"Davos in the Desert" is Saudi Arabia's charm offensive aimed at global financial elites, but its launch last year was marred by its close proximity to the gruesome murder and dismemberment of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, carried out at the personal behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who styles himself a progressive reformer. Read the rest
Last week, free software developer Seth Vargo pulled the plug on tools he made to work with software developed by his former employer Chef, in protest of Chef's ongoing contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency that has been implicated in crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing, family separation, and the deaths of children in its custody. Read the rest
Purdue Pharma (and its richer-than-the-Rockefellers owners, the Sackler family are increasingly being dragged into state courts to account for their role in the opioid epidemic, which has claimed more American lives than the Vietnam War. Read the rest
Yesterday, I wrote about science publishing profiteer Elsevier's legal threats against Citationsy, in which the company claimed that the mere act of linking to Sci-Hub (an illegal open-access portal) was itself illegal. Read the rest
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is not the first state to sue Purdue Pharma, members of the Sackler family (who own the company), and other board members for their role in deliberately seeking to addict people to their powerful opioid Oxycontin, but unlike other states, Massachusetts is conducting the suit in the public eye, targeting a court judgment rather than a quiet settlement with an accompanying gag-order. Read the rest
Transdigm is a notorious military supplier/hedge fund that used acquisitions to attain a monopoly over many spare parts so they could charge exorbitant markups -- as high as 4,451%! -- on materials procured with tax dollars. Read the rest
Economist international editor Edward Lucas devotes 4,000+ words in the new issue of Foreign Policy to the changing landscape of state espionage in the 21st century; it's not particularly well-organized (if there's a reason for the order in which his thoughts are laid out, I couldn't find it), but despite that, it's well worth a read, even if there's lots I don't agree with here. Read the rest
Genie Ogden writes, "Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince (previously) was invited to speak at Beloit College last night, by the right wing group Young Americans for Freedom. A couple of weeks ago, a Beloit student who is Muslim posted on the internet that he was angry - about the shootings of fellow Muslims in New Zealand, and then about the YAF bringing Erik Prince to speak. He was suspended. Fellow students were upset about his suspension, and protested in the hall where Prince was scheduled to speak last night. They banged on drums, and some of them piled their chairs on the stage. Erik Prince cancelled his speech and has threatened to sue." (Image: Tess Lydon/The Round Table) Read the rest
Last August, Florida's prison system announced that it was switching digital music providers and would be wiping out the $11.2 million worth of music that it had sold inmates -- music they'd paid for at $1.70/track, nearly double the going rate for music when not purchased from prison-system profiteers. Read the rest
The state of Tennessee pays doctor-contractors by the case to review Medicare disability claims, leading to a situation in which doctors review four or more cases per hour -- and kick profoundly disabled and terminally ill people out of the program. Tennessee leads the nation in denied disability claims. Read the rest
America has a gun problem: the proliferation of guns in American homes has led to a largely silent epidemic of accidental shootings, intimate partner murders, and suicides. Read the rest
When Josh Black quit his job as Obama's director for U.N. and Multilateral Affairs after the 2016 election (citing "growing disillusionment"), he found a sweet job as Associate Vice President for International Advocacy at Phrma, the global lobbying group for the pharmaceutical industry, which meant that he still got to work at the UN, but now he'd be advocating for giant, rapacious corporations that hold peoples' lives hostage to their profits! (speaking as a former NGO observer at the World Intellectual Property Organization from the era of the Access to Medicines treaty, Phrma are effectively public health war criminals). Read the rest
Defense Secretary James Mattis has announced a criminal investigation into the misuse of $458,000,000 that the US government gave to Iraq and Afghanistan to build out mass-scale domestic surveillance apparatus and other "anti-terrorism" capabilities. Read the rest
Wells Fargo, America's dirtiest bank, has proudly announced that it will continue to lend money to gun manufacturers, unlike its competitors at Citi and Bank of America. Read the rest
The Management & Training Corporation operates two federal prisons and 20 more state/local prisons around America; previously, it has been censured by Arizona for its role in deadly prison riots; now, the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center are suing the state of Mississippi over the violence, neglect, and rampant human rights abuses at Management & Training's East Mississippi Correctional Facility, near Meridian in Lauderdale County.
Paul Ryan ally Rep. Mike Conaway [R-TX, @ConawayTX11, +1 (202) 225-3605] is the proud owner of $30,000 worth of stock in UnitedHealth, who stand to benefit enormously from Rep Conaway's efforts to destroy Obamacare and replace it with a system that allows insurers to charge more and kick more than 22,000,000 Americans off their insurance. Read the rest
The US lost -- as in, can't account for -- $6 trillion fighting disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a fact that Trump was quick to point out during his speech to both houses of Congress, just before announcing that he planned on giving the same government department that literally claims not to know what happened to that money billions more. Read the rest
