Hunter’s latest cuts recall the golden ages of soul and blues.

This is Autechre operating at their highest level since 1998’s LP5.

British producer plays weird with his inspirations on a seductive debut.

Balances intensity and introspection well, befitting the game’s conflicted protagonist.

NTT DATA Business Solutions has announced that Guernsey Ports has embarked on a strategic partnership to implement Hexagon's Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) solution.

Business group Logistics UK has expressed its members’ mixed emotions about the new government’s first Budget. While the industry is reassured by the freeze in fuel duty, the hike in National Insurance contributions from employers and higher business rates, amongst other tax rises, will be a real challenge for a sector that operates on small margins.

In 2020, pivotal events ushered in a season of antiracism rhetoric in the U.S. The brutal deaths of unarmed black Americans at the hands of police officers and white vigilantes, and the disproportionately harsh impact of COVID-19 in the black American community, launched the nation into a discussion about systemic racism. Unfortunately, it seems likely that the 2020 antiracism discourse was merely seasonal rather than enduring, and unlikely to result in meaningful change. 

Black American’s vulnerability in the face of systemic racism is not limited to death, sickness and injury as a result of COVID-19 or antiblack bias in police departments. Our vulnerability is precipitated by things like lack of access to nonpredatory financial services. This is just one of the contexts that compromise black Americans’ economic survival. Unacknowledged systemic racism destroys the wealth and wellbeing of black individuals, families and communities, sometimes causing working and middle-class black Americans to plummet into poverty. As 2020 comes to a close, an election that threatened democracy in the U.S. and the existential threats of an uncontrolled pandemic, eclipse a system of intentional antiblack racism on the part of the financial institutions that engaged in predatory mortgage lending in the years leading up to and beyond the 2008 recession. It is now well documented that lenders, brokers, and mortgage servicers engaged in conduct that was fraudulent and misleading. The mortgage market charged excessively high rates and fees, engaged in high-pressure sales tactics, imposed unnecessarily harsh prepayment penalties, and distorted loan structures to avoid the application of consumer protection statutes.  But, more than a decade later, many black Americans are still fighting to prevent financial institutions from taking away their homes. 

In a book I coauthored with Dr. Janis Sarra, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, Predatory Lending and the Destruction of the African American Dream (Cambridge University Press, 2020), we describe new iterations of predation that continue to target black consumers years after financial institutions settled litigation that alleged pervasive fraud on their part for steering black Americans into predatory subprime loans. But these renovated predatory practices are obscured by the nation’s focus on COVID-19 and a vitriolic election season. Meanwhile, more black Americans will lose their homes even after investing all or most of their wealth in attempts to keep them. This reality requires the calls for moratoriums on mortgage foreclosures to be answered in the affirmative.

Wikimedia Commons Philadelphia County Prison

In an important move that returns federal government policy to the Obama era, today President Biden signed an executive order calling on the Department of Justice to ends its use of private prisons.  While this executive order does not end federal government reliance on for-profit immigration detention centers, it does require that no future contracts with private prison operators be entered into between the federal government and private prison corporations CoreCivic, GEO Group and others.  Use of the executive order to end private for-profit prison reliance has proven difficult politically as Obama ended their use before the 2016 election, but once Trump entered the White House, he rescinded the policy and made robust use of private prisons for federal prisoners as well as immigration detention.

 I just published a new law review article with the Seattle University Law Review entitled: Students for Fair Admissions: Affirming Affirmative Action and Shapeshifting Towards Cognitive Diversity? The article can be downloaded here: https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sulr/vol47/iss4/7/. Here is the abstract:

The Roberts Court holds a well-earned reputation for overturning Supreme Court precedent regardless of the long-standing nature of the case. The Roberts Court knows how to overrule precedent. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), the Court’s majority opinion never intimates that it overrules Grutter v. Bollinger, the Court’s leading opinion permitting race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Instead, the Roberts Court applied Grutter as authoritative to hold certain affirmative action programs entailing racial preferences violative of the Constitution. These programs did not provide an end point, nor did they require assessment, review, periodic expiration, or revision for greater institutional efficacy, including possible race-neutral alternatives. The programs also failed to break down stereotypes through the introduction of a critical mass to empower diverse voices. The programs thereby resembled prohibited quotas or racial balancing. As such, the programs at issue violated Grutter, which still governs race-based affirmative action in college admissions. More importantly, the Roberts court paved the way for more expansive diversity-based admissions programs by permitting institutions to value individual racial experiences, which authentically further an institution’s mission and interests. After SFFA, the use of race as a factor could well face time limits. Contrastingly, individualized racial experiences may benefit college applicants at institutions that embrace diversity in an authentic way without facing any time limitation. Further, institutions with distinct missions may value diversity in a race-conscious way but without any racial preference. In sum, the Roberts Court guides the use of race in college admissions toward a race-neutral, diversity-based paradigm such that institutions may still unlock the empirically proven benefits of cultural diversity with only de minimus interference from the courts. This approach rests upon a powerful policy basis that leads to superior innovation, macroeconomic outcomes, social cohesion and, therefore, superior national security for the United States. This approach thus could support a powerful interest convergence.

The article shows that Supreme Court did not overrule its prior affirmative action precedents, and in fact paved the way for universities to embrace cultural and cognitive diversity to enrich their educational missions. This is important because the case has been widely misconstrued.

My next article will extend the Court's holding to corporate DEI efforts and demonstrate that such efforts are not only remain lawful but also essential to rational human resources management.

They are the first all boys school to take out the NSW mountain biking title — but now they have set their sights on winning at Nationals.

A 14-year-old boy is in hospital after being hit by a taxi at Greenacre on Monday.

Robert Xie Lianbin, 51, returned to the NSW Supreme Court for the start of his fourth trial in the killing of five members of the Lin family almost seven years ago.

IT WAS a case of déjà vu for the Central Coast across the ditch on Saturday, as Wellington ran riot against a young Mariners side to register a 3-0 win in Waikato.

COUNTY Rugby League have announced the Central Coast will be home to a women’s nines competition in 2017.

POLICE seized nearly 1000 cannabis plants in two simultaneous raids at industrial premises at Brookvale and Cromer this morning with six men taken into custody over the $3m haul.

KING Davidson is a man on a mission — to act as a role model for kids doing it tough.

“I don’t know how I kept going I just know why I did.” - Omer Mustafa fasted for 12 hours a day during Ramadan but the 15-year-old boxer from Liverpool still got up and trained twice a day.

jaygooby starred dandavison/delta

a 1% change in several swing states...

via GitHub Public Timeline Feed https://ift.tt/EHbhjky

Don't panic! Here's how to tactfully answer salary expectations questions without costing yourself a ton of money (updated for 2020)

Federal legislation needs to be simplified and improved, according to Liberal Democrats candidate Mark Guest, who is running for the seat of Parramatta.

She was chasing a bunch of other rich boys too. Willys friends called her The Mattress I think the options dried up for both so they both had to settle for each other

BarcelonaRelleu a la Taula d'Entitats del Tercer Sector. L'activista Enric Morist és el nou president de la gran plataforma d'associacions socials i federacions en substitució de Francina Alsina, que ha esgotat els dos mandats màxims. via Pocket

A l'Arxiu Històric de Barcelona acaba d'ingressar tota la documentació del Projecte d'un Ferrocarril Metropolità Circular per a Barcelona, que proposava una xarxa a partir d'anelles que s'entrellacen, amb un abast descomunal. via Pocket

“O s’abaixen els preus, o vaga de lloguers”. Aquesta és la consigna que han llançat les organitzacions en defensa de l’habitatge en els últims mesos. via Pocket

Site with free patterns and textures.

I don't care about the Royal Family, but the Kate Middleton (Princess of Wale) story is wild: - In high school, she and her sister (Pippa) were called the "Wisteria Sisters" for being shameless social climbers.   - She got into a relatively prestigious college (Edinburgh) and then switched to a less prestigious school (St. Andrews) after it was announced that Prince William would be attending. - She delayed starting by a year to be in the same class as William, and then changed her major to Art History to match his.  - She dumped her boyfriend after being told that Prince William said she was "hot." - Her mom gave William an ultimatum that he needed to propose, which Kate then helped plan.  Mission accomplished.

man pages for UNIX, BSD, Linux, SunOS, HP-UX, AIX, Minux, Ultrix, Plan9, Darwin, XFree86, & Perl Man & Info Pages, plus Application manuals

granny shots - grny