile are not those of a space alien, according to recently reported research. The tiny body with its strange features – a pointed head, elongated bones – had been the subject of fierce debate over whether a UFO might have left it behind. The scientists gained access to the body,…

Read More Read More

Science shouldn’t treat the undetectable as taboo

Science shouldn’t treat the undetectable as taboo

Comments 0 Comment

Adam Becker writes: The Viennese physicist Wolfgang Pauli suffered from a guilty conscience. He’d solved one of the knottiest puzzles in nuclear physics, but at a cost. ‘I have done a terrible thing,’ he admitted to a friend in the winter of 1930. ‘I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.’ Despite his pantomime of despair, Pauli’s letters reveal that he didn’t really think his new sub-atomic particle would stay unseen. He trusted that experimental equipment would eventually be…

Read More Read More

Neanderthals cared for each other and survived into old age – new research

Neanderthals cared for each other and survived into old age – new research

Comments 0 Comment

shutterstock By James Ohman, Liverpool John Moores University and Asier Gomez-Olivencia, University of the Basque Country When we think of Neanderthals, we often imagine these distant ancestors of ours to be rather brutish, dying at a young age and ultimately becoming extinct. But new findings show that at least some of these ancient Neanderthals survived into old age – despite suffering from sickness or diseases. Neanderthals were hunter-gatherers, living in harsh environments, mostly colder than today. And of course they…

Read More Read More

Department of Homeland Security to create massive database to classify and track journalists and bloggers

Department of Homeland Security to create massive database to classify and track journalists and bloggers

Comments 0 Comment

Bloomberg reports: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to monitor hundreds of thousands of news sources around the world and compile a database of journalists, editors, foreign correspondents, and bloggers to identify top “media influencers.” It’s seeking a contractor that can help it monitor traditional news sources as well as social media and identify “any and all” coverage related to the agency or a particular event, according to a request for information released April 3. The data to be…

Read More Read More

Facebook sent a doctor on a secret mission to ask hospitals to share patient data

Facebook sent a doctor on a secret mission to ask hospitals to share patient data

Comments 0 Comment

CNBC reports: Facebook has asked several major U.S. hospitals to share anonymized data about their patients, such as illnesses and prescription info, for a proposed research project. Facebook was intending to match it up with user data it had collected, and help the hospitals figure out which patients might need special care or treatment. The proposal never went past the planning phases and has been put on pause after the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal raised public concerns over how…

Read More Read More

Mark Zuckerberg’s exceptional ability to retract his own words

Mark Zuckerberg’s exceptional ability to retract his own words

Comments 0 Comment

TechCrunch reports: You can’t remove Facebook messages from the inboxes of people you sent them to, but Facebook did that for Mark Zuckerberg and other executives. Three sources confirm to TechCrunch that old Facebook messages they received from Zuckerberg have disappeared from their Facebook inboxes, while their own replies to him conspiculously remain. An email receipt of a Facebook message from 2010 reviewed by TechCrunch proves Zuckerberg sent people messages that no longer appear in their Facebook chat logs or…

Read More Read More

These messages show Julian Assange talked about seeking hacked files from Guccifer 2.0

These messages show Julian Assange talked about seeking hacked files from Guccifer 2.0

Comments 0 Comment

BuzzFeed reports: Twitter DMs obtained by BuzzFeed News show that in the summer of 2016, WikiLeaks was working to obtain files from Guccifer 2.0, an online hacktivist persona linked to by Russian military intelligence, the clearest evidence to date of WikiLeaks admitting its pursuit of Guccifer 2.0. “[P]lease ‘leave,’ their conversation with them and us,” WikiLeaks asked journalist Emma Best, who was also negotiating with Guccifer 2.0 for access to what it had teased on its blog as “exclusive access”…

Read More Read More

The demise of the nation state

The demise of the nation state

Comments 0 Comment

Rana Dasgupta writes: What is happening to national politics? Every day in the US, events further exceed the imaginations of absurdist novelists and comedians; politics in the UK still shows few signs of recovery after the “national nervous breakdown” of Brexit. France “narrowly escaped a heart attack” in last year’s elections, but the country’s leading daily feels this has done little to alter the “accelerated decomposition” of the political system. In neighbouring Spain, El País goes so far as to…

Read More Read More

Shell scientists foresaw a storm like Sandy, as well as climate lawsuits

Shell scientists foresaw a storm like Sandy, as well as climate lawsuits

Comments 0 Comment

E&E News reports: Two decades ago, a group of researchers envisioned a violent storm ripping through the East Coast with such force that it would transform young people into climate activists, spark lawsuits and cause government leaders to turn on fossil fuel companies. They were only off by two years. They also worked for Shell Oil Co. In 1998, Shell researchers wrote an internal memo about future scenarios that could harm their business. They determined that “only a crisis can…

Read More Read More

The unnoticed rise of America’s white gangs

The unnoticed rise of America’s white gangs

Comments 0 Comment

Donna Ladd reports: Surveys of young Americans have shown that 40% identifying as gang members are white, but police tend to undercount them at 10% to 14% and overcount black and Hispanic members, says Babe Howell, a criminal law professor at City University of New York who focuses on crime and race. “Police see groups of young white people as individuals, each responsible for his or her own conduct, and hold young people of color in street gangs criminally liable…

Read More Read More

Robert Mercer backed a secretive group that worked with Facebook, Google to target anti-Muslim ads at swing voters

Robert Mercer backed a secretive group that worked with Facebook, Google to target anti-Muslim ads at swing voters

Comments 0 Comment

Center for Responsive Politics reports: As the final weeks of the 2016 elections ticked down, voters in swing states like Nevada and North Carolina began seeing eerie promotional travel ads as they scrolled through their Facebook feeds or clicked through Google sites. In one, a woman with a French accent cheerfully welcomes visitors to the “Islamic State of France,” where “under Sharia law, you can enjoy everything the Islamic State of France has to offer, as long as you follow…

Read More Read More