Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON ― The Israeli government is blocking an American citizen from taking his post with Human Rights Watch in Israel, accusing the group of engaging in “politics in the service of Palestinian propaganda.”

The 39-year-old Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization sent a request in July 2016 for its new Israel and Palestine program director, Omar Shakir, to start his assignment in October. The approval process is supposed to take 60 days, but Human Rights Watch heard nothing back until Monday.

The group received a letter from Israel’s Interior Ministry denying the work permit “on the grounds that we were not a real human rights organization,” said Shakir, a California native of Iraqi descent with a master’s degree from Georgetown and a law degree from Stanford.

The Interior Ministry cited guidance from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a letter explaining its decision not to grant Human Rights Watch’s request. “The opinion received from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that, for some time now, this organization’s public activities and reports have engaged in politics in the service of Palestinian propaganda, while falsely raising the banner of ‘human rights,’ and therefore recommended denying the application,” the letter stated.

The Israeli government did not respond to The Huffington Post’s requests for comment.

Human Rights Watch has operated in Israel for three decades, Shakir said. The last director of the Israel and Palestine program was an Israeli national and did not need a work permit. However, previous regional directors needed and received work permits from the Israeli government, he added.

On the Israel/Palestine page on its website, Human Rights Watch criticizes Israel for “severe and discriminatory restrictions on Palestinians’ human rights” and for building “unlawful settlements” in the occupied West Bank. But it also criticizes the Palestinian Authority for arresting dissenting students and activists and Hamas security forces in Gaza for using torture.

“This decision and the spurious rationale should worry anyone concerned about Israel’s commitment to basic democratic values,” Iain Levine, who oversees Human Rights Watch’s research and reporting, said in a statement. “It is disappointing that the Israeli government seems unable or unwilling to distinguish between justified criticisms of its actions and hostile political propaganda.”

Human Rights Watch pointed to a law Israel passed last July that increased reporting requirements for organizations that support Palestinian groups and receive foreign funds, but not for those that support the expansion of Jewish settlements.

Human Rights Watch got a vote of support on Thursday from the U.S. State Department, whose acting spokesman, Mark Toner, said it strongly disagreed with Israel’s description of the group.

“HRW is a credible human rights organization and even though we do not agree with all of their assertions or conclusions, given the seriousness of their efforts, we support the importance of the work they do,” Toner said. “We reference HRW reports in our own reporting, including our annual human rights reports.”

Human Rights Watch was founded in 1978 to monitor compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which included guarantees of human rights. The nonprofit now operates in some 90 nations to report on human rights conditions. In 1997, a group it co-founded, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Israel joins Egypt, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea on the list of nations that refuse entry to Human Rights Watch to monitor human rights conditions.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

WASHINGTON ― Koch Industries, one of the nation’s largest importers, is waging a campaign in Washington against a major new importation levy ― but it is doing so only on principle, the company says.

Either way, the battle puts the Kochs, who have given billions to conservative causes, at odds with House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). The irony of the fight is heightened by just how close they have been in the past. It was the Kochs who pushed hardest for Ryan to be Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012, and last year, Charles Koch was still hoping Ryan would emerge as a surprise presidential nominee even on the eve of the Republican National Convention.

The cornerstone of Ryan’s agenda is a reform of the tax code that would eliminate the current corporate tax regime and replace it with a “territorial” system that would tax imports at around 20 to 25 percent while allowing exports to flow freely. The aim is to give an advantage to U.S. manufacturers and to cut corporate taxes.

More than a hundred other countries have moved to similar systems, but it faces stiff opposition in the Senate — and from America’s big importers: Walmart, Target, Home Depot and Koch Industries.

Koch Industries, which is not thought of in the public imagination as an importer, makes the list largely for its importation of tar sands oil. In 2015, the last full year for which the Department of Energy has records, the company’s Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota imported just under 80 million barrels of tar sands oil from Canada, accounting for a quarter of all the oil imported from up north. Even though the price of tar sands oil has fallen to as low as $8 a barrel, while global crude prices are about $55 a barrel, the Kochs would end up with $640 million in imports. A 20 percent tax on $640 million in oil would cost the Kochs $128 million each year.

To put the Kochs’ importation business in context, Dole Food is considered by the Journal of Commerce to be the fourth-largest importer in the U.S. But the business press often leaves the Kochs out of such conversations. Last year, Dole pulled in $4.5 billion in revenue. Subtract from that profit and the cost of importing and distributing its fruit and other products, and you’re left with the value of the imported goods themselves — likely less than the Kochs’ $640 million in imported oil.

Koch Industries doesn’t tout Pine Bend publicly as part of its empire, but the importance to its business is hard to overstate. “This was always referred to as the crown jewel of Koch,” said one former Koch insider. “The deal that made Pine Bend refinery a part of Koch Industries was a seminal moment in the history of the company. Without Pine Bend, we probably never would have heard of Charles and David Koch, and they certainly wouldn’t be spending in elections the way they are without it.”

Acquiring Pine Bend in 1969 was “one of the most significant events in the evolution of our company,” Charles Koch wrote in his 2007 book, “The Science of Success.” It allowed the Kochs “to enter chemicals and, more recently, fibers and polymers.” The development of western Canada’s tar sands extraction industry, and the resulting pipeline boom that has become a political flashpoint at the border and on tribal lands, would have happened far differently were it not for the Koch brothers.

“Without Pine Bend, Koch Industries as you know it today does not exist. It allowed them to invest in buying and growing companies like Georgia Pacific, Molex, Invista and Koch Fertilizer,” said the Koch insider.

The volume of imports puts Koch opposition to Ryan’s importation levy into an entirely different perspective. Earlier this month, HuffPost asked Koch Industries if its opposition to the border tax would be softened by exempting oil imports. Philip Ellender, president of government and public affairs at Koch Companies Public Sector, said that if oil was carved out of the border tax, “Koch would benefit,” but they’d still oppose it on principle.

“If there is in fact a carve-out for oil ― or any industry ― we will not support it,” Ellender said. “While Koch would benefit, we are opposed to taxing consumers in order to cut our company’s taxes. We agree with Speaker Ryan on the need for comprehensive tax reform, but we do not support a border adjustment tax and his plan as currently proposed.”

But in December, when the Kochs initially announced opposition to the border tax, the messaging was a bit different, putting the focus on the manufacturing the Kochs do. “While companies like Koch who manufacture and produce many products domestically would greatly benefit in the short-term, the long-term consequences to the economy and the American consumer could be devastating,” Ellender said at the time.

David Dziok, a spokesman for Koch Industries, said this week that ultimately the Kochs would benefit from a border tax, because the tax on their imports would be passed on to consumers. “A BAT will force Americans to pay higher prices for the goods they use every single day ― from clothing to gas to groceries,” he said. “Koch Industries agrees on the need for comprehensive tax reform, but we are opposed to taxing consumers in order to cut our company’s taxes.”

But even if the company can pass on the entire increase to its consumers ― not always possible ― raising the price of gas tends to mean people will buy less gas. As fuel prices rose a decade ago, sales of gas-guzzling SUVs fell. With gas prices dropping, sales of bigger cars are on the rise. Whether the drop in demand would wash out the rise in price is impossible to predict, but a Goldman Sachs analysis of the House Republican plan predicted a 30-cent-a-gallon hike in gas prices in the short term but noted it would “likely moderate over time” as U.S. production rose and the dollar strengthened, which would drive down the price of foreign oil.

The confusion over such a basic question as whether the company would be hurt or helped, or whether its tax bill would go up or down, flows from the Kochs’ longtime insistence that their libertarian politics and their corporate self-interest are entirely unrelated. There’s glory in fighting for freedom but not in lobbying for corporate profit. People outside Washington may find it head-scratching, but maintaining this public distinction is deeply important to the Kochs, said three people who’ve worked with the company. Koch Industries and its representatives routinely refer to the brothers’ opposition to ethanol subsidies, for instance — even though they are one of the largest producers of ethanol — as evidence of the purity of their libertarian values. So lobbying that it does on public policy must be divorced from the corporate bottom line.

That lobbying is kicking into high gear, said the former Koch insider. “They’re marshaling their resources and going back to their old playbook, which means unleashing [Americans for Prosperity] and leaning on academics they have ‘sponsored,’” said the former Koch insider.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Revision wars on Wikipedia amongst human editors is an all-too-common occurrence, but new research from the UK shows that similar online battles are being waged between the site’s software robots.

Read more…

Mouse Computer hits back with their new 15.6-inch Full HD notebook, the DAIV-NG5720E1-S2. As part of the DAIV series, this creator-friendly notebook boasts a 15.6-inch 1920 x 1080 Full HD IPS LED-backlit display (sRBG ratio 95%), a 2.80GHz Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor, an Intel HM175 Chipset, a GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card, an 8GB DDR4 RAM and a 240GB SSD.

Not just that, the system also has a 2MP webcam, a multi-card reader, a built-in lithium-ion battery (up to 7.6 hours of battery driving time) and built-in stereo speakers (w/ High Definition Audio).

Running on Windows 10 Home 64-bit OS, the DAIV-NG5720E1-S2 provides dual-band WiFi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.2 + LE for connectivity. The Mouse Computer DAIV-NG5720E1-S2 is available now for 149,800 Yen (about $1,321). [Product Page]

The post Mouse Computer DAIV-NG5720E1-S2 15.6-Inch Full HD Notebook appeared first on TechFresh, Consumer Electronics Guide.

Here we have another newly launched entry-level Android 6.0 tablet ‘EB-TB60K’ from e-BALANCE. As part of the ROOMMATE brand, this budget-minded tablet is packed with a 7.0-inch 1024 x 600 capacitive multi-touch display, a 1.3GHz Rockchip RK3126 quad-core processor, a 1GB RAM and an 8GB of internal storage.

Not only that, the tablet also sports a 0.3MP front-facing camera, a 2MP rear-facing camera, a microSD card slot, a micro-USB charging port and a built-in 2200mAh battery.

Running on Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS, the EB-TB60K provides WiFi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0 for connectivity. Measuring W108mm x D188mm x H9mm and weighing 300g, the e-BALANCE EB-TB60K will set you back just 9,980 Yen (about $88). [e-BALANCE]

The post e-BALANCE EB-TB60K Entry-Level Android 6.0 Tablet Launched appeared first on TechFresh, Consumer Electronics Guide.