America’s Poorest White Town: Abandoned by Coal, Swallowed by Drugs
November 13th, 2015What you have here mass unemployment, intergenerational poverty and welfare money flowing into the prescription drug industry. It’s like the place has been hit with some sort of zombie neutron bomb.
Via: The Guardian:
Leading the blight is a powerful and highly addictive opioid painkiller, OxyContin, known locally as “hillbilly heroin”. Typically it is ground down and injected or snorted to give an instant and powerful high.
Its misuse is so routine that the bulk of court cases reported in the local papers are drug related. Just about everyone in Beattyville has a story of the human cost. Some mention the decline of the town’s homecoming queen, Michele Moore, into addiction in the 1990s. Moore struggled by as a single mother living in a trailer home before she was stabbed to death by a man while the two were taking drugs.
At about that time, Beattyville’s police chief, Omer Noe , and the Lee County sheriff, Johnny Mann, were jailed for taking bribes to protect drug smugglers. Five years later, the next Lee County sheriff, Douglas Brandenburg, went to prison for a similar crime.
Amid the relentless destruction of life, there is little that shocks. But four years ago residents of Harlan County – a couple of hours’ drive to the south-east – were shaken by a series of deaths over six weeks of parents of members of the local boys and girls club. Eleven of the children watched a parent die.
Getting the drugs isn’t difficult. Elderly people sell their prescription drugs to supplement some of the lowest incomes in the US. The national average retirement income is about $21,500. In Beattyville it is $6,500.
Last year, a pharmacy owner in nearby Clay County, Terry Tenhet, was jailed for 10 years for illegally distributing hundreds of thousands of pills after police tied the prescriptions to several overdose deaths. In 2011 alone, he supplied more than 360,000 OxyContin pills in a county with only 21,000 residents. Those prescriptions were mostly written by doctors in other states.
Prosecutors alleged that for years a single pain clinic nearly 1,000 miles away in south Florida had provided the prescriptions for a quarter of the OxyContin sold in eastern Kentucky. The bus service to Florida is known to police and addicts alike as the “Oxy Express”.
In 2012, Dr Paul Volkman was sentenced to four life terms for writing illegal prescriptions for more than 3m pills from a clinic he ran in Portsmouth, Ohio, on the border with eastern Kentucky. Prosecutors said the prescriptions had contributed to dozens of overdose deaths.
Another doctor, David Procter, is serving 16 years in prison for running a “pill mill” at which at least four other doctors were involved in the illegal supply of drugs to eastern Kentucky.
Dozens of People Killed in Terrorist Attacks Across Paris
November 13th, 2015Live Video Coverage: France 24
—
Via: CNN:
Dozens of people are reported dead after what are being called terror attacks across Paris. Police early Saturday freed hostages at a concert hall. The attacks seemed to be planned to hit areas where many people would be gathered on a Friday night in Paris, officials said.
Own a Vizio Smart TV? It’s Watching You
November 12th, 2015Via: ProPublica:
TV makers are constantly crowing about the tricks their smart TVs can do. But one of the most popular brands has a feature that it’s not advertising: Vizio’s Smart TVs track your viewing habits and share it with advertisers, who can then find you on your phone and other devices.
The tracking — which Vizio calls “Smart Interactivity” — is turned on by default for the more than 10 million Smart TVs that the company has sold. Customers who want to escape it have to opt-out.
Tor Says Feds Paid Carnegie Mellon $1 Million to Help Unmask Users
November 12th, 2015Via: Wired:
Ever since a Carnegie Mellon talk on cracking the anonymity software Tor was abruptly pulled from the schedule of the Black Hat hacker conference last year, the security community has been left to wonder whether the research was silently handed over to law enforcement agencies seeking to uncloak the internet’s anonymous users. Now the non-profit Tor Project itself says that it believes the FBI did use Carnegie Mellon’s attack technique—and paid them handsomely for the privilege.
The Tor Project on Wednesday afternoon sent WIRED a statement from its director Roger Dingledine directly accusing Carnegie Mellon of providing its Tor-breaking research in secret to the FBI in exchange for a payment of “at least $1 million.” You can now read the full statement on the Tor Project’s blog.1 And while Carnegie Mellon’s attack had been rumored to have been used in takedowns of dark web drug markets that used Tor’s “hidden service” features to obscure their servers and administrators, Dingledine writes that the researchers’ dragnet was larger, affecting innocent users, too.
“Apparently these researchers were paid by the FBI to attack hidden services users in a broad sweep, and then sift through their data to find people whom they could accuse of crimes,” Dingledine writes. “Such action is a violation of our trust and basic guidelines for ethical research. We strongly support independent research on our software and network, but this attack crosses the crucial line between research and endangering innocent users.”
Tor’s statement all but confirms that Carnegie Mellon’s attack was used in the late 2014 law enforcement operation known as Operation Onymous, carried out by the FBI and Europol. That dark web purge took down dozens of Tor hidden services, including several of the most popular Tor-based black markets for drugs including the Silk Road 2, and led to at least 17 arrests. Tor, for its part, has made efforts to subsequently block the attack, which it says it first detected in July of 2014.
Apple Boss: Next Generation of Children ‘Will Not Know What Money Is’
November 11th, 2015Well, most adults don’t know what money is, so…
I’ve maintained for years that the whole thing isn’t cashless already because of the drug trade being run by intelligence agencies. I don’t know how officially sanctioned “illegal” drug trafficking will work in a cashless system.
Maybe they will implement some sort of blockchain thing that pretends to offer anonymity?
Via: Telegraph:
The next generation of children born in Britain “will not know what money is”, the boss of Apple has predicted.
Tim Cook, the chief executive of technology giant, forecast the death of cash by the time current university students have a family.
Cash is still used for more than half of payments by consumers, according to Payments UK, the industry body, but its popularity is falling as people switch to cards and smartphone apps such as Apple Pay and Google Wallet.
Constant Lockdowns Lead Schools to Buy Portable Toilets
November 11th, 2015Via: San Diego Union Tribune:
Shortly after San Diego schools kicked off the new year in September, 21,000 students at 11 campuses were locked in classrooms for up to three hours following a rash of violent — and ultimately false — threats.
Not surprisingly, some students had to use a bathroom.
Patrick Henry High School was among those to provide students with security escorts to restrooms, which critics later called dangerous. Some Grossmont High School classrooms made due with trash cans in adjoining rooms during a five-hour lock-down in February, upsetting parents who raised concerns about hygiene.
In a sign of the times, schools locally and nationwide are stocking up on emergency bathroom provisions to make increasingly frequent classroom lockdowns safer and more comfortable for students and educators.
The San Diego Unified School District is preparing to purchase toilet kits for every classroom that needs one at a cost of $180,000 to $200,000. Grossmont Union High School District has also purchased the kits for classrooms at about $30 each.
TV Audiences “Numb” from Ads
November 11th, 2015Via: Bloomberg:
Media companies, including Time Warner Inc., 21st Century Fox Inc. and Viacom Inc., have started cutting back on commercials after years of squeezing in as many ads as possible.
The new strategy is an attempt to appeal to younger viewers, who are more accustomed to watching shows ad-free on online streaming services like Netflix Inc., and to advertisers concerned their messages are being ignored amid all the commercial clutter.
U.S. Navy Launches Second Missile Off Southern California Coast
November 10th, 2015Via: ABC News:
The Navy has confirmed a second missile launch that was like the one that caused so much alarm over the weekend.
Just before noon on Monday, the Navy conducted a Trident missile test off the Southern California coast.
When the first test was done on Saturday night, thousands of people saw a mysterious green light flash in the sky from San Diego to Ventura. That created quite a stir, and ABC7 got hundreds of calls in the newsroom from people anxious to know what it was.
Because the second launch was during the day, no pictures have been seen so far.
The tests were part of the Navy’s ongoing system evaluation test, and the missiles are not armed.
Related: Social Media Nightmare or Exactly What the Navy Wanted?
Maintenance of U.S. Passenger Planes Outsourced to El Salvador, Mexico and China
November 10th, 2015Via: The Atlantic:
Over the past decade, nearly all large U.S. airlines have shifted heavy maintenance work on their airplanes to repair shops thousands of miles away, in developing countries, where the mechanics who take the planes apart (completely) and put them back together (or almost) may not even be able to read or speak English. US Airways and Southwest fly planes to a maintenance facility in El Salvador. Delta sends planes to Mexico. United uses a shop in China. American still does much of its most intensive maintenance in-house in the U.S., but that is likely to change in the aftermath of the company’s merger with US Airways.
The airlines are shipping this maintenance work offshore for the reason you’d expect: to cut labor costs. Mechanics in El Salvador, Mexico, China, and elsewhere earn a fraction of what mechanics in the U.S. do. In part because of this offshoring, the number of maintenance jobs at U.S. carriers has plummeted, from 72,000 in the year 2000 to fewer than 50,000 today.
Belgium Tells Facebook to Stop Storing Personal Data From Non-Users
November 9th, 2015Via: Bloomberg:
Facebook Inc. lost a fight with Belgium’s privacy watchdog after a court ordered it to stop storing personal data from people who don’t have an account with the social network.
Facebook faces a fine of 250,000 euros ($269,000) a day if it doesn’t comply with the ruling, the court said in an e-mailed statement Monday.
Belgium’s privacy watchdog had sued Menlo Park, California-based Facebook for failing to respond to its demands to bring its privacy policy in line with local laws. Facebook’s “disrespectful” treatment of users’ personal data, without their knowledge, “needs tackling,” Willem Debeuckelaere, president of the Belgian commission, said in May.
“If a surfer doesn’t have an own Facebook account, Facebook from now on will have to explicitly solicit consent and provide the needed explanations,” the Brussels court of first instance said.
