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Huawei Matebook 2017 Launch Live Blog: Starts 2pm CEST (8am ET)

Huawei Launching Two New Clamshell Laptops: The MateBook X and the MateBook D

Huawei Launches the MateBook E 2-in-1: The Next Generation (compare to Surface Pro 5)

Or at the extreme end, would you only buy Purism? Or this thing?

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-39993739

The Church of England's investment success has pushed it into the top ranks of the world's best performing funds of its type last year.

The fund made a 17.1% on its 2016 investments, more than double the 8.2% it made in 2016, according to the Church Commissioners annual report.

[...] "While this is only around 15% of the Church's overall income - most funding comes from the extraordinary generosity of parishioners - we are delighted to be able to play our part."

The Church's ethical investment policy dictates that all investments should be compatible with Christian values and "recommends against investment" in companies which make more than 3% of their income from pornography, 10% from military products and services, or 25% from other industries such as gambling, alcohol and high interest rate lenders.

However, in 2013 it emerged that the Church had invested indirectly in payday loan firm Wonga. It was a particular embarrassment for the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Justin Welby, who had pledged to try to put Wonga out of business by helping credit unions compete with it.

Thousands of 'Second Life' Bunnies Are Going to Starve to Death This Saturday

Any bunny who is Everlasting will continue to function, as he or she does now: without cost.
Any bunny who is not Everlasting will be unable to eat and will hibernate within 72 hours.

"Hibernate" is a very kind word for it, considering that these bunnies are unlikely to ever be revived. In essence, every mortal rabbit in Second Life is going to starve to death on Saturday morning.

Cloud Computing wins Preakness Stakes, dashing Always Dreaming's chances for Triple Crown

I deleted these Seth Rich submissions and threw them here with some updates.

takyon writes:

The Washington Post reports:

The family of slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich refuted Fox News reports that he had leaked work e-mails to WikiLeaks before he was fatally shot last year in the District.

The reports, which gained traction on social media, said an FBI forensics examination showed Rich transferred 44,053 DNC e-mails and 17,761 attachments to a now-deceased WikiLeaks director.

[...] Several federal and local law enforcement authorities also said Tuesday they were not aware that Rich sent any DNC information to WikiLeaks. "There is nothing that we can find that any of this is accurate," said Dustin Sternbeck, the chief spokesman for D.C police, which is leading the investigation into Rich's death.

[...] The allegations were reported by Fox News, including WTTG-TV, the District's Fox News affiliate. The reports cited a private investigator, Rod Wheeler, who Fox said was hired by the family and had previously worked for D.C. police. He also has been an on-air contributor to the Fox-5 news station. Fox also cited an unnamed federal official who said Rich had transferred thousands of emails to a WikiLeaks director. Fox's source asserts those emails were transferred between January 2015 and May 2016.

Also at MarketWatch, Fox News, and Washingtonian. Original Fox 5 DC story which now includes details of Wheeler backtracking on his claims multiple times during the week:

On Wednesday, just before our newscast, Wheeler responded to our requests via a telephone conversation, where he now backtracks his position and Wheeler characterizes his on-the-record and on-camera statements as "miscommunication."

And here is a reddit thread about some new "evidence".

-----

butthurt writes:

—Fox News (archive link)

—BuzzFeed News

—CNN Money

—Haaretz

additional coverage:

• Media Matters for America
• Infowars
• Heavy
• Washington Times (earlier story from 1 May)
• Breitbart News
• Breitbart News
• Breitbart News
• Washington Times
• The Guardian
• Mic
• Newsweek
• The Independent
• Right Wing Watch
• 1011 News
• The Week

• previous story:
  WikiLeaks Announces $20k Bounty For Murderer(s) of DNC Staffer

-----

Original Submission #1   Original Submission #2

Sanctuary Bills in Maryland Faced a Surprise Foe: Legal Immigrants

ELLICOTT CITY, Md. — When lawmakers in Howard County, Md., a stretch of suburbia between Washington and Baltimore, declared their intention to make the county a sanctuary for people living in the country illegally, J. D. Ma thought back to how hard he had worked studying English as a boy in Shanghai.

Stanley Salazar, a native of El Salvador, worried that the violent crime already plaguing Maryland’s suburbs attributed to immigrant gangs would eventually touch his own daughters.

Hongling Zhou, who had been a student in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square uprising, feared an influx of undocumented immigrants, and their children, would cripple the public schools.

At first blush, making Howard County a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants had seemed a natural move: The county has twice as many Democrats as Republicans and a highly educated population, full of scientists and engineers. One in five residents was born abroad.

But the bill met stout opposition from an unlikely source: some of those very same foreign-born residents.

In passionate testimony before county legislators, and in tense debates with liberal neighbors born in the United States, legal immigrants argued that offering sanctuary to people who came to the country illegally devalued their own past struggles to gain citizenship.

Some even felt it threatened their hard-won hold on the American dream.

Their objections stunned Democratic supporters of sanctuary here and helped bring about the bill’s demise in March. A similar proposal for the state collapsed this month in the Maryland Senate, where Democrats also hold a two-to-one advantage. Some of the same immigrants spoke out against it.

The failure of the sanctuary bills in Maryland reveals a potentially troublesome fissure for Democrats as they rush to defy Mr. Trump. Their party has staked out an activist position built around protecting undocumented immigrants. But it is one that has alienated many who might have been expected to support it.

What follows are the stories of four immigrants in Maryland who oppose sanctuary status — people whose voices have rarely been heard in the long debate over how to fix the nation’s immigration system.

Some supporters of sanctuary had dismissed them as white-collar professionals whose personal struggles could not compare with those of undocumented people now facing possible deportation.

But anyone who thought their journeys were easy, these immigrants said, has never walked in their shoes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/us/legal-immigrants-who-oppose-illegal-immigration.html?_r=2

Please, click the link, and read their stories.

Men-only island set for UNESCO World Heritage status

A Japanese island where women are not allowed to set foot has been recommended for listing as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Okinoshima in south-western Japan is deemed so sacred that only men are allowed to visit, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper reports. Even then, visitors are not allowed to bring back any souvenirs to the mainland, not even a blade of grass, the paper says. It has been recommended for World Heritage status by an advisory panel, with a final decision to be made at a UNESCO meeting in July.

The home to the Munakata Taisha Okitsumiya shrine, which honours a goddess of the sea, Okinoshima was the site of rituals for the safety of ships, and successful exchanges with the people of the Korean Peninsula and China between the fourth and ninth centuries, the Japan Times says.

wut about the kawaii goddess? Do she count?

New World Order Government cultural organization enforces gender norms on a Japanese island with a for real goddess on it, leading to a disastrous series of events. I'm sure somebody could write a 25 episode anime with that premise.

The FBI translator who went rogue and married an ISIS terrorist

He was Denis Cuspert, a German rapper turned ISIS pitchman, whose growing influence as an online recruiter for violent jihadists had put him on the radar of counter-terrorism authorities on two continents.

In Germany, Cuspert went by the rap name Deso Dogg. In Syria, he was known as Abu Talha al-Almani. He praised Osama bin Laden in a song, threatened former President Barack Obama with a throat-cutting gesture and appeared in propaganda videos, including one in which he was holding a freshly severed human head.

Within weeks of marrying Cuspert, Greene, 38, seemed to realize she had made a terrible mistake. She fled back to the US, where she was immediately arrested and agreed to cooperate with authorities. She pleaded guilty to making false statements involving international terrorism and was sentenced to two years in federal prison. She was released last summer.

FBI employee married ISIS fighter she was asked to investigate

Prosecutors describe her actions as deserving of "severe punishment," but she was sentenced to just two years in prison. According to an analysis by Fordham University, Americans who are prosecuted for ISIS-related cases received on average 13.5 years in prison.

Quick! WRITE THE SCRIPT! Call Lionsgate!

Unblur!

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2017_Phase_I_Phase_II/Fusion_Enabled_Pluto_Orbiter_and_Lander

http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/04/fusion-enabled-pluto-orbiter-and-lander.html

The Direct Fusion Drive (DFD) concept provides game-changing propulsion and power capabilities that would revolutionize interplanetary travel. DFD is based on the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) fusion reactor under development at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The mission context we are proposing is delivery of a Pluto orbiter with a lander. DFD provides high thrust to allow for reasonable transit times to Pluto while delivering substantial mass to orbit: 1000 kg delivered in 4 years. Since DFD provides power as well as propulsion in one integrated device, it will also provide as much as 1 MW of power to the payloads upon arrival. This enables high-bandwidth communication, powering of the lander from orbit, and radically expanded options for instrument design. The data acquired by New Horizons’ recent Pluto flyby is just a tiny fraction of the scientific data that could be generated from an orbiter and lander. Engine modeling accomplished during Phase I has shown that we can expect 2.5 to 5 N of thrust per megawatt of fusion power, with an Isp of about 10,000 seconds and 200 kW available as electrical power. We have evaluated the components of the Pluto trajectory including an Earth departure spiral, constant thrust planar transfer, and Pluto insertion using these thrust and Isp levels, and confirmed the plausibility of the proposed mission. In fact, the mission can depart from LEO with about the mass we originally estimated for an interplanetary insertion, widening the range of available launch vehicles and reducing the cost.

Planet Nine in 10-15 years instead of 100:

John Brophy at NASA Jet propulsion laboratory combines a near term 100 megawatt laser beamed power system to enable an ion drive with 70 megawatts of power and 58000 ISP.

They propose a new power/propulsion architecture to enable missions such as a 12-yr flight time to 500 AU—the distance at which solar gravity lensing can be used to image exoplanets—with a conventional (i.e., New Horizons sized) spacecraft. This architecture would also enable orbiter missions to Pluto with the same sized spacecraft in just 3.6 years. Significantly, this same architecture could deliver an 80-metric-ton payload to Jupiter orbit in one year, opening the possibility of human missions to Jupiter. These are just a few examples of high-impact missions that simply cannot be performed today due to limitations in current technology.

Fictions of fascism: what twentieth century dystopia can (and can't) teach us about Trump by John Gray

Dystopian novels of the 1930s and 1940s feel topical once again – but how much do they tell us about Trump and today’s populist upheavals?

A 20th century novelist pictured a Nazi diplomat ruminating over the grand objectives of the regime he served:
"D“Don’t you realise that what we are doing is a real revolution and more internationalist in its effects than the storming of the Bastille or of the Winter Palace in Petrograd? . . . Wipe out those ridiculous winding boundaries . . . wipe out . . . the influence of the churches, of overseas capital, of any philosophy, religion, ethical or aesthetical system

of the past . . . There are no more impossibilities for man now. For the first time we are attacking the biological structure of the race. We have started to breed a new species of Homo sapiens. We are weeding out its streaks of bad heredity. We have practically finished the task of exterminating or sterilising the gypsies in Europe; the liquidation of the Jews will be completed in a year or two . . . We are the first to make use of the hypodermic syringe, the lancet and the sterilising apparatus in our revolution.”

The writer was Arthur Koestler, and the book Arrival and Departure (Vintage Classics), first published in 1943. We are living in a time when many believe we are seeing a resurgence of fascism, yet so far Koestler’s semi-autobiographical novel has been neglected. This is a pity, as he did not invent the type of Nazi whose terrifying visions he put into the mouth of Bernard, the fictional diplomat. Travelling across Europe as a journalist and undercover communist in the 1930s, Koestler must have encountered many who shared this view of the world – one that departs in a number of ways from the view of fascism that most modern liberals have today.

Under the impact of the rise of Donald Trump and with the growing strength of European anti-immigrant parties, fascism is equated nowadays with extreme versions of nationalism. However, as Koestler shows, many Nazis and fascists regarded nation states as relics that would be subsumed into a new, pan-European order – a project that was revived by Oswald Mosley after the Second World War under the rubric “Europe a Nation”.

Fascism is now being seen as an ideology of irrationalism that was hostile to science and reason. But while some fascists preached “thinking with the blood”, others, like Koestler’s diplomat, gloried in the new powers conferred by modern science. As the historian Lewis Bernstein Namier wrote in 1958: “Hitler and the Third Reich were the gruesome and incongruous consummation of an age which, as none other, believed in progress and felt assured it was being achieved.”

In some ways interwar fascism was a parody of the progressive thinking of the time. In Spain and Portugal, the Balkans and Vichy France, many fascists wanted to roll back the modern world – a project that appealed to figures such as T S Eliot and G K Chesterton, who hankered after the cultural homogeneity of medieval Christendom. Yet many others were at one with Koestler’s diplomat in believing that modern technology opened up the prospect of remaking humankind on a “more advanced” model.

Such views were not confined to the far right. The “evolutionary humanist” Julian Huxley, for many years a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, advocated “preventing the deterioration of quality in racial stock” throughout the 1920s into the early 1930s. “Racial science” was not a Nazi aberration.

Attitudes that many have seen as defining features of fascism can appear at many points on the political spectrum. Anti-Semitism has been a feature of fascist movements everywhere, and hatred of Jews was the core of Nazism. But anti-Semitic attitudes are not the exclusive property of the far right. After its foundation, the state of Israel was attacked by the left under the banner of anti-colonialism. Clearly, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are analytically distinct positions; but when criticism of Israel’s policies occurs in the context of talk about “Zio media conspiracies” – as has been the case recently among certain sections of the left in Britain – the two become functionally equivalent. The emergence of a left-liberal anti-Semitism is a defining fact of our age.

The rest of this "long read":

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/03/fictions-fascism-what-twentieth-century-dystopia-can-and-cant-teach-us-about