At a Facebook content moderation site, one contractor has died, and others say they fear for their lives

At a Facebook content moderation site, one contractor has died, and others say they fear for their lives

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Casey Newton reports: Keith Utley loved to help. First, he served in the Coast Guard, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant commander. He married, had a family, and devoted himself utterly to his two little girls. After he got out of the military, he worked as a moderator for Facebook, where he purged the social network of the worst stuff that its users post on a daily basis: the hate speech, the murders, the child pornography. Utley worked…

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With cryptocurrency launch, Facebook sets its path toward becoming an independent nation

With cryptocurrency launch, Facebook sets its path toward becoming an independent nation

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The world’s newest country? railway fx/Shutterstock.com By Jennifer Grygiel, Syracuse University Facebook has announced a plan to launch a new cryptocurrency named the Libra, adding another layer to its efforts to dominate global communications and business. Backed by huge finance and technology companies including Visa, Spotify, eBay, PayPal and Uber – plus a ready-made user base of 2 billion people around the world – Facebook is positioned to pressure countries and central banks to cooperate with its reinvention of the…

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Deutsche Bank faces criminal investigation for potential money-laundering

Deutsche Bank faces criminal investigation for potential money-laundering

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The New York Times reports: Federal authorities are investigating whether Deutsche Bank complied with laws meant to stop money laundering and other crimes, the latest government examination of potential misconduct at one of the world’s largest and most troubled banks, according to seven people familiar with the inquiry. The investigation includes a review of Deutsche Bank’s handling of so-called suspicious activity reports that its employees prepared about possibly problematic transactions, including some linked to President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser,…

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Why Elizabeth Warren’s appeal is wider than expected

Why Elizabeth Warren’s appeal is wider than expected

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McClatchy reports: Many moderate Democratic leaders have reached a surprising conclusion about Elizabeth Warren: They’d actually feel comfortable if she won the party’s presidential nomination. She might be an unabashed liberal, they say, but at least she’s a talented candidate — and she’s much more acceptable than democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. “The thing about Warren is that she is staying within the lines of what is manageable,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of the center-left group Third Way, who also praised…

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The interoceptive turn is maturing as a rich science of selfhood

The interoceptive turn is maturing as a rich science of selfhood

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Noga Arikha writes: In 1926, Virgina Woolf wrote about how, when one is ill: All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it…

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The search for extraterrestrial technology finds none

The search for extraterrestrial technology finds none

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The Guardian reports: The close encounter will have to wait. Astronomers have come up empty-handed after scanning the heavens for signs of intelligent life in the most extensive search ever performed. Researchers used ground-based telescopes to eavesdrop on 1,327 stars within 160 light years of Earth. During three years of observations they found no evidence of signals that could plausibly come from an alien civilisation. The only signals picked up by the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia and the…

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Facebook’s path to global domination: Take over the internet, then the world’s financial system

Facebook’s path to global domination: Take over the internet, then the world’s financial system

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Thomas Claburn writes: Facebook – the global ad business pilloried repeatedly over the past 15 years for privacy disasters – on Tuesday announced a scheme to allow account holders to buy credits and spend the digitized funds online through a network of partners, under a “strong commitment to privacy.” The antisocial network’s blockchain-tracked currency, Libra, will reside in a digital wallet named for the company’s newly formed financial services subsidiary Calibra. This coin-storing code will be available initially in WhatsApp…

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Environment reporters facing harassment and murder, study finds

Environment reporters facing harassment and murder, study finds

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The Guardian reports: Thirteen journalists who were investigating damage to the environment have been killed in recent years and many more are suffering violence, harassment, intimidation and lawsuits, according to a study. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which produced the tally, is investigating a further 16 deaths over the last decade. It says the number of murders may be as high as 29, making this field of journalism one of the most dangerous after war reporting. On every continent…

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‘The Saudis couldn’t do it without us’: the UK’s true role in Yemen’s deadly war

‘The Saudis couldn’t do it without us’: the UK’s true role in Yemen’s deadly war

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Arron Merat writes: For more than four years, a brutal Saudi air campaign has bombarded Yemen, killing tens of thousands, injuring hundreds of thousands and displacing millions – creating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. And British weapons are doing much of the killing. Every day Yemen is hit by British bombs – dropped by British planes that are flown by British-trained pilots and maintained and prepared inside Saudi Arabia by thousands of British contractors. The Saudi-led military coalition, which includes…

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Syrian refugees have become pawns in their host nations’ politics

Syrian refugees have become pawns in their host nations’ politics

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Gerasimos Tsourapas writes: As the number of refugees globally reaches records, states are developing diverse yet similar strategies of linking their management of forced displacement to foreign policy goals. In May, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said that if crude exports continue to decrease in light of American sanctions, “it is possible that we ask our Afghan brothers and sisters to leave Iran.” In September, Turkey threatened to open the border with Syria and allow internally displaced Syrians into…

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Trump, Falwell, the ‘pool boy,’ the comedian, and the hush money

Trump, Falwell, the ‘pool boy,’ the comedian, and the hush money

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The New York Times reports: Senator Ted Cruz was running neck and neck with Donald J. Trump in Iowa just before the caucuses in 2016, but his campaign was expecting a last-minute boost from a powerful endorser, Jerry Falwell Jr. Mr. Falwell was chancellor of one of the nation’s largest Christian colleges, Liberty University, and a son of the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., the televangelist and co-founder of the modern religious right. Months earlier, Mr. Falwell had provided Liberty’s basketball…

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The biggest disaster in the history of the music business

The biggest disaster in the history of the music business

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Jody Rosen writes: The fire that swept across the backlot of Universal Studios Hollywood on Sunday, June 1, 2008, began early that morning, in New England. At 4:43 a.m., a security guard at the movie studio and theme park saw flames rising from a rooftop on the set known as New England Street, a stretch of quaint Colonial-style buildings where small-town scenes were filmed for motion pictures and television shows. That night, maintenance workers had repaired the roof of a…

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How American waste crosses the globe and overwhelms the poorest nations

How American waste crosses the globe and overwhelms the poorest nations

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The Guardian reports: What happens to your plastic after you drop it in a recycling bin? According to promotional materials from America’s plastics industry, it is whisked off to a factory where it is seamlessly transformed into something new. This is not the experience of Nguyễn Thị Hồng Thắm, a 60-year-old Vietnamese mother of seven, living amid piles of grimy American plastic on the outskirts of Hanoi. Outside her home, the sun beats down on a Cheetos bag; aisle markers…

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Trump vows mass immigration arrests while slashing aid to Central America

Trump vows mass immigration arrests while slashing aid to Central America

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The Washington Post reports: President Trump said in a tweet Monday night that U.S. immigration agents are planning to make mass arrests starting “next week,” an apparent reference to a plan in preparation for months that aims to round up thousands of migrant parents and children in a blitz operation across major U.S. cities. “Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States,” Trump wrote,…

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