Despite President Obama's recent call for companies to "insource" jobs sent overseas, it turns out that the federal government itself is spending millions of dollars to train foreign students for employment in some booming career fields--including working in offshore call centers that serve U.S. businesses.
The program is called JEEP, which stands for Job Enabling English Proficiency. It's available to college students in the Philippines through USAID. That's the same agency that until a couple of years ago was spending millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to train offshore IT workers in Sri Lanka--until I reported that inconvenient truth in this story. The ensuing uproar led to the Sri Lanka initiative's termination.

In early 2001, an 11-year-old Kalama girl named Cassandra Ann Kennedy told police her dad raped her on at least three occasions. Her father, Thomas Edward Kennedy, denied the allegation, but he was convicted by a jury and sentenced to more than 15 years in prison.
In January, Cassandra Kennedy, now 23, told Longview police she made it all up. So after serving more than nine years in prison, her father was released last week and the charges against him were dismissed.
"I did a horrible thing," Cassandra told detectives in January, according to a police report. "It's not OK to sit and be locked in this horrible place for something you didn't do. It's just not right."

Read more: http://tdn.com/news/local/local-girl-lied-about-rape-father-set-free/article_bf9cac36-7c7a-11e1-a9e4-001a4bcf887a.html#ixzz1qz9svG3H

U.S. officials were scrambling Sunday to contain the damage caused when an American soldier in Afghanistan wandered off base and allegedly gunned down more than a dozen villagers.

Sixteen Afghan civilians, including nine children, were shot dead in what witnesses described as a nighttime massacre on Sunday near a U.S. base in southern Afghanistan, and one U.S. soldier was in custody.
While U.S. officials rushed to draw a line between the rogue shooting and the ongoing efforts of a U.S. force of around 90,000, the incident is sure to further inflame Afghan anger triggered when U.S. soldiers burned copies of the Koran at a NATO base.

Stalking from home to home, a United States Army sergeant methodically killed at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children, in a rural stretch of southern Afghanistan early on Sunday, igniting fears of a new wave of anti-American hostility, Afghan and American officials said.

A few days after the New York Times’ (embarrassingly belated and deeply flawed) article on Apple’s Chinese production facilities reignited a national discussion about offshore outsourcing, President Obama was confronted during a Google+ “hang out” about why during a brutal unemployment crisis his administration continues to support expanding the H-1B visa program that allows tech companies to annually import thousands of low-wage engineers from abroad. In his stunning answer, the president first expresses bewilderment that any American high-tech engineer could be out of work, because he says that “what industry tells me is that they don’t have enough (domestic) highly skilled engineers” and that “the word that we’re getting is that somebody (a domestic engineer) in a high-tech field should be able to find something right away.” He then goes on to insist that the H-1B program is “reserved only for those companies who say they cannot find somebody in (a) particular field” and that it shouldn’t apply to industries where “there are a lot of highly skilled American workers” looking for a job because he says his administration is focused on “encourag(ing) more American engineers to be placed” in open positions.

A new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute paints a grim picture of state science standards across the United States. But it also reveals some intriguing details about exactly what’s going wrong with the way many American students are learning science.

Standards are the foundation upon which educators build curricula, write textbooks and train teachers– they often take the form of a list of facts and skills that students must master at each grade level. Each state is free to formulate its own standards, and numerous studies have found that high standards are a first step on the road to high student achievement. “A majority of the states’ standards remain mediocre to awful,” write the authors of the report. Only one state, California, plus the District of Columbia, earned straight A’s. Indiana, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Virginia each scored an A-, and a band of states in and around the northwest, including Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska, scored F’s. (For any New Yorkers reading this, our standards earned a respectable B+, plus the honor of having “some of the most elegant writing of any science standards document”).

What exactly is going wrong? The study’s lead authors identified four main factors: an undermining of evolution, vague goals, not enough guidance for teachers on how to integrate the history of science and the concept of scientific inquiry into their lessons, and not enough math instruction.

As an artist who probably makes a substantial income from licensing his music, you might think Neil Young would frown on piracy and file-sharing, but that appears not to be the case, according to an interview he gave at the Dive Into Media conference in Los Angeles. Instead of railing against file-sharers, Young called piracy “the new radio” because it’s “how music gets around.” The musician’s comment puts a lot of the hysteria about copyright infringement into perspective — as we’ve pointed out before, file-sharing and monetization aren’t mutually exclusive, and in many cases a certain amount of so-called “piracy” can actually be good for business, as authors, musicians and even game developers have come to realize.

Comparing piracy to radio is a smart way of looking at the issue: in the early days of the music business, when live performances and record sales were the main revenue generator for artists and publishers, radio itself was seen as a form of piracy (as sheet music was before that). Musicians fulminated about radio stations playing their music for free, and some record labels made their acts sign waivers saying they would not appear on the radio. In the end, of course, radio became a huge revenue driver for music — although it did so in part because record labels and publishers pushed for licensing fees.

Essentially, the list of charges is that the near 1 million people who work for Foxconn (about 230,000 of whom produce products for Apple, the others assembling for Dell, HP, just about every electronics company in fact) have to work long hours for low pay in dangerous conditions.

Well, yes, they’re poor people living in a poor country. That’s what being poor means, having to work extremely hard to make very little. Yes, that is a harsh thing to say but then reality can indeed be harsh.

To show that it’s not just uncaring neoliberals like myself who say such things why not try reading Paul Krugman on the subject of sweatshops? Specifically, here, on what would happen if we were to try and stop the manufacturing being done in such poor places:

“Imagine an NFL coach,” writes Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, in his important new book, Fixing the Game, “holding a press conference on Wednesday to announce that he predicts a win by 9 points on Sunday, and that bettors should recognize that the current spread of 6 points is too low. Or picture the team’s quarterback standing up in the postgame press conference and apologizing for having only won by 3 points when the final betting spread was 9 points in his team’s favor. While it’s laughable to imagine coaches or quarterbacks doing so, CEOs are expected to do both of these things.”

This blogger we all know got a pic of himself flipping off a camera removed from Google+ yesterday, and another blogger blogged about it, and then the original blogger blogged about that blogger. Here’s why the image removal was significant, via BoingBoing’s Rob Beschizza.

The Internet's most popular destinations, including eBay, Google, Facebook, and Twitter seem to view Hollywood-backed copyright legislation as an existential threat.

The House, of course, has been mired in Internet controversy since Rep Lamar Smith introduced his Stop Online Piracy Act, which establishes a regime of national censorship in the name of fighting copyright infringement. So it is with some amusement that TorrentFreak points out that more than 800 of the IP addresses assigned to the House of Reps were involved in copyright infringement over BitTorrent, according to the YHD database. There's a big trove of self-help books in there, with titles like "Crucial Conversations- Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High," and who knows, maybe that's what Mr Smith was reading when he decided to sell out America to Hollywood?

Parents of a five-year-old girl in Grant County, Wisconsin are pressing charges for first-degree sexual assault against a then six-year-old (now seven-year-old) boy. The accusation? Playing doctor with their daughter.

Although too young to be prosecuted, the boy could be listed on the permanent sex offender registry when he turns 18.

With its legislation this week limiting our access to the drugs we use to kill one another, the European Union has just proven that if America is still a superpower, that designation must carry a prominent asterisk for how easily we're humbled these days. The EU is now blocking importation of technology into the United States that we cannot be trusted to use properly. As widely reported yesterday, the EU is cutting off our supply to the drugs we use for lethal injections, some of which we no longer have the capacity to manufacture domestically:

Despite not owning a computer or even a router, a retired woman has been ordered by a court to pay compensation to a movie company. The woman had been pursued by a rightsholder who claimed she had illegally shared a violent movie about hooligans on the Internet, but the fact that she didn’t even have an email address proved of little interest to the court. Guilty until proven innocent is the formula in Germany.

Daniel Hiler ran out of gas during an evening motorcycle ride in Oildale, California on December 16. While walking his bike to a gas station, the twenty-year-old father of two ran into a family friend named Chrystal Jolley. The pair was crossing a street at a widely-recognized intersection when they were fatally blindsided by a vehicle traveling at a speed well in excess of the posted speed limit. Despite the fact that darkness had descended, the driver hadn’t turned on his headlights. The victims were killed instantly.

A few days ago we reported that no less than 6 IP-addresses registered to the RIAA had been busted for downloading copyrighted material. Quite a shocker to everyone – including the music industry group apparently – as they are now using a defense previously attempted by many alleged file-sharers. It wasn’t members of RIAA staff who downloaded these files, the RIAA insists, it was a mysterious third party vendor who unknowingly smeared the group’s good name.

NDAA, SOPA, Occupy Wall Street and Anonymous may be off-limits on Twitter. As Twitter users who extensively discuss those topics continue to find their accounts being shut down or otherwise restricted, it seems increasingly likely that the phenomenon is more than a coincidence.

We get it. You think you can be cute and old-fashioned by openly admitting that you don’t know what a DNS server is. You relish the opportunity to put on a half-cocked smile and ask to skip over the techno-jargon, conveniently masking your ignorance by making yourselves seem better aligned with the average American joe or jane — the “non-nerds” among us. But to anyone of moderate intelligence that tuned in to yesterday’s Congressional mark-up of SOPA, the legislation that seeks to fundamentally change how the internet works, you kind of just looked like a bunch of jack-asses.

83 of the Internet's most prominent inventors, founders, and engineers have penned an open letter to Congress in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is slated for markup in the House today. The signatories warn that the bill will compromise fundamental Internet infrastructure and undermine the security of the net.

Last week's SOPA hearings were punctuated by facepalming moments in which learned members of the House Judiciary Committee dismissed the distinguished engineers who say the bill weakens Internet security. They said things like, "I'm no nerd, but I just don't believe it."

Well, you don't have to be a "nerd" to understand a) what DNSSEC is; b) why we desperately need it (or something like it) before the Internet collapses along with the creaking public key infrastructure; and c) how the insanity in SOPA will tank that effort. Stewart Baker at the Volokh Conspiracy lays it out in small, easy-to-understand words.

Alec Macgillivray (Twitter General Counsel, former Google attorney, Berkman Fellow) has a great post explaining how SOPA might impact everyday Americans.

As the House of Representatives opens hearings on SOPA, the worst piece of Internet legislation in American history, it has rejected all submissions and testimony from public interest groups and others who oppose the bill.

Aziz Rana, professor of constitutional law at Cornell University, explains the significance of provisions in the 2012 National Defense Authorisation Act that define the entire world as a battlefield, allowing for open-ended detainment of US citizens, without a trial.

Already making its way through the House and Senate, the Act in its current wording will allow for Americans suspected of any “belligerent” act to be detained in Guantanamo Bay-style military prisons indefinitely for any alleged crimes without trial. With it now being revealed that the president put forth suggestions to draft the latest version of the legislation, Levin told the press Monday night, "I just can't imagine that the president would veto this bill.”