March 18, 2014

Crimean Voters Excited To Exercise Democracy For Last Time

SIMFEROPOL, UKRAINE—Following yesterday’s referendum in which 97 percent of voters cast ballots in favor of seceding from Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation, Crimean citizens expressed their excitement Monday at participating in the democratic process one final time. “It brought me such great personal joy to head to the polls and, for the last time ever, have my vote tallied and actually mean something,” said local businessman Sergei Petrov of his vote in support of annexation by Russia, echoing the enthusiasm of hundreds of thousands of his fellow Crimeans who proudly took part in their final opportunity to assert their collective will at the ballot box. “Yesterday was a historic day for Crimea. Our people had a say in their future, and our voices were heard loud and clear, which is extremely special given that it won’t happen again for who knows how long.” At press time, Crimeans were commemorating the vote to become Russian citizens by eagerly watching and reading coverage of the momentous event in the limited handful of sanctioned media sources they now have available to them.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/crimean-voters-excited-to-exercise-democracy-for-l,35548/

March 16, 2014

Race Matters: “Afraid Of Dark” Documentary Addresses Damaging Black Men Stereotypes

According to Huffington Post:

Tragedies like the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant and Jordan Davis — and the public outcries that have followed each one — are proof that that there is a sharp awareness in the black community of the unjust targeting of black males, as well as the cultural stereotypes and myths that fuel it. This year, one film will explore the fears that underlie the criticism, marginalization and seemingly systematic incarceration of black men, as well as the violence so often directed toward them.

The upcoming documentary “Afraid Of Dark” will examine racial stereotypes associated with black masculinity and the societal fears that ensue from them. The film will include interviews with rappers, actors and politicians describing their own experiences with prejudice and injustice.

“Afraid of Dark” Filmmaker Mya B explains why now is the right time to put this out to the public…

Via Indiewire Blog:

Sometimes when you’re a filmmaker it takes so long to make a film, that you wonder if it still will be relevant, or if anyone will care about it, once it’s finally finished. Well, according to Brooklyn-based filmmaker Mya B, speaking on her new documentary feature film, Afraid of Dark, she, in fact, wondered just that about her film, or, as she says, when she started the project she had “no idea that it would be more relevant now than ever, and that it would take shape the way it did. I pray that it wakes up the masses not only in our community, but in others as well.”

“I wanted to analyze the damaging stereotypes of black men which has led to them being murdered and criminalized. I also wanted black men to receive their glory outside of all the bad things you hear in the media and profile the amazing black men I know and who are in our communities. More importantly I wanted people to never forget those black youth and men who never got justice in death by honoring them in the film to keep them alive in our memories.”

Watch the trailer below and discuss…

- See more at: http://bossip.com/932006/race-matters-afraid-of-dark-documentary-addresses-damaging-black-men-stereotypes-video/#sthash.6pgR5ClC.dpuf

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/14/afraid-of-dark-trailer_n_4964027.html?ir=Black+Voices

http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/now-documentary-afraid-of-the-dark-examines-why-is-everyone-afraid-of-black-men

March 14, 2014

Defense Contractor Pleads Guilty to Sharing State Secrets with His Chinese Girlfriend

U.S. Defense Contractor Pleads Guilty to Sharing State Secrets with His Chinese Girlfriend

Theirs was an unconventional love story. He was a 59-year-old, married defense contractor with a Top Secret security clearance. She was a 27-year-old Chinese national with a student visa. They met at a defense conference in Hawaii, where he lived, and began an illicit, long-distance romance that lasted nearly three years and saw him give her reams of classified U.S. military secrets.

But like all good love stories, this one ends unhappily. On Thursday, Benjamin Bishop pled guilty in federal court to charges of unlawfully transmitting and retaining classified national defense information.

When the couple began the ill-fated love affair, Bishop was working in cyber defense at the U.S. Pacific Command, and the young woman was attending graduate school in the United States on a J-1 visa. Their courtship was unusual from the beginning: According to an FBI affidavit, she repeatedly asked Bishop not to give her classified information, but nevertheless persisted in asking him questions about his work at Pacific Command. At one point, she even asked him to conduct research for her on "what Western nation's [sic] know about the operation of a particular naval asset of the People's Republic of China," according to the affidavit. Bishop, who is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, managed to obtain the information she wanted by misrepresenting himself as an active-duty officer to U.S. government personnel.

For obvious reasons, various media have branded her a Chinese "honeytrap," fueling speculation that she's actually a spy who seduced Bishop in order to gain access to sensitive military information. Who needs sophisticated hacker groups, after all, when you have 27-year-old co-eds? FBI Special Agent Scott Freeman acknowledged in an affidavit that that the young woman may have attended the conference in Hawaii "in order to target individuals such as Bishop."

But in court, Bishop's attorney, Birney Bervar, characterized the couple's exchange of secret information as an act of love, not espionage.


http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/03/13/how_to_set_a_honeytrap_us_defense_contractor_pleads_guilty_to_sharing_state_secrets

http://news.yahoo.com/us-man-plead-guilty-espionage-charges-121024892.html?.tsrc=attmp

March 12, 2014

Minorities in tech: A vastly under-tapped market

As the economy gets stronger, jobs in the tech sector continue to boom. Every month around 9,600 technology-related jobs are added. Which is why teaching technology — be it MOOCs, code camps, meetups — has become such a popular entrepreneurial endeavor over the past few years.

But not everyone has been catching the wave. Minorities and women represent a tiny fraction of the robust technology economy. The good news, I suppose, is that there are advocates and leaders out there trying to fix this. And, well, they have their work cut out for them. South by Southwest held a fascinating, albeit depressingly under-attended, panel on this issue with a few of these leaders.

To give you a sense of the inequality gap Laura Weidman Powers, co-founder and executive director of the minority engineer advocacy program CODE2040, says the average income of a computer science graduate equals the median income of one black and one latino family combined. That is, one engineer rakes in more cash than two entire families.

That’s why she views her role as so important. “There’s a deep need for technical talent,” she told the audience. “There will be a million jobs in tech unfilled by 2020.”

A great deal of what she does is to seek out universities that have top minority engineers of which most companies aren’t aware. CODE2040 has mapped out and connected with institutions it considers underserved by current recruiters. “[Tech companies] think they’e tapped the talent pool, and what we’re saying is ‘no, you have not,”" Powers said.

http://pando.com/2014/03/10/minorities-in-tech-a-vastly-under-tapped-market/

March 12, 2014

After nearly 30 years on death row, Glenn Ford is exonerated — and free

“My sons, when I left, was babies,” Louisiana’s longest-serving death row inmate told reporters after his release late Tuesday. “Now they’re grown men with babies.”

Standing outside in a denim shirt and dark-rimmed glasses, 64-year-old Glenn Ford said he feels resentment when remembering the nearly 30 years he served on Louisiana’s death row for a crime he didn’t commit. In fact, prosecutors now say he wasn’t even at the scene of the murder and did not participate in it.

But now, he’s a free man. A judge ordered Ford’s release from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, where he had been held since March 1985.

He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to die by electrocution by an all-white jury that found him guilty in the robbery and murder of Isadore Rozeman, a Shreveport watchmaker who was killed in his repair shop on Nov. 5, 1983, according to Reuters. It was a verdict Ford always disputed, saying he wasn’t even there. But, until recently, the courts wouldn’t listen.

Here’s the motion to vacate filed March 11 in which prosecutors acknowledge that had they known then what they know now, Ford would not have been charged.

The Atlantic details the series of events that led to Ford’s conviction, including the testimony of a woman named Marvella Brown who claimed Ford was with two of the other suspects — and in the possession of a firearm — on the day of the murder. She then testified she had lied during Ford’s trial.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/12/after-nearly-30-years-on-death-row-glenn-ford-is-exonerated-and-free/?tid=pm_pop

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/03/freedom-after-30-years-on-death-row/284179/

March 11, 2014

Need some help fast

I need to come up with a quickie flyer for an event -- Anyone know a site with *good* templates?


TIA

March 11, 2014

Daunting Tests Await Admiral Named N.S.A. Chief

WASHINGTON — It is not hard to understand why veterans of the National Security Agency argue that 2013 was the worst year since Harry S. Truman got the place running 62 years ago.

It started with Edward Snowden’s leaks of stolen N.S.A. documents and ended with a holiday letter to families of agency employees declaring that despite what everyone was hearing on television and reading in the papers, their relatives were heroes, not violators of privacy rights. In recent weeks it has gotten tougher. President Obama has moved from lukewarm defenses of the agency’s programs to embracing recommendations to take the bulk collection of telephone call records out of its hands.

Google and Yahoo say they are equipping themselves with new technologies designed to defeat N.S.A. interception, and the general counsel of Microsoft blogged not long ago that “government snooping potentially now constitutes an ‘advanced persistent threat,’ ” a phrase normally used to describe China’s most sophisticated hackers. And to stop leakers, the agency plans to step up monitoring the calls, emails and financial transactions of agency employees, a move the N.S.A.’s privacy critics find particularly rich in irony.

The man chosen by Mr. Obama to navigate this bureaucratic, political and public relations disaster is Vice Adm. Michael S. Rogers, who on Tuesday will face members of the Senate at his confirmation hearing, an event not likely to be accompanied by the thunderous applause that greeted Mr. Snowden in Texas. Friends of Admiral Rogers in the intelligence community, who have worked with him in his current job running the Navy’s Fleet Cyber Command, say they wonder whether he has a sense of what he is wading into.

“Why would anyone in his right mind be director of N.S.A. right now?” asked John R. Schindler, a former N.S.A. officer who is now a professor at the Naval War College. “It’s a massive political headache.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/world/admiral-set-to-face-confirmation-to-lead-nsa.html?hp&_r=2

March 11, 2014

Bomb Squad Destroys Pressure Cooker On East Boston Street

EAST BOSTON (CBS) – The bomb squad destroyed a pressure cooker left unattended on a street in East Boston Tuesday morning.

Boston Police were called to a house on Lexington Street near the O’Donnell Elementary School around 9:30 a.m. after the device was discovered on the sidewalk.

A member of the bomb squad set up a disruption device near the pressure cooker and a few minutes later it was blown up.

Police later said the pressure cooker was empty.

A spokesperson for Boston Public Schools told WBZ-TV the device was not on school grounds and students and teachers were not in any danger, but the school was put into safe mode as a precaution.

Police say a neighbor called them to alert them to the device. They’re not sure yet who put it on the sidewalk.

Two pressure cookers were used as explosives in the Boston Marathon bombings last year.

“People are sensitive to this. We’ve had a lot of people go through a serious crisis this year with pressure cookers. It’s no joke. We don’t take it as a joke. We’ll never take it as a joke,” Boston Police Capt. Kelley McCormick told WBZ-TV.

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2014/03/11/bomb-squad-called-to-east-boston-school-after-pressure-cooker-found/

Either someone out there is really oblivious, or just trying to be a dick...

March 10, 2014

The Edward Snowden NSA Story Re-enacted By Kids

http://thedailybanter.com/2014/03/watch-the-edward-snowden-nsa-story-re-enacted-by-kids-in-under-40-seconds/

March 10, 2014

Does something like this belong in the office of a pimp, or merely a gangster?

For those tired of driving a desk and would rather be driving a Rolls-Royce, here’s a desk that is billed as the Rolls-Royce of office desks. Even the lights light up, although it’s not so clear whether the headlight washer-wiper works (and, for the well being of your tax return print-outs, maybe hope they don’t). If you are chained to a desk, you may as well be captive in style.

http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20140307-oddballs-of-the-geneva-motor-show