The military defeat of Hamas can become liberation for the Palestinian people and security for the people of Israel.

'Public servants should never be targeted for doing their jobs'

Tort law is one of the rare cases in which the United States does worse than other nations.

The second-largest diamond ever unearthed was found in Botswana last week. Lucara Diamond, a Canadian company, found the huge 2,492 carat stone in the Karowe mine where they had deployed X-ray technology in their search. The diamond is the biggest reported in over a century, since the ‘Cullinan Diamond’ was discovered in South Africa in […] The post Second-Largest Diamond Ever Found is Unearthed in Botswana: A ‘Remarkable find’ appeared first on Good News Network.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. More revelations about the previously secret world of “coordination” between the Biden administration and major social media companies have come out with a new set of Twitter Files documents. Released by journalist Paul D. Thacker, they show that what political opponents consider to be collusion rather than coordination did not concern only the US – and that the entire scheme was playing out through what were effectively middlemen. The White House denies these accusations, including before Senate commissions investigating the damning claims, and fights them in courts. However, the Twitter Files paint a different picture, and this time the focus involves Twitter, censorship demands coming from India, the State Department, and a lobbying firm, Albright Stonebridge, that was in charge of “coordination.” It was 2021 when Twitter turned to Albright Stonebridge (a merger of groups founded by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former US National Security Advisor Sandy Berger) for help. The social platform was facing censorship demands, this time concerning criticism around India’s Covid policies. Given its founders, previous funding it received from the Gates Foundation, and a Politico report saying ten of Biden’s top national security and foreign policy officials “had ties” to Albright Stonebridge – the firm seems to be just one degree of separation from the current White House. Twitter wanted the lobbyists to pressure the US government (via the State Department) to help the company out in India, a huge market. According to the new batch of documents, they did, and the State Department started “working closely with Twitter to deal with the company’s problems in India” – while itself indirectly pressuring Twitter to engage in censorship “around the same timeframe,” Thacker writes. Namely, there was another actor: the Atlantic Council, nominally an independent think tank – but a recipient of a State Department grant – and one that, as Thacker says, has a board “littered with former heads of national security agencies, including the CIA.” It once had Albright as a board member. A tangled web, indeed. Previous Twitter Files documents show that the Atlantic Council and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) banded together to compile a censorship list of about 40,000 Twitter files critical of the Indian government (but allegedly “engaging in inauthentic behavior”). “These emails (call) into sharp question claims by Democrats and their allies in the media that Twitter did not collude with federal agencies and was free from Biden administration pressure to make its own censorship decisions,” Thacker concluded. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Behind the Curtain: New Twitter Files Reveal Biden-Harris Team’s Global Censorship Web appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has announced it is helping sue North Carolina’s State Board of Elections over a ban, which the group considers unconstitutional, of what are known as “ballot selfies.” FIRE is supporting a lawsuit filed by Susan Hogarth against members of the North Carolina board. We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here. This US state treats taking photos or videos of a voted ballot as a misdemeanor. Hogarth found herself on the wrong side of this rule when she took a selfie with a ballot paper and then posted it on X, as a form of support for her chosen candidate. This happened in early March during the North Carolina Libertarian Party primary. But Hogarth is also vocal in her opposition to rules banning this sort of behavior, and made sure to express that opinion, too, when she photographed a sign in front of the voting premises that warned against taking photos in the voting booth – and then posted that picture on X as well. “Laws against #ballotselfie are bullshit,” was the caption. FIRE agrees. And, the non-profit noted, not only do several statutes in North Carolina make it a crime to do what Hogarth did in the voting booth: but this is true also of, for example, “posing with absentee ballots in the comfort of your own home.” After the posts on X, the state election board then sent Hogarth a letter, threatening fines or even jail unless she deleted them. She decided not to and instead went for suing the board on First Amendment grounds – namely, that the government can only restrict free speech if there’s a compelling reason. Nothing about North Carolina officials’ actions, or the state rules, indicates that there’s such a reason, FIRE said – hence, the lawsuit. And even though North Carolina is not alone in this – 13 other states have similar rules – citizens fairly routinely ignore them. “More than 20 million Americans nationwide say they’ve taken a ‘ballot selfie’,” FIRE remarks. The group’s attorney Jeff Zeman said that what these people are doing is core political speech, while innocent citizens are criminalized for behavior that is protected by the First Amendment. Hogarth and FIRE want the court to overturn all laws in North Carolina designed to prohibit photos of ballots, and “ballot selfies.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post North Carolina Is Challenged on Its Ballot Box Selfie Ban appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

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