This week, people took to the streets in nations around the world to celebrate gay pride, and to protest threats to LGBT rights.
…
Day: June 25, 2017
A SpaceX rocket carried 10 communications satellites into orbit from California on Sunday, two days after the company successfully launched a satellite from Florida.
The Falcon 9 rocket blasted off through low-lying fog at 1:25 p.m. PDT from Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles. It carried a second batch of new satellites for Iridium Communications, which is replacing its orbiting fleet with a next-generation constellation of satellites.
About 7 minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s first-stage booster returned to earth and landed on a floating platform on a ship in the Pacific Ocean, while the rocket’s second stage continued to carry the satellites toward orbit.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 on Friday launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida and boosted a communications satellite for Bulgaria into orbit. Its first stage was recovered after landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who founded Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX, believes reusing rocket components will bring down the cost of space launches.
Iridium plans to put in place 75 new satellites for its mobile voice and data communications system by mid-2018, requiring six more launches, all by SpaceX.
The $3 billion effort by the McLean, Virginia, company involves complex procedures to replace 66 operational satellites in use for many years. Some of the new satellites will be so-called on-orbit spares, or older satellites that remain in orbit on standby for use if the newer ones malfunction.
Swapping out and deorbiting some old satellites has already begun, Iridium CEO Matt Desch said in a pre-launch call with reporters.
Several old satellites have been moved into lower orbits to use up their remaining fuel and configure the solar panels for maximum drag so they will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up.
The first re-entry was believed to have occurred on June 11, Desch said.
“It’s hard to celebrate something like that, but these satellites have put in almost 20 years of service, and making sure we’ve cleaned up after ourselves as we deploy our new constellation is a priority,” he said.
The new satellites also carry payloads for joint-venture Aerion’s space-based, real-time tracking and surveillance of aircraft around the globe, which has implications for efficiency, economy and safety — especially in remote airspace over the oceans.
“This will truly be a revolutionary aspect of air-traffic control,” said Aireon CEO Don Thomas.
The technology, which requires aircraft to be equipped with certain equipment, is undergoing testing involving eight of the initial batch of Iridium NEXT satellites.
The Iridium NEXT program also will bring an end to so-called “Iridium flares,” which space enthusiasts have observed for years. The new satellites will not create visible flashes of reflected sunlight as they passed overhead.
…
Opera has been popping up recently at the most unlikely New York places: a revamped garage, a dive bar, a basketball court and even an old aircraft carrier.
It’s part of a festival with an in-your-face goal – to bring this once grandiose art form to ordinary places where people hang out.
The New York Opera Fest 2017 that ends in late June has drawn casual, but curious, spectators, some of whom may never have gone to an expensive production in a plush theater.
On Saturday, composer Darius Milhaud’s “The Guilty Mother” got its U.S. premiere in the onetime garage on Manhattan’s West Side – a story rife with adultery and intrigue.
The more than 30 festival spectacles included a Brooklyn basketball court that hosted a hip-hop opera called “Bounce,” with a group of public school kids participating. Children also were invited, free of charge, to Public School 129 in Harlem for a playground performance last week of Donizetti’s “The Elixir of Love.” The kids helped create the production, from designing the costumes to singing in the chorus.
Excerpts from Bizet’s “Carmen” were heard in a bar called Freddy’s in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, under a beer-stained wall.
And Mozart melodies floated through a lush community garden on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for the composer’s “La Finta Giardiniera,” a free performance in which a noblewoman poses as a simple gardener while caught up in her own romantic twists and turns.
In Harlem, the Baylander, a decommissioned aircraft carrier, was the stage for Tom Cipullo’s “Glory Denied,” which dives into the struggles of an American prisoner of war in Vietnam.
The festival serves to counter the shrinking audiences for the formal grand opera tradition. Organizers say that experimenting with new ways of presenting it to spectators of all ages has pumped fresh blood into this still great musical theater.
The festival, starting in May, brought together a group of small, innovative companies experts say are the cutting-edge future of the classical arts.
…
The global economy has picked up and prospects for the next few months are the best in a long time.
But the recovery is maturing and faces risks from populist rejection of free trade and from high debt that could burden consumers and companies as interest rates rise.
Those were key takeaways from a review of the global economy released Sunday by the Bank for International Settlements, an international organization for central banks based in Basel, Switzerland.
The report said that “the global economy’s performance has improved considerably and that its near-term prospects appear the best in a long time.” Global growth should reach 3.5 percent this year, according to a summary of forecasts, not quite what it was before the Great Recession but in line with long-term averages. Meanwhile, financial markets for stocks and bonds have been unusually buoyant and steady.
On top of that, forecasts by governments and international organizations as well as by private analysts point to “further gradual improvement” in coming months.
Key risks include a possible weakening of consumer spending across different economies. So far, the recovery has been largely fueled by people being willing and able to spend more. But that trend could fall victim to higher levels of debt as interest rates rise in some countries and as the amount people need to spend to service their debts takes a bigger chunk of income.
Countries that were slammed by collapsing real estate markets during the Great Recession seem less vulnerable now, such as the United States, the U.K., and Spain. But debt burdens are more worrisome in a range of other countries mentioned in the report, including China, Australia and Norway.
Another risk comes from weak business investment, typically the second stage of recovery after consumers start spending more; yet that kind of spending has lagged its pre-recession levels for reasons that aren’t always clear to economists.
The BIS urged governments around the world to take advantage of the economic recovery as an opportunity to make growth more resistant to trouble by implementing pro-business and pro-growth measures.
In particular, the report warned against a backlash against globalization, saying that trade and interconnected financial markets had led to higher standards of living and lifted large parts of the world’s population out of poverty. It called for domestic policies to address inequality and lost jobs, saying that changing technology was often to blame, not free trade. “Attempts to roll back globalization would be the wrong response to these challenges,” it said.
Governments around the world are using surveillance software that taps into individual smartphones, taking screenshots, reading email and tracking users’ movements, according to security experts and civil liberties groups.
The rise of so-called spyware comes as electronic communications have become more encrypted, frustrating law enforcement and governments’ surveillance efforts.
Over the past several years, private companies have begun selling advanced software that first appears as a text message with a link. When a person clicks on the link, the phone becomes infected. A third party can then read emails, take data and listen to audio, as well as track users’ movements.
The companies that sell this spyware exclusively to government agencies insist that the software must be used only in a legal manner, to fight crime and terrorism. However, security researchers and civil liberties groups contend that some governments use the programs to track human rights activists, journalists and others.
A recent story in The New York Times focused on activists and journalists in Mexico who have received text messages and emails with links that, if clicked on, would infect their devices with spyware. In some cases, the messages appeared to come from legitimate sources, such as the U.S. Embassy.
The Mexican government says it does not target activists, journalists and others with spyware unless it has “prior judicial authorization.”
‘Lawful intercept’
In recent years, there’s been a rise in software sales in what is known as the “lawful intercept” market, said Mike Murray, vice president of security intelligence at Lookout, a mobile security company based in San Francisco, California.
Countries that can’t make their own surveillance software can now buy sophisticated surveillance tools, Murray said.
“What’s new is the enthusiasm [from] nation-states. … It’s a capability they always wished they had. Now they have it,” he added.
Lookout, which makes security software and services, receives monthly information from more than 100 million phones in 150 countries. It has seen spyware “in every kind of contentious place around the world,” Murray said.
Nation-state use
The use of nation-state spyware used to be limited to a handful of governments, said Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group. But now that the price of the spyware has come down, countries can spend a few hundred thousand dollars to get the same capability.
Galperin spent three weeks in Mexico last year training activists. One tip she gives: Users who are not certain that a link in email or a text message is safe should forward it to a separate account, such as Google’s Gmail or Google Docs, to prevent infection.
“We should be very concerned,” Galperin said. “Surveillance malware is incredibly powerful. You have full control of the machine. You can see everything the user can see, and do everything the user can do.”
…
Chief lieutenants in the Koch brothers’ political network lashed out at the Senate Republican health care bill on Saturday, becoming a powerful outside critic as GOP leaders try to rally support for their plan among rank-and-file Republicans.
“This Senate bill needs to get better,” said Tim Phillips, who leads Americans for Prosperity, the Koch network’s political arm. “It has to get better.”
Phillips called the Senate’s plans for Medicaid “a slight nip and tuck” over President Barack Obama’s health care law, a modest change he described as “immoral.”
The comments came on the first day of a three-day private donor retreat at a luxury resort in the Rocky Mountains. Invitations were extended only to donors who promise to give at least $100,000 each year to the various groups backed by the Koch brothers’ Freedom Partners — a network of education, policy and political entities that aim to promote small government.
No outside group has been move aggressive over the yearslong push to repeal Obama’s health care law than that of the Kochs, who vowed on Saturday to spend another 10 years fighting to change the health care system if necessary. The Koch network has often displayed a willingness to take on Republicans — including President Donald Trump — when their policies aren’t deemed conservative enough.
Big-budget push
Network spokesman James Davis said the organization would continue to push for changes to the Senate health care bill over the coming week.
“At the end of the day, this bill is not going to fix health care,” Davis declared.
The network’s wishes are backed by a massive political budget that will be used to take on Republican lawmakers, if necessary, Phillips said.
He described the organization’s budget for policy and politics heading into the 2018 midterm elections as between $300 million and $400 million. “We believe we’re headed to the high end of that range,” he said.
On Friday, Nevada Republican Dean Heller became the fifth GOP senator to declare his opposition to the Senate health care proposal. Echoing the other four, Heller said he opposed the measure “in this form” but did not rule out backing a version that was changed to his liking.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, has said he’s willing to alter the measure to attract support, and promised plenty of backroom bargaining as he tries pushing a final package through his chamber next week.
Republican leaders have scant margin for error. Facing unanimous Democratic opposition, McConnell can afford to lose just two of the 52 GOP senators and still prevail.
At least two of the current opponents, Utah Senator Mike Lee and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, were among 18 elected officials scheduled to attend the Koch donor conference.
The Senate measure resembles legislation the House approved last month that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said would mean 23 million additional uninsured people within a decade and that recent polling shows is viewed favorably by only around 1 in 4 Americans.
Meeting with Pence
Billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and his chief lieutenants met privately with Vice President Mike Pence for nearly an hour Friday. Pence, a longtime Koch ally, was in Colorado Springs to address a gathering of religious conservatives.
Phillips said it was “a cordial discussion” about policy.
Also Saturday, retired football star Deion Sanders announced plans to partner with the Kochs to help fight poverty in Dallas.
The unlikely partnership aims to raise $21 million over the next three years to fund anti-poverty programs in the city where Sanders once played football. The outspoken athlete also defended Koch, who is often demonized by Democrats, as someone simply “trying to make the world a better place.”
“I’m happy where I am and who I’m with because we share a lot of the same values and goals,” Sanders said when asked if he’d be willing to partner with organizations on the left.
…