An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Jane was working in Amazon's Seattle headquarters when she was asked to a meeting with her manager and a human resources representative. They gave her a document outlining concerns about her work performance and spelled out three choices. She could quit and receive severance pay, spend the next several weeks trying to keep her job by meeting certain performance goals, or square off with her manager in a videoconference version of the Thunderdome, pleading her case with a panel of co-workers while her boss argued against her. Jane, who asked that her real name not be used to discuss a personal matter, chose the last one. Amazon is borrowing a page from union grievance processes that don't apply to most corporate employees. But only about 30 percent of those who appeal their manager's criticisms prevail, meaning they can keep their jobs or seek new ones within the company with different bosses, according to people familiar with the matter. Eighteen months after its debut, the hearing process has created resentment and raised questions about fairness, according to current and former workers as well as attorneys familiar with their situations. "It's a kangaroo court," says George Tamblyn, a Seattle employment lawyer who helped one former Amazon worker plan her appeal earlier this year. "My impression of the process is it's totally unfair." According to a person familiar with the process, the workers who fail to make their case and get their job back can still choose between severance pay or a performance-improvement plan. The program, called "Pivot," was started last year. Here's what Amazon has to say on the matter: "Pivot is a uniquely Amazonian program that was thoughtfully designed to provide a fair and transparent process for employees who need support. When employees are placed in Pivot, they have the option of working with their manager and HR to improve with a clear plan forward, of leaving Amazon with severance, or of appealing if they feel they shouldn't be in the program. Just over a year into program, we're pleased with the support it offers our employees and we're continuing to iterate based on employee feedback and their needs."

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News agency AFP reports: After mocking censors working overtime to delete comparisons of Chinese President Xi Jinping with the cartoon bear, comedian John Oliver and now the website of TV giant HBO have fallen victim to Beijing's censorship machine. Chinese authorities blocked HBO's site in China, just days after Oliver took Xi to task, anti-censorship and monitoring group GreatFire.org said on Saturday. The website was still not accessible on Monday. HBO joins a long list of Western media outlets that have had their websites blocked in China including The New York Times, Facebook and Twitter.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved the first prescription drug derived from the marijuana plant, as a treatment for rare forms of epilepsy that primarily afflict children. From a report: The FDA said Monday that it cleared GW Pharmaceuticals's Epidiolex, also known as cannabidiol, to reduce seizures associated with forms of epilepsy known as Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome, in patients 2 years of age and older. Cannabidiol is derived from the cannabis plant, also known as marijuana. U.K.-based GW Pharmaceuticals says the solution, taken by mouth, is made from a proprietary strain of cannabis designed to maximize a therapeutic component while minimizing components that produce euphoria. GW Pharmaceuticals grows the plants in the U.K. The FDA said Monday that the drug doesn't cause the high that comes from the chemical tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which is the main psychoactive component of marijuana. FDA officials also said the drug doesn't appear to have abuse potential, citing minimal reports of euphoria in patients who took the drug in clinical studies. Further reading: StatNews, The Guardian, and FDA.

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This should be aTV show. Believe it or not it would do a lot of good. Not by shaming people, but by showing them in real terms why the ideas they're hearing are wrong.

I now have Happy Friends running with the new Twitter callback constraints. You may have to log off and log back on to get it to save your changes.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan wins re-election with greater powers under the new constitution.

Over 230 people stranded on Maltese waters after neither Italy nor Malta give permission to disembark passengers.

Mark Wilson writes: When it comes to messaging tools, people have started to show greater interest in whether encryption is used for security, and the same for websites -- but not so much with email. Thanks to the work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, email security is being placed at the top of the agenda. The privacy group today announces STARTTLS Everywhere, its new initiative to improve the security of the email ecosystem. STARTTLS is an addition to SMTP, and while it does not add end-to-end encryption, it does provide hop-to-hop encryption, which is very much a step in the right direction. In a blog post, EFF elaborates SMARTTLS for the uninitiated, and outlines how it worked around some of the tech's underlying challenges: There are two primary security models for email transmission: end-to-end, and hop-to-hop. Solutions like PGP and S/MIME were developed as end-to-end solutions for encrypted email, which ensure that only the intended recipient can decrypt and read a particular message. Unlike PGP and S/MIME, STARTTLS provides hop-to-hop encryption (TLS for email), not end-to-end. Without requiring configuration on the end-user's part, a mailserver with STARTTLS support can protect email from passive network eavesdroppers. For instance, network observers gobbling up worldwide information from Internet backbone access points (like the NSA or other governments) won't be able to see the contents of messages, and will need more targeted, low-volume methods. In addition, if you are using PGP or S/MIME to encrypt your emails, STARTTLS prevents metadata leakage (like the "Subject" line, which is often not encrypted by either standard) and can negotiate forward secrecy for your emails.

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Thousands of traders in the Grand Bazaar of Tehran protest against the collapse of the local currency.

Everyone is focused on the optics of what's happening in the immigration system, but underneath the awful images there's a real problem with no easy answers. The problem he's dealing with is far from new, and is horrible, and has been mishandled by every president since Clinton, leading to an escalating problem, and because he is so inept at communicating, Trump has turned into a huge crisis.

Looked at another way, remember how everyone has been positing what would happen when Trump had to deal with a crisis not of his own making? This is it. But he can't seem to get our sympathy and support, when any other president would have been able to do so easily.

Just listen to today's Daily podcast, and find out how when we had to deal with the El Salvadoran gangs in LA in the 90s, we exported them back to El Salvador where they grew, and now the next generation is coming of age, and the country is unlivable so they're coming north, and in fact Trump has a good point (if he could only communicate it) that we're going to deal with an even bigger problem next time around, as it echoes in a decades-long feedback loop.

Part of what we're seeing here is not only Adolf Hitler 2.0, but also a man who is in totally over his head, unable to understand how the US government functions. He's panicking. And folks, this is only one of a dozen major ongoing crises a president has to deal with.

It's a real problem. If only our president had the means to communicate it in a rational, non-hysterical way. This one only knows one way of communicating -- he attacks. And that puts him at odds with how our form of government works.

A state-of-the-art telescope is named after Annie Maunder, a Victorian pioneer of space photography.

More than 50,000 forced from homes in rebel-held province since government push began on June 19, local sources say.

Sunday's vote ushers in a powerful new executive presidency long sought by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who insists there will be plenty of checks and balances.

Workers' unions protest against government's $50bn deal with International Monetary Fund and demand salary hikes.

OpenAI said on Monday that its newest AI bots can hold their own as a team of five against human gamers at Dota 2, a multiplayer game popular in e-sports for its complexity and necessity for teamwork. The AI research lab is looking to take the bots to Dota 2 championship matches in August to compete against the pros. From a report: Dota 2 is a challenging game for AI to master simply because of the amount of decisions that the players have to juggle. While chess can end in fewer than 40 moves, and Go fewer than 150, OpenAI's Dota 2 bots make 20,000 moves over the course of a 45 minute game. While OpenAI showed last year that the bots could go one on one against a human professional in a curated snippet of the game, the company wasn't entirely sure that they could scale up to five against five. But the research team doesn't credit this breakthrough to a new technique or a lightbulb moment, rather a simple idea. "As long as the AI can explore, it will learn, given enough time," Greg Brockman, OpenAI's chief technology officer, told Quartz. The bots learn from self-play, meaning two bots playing each other and learning from each side's successes and failures. By using a huge stack of 256 graphics processing units (GPUs) with 128,000 processing cores, the researchers were able to speed up the AI's gameplay so that they learned from the equivalent of 180 years of gameplay for every day it trained.

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