A child’s first plane ride should be a fun one, perhaps part of a journey to visit grandma, or maybe a trip to Disneyland. But for “L.E.A.,” it was one that tore her away from her mom. The child and her mother, Leticia, fled Guatemala last May, only to be separated by U.S. agents at the southern border. Leticia was sent to Nevada, while L.E.A. was flown, by herself, thousands of miles away to New York. They would not see each other again for months.

Leticia now joins Elena, “Dania,” and three other families in seeking millions in damages after being forcibly separated and traumatized by the Trump administration. “The government intentionally subjected these six parents and their children, who were as young as five, to extraordinary trauma that will have life-long implications,” law firm Arnold & Porter said in a statement.

L.E.A. is that 5-year-old. Leticia said that during the first part of their separation, not one official gave her information on her daughter’s whereabouts, or if she was even alive. She was only able to find her because a fellow detainee gave her the number of a social worker, who was then able to locate the girl in New York. “About one month after being forcibly separated from her daughter,” a legal filing in the case states, “Leticia and L.E.A. were finally able to speak to each other on the telephone.”

It would still be months until they were reunited. During this time, officials tried to deport Leticia after she failed her initial asylum interview through no fault of her own. “The asylum officer, claiming they were out of time, ended the interview before Leticia finished explaining why she feared for her life in Guatemala.” By then a federal judge had ordered the reunification of separated families, but officials threatened Leticia with a taser unless she signed their documents. It took an emergency filing from her attorney to block her imminent deportation.

Leticia and L.E.A. were finally reunited after four months and a day, but the separation has taken its toll despite their being together again. “L.E.A.’s suffering has continued since her release,” the legal filing continues. “She has nightmares. Leticia is often woken by her daughter in the middle of the night, still asleep and sweating, screaming, ‘mama, mama.’” Friday, Feb. 15, marks 204 days since a federal judge’s reunification deadline, but children stolen from families at the border are still in U.S. custody. Family separation remains a crisis.

If you have a cellular data cap or just loathe those annoying autoplaying videos, you may want to disable the Autoplay feature in the Home feed of the mobile YouTube app. iDownloadBlog shows you how.

As you may have noticed, Facebook is not cool anymore. The social juggernaut has been mired in controversies -- infamous privacy scandals or company's ruthless "grow fast and break things" approach to gain users, to name a few. Luckily enough, some people are trying to build new social networks and are coming up with interesting original ideas. Minds.com is one such social network. The open source social network, which has been operational since 2012, works on a point-earning/exchange system to give users full control over the reach of their posts. One of the complaints people have with Facebook and Twitter is that they feel their posts are not being seen by all of their friends. Minds.com lets users earn points and then trade those points to boost their posts on the platform. Users earn tokens by being active on the platform and engaging in uploading, voting, commenting and other similar activities. They can then use these tokens, which can be exchanged within the platform, to boost the reach of their posts. The company last year launched a cryptocurrency reward program based on the ethereum blockchain for all users on the platform. Minds says it does not determine what should be censored. Users are free to post whatever they want. (You can follow us on Minds.) We are excited to announced that Minds founder and chief executive Bill Ottman has agreed to do an interview with us. If you have a question about Minds.com for him or his take on the current social networking space, feel free to ask it in the comments section below.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The presidency of Donald Trump has not been a successful one for him—except for the obscene amount of havoc and pain he has inflicted upon the most vulnerable people in our society. As part of his reign of terror, Trump has appointed a record number of conservative federal judges, many of whom hold absolutely frightening views on race, religion, and reproductive justice. In fact, their retrograde views seem to be a necessary qualification for becoming a judicial nominee under this administration. 

As an example, Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that ended school segregation, has been universally supported in the legal community. It is considered to be beyond debate. Yet Trump has put forth at least ten judicial nominees in the past year who refuse to offer an opinion on Brown.  As Mother Jones reports, earlier this month, Trump’s nominee to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Neomi Rao, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She is positioned to take the seat left vacant by Brett Kavanaugh when he was confirmed to the Supreme Court. In her hearing, Rao refused to answer whether she thought Brown was correctly decided. 

Asked by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) whether the court had made the right decision in Brown, Rao replied, “As a judicial nominee, I think it’s not appropriate for me to comment on the correctness of particular precedents.”

When pressed for a yes or no answer, Rao only replied that the case was “an incredibly important decision of the Supreme Court.”

The shutdown crisis is over:

President Trump is speaking at an event in the Rose Garden, where his acting chief of staff says he will announce that he will sign spending legislation to avert a government shutdown and at the same declare a national emergency with the aim of securing about $6.5 billion more to build his long-promised border wall without congressional approval.

….Trump is eyeing about $600 million from a Treasury Department drug forfeiture fund and $2.5 billion from a Department of Defense drug interdiction program, according to officials. In addition, the president wants to use $3.6 billion in military construction funds to help build his new border barriers. Of the different pots of money, White House officials believe only a military construction account requires a national emergency designation.

Maybe some budget expert can help us out here. My first question is: What’s the point? There are only seven months left in the fiscal year, and I doubt Trump could spend $6 billion in seven months even if nothing (i.e., lawsuits) stood in his way. Second: What was the Pentagon planning to do with this money? A mere few months ago we were being told that our military was in such dire ramshackle shape that it desperately need a huge budget increase. Did that turn out not to be true? Were they wasting so much money that they won’t even notice that they’re losing $6 billion? Inquiring minds want to know.

Hacker and unc0ver lead developer Pwn20wnd has revised the unc0ver v3.0.0 pre-release on Friday with initial support for tihmstar's recently-released v3ntex exploit for iOS 12. Learn more inside.

As the Orange Buffoon detailed the national emergency our nation currently faces—that emergency being Trump facing the wrath of his rabid base over his epic fail to get his racist wall—Twitter went, “Huh?”

x

This is remarkably defensive and incoherent, even for Trump.

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) February 15, 2019

x

Man, this emergency is really taking a backseat to whatever is on Trump’s mind.

— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) February 15, 2019

x

So this is how freedom dies -- with a rambling, incoherent monologue

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) February 15, 2019

Donald Trump walked into the Rose Garden on Friday morning, and, as expected, abused the National Emergency Act to appropriate funds for a wall along the southern border. What many probably didn’t expect was a speech so bumbling, random, and scattered that it made the average Donald Trump speech play like Shakespeare. 

Mexico wouldn’t pay for his wall. Congress wouldn’t pay for his wall. So the “great dealmaker” simply determined to steal the money from other projects—including those genuinely effective in reducing the flow of drugs into the United States.

Protect Democracy is standing by to file a lawsuit to halt Trump’s theft of $6.7 billion dollars. Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Joaquin Castro is ready with a resolution to end Trump’s declaration in Congress. One or both of these may fail, and NBC reports that Trump is prepared to veto anything that reaches his desk. But there’s little doubt that court actions will keep Trump’s attempt tied up for months and prevent any actual construction on the border. In fact, it may well confuse the situation enough that the fencing authorized by Congress in legislation is also put on hold. 

To get his money, Trump will take money from the Department of Defense from funds that were requested by the Pentagon and approved by Congress. These are funds that were earmarked not just for addressing emergencies, but for building military infrastructure. Trump is essentially stealing classrooms and homes from military families, taking hospital beds away from veterans. And he’s taking money from proven, effective programs to interdict drugs to fund a boondoggle that every expert agrees will not address the issue. What’s very likely to happen is that Trump will not get his wall, but that effective programs will be wrecked in the process.

The National Emergency Act was intended to deal with emergencies. As in situations that hit so fast, such as the events on 9/11, that some response is required before Congress can convene. What the authors of the act never even contemplated was a situation in which the executive branch might use the National Emergency Act to simply overrule the outcome of negotiations within the legislative branch. 

It's finally Friday. Boy, doesn't every week feel like it lasted a year?

Former MA Gov. Bill Weld, who's kind of a flake (now identifies as libertarian) is looking at running for the Republican nomination. Will this open the door for a primary fight? Who knows? He's not a really big name, and Republicans are just deer caught in the headlights where Trump's concerned:

BREAKING: Bill Weld launches GOP presidential exploratory committee #2020election @joebattenfeld writeshttps://t.co/v2k2fGbScj pic.twitter.com/xWMifUoeN8

— Joe Dwinell (@joedwinell) February 15, 2019

Here's the money quote from Bill Weld's 2020 announcement pic.twitter.com/0FACtLca2I

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) February 15, 2019

read more

Anti-vaxxers are literally a pox on the nation. Here, the wife of the Communications Director for the White House and former co-president of Fox News tweets something incredibly irresponsible out there, and it'll likely get received by Trump cultists just in time to make more kids sick. That these Trump people are dangerous sociopaths is not hyperbole, not Fake News. That's just what they are.

Source: Washington Post

Darla Shine, the outspoken wife of White House communications director Bill Shine, has been tweeting about childhood diseases, claiming that illnesses such as measles, mumps, and chickenpox “keep you healthy & fight cancer.” Health experts warn that the claim is not true and adds to misinformation that could cause harm.

Darla Shine, who has been known to tweet out stories with anti-vaccination claims, wrote Wednesday on Twitter that “The entire Baby Boom population alive today had the #Measles as kids."

She added: “I had the #Measles #Mumps #ChickenPox as a child and so did every kid I knew — Sadly my kids had #MMR so they will never have the life long natural immunity I have. Come breathe on me!”

read more

Visa and Mastercard, the two biggest U.S. card networks, are preparing to increase certain fees levied on U.S. merchants for processing transactions that will kick in this April, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: Some of the changes relate to so-called interchange fees, the report said. Interchange fees are what merchants pay to banks when consumers use a credit or a debit card to make a purchase from their store. Fees that Mastercard and Visa charge financial institutions, such as banks, for processing card payments on behalf of merchants are also set to increase, the report said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We all know that there’s no national emergency on the southern US border. We all also know that this will not stop the President in declaring a national emergency this morning. The devil will, of course, be in the details. Specifically we’ll need to see not what the President actually says this morning, though that is likely to be hyperbolic and factually incorrect, but what the actual declaration says. Because the drafting of it was surely a fight between the President’s senior policy advisor Stephen Miller, who has a bachelors degree in what is generally reported as political science, and the actual attorneys at the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and the White House Counsel’s Office who are trying to mitigate potential damage by keeping the declaration as close to constitutional (constitutionally adjacent?) as possible.

Here’s the live feed:

I leave you with the timeless wisdom of Vice President Pence regarding what the President is going to do today:

Mike Pence: The president usurping power and end-running Congress is "a profound mistake." pic.twitter.com/GjDbHDvh0u

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) February 15, 2019

Expect the crazy to go the whole day…

Open thread!

A new study from OpenSignal published today looks into the cellular performance of the most popular iPhones going back to 2013. While there’s nothing too surprising in the findings, it does nail down exactly what speeds each model sees, how much owners of older iPhones are missing out, how much iPhone cellular speeds have grown over the years, and a few other interesting details.

more…

The post Test compares cellular speeds for top iPhone models, difference between the iPhone 5s and XS, more appeared first on 9to5Mac.

Despite years-long calls from power users for an "edit" button, Twitter is considering how it could enable 'clarifications' of tweets, CEO Jack Dorsey said Thursday at Goldman Sachs' tech conference in San Francisco. From a report: "One of the concepts we're thinking about is clarifications," Dorsey said, saying that it could function similarly to a quote tweet. "Kind of like retweet with comment.. to add some context and some color on what they might have tweeted, or what they might have meant." People already often use the quote tweet option for this kind of thing, but the two tweets may not always have the same reach, Dorsey noted. But if the person had opted to "clarify" that tweet, then the original tweet could always appear with the subsequent clarification. Dorsey cautioned that the feature is still just something the company is thinking about, not necessarily something that would launch. But he said such a feature could help people feel more comfortable with Twitter.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from 9to5Mac. 9to5Mac Daily is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play, or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2019/02/9to5Mac-Daily-02-15-2019.mp3

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Donald Trump’s Friday morning: declare a national emergency.

Donald Trump’s Friday afternoon: jet off to Mar-a-Lago.

Things are so terrible at the border, so incredibly dangerous despite what all the statistics tell us, that it is an EMERGENCY to build a wall. The emergency is not so severe, however, that Trump doesn’t have the leisure to hang with billionaires at his private club and do some secret golfing. After a few hours of executive time, of course. The man’s got to rest up between ranting while signing some pieces of paper and getting on Air Force One.

Priorities, I tell you.

Imagine if a 37-year-old newly-elected white Democratic congressman from a safe seat asked Elliot Abrams the same questions as Ilhan Omar asked him Wednesday.  Now, imagine that the same guy advocated for a 70% marginal tax rate.

In my imagination, I’m guessing that the Abrams testimony would have perhaps gotten some play on YouTube and perhaps a mention on MSNBC.  I’m not sure about that, because these blob members sure think that their collective shit smells like roses.  And I also imagine that the 70% marginal rate proposal would have been ignored.

I don’t have a deep observation to make here, but from the perspective of pure political power, AOC and Ilhan Omar have it, and they are wielding it wisely.  Omar’s apology was pitch perfect.  AOC’s response to petty criticism on Twitter is consistently good.  The right is afraid of these women, and they should be.

Nationwide insurance company Allstate has bought smartphone and tablet repair service iCracked. It already owned SquareTrade, which offers both gadget insurance and tech support …

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