January 2013

National Rifle Association President Wayne LaPierre blamed the media, the entertainment industry, video games, gun-free school zones and several other factors for the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown (CT). He did not blame his own organization nor the availability of guns.

"In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing an ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes — every minute of every day of every month of every year," LaPierre said. "A child growing up in America witnesses 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence by the time he or she reaches the ripe old age of 18. And throughout it all, too many in our national media … their corporate owners … and their stockholders … act as silent enablers, if not complicit co-conspirators," LaPierre continued. "Rather than face their own moral failings, the media demonize lawful gun owners, amplify their cries for more laws and fill the national debate with misinformation and dishonest thinking that only delay meaningful action and all but guarantee that the next atrocity is only a news cycle away." LaPierre's effort to blame the massacre on factors other than guns struck many members of both the progressive and mainstream media as tone-deaf, according to a flurry of responses on Twitter, where the news conference was trending nationwide.

The U.S. military is ramping up preparation for cyber wars of the future that will be waged over computers instead of traditional combat zones. In this world, some of our best technological advances look more like vulnerabilities. We’ve figured out how to network bank accounts, streetlights and power grids, how to connect real-time transit data to riders anywhere, or medical records in one hospital to doctors across town. Each of these technologies, though, could just as easily invite cyber attack, with particularly grim implications for major cities. But for all of these high-tech high stakes, the latest training tool to defend urban infrastructure is a decidedly low-budget innovation: It’s a model-train town, built with parts from the local hobby shop, sitting in an office in New Jersey. The 6-by-8-foot miniature CyberCity has just been built by the SANS Institute, which leads information-security training for military, government, and civilian officials. For the past few years, SANS has been running NetWars computer simulation training games for the military. Officials, though, wanted a program that would really capture the “kinetic effects” of cyber warfare.

So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of Rupert Murdoch's ultimate and most audacious attempt – thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance – to hijack America's democratic institutions on a scale equal to his success in kidnapping and corrupting the essential democratic institutions of Great Britain through money, influence and wholesale abuse of the privileges of a free press.

In the American instance, Murdoch's goal seems to have been nothing less than using his media empire – notably Fox News – to stealthily recruit, bankroll and support the presidential candidacy of General David Petraeus in the 2012 election. All this was revealed in a tape recording of Petraeus's meeting with McFarland obtained by Bob Woodward, whose account of their discussion, accompanied online by audio of the tape, was published in the Washington Post – distressingly, in its style section, and not on page one, where it belonged – and, under the style logo, online on December 3. Indeed, almost as dismaying as Ailes' and Murdoch's disdain for an independent and truly free and honest press, and as remarkable as the obsequious eagerness of their messenger to convey their extraordinary presidential draft and promise of on-air Fox support to Petraeus, has been the ho-hum response to the story by the American press and the country's political establishment, whether out of fear of Murdoch, Ailes and Fox – or, perhaps, lack of surprise at Murdoch's, Ailes' and Fox's contempt for decent journalistic values or a transparent electoral process. The tone of the media's reaction was set from the beginning by the Post's own tin-eared treatment of this huge story: relegating it, like any other juicy tidbit of inside-the-beltway media gossip, to the section of the newspaper and its website that focuses on entertainment, gossip, cultural and personality-driven news, instead of the front page.

Some 13% of those ages 16 and older have visited library websites or otherwise accessed library services by mobile device.

This is the first reading in a national survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project on this subject. An earlier survey in 2009 by scholars at the University of Washington found that 6% of Americans ages 16 and older had used a mobile device to connect to a library site, so the incidence of this activity has doubled since then. Those who are most likely to have connected to a library site include parents of minor children, women, and those with at least some college education. In all, the Pew Internet Project survey finds that 39% of Americans ages 16 and older have gone to a library website at one time or another and, of them, 64% visited a library site in the previous 12 months. That translates into 25% of all Americans ages 16+ who visited a library website in the past year. Those who are most likely to have visited library websites are parents of minors, women, those with college educations, those under age 50, and people living in households earning $75,000 or more.