Society's ChildS


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#ThisIsNotConsent protests erupt in Ireland after lawyer highlights woman's thong in rape trial

thong
© Global Look Press/ CHROMORANGE / Bilderbox
Protests across Ireland were held on Wednesday against what activists say is recurring victim-blaming in rape cases, after a woman's lace thong was controversially cited as evidence against a 17-year-old alleged victim.

The Cork trial first grabbed the headlines on November 6 when a 27-year-old was acquitted of raping a 17-year-old. The defense counsel, Elizabeth O'Connell, stirred widespread outcry when she said about the teenage girl: "You have to look at the way she was dressed. She was wearing a thong with a lace front."

It prompted a mass movement on Twitter where people posted pictures of their underpants with the hashtag #ThisIsNotConsent.

Bullseye

Veteran reporter Bob Woodward criticizes CNN White House lawsuit - Better reporting, not a lawsuit, should be focus

bob woodward
© AFP / Drew Angerer
Veteran reporter Bob Woodward criticized CNN's lawsuit against the White House over the revocation of correspondent Jim Acosta's press credentials, saying media should focus on "serious reporting" and not lawsuits and smugness.

CNN filed the lawsuit on Tuesday, alleging that the Trump administration violated Acosta's First and Fifth Amendment rights when he was banned from entering the White House and had his press pass confiscated. It followed a heated press conference earlier in the day, during which the White House accused Acosta of putting his hands on a female intern who was attempting to remove a microphone from his hand.

Speaking at the Global Financial Leadership Conference in Florida, Woodward said the remedy to Trump isn't a lawsuit, but "more serious reporting" about his actions, according to NBC reporter Dylan Byers who tweeted the comments.

Magnify

FAA reviewing Boeing's safety analyses as part of investigation into deadly Lion Air crash

Lion Air flight JT610 crash wreckage
© Reuters / Willy KurniawanWreckage recovered from Lion Air flight JT610 lies at Tanjung Priok port in Jakarta on October 29, 2018.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is reviewing Boeing's previous safety analyses and the information it distributed to the agency as part of an investigation into the Lion Air crash that killed all 189 people on board.

In a statement late Tuesday, cited by The Wall Street Journal, the FAA said it is reviewing details surrounding the safety data and conclusions distributed to the agency as part of certifying the 737 MAX 8 - the plane involved in the Lion Air crash - and MAX 9 models.

The review is part of the wider investigation into the Lion Air crash, which occurred on October 29, just minutes after the Boeing aircraft took off from Jakarta's airport.

The WSJ article came after the newspaper also reported that Boeing had failed to warn the airline industry about a potentially dangerous feature in its new flight-control system which is suspected of playing a role in the Lion Air crash. Two pilots unions have also lashed out at Boeing for failing to inform them about the potential risks of the feature.

Comment: All 189 passengers feared dead in plane crash off Jakarta, Indonesia - UPDATE

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Cheese

Food tastes are too subjective to be copyrighted, says EU court

cheese tray
© Reuters / Christine Muschi
Not every experience can be copyrighted, at least for now, an EU court has ruled, dismissing a Dutch cheesemaker's suit against a rival it accused of infringing on its signature taste.

Dutch cheesemaker Levola Hengelo sued rival Smilde for copyright infringement, alleging the company's leek-and-garlic cheese spread was a rip-off of Levola's own Heksenkaas ("witches' cheese"). Dutch courts, stumped, passed the case on to the EU's Court of Justice.

Stating that "the taste of a food product cannot be identified with precision and objectivity," the European court dismissed the suit, pointing out copyright can only be applied to a "work" - an "original intellectual creation" - and an "expression" of that creation.

"Unlike, for example, a literary, pictorial, cinematographic or musical work, which is a precise and objective expression, the taste of a food product will be identified essentially on the basis of taste sensations and experiences, which are subjective and variable," the court wrote in its ruling.

Bullseye

FBI reports 17% spike in hate crimes with blacks and Jews the most targeted

jewish vigil
© Reuters / Alan FreedA vigil is held following the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The US has seen a 17 percent spike in hate crimes in 2017, with the majority of reported incidents targeting African-Americans and Jews, according to the FBI's annual Hate Crimes Statistics report.

The report, released on Tuesday by the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, breaks down hate crime information from last year, broken down by location, offenders, bias types, and victims.

A total of 7,175 hate crimes were reported to UCR last year, up from 6,121 in 2016. Of those, the vast majority were "single-bias incidents," meaning the perpetrators were motivated by only one factor. Sixty-nine of the cases involved multiple biases.

The majority (59.6 percent) of crimes in the "single-bias incident" category were motivated by a person's race, ethnicity, or ancestry. African-Americans were by far the most targeted, with a reported 2,013 attacks against them, compared to 741 "anti-white" attacks.

Religion took second place as a motivating factor, accounting for 20.6 percent of single-bias hate crimes. Of those, the Jewish population was the most targeted, with 1,017 people falling victim in 938 incidents.

Apple Green

Australian woman finds needle in pear just after strawberry scare arrest

Woman finds needle in pear
© Global Look Press/ digifoodstock.com
It was just on Sunday when a woman was arrested and charged with contaminating strawberries in Australia's Queensland. But it looks like the fruit saga is far from over as a needle was again spotted... this time in a pear.

Clare Bonser, a make up artist with ABC News Breakfast, said she was driving on Tuesday as she casually "chomped on" her pear.

For some lucky twist of fate, she happened to look down at the fruit before taking the next bite. That was when she spotted the menace and managed to just narrowly avoid being injured by the spiky item.

"At first I just put it on the seat next to me and tried to process what I saw, then realised, 'Oh crumbs'," Bonser said.


Comment: 50-year-old woman arrested over Australia's strawberry needle scare [Update]


Fire

Evacuation fatigue: California authorities fear people will ignore warnings as wildfires become routine

evacuating Feather River hospital during Camp Fire Paradise CA
© Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesHospital workers and first responders evacuate patients from the Feather River hospital as the Camp Fire moved through the Paradise area last week.
Authorities fear that residents will increasingly ignore repeated calls to flee as devastating wildfires become routine

In 13 months, Meg Brown has evacuated her 3,500-acre family ranch just outside of Oroville three times, as the California wildfires have closed in.

After losing animals and historic buildings on Table Mountain Ranch to the 2017 Cherokee fire, she has a plan to respond to such disasters, and how to decide when to stay or go. In recent days, Brown has worked nonstop to secure her animals and livelihood. She and her mother sleep in shifts to ensure the flames of the Camp fire - the deadliest blaze in California state history -don't surprise them in the middle of the night.

Brown and her mother left at one point after they could see the glow of the fire creeping toward the property but returned after firefighters were able to push the fire back.

That doesn't mean the risk has gone away. High winds have threatened to move the blaze back toward the ranch and the area remains under an evacuation warning. But the Browns have lived through fires before, and they want to do what they can to protect the ranch that has been in the family since the 1930s.

"Last night everybody's like, 'go, go, go'. We went, we looked, we came back because we are exhausted," Brown said. "It is evacuation fatigue."

Comment: See also:


Boat

NATO drills fallout: Norwegian frigate almost entirely underwater after oil tanker collision

KNM Helge Ingstad
© Reuters
The Norwegian Navy frigate that tried and failed to return home after parading its might in NATO war games is almost completely submerged under water after colliding with an oil tanker.

Eight people were injured when the KNM Helge Ingstad and the tanker Sola TS collided last week off Norway's western coast, putting a not-so-great finish on the much touted Trident Juncture 2018 drills - the largest exercise hosted by Norway since the 1980s and the largest that NATO has held in decades.

Since then, the frigate has been slowly sinking. Photos from the scene on Monday show a tiny fraction of the warship above water, with the rest of it completely submerged.

Comment: Norwegian frigate collides with oil tanker off country's coast


Network

ACTA 2.0: The EU's Article 13 threatens the end of freedom on the Internet

gun point
© shutterstock.com
Freedom of expression is a thorn in the side of EU technocrats. The new intellectual property law adopted by the European Parliament in September threatens our fundamental rights.1

Internet means freedom. Still. We can (still) freely retrieve content with our search engines. We can (still) freely and without further ado access the sources in a text. This will soon change. Article 13 of the controversial law says that website operators and Internet providers will be held accountable for the content of their customers and readers.

The new law thus obliges them to use the so-called upload filters. The filter obligation leaves it to the software to decide what users are allowed to upload and what not. In plain language it says the provider will control and censor our activities on the net: every uploaded photo, video, every text will be checked. The question arises: what criteria will apply to this censorship and how and by whom will this filter software be programmed?

Comment: This is what happens when you have bureaucrats who don't understand the internet trying to regulate it. That they feel the right to step in and fundamentally change how a such a massive and essential utility functions is the height of hubris. Let's hope that cooler heads prevail on this one.

As Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube said wrote in an op-ed for the Financial Times (viewable here, rather than behind a paywall on the Financial Times site):
The consequences of article 13 go beyond financial losses. EU residents are at risk of being cut off from videos that, in just the last month, they viewed more than 90bn times. Those videos come from around the world, including more than 35m EU channels, and they include language classes and science tutorials as well as music videos. We welcome the chance to work with policymakers and the industry to develop a solution within article 13 that protects rights holders while also allowing the creative economy to thrive. This could include more comprehensive licensing agreements, collaboration with rights holders to identify who owns what, and smart rights management technology, similar to Content ID.
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Light Sabers

Free speech on campus: War on Christianity or equal-opportunity ideological battleground?

Conservative counterprotesters at UC-Berkeley
© Reuters / Stephen LamConservative counterprotesters at UC-Berkeley
A pair of recent incidents on US campuses has again highlighted the issue of free speech. Is there really a "war on Christianity" happening on American campuses?

In September, Polly Olsen sued Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, claiming staff had violated her free speech rights when they stopped her from handing out religiously-themed Valentines to her fellow students. An observer had complained of "suspicious activity" and Olsen was escorted to the campus security office and told her cards - which contained Christian messages like "Jesus Loves You" - might be considered "offensive," and that she was "soliciting" by distributing them outside the campus' designated "free speech zone."

Comment: See also: