Ditched Google for DuckDuckGo...

When you realise that most things you search for online are really boring and obvious, you soon realise you don't really need Google in your life.

I ditched Google for DuckDuckGo. Here's why you should too
By James Temperton
WIRED, 24 November 2019

What was the last thing you searched for online? For me, it was ‘$120 in pounds’. Before that, I wanted to know the capital of Albania (Tirana), the Twitter handle of Liberal Democrat deputy leader Ed Davey (he’s @EdwardJDavey) and dates of bank holidays in the UK for 2019 (it’s a late Easter next year, folks). Thrilling, I’m sure you’ll agree. But something makes these searches, in internet terms, a bit unusual. Shock, horror, I didn’t use Google. I used DuckDuckGo. And, after two years in the wilderness, I’m pretty sure I’m sold on a post-Google future.

It all started with a realisation: most the things I search for are easy to find. Did I really need the all-seeing, all-knowing algorithms of Google to assist me? Probably not. So I made a simple change: I opened up Firefox on my Android phone and switched Google search for DuckDuckGo. As a result, I’ve had a fairly tedious but important revelation: I search for really obvious stuff. Google’s own data backs this up. Its annual round-up of the most searched-for terms is basically a list of names and events: World Cup, Avicii, Mac Miller, Stan Lee, Black Panther, Megan Markle. The list goes on. And I don’t need to buy into Google’s leviathan network of privacy-invading trackers to find out what Black Panther is and when I can go and see it at my local cinema.

While I continue to use Google at work (more out of necessity as my employer runs on G-Suite), on my phone I’m all about DuckDuckGo. I had, based on zero evidence, convinced myself that finding things on the internet was hard and, inevitably, involved a fair amount of tracking. After two years of not being tracked and targeted I have slowly come to realise that this is nonsense.

DuckDuckGo works in broadly the same way as any other search engine, Google included. It combines data from hundreds of sources including Wolfram Alpha, Wikipedia and Bing, with its own web crawler, to surface the most relevant results. Google does exactly the same, albeit on a somewhat larger scale. The key difference: DuckDuckGo does not store IP addresses or user information.

Billed as the search engine that doesn’t track you, DuckDuckGo processes around 1.5 billion searches every month. Google, for contrast, processes around 3.5 billion searches per day. It’s hardly a fair fight, but DuckDuckGo is growing. Back in 2012, it averaged just 45 million searches per month. While Google still operates in a different universe, the actual difference in the results you see when you search isn’t so far apart. In fact, in many respects, DuckDuckGo is better. Its search results aren’t littered with Google products and services – boxes and carousels to try and persuade people to spend more time in Google’s family of apps.

Search for, say, ‘Iron Man 2’ and Google will first tell you it can be purchased from Google Play or YouTube from £9.99. It will then suggest you play a trailer for the film on, where else, YouTube. The film is also “liked” by 92 per cent of Google users and people searching for this also search for, you guessed it, Iron Man and Iron Man 3. The same search on DuckDuckGo pulls in a snippet from Wikipedia and quick links to find out more on IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Amazon or iTunes. For the most part, the top of Google’s page of results directs you towards more Google products and services.

Go further still and search for ‘Iron Man 2 cast’ and Google displays a carousel of names and pictures right at the top of the page. As a result, 50 per cent of all Google searches now end without a click. Great for Google, bad for the list of websites below that also contain this information and that you will never visit. Do the same search on DuckDuckGo and the top result is IMDb. It might sound small but issues like this are fundamental to how the internet works – and who makes the most money from it. Google’s prioritisation of its results, and a perceived bias towards its own products and services, has landed the company in hot water with the European Commission slapping it with multi-billion pound fines and launching investigation after investigation into alleged anti-competitive behaviour. What’s good for Google, the commission argues, isn’t necessarily good for consumers or competitors.

Then there’s privacy. Search for something on DuckDuckGo and, for the most part, you just get a list of links or a simple snippet with exactly the information you were looking for. And it does all this without storing or tracking my search history. Nor is what I search for collected and shared with advertisers, allowing them to micro-target me with a myriad of things I’m never likely to buy. The ads I do see in DuckDuckGo, which the company explains makes it more than enough money to operate, are more general. My search for bank holidays in the UK returned an advert for a package holiday company.

A quick office survey revealed similar search banality: recent Googles included ‘capitalist’, ‘toxoplasmosis’ and ‘hyde park police’. For the most part, what we’re looking for online is simple: it’s definitions, companies, names and places. Where DuckDuckGo has struggled is when I look for something incredibly specific. So, for example, search for ‘film Leonardo Dicaprio goats scene’ in DuckDuckGo and it doesn’t work out you’re looking for Blood Diamond. Google does. While Google, with its vastly greater tranche of search data, is able to second-guess what I’m after, DuckDuckGo requires a bit more hand-holding. That doesn’t mean I can’t find what I’m looking for, but it does mean I have to modify my search term a couple of times to narrow things down.

But such moments are rare and fleeting. Yes, Google has more bells and whistles. But such bells and whistles are, once you stop seeing them, easily forgotten. A realisation that most of your online searches are really bloody obvious is somewhat liberating. You don’t need to be tracked and targeted to work out the name of that hideous earworm that’s been stuck in your head all day (in my case it was Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles, I don’t know why). DuckDuckGo helps you find it in the same way Google does: you tap in a random line of lyrics, it finds them on a site with song lyrics on it and voila, the earworm is dead.

It’s not a fair fight, but it is one, oddly, where the small guy can compete. It might seem ludicrous – DuckDuckGo has 78 employees and Google 114,096 – but often the outcome is the same. For the majority of your searches David, it turns out, is just as good as Goliath.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Essential Info...

Artificial intelligence: Cheat sheet
by Brandon Vigliarolo
Tech Republic, October 23, 2020

Learn artificial intelligence basics, business use cases, and more in this beginner's guide to using AI in the enterprise.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next big thing in business computing. Its uses come in many forms, from simple tools that respond to customer chat, to complex machine learning systems that predict the trajectory of an entire organization. Popularity does not necessarily lead to familiarity, and despite its constant appearance as a state-of-the-art feature, AI is often misunderstood.

In order to help business leaders understand what AI is capable of, how it can be used, and where to begin an AI journey, it's essential to first dispel the myths surrounding this huge leap in computing technology.

What is artificial intelligence?

When AI comes to mind, it's easy to get pulled into a world of science-fiction robots like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, Skynet from the Terminator series, and Marvin the paranoid android from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The reality of AI is nothing like fiction, though. Instead of fully autonomous thinking machines that mimic human intelligence, we live in an age where computers can be taught to perform limited tasks that involve making judgments similar to those made by people, but are far from being able to reason like human beings.

Modern AI can perform image recognition, understand the natural language and writing patterns of humans, make connections between different types of data, identify abnormalities in patterns, strategize, predict, and more.

All artificial intelligence comes down to one core concept: Pattern recognition. At the core of all applications and varieties of AI is the simple ability to identify patterns and make inferences based on those patterns.

AI isn't truly intelligent in the way we define intelligence: It can't think and lacks reasoning skills, it doesn't show preferences or have opinions, and it's not able to do anything outside of the very narrow scope of its training.

That doesn't mean AI isn't useful for businesses and consumers trying to solve real-world problems, it just means that we're nowhere close to machines that can actually make independent decisions or arrive at conclusions without being given the proper data first. Artificial intelligence is still a marvel of technology, but it's still far from replicating human intelligence or truly intelligent behavior.

What can artificial intelligence do?

AI's power lies in its ability to become incredibly skilled at doing the things humans train it to. Microsoft and Alibaba independently built AI machines capable of better reading comprehension than humans, Microsoft has AI that is better at speech recognition than its human builders, and some researchers are predicting that AI will outperform humans in most everything in less than 50 years.

That doesn't mean those AI creations are truly intelligent--only that they're capable of performing human-like tasks with greater efficiency than us error-prone organic beings. If you were to try, say, to give a speech recognition AI an image-recognition task, it would fail completely. All AI systems are built for very specific tasks, and they don't have the capability to do anything else.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, artificial intelligence and machine learning has seen a surge of activity as businesses rush to fill holes left by employees forced to work remotely, or those who've lost jobs due to the financial strain of the pandemic.

The quick adoption of AI during the pandemic highlights another important thing that AI can do: Replace human workers. According to Gartner, 79% of businesses are currently exploring or piloting AI projects, meaning those projects are in the early post-COVID-19 stages of development. What the pandemic has done for AI is cause a shift in priorities and applications: Instead of focusing on financial analysis and consumer insight, post-pandemic AI projects are focusing on customer experience and cost optimization, Algorithmia found.

Like other AI applications, customer experience and cost optimization are based on pattern recognition. In the case of the former, AI bots can perform many basic customer service tasks, freeing employees up to only address cases that need human intervention. AI like this has been particularly widespread during the pandemic, when workers forced out of call centers put stress on the customer service end of business.

What are the business applications of artificial intelligence?

Modern AI systems are capable of amazing things, and it's not hard to imagine what kind of business tasks and problem solving exercises they could be suited to. Think of any routine task, even incredibly complicated ones, and there's a possibility an AI can do it more accurately and quickly than a human--just don't expect it to do science fiction-level reasoning.

In the business world, there are plenty of AI applications, but perhaps none is gaining traction as much as business analytics and its end goal: Prescriptive analytics.

Business analytics is a complicated set of processes that aim to model the present state of a business, predict where it will go if kept on its current trajectory, and model potential futures with a given set of changes. Prior to the AI age, analytics work was slow, cumbersome, and limited in scope.

When modeling the past of a business, it's necessary to account for nearly endless variables, sort through tons of data, and include all of it in an analysis that builds a complete picture of the up-to-the-present state of an organization. Think about the business you're in and all the things that need to be considered, and then imagine a human trying to calculate all of it--cumbersome, to say the least.

Predicting the future with an established model of the past can be easy enough, but prescriptive analysis, which aims to find the best possible outcome by tweaking an organization's current course, can be downright impossible without AI help.

There are many artificial intelligence software platforms and AI machines designed to do all that heavy lifting, and the results are transforming businesses: What was once out of reach for smaller organizations is now feasible, and businesses of all sizes can make the most of each resource by using artificial intelligence to design the perfect future.

Analytics may be the rising star of business AI, but it's hardly the only application of artificial intelligence in the commercial and industrial worlds. Other AI use cases for businesses include the following.

•     Recruiting and employment: Human beings can often overlook qualified candidates, or candidates can fail to make themselves noticed. Artificial intelligence can streamline recruiting by filtering through larger numbers of candidates more quickly, and by noticing qualified people who may go overlooked.
•     Fraud detection: Artificial intelligence is great at picking up on subtle differences and irregular behavior. If trained to monitor financial and banking traffic, AI systems can pick up on subtle indicators of fraud that humans may miss.
•     Cybersecurity: Just as with financial irregularities, artificial intelligence is great at detecting indicators of hacking and other cybersecurity issues.
•     Data management: Using AI to categorize raw data and find relations between items that were previously unknown.
•     Customer relations: Modern AI-powered chatbots are incredibly good at carrying on conversations thanks to natural language processing. AI chatbots can be a great first line of customer interaction.
•     Healthcare: Not only are some AIs able to detect cancer and other health concerns before doctors, they can also provide feedback on patient care based on long-term records and trends.
•     Predicting market trends: Much like prescriptive analysis in the business analytics world, AI systems can be trained to predict trends in larger markets, which can lead to businesses getting a jump on emerging trends.
•     Reducing energy use: Artificial intelligence can streamline energy use in buildings, and even across cities, as well as make better predictions for construction planning, oil and gas drilling, and other energy-centric projects.
•     Marketing: AI systems can be trained to increase the value of marketing both toward individuals and larger markets, helping organizations save money and get better marketing results.

If a problem involves data, there's a good possibility that AI can help. This list is hardly complete, and new innovations in AI and machine learning are being made all the time.

What AI platforms are available?

When adopting an AI strategy, it's important to know what sorts of software are available for business-focused AI. There are a wide variety of platforms available from the usual cloud-hosting suspects like Google, AWS, Microsoft, and IBM, and choosing the right one can mean the difference between success and failure.

AWS Machine Learning offers a wide variety of tools that run in the AWS cloud. AI services, pre-built frameworks, analytics tools, and more are all available, with many designed to take the legwork out of getting started. AWS offers pre-built algorithms, one-click machine learning training, and training tools for developers getting started in, or expanding their knowledge of AI development.

Google Cloud offers similar AI solutions to AWS, as well as having several pre-built total AI solutions that organizations can (ideally) plug into their organizations with minimal effort. Google's AI offerings include the TensorFlow open source machine learning library.

Microsoft's AI platform comes with pre-generated services, ready-to-deploy cloud infrastructure, and a variety of additional AI tools that can be plugged in to existing models. Its AI Lab also offers a wide range of AI apps that developers can tinker with and learn from what others have done. Microsoft also offers an AI school with educational tracks specifically for business applications.

Watson is IBM's version of cloud-hosted machine learning and business AI, but it goes a bit further with more AI options. IBM offers on-site servers custom built for AI tasks for businesses that don't want to rely on cloud hosting, and it also has IBM AI OpenScale, an AI platform that can be integrated into other cloud hosting services, which could help to avoid vendor lock-in.

Before choosing an AI platform, it's important to determine what sorts of skills you have available within your organization, and what skills you'll want to focus on when hiring new AI team members. The platforms can require specialization in different sorts of development and data science skills, so be sure to plan accordingly.

What AI skills will businesses need to invest in?

With business AI taking so many forms, it can be tough to determine what skills an organization needs to implement it.

As previously reported by TechRepublic, finding employees with the right set of AI skills is the problem most commonly cited by organizations looking to get started with artificial intelligence.

Skills needed for an AI project differ based on business needs and the platform being used, though most of the biggest platforms (like those listed above) support most, if not all, of the most commonly used programming languages and skills needed for AI.

TechRepublic covered in March 2018 the 10 most in-demand AI skills, which is an excellent summary of the types of training an organization should look at when building or expanding a business AI team:

    Machine learning
    Python
    R
    Data science
    Hadoop
    Big data
    Java
    Data mining
    Spark
    SAS

Many business AI platforms offer training courses in the specifics of running their architecture and the programming languages needed to develop more AI tools. Businesses that are serious about AI should plan to either hire new employees or give existing ones the time and resources necessary to train in the skills needed to make AI projects succeed.

How can businesses start using artificial intelligence?

Getting started with business AI isn't as easy as simply spending money on an AI platform provider and spinning up some pre-built models and algorithms. There's a lot that goes into successfully adding AI to an organization.

At the heart of it all is good project planning. Adding artificial intelligence to a business, no matter how it will be used, is just like any business transformation initiative. Here is an outline of just one way to approach getting started with business AI.

    Determine your AI objective. Figure out how AI can be used in your organization and to what end. By focusing on a narrower implementation with a specific goal, you can better allocate resources.

    Identify what needs to happen to get there. Once you know where you want to be, you can figure out where you are and how to make the journey. This could include starting to sort existing data, gathering new data, hiring talent, and other pre-project steps.

    Build a team. With an end goal in sight and a plan to get there, it's time to assemble the best team to make it happen. This can include current employees, but don't be afraid to go outside the organization to find the most qualified people. Also, be sure to allow existing staff to train so they have the opportunity to contribute to the project.

    Choose an AI platform. Some AI platforms may be better suited to particular projects, but by and large they all offer similar products in order to compete with each other. Let your team give recommendations on which AI platform to choose--they're the experts who will be in the trenches.

    Begin implementation. With a goal, team, and platform, you're ready to start working in earnest. This won't be quick: AI machines need to be trained, testing on subsets of data has to be performed, and lots of tweaks will need to be made before a business AI is ready to hit the real world.

Londoners march against more police powers...

This is scary. A little bit here, some there, it is how they take your rights away. Baby steps. This is the blueprint to fascism in our time. We are witnessing the steps to full control by some invisible power. There are already existing laws which could have been used against XR and BLM, but the police were ordered to stand by and watch. That was a political choice, not a lack of legal restrictions.

They were ordered to stand down by the Democrats to make Trump look bad on leadership, and saying he is a racist.

The government argues that the legislation is aimed at curtailing actions that cause "unjustifiable disruption or distress" to others", but with lockdowns and other convid restrictions  isn't that is exactly what the govt itself is doing, causing unjustifiable disruption and stress to others?

Zio oligarchy who rules the West is worried the sheep population may wake up and realise that they are nothing but slaves. So it is trying to put them in a cage before they can threaten its power. Sadly, most sheep willingly obey.

Resistance will become the new normal as people see that the pandemic was a cover story for a totalitarian government, who imposed martial law, limited the right of free speech and assembly, in a complete takeover of the civil space.

More of this needs to happen worldwide with all the attempts  going on by various local and country governments in their efforts to continue to strip the people of their rights.....their freedoms....keeping them under control and subjective.  The world goal is to make the people simply passive slaves controlled by whatever whim their government may impose upon them.

Resistance to the 'new normal' is happening everywhere the Dictatorships are attempting to keep their 'covid' powers.

‘Kill the Bill’: Londoners march against proposed law that would give police more powers to crack down on public protests
RT : 3 Apr, 2021

Many in the UK defied the rules and rallied against controversial legislation that would allow authorities to place additional restrictions on public protests there. London police had urged people not to attend the demonstrations.

The protests were held in 25 cities across England and Wales, including London. People marched from the capital's Hyde Park with placards saying 'Protect our rights' and 'Kill the Bill,' referring to the controversial proposed legislation, known as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.

London's Metropolitan Police urged the public not to attend large gatherings that violate Covid-19 regulations and are punishable by fines. Similar rallies last month led to clashes with police and to arrests.

The bill, which passed its second reading in the House of Commons on March 16, gives police additional powers to restrict and control all public protests, while reinforcing the punishment for public disturbance.

The government argues that the legislation is aimed at curtailing actions that cause "unjustifiable disruption or distress" to others. The bill was introduced on the heels of the Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter protests that also involved rioting and property damage.

Opponents of the bill believe it will allow a crackdown on the freedom of assembly. Labour Party MP David Lammy described the bill as "draconian" and argued that it will incentivize authorities to move against any protests they do not like.

Protests in the UK over proposed legislation that would crack down on public demonstrations have led to ten officers being injured and dozens people arrested, according to police, who describe the event as a “policing operation.”

“Today’s policing operation is still ongoing and arrest numbers may rise, but at this time, 26 people have been arrested for a variety of offences,” London’s Metropolitan Police announced on Saturday hours after numerous protests kicked off in 25 cities in the UK, including London.

It was also revealed that 10 officers have sustained injuries “during the operation,” but none of them have been serious.

In a statement, Commander Ade Adelekan, who is leading the “policing operation,” said the “vast majority” of protesters have adhered to social distancing guidelines “engaged with my officers when required and left when asked.”

A small majority being less cooperative, however, led police to move to “the enforcement stage,” according to Adelekan.

He added that the protests threatened the “progress” that has been made in the fight against Covid-19, and blasted “the selfish actions of a small number of people.”

"We remain in the middle of a global pandemic and we have made great progress in controlling the spread of the virus; we will not allow the selfish actions of a small number of people to put Londoners progress in jeopardy."

Just before their update, police urged people to “leave and return home.” Officials had previously warned citizens that such large demonstrations violate current Covid-19 restrictions and they could be fined by police.

Demonstrators on Saturday marched and gave speeches while holding signs with slogans such as ‘Kill the Bill,’ referring to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. The proposed legislation would give police more authority in restricting public

protests, supposedly in an effort to avoid rioting and destruction to property. Critics believe the “draconian” bill is thinly-veiled crackdown on the freedom of assembly, which has already been de-facto heavily restricted by the tough British Covid-19 regulations.

Secretive Israeli nuclear facility confirmed by satellite!

In Dimona, a small city nestled in the Negev desert of southern Israel, is a nuclear plant first built in secret in the 1950s.

An obscure US regulation known as the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment compelled the US government to blur satellite imagery exclusively over Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

= = =

Clearer view of secretive Israeli nuclear facility is visible by satellite thanks to two archaeologists
By Tom Joyner in Jerusalem
ABC, Apr 5, 2021

It was late one evening in 2017 when somewhere in the minds of Michael Fradley and his colleague Andrea Zerbini a light flickered on.

The two Oxford University archaeologists often found they worked better after hours, once the office had emptied and with no phone calls or emails to distract them.

Both specialists in the Middle East, the pair were two years into a project involving satellite imagery of Israel and the West Bank when they noticed something odd.

"From the start, we knew that there was a problem," Dr Fradley said.

They were trying to access photos taken over Israel but noticed they were all blurry, and not high enough quality to make out any of the details on the ground they were looking for.

The blurry satellite imagery of Israel

They didn't know it then, but Dr Fradley and Dr Zerbini had run into an obscure US regulation known as the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, which compelled the US government to blur satellite imagery exclusively over Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

During the Cold War, the United States' satellite program was as much a political instrument as it was a practical one. And at the time, lobbying of the US Congress by Israel, which argues allowing open access to satellite pictures endangers its national security, led to the passing of the little-known amendment at the end of the millennium.

With many of the world's largest commercially available satellite systems having long been owned by American companies, this has meant for decades satellite imagery over Israel on websites like Google Earth has been blurred out.

To the minds of the two researchers, there didn't seem to be a whole lot of information about the problem on the internet, and the situation presented an interesting challenge.

So, over many evenings in 2017, the pair got to work as they tried to find a workaround to accessing the detailed satellite imagery needed for their archeological research.

Working from their modest office on campus, they trawled what felt like every corner of the web, skimming through reams of declassified reports and endless newspaper clippings.

Suddenly Dr Fradley and Dr Zerbini found themselves in territory that was at once familiar and unfamiliar — the work gave them the same thrill of the hunt for new knowledge.

But it also gave them a feeling they were part of something subversive. They had become quasi-internet sleuths looking for answers on a subject that was very different to their day jobs.

"We were archaeologists," Dr Fradley laughed.

"We didn't really know anything about space law."

Finally, after two weeks of head-scratching, the pair had a breakthrough.

A French loophole to the rescue

The solution at first seemed so obvious that Dr Fradley's immediate thought was that they had made a mistake.

The pair had discovered there were other companies producing satellite imagery, at a cost. That included Airbus, a French aerospace company, which was among the first non-American companies to produce high-resolution satellite imagery of Israel and the Palestinian Territories, unbounded by the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment.

Having obtained clearer satellite pictures, Dr Fradley and Dr Zerbini set about publishing their findings, and wrote to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, the agency that regulates satellite systems, to alert them to their discovery.

Under the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, Israeli satellite imagery must specifically be "no more detailed or precise than satellite imagery of Israel that is available from commercial sources".

In July 2020, after some back and forth, the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment was quietly updated to remove its exception for Israel.

In response, Israeli Defence Ministry's head of space programs told an Israeli radio station that "we would always prefer to be photographed at the lowest resolution possible".

"It's always preferable to be seen blurred, rather than precisely," Amnon Harari said in July.

The rule change opened up brand new opportunities for scientific and environmental research that had previously been impossible.

But it also led to some unexpected discoveries.

The mystery of the nuclear facility

In Dimona, a small city nestled in the Negev desert of southern Israel, is a nuclear plant first built in secret in the 1950s.

Israel maintains a policy of what is known as "nuclear ambiguity", meaning it neither confirms nor denies the existence of a nuclear program, and it is not a signatory of the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty.

The airspace above the facility is closed to passing aircraft.

But if a plane were to fly over, its passengers would see below them a collection of squat buildings lining a grid of roads, all surrounded by sand.

For decades, that layout has barely changed.

But in February an international group of nuclear experts noticed "significant new construction" from analysis of commercially available satellite imagery

That imagery was made recently available by the relaxing of the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment.

Shortly afterwards, high-resolution photos of the Dimona facility produced by American company Planet Labs — only available since the relaxing of the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment — was obtained by the Associated Press, revealing a new dig about the size of a soccer pitch.

"[What] the Israeli government is doing at this secret nuclear weapons plant is something for the Israeli government to come clean about," Daryl Kimball of the US-based Arms Control Association told the Associated Press at the time.

Andrea Zerbini never saw the fruits of his labour

Today, Dr Fradley is still an archaeologist at Oxford University and looks back on the satellite imagery saga he helped shape with fondness.

"It was a really happy moment," he said, recalling the day the US government told him the rules were changing.

"But it was tinged with real sadness."

In 2018, his research partner and colleague Andrea Zerbini died after a battle with a rare form of liver cancer.

"He was the only other person who really kind of understood the nuances and how much we put into it," Dr Fradley said.

In an obituary for Dr Zerbini, Dr Fradley paid tribute to his friend and colleague.

"It is our work in early 2017 investigating an obscure piece of US [satellite] legislation that really sticks in my mind when I think of our time working together," he wrote.

"We were immensely proud of the work that we had done."

An African Climate Heroine Turning Waste to Wealth

Meet the “Queen of Recycling”, Isatou Ceesay. Growing up in the Gambia – where there was virtually no recycling infrastructure – Ceesay looked at the piles of waste and burning plastic around her and decided to take matters into her own hands. She created a movement called One Plastic Bag, educating women to cut down on single-use plastic and recycle plastic waste into sellable products for income.

Isatou Ceesay and the Women Turning Waste to Wealth
by Lily Dyu

Isatou stood at the edge of the village and looked at the ugly heap of rubbish piled high on the red earth. Amongst the discarded tins, food and bike tyres, one thing stood out: there were plastic bags everywhere. Mosquitoes swarmed above murky puddles of water pooled on bags on the ground. Two of her neighbour’s goats perched on the rubbish, foraging for food. She shooed them away. Isatou had heard that many people’s goats had died recently. When the butcher cut them open, he had found plastic knotted in their stomachs.

It was 1997, and 25-year-old Isatou Ceesay was taking a walk through her village of N’jau in the centre of the Gambia – the smallest country in Africa. As she turned down the dusty main street, women greeted her from their courtyards as they prepared vegetables and washed clothes. The smell of familiar dishes filled the air. Children played in a clearing by the forest, and cows grazed near a field of peanuts. Later that afternoon, she sat with five friends in the shade of a tree for the first meeting of her women’s group.

Over recent years, Isatou’s community had faced increasing problems with waste. In the Gambia, many people live in poverty. Here and in many countries around the world, there are no weekly rubbish collections to take away waste, so people have no choice but to leave it piled in the streets. Ever since she could remember, in her village, people had thrown their rubbish behind their homes. As a little girl, she had carried shopping back from the market in a basket, but then everyone started using plastic bags instead. Now those bags were killing animals, there were malaria outbreaks from mosquitoes, and vegetables weren’t growing because of rubbish in the soil. Worst of all, Isatou had watched her friends burning plastic as fuel for cooking. This was dangerous, releasing toxic fumes that were harmful to people. The waste problem was huge, but Isatou was determined to do something about it.

Isatou grew up in N’jau with two sisters and a brother. Her parents were farmers. As a girl, Isatou used bits of waste, like scraps of cloth and wood, to make dolls and other toys. This made her popular with her friends because children in her village didn’t have many things to play with. She was a bright girl who loved learning and always came near the top of her class. Sadly, her father died when Isatou was just 10 years old and her mother was left to support the family alone. Isatou desperately wanted to go to high school, but her mother couldn’t afford to send her. She needed Isatou to work to bring money into the home. This wasn’t unusual; in the Gambia an estimated 75 per cent of children do not have access to a proper education.

So Isatou stayed in N’jau, taking jobs and making and selling things. But she didn’t give up her passion for learning; she realised she would have to find her own way of getting the education that she had missed out on. When she was 20, she sold the cow she had inherited when her father died and used the money to attend Gambia Technical Training Institute in the capital city, Banjul, to train as a secretary. After returning home, she became a volunteer with the US Peace Corps, seeing this as a chance to get more training while helping her community. It was through the Peace Corps that Isatou learned about the possibilities of recycling waste, knowledge that would change her life and the lives of many in N’jau and beyond.

"I think that when you abuse your environment, you abuse yourself” -Isatou Ceesay

Isatou’s sister had taught her how to crochet, and this gave her an idea for how to upcycle the plastic bags that were causing so many problems – changing them from waste into something valuable. She would turn them into purses that could be sold to make money. Isatou persuaded five friends to join her to form a new women’s group, and together they collected bags from the rubbish pile, washed them and dried them out. Then, that first afternoon beneath the tree, they carefully cut each bag into a long continuous thread of plastic several centimetres wide – called ‘plarn’, or plastic yarn. With this, they started to crochet small purses for coins, using different coloured plarn to add pretty patterns. It took eight hours or more to make one purse and it used up around 10 plastic bags. The women were delighted with what they had made.

Some people laughed at Isatou and her friends, telling them they were ‘dirty’ for digging around in the rubbish. Some men told her that her plans couldn’t work because she was a woman and too young to be a leader. But Isatou believed in what she was doing. She loved helping others and relished a challenge. In her family, everyone had always worked together to solve problems, and her mother had been a great inspiration to her. In the Gambia, many girls were unable to finish school because they were needed at home to help their mothers. Isatou wanted women to have the chance to learn skills and to earn money, even if they had not been given the chance to finish their education.

Some men did not like to see the women working beneath the tree. Women were expected to take care of their homes and families while the men went out to work, and these men were afraid that the women would learn to no longer obey their husbands. Isatou moved the meetings to her house, where she and her friends could gather at night to chat and crochet purses by candlelight. They worked secretly for months until they had enough purses. Then Isatou took these to a market in the city and managed to sell them all – the city women loved them because they were so unusual.

The women continued with their tiny business, now also making shoulder bags and cosmetic purses from plarn. Many of them were earning money for the first time, and they were able to use it to buy food to help their families through the ‘hungry gap’ – the three months in the year when there were few crops from their farmland. Their husbands noticed how their family’s lives were improving and encouraged their wives in their purse-making. The women no longer worked in secret, and soon others joined them. Within a year, Isatou’s community recycling project had grown to 50 women and she named it the N’jau Recycling and Income Generation Group (NRIGG).

Women in N’jau were now able to save some money, and Isatou helped them to open their own bank accounts. With their savings, many of the women could afford to support their families in ways that would have been impossible before. Their daughters could continue into secondary school and they could pay for medical treatment when they needed it. The women helped their community, too, each contributing some of their earnings to start a community garden to grow vegetables, and to help pay for orphans to go to school.

But Isatou wanted to find more ways to share her knowledge and help people in her village. In 2000, she got a job as a language and culture helper with the Peace Corps and, through this, she helped to secure funding to build a skill centre in N’jau, where the women could meet and work together. Here they could learn about the importance of caring for their environment and about the dangers of burning plastic. Isatou started to teach classes on subjects such as gardening, soap making and tie-dying, and the women were able to sell many of the things they made. She had learned about nutrition and gave cooking demonstrations on how to prepare meals full of vitamins and minerals to keep their children healthy.

The women of the NRIGG continued to make their bags and purses and, in 2007, they even started to sell them to people in America, with the help of friends Isatou had made through her work. They began to think of ideas for using other types of waste. They turned food waste into compost for their vegetable plots. They sold scrap metal, turned bike tyres into jewellery, and crafted colourful bags from old rice sacks. They made beads from paper and even learned how to turn truck tyres into armchairs and stools. They made skipping ropes and used leftover bits of plastic bags to stuff footballs, so that local children had toys to play with.

And there were other ways they could help the environment too. People usually burned charcoal for fuel, and this was made from trees cut down from the local forest. The women found a way to combine old coconut husks, mango leaves and dried grass to make briquettes. These burned just as well as charcoal, but were cheaper and saved trees. They started to sell these alongside their upcycled crafts.

Soon the women had run out of plastic bags and other useful waste in N’jau, so they started to collect these from neighbouring villages and shared their knowledge about plastic and upcycling with the people there. In 2009, Isatou got a job leading a women’s project for the Swedish NGO, or non-profit organisation, Future In Our Hands. This gave her the opportunity to work with many more communities throughout the Gambia, while also continuing her own education by studying for a diploma in community development.

In 2012, Isatou won a Making a World of Difference Award from the International Alliance for Women. Two years later, NRIGG became the Women’s Initiative Gambia, and today Isatou has trained over 11,000 people all over her country in the dangers of plastic and the opportunities for upcycling waste. But her work has had an even bigger impact as, in 2015, the Gambia’s government banned the import and use of plastic bags.

When she first started making her purses, all those years ago, Isatou’s aims had been to solve the problem of plastic waste and allow women to earn money to support their families. Now she dreams of seeing more women leaders in her country. There are now five women on the N’jau village council, something Isatou would never have imagined possible. And as a mother to three sons, she sees it as her duty to leave the world a better place for future generations. She wants all children to have the chance to go to school. If they are taught to care about the environment, she explains, then we’ll be leaving the planet in good hands.

Isatou has travelled all around the world to share her story, but she’s always happy to return home to N’jau. Today, her village is clean and tidy and you won’t find plastic bags piled in the streets. But she still remembers the villagers’ struggle with waste. Where others saw a problem, Isatou saw an opportunity – an opportunity to create a healthier environment, but above all an opportunity to change people’s lives.

US looting Syrian crude petroleum oil from Northeast

This plunder is still taking place during Biden regime as it was happening with Trump and Obama in office... In doing so, they make the victim pay for the bullet they receive and the remuneration payout for its mercenaries. Just as they have done in Iraq. That's the Western way!!

Kurds are being played by the US. They help the Yanks steal Syria's oil in exchange for a false promise of statehood. They intend to break up Syria and give a large chunk of it to the Kurds -- and by that I mean ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron. Once the Americans dry up the region and do leave, the Kurds will have made enemies with not only the rest of Syria but also Turkey and Iran. Not a wise move for a land-locked nation to get in bed with a foreign power at the expense of neighbors. Ask the Armenians.

‘Just like pirates’: Syrian minister says US controls most crude reserves in northeast, loots oil to strangle country’s economy

20 Mar, 2021

Syria’s petroleum minister has condemned US forces for acting “like pirates” as Washington continues to plunder most of the oil wealth from the country’s resource-rich northeast, where the Pentagon backs Kurdish militia groups.

“Americans and their allies are targeting the Syrian oil wealth and its tankers just like pirates,” Petroleum and Mineral Resources Minister Bassam Tomeh told state TV this week, adding that the move is designed to cripple Syria’s economy, which depends on oil revenues. 

“What has happened all through [the] Syria war has not happened in any country, in terms of preventing us from tapping our wealth resources and at the same time stopping basic commodities from reaching our country.”

Tomeh said that the total damage inflicted on the Syrian petroleum sector due to the US occupation exceeds $92 billion, noting that Washington currently controls 90% of the crude oil resources in the northeast region.

In an interview last month with the Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar, the governor of the northeastern Hasakah province, Ghassan Khalil, said that US-backed Kurdish militants were stealing 140,000 barrels of crude oil every day from fields in the area. He claimed the fighters then used tankers to smuggle the oil across the border into Iraq.

Since at least 2015, the Pentagon has offered direct support to the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-dominated faction that controls significant territory in the northeast. The US itself maintains a force of around 900 troops in the country, most embedded alongside the SDF.

While US officials maintain that the military presence in Syria, which is illegal under international law, is meant to prevent the resurgence of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), former President Donald Trump often spoke candidly about desires to grab the country’s oil wealth. 

“We’re keeping the oil – remember that,” then-President Trump said in October 2019. “I’ve always said that: ‘Keep the oil.’ We want to keep the oil. Forty-five million dollars a month? Keep the oil.”

Though Trump largely abandoned former President Barack Obama’s push to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad – which saw the US pour hundreds of millions of dollars into jihadist-linked militant groups – he repeatedly defended the occupation of oil fields while expanding that policy.

Last year, the Trump administration facilitated a deal between the SDF and an American oil firm named Delta Crescent Energy, according to Politico and other outlets. The company is headed up by a former US ambassador to Denmark, James Cain, as well as a retired officer in the Army’s elite Delta Force and a former UK oil executive. Protesting the continued looting of the oil fields, Damascus slammed the agreement “in the strongest terms,” calling the contract “null and void.”

While the Joe Biden administration has signaled that it would no longer prioritize the occupation of Syrian oil resources, just last month, local Arabic-language media reported US forces were constructing a new airport alongside the al-Omar oil field, where Washington maintains a military installation. Around the same time, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby clarified that the DOD is barred from cooperating with energy companies on the ground “except where appropriate under certain existing authorizations,” suggesting Biden may continue the practice on a limited basis. A spokesman for the US-led coalition, Colonel Wayne Marotto, reiterated that stance more recently, though did not mention the loophole cited by Kirby.

Syrian officials, including President Assad himself, have condemned Washington’s oil theft on a number of occasions, even vowing legal action. Soon after Biden’s inauguration, Syria’s UN envoy, Bashar al-Jaafari, pleaded with the new president to withdraw US forces and cease occupying the oil fields.

“The new US administration must stop acts of aggression and occupation, plundering the wealth of my country, withdraw its occupying forces from it, and stop supporting separatist militias, illegal entities, and attempts to threaten Syria's sovereignty,” Jaafari said.

Biden has so far shown little interest in pulling out of Syria, launching a series of airstrikes on militia groups based in the country last month, though US officials have nonetheless said they are reviewing the troop presence there.

The decade-long war has taken a massive toll on Syria’s oil sector, underscoring the cost of the continued American occupation. According to a report by British Petroleum, overall oil production dropped by more than 90% between 2011 and 2019, or from 353,000 barrels per day to just 24,000.

Free Speech as practised in the West...

Most people are disillusioned to think that the West allows unlimited free speech allowance, but they actually fool themselves to think that way.

They Don’t Work To Kill All Dissent, They Just Keep It From Going Mainstream
Caitlin Johnstone
February 20, 2021

One of the most consequential collective delusions circulating in our society is the belief that our society is free. Our society is exactly free enough to create the illusion that we have freedom; from that line onwards it’s just totalitarianism veiled in propaganda.

I get comments from people every day wagging their fingers at my criticisms of western imperialist agendas against nations like China or Iran saying “If you lived over there you wouldn’t be allowed to criticize the government the way you criticize western governments!”

It is true that dissidents are permitted to criticize the government systems of the US-centralized empire to an extent, but only to an extent. Yes, as long as my criticisms of capitalism, oligarchy and imperialism remain relegated to the fringes of influence I am indeed permitted to express my views unmolested. If however I somehow ascended to a position of significant mainstream influence I would be targeted and smeared until my reputation was ruined or I had a psychological breakdown and went
away. You may be certain of this.

The managers of empire do not work to crush and silence all dissent like a conventional totalitarian regime would do. They are much more clever than that.

In a society that maintains the illusion of freedom in order to prevent outrage and revolution, it does not serve rulers to stifle all dissent. Just the opposite in fact: their interests are served by having a small number of dissidents hanging around the fringes of society creating the illusion of freedom. If Johnny Hempshirt over there is allowed to stand on a soapbox and criticize the US war machine, then the US must be a free country.

So they don’t work to silence all dissent. What they do is work to make sure that dissent never hits a critical mass and goes mainstream. That’s their sweet spot. That’s what the entire imperial propaganda engine is geared toward accomplishing. Not to eliminate socialist and anti-imperialist voices, but to make sure they never attain enough influence to be politically consequential.

This is why you rarely see anyone who opposes the empire platformed on mainstream media. The imperial narrative managers work to shrink the Overton window of acceptable debate to get people arguing about how best to support imperial interests, rather than arguing about whether those interests should be supported or whether there should be an empire at all. Having on people who oppose imperialism, oligarchy and capitalism would widen that Overton window, which is against the empire’s interests.

This is also why you saw the imperial narrative managers completely lose their minds during the Tulsi Gabbard presidential campaign. It wasn’t because they feared she could win the election, it was because there was a US congresswoman standing on mainstream liberal platforms criticizing certain critical aspects of US warmongering. Someone had attained a position of influence and was using that influence to disrupt narratives that are very important for powerful people to maintain. She therefore needed to be smeared very aggressively to nullify the influence she was having.

So the good news is that they can’t get rid of us altogether or they’ll shatter the illusion of freedom, while the bad news is that they’re working tirelessly to prevent us from ever attaining a critical mass of political consequence. Our job is to find a way to outmaneuver them and attain that critical mass anyway so that we can use the power of our numbers to force real change.

We know they can’t shut us down completely or else they’ll break the illusion of freedom and lose the ability to propagandize effectively, which is an ability the entire empire depends upon.

Our job is to wake up the mainstream public. This is very feasible, as trust in the imperial media is at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information is at an all-time high. It does mean we need to stop thinking of ourselves as radicals (we’re not radical, we’re just sane) and push inward from the fringes to the heart of the mainstream public as hard as we can.

We’ve got creativity, inspiration and humor on our side, and if we can wake up a critical mass of people to the fact that they live in a profoundly unfree society disguised by propaganda we’ll have the numbers too. We absolutely can win this thing, we just have to push hard enough for it.