Android users who thought their private tweets were, well, private have been proved sorely mistaken thanks to the latest privacy breach admission by the social networking site. Twitter copped to the blunder on Thursday, saying they had “become aware of and fixed an issue where the ‘Protect your Tweets’ setting was disabled on Twitter for Android.” Desktop and iOS users were not affected by the bug. However, unless curious users clicked the link to read the company’s full statement, they wouldn’t know one small added detail – that this particular feature has been switched off since November 3, 2014.

On Friday the US Defense Department identified three out of the four Americans that were killed this week as a result of an ISIS suicide bombing in the northern Syrian city of Manbij. According to an official DoD press release, the three US. military personnel were identified as Army Chief Warrant Officer Jonathan R. Farmer, 37, Navy Chief Cryptologic Technician Shannon M. Kent, 35 and Scott A. Wirtz. The fourth American that was killed, whose name has yet to be released, is believed to be a military contractor that was working inside Syria.

Welcome to US direct investment in the military-industrial complex. President Donald Trump has approved direct federal investment in suppliers of American bomb parts and chemicals, part of as much as $250 million in direct investments by the Pentagon, reports The Military Times. The government funding for those suppliers, under the Defense Production Act, is meant to lift a subsector of the defense-industrial base that the Pentagon deems weak...

Crowdfund to ‘show public agencies they can’t make requesters go away’... Under scrutiny from lawmakers of both parties and academic groups, universities have been closing their Chinese government-run centers at a brisk pace.The University of Kansas has not publicly moved to shutter its Confucius Institute, however, and a KU student wanted to know if administrators had discussed the possibility. He filed a public records request a month ago. The taxpayer-funded university gave him an answer Thursday: $506.50.

Kenya has announced that it will arm private security officers guarding public places in the aftermath of Tuesday's attack on a luxury hotel and office complex. The siege, which lasted 18 hours and left 21 people dead, was claimed by the al-Qaeda-linked Somalia-based armed group, al-Shabab. Armed contractors will "guard key installations" where there is "a lot of human traffic", Fazul Mahamed, director general of the Private Security Regulatory Authority, said in a media briefing late on Friday.

A gas pipeline in the Mexican state of Hidalgo exploded on Friday night, killing at least 21 people in a blast the authorities said was caused by an illegal tap used to steal fuel. Omar Fayad, the governor of Hidalgo, said on Twitter that more than 70 others were injured in the explosion in Tlahuelilpan, a town about 80 miles north of Mexico City.

Every single day, the benefits of our labor are going to enrich somebody else.  A portion of the taxes that are deducted from your paycheck is used to pay interest on government debt.  A portion of the profits that your company makes probably goes to servicing some form of business debt.  And most Americans are continuously making payments on their mortgages, their auto loans, their credit card balances and their student loan debts.  But most people never stop to think about who is becoming exceedingly wealthy on the other end of these transactions.  Needless to say, it isn’t the 46 percent of the global population that is living on less than $5.50 a day.

A slow-motion coup by right-wing opposition forces is underway in Venezuela. It has the support of President Donald Trump’s administration, and if successful, President Nicolas Maduro will be undemocratically removed from power though he was re-elected last May.

The world of drag queens – male performers taking on exaggeratedly female personas and taking to the stage – may seem like an inappropriate place for minors. After all, sexuality plays a major part in a drag performance, and the common wisdom is that sexualizing young children for entertainment is a taboo.

The U.S. has both the highest number of prisoners and the highest per capita incarceration rate in the modern world at 655 adults per 100,000. (It’s worth noting that China’s incarceration statistics are dubious, and they execute far more people than the United States. Indeed, the so-called People’s Republic executes more people annually than the rest of the world combined.)  Still, that’s more than 2.2 million Americans in state and federal prisons as well as county jails.

In the 1960s, the sugar industry funded research that downplayed the risks of sugar and highlighted the hazards of fat, according to a newly published article in JAMA Internal Medicine.

“That buzzing noise over a construction site could be an OSHA drone searching for safety violations,” notes Littler Mendelson lawyer Tammy McCutchen in a piece for the Federalist Society. Quoting a U.S. Department of Labor memorandum from May of last year obtained by Bloomberg Law, McCutchen writes that “your friendly neighborhood OSHA inspector is now authorized by the Labor Department ‘to use camera-carrying drones as part of their inspections of outdoor workplaces.’”

On Wednesday, Yahoo News revealed new documents from late 2017 that show, contrary to the Defense Department’s insistence that it is neutral in the bloody conflict in Yemen perpetrated by a coalition of Saudi Arabia and its allies, the U.S. appears to have provided training to forces from the United Arab Emirates, which is part of the coalition...

In what looks to be a highly ambitious and even more highly cost-prohibitive scheme, President Trump has announced his intention to greatly expand US missile defense systems, with a major focus on putting them in space. During his announcement Thursday at the Pentagon, Trump set out his goals, saying that he wants “to ensure that we can detect and destroy any missile launched against the United States – anywhere, anytime, anyplace.”

It's not just social media users that are being censored, now its social media employees. According to a new report by Business Insider, citing an internal company memo, Facebook is now telling its employees what they can, and can't, talk about at work. Business Insider reviewed an internal company memo where Facebook's CTO claims to have put together "a set of ground rules for open and respectful communication at work, and a central moderation model."

The U.S. Justice Department and FBI continue to refuse to comment on the jailing of Marzieh Hashemi, a documentarian and news anchor on Iran’s English language station, Press TV. The 59-year-old Hashemi, born Melanie Franklin in New Orleans, is an American citizen. She was in the U.S. filming a documentary on Black Lives Matter and visiting family when the FBI suddenly arrested her.

The new US missile defense strategy is a boondoggle for the military-industrial complex, which will drive the US into more debt and can bring misery upon multiple nations by fueling an arms race, ex-US Congressman Ron Paul said. Plans to weaponize space with a new layer of sensors unveiled by Trump as part of his administration's Missile Defense Review is an unnecessary and hard-to-implement project that is sure to enrich the military-industrial lobby, Paul told RT.

Zimbabwe has shut down the internet indefinitely amid an intensifying crackdown on protests against a hike in fuel prices. The country's largest mobile operator - Econet - says it has been ordered to cut services until further notice. Access to Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter has been intermittently blocked since protests broke out on Monday. At least three people have been killed and 600 people have been arrested.

On Monday, we reported that for the first time, a plant seed had germinated on the moon, an early experiment to test whether food could someday be grown on the moon to feed residents of a lunar base. The cotton sprout was inside a canister on China's Chang’e 4 lander that touched down on the far side of the moon earlier this month. Now, word that the first lunar plant has died. The little seedling froze to death during the lunar night.

The EU Copyright Directive continues to be a total and complete disaster. It's so bad that neither of the two main groups lobbying around it -- the legacy entertainment industry and the big tech companies (with the vast majority of the lobbying coming from the copyright sector) are both unhappy with the bill (though for opposite reasons). And yet, despite all of this, the EU continues to soldier forward with a new proposal and a new draft that still requires that internet companies do the impossible.