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takyon writes:

Saudi Arabia will lift its ban on women drivers in June 2018, in a move the interior minister said would "transform traffic safety":

Saudi Arabia's lifting of a much criticized ban on women drivers will reduce the number of car crashes in a country with one of the world's worst traffic-related death rates, its interior minister said on Thursday.

King Salman announced the historic change on Tuesday, ending a conservative tradition which limited women's mobility and was seen by rights activists as an emblem of their suppression in the kingdom where Islam originated.

Saudi Arabia was the only remaining country in the world to bar women from driving, a policy that will officially end in June 2018 after a ministerial committee reports on measures needed for implementation.

Prince Abdulaziz bin Saud bin Nayef, the interior minister who took over from his uncle in June, said security forces were ready to apply traffic laws to men and women, though he did not mention if women would be recruited as traffic police.

"Women driving cars will transform traffic safety into a pedagogical practice which will reduce human and economic losses caused by accidents," he was quoted as saying on the ministry's official Twitter feed. He did not elaborate.

The current King of Saudi Arabia was crowned on January 23, 2015.

Also at the Washington Post. NYT has teaching activities for your students.

Related: Saudi Arabia, UAE to Donate to Women Entrepreneurs Fund
Saudi Arabia to Lift Ban on Online VoIP and Video Calling Services

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realDonaldTrump writes:

DirecTV is allowing at least some customers to cancel subscriptions to its Sunday Ticket package of NFL games and obtain refunds, if they cite players' national anthem protests as the reason for discontinuing service, customer service representatives said Tuesday.

Under Sunday Ticket's regular policy, refunds are not to be given once the season is underway. But the representatives said they are making exceptions this season -- which began in September -- because of the controversy over the protests, in which players kneel or link arms during the national anthem.

Spokesmen for DirecTV-parent AT&T Inc. (T) and the National Football League declined to comment.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/09/26/directv-allows-some-nfl-refunds-after-anthem-controversy.html

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.pressherald.com/2017/09/24/ohio-bill-would-bar-abortion-when-prenatal-test-is-positive-for-down-syndrome/

an Ohio bill [would] ban abortions in cases where a pregnant woman has had a positive test result or prenatal diagnosis indicating Down syndrome. Physicians convicted of performing an abortion under such circumstances could be charged with a fourth-degree felony, stripped of their medical license and held liable for legal damages. The pregnant woman would face no criminal liability.

Several other states have considered similar measures, triggering emotional debate over women's rights, parental love, and the trust between doctor and patient.

The Ohio bill's chief Senate sponsor, Republican Sen. Frank LaRose, said Republican lawmakers accelerated the measure after hearing a mid-August CBS News report on Iceland's high rate of abortions in cases involving Down syndrome. The report asserted Iceland had come close to "eradicating" such births.

Anonymous Coward submitted:

Commentary from The Guardian

The rationale for this rapid curricular renovation is economic. Teaching kids how to code will help them land good jobs, the argument goes. In an era of flat and falling incomes, programming provides a new path to the middle class – a skill so widely demanded that anyone who acquires it can command a livable, even lucrative, wage.

This narrative pervades policymaking at every level, from school boards to the government. Yet it rests on a fundamentally flawed premise. Contrary to public perception, the economy doesn't actually need that many more programmers. As a result, teaching millions of kids to code won't make them all middle-class. Rather, it will proletarianize the profession by flooding the market and forcing wages down – and that's precisely the point.

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Common Dreams reports

Thanks to a hiring freeze, budget cuts, and the exorbitant travel needs of Trump's cabinet, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agents are being forced to ditch climate crime investigations in order to serve as personal bodyguards for EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, resulting in what one critic called an "evaporation of criminal enforcement".

"The EPA head has traditionally had one of the smallest security details among cabinet members," the Washington Post reported [September 19]. But Pruitt's expansive security team--which cost taxpayers over $830,000 in his first three months as EPA chief--has shattered all precedent.

"This never happened with prior administrators", Michael Hubbard, former head of the EPA Criminal Investigation Division's Boston office.

Pruitt's 24/7, 18-member security detail "demands triple the manpower of his predecessors" and is forcing "officials to rotate in special agents from around the country who otherwise would be investigating environmental crimes", the Post's Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis noted.

These officials "signed on to work on complex environmental cases, not to be an executive protection detail", Hubbard observed. "It's not only not what they want to do, it's not what they were trained and paid to do."

The impact of this transfer of resources can already be seen in the rapidly falling number of new cases opened by the EPA's Criminal Investigation Division. Eilperin and Dennis note that the "current fiscal year is on pace to open just 120 new cases...down sharply from the 170 initiated last year".

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1937

Net neutrality advocates are planning two days of protest in Washington DC this month as they fight off plans to defang regulations meant to protect an open internet.

A coalition of activists, consumer groups and writers are calling on supporters to attend the next meeting of the Federal Communications Commission on 26 September in DC. The next day, the protest will move to Capitol Hill, where people will meet legislators to express their concerns about an FCC proposal to rewrite the rules governing the internet.

The FCC has received 22 million comments on "Restoring Internet Freedom", the regulator's proposal to dismantle net neutrality rules put in place in 2015. Opponents argue the rule changes, proposed by the FCC's Republican chairman Ajit Pai, will pave the way for a tiered internet where internet service providers (ISPs) will be free to pick and choose winners online by giving higher speeds to those they favor, or those willing or able to pay more.

The regulator has yet to process the comments, and is reviewing its proposals before a vote expected later this year.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/15/washington-dc-net-neutrality-protests-restoring-internet-freedom

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Harvard Dean Rescinds Chelsea Manning's Visiting Fellow Invitation, Calling It a 'Mistake'

Phoenix666 writes:

Harvard's Kennedy School of Government rescinded a visiting fellowship offered to Chelsea Manning, the former military intelligence analyst who spent seven years in prison for leaking classified government secrets, after the university faced forceful backlash from CIA Director Mike Pompeo among others.

"I now think that designating Chelsea Manning as a Visiting Fellow was a mistake, for which I accept responsibility," Douglas W. Elmendorf, the school's dean, wrote in a 700-word statement released shortly after midnight Friday.

Manning was one of four visiting fellows announced two days earlier by the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics. As part of the program, visiting fellows appear on Harvard's campus for speaking engagements and events, interacting with undergraduate students on "topical issues of today," the school's initial announcement explained.

Elmendorf decided to withdraw the invitation after realizing that "many people view a Visiting Fellow title as an honorific," though the school had not intended to "honor [Manning] in any way or to endorse any of her words or deeds."

The Establishment called.

Harvard withdraws Chelsea Manning fellowship after CIA response

Leave Blank writes:

Harvard University invited Chelsea Manning to be a visiting fellow, but withdrew the invitation after CIA Director Mike Pompeo wrote:

The students there are now owed an institution that acts responsibility; an institution that does not sanction or legitimize the criminal path Ms. Manning took to undermine our national security.

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n1 writes:

A controversial motion that will grant the government the power to force through Brexit legislation has been passed.

[...] It means the Conservatives, despite not winning a majority at the general election, will take control of a powerful Commons committee, and grant themselves the power to force through legislation without it being voted on or debated in parliament.

With parliament needing to change, amend or import wholesale thousands of laws and regulation to prepare the UK for its exit from the European Union, the EU Withdrawal Bill has been designed to allow for new laws and regulations to be passed via controversial legislative device called a statutory instrument, which are debated in tiny standing committees.

But the government has now voted to give itself a majority on the little known Committee of Selection, which decides the make up of those committees, and in so doing has seized control of the whole process.

[...] Liberal Democrat Chief Whip Alistair Carmichael commented: "This is a sinister power grab by an increasingly authoritarian Prime Minister.

"The Tories didn't win a majority at the election, but are now hijacking Parliament to try and impose their extreme Brexit on the country.

"It is a bitter irony that Brexiteers who spent their careers championing parliamentary sovereignty have now chosen to sell it down the river.

Source: The Independent

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jman writes:

Anu Garg at A Word A Day posted this story of an upcoming mayoral election in the small town of Völklingen, Germany (near the French border, south of Belgium), wherein one of the candidates gave a spectacularly bad answer to a question in a recent debate.

Representative Uwe Faust of the political party Die Partei jokingly asked, “According to the building code, paragraph 126, each owner is obliged to label his property with the number given by the municipality. I find it alarming that in Völklingen many house numbers are displayed in Arabic numerals. How would you like to take action against this creeping foreigner infiltration?”

To which Otfried Best, running with the far-right NPD party, fell for the joke, replying, "You just wait until I am mayor. I will change that. Then there will be normal numbers."

Mr. Best apparently does not know what Arabic numerals are.

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canopic jug writes:

[IANAL]

In the US, courts assess guilt or innocence before a conviction, then after that the appellate courts focus solely on fairness. The Atlantic has an exposé on some people who are wrongly convicted are pressured to accept Alford Plea Deals in lieu of exonerations — that more or less means to plead guilty for a verbal guarantee from the courts to both speed things up and give a much lighter or minimal sentence. But how many do this is not known: this situation is not tracked there are no formal statistics. However, in Baltimore City and County alone, there were at least 10 cases in the last 19 years in which defendants with viable innocence claims ended up signing Alford pleas. These can translate to the occasional innocent person being stigmatized, unable to sue the state, and that no one re-investigates the crime meaning that the real perpetrator is never brought to justice.

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