5: MH17: Missile fired from Russia-backed rebel area
A Malaysian airliner shot down in eastern Ukraine was hit by a missile launched from an area controlled by Russia-backed rebels and the delivery system then retreated back into Russian territory, investigators said on Wednesday.
The findings challenge Russia’s suggestion that Malaysia Airlines flight 17 – en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in July 2014 – was brought down by the Ukrainian military. All 298 people on board, most of them Dutch citizens, were killed.
Aljazeera
4: Queensland’s Women’s Prison Is So Overcrowded Inmates Have to Sleep on the Floor
Brisbane Women’s Correctional Facility was built to house 258 prisoners but there are currently 366 female inmates living there. Released on Tuesday, a damning report written by Queensland Ombudsman Phil Clarke exposes how dire the situation has become. In the overcrowded conditions, many inmates are sleeping on the floor—some even with their heads pressed up against the toilet in their cell.
“In my view, Queensland Corrective Services has failed to provide adequate living conditions for prisoners at the BWCF [Brisbane Women’s Correctional Facility],” Clarke writes in the report.
His report details the many instances where two prisoners are forced to share tiny cells that are designed for one person. This means that one inmate must sleep on the floor, with their head next to the toilet—neither hygienic nor comfortable. Any sense of privacy goes out the window.
Vice News
3: APPLE LOGS YOUR IMESSAGE CONTACTS — AND MAY SHARE THEM WITH POLICE
APPLE PROMISES THAT your iMessage conversations are safe and out of reach from anyone other than you and your friends. But according to a document obtained by The Intercept, your blue-bubbled texts do leave behind a log of which phone numbers you are poised to contact and shares this (and other potentially sensitive metadata) with law enforcement when compelled by court order.
Every time you type a number into your iPhone for a text conversation, the Messages app contacts Apple servers to determine whether to route a given message over the ubiquitous SMS system, represented in the app by those déclassé green text bubbles, or over Apple’s proprietary and more secure messaging network, represented by pleasant blue bubbles, according to the document. Apple records each query in which your phone calls home to see who’s in the iMessage system and who’s not.
This log also includes the date and time when you entered a number, along with your IP address — which could, contrary to a 2013 Apple claim that “we do not store data related to customers’ location,” identify a customer’s location. Apple is compelled to turn over such information via court orders for systems known as “pen registers” or “trap and trace devices,” orders that are not particularly onerous to obtain, requiring only that government lawyers represent they are “likely” to obtain information whose “use is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.” Apple confirmed to The Intercept that it only retains these logs for a period of 30 days, though court orders of this kind can typically be extended in additional 30-day periods, meaning a series of monthlong log snapshots from Apple could be strung together by police to create a longer list of whose numbers someone has been entering.
The Intercept
Police in the San Diego, California, suburb of El Cajon shot and killed an unarmed African-American man Tuesday, after his sister called 911 to report her brother was having a mental health emergency. Eyewitnesses said 30-year-old Alfred Olango was holding his hands up when he was tased by one police officer and then fired upon five times by another officer. In video posted online, Alfred Olango’s grieving sister is seen tearfully confronting police. She tells them, “I called you to help me, but you killed my brother.”
Democracy Now
1: Two Aleppo hospitals bombed out of service in ‘catastrophic’ airstrikes
Airstrikes by forces loyal to the Syrian government have bombed out of service the two largest hospitals in besieged eastern Aleppo, which serve a quarter of a million civilians, in what doctors have described as a catastrophic campaign that is testing the conscience of the world.
“You cannot imagine what we see every day: children who are coming to us as body parts. We collect the body parts and wrap them in shrouds and bury them,” said Bara’a, a nurse at one of the affected hospitals, who was present during the bombings.
“Tell the world to wake up, to wake their consciences. Where are you? When Palestine was being destroyed everyone got involved. Why are Syria’s children being forgotten? Nobody is doing anything to reduce this suffering.”
The Guardian
