Category Archives: Viva!

Acting Defense Chief Sees No Need to Restart Big Military Exercises With South Korea

LMAO – what would he now about it? A Boeing exec? Patrick Shanahan said he was confident troops were well prepared despite the halt to large-scale war games in a concession to North Korea.

It’s un-British to roll out the red carpet for Donald Trump | Sadiq Khan

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The US president gives comfort to the far right. The prime minister should speak truth to power

Praising the “very fine people on both sides” when torch-wielding white supremacists and antisemites marched through the streets clashing with anti-racist campaigners. Threatening to veto a ban on the use of rape as a weapon of war. Setting an immigration policy that forcefully separates young children from their parents at the border. The deliberate use of xenophobia, racism and “otherness” as an electoral tactic. Introducing a travel ban to a number of predominately Muslim countries. Lying deliberately and repeatedly to the public.

No, these are not the actions of European dictators of the 1930s and 40s. Nor the military juntas of the 1970s and 80s. I’m not talking about Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un. These are the actions of the leader of our closest ally, the president of the United States of America. This is a man who tried to exploit Londoners’ fears following a horrific terrorist attack on our city, amplified the tweets of a British far-right racist group, denounced as fake news robust scientific evidence warning of the dangers of climate change, and is now trying to interfere shamelessly in the Conservative party leadership race by backing Boris Johnson because he believes it would enable him to gain an ally in Number 10 for his divisive agenda.

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Candidate to run global food body will ‘not defend’ EU stance on GM

Nothing to do with food just power and profit and not evn for majority of small farmers! Duh?

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Catherine Geslain-Lanéelle tells US she would be more open to its interests in UN role

Europe’s candidate to run the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which guides policymakers around the world, has promised the US she will “not defend the EU position” in resisting the global spread of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

In a bid for US support, Catherine Geslain-Lanéelle told senior US officials at a meeting in Washington on 15 May that under her leadership the FAO would be more open to American interests and accepting of GMOs and gene editing, according to a US official record of the meeting seen by the Guardian.

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Google’s API changes mean only paid enterprise users of Chrome will be able to access full adblock

Via Sophia, Not Loren

Since January, Google has been pushing for a change to its extensions handling in Chrome; one casualty of that change is ability to block unwanted content before its loads, something that would effectively kill privacy tools and ad-blockers.

After a public outcry, Google has tweaked the change, but only for enterprise customers, who will have access to an API that will allow this kind of blocking. That means that corporations will be able to develop internal-use plugins that do the kind of screening that adblockers do for the rest of us today.

Google has warned investors that “New and existing technologies could affect our ability to customize ads and/or could block ads online, which would harm our business,” and ad blocker developers like Raymond Hill of Ublock Origin have speculated that “Google’s primary business is incompatible with unimpeded content blocking. Now that Google Chrome product has achieve high market share, the content blocking concerns as stated in its 10K filing are being tackled.”

Google denies this, and says “We’re actively working with the developer community to get feedback and iterate on the design of a privacy-preserving content filtering system that limits the amount of sensitive browser data shared with third parties.”

Chrome is the dominant browser on the web today, and even though it is nominally open source, Google has used a suite of tricks to ensure that it gets to decide who can adapt it and what features those adaptations can have.

Firefox is available for virtually every OS — mobile and desktop — and supports full ad-blocking.

Chrome is deprecating the blocking capabilities of the webRequest API in Manifest V3, not the entire webRequest API (though blocking will still be available to enterprise deployments).

Google is essentially saying that Chrome will still have the capability to block unwanted content, but this will be restricted to only paid, enterprise users of Chrome. This is likely to allow enterprise customers to develop in-house Chrome extensions, not for ad blocking usage.

For the rest of us, Google hasn’t budged on their changes to content blockers, meaning that ad blockers will need to switch to a less effective, rules-based system, called “declarativeNetRequest.”

Chrome to limit full ad blocking extensions to enterprise users [Kyle Bradshaw/9to5Google]

(via /.)

US visa applicants to be asked to furnish 5-year social media history

Social media platforms which are covered in the drop-down menu include Facebook, Flickr, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Youtube. The scope of the drop down menu is expected to be further extended. However, visa applicants do not have to list accounts designed for use by multiple users within a business organisation.

Donald Trump is like a 20th-century fascist, says Sadiq Khan

Spot on!

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London mayor hits out at US president before his state visit to Britain

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has compared the language used by Donald Trump to rally his supporters to that of “the fascists of the 20th century” in an explosive intervention before the US president’s state visit to London that begins on Monday.

Writing in the Observer, Khan condemned the red-carpet treatment being afforded to Trump who, with his wife Melania, will be a guest of the Queen during his three-day stay, which is expected to provoke massive protests in the capital on Tuesday.

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Donald Trump: send in Nigel Farage to negotiate with the EU

Didn’t think he could ever be more stupid than was thought? ROTFLMAO

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US president makes second intervention in British politics, saying UK should ‘walk away’

Donald Trump has called on Britain to leave the European Union without a deal if Brussels refuses to meet its demands, as he urged the government to send Nigel Farage into the negotiations.

In his second extraordinary intervention into British politics ahead of this week’s state visit, the US president suggested the UK should “walk away” from talks and refuse to pay the £39bn divorce bill if its requests were not met.

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