"South Korea’s interest is to a) avoid war with the North, and b) restart peace negotiations with Pyongyang and move toward fulfilling the promise of reunification. Both countries have ministries devoted to reunification and there is much political capital to be gained if progress can be made along this path. The fact is that Washington is the third man out on this date."
"86.4 percent of those surveyed feel the American military should be used only as a last resort, while 57 percent feel that US military aid to foreign countries is counterproductive. The latter sentiment 'increases significantly' when involving countries like Saudi Arabia, with 63.9 percent saying military aid—including money and weapons—should not be provided to such countries. The poll shows strong, indeed overwhelming, support, for Congress to reassert itself in the oversight of US military interventions, with 70.8 percent of those polled saying Congress should pass legislation that would restrain military action overseas."
"With legal marijuana enjoying consistent majority support in opinion polls—a Pew poll released Friday at support at 61%--the blowback has been immediate, fierce, and across the board. Feeling particularly vulnerable, legal pot state Republicans howled especially loudly."
"Details from diversity training sessions, accounts of alleged reverse discrimination, and screenshots of internal communications on company forums and message boards in the lawsuit cast the company culture as extremely hostile to employees with unpopular opinions, especially heterosexuals, men, white people, and those who hold conservative views."
"Newly released undercover video footage from Project Veritas shows current and former Twitter employees bragging about their ability to censor people on the platform whose political opinions they don’t like."
"'Outrageous and tone deaf.' 'Madness.' 'Completely counterproductive and wrong-headed.' And that's just within the first few of more than 400 pages of comments submitted by residents of Washington, D.C., a city where child care costs are already some of the highest in the country, in response to an onerous new licensing requirement for daycare workers. The Office of the State Superintendent for Education (OSSE), which regulates daycares and early childhood education programs in the nation's capital, last year passed a rule requiring all daycare workers to have a college degree by 2020."
"California was home to the Haight-Ashbury counterculture movement, the Grateful Dead and Cheech & Chong. It’s also the home state of Richard Nixon, who birthed the modern drug war, and Ronald Reagan, the president who made Nixon’s war metaphor all too literal. Today, we’ll look at cannabis in California up until about the late 1960s."
"Encrypted messaging startup Telegram plans to launch its own blockchain platform and native cryptocurrency, powering payments on its chat app and beyond. With cryptocurrency powered payments inside Telegram, users could bypass remittance fees when sending funds across international borders, move sums of money privately thanks to the app’s encryption, deliver micropayments that would incur too high of credit card fees, and more."
"Tech companies and many cyber security experts have said that any measure ensuring that law enforcement authorities are able to access data from encrypted products would weaken cyber security for everyone. U.S. officials have said that default encryption settings on cellphones and other devices hinder their ability to collect evidence needed to pursue criminals."
"Police officials vow that they will proceed to implement the censorship program even if no new law is enacted. They insist that no new laws are necessary by pointing to a pre-internet censorship law enacted in 1983 — during the time Brazil was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship that severely limited free expression and routinely imprisoned dissidents."