In a surprise move, the Nevada Republican party voted to strip language from its party platform that opposed same-sex marriage and abortion. This is quite a stunning development.
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A friend recently sent me this very short video clip. It briefly tells the love story of a middle-aged couple in rural Sri Lanka who have been married for 34 years and live and work on their own small tea plantation.
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NPR had a wonderful story about someone whom I had never heard of. It was about a US District Judge named J. Waties Waring in South Carolina who, in a landmark school segregation case Briggs v. Elliott, declared that segregation “was an evil that must be eradicated”.
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In an interesting and amusing turn of events, Pastafarianism has been allowed to apply to be an official religion in Poland.
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Last Wednesday a three judge panel of the US Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the appeal of the US District Judge’s’ ruling that struck down Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage. Although over a dozen federal district courts around the nation have struck down the ban or aspects of it since the US Supreme Court’s DOMA decision last summer, and not a single judge has upheld it, this is the first time that this issue has reached the level of an Appeals Court, so this is a significant case
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The Daily Show chronicles the continuing decline of Congress into a body that seems to be purely becoming a punching bag for comedians, such as producing over-the-top campaign ads
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Given all the revelations about the NSA and GCHQ spy agencies intercepting the communications of individuals all over the globe, the obvious question that arises is to what extent they were involved in the Heartbleed bug, the weakness in the OpenSSL protocol that enables third parties to extract 64K chunks of information at a time from targeted computers without the hosts being aware, a security problem so serious that it even caused the Canadian government to suspend electronic tax filing.
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Sex sells. That is something that the advertising agencies discovered a long time ago. So it should not be surprising that TV channels should want to use sex to gain audiences, especially during the periods when ratings are being calculated. But at the same time, news stations tend to have older viewers who, at least on the surface, like to think of themselves as upholders of old-fashioned morality. Thus has emerged one of the most obvious media tricks to have your cake and eat it, and that is to have an ‘in-depth’ news story closely examining some aspect of sex while deploring it.
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On April 7, 2014 we learned of a vulnerability in the OpenSSL security system that you know is in operation when the webpage begins with https instead of http. It is the encryption system used to protect confidential information such as passwords and most sites that deal with sensitive information use it. This vulnerability allowed third parties to intercept and get that information.
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Andrew Rice of New York magazine had an entertaining description of the Polk Awards last night where Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill, and Barton Gellman received the award for National Security Reporting for their work on the Snowden documents. Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian who supported the printing of the first major articles, also was present to pick up a well-deserved award for his paper.
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