Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Every day brings with it fresh reports of acts of hate aimed at Jews in the US. ProPublica has been monitoring these acts as part of a project called Documenting Hate and has published a lengthy report, listing incidents ranging from swastikas painted on the homes and cars of people that had some kind of indicator that the owner was Jewish, to bomb threats.
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As a result of the way that the CIA leaks have fueled the coverage of the links between Donald Trump and his associates, partisan opinions about the CIA have shifted dramatically from the way it was perceived when this question was last polled in 2015
The poll, which measured Republican and Democratic sentiment toward the CIA, showed that Democrats had started to view the CIA with a net favorability of 32%, compared with 4% net favorability for Republicans.
An NBC/WSJ poll from 2015 showed Republicans viewing the CIA with a net favorability of 27%, versus -4% from Democrats.
The divide in the latest poll was even steeper between Trump supporters and those who supported his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The CIA had net favorability of 39% among Clinton supporters in December, compared with 2% among Trump supporters.
I was surprised that the leaks from within the CIA of nearly 9,000 documents that WikiLeaks has labeled ‘Vault 7’ that revealed information about its spying methods on Americans and how they lost control of the systems it was using have not received much greater prominence in the news, though it is now receiving more scrutiny as both the FBI and CIA launch criminal investigations into the leaks.
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Fortunately for us, Conan O’Brien has recordings of the conversations.
I suspect that many of us worry, at least occasionally, that we might fall asleep or leave the house with the stove left on and have visions of the burner overheating and catching fire and destroying everything. I have on numerous occasions gone back into the house after leaving it, just to check the stove. But how bad could it really be? According to this article by Steve Rousseau, John Drengenberg, the Consumer Safety Director at Underwriters Laboratories, says that the manufacturers of stoves have taken this possibility into account.
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The report released by the University of California system about 113 reported cases of sexual harassment by professors of their students was eye-opening for me. The blatant nature of the propositioning and assault was quite shocking.
University of California professor Eric Gans told his female graduate student that he loved her – and that “in another universe”, they were meant to share a life together.
“I have never seen you more beautiful than the past two days,” the French and Francophone studies professor wrote to the student in May 2011, when he was 69 years old. “I can’t help feeling that … you are being beautiful for me, that I somehow inspire this beauty.”
The letter came one week before the UC Los Angeles (UCLA) student had to take an exam that Gans would evaluate. It caused her to become anxious and depressed, and according to a university investigation, was one of many sexually harassing messages he sent even though she repeatedly stated she was not interested in a romantic relationship.
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It was disgusting to see how the media fawned over Donald Trump’s speech to the joint session of Congress. Simply for acting like a normal human being for a brief time, they gushed that he had suddenly become presidential. But as Trevor Noah astutely pointed out, Trump knows exactly how to fake the media into thinking he is presidential and has mocked them in the past about how easy it was to fool them. In the speech, he did exactly what he said he would do and they still fell for it.
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WikiLeaks has issued a blockbuster press release today along with a tranche of documents that were leaked to it that describe the CIA’s efforts to infiltrate people’s communications systems. The documents reveal that the CIA targeted smartphones and computers and turned so-called Smart TVs into eavesdropping devices. The documents allege that the CIA then lost control of this spying arsenal which means that others may now possess these same capabilities, which would constitute a massive breach in its security systems.
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