Cisco’s Latest Attempt to Dodge Responsibility for Facilitating Human Rights Abuses: Export Rules
April 19th, 2016Via: EFF:
Cisco custom-built the so-called “Great Firewall of China,” also known as the “Golden Shield.” This system enables the Chinese government to conduct Internet surveillance and censorship against its citizens. As if that weren’t bad enough, company documents also revealed that, as part of its marketing pitch to China and in an effort to meet its customers needs, Cisco built a special Falun Gong module into the Golden Shield that helped the Chinese authorities identify, locate, and ultimately persecute practitioners of that religion by, for example, creating profiles of them that could be used during interrogations and forced conversions (i.e., torture).
Five years ago, victims sued Cisco for the human rights abuses they suffered as a result of the Falun Gong module. The case, Doe I v. Cisco Systems, is currently pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The plaintiffs are Falun Gong practitioners who allege that the company knowingly and purposefully designed and sold specific technologies to the Chinese government that aided and abetted human rights abuses, including torture, against them. We filed an amicus brief in January in favor of the plaintiffs.
Cisco recently submitted its responsive appellate brief (and the plaintiffs filed their reply) and one of its arguments made us do a double-take. Cisco claims that because U.S. export law doesn’t ban it from selling its equipment to China, the company is immune from civil liability for the human rights abuses it facilitated. Cisco even went so far as to argue that the U.S. government’s recent dropping of overbroad proposed rules for regulating surveillance technologies under the Wassenaar Arrangement—rules that EFF strongly argued should be dropped—establishes that Cisco should be immune.
Specifically, Cisco argues that since Congress and the Department of Commerce regulate exports to China of guns and other “crime control and detection” equipment but do not ban the export of the “Internet infrastructure” products that Cisco sells, Cisco should be held completely immune for aiding and abetting human rights abuses.
Defaults Hit Highest Level Since ’09 Bust
April 19th, 2016Recovery!
Via: USA Today:
Get ready to step over some landmines, investors. The number of companies defaulting on their debt is hitting levels not seen since the financial crisis, and it’s not just a problem for bondholders.
Intel to Cut 11% of Workforce
April 19th, 2016Via: Bloomberg:
Intel Corp. will eliminate 12,000 jobs, or 11 percent of its workforce, embarking on the deepest cutbacks in a decade to gird for a fifth year of declines in the personal-computer market.
The world’s biggest maker of semiconductors said it’s shifting focus to higher-growth areas, such as chips for data center machines and Internet-connected devices. Intel also posted disappointing first-quarter revenue and gave a second-quarter sales forecast that fell short of analysts’ estimates.
Shipments of PCs, a market that provides Intel with more than half of its sales, fell to their lowest level in a decade in the first three months of 2016. The depth and duration of the slump mean Intel can no longer fall back on booming demand for server chips or market-share gains against weaker rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. The job cuts mark the most radical action yet by Chief Executive Officer Brian Krzanich, who has brought in new executives and shaken up his team as he works to reduce Intel’s dependence on PCs and rekindle growth by pushing into newer businesses.
“It’s acknowledging the reality that it’s a single-digit growth world,” said Michael Shinnick, a fund manager at Wasatch Advisors Inc., which owns Intel shares. “The end markets aren’t growing to the extent that they were.”
Life-Expectancy Inequality Grows in America
April 19th, 2016Via: The New Yorker:
There may be no better way to appreciate humanity’s growing prosperity than to consider how long we live. A child born in 1900—little more than a century ago—was likely, on average, to die by the age of thirty. Today, according to the World Bank, the comparable figure is seventy-one. That is a worldwide average and so, of course, there is a considerable gulf between rich countries in Europe and Asia, where people live into their eighties, and the poorest nations in sub-Saharan Africa, where people born today will struggle to live to fifty. Nonetheless, even a child born in Chad, which has the world’s lowest life expectancy—49.81 years—will live two years longer than did the average white American male born in 1900.
Globally, the inequality in life expectancy is shrinking. Unfortunately, this effect, which the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt has aptly described as a “survival revolution,” does not apply to our country. Here, according to a study published in the most recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the numbers are moving in the opposite direction.
It will surprise nobody to learn that life expectancy increases with income. Coming, however, in the midst of a Presidential campaign in which the corrosive effects of income inequality have been a principal debate topic, the data and its implications for public policy are particularly striking: the richest one per cent of American men live 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest one per cent. For women, the average difference is a just over ten years.
The gap appears to be growing fast. The researchers, led by Raj Chetty, a professor of economics at Stanford University, analyzed more than 1.4 billion federal tax returns, as well as mortality data from the Social Security Administration, from the years 2001 to 2014. In that period, the life expectancy of the richest five per cent of Americans increased by roughly three years. For the poorest five per cent, there was no increase.
What does a three-year difference mean? According to federal statistics cited in the study, eliminating every cancer death in the United States would add roughly three years to the average lifespan. For the richest Americans, then, the longevity increases of the past fifteen years have been the equivalent of curing cancer.
“To give you a sense of the magnitude’’ of the difference in life expectancy between rich and poor Americans, Chetty told NPR, “men in the bottom one per cent have life expectancy comparable to the average life expectancy in Pakistan or Sudan.’’
Earth-Insulated, Shipping Container, Underground Home
April 18th, 2016Book: Off Grid and Underground: A Simpler Way to Live Paperback by Steve Rees
Via: Kirsten Dirksen:
Children of Sydney’s Business and Political Elite Attend School That Bans Screens in Classrooms
April 18th, 2016Via: The Australian:
A top Australian school has banned laptops in class, warning that technology “distracts’’ from old-school quality teaching.
The headmaster of Sydney Grammar School, John Vallance, yesterday described the billions of dollars spent on computers in Australian schools over the past seven years as a “scandalous waste of money’’.
“I’ve seen so many schools with limited budgets spending a disproportionate amount of their money on technology that doesn’t really bring any measurable, or non-measurable, benefits,’’ he said.
“Schools have spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on interactive whiteboards, digital projectors, and now they’re all being jettisoned.’’
Sydney Grammar has banned students from bringing laptops to school, even in the senior years, and requires them to handwrite assignments and essays until Year 10. Its old-school policy bucks the prevailing trend in most Australian high schools, and many primary schools, to require parents to purchase laptops for use in the classroom.
Dr Vallance said the Rudd-Gillard government’s $2.4 billion Digital Education Revolution, which used taxpayer funds to buy laptops for high school students, was money wasted. “It didn’t really do anything except enrich Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard and Apple,’’ he said. “They’ve got very powerful lobby influence in the educational community.’’
Sydney Grammar students have access to computers in the school computer lab, and use laptops at home.
…
Academically, Sydney Grammar rates among Australia’s top-performing schools, and is frequented by the sons of Sydney’s business and political elite. Almost one in five of its Year 12 graduates placed in the top 1 per cent of Australian students for Australian Tertiary Admission Rank university entry scores last year.
Related: Some Parents Who Work for Elite Silicon Valley Firms Send Their Children to School with No Computers
Thousands of Troops Remain Deployed in French Cities
April 18th, 2016Via: Guardian:
After last year’s terrorist attacks on Paris, the president, François Hollande, declared that France was at war and swiftly saturated the streets of main cities with soldiers standing guard in full military fatigues to make people feel more secure. The now permanent presence of thousands of soldiers in khaki across the capital and major cities has transformed the image and mood of France.
Operation Sentinelle, in which combat troops patrol streets and protect key sites – from synagogues to art galleries, nursery schools to mosques and Métro stations – is the army’s first wide-scale peacetime military operation on mainland France.
Substituting Vegetable Oils for Butter Increases Risk of Death
April 18th, 2016Via: Medical Xpress:
A research team led by scientists at the UNC School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health has unearthed more evidence that casts doubt on the traditional “heart healthy” practice of replacing butter and other saturated fats with corn oil and other vegetable oils high in linoleic acid.
The findings, reported today in the British Medical Journal, suggest that using vegetable oils high in linoleic acid might be worse than using butter when it comes to preventing heart disease, though more research needs to be done on that front. This latest evidence comes from an analysis of previously unpublished data of a large controlled trial conducted in Minnesota nearly 50 years ago, as well as a broader analysis of published data from all similar trials of this dietary intervention.
The analyses show that interventions using linoleic acid-rich oils failed to reduce heart disease and overall mortality even though the intervention reduced cholesterol levels. In the Minnesota study, participants who had greater reduction in serum cholesterol had higher rather than lower risk of death.
Junk Food Kills Bacteria That Protect Against Obesity, Heart Disease and Cancer, Study Finds
April 18th, 2016This is from 2015.
Via: Telegraph:
Eating junk food kills stomach bacteria which protect against obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, inflammatory bowel conditions and autism, fresh studies have found.
The human gut contains around 3,500 difference microbial species, which together make up some three pounds in weight.
Scientists now believe a diet based on a limited range of highly processed foods, rather than those found in a balanced, healthy diet, can wipe out the number of stomach flora by more than a third.
The discovery could explain why some people put on weight while others don’t, despite eating roughly similar amounts of fat, sugar, protein and carbohydrates.
The finding emerged from studies conducted by Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London.
Here Come the Unregulated GMOs
April 18th, 2016Via: MIT Technology Review:
People are arguing about whether genetically modified foods should carry labels. But the next generation of GMOs might not only be unlabeled—they might be unregulated.
Over at Scientific American you can read a 6,000-word story about how one such plant, a GM mushroom, was created. The short version is that a plant scientist named Yinong Yang used the gene-editing technique called CRISPR to snip out a few DNA letters in the genome of “Agaricus bisporus, the most popular dinner-table mushroom in the Western world.”
The result: he turned off an enzyme that turns mushrooms brown.
But Yang’s mushroom doesn’t have any bacterial DNA in its genome. He didn’t add any DNA at all, he told the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Instead, he just used gene-editing to blow a few teeny little holes in one gene and shut it off.
As a result, the USDA’s APHIS division told Yang his GMO plant isn’t going to be regulated because it sidesteps the regulation:
APHIS has concluded that your CRISPR/Cas9-edited white button mushrooms as described in your letter do not contain any introduced genetic material. APHIS has no reason to believe that CRISPR/Cas9-edited white button mushrooms are plant pests.
It’s not the first product to get cleared in this way. Last summer we wrote about a potato with a similar modification, also to stop browning, and there have been a handful of others.
