Loud explosions heard…

On March 20, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

The Israeli military confirmed that two rockets were fired towards central Israel on Thursday evening, with at least two loud explosions heard the Gush Dan region.One was reported to have been intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system while another one is said to have fallen in open territory.  There were reports of a number of Israeli who were treated for shock.It was the first time sirens were activated in Tel Aviv since the last war with Gaza in 2014.

Video of an Iron Dome missile being fired over #TelAviv pic.twitter.com/UYxFzuGMa6

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Facebook Won’t Let Employers, Landlords or Lenders Discriminate in Ads Anymore

On March 20, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

by Jack Gillum and Ariana Tobin

Facebook advertisers can no longer target users by age, gender and ZIP code for housing, employment and credit offers, the company announced Tuesday as part of a major settlement with civil rights organizations.

The wide-ranging agreement follows reporting by ProPublica since 2016 that found Facebook let advertisers exclude users by race and other categories that are protected by federal law. It is illegal for housing, job and credit advertisers to discriminate against protected groups.

ProPublica had been able to buy housing-related ads on Facebook that excluded groups such as African Americans and Jews, and it previously found job ads excluding users by age and gender placed by companies that are household names, like Uber and Verizon Wireless.

“This settlement is a shot across the bow to all tech companies and platforms,” said Peter Romer-Friedman, a lawyer with Outten & Golden in Washington who represented the plaintiffs along with the ACLU. “They need to understand that civil rights apply to the internet, and it’s not a civil rights-free zone.”

The changes apply to advertisers who offer housing, employment and credit offers to U.S.-based users of Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Facebook said it hopes to implement the requirements by the end of the year.

The agreement also will create a separate online portal for housing, credit and employment offers. Those advertisers will not be able to target users in a geographic area smaller than a 15-mile radius, which advocates say tamps down on “digital” neighborhood redlining.

Housing, job and credit advertisers will also now only be able to choose from a few hundred interest categories to target consumers, down from several thousand. Critics have said such a swath of finely tuned categories, like people interested in wheelchair ramps, are essentially proxies to find and exclude certain groups. Facebook said it will keep more generic interests like “real estate,” “apartment” and “job interview.”

Facebook also said it will create a page where users can see all current housing ads whether or not the users were among those targeted. The agreement says Facebook will also study how algorithms can be biased.

“There is a long history of discrimination in the areas of housing, employment and credit, and this harmful behavior should not happen through Facebook ads,” Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg wrote in a statement Tuesday.

The changes are part of Facebook’s settlement in five discrimination lawsuits. Plaintiffs included the Communications Workers of America and several fair-housing organizations, as well as individual consumers and job seekers. The settlement includes a payout of about $5 million to plaintiffs, mostly to defray legal costs.

The company agreed last year to limit advertisers’ ability to target by some demographic categories, following a complaint by Washington state.

Facebook has previously said that it was being held to an unreasonably high standard, and that ads excluding users by age and gender were not discriminatory. “We completely reject the allegation that these advertisements are discriminatory,” Vice President of Ads Rob Goldman wrote in a December 2017 post. “Used responsibly, age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason: it helps employers recruit and people of all ages find work.” The post was titled: “This Time, ProPublica, We Disagree.”

Facebook said Tuesday it had “not seen the kind of explicit discriminatory behavior that civil rights groups are concerned about.” But ProPublica used a crowdsourcing project to find dozens examples of job ads that excluded workers over 40, women and other protected groups.

Facebook has made another move recently that resulted in less transparency around ads. This year, it moved to block a ProPublica project that allowed the public to see how political ads are being targeted on Facebook.

The company said it was simply enforcing its terms of service.

The Art of a Monster

On March 20, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

The camera flies high above the palm trees of Hollywood, soaring north and west, all the way to the suburb of Simi Valley, where it slows down to seek out a certain street, and then slows some more until it finds a particular house. It hovers above it, and then swoops down, pushing in all the way to the doorstep, where it rests, impatient. It is the house where James Safechuck, one of the two men at the center of Leaving Neverland, an HBO documentary, grew up, but in a way it might as well be the Darlings’ house: “Peter Pan chose this particular house because there were people here who believed in him.”

But the Safechucks are not the only people who believe, because here is another suburban house, and here again is that seeking, searching intelligence, the camera pushing closer and closer. It is the house in Brisbane, Australia, where the other subject of the documentary, Wade Robson, grew up. The implication is clear: Michael Jackson could have any little boy in the world; all he needed were parents who would serve up their sons to him.

The two mothers, Stephanie Safechuck and Joy Robson, interviewed at length in the film, are a remarkable pair. Their eyes glimmer with excitement as they talk about hotel suites, meeting movie stars, the lavish guest rooms at Neverland Ranch and its excellent wine cellar. (“That was just something I really enjoyed,” Stephanie says in a matter-of-fact way, as though describing a nice feature of a resort.) They tell us that living in the orbit of Michael Jackson was a “dream,” a “fantasy,” even as one of them admits that she spent a lot of her time at Neverland alone, playing with the chimps, because Jackson and her son avoided her all day long. Most damning is the women’s tacit and unexamined admission that the central proposition upon which their fantastical stories depend—that it never occurred to them that Jackson might pose a threat to their sons—is false. Here is Stephanie pressing her ear against a hotel bedroom, trying to hear what is happening inside; here is Joy, realizing that a new boy appears every 12 months.

[Read: On not believing “Leaving Neverland”]

In early March, the physician Drew Pinsky said on the Daily Pop talk show that he suspected both of these women had themselves been the victims of childhood sexual abuse, before quickly walking back the statement to a less slanderous avowal that he did not know either of them, and was merely guessing. But his speculation offered the only explanation outside the demonic for the most harrowing of the women’s remarks; when Jackson asked Joy whether her son could live with him for a year, she offered a modified plan:  She would not leave Wade with him, but would “share Wade” with him.

The fathers, as is so often the case in stories of child sexual abuse, are largely absent from their sons’ lives. Pedophiles tend to skulk away from fathers, and for good reason. They believe that even an inattentive father—even a bad one—will usually stir to action if he senses that his children are under threat from an adult male. Both men seem to have enjoyed the material delights offered by Jackson’s obsession with their sons, but they were often called away to the drudgery of their own Dickensian jobs: James’s father had inherited a family rubbish business; Wade’s owned a couple of small fruit shops. Both marriages were unhappy.

“What the hell is wrong with Michael?” Chris Rock asked in Never Scared, which was filmed in 2004, the same year the pop star was indicted on a second child-molestation charge. “Another kid?” he asked, stunned, before summing up the situation perfectly: “We love Michael so much, we let the first kid slide.” In 1993, the parents of a boy named Jordan Chandler filed a civil suit against Jackson, which the entertainer settled for an estimated $25 million. The 2004 molestation charge against him was supported by evidence gained during a 2003 police raid on Neverland Ranch, including photographs of a hidden closet outfitted with multiple deadbolts and a bed, life-size mannequins of children that could be bent into various positions, and enough children’s toys to fill the lair of a figure from Grimms’ Fairy Tales. In 2005, Jackson was found not guilty of the molestation charge, and other charges against him. But the photographs and their terrible implications lived on, even as Jackson’s true believers insisted he was an innocent man.

[Read: I’m not black, I’m Kanye]

Like Hannibal Buress’s bit about Bill Cosby raping women, Leaving Neverland is what finally got many people to admit to themselves what they already believed. The testimony of the two men is so intimate, so drenched with the sorrow of ruined childhoods, that it cannot be denied. They talk about falling in love with Michael Jackson, about childhood sexual pleasure, and all the other aspects of this kind of abuse that we don’t want to understand. During descriptions of the sex acts, the film sometimes cuts away from the speaker to show pictures of the little boys they were at the time of the events. They were beautiful children, so young that a parent might still have read bedtime stories to them.

The most grievous moment of the film is when Wade describes the horror of a particular sex act forced on him: “To be graphic about it … a full, adult, grown-man-sized penis in my mouth … in a little 7-year-old’s mouth.” And the most heartbreaking moment takes place when James describes what it was like to meet the fate that all these children apparently met: being replaced by another boy and, his bond with his own family already broken, abandoned. One night, James went to spend the night at Jackson’s Century City apartment, but another little boy was also there. Jackson took that child to his bedroom and closed the door, leaving James to sleep alone on the couch. “I cried and cried,” he tells us of that long night, “and I cried out for my mom.”

There is one moment in the film in which it is possible to think that Jackson—otherwise portrayed as monstrous—might have had moments of self-awareness, even of guilt. Wade says he once woke up in the middle of the night to find him sitting in the corner of the bedroom, sobbing. Jackson told him that he was sad because the boy was scheduled to return to Australia the next day, but throughout Jackson’s long, public life were hints that on some level, he was grappling with the deep horrors that he was allegedly committing in private.

Jackson’s childhood was marked by terror of his father. He said that just catching sight of the man could make him vomit; that Joe Jackson beat his sons with razor strops and belts when they made slight mistakes rehearsing. Michael’s sister La Toya accused their father of sexually abusing her in her early adolescence, but the claim was roundly denied by members of the family, who also deny the sexual-abuse allegations made in the documentary. (Jackson’s estate is suing HBO for $100 million, for violating a nondisparagement agreement.)

One of Jackson’s most famous songs grapples with the notion of guilt—“I’m starting with the man in the mirror/I’m asking him to change his ways”—and the “Thriller” video is about a young man trying to convince people that he turns into a monster at night. Perhaps, as he began to develop his relationships with young boys, he was testing the public, waiting for a punishment that never came. His plastic surgery seemed to become an act of self-erasure. In the end, the only way he could conquer the night was to have a doctor come and put him under anesthesia.

And through this terrible man, this destroyer, poured a force that can only be truthfully described as art. Michael Jackson’s dancing is no mortal enterprise: James Brown’s shuffle, Fred Astaire’s precision, and some other element that exists so far beyond anything as simple as influence, or talent, that we can only say we know it when we see it. It’s not a gift; it’s the gift itself.

The ancient question: What moral stain awaits us if we cannot abandon the art of a monster? None.

[Read: The disturbing truth about Kevin Spacey’s “Let Me Be Frank” video]

Edmund Wilson taught us in “The Wound and the Bow”—nominally about Sophocles’s Philoctetes, an obscure play about the great archer who was bitten by a snake and suffered from its suppurating wound for years—that “the victim of a malodorous disease which renders him abhorrent to society and periodically degrades him and makes him helpless is also the master of a superhuman art which everybody has to respect and which the normal man finds he needs.” T. S. Eliot wrote in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” More to the point, Don Cornelius said, “It is always a pleasure to find something that matters.”

Michael Jackson’s art matters. It matters not because of any sociopolitical significance, although many of his songs bear uplifting messages. It matters not for its implications about race in America. It matters because of the simple fact that it is, in every sense, the gift revealed.

A generation ago, young people read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift to understand how to live meaningful lives by cultivating within themselves the ability to receive art: “An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.”

You can cast away Picasso because Hannah Gadsby told you he was cruel to women. But can you cast away Guernica? Art isn’t something mere; it doesn’t exist as the moral bona fides of the person who made it. That person is a supernumerary. Separate yourself from any art—even popular art; even art created simply as entertainment—and you separate yourself from all of it.