In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, London Business School organizational behavior scholars Niro Sivanathan and Hemant Kakkar used empirical methods to find the socioeconomic circumstances that predict when voters will elect "dominance-style" strongman leaders like "Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Rodrigo Duterte, Nicolás Maduro and Recep Erdogan." Read the rest

David Lesperance is a Canadian-born lawyer who specializes in helping the super-rich secretly buy foreign citizenship so they can escape taxation at home. Read the rest

As the UK government passes increasingly far-reaching surveillance laws that bind companies to capture, store and share data on their customers' activities, US tech giants like Facebook and Google are caught in a dilemma: much of what the UK government demands of them, the US government prohibits. Read the rest

Richard O'Dwyer, the young British man who ran the TVShack linksite (which allowed users to post links to legal and illegal places to watch TV online) will not be extradited to the USA after all. He's settled with the US government, and will pay a small fine, as well as travelling voluntarily to the USA to paper over the proceedings. TorrentFreak paints this as a victory for the activists who fought for O'Dwyer, including the 250,000+ Britons who signed Jimmy Wales's petition to keep O'Dwyer out of the US justice system.

The MPAA, who are believed to be the prime instigators of the case, were not happy with these campaigns and will probably be disappointed by the deal. A few months ago leaked documents revealed that the movie industry group saw Richard O’Dwyer as a purposeful copyright infringer.

“O’Dwyer was not a mere ‘middleman.’ He profited heavily from this activity. To call him a ‘middleman’ suggests a lack of involvement in the illegal activity, which is simply not the case,” MPAA wrote.

“Being 24, posing for newspaper photo shoots in a cartoon sweatshirt, and having your mother and Jimmy Wales speak for you, does not mean you are incapable for breaking the law,” the added.

TV Shack Admin Richard O’Dwyer Will NOT Be Extradited To U.S. Read the rest

Update: Jimmy Wales sez, "They have NOT said no yet. It sounds like the chap from V3 got someone on the phone to read the standard statement."

Hundreds of thousands of Britons have signed a petition asking the Home Secretary to abandon plans to extradite Richard O'Dwyer to America. O'Dwyer, a student, has a website called TVShack that contains user-submitted links to TV show streams and downloads -- some legal, some infringing. This is almost certainly legal under US law, and is absolutely legal in UK law. Nevertheless, O'Dwyer faces being rendered for a round of punitively expensive dirty litigation by US entertainment giants.

Despite all this, the Home Secretary has declined to reconsider O'Dwyer's case, and is set to send him off to America. As Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales wrote in the petition, "No US citizen has ever been brought to the UK for alleged criminal activity that took place on US soil."

More on this from V3's Alastair Stevenson:

"Richard O'Dwyer is wanted in the US for offences related to copyright infringement," a Home Office spokesman told V3.

"The UK courts found there were no statutory bars to his surrender under the Extradition Act 2003 and on 9 March the Home Secretary, having carefully considered all relevant matters, signed an order for his extradition to the US."

Home Office to ignore Wikipedia founder's petition against O'Dwyer extradition Read the rest

Glenn Greenwald rounds up a number of reports related to the killing of al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son by an unmanned aerial drone from the US:

Two weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki with a drone strike in Yemen — far from any battlefield and with no due process — it did the same to his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, ending the teenager’s life on Friday along with his 17-year-old cousin and seven other people.

Initial US reports stated he was 21, but a birth certificate obtained by The Washington Post shows that he was born 16 years ago in Denver. According to the boy's grandfather, he and his cousin were at a barbecue and preparing to eat when they were killed.

(thanks, @ioerror) Read the rest