Ecuador handed Julian Assange over to British authorities Thursday, ending a standoff that left the controversial WikiLeaks founder holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London for nearly seven years.
The WikiLeaks Defence Fund promotes media and public activities to defend Julian Assange and other WikiLeaks journalists.
The Fund supports a dedicated campaign team which works across global media to build support for WikiLeaks and the public’s right to know.
The Courage Foundation and the Defence Fund
The Defence Fund is run by the Courage Foundation – a trust audited by accountants Sterling Partners in the UK for the purpose of providing legal defence and campaign aid to whistleblowers and journalistic sources.
The Courage Foundation is an international organisation that supports those who risk life or liberty to make significant contributions to the historical record.
It also campaigns for the protection of truthtellers and the public’s right to know.
Poland Spring accused of defrauding consumers by peddling water from ‘phony’ springs
“Not one drop” of Poland Spring water is spring-fed, claims the 325-page lawsuit on behalf of consumers from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
A federal judge in Connecticut on Thursday gave the green light to a class-action lawsuit claiming the bottled water company’s owner, Nestle SA, defrauded customers by filling their bottles with ordinary groundwater
The Science of Flint’s Water Crisis https://youtu.be/BAIXmt58iBU
In 2015 and 2016, headlines throughout the United States were captured by a human-made water crisis in Flint, Michigan: a chain of events that resulted in the city’s approximately 100,000 residents being exposed to dangerous levels of lead contamination in their tap water due to financial decisions made at the state level.
A DIY Groundwater Model https://www.sciencefriday.com/educational-resources/diy-groundwater-model In many places, water for municipal and household use comes from underground aquifers. If the groundwater in such a place became contaminated, the consequences could easily affect entire cities or more.
National Drinking Water Alliance https://www.drinkingwateralliance.orgReaders interested in learning more about water safety and policy in the United States may want to check out the National Drinking Water Alliance (NDWA). This network of organizations aims to “ensure that all children in the U.S. can drink safe water in the places where they live, learn and play” and describes its website as “the nationwide clearinghouse for essential drinking water research and resources.”
The Center for Great Lakes Literacy https://www.cgll.org
North America’s Great Lakes account for approximately 20 percent of the world’s surface freshwater an excellent educational resource.
2016 The Resnicks’ Kern County Water Bank water deal.
A legal cloud has long shadowed the Resnicks’ water deal. The Kern County Water Bank was originally acquired in 1988 by the state to serve as an emergency water supply for the Los Angeles area—at a cost to taxpayers of $148 million in today’s dollars.
In 2014, a judge ruled that the Department of Water Resources had turned the water bank over to the farmers without properly analyzing environmental impacts.
A new environmental review is due next month, and a coalition of environmental groups and water agencies is suing to return the water bank to public ownership. Adam Keats, senior attorney at the Center for Food Safety, describes the transfer of the water bank to the Resnicks and other farmers as “an unconstitutional rip-off.”
And here’s a key fact to consider against this backdrop: The Resnicks aren’t just pumping to irrigate their fruit and nut trees—they’re also in the business of farming water itself. Their land came with decades-old contracts with the state and federal government that allow them to purchase water piped south by state canals. The Kern Water Bank gave them the ability to store this water and sell it back to the state at a premium in times of drought. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/04/lynda-stewart-resnick-california-water
2016 Resnick’s bought H2O $28 sold $196 to CA during drought $30 million profit.
According to an investigation by the Contra Costa Times, between 2000 and 2007 the Resnicks bought water for potentially as little as $28 per acre-foot (the amount needed to cover one acre in one foot of water) and then sold it for as much as $196 per acre-foot to the state, which used it to supply other farmers whose Delta supply had been previously curtailed. The couple pocketed more than $30 million in the process. If winter storms replenish the Kern Water Bank this year, they could again find themselves with a bumper crop of H2O. Meanwhile, the fight between farmers and smelt has plodded on, with the Resnicks becoming prominent advocates for pumping even more water south to farms. In 2007, a group called the Coalition for a Sustainable Delta began using lawsuits of its own to assign blame for the estuary’s decline to just about everything except farming: housing development in Delta floodplains, pesticide use by Delta farms, dredging, power plants, sport fishing, and pollution from mothballed ships. The coalition’s website doesn’t mention the Resnicks, but it originally listed a Paramount Farms fax number, and three of the four officers on its early tax documents were Resnick employees. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/04/lynda-stewart-resnick-california-water
2014 State failed to analyze effects of water bank, judge rules
A court ruling issued Wednesday could throw up obstacles to operation of a Kern County groundwater bank that has helped billionaire Stewart Resnick build a nut empire in the southern San Joaquin Valley. In the latest development in a two-decade legal fight, a Sacramento County Superior Court judge found that the state Department of Water Resources didn’t properly analyze the environmental impacts of the Kern Water Bank, which is partly controlled by Resnick’s Paramount Farms enterprise.
Lynda Resnick and her husband, Stewart, also own a few other things: Teleflora, the nation’s largest flower delivery service; Fiji Water, the best-selling brand of premium bottled water; Pom Wonderful, the iconic pomegranate juice brand; Halos, the insanely popular brand of mandarin oranges formerly known as Cuties; and Wonderful Pistachios, with its “Get Crackin’” ad campaign. The Resnicks are the world’s biggest producers of pistachios and almonds, and they also hold vast groves of lemons, grapefruit, and navel oranges. All told, they claim to own America’s second-largest produce company, worth an estimated $4.2 billion.
Billionaires Behaving Badly: Lynda and Stewart ResnickWhen a Mother Jones reporter was in the country writing an expose on Fiji Water, she was snatched up by police from an internet cafe and detained.
Robert Thomas Zephyrhills Natural Spring Water Company
Crystal Springs Preserve owner Robert Thomas speaks during the unveiling of WaterVentures, Florida’s Learning Lab at Crystal Springs Preserve in partnership with Zephyrhills Brand 100% Natural Spring Water on January 9, 2013 in Crystal Springs, Florida.
Zephyrhills, population 14,000, has long made its name on water. But it was when the bottling plant south of town began filling 4 million to 5 million bottles of water every day.
Every day, 30 million gallons of water gush from the Floridan aquifer into Crystal Springs. Nestled in what is now a 525-acre wildlife preserve, the springs are almost alien in their beauty: impossibly clear, perpetually cool and, in spots, the same turquoise color as the Zephyrhills label.
Florida springs have been suffering in recent years due to pollution such as fertilizers and nitrates. “They convinced us that this water was somehow better than the water in our taps even though it’s no better, and then convinced us to pay 1,000 or 10,000 times more for it,” she said.
Nestlé Waters North America, Inc. corporate giant Nestle, which also owns Perrier and other bottled water brands. Based in Stamford, Connecticut with 7,500 employees nationwide.
In the next two weeks, Russia is planning to attempt something no other country has tried before. It’s going to test whether it can disconnect from the rest of the world electronically while keeping the internet running for its citizens. This means it will have to reroute all its data internally, rather than relying on servers abroad.
The test is key to a proposed “sovereign internet” law currently working its way through Russia’s government. It looks likely to be eventually voted through and signed into law by President Vladimir Putin, though it has stalled in parliament for now.
Pulling an iron curtain down over the internet is a simple idea, but don’t be fooled: it’s a fiendishly difficult technical challenge to get right. It is also going to be very expensive. The project’s initial cost has been set at $38 million by Russia’s financial watchdog, but it’s likely to require far more funding than that. One of the authors of the plan has said it’ll be more like $304 million, Bloomberg reports, but even that figure, industry experts say, won’t be enough to get the system up and running, let alone maintain it.
Not only that, but it has already proved deeply unpopular with the general public. An estimated 15,000 people took to the streets in Moscow earlier this month to protest the law, one of the biggest demonstrations in years.
Operation disconnect
So how will Russia actually disconnect itself from the global internet? “It is unclear what the ‘disconnect test’ might entail,” says Andrew Sullivan, president and CEO of the Internet Society. All we know is that if it passes, the new law will require the nation’s internet service providers (ISPs) to use only exchange points inside the country that are approved by Russia’s telecoms regulator, Roskomnadzor.
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These exchange points are where internet service providers connect with each other. It’s where their cabling meets at physical locations to exchange traffic. These locations are overseen by organizations known as internet exchange providers (IXPs). Russia’s largest IXP is in Moscow, connecting cities in Russia’s east but also Riga in neighboring Latvia.
MSK-IX, as this exchange point is known, is one of the world’s largest. It connects over 500 different ISPs and handles over 140 gigabits of throughput during peak hours on weekdays. There are six other internet exchange points in Russia, spanning most of its 11 time zones. Many ISPs also use exchanges that are physically located in neighboring countries or that are owned by foreign companies. These would now be off limits. Once this stage is completed, it would provide Russia with a literal, physical “on/off switch” to decide whether its internet is shielded from the outside world or kept open.
What’s in a name?
As well as rerouting its ISPs, Russia will also have to unplug from the global domain name system (DNS) so traffic cannot be rerouted through any exchange points that are not inside Russia.
The DNS is basically a phone book for the internet: when you type, for example, “google.com” into your browser, your computer uses the DNS to translate this domain name into an IP address, which identifies the correct server on the internet to send the request. If one server won’t respond to a request, another will step in. Traffic behaves rather like water—it will seek any gap it can to flow through.
“The creators of the DNS wanted to create a system able to work even when bits of it stopped working, regardless of whether the decision to break parts of it was deliberate or accidental,” says Brad Karp, a computer scientist at University College London. This in-built resilience in the underlying structure of the internet will make Russia’s plan even harder to carry out.
The actual mechanics of the DNS are operated by a wide variety of organizations, but a majority of the “root servers,” which are its foundational layer, are run by groups in the US. Russia sees this as a strategic weakness and wants to create its own alternative, setting up an entire new network of its own root servers.
“An alternate DNS can be used to create an alternate reality for the majority of Russian internet users,” says Ameet Naik, an expert on internet monitoring for the software company ThousandEyes. “Whoever controls this directory controls the internet.” Thus, if Russia can create its own DNS, it will have at least a semblance of control over the internet within its borders.
This won’t be easy, says Sullivan. It will involve configuring tens of thousands of systems, and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to identify all the different access points citizens use to get online (their laptops, smartphones, iPads, and so on). Some of them will be using servers abroad, such as Google’s Public DNS, which Russia simply won’t be able to replicate—so the connection will fail when a Russian user tries to access them.
[snip]
Could someone really destroy the whole Internet? YES
The Internet is more than just a technology. It is a domain similar to the domains of land, air, sea and space, but with its own distinct challenges.
The whole internet is controlled by seven actual, physical keys. – The key issue with internet governance is always trust, which is ridiculous.
WHO MANAGES THE INTERNET’S ADDRESS BOOK?
BY VINT CERF Vint Cerf summarizes the transition of ICANN.
THE NET IS A WORLD OF ENDS. The Internet is a “network of networks” of computers. It was born on Oct. 29, 1969, when a UCLA student programmer sent a message from his computer to one at Stanford.
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