Nellie Bowles and Zach Wichter, reporting for The New York Times: Joining a long tradition of companies and campaigns that drop bad news on holidays, Facebook on Thanksgiving eve took responsibility for hiring a Washington-based lobbying company, Definers Public Affairs, that pushed negative stories about Facebook's critics, including the philanthropist George Soros. Facebook's communications and policy chief, Elliot Schrage, said in a memo posted Wednesday that he was responsible for hiring the group, and had done so to help protect the company's image and conduct research about high-profile individuals who spoke critically about the social media platform. Mr. Schrage will be leaving the company, a move planned before the memo was released. Facebook fired Definers last week, after a New York Times investigation published on Nov. 14. "Did we ask them to do work on George Soros?" Mr. Schrage wrote in the memo, a draft of which had circulated online earlier in the week. "Yes." He added: "I'm sorry I let you all down. I regret my own failure here." This is a change from just a few days ago, when Facebook wrote on Nov. 15 that the Times report was full of "inaccuracies." The same day, Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer, posted on her Facebook page that she had no idea the company had hired Definers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 30 days, some 40 million people in the DRC are expected to elect a new president after a two-year wait.

The decision follows a report which estimates that some 90 percent of African art is housed outside the continent.

Google and Mozilla are heading a group that is devising a way for users to save changes they make using web apps. From a report: The idea is to allow users to save changes they've made using web apps, without the hassle of having to download new files after each edit, as is necessary today. "Today, if a user wants to edit a local file in a web app, the web app needs to ask the user to open the file," said Google developer advocate Pete LePage. "Then, after editing the file, the only way to save changes is by downloading the file to the Downloads folder, or having to replace the original file by navigating the directory structure to find the original folder and file. This user experience leaves a lot to be desired, and makes it hard to build web apps that access user files." To this end, the W3C Web Incubator Community Group (WICG), which is chaired by representatives from Chrome developer Google and Firefox developer Mozilla, is working on developing the new Writable Files API, which would allow web apps running in the browser to open a file, edit it, and save the changes back to the same file. However, the group says the biggest challenge will be guarding against malicious sites seeking to abuse persistent access to files on a user's system. "By far the hardest part for this API is of course going to be the security model to use," warns the WICG's explainer page for the API. "The API provides a lot of scary power to websites that could be abused in many terrible ways."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I think Amy Klobuchar would be a great candidate for president in 2020. Her competence, coolness and good manners say everything I as an American would like to say to the world. She's young, but not too young. A liberal who presents as a moderate. Thoughtful. Doesn't shoot from the hip. Everything the current president is not.

This is who we really are.

If she wins, my pick for Attorney General would be Stacey Abrams. Like Sessions, from the South, but the South of today, not the south of the 1940s. Let's use the Democratic majorities to pass some strong updates to the Voting Rights Act, as a first priority. No more of the funny bullshit the Repubs have been doing to game the system.

Secretary of Labor -- Sherrod Brown.

Secretary of State -- John Kerry of course.

Secretary of Defense -- Jim Mattis (a Dem tradition started by Obama).

Speaker of the House -- Nancy Pelosi, if she'll have us.

Note to self. Must fix Likes for non-singular items. There are two on this page. I'll do this later today or tomorrow.

Scientists are proposing an ingenious but as-yet-unproven way to tackle climate change: spraying sun-dimming chemicals into the Earth's atmosphere. From a report: A fleet of 100 planes making 4,000 worldwide missions per year could help save the world from climate change. Also, it may be relatively cheap. That's the conclusion of a new peer-reviewed study in Environmental Research Letters. It's the stuff of science fiction. Planes spraying tiny sulphate particulates into the lower stratosphere, around 60,000 feet up. The idea is to help shield the Earth from just enough sunlight to help keep temperatures low. The researchers examined how practical and costly a hypothetical solar geoengineering project would be beginning 15 years from now. The aim would be to half the temperature increase caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases. This method would mimic what large volcanoes do. In 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines. It was the second largest eruption of the 20th century, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). In total, the eruption injected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide aerosols into the stratosphere. USGS said the Earth's lower atmosphere temperature dropped by approximately 1-degree Fahrenheit. The effect only lasted a couple of years because the sulfates eventually fell to Earth.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Khadim Hussain Rizvi, whose TLP party held massive protests against Aasia Bibi's acquittal, has been arrested.

Climate change could cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars and damage health, a major report warns.

A new US government report delivers a dire warning about climate change and its devastating impacts on the health and economy of the country. From a report: The federally mandated study was released by the Trump administration on Friday, at a time when many Americans are on a long holiday weekend, distracted by family and shopping. Coming from the US Global Change Research Program, a team of 13 federal agencies, the Fourth National Climate Assessment was put together with the help of 1,000 people, including 300 leading scientists. It's the second of two volumes. The first, released in November 2017, concluded that there is "no convincing alternative explanation" for the changing climate other than "human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases." The report's findings run counter to President Donald Trump's consistent message that climate change is a hoax. On Wednesday, Trump tweeted, "Whatever happened to Global Warming?" as some Americans faced the coldest Thanksgiving in over a century. But the science explained in these and other federal government reports is clear: Climate change is not disproved by the extreme weather of one day or a week; it's demonstrated by long-term trends. Humans are living with the warmest temperatures in modern history. Even if the best-case scenario were to happen and greenhouse gas emissions were to drop to nothing, the world is on track to warm 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit. As of now, not a single G20 country is meeting climate targets, research shows. The costs of climate change could reach hundreds of billions of dollars annually, according to the report. The Southeast alone will probably lose over a half a billion labor hours by 2100 due to extreme heat. Farmers will face extremely tough times. The quality and quantity of their crops will decline across the country due to higher temperatures, drought and flooding. In parts of the Midwest, farms will be able to produce less than 75% of the corn they produce today, and the southern part of the region could lose more than 25% of its soybean yield. Heat stress could cause average dairy production to fall between 0.60% and 1.35% over the next 12 years -- having already cost the industry $1.2 billion from heat stress in 2010. Further reading: Climate Change Will Cost US Economy Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, Government Says in Sweeping Report (Reuters); Climate Change 'Will Inflict Substantial Damages on US Lives' (The Guardian); Climate Change Is Already Hurting U.S. Communities, Federal Report Says (NPR); Major Trump Administration Climate Report Says Damages Are 'Intensifying Across the Country' (The Washington Post); and Climate Impacts Grow, But U.S. Can Adapt, Says New Report (National Geographic).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The student's conviction for spying highlights the contrast between the UAE's open image and its conservative policies.

Bengaluru-based Zapr Media Labs, which counts Rupert Murdoch-led media group Star and several major local companies including Flipkart (which is now owned by Walmart), music streaming service Saavn, handset maker Micromax as its investors, has developed a tech that listens to ambient sounds around users to build targeted advertising profiles of them, reports news outlet FactorDaily. Zapr does this by using the microphone on the smartphone. Several major services in the country including Chota Bheem games to Dainik Bhaskar (a news outlet) to, likely, even Hotstar (a hugely popular streaming service which launched its service in the US and Canada last year, and which as you may recall, set a global record for most simultaneous views earlier this year) have embedded Zapr's technology into their apps. FactorDaily reports that most of these services are not forthcoming to their customers about what kind of monitoring they are doing. An excerpt from the report: One of the apps that inspired Zapr's founding team was the popular music detection and identification app Shazam. But, its three co-founders saw opportunity in going further. "Instead of detecting music, can we detect all kinds of medium? Can we detect television? Can we detect movies in a theatre? Can we detect video on demand? Can we really build a profile for a user about their media consumption habits... and that really became the idea, the vision we wanted to solve for," Sandipan Mondal, CEO of Zapr Media Labs, said in an interview last week on Thursday. Shorn of jargon, the underlying Zapr tech listens to ambient sounds around you, analyses it, and profiles users based on their media consumption habits. "That data would be very useful in order to recommend the right kind of content and also for brands and advertisers to hopefully reduce the wastage and inefficiencies and make smarter decisions," said Mondal, who co-founded the company in 2012 along with his batchmates from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (batch of 2010) Deepak Baid and Sajo Mathews. Zapr claims to have the largest media consumption analytics database in India and helps television channels and brands to earn a better bang for their advertising buck. To be sure, advertising -- even with the internet's promise of better targeting -- still is an inaccurate business with proxies, at best, helping measure its return on investment. But, Zapr's tech comes with privacy and data concerns -- lots of it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The games publisher Square Enix is pulling three mobile games from Belgium following the introduction of a law in the European nation that bans "loot boxes" as a form of gambling. From a report: The games -- "Mobius Final Fantasy", "Kingdom Hearts Union X" and "Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia" -- are some of largest titles in the publisher's mobile roster, although it is better known for its console games such as "Tomb Raider", "Final Fantasy" and "Hitman." In statements posted in the games, Square Enix confirmed that the new law was to blame for their removal, citing "the present uncertain legal status of 'loot boxes' under Belgian law". Belgium first took action against "loot boxes", digital reward packs which can be bought with real or virtual money and contain a semi-random array of in-game items, back in April. The country's gaming commission ruled that the mechanics, as implemented in three popular games -- "Overwatch", "Fifa 18" and "Counter-Strike: Global Offensive" -- were in violation of gambling legislation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Never forget. Last year one person shot over 600 people in Las Vegas. It shouldn't be that easy for one person to shoot so many people.

Only 92 opposition lawmakers vote, well short of the 101 needed to remove Andrej Babis over a fraud scandal.