Category Archives: Fail!

‘Leave UK immediately’: scientist is latest victim of Home Office blunder | UK news | The Guardian – A Prequel to what Trump would like to see in US?

Danaie holds Canadian-Iranian joint citizenship. He is an electron microscopy scientist who has worked since October 2016 at Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron, based at Harwell science and innovation campus in Oxfordshire. He has a work visa valid until September 2019 and previously worked at Oxford University’s department of materials.Danaie went public with his case after the Guardian highlighted the introduction of “hostile environment” immigration status bank account checks last week, and following an assessment by the chief inspector of borders that there was a 10% error rate in Home Office records used for some forms of enforcement action.“I happen to be in that 10% statistic. Despite having a valid work visa, I received this letter,” he said. “It hurts on so many levels. They even have a typo in my name. Such disarray is astonishing in an office responsible for security.”

Source: ‘Leave UK immediately’: scientist is latest victim of Home Office blunder | UK news | The Guardian

Charlottesville’s white awakening: ‘We were living in a bubble,’ say residents | World news | The Guardian

Charlottesville was definitely not the first time Trump had said something that made Cronk uncomfortable, and it was was not the first time friends had shared their fears with him about how their race might make them vulnerable. When it came to police brutality, Cronk said, he listened, but he also had his own relationship with the police as authority figures, and wanted to believe that most police officers would not simply racially profile people. “This was different,” he said. The white supremacists’ attitude towards other races was absolutely clear.Whether Trump was a white supremacist himself, he said, he did not know. But together with Trump’s “Rocket Man” jabs at North Korea, the president’s reaction to Charlottesville had convinced him that he would not be voting for Trump again, and that he needed to vet his candidates more carefully in the future.

Source: Charlottesville’s white awakening: ‘We were living in a bubble,’ say residents | World news | The Guardian

Brazilian judge approves ‘gay conversion therapy’, sparking national outrage | World news | The Guardian – idiocy, hatred, anti-science ideologies arise anew with neo-nazism and fascism!

Council president Rogério Giannini, a psychologist based in São Paulo, said its 1999 decision prohibiting “sexual conversion” therapy had already faced off other legal actions and even a proposed bill in Congress.“There is no way to cure what is not a disease,” Giannini told the Guardian. “It is not a serious, academic debate, it is a debate connected to religious or conservative positions.”He noted that the ruling also said academic research into sexual conversion therapy should be allowed, which the council has never banned.“We have no power over research,” he said. “The way it was put by the judge gave the impression that we prohibited research which is not true.”As hashtags like #curagay (“gay cure”) trended in Brazil, Twitter users used memes and GIFs to ridicule the decision.“They tried to make me go to rehab, I said no, no, no,” tweeted one Brazilian using the name Ubiratan.

Source: Brazilian judge approves ‘gay conversion therapy’, sparking national outrage | World news | The Guardian

The White House Is Doxxing America | Dame Magazine

For writers and journalists, for activists, and for people directly affected by unjust policy and legislation, asking questions, seeking justice, and speaking out is an innate part of our work, of our livelihood, of who we are as humans. The attempt to silence people through public shaming and the tacit threat of a public and threatening pile-on are tools the federal government appears to now be using to effectively silence the most vulnerable people in our society. Many are already familiar with this culture in online spaces and in some locales, but blatantly and openly bullying constituents at the Federal level in the U.S. is new. And it does not smell like democracy.

Source: The White House Is Doxxing America | Dame Magazine

Germany: AfD Accuses Google of Sabotaging Campaign – SPIEGEL ONLINE _ Google says no to hate ads, so on to Facebook and Twitter to target hate and racist political messages!

As part of its digital campaign strategy, AfD has even brought on American consultants with the Harris Media advertising agency. The Texas consulting firm specializes in customers with “controversial” messages who range from Donald Trump and the gun lobby to France’s far-right Front National. Their task is to adapt Kunkel’s print campaign for the digital world. Two Harris employees have also embedded themselves in the digital “war room” inside the AfD’s national headquarters in Berlin.But it appears that the American pros are running into hurdles — with one of the most important advertising platforms around. Officials with AfD have complained that Google is blocking large parts of its advertising campaign. “We aren’t having difficulties with any other platform,” said campaign manager Kunkel. He said that Facebook and Twitter are treating AfD like a normal customer. “But Google is sabotaging us, creating a disadvantage for us relative to our political competition.”Dividing the Pie Between Google, Facebook and TwitterThe dispute shines a spotlight on the role the U.S. Internet giants are playing in the current German election. For the first time, the criteria used by major American internet platforms to decide on what paid political content can be disseminated to their users — and what cannot — is playing a central role in a German election.

Source: Germany: AfD Accuses Google of Sabotaging Campaign – SPIEGEL ONLINE

Nikon Picked 32 Photographers to Promote a Camera. All 32 Were Men. – The New York Times

 

Tired of editors giving assignments overwhelmingly to men, Ms. Zalcman created Women Photograph to address the imbalance. The database lists 650 women in 87 countries. It includes 40 in Africa, 37 in Asia and 38 in the Middle East. To not include women from those areas, she said, “almost seems like a mathematical impossibility.”Melissa Lyttle, president of the National Press Photographers Association, called Nikon’s marketing attempt an “egregious slap in the face to advancement that’s happened in the past 20 years in our industry.”She said she had worked for paternalistic editors who did not want to send a woman into harm’s way by giving her dangerous assignments. Other women have said they had to overcome sexual harassment, insular networks of men, and being pigeonholed into specific stories.

Theresa May rebukes Donald Trump over tube bombing tweets | UK news | The Guardian – “Bow wow, ruff, ruff, yip, yip, I am the big dog! cried the Pomeranian!”

Asked about Trump’s potential breach of convention on intelligence sharing, May was unusually critical of the US president, saying: “I never think it’s helpful for anybody to speculate on what is an ongoing investigation.”When the president tweeted, no suspect had been identified and no group or individual had claimed responsibility for the blast.The Met police said the president’s comments regarding Friday morning’s incident were unhelpful and “pure speculation”.There was no immediate response from the White House to questions about the basis of Trump’s assertion.Speaking outside the White House on Friday, Trump made no reference to her rebuke. “It’s a terrible thing,” he said. “It just keeps going and going, and we have to be very smart, we have to be very, very tough. Perhaps we are not nearly tough enough.

Source: Theresa May rebukes Donald Trump over tube bombing tweets | UK news | The Guardian

My ‘aha!’ moment: Fishers are not the enemies of healthy oceans | Human Nature – Conservation International Blog – Carefully thought out self-delusion but still self-delusion. If you are fishing for profit – rather than for feeding your self and family, it will eventually lead to overfishing and the earth’s death.

I was already midway through my 13 years of working to improve fishery sustainability in the Galápagos and throughout Latin America when I had my “aha!” moment. What I came to realize is that fishers are not the enemies of sustainability or ocean health, but rather the best allies that humankind can have to ensure the conservation of marine ecosystems, food security and poverty eradication around the world. We just need to understand their motivations, needs and concerns in order to help them create the conditions to move fisheries toward sustainability, while not forgetting that crises represent the best opportunities for change.

Source: My ‘aha!’ moment: Fishers are not the enemies of healthy oceans | Human Nature – Conservation International Blog