An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: President Trump's former national security adviser and other White House officials pushed a venture to bring nuclear power plants to Saudi Arabia over repeated legal and ethical warnings that potential conflicts of interest around the plan could put American security at risk, concluded a new report from House Democrats released on Tuesday. The 24-page report from the House Oversight and Reform Committee outlined actions taken in the early weeks of the Trump administration to secure government backing to have American companies build dozens of nuclear power plants across Saudi Arabia, potentially at the risk of spreading nuclear weapons technology. But House Democrats said there was evidence that as recently as last week, the White House was still considering the proposal. Claims presented by whistle-blowers and White House documents obtained by the committee show that the company backing the nuclear plan, IP3 International, and its allies in the White House were working so closely that the company sent a draft memo to the former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, to circulate just days after the inauguration. Mr. Flynn had worked on the plan for IP3 during the Trump campaign and transition, the Democrats said, and continued to advocate for it in the White House. Even after Mr. Flynn left the White House in February 2017, officials on the National Security Council pushed ahead, the Democrats said, ignoring advice from the N.S.C.'s ethics counsel and other lawyers to cease all work on the plan because of potentially illegal conflicts. At a March 2017 meeting, a National Security Council aide tried to revive the IP3 plan "so that Jared Kushner can present it to the President for approval," the Democratic report said, a reference to Mr. Trump's son-in-law and top adviser. The draft memo also referenced another close Trump associate, Thomas J. Barrack, who served as chairman of the president's inaugural committee. It said that Mr. Trump had appointed Mr. Barrack as a special representative to implement the plan, which it called "the Middle East Marshall Plan." The memo also directed agencies to support Mr. Barrack's efforts.

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One of Windows Subsystem for Linux's more annoying tricks is it's hard to get at your Linux files from Windows. From a report: Oh, you can do it, but you take a real chance of ruining the files. To quote Microsoft, "DO NOT, under ANY circumstances, access, create, and/or modify files in your distro's filesystem using Windows apps, tools, scripts, consoles, etc." In the forthcoming Windows 10 April 2019 Update, aka Windows 10 19H1, this Linux file problem will finally be fixed. According to Craig Loewen, a Microsoft programming manger working on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), "The next Windows update is coming soon and we're bringing exciting new updates to WSL with it! These include accessing the Linux file system from Windows, and improvements to how you manage and configure your distros in the command line."

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There are three big things that remain before the first feature-complete build (which will be 5.0a1): searching, the app icon, and syncing with FeedBin.

Brad Ellis is working on the app icon, so that leaves searching and syncing (and a few miscellaneous bugs) for me.

I’ve been working on searching — I want to get that done next, and then do syncing as the last thing before hitting alpha 1.

How search is implemented

The UI for searching is pretty straightforward: you type into the search field, and then the timeline shows your search results. Click on an article to show it in the detail web view. Exactly as expected.

But there are two ways I can think of to implement this UI.

1. When a search starts, do the search and show the results in the timeline. When the user ends searching, restore the previous timeline and detail view states.
2. When a search starts, swap in a separate timeline and detail view, do the search, and then show the results in these swapped-in views. When the user ends searching, swap those views out, and swap back in the regular timeline and detail views.

Ideally the user can’t tell the difference between the two methods. But if you go with solution #1 — use the existing timeline and detail views — then you have the challenge of restoring state, including selection and scroll positions, when searching ends.

If you use solution #2 — swapping views in and out — then you don’t have that challenge. State is restored exactly as it was, because you saved the non-search views and swapped them back in.

(If you look at other apps — Mail, for example — it appears they use solution #1, and state restoration is not always instant. I want it to be instant.)

So, for the past week, I’ve been re-jiggering so that I can have multiple timeline and detail views and swap them in and out.

(This is not that different from how searching in iOS apps is supposed to work.)

And then, last night, as I finished the re-jiggering, I did the actual search-in-the-database implementation, which took about an hour.

This still leaves me to handle changes to the search field, so that the search is actually run at the right time, and so that searching ends properly. I expect that to take a few hours to get all right. (I’ve done this before, and it’s always slightly more complex than it seems.)

Why do I make this point?

If you’re not a programmer — or you’re new to programming, or haven’t written apps with a user interface — it’s easy to think that the actual under-the-hood implementation of a feature is what takes the most time.

It’s not. In the case of the search feature, I spent more time just thinking about how I want to do the UI than on the actual search-in-the-database implementation. And then there’s the UI work itself, which absolutely dwarfs the database work.

Another case: you might imagine that the bulk of the work in NetNewsWire was writing an RSS parser, for instance. But no. While that code is critical, obviously, it’s very, very small compared to the user interface.

And, similarly, the part of syncing that’s just making API calls and updating the database will be the easy part. The part that takes longest will be user interface. A factor of ten would not be surprising.

US reporter David Kirkpatrick held for seven hours without food or water before being sent back on a flight to London.

Family of the 19-year-old runaway 'considering all legal avenues' following a Home Office notice, lawyer says.

A new study finds that active middle aged men who can do more than 40 push-ups at a time have a significantly lower risk of heart disease. From a report: Researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health followed more than 1,100 middle-aged male firefighters over a decade. They looked at two specific measures: how many push-ups they could do and their exercise tolerance on a treadmill. They found that men who could do more than 40 push-ups had a 96-percent lower risk of heart disease than those who could do no more than 10 and their ability to do push-ups was a better predictor of cardiovascular disease than their stamina on a treadmill test.

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I was recently asked what I would do if I were in charge of a major news org like the NY Times. This is a game I love to play. (I've done it before, in 1996, with Apple.)

Here's what I would do.

• I would start a blog hosting service, with NYT branding, it would be carefully designed so that people knew this was blog space and not editorial space. The Times editorial people do not control what's said here. These are our sources. Maybe the site would be called sources.nytimes.com.
• I would offer a blog to every person who was quoted in a NYT story. So ths would give people an extra reason to work with our reporters. It would also serve as vetting. If their ideas or experiences are valuable enough to be quoted in our news flow, we want to stay in touch, and this is a great way to do that.
• There would be a central place where the posts of all the sources are aggregated. Until it became overwhelming, then you could opt out of the full flow, and subscribe to individual blogs. All this would be under reader control.
• Of course all the NYT reporters, editors, managers, board members, everyone who gets a paycheck from the NYT, would have a blog here too. However they would not have any special access. It's a level playing field.
• It's not a silo. Every blog has an RSS feed so it can be subscribed to independently of the others.
• It's the place of record on the web. We'd partner with several long-lived institutions as backups. archive.org, obviously. Several universities, other news orgs, spread around the world, a hedge against a failure of the American government.
• The user interface would be simple and clean. Fast. You should feel as if you already know how to use it.
• Behind the scenes we would encourage our editorial people to quote sources directly from the NYT-hosted blogs. Other news orgs of course would also be welcome to quote from them.

Khashoggi's murder dominates human rights committee's conference at the European Parliament as GCC victims testify.

Experts worry tech transfer will allow Saudi Arabia to produce nuclear weapons, contributing to Middle East arms race.

AFC is the latest organisation to highlight 'Intellectual Property theft' by Saudi-based pirate channel beoutQ.

Millions of people are punished for alleged bad behaviour under a government monitoring scheme in China.

Security forces find dozens of bodies following gunmen's attack in Kaduna state, doubling the initial death toll.

AmiMoJo shares a report: The founder of one of the first big companies to switch to a four-day working week has called on others to follow, claiming it has resulted in a 20% increase in productivity, appeared to have helped increase profits and boosted staff wellbeing. Analysis of one of the biggest trials yet of the four-day working week has revealed no fall in output, reduced stress and increased staff engagement, fuelling hopes that a better work-life-balance for millions could be in sight. Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay. Productivity increased in the four days they worked so there was no drop in the total amount of work done, a study of the trial released on Tuesday has revealed. The trial was monitored by academics at the University of Auckland and Auckland University of Technology. Among the Perpetual Guardian staff they found scores given by workers about leadership, stimulation, empowerment and commitment all increased compared with a 2017 survey. Details of an earlier trial showed the biggest increases were in commitment and empowerment. Staff stress levels were down from 45% to 38%. Work-life balance scores increased from 54% to 78%. "This is an idea whose time has come," said Andrew Barnes, Perpetual Guardian's founder and chief executive. "We need to get more companies to give it a go. They will be surprised at the improvement in their company, their staff and in their wider community."

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President Donald Trump signed a directive on Tuesday that ordered the Department of Defense to create a Space Force as a sixth military branch. From a report: With a directive signed Tuesday, Mr. Trump was positioning the Space Force much as the Marine Corps fits into the Navy, officials said, with the result being lower costs and less bureaucracy. The plan would require congressional approval. Mr. Trump is to propose funding in his proposed 2020 budget, and spell out a goal of eventually establishing the Space Force as a separate military department, a senior administration official said. "Space, that's the next step and we have to be prepared," said Mr. Trump, who added that adversaries were training forces and developing technology. "I think we'll have great support from Congress." The order Mr. Trump signed, Space Policy Directive 4, calls for a legislative proposal by the secretary of defense to establish a chief of staff of the Space Force within the Air Force. That officer would be a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to an outline. There also be a new under secretary of defense for space to be appointed by the president. The proposal calls for the Space Force to organize, train and equip personnel to defend the U.S. in space, to provide independent military options for "joint and national leadership" and "enable the lethality and effectiveness of the joint force," according to the administration's outline.

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Controversial interior minister won't face trial after support from Five Star Movement, raising credibility questions.