All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Tesla saboteur claims to be whistleblower

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The former Tesla employee, whom the US e-carmaker accuses of sabotage and stealing company secrets, has claimed he was sacked because he wanted to speak out about the company’s flawed production and resource waste.

Romania police arrest German journalist covering protest in Bucharest

Police are alike world-wide – they repress because they can and mean-spirited and cruel control freaks are drawn to the work.

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German journalist Paul Arne Wagner never expected to be arrested while covering an anti-corruption protest in Bucharest. More than a week later, Romanian authorities have failed to provide a convincing justification.

AT&T Successfully Cripples California’s Net Neutrality Law –

Crap! will never, ever, ever buy AT&T services

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AT&T wins again. As we’ve been noting, California had been making great progress in passing one of the toughest net neutrality state laws in the nation. Scott Weiner’s SB822 was called the “gold standard” for state-level net neutrality laws, going even a bit further than the FCC’s discarded 2015 rules in terms of policing anti-competitive behavior. It not only banned ISPs from blocking or throttling competitors’ websites, but it also prohibited ISPs like AT&T from using usage-caps anti-competitively, most commonly by exempting an ISP’s own content while still penalizing competitors like Netflix (aka zero rating).

AT&T, fresh off of its $86 billion merger with Time Warner, has dreams of using its combined new media and broadband market power to dominate competitors in the streaming video and online ad wars to come.

AT&T saw California’s restrictions as a serious threat to those ambitions. As a result, it did what the company always did: it used cash-compromised lawmakers to kill the legislation before it could truly come to pass.

AT&T this week first began circulating a misleading study by an AT&T-funded group named CALInnovates that claimed that preventing AT&T from abusing usage caps anti-competitively would somehow harm the state’s minority populations (absurd and decidedly false, it should go without saying). The California law didn’t ban zero rating, but it did require that if ISPs are to zero rate it should be for entire classes of traffic (like video), preventing ISPs from giving any one specific company an unfair advantage.

After AT&T had successfully confused lawmakers into misunderstanding zero rating, its lobbyists then convinced California Assemblyman Miguel Santiago to introduce a series of last-minute secretive Tuesday night amendments that severely weakened the original proposal. Those amendments eliminated rules governing usage caps and zero rating, interconnection and ISP efforts to double dip by charging companies “access fees” just to reach their broadband subscribers.

Santiago then quickly rushed the amendments through without letting the committee or the bill sponsor even discuss them. The amendments were approved 8-0 by a committee of four Democrats and four Republicans happy to work in perfect unison to give AT&T what it wanted. Wiener then pulled the bill entirely, noting the remaining scraps would not adequately protect California consumers.

“What the committee just did was outrageous,” Wiener said at the hearing. “These amendments eviscerated the bill–it is no longer a net neutrality bill. I will state for the record…I think it was fundamentally unfair.”

That’s a bit of an understatement, and net neutrality activist groups had notably less polite words for what occurred.

“The level of corruption we just witnessed literally makes me sick to my stomach, said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future. “These California democrats will go down in history as among the worst corporate shills that have ever held elected office.Californians should rise up and demand that at their Assembly members represent them. The actions of this committee today are an attack not just on net neutrality, but on our democracy.”

Weiner could try and reintroduce the legislation, but it would need to be passed, intact, by next Friday, something local activists tell me isn’t likely to happen. This isn’t likely the end of the fight for California’s efforts, though it does once again highlight the absurd power AT&T wields over state lawmakers, Republican and Democrat alike.

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“We are going to take the risk and go to the US, we can’t go back”

Donald Trump needs to try harder if he wants to scare Rafael Castillo. On May 2, Rafael finished his work cutting lemons in a field in Apatazingán, Michoacán. He passed by his parents’ place then headed home. That’s when he received the call: “They have just killed your brothers.” Gunmen had shot two of his siblings, right in front of his parents, just 10 minutes after Rafael had left them. They buried the bodies that same afternoon. When he went home that night, armed men in SUVs were waiting for him outside his house. A friend of his wife’s bought them plane tickets to Tijuana. They arrived the next day.

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Steve Schmidt Denounces, Then Leaves The Republican Party

Steve Schmidt Denounces, Then Leaves The Republican Party:

crooksandliars:

Steve Schmidt Denounces, Then Leaves The Republican Party

The Republican Party has become the party of Trump, “corrupt, indecent and immoral.” And that Ronald Reagan would have been ashamed of McConnell and Paul Ryan (debatable), and that they had disgraced the party of Lincoln (nevermind that it hasn’t been that in well over a century). Much of this Schmidt has said before. What is new, however, is that he’s now aligning himself with the Democratic Party, saying: “This Independent voter will be aligned with the only party left in America that stands for what is right and decent and remains fidelitous to our Republic, objective truth, the rule of law and our Allies. That party is the Democratic Party.”

Source: The Hill

Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, one of the GOP’s loudest critics of President Trump, renounced the party early Wednesday and announced that he will begin voting for Democrats.

Schmidt slammed Trump in a Twitter thread, saying he was leaving the party that once ended slavery.

29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of The Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life. Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.

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