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Netflix is in talks with Nipsey Hussles production company, Marathon Films, for Ava DuVernay to co-produce and possibly direct a documentary about the late rapper.

Although DuVernay has attached herself to direct, its unclear if she has the room in her schedule, given her commitment to helm DC Comics New Gods for Warner Bros. According to a source at Netflix, the project is in preliminary stages and could manifest as a series.

Marathon Films announced in an Instagram post that in addition to DuVernay and her company Array, the untitled project will be executive produced by Roc Nation and Hussles children, Emani and Kross Asghedom.

No final deal has been inked, the post reads. The documentary is very important to the family and will not be fast tracked by monetary gain and/or commercial interest.

Hussle was killed on March 31, 2019, at the age of 33, outside his Marathon Clothing store in Los Angeles. Eric Holder was arrested and charged with murder two days later. Hussle won two posthumous Grammy Awards last month for rap performance and rap/sung performance.

DuVernay worked with Netflix on the documentary 13th, which received an Oscar nomination, and on the limited series When They See Us.

CAA conducted an auction for the rights to the project. DuVernary is repped by CAA and attorneys Nina Shaw and Gordon Bobb. The news was first reported by Deadline Hollywood.

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Nipsey Hussle documentary from Ava DuVernay in the works at Netflix - New York Post

Washington The Department of Justice unveiled charges against four members of China's military for allegedly hacking into the credit agency Equifax and stealing the personal information of millions of Americans in 2017

"This was one of the largest data breaches in history," Attorney General William Barr said at a press conference on Monday. "The scale of the theft was staggering. As alleged in the indictment, the hackers obtained the names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of nearly 145 million Americans, and the drivers licenses of at least 10 million Americans."

The four charged are Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke and Liu Lei, all of whom are members of the 54th Research Institute, a component of China's People's Liberation Army, prosecutors said. A federal grand jury in Atlanta returned the nine-count indictment on charges of computer fraud, economic espionage and wire fraud. The men have not been taken into custody and are considered wanted by the FBI.

"This is the largest theft of sensitive [personally identifiable information] by state-sponsored hackers ever recorded," FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich said. "This indictment is also a reminder that with their attacks on our economy, our cyber infrastructure and our citizens, China is one of the most significant threats to our national security today."

Bowdich said there is no evidence that the stolen personal information of millions of Americans is being used, but acknowledged it could be in the future. Equifax settled a class action lawsuit over the breach for more than $700 million in 2019.

In the indictment, prosecutors said the hackers exploited a vulnerability in a portal on Equifax's website to steal login credentials used to gain access to databases on the company's network. Once inside the network, the hackers ran searches of databases to identify personal information, storing the results in files that were split into smaller pieces to download more efficiently.

The indictment says the hackers used 34 servers in 20 countries to access the Equifax network and used existing encrypted communication channels to "blend in with normal network activity."

The hackers first gained access to the portal in May 2017 and continued to steal information from Equifax's databases until the end of July, according to the indictment. The theft amounted to economic espionage and theft of trade secrets, prosecutors said.

"The hackers also stole Equifax's trade secrets, embodied by the compiled data and complex database designs used to store the personal information," Barr said. "Those trade secrets were the product of decades of investment and hard work by the company."

The attorney general said the Equifax case is consistent with China's "voracious appetite" for personal data about Americans in recent years. He also said it is part of a much broader campaign to steal intellectual property from American businesses through "state-sponsored computer intrusions."

"About 80% of our economic espionage prosecutions have implicated the Chinese government, and about 60% of all trade secret theft cases in recent years involved some connection to China," Barr said.

The Trump administration has raised the alarm about the data security practices of Chinese companies, particularly the massive telecom company Huawei. The administration effectively cut off Huawei's access to U.S. markets in 2019, saying the company posed a security risk because it could be forced to cooperate with surveillance orders by the Chinese government. Last month, the U.K.disregarded those warnings and announced that Huawei would provide equipment for 5G networks in the country, raising concerns about intelligence-sharing between the U.S. and Britain.

At a conference in Washington last week, Barr hinted at upcoming indictments targeting state-sponsored cyberattacks from China and warned against the danger posed by economic espionage. FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau "has about 1,000 investigations involving China's attempted theft of U.S.-based technology in all 56 of our field offices, and spanning just about every industry and sector."

On Monday, Barr acknowledged that the U.S. does "not normally bring criminal charges against the members of another country's military or intelligence services outside the United States," but said the "indiscriminate theft" of information about private citizens would not be tolerated.

In 2014, then-Attorney General Eric Holder announced indictments against five Chinese military hackers for stealing trade secrets of six American companies in the nuclear power, metal and solar industries. Those charges were the first the department ever brought against state-sponsored actors for hacking crimes.

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Justice Department charges 4 members of the Chinese military for massive Equifax hack - WFMYNews2.com

Like many/most Americans, I loathe Donald Trump. I loathe him on his worst day, and I loathe him on his best. He is a bad person and the people who surround him and support him in his family, in the White House, in the Republican Party, in the right-wing think tanks and political action committees are also bad people. I loathe Trump and believe he is bad, not because of anything he has done or said in his private life, but because he brought these private qualities into public life and insinuated them into the fabric of our being as a nation, diminishing and endangering all of us. That is his ultimate abuse of power.

Michael Moore calls Trump an evil genius and warns us not to underestimate him. And we shouldnt. Trump is an insane clown, a gaslighting pathological liar, and a world-destroying narcissist. He is the opposite in every way of what we need and must ask for from our leaders. He has created a cult of personality for freaks and geeks with too many nuts and bolts rattling through their hollow brains. He is a weapon of mass destruction for a crypto-fascist alliance of business and religious extremists whose hubris and arrogance is only exceeded by their will to power. He has tucked the Republican Party establishment in his pocket, from where its members cower and fawn like sniveling royal court parasites.

But Im also mindful that hating Trump only takes us so far. And in reality probably keeps us too near, by which I mean the shock and awe of his presidency (and of his own, entirely effable and malodorous, personal presence) leave us circling our tails with a misbegotten fear-rage that allows its target, who is cunning but not wise, to consistently and easily elude us.

I guess the point is that if Michelle Obama asks us to go high when Trump and his supporters go low, and if Eric Holder, Jemelle Hill, Ibram X. Kendi, and Peter Beinart say otherwise, the truth is the far more difficult but powerful answer that we must contain within ourselves and act on both impulses the high and the low as if each were equally valid and mutually reinforcing imperatives. We must answer fire with fire, and more, but also acknowledge, as we hurl ourselves into the trenches, that the battle will be ultimately be won on higher ground (perhaps the ground of love for everything Donald Trump himself hates).

But hate, suspicion, paranoia, melodrama are in Trumps nature and, apparently in the natures of those who identify with and work for him. No self-contradiction accompanies their dark impulses. They yearn for the street fight and will happily unleash Gangs of New York brass knuckles mayhem where they can. And so tempting as it may be to respond in kind and descend into the chaos with a kind of willful glee and exaltation, the outcome is self-consuming and ultimately self-annihilating.

Philosophically speaking, we also should certainly consider what it is that makes our hatred of Trump and his people any more valid than the hatred he and his people feel for us. Are we privy to truth claims deep and universal which bestow on us this right or freedom to hate that elude Trump and his Republican acolytes, enablers, whisperers, and supporters? What makes us so sure that we are right, and they are wrong, when they are equally sure that they are right, and we are wrong? If the truth is that clear, how can it be so divisive? Can we really, or simply, reduce the difference to matters of white supremacy or misogyny or greed, prevalent as though forces may be? What must we also look to in ourselves to parse these fault lines in our nation?

The experience of loathing Donald Trump, legitimate and important though it may be, does not resolve these conundrums and so gives us no path forward. Indeed, this experience strips the ground from our feet by ignoring the objective realities of our times, and of all times. In other words, beneath the Trump is fill in your most heinous adjective, there are the but whys, and the but hows, the conditioning circumstances that root his rise and influence to forces deeper and more sustaining than a quivering malevolence. There are many ways to think about these whys and hows. Probably the simplest way is to step back and consider if Trump appears to us as a uniquely disturbing and frightening and loathsome human merely being because of who he is. Or is it also because of what he tells us, each of us, about ourselves, about the times in which we live, and about how power discloses and arranges itself in moments of heightened social and environmental stress.

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It's Okay To Hate Donald Trump. But Is It Enough? - Patheos

WASHINGTON Fresh from handing President Trump a victory in his impeachment trial, the U.S. Senate has moved to install federal judges who have expressed disdain for the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 law that struck down rules across the South that kept African-Americans from the ballot box.

Overturning voting-rights protections tends to benefit Republicans, who have said states, not the federal government, should decide the particulars of how elections are conducted. Some scholars even believe that weakening the Voting Rights Act ahead of the 2016 election helped Trump win the presidency.

The first of those nominees, Andrew L. Brasher, 38, was formerly the solicitor general of Alabama, a position that allowed him to stake out conservative stances on issues from gun control to reproductive rights. He was confirmed to an Alabama district court last year and, in a rapid elevation, was nominated only months later for a seat on the 11th Circuit court of appeals, which is based in Atlanta. Despite intense opposition by progressive groups, Brasher was confirmed by the full Senate on Feb. 11 in a 52-43 vote.

He is the 188th judge confirmed during Trumps time in the White House.

The other nominee is Cory Wilson, 49, a former Mississippi politician who is now a state appellate judge there. He is currently being considered for a Mississippi federal district judgeship and is expected to face a full Senate vote sometime in March.

The nominations were an opening salvo to 2020, and not a welcome one at that, said Lena Zwarensteyn, an expert on the judiciary at the progressive Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She worried that these two jurists, and others, were advancing really extreme arguments when it comes to voting rights.

Conservatives argue that it is unfair to characterize judges like Brasher for work they did on behalf of constituents they were required to defend in court. When lawyers take litigating positions on behalf of their clients, theyre doing their jobs, says Mike Davis, whose Article 3 Project advocates for a conservative judiciary.

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Democrats, he warned, need to remember that Eric Holder provided free legal services to suspected terrorists. The reference is to pro bono work by Holders firm, Covington and Burling, on behalf of suspected jihadists detained at Guantnamo Bay detention facility in Cuba. Holder served as U.S. attorney general for former President Barack Obama.

Brashers confirmation means that half of the judges on the 11th Circuit are now Trump nominees. None of those judges is African-American, though there are nearly 8 million African-Americans living in the three states it covers.

Wilson, meanwhile, would be seated in the Southern District of Mississippi, which is part of the Fifth Circuit along with Texas and Louisiana. Of the five Trump appointees to the Fifth Circuit, four have been white men.

Trump has remade federal courts all across the country, but those changes could be especially consequential in the Deep South, where judges helped keep segregation in place, but then later struck segregation down during the civil rights era. Many decades since then, courts have continued to struggle with race, in particular regarding the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which gave the federal government great powers to supervise elections in Southern states that had previously kept African-Americans from voting.

Fairness of elections was also at the heart of Democrats argument about the just-concluded impeachment inquiry. Trump was accused of pressuring the Ukrainian government to open investigations that would benefit him domestically, but he was acquitted by a Republican-controlled Senate.

Senate Republicans are trying to rig the election at every turn, Nan Aron of progressive organization Alliance for Justice told Yahoo News.

After giving Trump a pass on withholding foreign aid in exchange for interference in the election, they immediately returned to confirming nominees with terrible records, including on voting rights, she added.

As far as the presidents critics are concerned, appointing judges who will roll back voting-rights protections also has long-term effects on elections. Even if the new judges dont help Trump in the near-term, their lifetime tenure on the federal bench could ensure Republican majorities for a generation to come. Bob Moser, author of a book on Southern politics called Blue Dixie, notes that voter suppression efforts have been moving forward in Florida, Tennessee and Texas.

A former solicitor general of Alabama, Brasher has a long history of resisting federal oversight of state election laws. In 2012, he filed a petition in favor of an Arizona law that would require identification at the polls. Voter ID laws, as they are known, tend to decrease participation by poor people and minorities because they are sometimes unable to meet the kind of stringent documentary requirements such laws demand. The brief was signed by some of the most conservative attorneys general in the nation, including Greg Abbott of Texas and Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma.

In 2013, he filed a brief in Shelby County v. Holder, a case in which an Alabama county tried to get out from under the supervision foisted on it by the Voting Rights Act. The Alabama of 2013 is not the Alabama of 1965 or of 1970, 1975, or 1982, Brasher wrote in his brief. He argued that Congress violated the constitution by continuing to treat the state as if it somehow persisted in restricting African-American participation in the democratic process.

Later that year, the Supreme Court decided Shelby County in favor of Alabama, handing conservatives a long-sought victory.

In 2014, he argued Alabamas case against African-American legislators who charged that Republicans created electoral districts that concentrated black voters, depriving Democrats of broad statewide support, a practice known as gerrymandering.

Brasher denied that any gerrymandering took place. A district judge disagreed, writing that the evidence here is overwhelming that the State has intentionally singled out individuals based on race. In 2015, the U.S. Supreme court agreed, rejecting Brashers claim.

Progressives mounted a ferocious opposition to Bashers nomination. For Republicans determined to snuff out voting rights in the courts, Brasher is an ace in the hole, wrote former Florida gubernatorial nominee and voting rights advocate Andrew Gillum in a Tampa Bay Times op-ed.

Wilson, the Mississippi district court nominee, is also in favor of voter identification laws. In a 2013 article for the Press-Register of Mobile, Ala., he complained about the recent mayor election in nearby Hattiesburg, Miss., which a Democrat had won. Wilson, a Republican, complained of voter impersonation and disenfranchised felons voting, a claim frequently repeated by conservative media outlets covering elections.

In his article, Wilson argued that federal oversight was not necessary, while more stringent voting regulations were. They might spend less time chasing agendas that aren't there, he wrote of federal monitors, and more time investigating the voter fraud and other irregularities.

Writing in another op-ed, Wilson argued that Voter ID is a part of ensuring cleaner elections. Studies have found that to not be the case. Wilson blamed both politicians and the media: The Rachel Maddows of the media world have joined the chorus of voter suppression right on cue from Team Obama, he wrote.

Brashers confirmation was not a surprise, and Wilsons record of inflammatory writing may not make a difference. The current chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, has previously supported extension of Voting Rights Act provisions. But he is now one of President Trumps closest allies on Capitol Hill and has made confirming Trumps judicial nominees a priority.

The full Senate has sometimes proved more problematic for Trump nominees. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only African-American member of the Republican conference, has more or less single-handedly stopped the confirmations of two Trump nominees: Thomas Farr of North Carolina, who had been accused of voter-suppression efforts, and Ryan Bounds, who had published inflammatory articles on race.

But as the vote on Brasher neared, it became clear that Scott was not going to stand in the way. Scotts spokesman, Sean Smith, noted in response to a Yahoo News query that Scott had voted in favor of Brashers confirmation to the district court last year. I have not heard anything to indicate his position has changed, Smith said.

Judicial nominees could potentially encounter resistance from moderate Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska for reasons unrelated to voting rights. Collins and Murkowski have both expressed disfavor for judges who want to strike down Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

Wilson has called Roe the result of a liberal activist court and, as a state legislator, has endorsed a number of measures that would make it more difficult for a woman to terminate a pregnancy. As the solicitor general of Alabama, Brasher routinely defended similar measures.

Neither the office of Collins nor Murkowski responded to a request for comment ahead of the Brasher vote. Both senators voted to install him on the 11th Circuit.

Trump has appointed several judges with records on voting rights similar to those of Brasher and Wilson. Some of those judges have begun to agitate for the kind of lessened federal oversight conservatives have long yearned for.

Earlier this month, as the impeachment trial was coming to an end, a Trump-appointed judge said, in a dissenting opinion, that the Voting Rights Act infringed on states rights. That judge, Lisa Branch, sits on the 11th Circuit. She will soon have an ideological ally in Brasher.

In another dissent on voting rights, Fifth Circuit Trump judge Don Willett argued that states had the right to oversee their own elections, something conservatives want and progressives fear. Willett opened his dissent by invoking Abraham Lincoln, author of the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed African-Americans from slavery.

_____

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Trump is elevating judges who could gut the Voting Rights Act - Yahoo News

Written by Peter Pedroncelli

Feb 12, 2020

Qatar Airways is set to own60 percent of Rwandas new international airportwhen it is fully built and is now in negotiations to buy49 percent of Rwandas state-owned carrier, RwandAir.

A stake in RwandaAir would increase Qatar Airways reach in one of the worlds fastest-growing aviation regions, according to the Financial Times.

Africa is set to be one of the fastest-growing aviation regions globally in the next 20 years with an annual expansion of nearly 5 percent, according to the International Air Transport Association.

The African aviation industry generates $80 billion in economic activity, supporting around 6.9 million jobs.

The RwandAir deal couldhelp Qatar Airways to bypass restrictions imposed on it by some Arab stateswhich force itto fly longer routes to avoid the forbidden airspace of some of its neighborsin the Gulf, Businesslive reports.

Due to a regional dispute,Qatar Airways has been banned from flying to 18 cities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt since June 2017.Thosecountries cut ties with Qatarin 2017, accusing it of supporting terrorism.

The ban does not apply to foreign airlines flying to Qatar, according to Reuters.

This means that RwandAir could potentially carry passengers from Africa through the blocked airspace to Doha without any airspace restrictions.

Qatar Airways already owns a stake in International Airlines Group,a London-based company thatowns British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Vueling,and European low-cost airlineLevel as well as a stake in China Southern, Cathay Pacific, and Latam Airlines Group.

In December 2019, Qatar Airways agreed to buy a 60 percent stake in a new $1.3 billion airport that is under construction in Rwanda, AlJazeera reported.

TheBugesera International Airport in Kigali is expected to have the capacity for around 7 million passengers per year before expansion to 14 million passengers by 2032.

The Rwandan government hopes that the new airport will position the country as a regional hub.

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 69: Jamarlin Martin

Jamarlin goes solo to unpack the question: Was Barack Obama the first political anti-Christ to rise in Black America? To understand the question, we have to revisit Rev. Wright and Obamas decision to bring on political disciples David Plouffe, Joe Biden and Eric Holder.

Rwanda will have serious competition from nearby Ethiopia which has announced plans to build a new $5 billion airportat Bishoftu that is expected to have a capacity of 100 million passengers per year, according to Bloomberg.

Ethiopia already has the Addis Ababa Bole International Airport and its capacity of 22 million passengers a year.

The state-owned Ethiopian Airlines is Africas largest carrier. It has an operating fleet of 111 planes, flying to more than 119 international passenger and cargo destinations, with more than 61 of those in Africa alone, according to BusinessInsider.

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Qatar Airways Plans To Buy 49 Percent Of Rwandas State-Owned Airline - Moguldom