Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Ancient feces reveal how 'marsh diet' left Bronze Age Fen folk infected with parasites

'Coprolites' from the Must Farm archaeological excavation in East Anglia, UK, shows the prehistoric inhabitants were infected by parasitic worms that can be spread by eating raw fish, frogs and shellfish.

Victory! California Supreme Court Blocks Sweeping Search Condition of Minors’ Electronic Devices and Social Media Accounts

The California Supreme Court just rejected the government’s attempt to require a youth probationer, as a condition of release, to submit to random searches of his electronic devices and social media accounts. The trial court had imposed the condition because the judge believed teenagers “typically will brag” about drug use on the Internet—even though there was no evidence that the minor in this case, Ricardo P., had ever used any electronic devices in connection with any drugs or illegal activity, let alone ever previously bragged about drug use online.

EFF and the ACLU filed an amicus brief in the case back in 2016, warning that the search condition imposed here was highly invasive, unconstitutional, and in violation of the California Supreme Court’s own standard for probation conditions—which requires that search conditions be “reasonably related to future criminality.” We also warned of the far-reaching privacy implications of allowing courts to impose such broad electronic search conditions. We’re pleased that the California Supreme Court heeded our warnings and recognized the substantial burden this “sweeping probation condition” imposed on Ricardo’s privacy.

The court recognized that the probation condition would give Ricardo’s probation officers “full access, day or night, not only to his social media accounts but also to the contents of his e-mails, text messages, and search histories, all photographs and videos stored on his devices, as well as any other data accessible using electronic devices, which could include anything from banking information to private health or financial information to dating profiles.” And by allowing remote access to Ricardo’s online accounts, the condition would potentially allow his probation officers to monitor his communications in real time. According to the court:

“If we were to find this record sufficient to sustain the probation condition at issue, it is difficult to conceive of any case in which a comparable condition could not be imposed, especially given the constant and pervasive use of electronic devices and social media by juveniles today.”   

The court noted, for example, that if it were to hold—as the California Attorney General argued—that any search condition facilitating supervision of probationers was “reasonably related to future criminality,” it might be obligated to uphold “a condition mandating that probationers wear 24-hour body cameras or permit a probation officer to accompany them at all times.”

This is a critical ruling. The search condition imposed in this case was not unique, but one that many juvenile probationers have been subject to in California in recent years, under the same unsupported reasoning that the trial judge offered here. The California Supreme Court’s decision not only resolves a split in the lower courts regarding the legality of such probation conditions, but it sends a clear message: probation conditions that have “a very heavy burden on privacy with a very limited justification” are not entitled to deference.

We applaud the California Supreme Court for recognizing the serious privacy invasion imposed by the search condition issued in this case and for striking down the condition as invalid.

Fearing Trump’s New Crackdown, Immigrants Are Already Forgoing Food Stamps

The Trump administration clarified this week which kind of immigrants it prefers, and which it would rather send back to where they came from. A new rule will give the Department of Homeland Security more authority to deny green cards to immigrants who appear likely to become dependent on government assistance.

The new rule expands an arcane law on “public charges,” a label used by the U.S. government to assess whether green card or visa applicants are likely to be “self-sufficient.” Under the longstanding law, that information can, in turn, be used to deny green cards to immigrants. On Tuesday, Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, quipped on NPR of the new rule, "Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge," changing the lines of the famous poem emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty.

The underlying purpose of the new rule, however, is not fiscal prudence but collective punishment.

The new rule dramatically broadens the scope of the “likely to become a public charge” category, and expands the criteria to include programs such as food stamps, Medicaid and federal housing benefits like Section 8 rent subsidies. The government will also now take into consideration applicants’ health and financial background: Living in poverty counts against you, but an income of at least 250 percent above the poverty level could boost your chances.

Since first proposed last year, the rule has drawn more than 260,000 public comments, which have been overwhelmingly negative. It now faces several legal challenges but is scheduled to go into effect on October 15. The measure, based on a late-19th-century law that barred the admission of “idiots” and “insane persons,” is a relic of an era when medical examiners prodded and daubed arrivals to Ellis Island like cattle.

President Trump's focus on enforcing new controls on current immigrants marks a pivot in his anti-immigrant agenda, from cracking down on undocumented migrants to establishing a “merit-based” framework that favors wealthier, better educated (and often whiter) newcomers. Earlier this year, the administration moved to make the sponsors of immigrants financially liable for the public benefits immigrants use, and to expel undocumented immigrants from public housing.

Trump’s rule would apply to more than 382,000 noncitizens nationwide. According to the Migration Policy Institute, about 70 percent of people who have recently become permanent residents would meet at least one of the negative criteria in the public charge test. Similarly, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that more than half of U.S.-born citizens have used at least one of the listed benefits during their lifetimes. Although DHS would have some discretion over when to label someone as a likely public charge, those who are branded as such could eventually end up on track to deportation—which could result in a greater public cost if a family is left impoverished after the removal of a primary breadwinner.

Even before the rule is enacted, the threat of being branded a likely public charge is already driving immigrants away from public benefits. The Urban Institute estimates that in 2018, one in seven adults in immigrant families “did not apply for or dropped out of” a benefits program, citing “fear of risking future green card status.” The deterrent effect was even more pronounced for immigrants in households with children, Latinx immigrants and those living close to the poverty line.

Trump’s crackdown appears to be prompting many immigrants in New York City to opt-out of nutrition assistance. The New York City Department of Social Services reported a disproportionate decline in food stamps enrollment since Trump took office, and the highest rates of disenrollment in 2018 were seen among black and Latinx noncitizens. This disenrollment—estimated to include 25,000 individuals over two years—is expected to result in a $72 million loss in economic activity for the city. The New York-based nonprofit Robin Hood Foundation has also estimated that the policy change could increase the citywide poverty rate by five percent.

For households already struggling with poverty, giving up a monthly food stamp supplement could push them toward hunger. One immigrant interviewee told Urban Institute researchers, “People don’t eat like they used to, because everything is too expensive. Before, people could purchase a greater variety of foods using their food stamps. But because we no longer have that aid, well, you eat what you can.”

Danilo Trisi, a senior research analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted that some groups are exempt from the public charge test, notably refugees and people with humanitarian visas, but they too may recoil from accessing benefits. “Because immigration rules are complicated and sometimes opaque, many families that [are exempt] may nevertheless choose to forgo benefits for which they qualify, out of fear that their status could otherwise be in jeopardy,” said Trisi.

Veyom Bahl, managing director of the Survival program at the Robin Hood Foundation, says via email, “From both quantitative and anecdotal sources, the chilling effect has already materialized and is likely worsening.” His organization’s food pantries—part of a network of food banks that form an alternative private “safety net” for New Yorkers in need—have also “seen a decline in immigrant families seeking even free, emergency food support in the last year.” With immigrants seemingly wary of receiving any aid, public or private, the Robin Hood Foundation has provided additional funding to local organizations to provide legal guidance for immigrants adapting to the new rule.

In addition to undermining social safety net programs, immigrants might also be deterred from even applying to adjust their status, explained Max Hadler, director of Health Policy with the New York Immigration Coalition. “It's not just about people using health benefits or food benefits or housing benefits,” Hadler said. “It's also the degree to which something like this discourages people from submitting applications for green cards and other immigration benefits. And we want to encourage people who have a pathway to permanent residency and citizenship to pursue those pathways.”

Still, community groups are hoping that the lawsuits filed by 13 state attorneys general this week will manage to thwart the rule before October 15. Even if the rule is halted by litigation, however, Hadler said “there’s a lot of damage that's already been done.”

The Trump Administration Is Trying to Make It Easier to Fire Unmarried Pregnant Women

The Department of Labor proposed a new rule this week that would make it easier for employers to discriminate against workers who they say violate their religious beliefs, including members of the LGBTQ community, pregnant women who are not married, and others. The proposed rule, published Thursday in the Federal Register, purports to “clarify the […]

A Weather Station Above the Arctic Circle Hit 94.6 Degrees Fahrenheit
https://earther.gizmodo.com/a-weather-station-above-the-arctic-circle-hit-94-6-degr-1837274379 #climatechange #climatecris

Toledo Passed a “Lake Erie Bill of Rights” To Protect Its Water. The State Is Trying to Stop It.

For three days in 2014, the people of Toledo, Ohio, couldn’t drink the water. A massive blue-green algae bloom producing a toxin known as microcystin was poisoning Lake Erie, the city's primary source of drinking water.

Algae blooms are increasingly common in Lake Erie, caused in large part by runoff from industrial factory farms and warming waters. Things have become so bad that there are now algae “forecasts” predicting how large the algae bloom will be each year. Large-scale toxic blooms are once again afflicting the lake, in summer 2019.

In the face of this growing crisis, and seeing little help coming from their state or federal representatives, residents of Toledo determined that they needed to take steps themselves.

A community coming together

Community members came together in 2016 to form Toledoans for Safe Water, a grassroots organization focused on protecting the lake and their drinking water. As they realized that conventional environmental laws were not going to be sufficient to protect the water, they decided to advance a new form of protection that secures environmental rights – of both people and nature. They drafted a new law, the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, to secure rights of the people to a healthy environment and of the lake itself. Despite $300,000 spent by BP in an opposition campaign, the law was approved by a citywide vote in February.

Toledoans for Safe Water worked with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), a non-profit organization that has assisted some of the first places in the world to develop rights of nature laws. (Co-author Mari Margil works for CELDF.)

Efforts to stop the expansion of rights

Like movements of the past, which focused on expanding rights, the people of Toledo are seeing their efforts met by a ready opposition. The Ohio legislature recently passed a budget bill that strips away the authority of community members to defend the rights of nature in court. And this spring, the state of Ohio also joined an industry lawsuit seeking to overturn the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. The litigation is ongoing.

Unfortunately, state-sponsored efforts to block the fight for more legal rights are all too common. 

The history of the Civil Rights movement is rife with examples. This includes going after one of the most effective tools of civil rights activists: the boycott. By refusing to patronize segregated businesses, African Americans were able to demonstrate their economic necessity to communities, leading to many shops and lunch counters opening their doors to black customers. This includes the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted 381 days when a federal court ordered the buses desegregated.

The full weight of the law was brought against Civil Rights activists, with injunctions and laws banning boycotts. Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists faced jail and intimidation based on such tactics.

Labor rights activists have faced similar pushback. Following a wave of worker strikes in 1945 and 1946, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act. The Act prohibited a number of union activities, including certain types of strikes, boycotts and picketing. Over time, Taft-Hartley has stymied advocacy for labor rights and better working conditions.

More recently, in the wake of the Standing Rock pipeline protests, legislation and executive orders have advanced in a number of states to restrict and criminalize such activities. Oklahoma’s legislature, anticipating protests against oil pipelines, recently enacted H.B. 1123. Among other things, the new law makes merely stepping onto a pipeline easement punishable by up to a year in prison. Similar legislation has advanced in Ohio.

No time to wait

History doesn’t tend to look kindly upon state-sponsored suppression of people’s movements. With over a million species on the brink of extinction, coral reefs bleaching and dying off, and the last five years the hottest on human record, we don’t have time to wait for history’s blessing. 

The anti-boycott laws did not stop the Civil Rights movement, and the Ohio Legislature’s ban on rights of nature enforcement will not stop the movement to recognize rights of ecosystems. Following Ohio’s ban, Williams County, Ohio, residents submitted initiative petition signatures to ban corporate water privatization and recognize rights of the freshwater Michindoh Aquifer, pressing forward regardless of efforts to stop them. Communities in other states are advancing laws of their own, to join dozens of municipalities and native nations that have recognized rights of nature in the United States, as well as laws and court decisions recognizing rights of nature in other countries including Ecuador, Colombia, and Uganda. Together they are advancing critical change – what Colombia’s Constitutional Court described, in recognizing that the Atrato River possessed legal rights, a necessary “step forward in jurisprudence” that must occur before it is “too late.”

26-Year-Old Gun Violence Prevention Activist Is Taking on 26-Year Incumbent Rep. Bobby Rush

Robert Emmons is vying for the Chicago-area congressional seat that Bobby Rush was first elected to in 1992.

The post 26-Year-Old Gun Violence Prevention Activist Is Taking on 26-Year Incumbent Rep. Bobby Rush appeared first on The Intercept.

Progressive Candidates Are Carving a Path to the Senate in 2020 — No Thanks to Chuck Schumer

If Democrats manage to seize the Senate and make Schumer the majority leader, it will be in large part due to the work of an organized left.

The post Progressive Candidates Are Carving a Path to the Senate in 2020 — No Thanks to Chuck Schumer appeared first on The Intercept.

How buildings can cut 80% of their carbon emissions by 2050

Energy use in buildings -- from heating and cooling your home to keeping the lights on in the office -- is responsible for over one-third of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the United States. Slashing building CO2 emissions 80% by 2050 would therefore contribute significantly to combatting climate change.

Here’s Your Daily Culture War Exercise From the President

Donald Trump sure does know how to keep the culture wars front and center: At the urging of President Trump, Israel on Thursday took the extraordinary step of barring two Democratic U.S. congresswomen who have been outspoken critics of the president from visiting the country. Trump, who has launched a campaign against Reps. Ilhan Omar […]

Improvements in #F-Droid and the call for more volunteers: https://f-droid.org/en/2019/07/06/improving-our-bus-factor.html

Who Is The Jordan Peterson of Animals?

What do animals make of human behavior?

Why We Always Cover Union Fights From the Perspective of Workers, Not Bosses

This month marks the 10th birthday of our continuing labor reporting project, Working In These Times. While In These Times has long been a champion of the union movement, WITT stepped it up with daily reporting at InTheseTimes.com. Our Golden Rule: Report from the perspective of workers, not bosses.

Reviewing some of the more than 4,500 stories, I am struck by the workers we’ve met. There’s former turkey plant worker Esmundo Juarez Carranza, fired for taking a bathroom break. “They treated us worse than animals,” he says.

There’s Samantha Rodriguez, who reported sexual harassment to her boss at a Walmart warehouse, only to have him ask her out. She says: “I pride myself on being an independent woman. I do remodeling, I hang drywall, I put in floors. ... I went to warehouses because I like doing that kind of work. Now, I won’t step foot in a warehouse. I refuse to.”

There’s YMCA worker Linda Aguilar, who says: “The Y claims they want to ‘disrupt the cycle of poverty.’ But it’s not lost on me that they’re employing mostly Black and Brown women, and they’re paying them poverty wages.”

There’s Fight for $15 leader Douglas Hunter, a single father and $9.25-an-hour McDonald’s worker: “Many people thought we were crazy two years ago when we walked off our jobs in New York and demanded $15 an hour. They don’t think we’re crazy now.”

Corporate America has spent 50 years turning a weak labor law regime even more to its advantage. Democrats have done little to stop them, while Republicans cheer them on. U.S. union density has declined from 20.1% in 1983 to 10.5% today. That means 90% of workers are at the mer- cy of their bosses. Most can be fired at will.

Our original labor reporter, David Moberg, never one to be a Pollyanna, said organized labor was “stuck, but stirring” in 1976. In 2015, he wrote a piece titled, “Saving Labor’s Sinking Ship.”

But in reading the past 10 years of reporting, I see workers taking up the oars. 

I became Working In These Times’ editor in 2012, a complete novice to the beat. (When reporter Bruce Vail talked about “the Fed,” I thought he meant the Federal Reserve, not the AFL-CIO.) Labor was riven by turf battles, like the notorious inter-union “nurse wars” in California. The innovative energy was in workers’ centers, which represented those hindered from unionizing by law: domestic workers, warehouse workers, restaurant workers, car-wash workers. The Chicago teachers were just about to walk out and the public launch of Fight for $15 was still four months away.

I never would have guessed that fast-food workers would make $15 a basic demand or that teachers in a dozen states would follow Chicago and walk out, not to mention that National Domestic Workers Alliance Director Ai-jen Poo would be Meryl Streep’s 2018 Golden Globes date.

Little of this activity, however, has increased union density, and the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision chips away at public-sector unions, organized labor’s last bastion.

Perhaps we should instead focus on union propensity—the fighting union spirit, as old-school labor folks might say. WITT proves that spirit alive and well. A growing strike wave indicates a stirring. As the singer-organizer Joe Hill put it:

If the workers take a notion, they can stop all speeding trains / Every ship upon the ocean, they can tie with mighty chains / Every wheel in the creation, every mine and every mill / Fleets and armies of the nations, will at their command stand still.

David Moberg, forgive me, but I’ll say it: The labor movement is on the move. We look forward to introducing our readers to the workers who power it in the years to come.

The Answer To Burn Out At Work Isn’t “Self-Care”—It’s Unionizing

It’s Monday morning and your alarm goes off. As you wake up, the dread of going to work creeps in. You’re feeling exhausted, stressed out, underpaid and underappreciated. It's a mindset you can’t shake, and no amount of coffee will fix: You have workplace burnout.

Compost key to sequestering carbon in the soil

In a 19-year study, scientists dug roughly 6 feet down to compare soil carbon changes in different cropping systems. They found that compost is a key to storing carbon, a strategy for offsetting carbon dioxide emissions.

A society's cultural practices shape the structure of its social networks

Biologists used mathematical models to show that societies that favor generalists, who have a wide range of skills, are less well-connected than those societies that favor specialists, who are highly skilled at a smaller number of traits. The findings have implications for improving information flow and problem-solving in settings from business to academia.

Another reason not to use Skype

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20805801/microsoft-privacy-policy-change-humans-listen-skype-cortana-voice-recording

Could Your Newsroom Use Help With Its Most Important Work?

by Bank Phrom on Unsplash

Freedom of the Press Foundation is expanding our technical efforts, and we want to work with you—and for you. Today we're opening a Call For Projects, to hear from interested journalistic organizations or individuals that could use a few months of outside technical help on a well-defined project that furthers press freedom or protects journalists and their sources.

We are especially looking for initiatives in any of the following areas:

censorship resistance
privacy
digital security
anonymity
government transparency and accountability

We plan to spend three-month cycles working directly with newsrooms, media organizations, independent journalists, documentary filmmakers, or other groups with a journalistic focus, on projects shaped in conjunction with those teams, with feedback from select Freedom of the Press Foundation staff and members of our board.

The projects we hope to identify with this new Call for Projects could include the development of prototyping tools for communicating with sources, for working with sensitive documents, or for exercising the public's right to know. We're open to assisting with technical research and planning, or with other projects with a technical dimension that aligns with our mission: to protect, defend, and empower public-interest journalism in the 21st century.

Even if your idea is not fully formed, we want to hear from you, and we can work with you or your organization to define the scope and goals that we will work towards over a three-month production cycle. If the proposed project is beyond the scope of this cycle, we may be able to work towards a proof-of-concept or a prototype of the final idea.

Our small special projects team has launched several initiatives—projects like online backups for news archives under threat of deletion, a Twitter bot that monitors media outlets for stories that rely on public records reporting, and a tool that automates FOIA requests for FBI Files of recently deceased public figures. Previously, Freedom of the Press Foundation has also created a website that automatically tracks how dozens of news outlets have deployed security features to protect readers’ privacy.

Now we want to focus our technical expertise directly on journalists or news organizations that need it. We aim to do so by helping to bridge the gap between exciting developments in the tech world and the reporters, whistleblowers, and readers who can benefit from them.

So please, if you've got an idea for a project, fill out our short Call for Projects form by Friday, August 30, and we'll be in touch about how we can work together.

For any other questions, please reach out to special-projects@freedom.press.

Here Are Five Lies About Iran That We Need to Refute to Stop Another Illegal War

The Trump administration is lying about Iran and its nuclear program. The media has to debunk this false drumbeat for war.

The post Here Are Five Lies About Iran That We Need to Refute to Stop Another Illegal War appeared first on The Intercept.