The company is currently testing its aircraft “Centaur” and Google Titan drones, and will wind up this testing phase in July 2016. Whilst the company has clearly set aside a generous budget to carry out this experiment, which is a branch of its Google Access platform, it seems Google is focusing on other aspects of the project as well. This became apparent after it launched its own repeater tower and flight control center, with its own terminal close to the Spaceflight Operations Center. Google wants to use drones to transmit high frequency millimeter waves to provide a connection 40 times faster than 4G LTE, which makes its yearning to compete and perhaps surpass competitors including Facebook, is evident. The latter has also been experimenting with similar technologies. This is perhaps the most likely reason Google launched Project Loon, an initiative making use of balloons with transmitters, to provide Wi-Fi connections in rural areas
It seems a deep interest in the development of 5G connections has become the modern day agenda for many companies. Startup company Starry recently rolled out an internet router, which also makes use of millimeter waves for faster connections. It is possible therefore, that Google’s inclination towards a drone-service, is in order to maintain its dominant position in competitive markets.
If the project is met with success, we believe its novelty could help Google top major competitors, albeit temporarily. The official public documents which discuss the project, and the company’s aim to launch “self-flying aircraft” technology, have intrigued users, and naturally so, any prospect of a faster, more efficient and reliable internet connection would please most of us. There is one major downside though; transmission using millimeter waves could have a more limited range compared to mobile phone networks.
Editing by Salman Ahmed;Graphics by Sheheryar Asif
The lefty hero weighs in, obliquely, on the Democratic primary.
Elizabeth Warren (remember her?) has so far withheld an endorsement in the Democratic presidential primary, though there’s little doubt where her loyalty lies. After all, it was the decision by the Massachusetts senator to forego a run that compelled her neighbor to the north, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, to pick up her populist critique and carry it into the race against Hillary Clinton. Sanders has since built the message — of hostility toward what he frames as entrenched corporatism and the campaign finance system that sustains it — into a bona fide grassroots movement. Now on the eve of his first test against Clinton, in the Iowa caucuses on Monday, Warren is reemerging. What she’s offering in lieu of an endorsement is a more nuanced argument for Sanders than the one he’s made for himself.
Last week, on the sixth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, Warren took the Senate floor to decry it for allowing dark money to flood back into campaigns. She didn’t mention Sanders by name, but as she concluded, she channeled him: “A new presidential election is upon us,” she said. “Anyone who shrugs and claims that change is just too hard has crawled into bed with the billionaires who want to run this country like some private club.”
Then on Friday, Warren released an 11-page reportarguing that the Obama administration’s approach to holding corporate lawbreakers criminally accountable has been “shockingly weak.” The report provides snapshots of 20 criminal and civil cases from 2015 in which she holds the feds went easy on wrongdoers — GM for its ignition switch problems; Novartis for an alleged kickback scheme with pharmacists; Massey Energy for its mine explosion; JPMorgan, Citigroup and others for manipulating exchange rates, and so on. In aNew York Times op-ed promoting the report, Warren contends that aggressive prosecutions would not only signal to executives that they’ll be held to the same standard as everybody else, they could also spare working people who’d otherwise get gouged. In other words, Warren is arguing that by simply wielding the laws already on the books, rather than struggling to pass new ones, a president could strike a blow against the inequality now agitating the left. And all it would take is somebody in the White House committed to stocking the administration with likeminded enforcers.
Say what you will about its merits. But that’s a far more realistic case for how a Sanders presidency could differ from a Clinton presidency than the candidate has made. On the stump, Sanders pledges a massive expansion of government, to the tune of $18 trillion, and higher taxes to pay for it, while acknowledging it will require no less than a political revolution to push it through Congress. In all likelihood, Sanders’s bid will fall short and he’ll return to the Senate. Then, the measure of his campaign’s success will be how far it forced the party establishment to move to adopt his appeals, from the aspirational to the relatively practicable.
Three days before the Iowa caucuses, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has released what might have been her closing argument had she been a candidate in the presidential race.
It’s a thorough indictment of a rigged system in Washington that allows corporate criminals to go free while those without the same power and influence get severely punished.
Of the 20 cases, which span Wall Street, the auto industry, pharmaceuticals, natural resources, and more, only one resulted in any convictions to executives, and that was for a misdemeanor — in the Upper Big Branch mine case, where 29 Americans died.
The focus on how laws are enforced rather than the intricacies of the law itself carries on a theme Warren has stressed throughout primary season — that personnel is policy, that who you will put in power in those key regulatory positions matters as much as your 10-point plan.
The Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders camps — and their allies in the press — have been arguing increasingly harshly over who has the most perfect or most attainable policies. But the real issue, as Warren sees it, comes in installing the personnel to carry out the laws on the books that protect public safety and the economy.
Both Clinton and Sanders have called for stiffer penalties and more aggressive Justice Department enforcement on financial crimes. The Warren report suggests how far we have to go, and how intensely she will be watching developments as they unfold.
The report is the first in a promised annual series from Sen. Warren, where she will highlight the most egregious cases of unprosecuted corporate crime from the previous year.
In virtually all the cases she cites — from Standard & Poor’s deliveringinflated credit ratings to defraud investors during the financial crisis, to Novartis giving kickbacks to pharmacists to steer customers to their products, to an explosion at a Bayer CropScience pesticide plant that killed two employees — the Department of Justice declined to prosecute individual executives or the corporations themselves, resorting to settlements with minuscule fines that barely disrupt the corporations’ business models.
The report also gives new meaning to the term “1 percent.”
JPMorgan’s settlement for giving conflicted advice to its clients over wealth management products was less than 1 percent of annual operating profits.
GM paid under 1 percent of company revenue to settle claims on the faulty ignition switch that killed multiple vehicle passengers.
For-profit college EDMC ripped off students with false promises of well-paying jobs, and paid below 1 percent of its student loan revenue over the period of violations.
Warren further documents how in some settlements, the headline dollar figure looks tough until you read the fine print. A settlement with Graco Children’s Products for selling defective car seats yielded $10 million, but $7 million of it went toward developing safety programs, which any responsible manufacturer would do in its normal course of business. The BP civil settlement over the Deepwater Horizon for $20.8 billion sounds massive until you learn that $5 billion could be deducted as an ordinary business expense for tax purposes.
Warren singles out the Securities and Exchange Commission as “particularly feeble,” letting corporate offenders off the hook with weak civil settlements, and then routinely granting the wrongdoers waivers from automatic penalties triggered by the violations. Sen. Warren has been at odds with the SEC and its chair, Mary Jo White, whose tenure has been “extremely disappointing,” in her view.
Some of the enforcement gaps stem from under-resourced federal agencies dealing with bad laws, Warren says. She points out that the Occupational Health and Safety Administration could only fine DuPont $372,000 for an incident at a factory in LaPorte, Texas, where four workers died from methyl mercaptan inhalation. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s maximum possible fine for Honda for concealing the harm from its violently exploding Takata airbags was $70 million, again around 1 percent of the company’s total profits.
This could get worse, Warren warns, if Republicans succeed in inserting a provision into a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill that would raise the bar for federal prosecutors to indict corporate criminals. The Koch Brothers have pushed for the provision. “If adopted,” Warren writes, “this amendment would severely weaken the already anemic enforcement of federal white-collar criminal laws.”
But Warren insists that the bigger problem is a failure to “use the tools Congress has already provided to impose meaningful accountability on corporate offenders.” She even argues that bank regulators had the tools they needed to stop the 2008 financial crisis, but chose not to.
Despite multiple promises by President Obama’s Department of Justice to stiffen enforcement of corporate misconduct, including a 2015 memo creating new guidelines for prosecutions of individuals, almost all major instances lead to toothless settlements, she writes. “Accountability has been shockingly weak.”
Warren also published an op-ed in the New York Times on Friday discussing her report. “Enforcement isn’t about big government or small government,” she writes there. “It’s about whether government works and who it works for.”
(CNN)The State Department announced Friday that it will not release 22 emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton because they contain "top secret" information, the highest level of government classification.
The decision, coming three days before the Iowa caucuses, could provide fodder for Clinton's political opponents, especially Republicans, who are likely to make note of the emails' "top secret" designation. Clinton's email use has haunted her on the campaign trail since it became public early last year that she maintained a private server while leading the State Department.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said the documents, totaling 37 pages, were not marked classified at the time they were sent, but are being upgraded at the request of the Intelligence Community because they contain sensitive information.
"We are aware that there is intense interest in this matter, and we are announcing this decision now because the (Freedom of Information Act) process regarding these emails has been completed," Kirby said. "While we have requested a month's extension to complete the entire review, we did not need the extension for these documents."
But, Kirby said, a separate review by the bureaus of Diplomatic Security and Intelligence and Research is being held into whether the information in the emails was classified at the time they were sent and received. He would not say when the review began or how long it would go, and acknowledged it's possible there could be classified emails that weren't marked as such.
"It's certainly possible that for any number of reasons, traffic can be sent that's not marked appropriately for its classification. That is certainly possible," Kirby said.
But he added that he wasn't going to make any judgments about this particular case.
"All I can tell you definitively is it wasn't marked classified at the time it was sent," Kirby said.
A senior State Department official said the review "began very recently" and was initiated by the State Department, but the official wouldn't say what prompted it.
A spokesperson for the Intelligence Community's inspector general declined to comment.
Kirby also said 18 emails, comprised of eight email chains between Clinton and President Barack Obama, are being "withheld in full" to "protect the President's ability to receive unvarnished advice and counsel." But, Kirby said, they "have not been determined to be classified" and said they will "ultimately be released in accordance with the Presidential records act."
Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Clinton's campaign, said in a statement that Friday's development was a case of "over-classification run amok."
"We firmly oppose the complete blocking of the release of these emails. Since first providing her emails to the State Department more than one year ago, Hillary Clinton has urged that they be made available to the public. We feel no differently today," Fallon said.
Fallon also contended on MSNBC that the decision to withhold the 22 emails is "happening at the behest of other agencies in the government who have hijacked the process that's been taking place for the last several months."
Asked Friday if he had "certainty and confidence" that Clinton will not be indicted over the email controversy, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said any decision to prosecute Clinton would rest with the Justice Department.
"That is a decision to be made solely by independent prosecutors," Earnest said. "But again, based on what we know from the Department of Justice, it does not seem to be headed in that direction."
Republicans pounce
Several prominent Republicans, including presidential hopefuls, quickly condemned Clinton, the Democratic 2016 front-runner, over Friday's developments.
"Hillary Clinton put some of the highest, most sensitive intelligence information on her private server because maybe she thinks she's above the law," Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said at a town hall event in Clinton, Iowa. "Or maybe she just wanted the convenience of being able to read this stuff on her Blackberry. This is unacceptable. This is a disqualifier."
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson said in a Facebook post that he "won't keep secrets from the American people."
"This election is about who will defeat Hillary Clinton -- I am best suited to do that because I have the best interests of We the People in mind," he said.
And Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus tweeted that Clinton and the Obama administration have "obfuscated and misled at every available opportunity," adding that she has "removed all doubt that she cannot be trusted with the presidency."
But Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said classification determinations "are often very complex."
"It's important to remember that none of these emails had any classification markings at the time they were sent, and Secretary Clinton and her staff were responding to world events in real time without the benefit of months of analysis after the fact," Schiff said.
Meanwhile, campaign officials for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton's top competitor for the Democratic nomination, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. But at a Democratic debate in October, Sanders memorably declined to attack Clinton over the issue.
"The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails," he said to applause.
More emails to be released
The State Department will release another batch of Clinton's emails Friday, but the release is expected to fall well behind the judge-imposed timetable for producing all of her emails.
The emails have been publishing over the last eight months more or less in accordance with aschedule set by Judge Rudolph Contreras, with increasingly large batches uploaded to a State Department website at the end of each month.
This month's release was supposed to be the final one and include just over 9,000 pages of documents -- the largest number to date.
But last Thursday, the State Department filed a motion to extend the final productions until February 29 because the department had failed to send more than 7,000 pages of those emails to other government agencies for review, only recognizing the mistake earlier this month.
That delay was then compounded by a huge snowstorm that shut down the federal government for several days, according to the State Department's motion.
In a separate filing Thursday night, lawyers for the State Department said the State Department "candidly acknowledged -- and regrets -- that it was responsible for the failure to send the documents for consultation and that it was simply a mistake that occurred during the enormous undertaking of reviewing and processing the entire Clinton email collection in a compressed time frame."
A State Department official told CNN Thursday, "State Department staff are working extremely hard to get as many emails are through our FOIA process as possible," but wouldn't elaborate on what was in the legal filing.
Contreras has not yet ruled on the State Department's request for more time. But regardless of his ruling, the State Department is unlikely to meet its full production quota since, as it acknowledges in Thursday's filing, some of the emails flagged for further review had not even been sent to a dozen relevant agencies for review.
"State has experienced some difficulty contacting some of the appropriate agency personnel since the snow storm and is still making arrangements with some of the receiving agencies for secure delivery of the documents," the department lawyers wrote, emphasizing that these represent a small portion of the total remaining emails.
Lawyers for the plaintiff in the Freedom of Information Act case have submitted their own filing opposing the State Department's request for more time.
The delay, they note, pushes the final release back until after the early presidential primaries, causing "grave, incurable harm."
In May, Contreras ordered the State Department to "aspire to abide" by the monthly production schedule. And while the timeline he set is aspirational, the department must also submit reports each month to explain its progress.
Paul Kantner, a founding member of Jefferson Airplane, one of the definitive San Francisco psychedelic groups of the 1960s, and the guiding spirit of its successor, Jefferson Starship, died. He was 74.
Mr. Kantner’s death was confirmed by Cash Edwards, the publicist for Hot Tuna, a band composed of several former members of Jefferson Airplane. His publicist, Cynthia Bowman, told The San Francisco Chronicle that he died of multiple organ failure and septic shock.
Mr. Kantner died just weeks after it was announced that Jefferson Airplane would receive a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award in the spring.
Mr. Kantner, who started as a folk singer, had a mellow baritone voice that blended ideally with the penetrating tenor of the group’s founder, Marty Balin, and the powerful mezzo of Grace Slick, who joined the band after its first album. He played a steady rhythm guitar that anchored the freak-out style of the group’s lead guitarist, Jorma Kaukonen, and the adventurous bass lines of Jack Casady.
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Mr. Kantner performing with Jefferson Starship in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1980.CreditEd Perlstein/Redferns, via Getty Images
“Paul was the catalyst that brought the whole thing together,” Mr. Kaukonen said in an interview on Thursday. “He had the transcendental vision and he hung onto it like a bulldog. The band would not have been what it was without him.”
He was a prolific songwriter, teaming with Mr. Balin on some of the group’s best-known songs, including “Today,” “Young Girl Sunday Blues” and “Volunteers.” He wrote most of the songs on the freewheeling “After Bathing at Baxter’s,” the group’s third album and in the opinion of many critics its best, and contributed the title song to the fourth, “Crown of Creation.”
Mr. Kantner came to be seen as the intellectual spokesman for the group, with an ideology, reflected in his songs, that combined anarchic politics, an enthusiasm for mind-expansion through LSD and science-fiction utopianism. The song “Wooden Ships,” which he wrote with Stephen Stills and David Crosby, was emblematic, describing a group of people escaping a totalitarian society to create their own freedom in a place unknown.
It was prophetic. With the breakup of the Jefferson Airplane in the early 1970s, Mr. Kantner began exploring his pet themes on a solo album, “Blows Against the Empire,” which had a science-fiction mini-epic on one side, and in the albums he recorded with Jefferson Starship, notably “Freedom at Point Zero” and “Modern Times.”
“We said what needed to be said,” Mr. Kantner told People magazine in 1981. “There was an obvious call not to turn the other cheek when we were being slapped by the system.”
But, he added, “The rock bands of the ’60s supplanted the football and military heroes, and just as all those heroes had fallen when put to the test, rock musicians proved they had no more of an answer to saving the world than anybody else.”
Paul Lorin Kantner was born on March 17, 1941, in San Francisco. After the death of his mother, the former Cora Fortier, when he was 8, he was sent to a Jesuit boarding school by his father, Paul, a salesman. The experience instilled in him a lifelong hatred of authority and a deep love of protest music.
He learned to play guitar in his teens, and learned banjo from the instructional book written by Pete Seeger. After attending Santa Clara University and San Jose State College, Mr. Kantner plunged into San Francisco’s folk scene.
It was while he was performing at the Drinking Gourd in 1965 that Mr. Balin approached him about joining the group that would become the Airplane. Mr. Kantner drafted Mr. Kaukonen, whom he had known at San Jose, who in turn provided the group with its name, taken from a blues name a friend had given him: Blind Lemon Jefferson Airplane.
With Mr. Balin, Mr. Kantner wrote four songs for “Jefferson Airplane Takes Off,” the group’s first album: “Come Up the Years,” “Run Around,” “Bringing Me Down” and “Let Me In,” all in a pop-folk vein. They also wrote two folk-inflected songs, “Today” and “D.C.B.A.,” for “Surrealistic Pillow,” the group’s breakout album and one of the signature records of the decade.
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Mr. Kantner performing in 2009 at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in Bethel, N.Y., as part of a concert celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock festival.CreditSuzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
“I was the one who was responsible mostly for the harmony songs in the Airplane and the Starship,” Mr. Kantner told the website Music Illuminati in 2010. “Marty did his solo business, and Grace did her solo business, and it was left to me to fashion these harmony songs, coming from the Weavers and God knows where else. We just did it, accidentally.”
With “After Bathing at Baxter’s,” the Airplane turned up the psychedelic dial. At generation-defining events like the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 and Woodstock and the ill-fated Altamont Speedway Free Festival in 1969, the group embodied the look, the sound, the politics and the aspirations of the counterculture, specifically its San Francisco incarnation.
The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. “Their heady psychedelia, combustible group dynamic and adventuresome live shows made them one of the defining bands of the era,” their entry on the Hall of Fame website reads.
Internal tensions caused the Airplane to fall apart in the early 1970s. From the wreckage came Jefferson Starship, introduced purely as a name on “Blows Against the Empire,” a concept album about a group of people escaping Earth on a hijacked starship. Mr. Kantner recorded that album with Ms. Slick, Mr. Crosby, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and others.
After he and Ms. Slick recorded the albums “Sunfighter” and “Baron von Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun,” they took several of the musicians with them to form Jefferson Starship, a group that went through many personnel changes through the years. Mr. Balin sang on the first album, “Dragonfly,” and, with Mr. Kantner, wrote its best-known song, “Caroline.”
Mr. Kantner left the group in 1984, complaining that it had become too commercial, and successfully sued to prevent it from using “Jefferson” in its name. As Starship, the group, with Ms. Slick, recorded several Top 10 hits, including “We Built This City” from 1985.
In 1986 Mr. Kantner recorded the album “KBC Band,” with his former Airplane bandmates Mr. Balin and Mr. Casady. He also wrote a book, “Nicaragua Diary: How I Spent My Summer Vacation, or, I Was a Commie Dupe for the Sandinistas.”
While he was performing one night in San Francisco with Hot Tuna, a group formed by Mr. Kaukonen and Mr. Casady, Ms. Slick walked onstage and began singing. A reunion of the Airplane, without the drummer, Spencer Dryden, followed in 1989, with a tour and an album of new material, simply titled “Jefferson Airplane.”
After re-forming Jefferson Starship with Mr. Balin in 1991, Mr. Kantner toured often with the group, which evolved into a solo vehicle for him, with guest musicians coming and going. In 2008 it recorded “Jefferson’s Tree of Liberty,” a collection of protest songs.
For several years Mr. Kantner and Ms. Slick were a couple. Their daughter, China Isler, survives him; two sons, Gareth and Alexander, also survive him.
“For us it was about new frontiers,” Mr. Kantner told the website Wales Online in 2009, speaking about the Airplane. “The whole world was going through these forward steps — beautiful, amazing stuff — much of it working, much of it not working. Revolution is not the right word for it, but it was progress.”
