Link Roundup October 2019

U.S. Border Officials Use Fake Addresses, Dangerous Conditions, and Mass Trials to Discourage Asylum-Seekers

Taylor’s brief discussed problems in NTAs issued borderwide for MPP enrollees: not just incorrect locations for their court hearings, but also wrong or absurd addresses, such as Facebook, for them to receive legal mail in Mexico.

IRS: Sorry, but It’s Just Easier and Cheaper to Audit the Poor

Lawmakers confronted IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig about the emphasis, citing our stories, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked Rettig for a plan to fix the imbalance. Rettig readily agreed. Last month, Rettig replied with a report, but it said the IRS has no plan and won’t have one until Congress agrees to restore the funding it slashed from the agency over the past nine years — something lawmakers have shown little inclination to do.

President Endorses Turkish Military Operation in Syria, Shifting U.S. Policy

Mr. Erdogan has demanded a “safe zone” for his nation to run 20 miles deep and 300 miles along the Turkish-Syrian border east of the Euphrates. That area, he has said, would be reserved for the return of at least a million Syrian refugees now inside Turkey. Mr. Erdogan has threatened to send a wave of Syrian migrants to Europe instead if the international community does not support the initiative to send them back to Syria.

Showdown Over LGBTQ Employment Rights Hits Supreme Court

Justice Neil Gorsuch said the text of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination "because of sex," or "on the basis of sex, appears to favor the plaintiffs in the case, but he wondered whether the court should also consider "the massive social upheaval" that could follow a ruling in favor of LGBTQ workers. The court's conservative justices, who are in a majority, appeared somewhat skeptical of the arguments of the lawyers for the LGBTQ workers.

Prince Estate Blasts Trump for Playing ‘Purple Rain’ Again During Campaign Event

President Donald Trump’s team played Prince’s “Purple Rain” during a rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Thursday, violating an agreement made by Trump’s campaign and the Prince Estate in 2018. The Prince Estate shared the written agreement on Twitter. The letter from the campaign’s legal representatives said it would not use any Prince songs in connection with Trump campaign events, per the estate’s request that was made after Trump used the song during pre-Election Day rallies.

Google defends contributions to climate change-denying think tanks

Google contributes to conservative political organizations and lobbies that are in support of regulatory efforts that benefit the company. Defending the donations to organizations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) that were cited in the report, Google said that it might not endorse every policy position of an organization when it makes a contribution.

The biggest lie tech people tell themselves — and the rest of us

Perhaps the most telling place this kind of loop shows up is in the high-tech baby device market: Bluetooth diapers, internet-connected baby monitors, an anklet that keeps track of your infant’s every move, heartbeat, and temperature fluctuation. In a country with an ever-eroding social safety net, parents are sold these surveillance devices under the guise of care and love, with a healthy dash of paranoia.

This Is Why California Will Keep Burning

Most advocates of resilient microgrids aren’t suggesting the state tear out all the existing transformers and power lines, but make them redundant over time with the installation of these networked little grids. The prospect of a distributed grid is less infrastructure anarchy than making the old monopoly system more environmentally responsible, more efficient, and more resilient. In the near-ish term, autonomy from corporate utilities is possible on an individual scale; very tricky for a community; and all but impossible for a state of 40 million.

Pence, Giuliani defy demands by Congress for documents

"If they enforce it, then we will see what happens," Giuliani said of his congressional subpoena.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper will no longer comply with impeachment inquiry

The White House has vowed not to comply with the impeachment inquiry and other officials such as Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have failed to meet requests for documents

ICE Moved 700 Women Out Of A Detention Center And Won’t Tell Lawyers Where They Are

Other lawyers have complained that the locator doesn’t load properly, or that it will show “no results found” for someone who is still in ICE custody. Meza said the latter is happening for roughly 100 of the women who were recently transferred from Karnes, and that another 660 of them show up in the system as still being detained at the facility even though they have been moved.

Federal judge overturns ObamaCare transgender protections

Judge Reed O’Connor in the Northern District of Texas vacated an Obama-era regulation that prohibited insurers and providers who receive federal money from denying treatment or coverage to anyone based on sex, gender identity or termination of pregnancy. It also required doctors and hospitals to provide “medically necessary” services to transgender individuals as long as those services were the same ones provided to other patients. O’Connor, the same judge who last year ruled that the entire Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, said the rule violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Zuckerberg defends allowing misinformation in campaign ads

Zuckerberg and Facebook have received backlash over their policy, which came under scrutiny this month after President Trump’s reelection campaign released an advertisement accusing former Vice President Joe Biden — without evidence — of using his office to pressure Ukrainian officials to drop an investigation into a company where his son, Hunter Biden, sat on the board. The Democratic National Committee called on Facebook to remove the "false ad." Cable network CNN has refused to run the ad, but Facebook has declined to remove it.

'Slave Bible' Converted Slaves to Christianity by Omitting Parts That Could Lead to Uprising

The Missionary Society For the Conversion of Negro Slaves was a group of missionaries’ that was formed in 1794. The society’s original intent was to convert Native Americans to Christ but the group began to focus on enslaved Africans after the American Revolution.

Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free

Ventry, who attended the meeting, got a call the next day alerting him that a California public records request had been filed for his emails — they were subject to such a request because he’s an employee of a state university. It came from the Free File Alliance, as The New York Times later reported. The request, Ventry believes, was designed to “freak me out.”

Vatican's wearable rosary gets fix for app flaw allowing easy hacks

On Wednesday, the Vatican announced its $110 wearable rosary, an internet of things device that syncs with an app from the Pope's Worldwide Prayer Network.

Can We Turn Down the Temperature on Urban Heat Islands?

Shandas and Hoffman say their work demonstrates that extreme heat is a social justice issue. In Richmond’s hottest areas, they found a higher concentration of poverty and of 911 calls for heat-related illnesses. Mapping last year in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore found a similar correlation, with higher temperatures in lower-income neighborhoods largely barren of trees and lower temperatures in more affluent, tree-shaded areas. Shandas and Hoffman recently completed a paper, due to be published soon, comparing redlined neighborhoods — those once illegally designated by lenders as too risky to make home loans — with extreme urban temperatures. “The big take-home point for the paper is that 92 percent of the cities that were redlined are now warmer than their A-rated neighbors,” Hoffman says. “This seems like it’s predominantly due to a lack of green and a dominance of gray.”

Gay World of Warcraft guild forced to change name because of user complaints [Updated]

Update, 12:58 p.m. ET: Blizzard still hasn't responded to our questions, but the guild's original "GAY BOYS" name has since been reinstated, according to members of the guild. Jilani forwarded a screencap of Blizzard's latest customer service message to the guild, which begins, "I too would hate to lose my account if the account was caught up in something some [sic] thought was violating the TOS/EULA and got the guild renamed, and I'm bummed yours was." After confirming that the guild name should be back to normal and citing a "careful investigation of your account warning," the unnamed moderator made clear that this kind of automatic takedown may very well happen again: "There isn't a way to stop people from reporting this name, as some find the way the term is used offensive. If you get actioned again, you can appeal like this, and we can look at it once more. For now, though, you have your guild name back!"

Men Explain Things to Me

That was April 2008 and it struck a chord. It still seems to get reposted more than just about anything I’ve written at TomDispatch.com, and prompted some very funny letters to this site. None was more astonishing than the one from the Indianapolis man who wrote in to tell me that he had “never personally or professionally shortchanged a woman” and went on to berate me for not hanging out with “more regular guys or at least do a little homework first,” gave me some advice about how to run my life, and then commented on my “feelings of inferiority.” He thought that being patronized was an experience a woman chooses to, or could choose not to have–and so the fault was all mine. Life is short; I didn’t write back.

'Go back to work': outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor

“How can you not see a 6ft 3in man laying on the ground and not help him within 20 minutes? A couple of days before, he put the wrong product in the wrong bin and within two minutes management saw it on camera and came down to talk to him about it,” Edward Foister said.

This Sure Looks Like Mitt Romney’s Secret Twitter Account

Update, 7:24 p.m.: Shortly after this post went up, Pierre Delecto made the account private, then public for a few minutes, then private once more. We’ve replaced the the embedded tweets with screenshots accordingly.

Google’s attempt to shut down a unionization meeting just riled up its employees

The note went on to explain how employees in Zurich are uniquely vulnerable because the “vast majority” are not Swiss citizens and could get kicked out of the country if they lose their job at Google — and because Switzerland has relatively fewer labor protections than other European countries.

Google Removed Employee Questions About Its Hiring Of A Former DHS Staffer Who Defended The Muslim Travel Ban

Ahead of an all-hands meeting on Thursday at Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters, management twice deleted inquiries about Miles Taylor, the chief of staff of former DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who joined the company last month as a government affairs and public policy manager. In response, some employees have expressed anger in emails and group messages, asking why the company hired and shielded a former Trump administration member who helped implement policies Google and its executives had previously protested.

Disney Is Quietly Placing Classic Fox Movies Into Its Vault, and That’s Worrying

It’s a vestige of the company’s long-standing “Disney Vault” strategy of artificially creating excitement for a repertory title by keeping film prints out of theaters for years or decades, and periodically manufacturing a limited number of physical media copies (on VHS, then DVD, and eventually Blu-ray). The general absence of older Disney films from first-run theaters always made them feel a wee bit denuded of possibility, but over the decades, cinephiles gradually got used to the idea that Pinocchio or Sleeping Beauty would probably never show at such theaters unless they were part of a coordinated, wide-scale Disney rerelease, timed to a film’s appearance on some new variant of home video, often remastered in a new format to spruce it up.

ICE Deleted Surveillance Video Of A Transgender Asylum-Seeker Who Died In Its Custody

An internal ICE report into Hernández’s death reviewed by BuzzFeed News found no indication that she was given antiretrovirals for HIV by Customs and Border Protection or ICE. According to ICE's detention standards, HIV-positive detainees transferred from one detention facility to another must be provided with a 30-day supply of medication. Hernández was taken to two detention facilities before arriving at the facility in Milan, New Mexico.

Impeachment deposition delayed after Republicans storm proceedings

The Republican effort came one day after Democrats secured some of their most explosive findings in the impeachment probe. Yet GOP lawmakers — at least for the first half of the day — successfully changed the conversation; instead of being pressed for reaction to Taylor’s testimony, they were fielding questions from reporters about the drama unfolding inside the secure facility.

‘It’s insanity!’: How the ‘Brooks Brothers Riot’ killed the 2000 recount in Miami

By the time Geller stepped off the elevator and into the elections office to grab a sample ballot, the Brooks Brothers riot was well underway with protesters shouting “voter fraud” and “let us in,” according to the New York Times. “They were banging on windows,” he said. “People [in the office] were scared.” As an elections officer handed him the sample ballot — clearly labeled as such, he said — a GOP organizer with a clipboard started shouting: “He stole a ballot.” Geller quickly got back in the elevator. A group of protesters followed him. “These people who had been kicking me were suddenly very quiet,” he said of the elevator ride. “When we got to the bottom, it started back up again. They were chasing me, and I was just trying to get to the exit.” One man in particular seemed to be “setting a pick” on Geller, he recalled. “He would jump in front of me and stop, so I’d run into him,” he said. At one point, the man threw himself into Geller before delivering a warning. “If you do that again, I’ll be forced to defend myself," Geller recalled the man saying.

Cuomo's New Subway Cops Won't Be Required To Wear Body Cameras

The camera-less cops also come at a time when the MTA is embracing video monitoring as a tool to crackdown on homeless people seeking shelter inside the system. More than 100 live camera feeds are now in place at subway stations, which cops can monitor 24 hours a day.

Keystone Pipeline Leaks 383,000 Gallons of Oil in North Dakota

The leak occurred along a stretch of the existing Keystone pipeline system, not the 1,179-mile-long addition to that system known as the Keystone XL pipeline, he said. Keystone XL has been the subject of environmental protests for years. President Barack Obama denied it a permit in 2015, but just days after taking office President Trump cleared a path for its operator, TC Energy, formerly known as TransCanada, to proceed.

I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb

In 2015, Airbnb spent at least $8 million on lobbying efforts to fight back an ordinance in San Francisco that required all Airbnb hosts to register their units with the city in a lengthy process. The ordinance passed anyway, severely reducing the number of properties available. But not all cities have San Francisco’s budgetary resources. When New Orleans overhauled their short-term rental laws in August, for example, the budget-strapped city mostly left oversight of the new rules in the hands of Airbnb.

Why did Microsoft fund an Israeli firm that surveils West Bank Palestinians?

When NBC News first approached AnyVision for an interview, CEO Eylon Etshtein denied any knowledge of "Google Ayosh," threatened to sue NBC News and said that AnyVision was the “most ethical company known to man.” He disputed that the West Bank was “occupied” and questioned the motivation of the NBC News inquiry, suggesting the reporter must have been funded by a Palestinian activist group.