2020-04-07 -

İranlı yetkililer, muhalefetin devam eden yoğun çağrıları sonrası tartışmalı cumhurbaşkanlığı seçimlerinde gözaltına alınan 140 muhalefet taraftarını kefaletle serbest bıraktı.

Amerika Birleşik Devletleri'nin Kuzey Carolina eyaletinde altısı ABD vatandaşı yedi kişiye aralarında İsrail ve Ürdün'ün de bulunduğu bazı ülkelerde terör saldırısı planlama suçlaması yöneltildi.

Annapolis, Maryland

"I don't care where he was born. I just wish he would do something abut gas [petrol] prices," a man in Chick and Ruth's diner on the main street of Annapolis in the US state of Maryland told me.

That is the sort of reaction President Barack Obama hopes for. His message is that the fuss about where he was born is bemusing, puzzling, silly and a "sideshow" distracting from the huge economic issues facing America.

But Mr Obama had to kick over the sideshow if the customers at the diner were anything to go by. Most people I spoke had a hazy perception that there was something slightly untrustworthy about the document released by the Obama campaign two and a half years ago. Most thought this had dragged on far too long and deserved to be cleared up.

The argument that Mr Obama isn't eligible to be US president because he wasn't born in the US was once thought to be the preserve of the political fringes, those whose "birther" nickname equates them with the "truthers" who believe 9/11 was carried out by the US government.

But it was plonked centre stage by potential Republican candidate, billionaire property developer and TV star Donald Trump, who has said several times that he doubts Mr Obama was born in Hawaii and that he has put private detectives on the case.

Mr Trump was in New Hampshire today doing multiple stops in this key state. Mr Obama's press conference both stymies his big day and gives him even more publicity. Mr Obama's aim must be to make him look deeply unserious.

Many Obama supporters feel racism motivates the birthers - disbelief that a black man can be an American president. Some birthers are opponents who hate his values so much they think he must be un-American literally as well as metaphorically.

But there's no doubt his team has handled this appallingly.

They have today released the full birth certificate. In 2008 they released a "certification of live birth". The White House communications director writes:

When any citizen born in Hawaii requests their birth certificate, they receive exactly what the president received. In fact, the document posted on the campaign website is what Hawaiians use to get a driver's license from the state and the document recognised by the federal government and the courts for all legal purposes. That's because it is the birth certificate.

That appears to be true, and the Hawaiian authorities were apparently reluctant to publish the full thing. But what could be more delicious to conspiracy theorists than the existence of an unseen document that apparently the authorities were keen to keep from the full public gaze?

In Chick and Ruth's I found a full variety of views about the issue. A waitress said it was crazy that anyone ever doubted when Mr Obama was born, an older man still thought that his president may have been born in Kenyan and wanted to study the document. A younger man had no real doubts but thought this was overdue.

It may not go away. I have already had one e-mail from someone who said he had no interest in were Mr Obama was born but claimed the new document had been doctored.

But one thing is very clear. I was in Annapolis filming a story on the economy, and nearly every customer I spoke to ended up talking, unprompted, about the price of petrol. That was the real issue for them. Like the president, they regarded anything else as a sideshow, albeit an entertaining one.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Syed Shah usually buys and sells stocks and currencies through his Interactive Brokers account, but he couldn't resist trying his hand at some oil trading on April 20, the day prices plunged below zero for the first time ever. The day trader, working from his house in a Toronto suburb, figured he couldn't lose as he spent $2,400 snapping up crude at $3.30 a barrel, and then 50 cents. Then came what looked like the deal of a lifetime: buying 212 futures contracts on West Texas Intermediate for an astonishing penny each. What he didn't know was oil's first trip into negative pricing had broken Interactive Brokers Group Inc. Its software couldn't cope with that pesky minus sign, even though it was always technically possible -- though this was an outlandish idea before the pandemic -- for the crude market to go upside down. Crude was actually around negative $3.70 a barrel when Shah's screen had it at 1 cent. Interactive Brokers never displayed a subzero price to him as oil kept diving to end the day at minus $37.63 a barrel. At midnight, Shah got the devastating news: he owed Interactive Brokers $9 million. He'd started the day with $77,000 in his account. To be clear, investors who were long those oil contracts had a brutal day, regardless of what brokerage they had their account in. What set Interactive Brokers apart, though, is that its customers were flying blind, unable to see that prices had turned negative, or in other cases locked into their investments and blocked from trading. Compounding the problem, and a big reason why Shah lost an unbelievable amount in a few hours, is that the negative numbers also blew up the model Interactive Brokers used to calculate the amount of margin -- aka collateral -- that customers needed to secure their accounts. "It's a $113 million mistake on our part," said Thomas Peterffy, the chairman and founder of Interactive Brokers, in an interview Wednesday. Customers will be made whole, Peterffy said. "We will rebate from our own funds to our customers who were locked in with a long position during the time the price was negative any losses they suffered below zero."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Uber lost $2.9 billion in the first quarter as its overseas investments were hammered by the coronavirus pandemic, but the company is looking to its growing food delivery business and aggressive cost-cutting to ease the pain. Tech Xplore reports: The ride-hailing giant said Thursday it is offloading Jump, its bike and scooter business, to Lime, a company in which it is investing $85 million. Jump had been losing about $60 million a quarter. "While our Rides business has been hit hard by the ongoing pandemic, we have taken quick action to preserve the strength of our balance sheet, focus additional resources on Uber Eats, and prepare us for any recovery scenario," said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in a statement. "Along with the surge in food delivery, we are encouraged by the early signs we are seeing in markets that are beginning to open back up." On Wednesday, San Francisco-based Uber said it was cutting 3,700 full-time workers, or about 14% of its workforce, as people avoiding contagion either stay indoors or try to limit contact with others. Its main U.S. rival Lyft announced last month it would lay off 982 people, or 17% of its workforce because of plummeting demand. Careem, Uber's subsidiary in the Middle East, cut its workforce by 31%. Uber brought in $3.54 billion in revenue in the first quarter, up 14% from the same time last year. Revenue in its Eats meal delivery business grew 53% as customers shuttered at home opted to order in. Gross bookings grew 8% to $15.8 billion, with 54% growth in the food delivery business and a 3% decline in rides, on a constant currency basis. The report adds that rides were down 80% globally during the month of April. "But rides have been increasing for the past three weeks and bookings in large cities across Georgia and Texas, two states that started re-opening, are up 43% and 50% respectively from their lowest points," the report says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: GPS is facing a major interference threat from a 5G network approved by the Federal Communications Commission, U.S. military officials told Congress in a hearing on Wednesday. In testimony to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Department of Defense Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy disputed the FCC's claims that conditions imposed on the Ligado network will protect GPS from interference. When the FCC approved Ligado's plan last month, the agency required a 23MHz guard band to provide a buffer between the Ligado cellular network and GPS. Deasy argued that this guard band won't prevent interference with GPS signals. Results from tests by federal agencies show that "conditions in this FCC order will not prevent impacts to millions of GPS receivers across the United States, with massive complaints expected to come," Deasy said. The FCC unanimously approved Ligado's application, but the decision is facing congressional scrutiny. "I do not think it is a good idea to place at risk the GPS signals that enable our national and economic security for the benefit of one company and its investors," Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said at the hearing, according to CNBC. "This is about much more than risking our military readiness and capabilities. Interfering with GPS will hurt the entire American economy." A spokesperson for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai called the military's concerns "baseless fear-mongering" in a statement quoted by Multichannel News. "The FCC made a unanimous, bipartisan decision based on sound engineering principles," the spokesperson said. The FCC said "the metric used by the Department of Defense to measure harmful interference does not, in fact, measure harmful interference," and that "testing on which they are relying took place at dramatically higher power levels than the FCC approved." "Ligado said Wednesday in a statement that it has gone to great lengths to prevent interference and will provide 'a 24/7 monitoring capability, a hotline, a stop buzzer or kill switch' and will 'repair or replace at Ligado's cost any government device shown to be susceptible to harmful interference,'" CNBC reported. The FCC also said it imposed a power limit of 9.8dBW on Ligado's downlink operations -- "a greater than 99 percent reduction from what Ligado proposed in its 2015 application," Pai said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Crawling along the world's river bottoms, the larvae of the caddis fly suffer a perpetual housing crisis. To protect themselves from predators, they gather up sand grains and other sediment and paste them all together with silk, forming a cone that holds their worm-like bodies. As they mature and elongate, they have to continuously add material to the case -- think of it like adding rooms to your home for the rest of your life, or at least until you turn into an adult insect. If the caddis fly larva somehow loses its case, it's got to start from scratch, and that's quite the precarious situation for a defenseless tube of flesh. And now, the microplastic menace is piling onto the caddis fly's list of tribulations. Microplastic particles -- pieces of plastic under 5 millimeters long -- have already corrupted many of Earth's environments, including the formerly pristine Arctic and deep-sea sediments. In a study published last year, researchers in Germany reported finding microplastic particles in the cases of caddis flies in the wild. Then, last month, they published the troubling results of lab experiments that found the more microplastic particles a caddis fly larva incorporates into its case, the weaker that structure becomes. That could open up caddis flies to greater predation, sending ripple effects through river ecosystems. In the lab, the researchers found that the larvae chose to use two kinds of microplastics to build their cases, likely because the plastic is lighter than the sand, so it's not as hard to lift. The problem is that the cases with more plastic and less sand collapse more easily, weakening the larvae's protection from predatory fish, among other things. A more long-term concern is bioaccumulation. "A small fish eats a larva, a bigger fish eats the smaller fish, all the way on up, and the concentrations of microplastic and associated toxins accumulate over time," the report says. "The bigger predators that people eat, like tuna, may be absorbing those microplastics and the chemicals they leach." The study has been published in the journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Boston Herald writes that a "video vigilante faces numerous charges after being arrested outside Massachusetts General Hospital where police say he was recording the emergency ramp at the height of the coronavirus pandemic." schwit1 shares their report: John L. McCullough, 41, was charged with trespassing, disturbing the peace and threats to do bodily harm after police say he refused to stop recording Sunday evening. "I informed him that I could not make him stop filming but I asked him to stop out of respect to patient privacy," the arresting officer wrote in a police report obtained by the Herald through a public records request. The next day the newspaper's senior editor posted a follow-up: John L. McCullough told the Herald Tuesday evening he is a First Amendment crusader who takes videos of police and posts them to YouTube. That's what got him a June 2 arraignment date. "I understand how people may feel, but that doesn't mean I should be locked up," McCullough said... "Did I break the law? No. I may have been rude," he added. "I understand people may feel jittery, but where peoples' feelings start my rights don't stop...." Cambridge civil-rights attorney Harvey Silverglate said McCullough will probably have his case tossed, even if what he was doing is seen as crass. "There's no amendment in the Constitution called the humanity amendment," said Silverglate. "It's a free country and you have a right to be a jerk." But taking video outside a hospital during a pandemic and as people try to social distance — and first responders, including the police, face all-too-real health risks — is "pretty distasteful," Silverglate added. Still, he added the judge will "have to throw it out." He added it's "punishment itself" to go to court in this climate. McCullough, records state, does not have an attorney yet. He did say he's ready to plead his case. "Don't be brainwashed," he added, "and it shouldn't be a problem when a black man has a camera." The Herald suggests one more interesting detail. "McCullough said '20 other cameras' were probably rolling at the same time as he was — alluding to security cameras in the area."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Friday, the Dunking Dutchman took over the Indiana Pacers' Twitter to do a question and answer session with Pacer fans.

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