Sovereign Rights

Roughly a year ago, Google offered health-data company Cerner Corp. an unusually rich proposal. Cerner was interviewing Silicon Valley giants to pick a storage provider for 250 million health records, one of the largest collections of U.S. patient data. Google dispatched former chief executive Eric Schmidt to personally pitch Cerner over several phone calls and offered around $250 million in discounts and incentives, people familiar with the matter say ...

A report from the Paris-based Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) on Sunday charged Iranian officials with killing one person who was detained during last month’s protests and torturing several others. Three imprisoned students told KHRN they were threatened with rape and ordered not to discuss sexual and physical violence they experienced or witnessed. KHRN said it has accumulated “evidence and testimony from people that showed high ...

In an exclusive report Friday that outraged human rights advocates worldwide, The Guardian revealed that Canadian police wanted snipers on standby for a January 2019 crackdown on Indigenous land defenders who were blocking construction of a natural gas pipeline through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. The Guardian reported on official records—documents as well as audio and video content—reviewed by the newspaper related to the police “invasion” that led ...

There are several schools of thought amongst those of us who have a ‘finger on the pulse,’ regarding what is really going on with the COVID-19 ‘crisis.’  But one thing of which we are very sure is that what it is NOT all about is a highly dangerous disease that will kill millions if left unchecked. Since when did our ‘lords and masters’ care anything whatsoever ...

The Hong Kong pro-democracy movement fueled record voter turnout and a crushing defeat for pro-China parties in Sunday’s District Council election, leaving the establishment with only 60 of the nearly 500 seats on the council. Voters took to the streets to celebrate the victories – and the losses of public officials who had become the villains of the pro-democracy movement like Junius Ho, a District Council ...

Another effort to warn U.S. citizens of the imminent and mounting threats to their sovereignty went largely unreported. A staff report from the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations entitled “Threats to the U.S. Research Enterprise: China’s Talent Recruitment Plans” should have been called “China’s plans to rule the World Through the Theft of U.S. Technology.” The report details “not only the lengths and expense China has ...

Google is facing a federal investigation after a report that revealed the tech giant was working on a project to collect health data on millions of Americans. Google partnered with Ascension, the second-largest health care system in the U.S., in an effort to create software using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to analyze patient information and give people recommendations to improve their health as part of a not-so-secret project titled ...

Google has agreed to purchase fitness watchmaker Fitbit for about $2.1 billion, the activity-tracking company announced in a Friday press release. Both companies have received backlash for their data-collection practices — Google for its massive scale of data collection and Fitbit for collecting specific individual health-related data. “Fitbit will come under Google’s privacy policy. Similar to our other products, including Fit, we will be transparent about the data we collect and ...

Facebook has agreed to pay the Information Commissioner’s Office, the United Kingdom’s privacy regulator, a £500,000 fine on Wednesday over its Cambridge Analytica data leak, but did not admit any wrongdoing in the matter. The fine, equal to about $644,000 at current exchange rates, comes after more than a year of legal back-and-forth between the social network and U.K. regulators. It’s also the maximum amount the ...

As many as a million Chileans protested peacefully late into the evening on Friday in the capital Santiago in the biggest rallies yet since violence broke out a week ago over entrenched inequality in the South American nation. Protesters waving national flags, dancing, banging pots with wooden spoons and bearing placards urging political and social change streamed through the streets, walking for miles (km) from around ...