Ron Mugar never committed a crime, never harmed anyone, yet he’s found himself in the middle of a government-sponsored thievery ring designed to separate citizens from their money. Now, Mugar is currently facing an uphill battle against thieving bureaucrats in his city who are attempting to rob him through immoral and unconstitutional legislation.

Among the mega-corporations that surveil you, your cellphone carrier has always been one of the keenest monitors, in constant contact with the one small device you keep on you at almost every moment. A confidential Facebook document reviewed by The Intercept shows that the social network courts carriers, along with phone makers — some 100 different companies in 50 countries — by offering the use of even more surveillance data, pulled straight from your smartphone by Facebook itself.

The Washington Post editorial’s headline (5/14/19)  had the US “drifting” toward war with Iran—another example, as analyst Nima Shirazi quipped, of the “world’s superpower somehow having no agency over its own imperialism.”

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned Iraqi leaders that if they are not going to stand with the US against Iran, then they should stand aside, AP reported. Pompeo’s message came last week as he met with Iraqi leaders to discuss the mounting tension between Washington and Tehran.

An extraordinary scoop from Ars Technica: senior space editor Eric Berger has obtained an internal NASA plan for the next 37 rocket launches to the Moon — and it includes sending human astronauts in 2024 and establishing a permanent lunar base in 2028. In sum, the schedule for Artemis is ambitious, and the program’s goal isn’t just sending Americans back to the Moon, but moving toward a permanent presence there that could signal a new era in the exploration of the solar system.

Imagine calling a friend. Only instead of hearing a ring tone you hear a police siren, and then a voice intoning, “Be careful in your dealings with this person.” Would that put a damper on your relationship? It’s supposed to. Welcome to life in China’s “Social Credit System,” where a low score can ruin your life in more ways than one.

Is a ban on facial recognition and a return to cash showing backlash against Big Tech coming from its home turf? As Facebook plans on rolling out a cashless payment system, San Francisco is banning credit-only stores, requiring businesses to accept cash. District Five Supervisor Vallie Brown, who introduced the legislation, said that not allowing cash was unfair to immigrants and the homeless.

As Trump Administration officials continue to talk up war with Iran, one would expect the reporters assigned to the Pentagon to be working overtime to get the specifics of what is happening. But that’s not happening. The Pentagon has been increasingly opaque about everything ongoing in the military, and is no better when it comes to the potential Iran War, as there just flat out aren’t any official briefings to get information from.

Just last week, we talked about the new Christchurch Call, and how a bunch of governments and social media companies have made some vague agreements to try to limit and take down "extremist" content. As we pointed out last week, however, there appeared to be little to no exploration by those involved in how such a program might backfire and hide content that is otherwise important.

Technology has increasingly come to occupy a central role in our lives. Growing numbers of people, however, have expressed concerns over how much of our privacy we’ve sacrificed for the sake of convenience. Networks are under assault from cyber attacks like never before, resulting in frequent, massive data breaches. Perhaps even more significantly, companies seem to be gathering data on customers, often without their knowledge, in an effort to more precisely target their advertising.

Yesterday, hundreds of undocumented migrants took control of Terminal 2 of the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris France. Approximately 500 migrants seized the terminal.

Here we go again — just as tensions seemed to be calming going into the weekend, with Trump distancing himself from some of the more out-front escalatory rhetoric from hawks like Bolton within his own administration last Friday, leave it to who else but Senator Lindsey Graham to ramp things up again. "We must deliver an overwhelming military response," he tweeted in reference to Iran.

Italian unions have refused to load cargo onto a Saudi ship carrying weapons, in protest against Riyadh’s war on Yemen. The dock workers have gone on strike, refusing to work until the ship leaves port in Genoa.

The Ile de la Cité real estate renovation operation and its transformation into a tourist promenade began with the awarding of part of the Hôtel-Dieu to Novaxia, “philanthropist” Joachim Azan’s "transitory urbanism" group (photo). This mega-operation was imagined in 2016, at the request of President François Hollande and the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, by the director of historical monuments Philippe Bélaval and architect Dominique Perrault.

The EU Commission is taking some heat on Twitter after its account tweeted a message that some blasted for perhaps unwittingly echoing "Orwellian" themes from George Orwell's seminal novel 1984.

When antibiotics prove ineffective against an E. coli infection, as many as half the patients with it die within two weeks. And because of the overuse of antibiotics by Western medicine, many infectious bacteria have evolved to survive the medications we use.  This the official “death of antibiotics.”

President Trump, speaking about hostile foreign powers, Iran especially, told Fox News that if he can solve tensions economically, he prefers that to a military solution.

At the heart of patents lies a quid pro quo. In return for a time-limited, government-backed intellectual monopoly, companies place their inventions in the public domain after the patent has expired. The theory is that granting patents encourages innovation, although there is plenty of evidence that it doesn't. In the world of drugs, this approach is supposed to allow other pharmaceutical companies to produce generics -- low-cost versions of drugs -- once they are off patent. People benefit because they can buy drugs at much cheaper prices than when they were still under patent.

Qatari state-funded broadcaster Al Jazeera suspended two journalists on Sunday over a video they produced claiming the extent of the Holocaust was being misrepresented by Jews.

The Times of Israel ran a column on Thursday calling for the US to pass new laws to stop Mel Gibson's new comedy movie "Rothchild" staring Shia LaBeouf from being released.