Japan top court sides with tattoo artist in test case

Issued on: 18/09/2020 
 

Tattoos are often associated in Japan with members of criminal groups known as the Yakuza Behrouz MEHRI AFP/File

Tokyo (AFP)

Japan's top court has sided with a tattoo artist who was fined for practising without a medical licence, in a case that revived debate about the country's uneasy relationship with body ink.

Though tattoos have a long history in Japan and the nation has long boasted leading artists, body ink is still often associated with "anti-social" elements, particularly members of criminal groups known as the yakuza.

People with tattoos are often prevented from using public facilities like swimming pools or baths, and in 2015, Osaka tattooist Taiki Masuda was arrested for allegedly violating the Medical Practioners' Act by tattooing people without a doctor's licence.


Masuda was fined 150,000 yen ($1,400) by an Osaka district court, but the ruling was overturned on appeal in 2018.

Prosecutors decided to take it to the Supreme Court, which this week rejected their appeal, a court spokeswoman told AFP on Friday.

The Supreme Court backed the earlier ruling that tattooing should not require a doctor's licence because it carries little risk of injury or health problems.

"Tattooing is not considered medical treatment nor an act linked to health care," the verdict upheld by the Supreme Court said.

The upheld ruling noted tattooing is "a practice seen since ancient times as part of regional customs" in Japan.

While there is still widespread aversion to tattoos in much of Japanese society, attitudes have started to change, especially after the country hosted the 2019 Rugby World Cup.

The event featured a large number of players sporting tattoos, including Samoans for whom the body art is an important part of their culture.

© 2020 AFP

Seven dead, dozens infected after 'superspreader' wedding in rural US

Issued on: 18/09/2020 - 

For the community and wider region, news of the 'superspreader' wedding was a brutal wake-up call Joseph Prezioso AFP

Millinocket (United States) (AFP)

A wedding in rural Maine became a coronavirus "superspreader" event that left seven people dead and 177 infected, renewing fear of the disease in the northeastern US state that had hoped the worst of the pandemic was behind it.

The nuptials in early August were attended by 65 people, breaking the official limit of 50 allowed at a gathering.

A ceremony at a church was followed by a reception at the Big Moose Inn -- both venues near the picturesque town of Millinocket, whose population numbers just 4,000.


Ten days later, two dozen people associated with the wedding had tested positive for Covid-19 and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Maine opened an investigation.

The center's local director Nirav Shah on Thursday gave the latest toll for the event, adding that none of the seven people who died had actually attended the wedding.

Contact-tracers linked the wedding to several virus hotspots across the state -- including more than 80 cases in a prison 230 miles (370 kilometers) away, where one of the guards had attended the ceremony.

Another 10 probable cases were found in a Baptist church in the same area, while 39 infections -- and six of the deaths -- were at a nursing home 100 miles from Millinocket.

For the community and wider region, which had relaxed social-distancing rules introduced earlier in the crisis, the news was a brutal wake-up call.

"When we heard of the outbreak... everyone really hunkered down," said Cody McEwen, head of the town council.

"As soon as the outbreak happened, we completely closed the town again."

- Recriminations -

Some of the residents were clearly angry at the event's organizers -- starting with the tavern, whose license was temporarily suspended.

"I don't think they should have had the wedding. I think it should have been limited like they were supposed to," said Nina Obrikis, a member of the Baptist church where the ceremony was held.

"We can't go nowhere or do nothing," she said.

Maine Governor Janet Mills on Thursday issued a warning to the 1.3 million residents of the state.

Such flare-ups "threaten to undo the gains we have made at the drop of a hat," she said.

"Covid-19 is not on the other side of the fence, it is in our yards."

Since the start of the pandemic earlier this year, similar superspreader events have been reported around the world.

The first in the United States were a biotech conference in Boston in February attended by around 175 people, and a funeral in Georgia where more than 100 people caught the virus.

In recent weeks, such clusters of infections have been seen on university campuses, forcing students to be sent home.

The university of Oneonta, in northern New York state, had more than 670 Covid cases confirmed in one month.

© 2020 AFP

Trump administration wrote controversial US agency guidelines on testing: report



Issued on: 18/09/2020 - 

Washington (AFP)

President Donald Trump's administration posted controversial recommendations on coronavirus testing to the US health agency's website against its objections, the New York Times reported Thursday.

The guidelines, which said testing was not necessary for people who were exposed to Covid-19 but not displaying symptoms, were criticized when they were issued last month.

That is because healthcare experts at the time were pushing for more, not less, testing to help track and control the spread of the respiratory disease that has now killed almost 200,000 people in the United States.


The newspaper said the recommendation was posted to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website "despite their serious objections," citing internal CDC documents and unnamed officials familiar with the issue.

"The Department of Health and Human Services did the rewriting and then 'dropped' it into the CDC's public website, flouting the agency's strict scientific review process," the newspaper said.

A federal official told the paper that the document came from the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, and from the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

"That policy does not reflect what many people at the CDC feel should be the policy," the official said.

The Times said healthcare experts at the CDC had "serious objections" to the document, and noted that it contained "elementary errors" as well as recommendations "inconsistent" with the CDC's advice, making it obvious it came from elsewhere, a senior CDC scientist told the paper under condition of anonymity.

The Times said that at the time of the guidelines' publication, administration officials had said the "document was a CDC product and had been revised with input from the agency's director, Dr Robert Redfield."

© 2020 AFP

Hong Kong gay couples win legal victory over inheritance law

Issued on: 18/09/2020 - 
  

Hong Kong does not allow same-sex marriage and does not recognise foreign unions, though limited recognition has been granted in recent years in several landmark rulings Yan ZHAO AFP/File



Hong Kong (AFP)

Hong Kong's high court on Friday ruled that same-sex couples should receive equal treatment under inheritance law, in a step forward for LGBT rights in the finance hub.

But the victory came on the same day as a separate legal bid for full recognition of foreign same-sex marriages was struck down, underscoring what campaigners say is a lack of progress on equality issues.

Hong Kong's law does not allow same-sex marriage and does not recognise foreign unions, though limited recognition has been granted in recent years in several landmark rulings.


Edgar Ng, a gay Hong Konger, last year launched a legal challenge against the city's inheritance and intestacy laws, alleging discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

In 2018 he bought a government-subsidised flat, a year after marrying his partner in London, according to court documents.

Under Hong Kong's housing policy, his husband cannot be recognised as the joint homeowner, and Ng was concerned that should he die without a will, his property would not be passed to his partner.

In the judgement handed down Friday, Judge Anderson Chow said the exclusion of spouses in same-sex marriages from their legal entitlements "constitutes unlawful discrimination".

The judge said "differential treatment is not justified".

LGBT rights activists with campaign group Hong Kong Marriage Equality described the ruling as an "important victory".

"The government should seize this opportunity to work with the LGBT+ community to implement marriage equality in the city," the association said.

Excitement about the legal win was tempered however by a separate ruling on Friday that rejected an application for a judicial review into Hong Kong's law on recognising overseas gay marriage.

In 2018 the city announced that overseas same-sex partners would qualify for the right to live and work in Hong Kong, but other rights are still denied to same-sex couples.

© 2020 AFP

A symbol of 'extermination': Indigenous Colombians tear down conquistador statue

Issued on: 17/09/2020 - 17:09

A statue of a Spanish conquistador overlooking the Colombian city of Popayán has been torn down by members of indigenous groups in the latest case of a monument to a historical figure with links to racism or colonialism being targeted by protesters.

The statue of Sebastián de Belalcázar had stood above Popayán, the Colombian city he founded, since 1537.

But on Wednesday, September 16, indigenous people armed with ropes pulled the statue from its pedestal, toppling what they say is a symbol of the country's colonial past.

Images of the statue being pulled down were posted on social media and protesters could be heard cheering and celebrating as the structure toppled.

It came amid a protest by the indigenous Misak, Nasa and Pijao communities against the "cultural and physical extermination" of native Colombians in the 500 years since Spanish conquest, AFP reported.

De Belalcázar founded Popayán in 1537 during the Spanish conquest of what is now Colombia and also founded Quito in Ecuador. But the Misak people accuse him of stealing their lands and the killing of their ancestors.

It is the latest of several statue-topplings around the world in recent months, which began in the US with the targeting of statues of Confederate figures as part of the Black Lives Matter movement and has since spread to other countries, including the UK and France. 

Man 'asleep' in speeding self-driving car charged in Canada
CANADA IS A REALLY BIG COUNTRY

Issued on: 18/09/2020 -
 

Johannes EISELE AFP


Ottawa (AFP)

A driver who allegedly set his car to autopilot and then took a nap as it broke the speed limit on a rural Canadian highway has been charged with dangerous driving, police said.

The incident took place near the town of Ponoka in Alberta province, the local force said in a tweet on Thursday.

"The car appeared to be self-driving, travelling over 140 km/h with both front seats completely reclined & occupants appeared to be asleep," it said.

According to Canadian public broadcaster CBC, the car was an electric Tesla model set to autopilot and the man charged was 20 years old.

The speed limit on that section of the highway is 110 kilometres per hour (68 mph), it added.

Police Sergeant Darrin Turnbull told CBC that he was "speechless" and had not seen such a case in his two-decade career -- "but of course the technology wasn't there".

"Nobody was looking out the windshield to see where the car was going," he said.

Tesla's autopilot mode allows cars to steer, accelerate and brake automatically within a lane, but is not supposed to enable trips without human intervention.

The US company warns on its website that "current autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous."

But the president of a Canadian Tesla owners' club, who condemned the incident, told CBC that there were videos circulating online with instructions on how to "hack" the cars' safety systems.

© 2020 AFP

 

BP Bombshell: India’s Oil Demand May Peak In 2025

By Tsvetana Paraskova - Sep 16, 2020, 

The world’s third-largest oil importer, India, will be the biggest source of energy demand growth through 2050 in any scenario about government policies about the energy transition. However, India may not be as key a driver of global oil demand growth as previously thought.

This was one of the messages in the BP Energy Outlook 2020, in which the supermajor said that global oil demand may have already peaked last year as oil consumption may never recover to the pre-pandemic levels.  

India’s oil consumption may peak as soon as 2025 at round 6 million barrels per day (bpd), compared to 5.1 million bpd demand in 2018, according to two out of three scenarios BP has examined in its outlook—Rapid and Net Zero.  

In the third scenario, Business As Usual (BAU), BP assumes that government policies, technologies, and societal ‎preferences will continue to evolve in a manner and speed seen in the recent past. Under this scenario, India’s oil demand growth still has a long way to run, with oil consumption reaching 9.7 million bpd in 2050.

In the Net Zero scenario, Indian oil demand slumps to just 2.4 million bpd in 2050, while the Rapid scenario – assuming a significant increase in carbon prices around the world – India’s oil demand in 2050 will be broadly flat compared to 2018, at 5.2 million bpd, BP estimates.

It is very likely that future oil demand, in India and globally, is some sort of a combination of the three scenarios BP has laid out. But it is also very likely that oil demand growth, in India and around the world, is going through a seismic shift amid the energy transition and government policies to support the economic recovery from the pandemic-driven recession.  Related: Oil Rises After EIA Confirms Crude Inventory Draw

India’s primary energy consumption is set to more than double by 2050 in all three scenarios, but the only fossil fuel growing in all scenarios is natural gas, underpinned by growing population and prosperity, BP said.

In addition, renewable energy is set to grow strongly in all the scenarios, becoming the largest energy source in 2050.

All in all, the strong growth in primary energy consumption in India will be primarily led by renewable energy and, to a lesser extent, natural gas, BP said.  

Globally, we may have passed peak oil demand last year, as fuel consumption may never recover from the pandemic-inflicted decline, BP said.  

In all of BP’s scenarios, global oil demand is set to decline within 2050. The Rapid and Net Zero scenarios assume that oil demand has already peaked, while in the BAU scenario, demand is expected to peak in the early 2020s, due to growing electrification and efficiency in road transportation. The rise of EVs will see oil demand for transport peaking in the mid- to late-2020s, according to BP’s estimates.

As BP said, these three scenarios “are not predictions but, based on alternative assumptions about policies and societal ‎preferences, are designed to help explore the range of outcomes possible over the next 30 ‎years.”

The future of the energy mix in India and the world over the next three decades will be some kind of a mix of those assumptions and will depend on government policies, consumer preferences, and the cost competition between renewable energy sources and fossil fuels.

Whatever reality turns out to be, the energy outlook of BP – which aims to reinvent itself into an integrated energy company from an international oil company – is a stark warning to Big Oil, OPEC, and oil bulls that oil demand growth may be a thing of the past.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

As U.S. TikTok ban nears, here's what we know about a deal

by Bloomberg News, Bloomberg News
 

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

With just days to go until President Donald Trump's ban on TikTok in the U.S. comes into effect, the race is on for owner ByteDance to win approval for its plan to avoid a shutdown.


Technology giant Oracle Corp. has emerged as the Beijing-based company's chosen partner for a deal, beating out Microsoft Corp. There's still much to be decided before the Sept. 20 deadline. Here's a rundown of what we know so far, what's still up in the air and what could happen next.

What we know:

Who's in and who's out

Oracle confirmed in a brief statement Monday that it's part of the proposal ByteDance has submitted to the U.S. Treasury Department to resolve the row over TikTok. The statement was light on details, but referred to Oracle as the company's "trusted technology provider." Microsoft, the previous presumed frontrunner, said its bid had been rejected.

What the deal looks like

Instead of an outright sale, the transaction is being seen as a corporate restructuring. People familiar with the proposal have said Oracle would make an investment in TikTok, alongside existing ByteDance shareholders including General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital and Coatue Capital.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has referred to the new entity that would come out of the Oracle deal as "TikTok Global." He said the business would have its headquarters in the U.S. and create 20,000 jobs.

What Trump thinks of it, for now

The president said Tuesday that his staff are "very close to a deal." He added that Oracle founder Larry Ellison has been "really a terrific guy for a long time," a show of potential support for the deal.

What we don't know:

The exact terms of the deal

While Oracle and some existing shareholders are likely to invest, it's unclear how much of the new TikTok entity they would own or how it would be valued. Walmart Inc.'s role is also unknown: the retail giant had teamed up with Microsoft as part of that company's proposal, but has since said that it remains in talks with ByteDance and other interested parties.

If it'll pass a national-security review

Though details are light, based on what's been revealed so far about the deal, national security experts have told Bloomberg News that the arrangement doesn't satisfy concerns laid out by the Trump administration in executive orders and public statements. However, even if security officials recommend Trump block the deal, the president has the final say and can overrule their recommendation.

Whether Trump will get his payout

The president has repeatedly insisted that any deal would have to include a substantial payment to the U.S. Mnuchin's promise of new American jobs could go some way to fulfilling that demand.

When it'll get done

While Trump initially said he wanted a deal by Sept. 15, the ban on TikTok's U.S. operations that he signed last month in a bid to force a sale requires the company to act by Sept. 20. Trump indicated last week that the deadline wouldn't be extended. A separate decision by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, requires a sale by mid-November.

What will happen to the algorithms

One of the big questions is what will happen to the source code underpinning the social media platform in a restructuring. ByteDance has decided it won't sell or transfer the algorithm, according to the South China Morning Post, but the company's U.S.-based technology team would be free to develop a new algorithm.

What China thinks

The Chinese government will also have to approve ByteDance's plans under new restrictions Beijing imposed on the export of artificial intelligence technologies, Bloomberg News reported earlier. ByteDance has said it will "strictly comply with" the new regulations.

What's next?

A U.S. national-security panel reviewed the bid Tuesday afternoon, but didn't make a recommendation that the president approve or reject the deal, Bloomberg News has reported. Mnuchin, who oversees CFIUS, has promised to give Trump the panel's recommendation this week.

The Commerce Department will also have to take a look at the deal, as the U.S. is running a two-track national security review.


Explore furtherTrump says no TikTok deal yet amid security concerns

©2020 Bloomberg News
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

New tool helps IT staff see why users click on fraudulent emails

by Alex Boss, National Institute of Standards and Technology
 

 

A new tool called the Phish Scale can help organizations better train their employees to avoid phishing attacks. Credit: National Institute of Standards and Technology

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new tool called the Phish Scale that could help organizations better train their employees to avoid a particularly dangerous form of cyberattack known as phishing.


By 2021, global cybercrime damages will cost $6 trillion annually, up from $3 trillion in 2015, according to estimates from the 2020 Official Annual Cybercrime Report by Cybersecurity Ventures.

One of the more prevalent types of cybercrime is phishing, a practice where hackers send emails that appear to be from an acquaintance or trustworthy institution. A phishing email (or phish) can tempt users with a variety of scenarios, from the promise of free gift cards to urgent alerts from upper management. If users click on links in a phishing email, the links can take them to websites that could deposit dangerous malware into the organization's computers.

Many organizations have phishing training programs in which employees receive fake phishing emails generated by the employees' own organization to teach them to be vigilant and to recognize the characteristics of actual phishing emails. Chief information security officers (CISOs), who often oversee these phishing awareness programs, then look at the click rates, or how often users click on the emails, to determine if their phishing training is working. Higher click rates are generally seen as bad because it means users failed to notice the email was a phish, while low click rates are often seen as good.

However, numbers alone don't tell the whole story. "The Phish Scale is intended to help provide a deeper understanding of whether a particular phishing email is harder or easier for a particular target audience to detect," said NIST researcher Michelle Steves. The tool can help explain why click rates are high or low.

The Phish Scale uses a rating system that is based on the message content in a phishing email. This can consist of cues that should tip users off about the legitimacy of the email and the premise of the scenario for the target audience, meaning whichever tactics the email uses would be effective for that audience. These groups can vary widely, including universities, business institutions, hospitals and government agencies.

The new method uses five elements that are rated on a 5-point scale that relate to the scenario's premise. The overall score is then used by the phishing trainer to help analyze their data and rank the phishing exercise as low, medium or high difficulty.


The significance of the Phish Scale is to give CISOs a better understanding of their click-rate data instead of relying on the numbers alone. A low click rate for a particular phishing email can have several causes: The phishing training emails are too easy or do not provide relevant context to the user, or the phishing email is similar to a previous exercise. Data like this can create a false sense of security if click rates are analyzed on their own without understanding the phishing email's difficulty.

           VIDEO https://techxplore.com/news/2020-09-tool-staff-users-click-fraudulent.html

If your employees are online, they are a target for phishing. Enter the Phish Scale. Created by NIST researchers using real data, this scale allows you to evaluate the quality and sophistication of phishing attacks to help you better understand your phishing vulnerabilities. Credit: NIST

By using the Phish Scale to analyze click rates and collecting feedback from users on why they clicked on certain phishing emails, CISOs can better understand their phishing training programs, especially if they are optimized for the intended target audience.

The Phish Scale is the culmination of years of research, and the data used for it comes from an "operational" setting, very much the opposite of a laboratory experiment with controlled variables. "As soon as you put people into a laboratory setting, they know," said Steves. "They're outside of their regular context, their regular work setting, and their regular work responsibilities. That is artificial already. Our data did not come from there."

This type of operational data is both beneficial and in short supply in the research field. "We were very fortunate that we were able to publish that data and contribute to the literature in that way," said NIST researcher Kristen Greene.

As for next steps, Greene and Steves say they need even more data. All of the data used for the Phish Scale came from NIST. The next step is to expand the pool and acquire data from other organizations, including nongovernmental ones, and to make sure the Phish Scale performs as it should over time and in different operational settings. "We know that the phishing threat landscape continues to change," said Greene. "Does the Phish Scale hold up against all the new phishing attacks? How can we improve it with new data?" NIST researcher Shaneé Dawkins and her colleagues are now working to make those improvements and revisions.

In the meantime, the Phish Scale provides a new method for computer security professionals to better understand their organization's phishing click rates, and ultimately improve training so their users are better prepared against real phishing scenarios.

Information on the Phish Scale is published in a research article appearing in the current issue of the Journal of Cybersecurity. For additional background information about the development of the Phish Scale, see the team's body of research.


Explore further

Research shows people are overconfident about identifying phishing emails

More information: Michelle Steves et al. Categorizing human phishing difficulty: a Phish Scale, Journal of Cybersecurity (2020). DOI: 10.1093/cybsec/tyaa009

Provided by National Institute of Standards and Technology

 

Facebook to curb private groups spreading hate, misinformation

Facebook says private groups on the social network will be held to the same standards as public content as it cracks down on hateful content and misinformation

Facebook on Thursday said it is cracking down on private groups where hate or misinformation is shared among members.


The move comes amid a wider crack down on malicious and false content at the social networking giant which has led people to turn to private groups of like-minded members who can share content that is not available to the wider Facebook community.

"People turn to Facebook Groups to connect with others who share their interests, but even if they decide to make a group private, they have to play by the same rules as everyone else," Facebook vice president of engineering Tom Alison said in a blog post.

Alison said Facebook's community standards "apply to public and private groups, and our proactive detection tools work across both."

Facebook uses artificial intelligence to automatically scanning posts, even in private groups, taking down pages that repeatedly break its rules or that are set up in violation of the social network's standards.

More than a million groups have been taken down in the past year for violating hate policies, according to Alison.

In the past year, Facebook has removed about 1.5 million pieces of content in groups for violating its policies on organized hate, with 91 percent of those posts found by automated software systems, according to Alison.

Over that same period, the leading social network has taken down about 12 million pieces of content in groups for violating policies on hate speech, 87 percent of which was found proactively.

Facebook last month said it has removed hundreds of groups tied to the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory and imposed restrictions on nearly 2,000 more as part of a crackdown on stoking violence.

The moves, which were made across both Facebook and Instagram, were against accounts tied to "offline anarchist groups that support violent acts amidst protests, US-based militia organizations and QAnon," the social media platform said in a blog post.

Under rules tightened on Thursday, administrators or moderators of groups taken down for rule-breaking will be temporarily blocked from forming new groups at Facebook.

People tagged for violating social network standards in groups will need to get moderator or administrator permission for any new posts for 30 days, and if what is cleared for sharing continues to break the rules the entire group will be removed, according to Alison.

Facebook will also start "archiving" groups that been without administrators for a long time, meaning they still exist but don't appear in searches and members can't post anything.

And, to promote getting information from authoritative sources, Facebook will no longer show health-themed groups in recommendation results.

Facebook has been struggling with hoaxes and misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, seeking to give users well-sourced information about the health emergency.


Explore further

Facebook says it removed over 7 million pieces of 'harmful' COVID-19 content in quarter

© 2020 AFP