The decisions were a major blow to attempts to rein in Big Tech. The judge said one of the complaints, from the Federal Trade Commission, lacked facts and gave the agency 30 days to refile it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/technology/facebook-ftc-lawsuit.html

Source: New York Times

The decisions were a major blow to attempts to rein in Big Tech. The judge said one of the complaints, from the Federal Trade Commission, lacked facts and gave the agency 30 days to refile it.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/technology/facebook-ftc-lawsuit.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Source: New York Times

A progressive challenger running her first campaign was poised on Tuesday to beat Buffalo’s four-term Democratic mayor in a primary upset that would upend the political landscape in New York’s second-biggest city and signal the strength of the party’s left wing.

The challenger, India B. Walton, is a former nurse and community activist who ran with the support of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party. She was leading Byron Brown, a longtime member of the Democratic establishment, by 7 percentage points, or about 1,500 votes, as of midnight with all of the in-person ballots counted, according to unofficial results.

Should Ms. Walton, 38, win the primary and then triumph in the general election November — a likely result in heavily Democratic Buffalo — she would be the first socialist mayor of a major American city since 1960, when Frank P. Zeidler stepped down as Milwaukee’s mayor. She would also be the first female mayor in Buffalo’s history.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/nyregion/india-walton-buffalo-mayor-socialist.html

Unmasking the far right: An extremist paid a price when his identity was exposed online

Source: Washington Post, June 21, 2021 at 8:28 a.m. EDT

Jedeed yelled at the man to stop touching her. A crowd formed around her and another journalist, with unmasked men screaming at them from all directions. Jedeed kept her camera rolling, and when she got away from the crowd, she uploaded video of the incident to YouTube and Twitter, and it went viral.

Reaction was swift.

The man in the flag mask was quickly identified as Washington state resident Edward Jeremy Dawson by a local antifa group. Twitter users mining public records later released his address and phone number.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/doxing-far-right-violent-extremists/2021/06/20/35f730e2-ba68-11eb-a5fe-bb49dc89a248_story.html

Source: Washington Post

Jedeed yelled at the man to stop touching her. A crowd formed around her and another journalist, with unmasked men screaming at them from all directions. Jedeed kept her camera rolling, and when she got away from the crowd, she uploaded video of the incident to YouTube and Twitter, and it went viral.

Reaction was swift.

The man in the flag mask was quickly identified as Washington state resident Edward Jeremy Dawson by a local antifa group. Twitter users mining public records later released his address and phone number.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/doxing-far-right-violent-extremists/2021/06/20/35f730e2-ba68-11eb-a5fe-bb49dc89a248_story.html

"I mention [the Rev. Fleming Rutledge] as a way of introducing the the latest controversy inside the Southern Baptist Convention. Internal letters and secret recordings leaked in recent days suggest that the nation’s largest (though dwindling) Protestant denomination has not come to grips with the problem of sexually predatory pastors.

That failing cannot be separated, it seems to me, from the theological sexism at the top of the SBC. When the convention holds its annual meeting this week, a key bit of business will be the reaffirmation of a doctrine euphemistically called complementarianism. It holds that even so great a preacher as Fleming Rutledge is an abomination on account of the fact that Fleming Rutledge is a woman."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/11/sbc-has-bad-sexist-theology-course-bad-culture-follows/

Source: Washington Post

He brought a sawed-off rifle to the Capitol on Jan. 6. Then he plotted to bomb Amazon data centers.

For weeks this spring, 28-year-old Seth Aaron Pendley had plotted an attack on Amazon data centers in Virginia. He’d already taken a sawed-off rifle to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Now, he hoped to cripple much of the Internet and take down government networks.

Last April, he finally arranged a meeting with a man promising to provide the C4 explosive devices. When they met in Fort Worth, Tex., the man showed Pendley how to arm and detonate the powerful bombs.

But just as Pendley placed the devices into his Pontiac, federal agents swarmed in and arrested him. The bomb seller was actually an FBI plant who had helped unravel a plan Pendley believed could “kill off about 70 percent of the internet.”

On Wednesday, Pendley pleaded guilty to planning to bomb Amazon facilities in an attempt to undermine the U.S. government and to spark a rebellion against the “oligarchy” he believed to be running the country.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/06/10/seth-pendley-amazon-bomb-guilty/

Source: New York Times

The Biden administration said on Saturday that no one at the White House had been aware that the Justice Department was seeking to seize the email data of four New York Times reporters and had obtained a gag order in March barring a handful of newspaper executives who knew about the fight from discussing it.

“As appropriate given the independence of the Justice Department in specific criminal cases, no one at the White House was aware of the gag order until Friday night,” Jen Psaki, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/05/us/politics/biden-gag-order-new-york-times-leak.html