all News of 12/11/19

Facebook Rebuffs Attorney General Barr Over Access To Encrypted Messages

Facebook is rebuffing efforts by U.S. Attorney General William Barr to give authorities a way to read encrypted messages. The heads of Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Messenger services told Barr and his U.K. and Australian counterparts that Facebook is ...

D-Wave Partners With NEC To Build Hybrid HPC And Quantum Apps

D-Wave Systems announced a partnership with Japanese industrial giant NEC today to build what they call “hybrid apps and services” that work on a combination of NEC high-performance computers and D-Wave’s quantum systems. The ...

What Are High Crimes And Misdemeanors? Here’S The History

On Tuesday, House Democrats unveiled two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, marking only the fourth time in American history that a President has faced impeachment charges. They included two specific accusations — one of ...

Rare Bipartisanship On Display In Impeachment-Obsessed Washington

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had quite the morning. Her public schedule on Tuesday began by making history: the U.S. House she leads had prepared two articles of impeachment to remove President Donald Trump from office for abuse of power and ...

President Trump Met With Russian Foreign Minister Hours After Articles Of Impeachment Were Introduced

(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump met Tuesday with the Russian foreign minister at the White House just hours after articles of impeachment were unveiled against him and a day after a Justice Department watchdog report declared the FBI was ...

All Americans Bear The Blame For The Failed Afghanistan War

In New York Times Co. vs. United States, the landmark 1971 case which permitted the publication of the Pentagon Papers, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in his majority opinion wrote, “Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose ...

San Francisco Ballot Measure Would Tax Empty Storefronts In Attempt To Boost Retail Sector

If you tax something, you generally get less of it. That logic undergirds a San Francisco ballot measure that would tax vacant storefronts in hopes of filling them with thriving retail businesses. Supporters of the idea argue that the city is facing ...

Impeachment And The Spending Power Revisited

Impeachment and the Spending Power Revisited image Earlier today, House Democrats released two draft articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. In September, I wrote two posts explaining why, if Trump withheld congressionally appropriated ...

High School Cancels 'Tarzan' Musical Because Parents Said It's Racist

Add Disney's  Tarzan  to the list of theater productions no longer tolerated on a school campus. Alexander Hamilton High School in Elmsford, New York, had planned to stage a musical based on the Disney version of Tarzan . But the production was ...

3 Winners And 3 Losers From Today's North America Trade Deal Announcement

Less than an hour after announcing two articles of impeachment aimed at ending President Donald Trump's tenure, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) announced a handshake deal with the Trump administration to pass a new North American free ...

The $100m ARR Club

Hello and welcome to a lightweight series I’m writing while I recapture my footing at TechCrunch. It’s lovely to be back, and I’m excited to chat about what’s going on with private companies, public markets and the space ...

Iraqi Protests Are Yet Another Reason To End U.S. Intervention

After months of deadly, large-scale grassroots protests demanding reform in Baghdad, Iraqi, Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi announced his intent to resign and the country's parliament approved his resignation. In the protests, about 400 ...

ExxonMobil Did Not Mislead Shareholders About Climate Risks, Rules New York Court

Grandstanding New York state Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman began a case in 2015 against ExxonMobil in which he accused the company of lying to its shareholders about what it knew of the risks of climate change to its future profits. The ...

What The U.S. Media Get Totally Wrong About Brexit: Daniel Hannan

On December 12, voters in the United Kingdom head to the polls for a general election that will decide the fate of Brexit, the long-delayed British withdrawal from the European Union. To understand the stakes of the election—which will result in ...

Apple’S New Parental Controls Can Limit Who Kids Can Call, Text And FaceTime And When

Apple’s new parental controls can limit who kids can call, text and FaceTime and when image An update to Apple’s iOS operating system, out today, will give parents a new set of tools to fight back against kids’ iPhone addiction. With the release of iOS 13.3, parents will for the first time be able to set limits over who kids can ...

The Inspector General’S FBI Report Should Disturb Republicans And Democrats Alike

Fair-minded readers of Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz’s report detailing his investigation of the FBI’s decision to open its “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into potential links between Russia and ...

What It Takes To Make A Federal Judge "Perplexed And Perturbed"

Last Thursday, a divided panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit stayed two preliminary injunctions that had been issued against the Trump Administration's effort to redefine the term "public charge" for purposes of immigration law. ...

Zetwerk, An 18-Month-Old Indian b2b Marketplace For Manufacturing Items, Raises $32m

Zetwerk, an Indian business-to-business marketplace for manufacturing items, has closed a significantly large financing round as it scales its operations in the nation and also helps local businesses find customers overseas. The 18-month-old ...

An IOS Bug In AirDrop Let Anyone Temporarily Lock-Up Nearby IPhones

Apple has fixed a bug in iOS 13.3, out today, which let anyone temporarily lock users out of their iPhones and iPads by forcing their devices into an inescapable loop. Kishan Bagaria found a bug in AirDrop, which allows users to share files ...

Is Your Startup Protected Against Insider Threats?

We’ve talked about securing your startup , the need to understand phishing risks  and how not to handle a data breach . But we haven’t yet discussed one of the more damaging threats that all businesses large and small face: the insider ...