Flash-heating efficiently recycles precious metals from e-waste New Atlas
Bob Carr: Israel lobby’s overreach far exceeded any other diaspora community
For casting light on the savage lobbying the Australian media — and politicians — receive from the Israel lobby, John Lyons should be congratulated.
Average citizens might not ‘volunteer’ for death if they could afford what the rich can: staying alive with dignity
- by John Watkins
Victoria J. Haneman (Creighton; Google Scholar), Prepaid Death, 59 Harv. J. on Legis. ___ (2022):
The cost of an adult funeral exceeds $9,000. Funerals are expensive and death is not considered an appropriate time to bargain shop.
Fast Company – “After a year and a half of working from home, we’ve all grown accustomed to personalized workspaces and the ability to work from anywhere. While many of us crave the option to work in a professional setting—away from children, partners, and other everyday distractions—the ability to choose one’s workplace has become paramount in the minds of today’s workforce. In its summer/fall 2020 workplace surveys, Gensler found that just over half of U.S. workers and two-thirds of U.K. workers prefer a hybrid model, with respondents indicating that they choose the office for productivity, but prefer home for its convenience and safety—and want the benefits of both. This widespread refusal to return to pre-pandemic office standards can be largely attributed to the failures of the open-office concept, which was designed to foster more collaboration and socialization across company departments, but gave little consideration to the variety of working environments necessary for a comfortable, productive workplace. In 2019, Harvard Business Review tracked both face-to-face and digital interactions at the headquarters of two Fortune 500 companies and found that face-to-face interactions actually dropped by about 70% after open offices were implemented, while online interactions increased. The result? An unhappy workforce in factory rows, increased sick days, and an overall lack of productivity…”
Deathly Silence: Journalists Who Mocked Assange Have Nothing to Say About CIA Plans to Kill Him FAIR
October 10, 2021] “The Washington Post is joining news organizations around the globe to bring you the first in a series of important stories. These are the product of nearly a year of reporting at The Post focused on a vast trove of documents that expose a secretive financial universe that benefits the wealthy and powerful. The project, known as the Pandora Papers, was conceived and organized by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which obtained the records and shared them with The Post and other partners. The documents — more than 11.9 million records from 14 offshore entities, including law and wealth-management firms — illuminate a hidden world that has allowed government leaders, a monarch, billionaires and criminals to shield their assets. The Post decided to join this project because we felt certain that the breadth of records obtained by the ICIJ would shine a light on aspects of the international financial system that have operated with little or no oversight. A similar but narrower ICIJ investigation, known as the Panama Papers and published in 2016, revealed hidden wealth that ignited protests in several countries, forcing two world leaders from power. The sheer scope of the records was too large for effective review by any single news organization. The partnership with the ICIJ allowed The Post, the BBC, the Guardian and others to work together in scouring the documents, validating the material and conducting the additional reporting needed to place key findings in context.
Historic firsts as virgin communists and social democrats fail to enter parliament
For the first time since 1920, the Czech parliament won’t have communist delegates after the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) failed to win more than 5% of the vote, the threshold needed to enter parliament.
The country’s oldest political party, the Social Democrats (CSSD), also failed to enter parliament for the first time in its history
Six takeaways from the Czech Republic’s historic election EuroNews
Czech election uncertainty as President rushed to hospital
- by Karel Janicek
Prague flat, Czech Republic, by Atelier 111 Architekti
Built-in wooden shelving and a comfortable daybed have been added to this window in a Prague living room. The window seat effectively functions as a sofa, while the surrounding bookshelves create a cosy, enclosed space.
Birch plywood was used to build the storage around the existing windows. Underneath the sofa, more storage can be found in wooden drawers.
Find out more about Prague flat ›
Ten interiors with window seats for peaceful contemplation
The Great Novel of the Internet Was Published in 1925
Almost 100 years ago, Mrs. Dalloway anticipated the anxiety of seeing—and being seen. One’s ability to see and know other people has boundaries—even in fiction.
In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motorcars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what [Clarissa Dalloway] loved; life; London; this moment of June.
History repeats itself. But do decades duplicate?” the AP asked earlier this year, in a story responding to predictions of “a new Roaring Twenties.” No, is the short answer. But the eerie resonances between Dalloway’s moment and our own—war, pandemic, entrenched inequality, betrayals that would lead to Lost Generations—help to explain why Woolf’s book is so ripe for revisitation.
The Right to be Forgotten and its Unintended Consequences to Intelligence Gathering
Goldfield, Charlene, ‘The Right to be Forgotten’ and its Unintended Consequences to Intelligence Gathering (July 1, 2020). Volume 32, Issue 2, Winter 2020 , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3898887
“Social media has dramatically changed how we interact and communicate with one another. The reliance on social media has also sparked many international debates revolving around privacy. We have seen the enactment of the comprehensive privacy law in the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States—both enacted in 2018. In the GDPR, Article 17 known as the “Right to Be Forgotten” (RTBF) principle allows for data subjects to request that their information be removed from online service providers like social media companies. In recent years, cases from the Court of Justice for the European Union have expanded these RTBF principles through three major cases: Google LLC v. Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL), GC v. Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL), and Glawischnig-Piesczek v. Facebook. This Article argues that the RTBF model will present unintended consequences to Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) by mandating online service providers to delete more data than necessary based on the pressures placed on these online service providers by the recent Court of Justice for the European Union (CJEU) cases. This will lead to problems in the Intelligence Community when obtaining open source intelligence especially when scrubbing social media information. This RTBF system will make it easier for terrorist groups, terrorist sympathizers or any other associated individuals to hide behind a process by which they can easily delete data that was not so easily removable before RTBF. Lastly, this Article proposes legal, procedural, and oversight solutions to address the issues caused by RTBF and OSINT.”