Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been critical of Big Tech, admonishing Facebook for mishandling misinformation and saying internet companies should lose a central legal protection. But his campaign has quietly welcomed onto its staff and policy groups people who have worked with or for Silicon Valley giants, raising concerns among the industry’s critics that the companies are seeking to co-opt a potential Biden administration.

On Sunday, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel sent employees an unusually personal note reflecting on the events of the past several weeks. Many brands took the occasion of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police, and the global protests that have followed, to signal their solidarity with the black community and their allies. But few CEOs took the step, as Spiegel did, of reflecting on his own privilege — and then calling for reparations for black folks. (He threw in a cogent analysis of the federal budget, too.)

Say your company makes a new email platform. In 2020, that means building not just a website but also an app — several of them, actually. You’ll probably want clients for Mac and Windows, iOS and Android, the open web, and — if you’re showing off — Linux. In some of these places, like the web, there is no cost for operating this service beyond building and hosting it.

After two years of work, an independent civil rights audit of Facebook is now complete. The company had been under pressure from Congress and civil rights groups to undertake such an effort for some time, but the audit was voluntary on Facebook’s part. And while sometimes these outside consulting projects approach the client with kid gloves, lead auditor Laura Murphy and her team at the law firm Relman Colfax delivered an 89-page assessment of Facebook’s policies around voter suppression, hate speech, algorithmic bias, and content moderation that is measured but often unsparing.

In 2015 the Lithuanian army reintroduced compulsory military service due to the potential threat caused by the Russia. Young Lithuanians try to avoid the service. Some of them even are not afraid of penalties and imprisonment. It is well known that Lithuanian authorities intend to increase the number of servicemen of the Lithuanian Armed Forces by 25%. From 2020, it is planned that their number will increase from 20,790 to 26,850 by 2024. The political crisis in neighboring Belarus and military exercise near the Lithuanian border force... Read more: https://balticword.eu/lithuanians-are-afraid-to-se

In responding to inequality, policy makers should recognize the difference between wealth, which includes land, and productive capital, which doesn't. By Peter R. Orszag

The Department of Justice report doesn't just call out discrimination in Ferguson. It offers recommendations to fix it.

An interview with Frank Drake, who conducted the first search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) experiment in 1960 and came up with a famous equation that estimates the possible number of alien civilizations.

When a public function is privatized, the result is a muddled middle ground.

For more than a decade, the New Jersey attorney general’s office conducted a hard-fought legal battle to hold Exxon Mobil Corporation responsible for decades of environmental contamination in northern New Jersey. But...

Their lawsuit argues that the Constitution requires them to bust pot smokers.

By Charles Hugh Smith

"This is as exciting as the Public Service Commission gets."

The free-market fantasy stands discredited by events. The challenge now: redeeming effective and democratic government. By Robert Kuttner

Matt Bowden (sometimes known as Starboy, an "interdimensional traveler") helped create one of the most viral outbreaks of new drugs in history. He might also have the antidote.

Women’s shelters are one of the most provocative legacies of the Western presence in Afghanistan.

In an interview a few days before he resigned, he explained in unusually candid terms the administration’s thinking — and how the White House lost its illusions.

How did ICANN -- the overseer of the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) - put itself in position to be the global law enforcer for copyright infringement claims?

The Karner blue butterfly is a tiny thing, with colorful wings that extend just an inch across and a life that rarely wanders more than 600 feet from where it began. Its caterpillars can only eat w...

In an interview with SPIEGEL, celebrated French economist Thomas Piketty speaks about Alexis Tsipras' election victory in Greece, Europe's inability to fix its financial woes and what EU leaders can learn from the United States.