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Florida Prosecutors Drop Charges Against PINAC Reporter Jeff Gray – Again

For the fifth time since 2010, Florida prosecutors were forced to dismiss criminal charges against PINAC reporter Jeff Gray before even going to trial, proving once again what we have known all along.

That his arrests are always unlawful and unconstitutional; nothing but an attempt to keep him from doing his job.

The latest case was dismissed Monday; the trespassing charge from last month where he was standing on the sidewalk in front of St. Augustine High School holding up a sign that read “The First Amendment is Not a Crime” on one side and “Public Records Access is Not a Crime” on the other side.

St. Johns County Schools Superintendent Joseph Joyner had barred Gray from stepping within 500 feet of any school to keep him from investigating safety oversights regarding school buses.

The trespass order stated he was only allowed to drop off or pick up his children, attend public meetings or submit public records requests to the district’s main office. Other than that, he needed to stay outside the “School Safety Zones,” which is defined as 500 feet within any school. Even if his three children attend the school as they do.

However, Joyner and his lawyers failed to do their research because Florida law does not bar citizens from peacefully assembling and protesting within these so-called school safety zones, which is exactly what he had been doing on March 14 when he was arrested.

[...] But Joyner has been desperate to jail Gray, even trying to convince a local state attorney to file felony wiretapping charges against him last year as we discovered by making a public records request for his emails. Joyner has also filed a lawsuit against Gray, which is still pending.

Previous entry: Florida Deputy Illegally Arrests Protesting PINAC Reporter.

Chinese Cartoon Warns Against 'Dangerous Love' With Foreigners Who May Be Spies

In a colorful, 16-panel cartoon called "Dangerous Love," China is warning female government workers that romancing handsome foreigner strangers can lead to heartbreak — and espionage.

Posters seen around Beijing show a cartoon government worker named Xiao Li striking up a relationship with a bespectacled, red-haired "visiting scholar." They share a romantic dinner and stroll through a leafy park. "Having a handsome, romantic, talented foreign boyfriend is pretty nice!" Li says to herself, according to The New York Times' translation.

But "pretty nice" turns to nightmarish after Li's new paramour persuades her to lend him internal government documents. Suddenly, the foreign boyfriend is nowhere to be found. Li weeps in front of two gruff police officers, who tell her she has a "shallow understanding of secrecy for a state employee," according to The Guardian.

"Dangerous Love" was posted in Beijing's subway and streets to mark National Security Education Day, which was "established after China passed a National Security Law in July outlining greater security efforts in 11 areas, including political, territorial, military, cultural and technological," the Times reports.

Image.

The BBC has an update on France's new bootlicking trend.

A bunch of links that will not make the cut in today's article. I will tidy up and add some more later. While Vice certainly covers drugs more than other news outlets, most of these just didn't fit with the hard facts focus of this year's article, and I didn't want to overuse any particular news source. There will be plenty more to find on aggregators like Google News today.

http://www.vice.com/read/how-decriminalizing-drugs-could-reduce-islamic-terrorism-in-france-and-belgium
http://www.vice.com/read/war-on-drugs-tool-of-minority-oppression
http://www.vice.com/read/luxury-weed-uk
http://www.vice.com/read/veterans-affairs-hospitals-still-wont-give-veterans-weed-medical-marijuana
http://www.vice.com/read/a-prosecutors-regret-how-i-got-someone-life-in-prison-for-drugs
http://www.vice.com/read/why-do-the-irish-take-more-drugs-than-any-other-country-in-eu
http://www.vice.com/read/how-parents-talk-to-their-kids-about-drugs-in-2016
http://www.vice.com/read/this-drug-smuggler-and-hippie-mafia-leader-was-an-og-in-the-weed-legalization-movement
http://www.vice.com/read/the-worst-time-i-ever-did-drugs
http://www.vice.com/read/a-professional-stoner-explains-how-to-smoke-pot-properly-in-2016
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-36055297
http://www.vice.com/read/what-the-un-still-gets-wrong-about-drugs
http://www.vice.com/read/yes-you-can-be-allergic-to-pot
http://www.vice.com/read/drugs-have-been-used-in-pretty-much-every-war-ever-shooting-up
http://www.vice.com/read/the-war-on-drugs-isnt-even-working-in-prison
http://www.vice.com/read/a-cannabis-cook-explains-how-youre-making-edibles-wrong

I glanced at yet another smartphone article. The specs table lists support for up to 200 GB of expandable storage for the Samsung Galaxy S7, and 2 TB for the HTC 10 and LG G5. 2 TB SD cards don't exist yet.

2 TB (actually 2 TiB) has been the theoretical maximum capacity for the SD standard for some years now. Although there was an update to the standard recently, it only specified larger block sizes and faster speeds, not capacities greater than 2 TiB. Newer SD cards could hit the limit soon... think 3D QLC (4 bits per cell) NAND, or just the 3D TLC which will become ubiquitous in SSDs soon. Currently, the largest SD card is 512 GB, and the largest MicroSD card is 200 GB. A Falcon 9 Heavy full of 512 GB SD cards would make for some fast data transmission.

All three of the smartphones I mentioned come with a 2560x1440 screen and 4 GB of RAM. Samsung could be the first manufacturer to bump that to 6 GB as soon as next year. With unnecessary specs like these, it's inevitable that they will market smartphones as VR inserts or desktop replacements.

There’s a loud corner of Reddit where millennials look to get rich or die tryin’

“Y-O-F**KING-LO,” the teen wrote, flashing his trading statement. “900 to 55K in 12 days!”

On Reddit, he’s known as “World Chaos,” a Florida high schooler who earlier this year multiplied his money by betting against the S&P 500. His real name is Jeffrey Rozanski, and the 18-year-old’s appetite for risk would make many seasoned market players facepalm.

In one corner of the Internet, though, praise rained down. “You magnificent bastard,” read one reply. “Sailing away on your yacht while the rest of us f**kers who went long are looking for the nearest window.”

That was peak “WallStreetBets,” the Reddit forum where “YOLO” is the war cry, Martin Shkreli is a role model, and irreverent traders trawl for tickets to quick wealth. It has become what one member calls “the beating heart of millennial day traders.”

“It’s tasteless, hilarious and subversive,” said Erik Johnson, a 28-year-old manufacturing worker and forum regular from Boston. “And you definitely need to have a thick skin to partake.”

France prostitution: MPs outlaw paying for sex

French MPs have passed a law that makes it illegal to pay for sex and imposes fines of up to €3,750 (£3,027, $4,274) for those buying sexual acts. Those convicted would also have to attend classes to learn about the conditions faced by prostitutes.

It has taken more than two years to pass the controversial legislation because of differences between the two houses of parliament over the issue.

Some sex workers protested against the law during the final debate. The demonstrators outside parliament in Paris, numbering about 60, carried banners and placards one of which read: "Don't liberate me, I'll take care of myself", the AFP news agency reports.

The Culture That Created Donald Trump Was Liberal, Not Conservative

EgyptAir hijack: Man surrenders at Larnaca airport

Falkland Islands fears new ruling expanding Argentina's sea control

Can Micro Bit replicate BBC Micro success?

Pet insurance claims hit record number

US pulls Tanzanian aid worth $470m over Zanzibar vote

White House to commit $116m to heroin and opioid abuse epidemic

Iraq dossier looms over lone MI6 Eurosceptic

Debate-Ducking Hillary Clinton in '08: Candidates Should Be Tough Enough to Debate "Anytime, Anywhere"

A Former Nixon Aide Admitted the 'War on Drugs' Was Designed to Screw Over Blacks and Hippies

According to Watergate mastermind and former Richard Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, the then-president launched the notorious (and ongoing) war on drugs in 1971 to disrupt that administration's two greatest perceived threats: black people and antiwar leftists.

The brazen quote surfaced in the April cover story of Harper's magazine that was written by Dan Baum and went online Tuesday. The reporter recalls an interview back in 1994 in which Ehrlichman bluntly explained the whole thing.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying?" Ehrlichman told Baum. "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Obvious? Sure. But it's important to get this kind of history explicitly out in the open so that mistakes can be corrected.

Here's the article at Harper's Magazine.

Too spicy for SoylentNews... not spicy enough for your job:

'Hot Tech Talent' IT job board ads caught up in sexism allegations

Dice, formerly the IT Job Boards, said it intended the images, which feature both men and women, to be light-hearted. Part of the drive behind the campaign was to counter the notion that people working in technology were "nerds".

Democracy is a joke, says China – just look at Donald Trump

“The rise of a racist in the US political area worries the whole world,” the party-controlled Global Times crowed this week ahead of of Trump’s victory in the latest round of primaries. “He has even been called another Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler by some western media.” It added, darkly: “Mussolini and Hitler came to power through elections, a heavy lesson for western democracy.”

Trump, or “Chuanpu” as they call him in China, has been a gift to Communist party spin doctors paid to convince the country’s 1.4 billion citizens that rule of the people is a sure path to chaos and destruction.

“They are relishing this moment,” says Zhou Fengsuo, a US-based democracy activist who fled his native China following the deadly 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. “They are very happy. They are laughing over this. To them [Trump] is a good character to show the deficiencies of the democratic system, that such a person could become president. It is just unbelievable. Beijing is definitely gloating over this.”

[...] Chinese newspapers, which have previously pounced on the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Maidan revolution as evidence of the dangers of democracy, have wasted no time in hyping the potential turmoil that Trump’s rise could bring.

An editorial in the Chinese-language edition of the Global Times noted with glee that fighting had broken out at Trump rallies in what was supposedly one of the world’s “most developed and mature democratic election systems”.

[...] An editorial on another government-run website claimed Trump had “humiliated” the US political system. “He has turned the election into a prank,” it said.