Cross-examination of #MichaelCohen resumes, an opportunity for the defense to poke holes in his testimony & perhaps trip up or provoke the state’s key witness. The questioning of Cohen, #Trump’s fmr fixer, is the beginning of the end of Trump’s #criminal trial, which began April 15 & might conclude before Memorial Day weekend at this pace.
Prosecutors have said that #Trump's reimbursements for the #HushMoney were fraudulently disguised as #legal services, even though #MichaelCohen had no legal retainer. The point Blanche is seeking to make is: Cohen did legal work for years, & never had a legal retainer. (See above)
#Blanche is also trying to minimize the fact that Cohen had no retainer agreement w/ Trump, suggesting NY #ethics rules don’t require it.
As much as Stewart's centrism can drive me up the wall, and as much as I wanted Roy Wood, Jr. to get the permanent host job, I do enjoy Stewart being back on Mondays only.
Despite the headline, this segment goes into bipartisan US congressional corruption, including insider trading.
Public Participation
The Aarhus Convention and its Protocol on PRTRs empower people with the rights to access information, participate in decision-making in environmental matters and to seek justice. They are the only legally binding global instruments on environmental democracy.
>> https://unece.org/environmental-policy-1/public-participation
If you design a system such that you cannot differentiate people from corporations and bots and that’s your defense for calling all of them “users”, you’ve designed a system that conflates people – who are mortal, have feelings, can feel pain and be hurt and who have human rights that must be protected – with the very entities that oftentimes exist to exploit them.
Design for people. Call them people. All else is secondary.
Toxic partisan politics is corrupting every segment of society, bit by bit, from civilian life to government to church to media to education and everything in-between, eating away at it all, like a cancer.
"Clarence Thomas Complains About ‘Awful’ People After His Ethics Scandals"
“Meta recruited me to lead their Human Exploitation investigations. My job was to prevent real-world harm from crimes like sextortion and trafficking. I was supposed to start Monday.
“But moments after hosting a webinar to combat the surge of sextortion targeting minors, and hearing from the parents of children who were killed by this crime, I got the phone call rescinding my offer.”
Complementary and Disparate: Conceptualising Female and Male Genital Cutting in Northern Tanzania
Mary-Anne Victoria Decatur, PhD dissertation, U of London 2023.
Yes, I do read your dissertations!
"It is the normal, functioning cells of all foreskins that are deemed dangerous. And yet it is specifically Black male bodies that are being constructed as promiscuous sources of infection in need of medical intervention."
"Does the concept of “genital integrity”, which is one of the most potent reasons put forward for opposition to female genital mutilation, apply also to men’s genitals, even if there would be public health benefit from removing men’s foreskins en masse?’. Rather than engage with this ethical question, the consultation’s report advised policy makers and programme developers to emphasise ‘that male circumcision is very different from female genital mutilation’."
Several companies are offering people in mourning a chance to chat with a “simulation” of a deceased loved one. Some say it feels like they’re speaking to them from beyond the grave, while others find it disconcerting and manipulative. Ethicists Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska from the University of Cambridge are the latest to voice their concerns over the risks of the "digital afterlife industry." Here’s more from Science Alert: https://flip.it/C6.06y #Science#AI#Ethics#Humans
It has been quite a while since I read a hard copy of newspaper. Took a tea break at a cafe, and was greeted by this pleasing headline and story. #ethics#LegalEthics#LawFedi
"ACM... has announced the publication of the first issue of the ACM Journal on Responsible Computing (JRC). The new journal publishes high-quality original research at the intersection of computing, ethics, information, law, policy, responsible innovation, and social responsibility from a wide range of convergent, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary perspectives."
Prominent academic publishers agreed that #ChatGPT and Co. should not be listed as the author of a scientific paper, as AI is not responsible for the content. Did everyone listen? We conducted a search in WoS and Scopus and found 14 papers with ChatGPT as the "author":
charges are falsifying business records to hide #HushMoney payments in lead up to 2016 election to #influence electorate
just one Trump supporter at the courthouse draped in a Trump flag.
#StormyDaniels's lawyer, #KeithDavidson, to return to stand. He negotiated the hush-money payment at the center of the case, & is expected to lay out details of the deal.
As a lawsuit about Marina Abramović’s 2010 MoMA retrospective makes its way through the courts, questions are being raised over museums’ duty towards the people working in boundary-pushing exhibitions. Is the act of harassing a performer akin to vandalizing the art?
"While recent debates center on enacting an ethics code for the Supreme Court, the statutory honoraria ban has been in place for decades. No new ethical rules need to be promulgated, or codes enacted on this subject. It exists right now, as it has since 1989. But Thomas and Leo are doing an end run around it, accomplishing indirectly what the law prohibits them from doing directly. And no one is stopping them."
"…Thomas is saying, No, I may not take a fee for speaking at a dinner sponsored by the Koch bros; heaven forbid I violate the…honorarium ban! But of course: Nothing stops you, Koch bros, from lavishing me w/a trip to Palm Springs in a private plane, sumptuous accommodations, & fabulous meals,…there is nothing wrong w/conservative billionaires enabling Thomas to have a lifestyle far beyond what his judicial salary allows."
"…version of Congress we had 23 yrs ago might have gone ballistic in response to recent discoveries about Thomas. If…concerned about…judges getting money for honoraria…surely would’ve been…evading the honoraria ban w/luxury vacations. If…worried about rich benefactors paying judges for their speeches…would surely be…about rich benefactors providing judges w/private planes & high-end accommodations."
Hey #journalists if you're going to use an open source project as an example of a hack, can you at least let them know in advance you're about to do something reckless so they can prepare?