A renowned music professor has been sensationally cleared of raping a former pupil after a three-year legal battle that has cost him £35,000, destroyed his career and almost saw his children taken from him.
Violinist Wen Zhou Li, 61, was due to stand trial later this year accused of raping and indecently assaulting a teenage girl he taught at Chetham's School of Music in the 1990s.
The Chinese-born musician was the last teacher facing charges after a four-year... (more)
A video going viral on YouTube allegedly shows a black female student at San Francisco State University assaulting a young white man for "appropriating her culture" by having dreadlocks.
The video was shared on YouTube Monday by Nicholas Silvera, the description says the incident occurred the same day.
... (more)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI said Monday it successfully used a mysterious technique without Apple Inc.'s help to hack into the iPhone used by a gunman in a mass shooting in California, effectively ending a pitched court battle between the Obama administration and one of the world's leading technology companies.
Scripps College's student president says she alerted campus police after "#trump2016" was found scrawled on a dorm room door, calling it "racist … violence," according to an email she sent to the campus community, a copy of which was circulated Saturday on social media.
"This morning, a Mexican-American Scripps student woke up to find her whiteboard vandalized with the phrase '#Trump 2016,'" Minjoo Kim, student body president, said in her March 26 email.
The US government filed a motion on Monday to vacate Tuesday's hearing against Apple. According to the memorandum, "an outside party demonstrated to the FBI a possible method for unlocking Farook's iPhone." The third party and what the possible methods could be involved are both mysteries.
"On Sunday, March 20, 2016, an outside party demonstrated to the FBI a possible method for unlocking Farook’s iPhone," the filing read. "Testing is required to determine whether it... (more)
A new poll finds that 58% of Brits who consider themselves “liberals” would support prosecuting people for saying negative things about religion, a shocking insight into how leftists have abandoned support for free speech in favor of political correctness.
The poll, conducted by Populus, found that almost half of respondents (46%) think that there are “some things” you should “not be able to say about religion”. This is an increase of 6 per cent... (more)
A new FBI initiative based on Britain's "anti-terror" mass surveillance program instructs high schools across America to inform on students who express "anti-government" and "anarchist" political beliefs.
"High school students are ideal targets for recruitment by violent extremists seeking support for their radical ideologies, foreign fighter networks, or conducting acts of targeted violence within our borders. High schools must remain vigilant in educating their students about ca... (more)
Smartphone users in California take notice: a new CA State Assembly bill would ban default encryption features on all smartphones. Assembly Bill 1681, introduced in January by Assemblymember Jim Cooper, would require any smartphone sold in California "to be capable of being decrypted and unlocked by its manufacturer or its operating system provider." This is perhaps even more drastic than ... (more)
Judicial Watch announced today that it obtained documents from the United States Department of the Army revealing that in April 2015, 400 soldiers in the 67th Signal Battalion at Fort Gordon, Georgia, were subjected to a "white privilege" briefing, including a PowerPoint presentation instructing the attendees: "Our society attaches privilege to being white and male and heterosexual ..."
Safe space students at Western Washington University have issued an extensive list of demands which includes the construction of an entirely new college dedicated to "social justice" as well as the ability to fire police officers who commit microaggressions against them.
The Student Assembly for Power and Liberation (SAPL) has published a petition which calls for "the creation and full implementation of the College of Power and Liberation," an institution that will be devoted ... (more)
Montreal comedian Mike Ward was hauled before Canada's Human Rights Commission for making a joke.
(This isn't the first time this has happened, either; a few years ago, Vancouver comedian Guy Earle was also fined over ten thousand dollars for heckling back at some hecklers in a comedy club.)
Everybody has obviously been focused on the DOJ's All Writs Act request on Apple in the case involving the San Bernardino attacker's work iPhone, but as we've been covering there are a other cases where the feds have made use of the All Writs Act as well, including a key one in NY in the court of Magistrate Judg... (more)
They like automatic cameras that record license plate and location data. They like surveillance cameras aimed at citizens around the clock. They even like dashcams and body cams, provided the released footage is limited to exonerating officers... (more)
Over and over again as people keep talking about the Apple / FBI encryption stuff, I keep seeing the same line pop up. It's something along the lines of "but the FBI needs to know what's on that phone, so if Apple can help, why shouldn't it." Let's debunk that myth. The FBI absolutely does not need to know what's on that phone. It might not even care very much about what's on that phone. As the Grugq ably explained last week, there's almost certainly nothing of interest ... (more)
In an embarrassing Constitutional setback for the American judicial system, a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled on Friday that citizens do not have the First Amendment right to record police in public.
That is, unless those citizens are telling the cops to go fuck themselves.
Then it's protected speech.
That's the twisted logic coming from Judge Mark A. Kearney, a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Eastern District ... (more)
The image above looks like concept art for a new dystopian sci-fi film. A billionaire superman with a rictus grin, striding straight past human drones, tethered to machines and blinded to reality by blinking plastic masks. Golden light shines down on the man as he strides past his subjects, cast in gloom, toward a stage where he will accept their adulation. Later
I guess this isn't that surprising, but as the big legal fight heated up this week between Apple and the Justice Department over whether or not Apple can be forced to create a backdoor to let the FBI access the contents of Syed Farook's iPhone, all of the major Presidential candidates have weighed in... and they're all wrong. Donald Trump is getting the most attention. Starting earlier this week he kept saying that Apple should just do what the FBI wants, and then he kicked it up a no... (more)
The truth is finally coming out about the highly suspicious case whereby Apple is now refusing to unlock a phone for the Feds in the San Bernardino mass shooting case.
A 2015 court case shows that the tech giant has been willing to play ball with the government before--and is only stopping now because it might "tarnish t
Following the December 2 horrific mass shooting in San Benardino, Judge Sheri Pym of U.S. District Court in Los Angeles said on Tuesday that Apple must provide "reasonable technical assistance" to investigators seeking to unlock data on - in other words hack - an iPhone 5C that had been owned by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters.
Tim Cook has refused to comply.
The Apple CEO said his company opposed the demand from the judge to help the FBI ... (more)
WASHINGTON (CN) - Rhetoric heated up Friday in the courtroom of the judge who blocked the government's bulk collection of cellphone metadata, as the government and a conservative activist argued over what to do with three cases against the National Security Agency while awaiting an appeals court ruling.
The D.C. Circuit is currently considering whether the passage of the USA Freedom Act in June renders moot the injunction Judge Richard Leon issued against the National Se... (more)
Last December a Virginia federal jury ruled that Internet provider Cox Communications was responsible for the copyright infringements of its subscribers.
The ISP was found guilty of willful contributory copyright infringement and must pay music publisher BMG Rights Management $25 million in damages.
The verdict was a massive victory for the music company a... (more)
Washington DC – The federal government spent $1 million to create an online database that will collect "suspicious" memes and track "misinformation." The project, which is known as the "Truthy Database" is being funded by The National Science Foundation, but it seems as if the operation has some powerful political motivations.
Ironically enough, the project takes its name from a term that was popularized by television personality, Stephen Colbert.
In January, state legislators from both California and New York introduced bills that would ban the retail sale of smartphones with full-disk encryption -- a technology designed to guarantee customers' digital data stored within a phone is only accessible to the devices owner.
After Edward Snowden's public disclosures of mass domestic surveillance in the U.S. and abroad, companies such as Google and Apple began to respond to a massive consumer demand for greater digital security.<... (more)
The federal government is seeking to create a new bureaucracy that would intervene in family life and could even see state-appointed monitors conduct routine home visits to assess a child’s well-being.
The U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has published a draft document which outlines a plan that will treat families as “equal partners” in the raising of children, opening the door for government intrusion a... (more)
