A man who filmed a pet dog giving Nazi salutes before putting the footage on YouTube has been convicted of committing a hate crime. Mark Meechan, 30, recorded his girlfriend's pug, Buddha, responding to statements such as "gas the Jews" and "Sieg Heil" by raising its paw. But police were alerted and he was arrested for allegedly committing a hate crime. The original clip had been viewed more than three million times on YouTube.

Meechan, of Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, went on trial at Airdrie Sheriff Court where he denied any wrong doing.

He insisted he made the video, which was posted in April 2016, to annoy his girlfriend Suzanne Kelly, 29. But Sheriff Derek O'Carroll found him guilty of a charge under the Communications Act that he posted a video on social media and YouTube which was grossly offensive because it was "anti-semitic and racist in nature" and was aggravated by religious prejudice. Sheriff O'Carroll told the court he did not believe Meechan had made the video only to annoy his girlfriend and ruled it was anti-Semitic.

He also said he believed Meechan - who was supported at court by Tommy Robinson, former leader of far-right group the English Defence League (EDL) - left the video on YouTube to drive traffic to other material he had on there. He added: "In my view it is a reasonable conclusion that the video is grossly offensive. "The description of the video as humorous is no magic wand. "This court has taken the freedom of expression into consideration. "But the right to freedom of expression also comes with responsibility."

Sheriff O'Carroll said Meehan was "quite obviously an intelligent and articulate man". But he added: "The accused knew that the material was offensive and knew why it was offensive. "Despite that the accused made a video containing anti-Semitic content and he would have known it was grossly offensive to many Jewish people."

Ross Brown, defending, said Meechan had only intended the video to be seen by a small group of friends and to annoy his girlfriend.  He said the material had been leaked and gone viral but Police Scotland then wrongly pursued Meechan despite his later videos attempting to "set the record straight".

Mr Brown said: "His girlfriend testified that Mr Meechan had never made known to her any anti-Semitic views whatsoever. "The accused possesses both tolerant and liberal views. "His girlfriend is in no doubt it was an example of his sense of humour."

At least 17 people were killed Wednesday in a high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said.

The suspect, 19-year-old former student Nikolaus Cruz, is in custody, the sheriff said. The sheriff said he was expelled for unspecified disciplinary reasons. Police are investigating his digital profile, he said. So far, what they've found is "very, very disturbing," Israel said.

Law enforcement responded to reports of a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shortly before 3 p.m.
Seventeen people, including the suspect, were sent to area hospitals, said Dr. Evan Boyar of Broward Health. The suspect was treated and released to police. The victims included students and adults, the sheriff said. Twelve were killed inside the building and two died outside, he said. One died in the street and two died at the hospital, Israel said.

Seventeen people were confirmed dead as the United States endured another horrifying school shooting at the hands of a teenage gunman armed with an AR-15 assault rifle.

Twelve people died inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida. Two more died just outside the building, one more died in a nearby street and two more victims died in hospital, a Broward County sheriff confirmed.

After initial reports of a shooter, officers surrounded the campus, directing the evacuation of hundreds of students from the scene, while other teens hid inside closets and under desks to stay safe. Students later told reporters that they at first thought alarms in the school were a fire drill, until they heard gunshots in the hallways.

As first reports emerged, deputies of the Broward County sheriff’s department said the high school was on a “code red” lockdown. The department said there were “at least 14 victims” being taken to a local hospital and medical center, although it was not clear from the statement whether any of them were fatally injured.

However, by 6.30pm local time, police sheriff Scott Israel confirmed the grim news: “It’s a horrific, horrific day. My triplets attended this school, and it’s horrible, just horrible.”

Medical staff confirmed a total of 17 patients had been taken to three hospitals - two patients died, at least three more were in critical condition. The suspect was treated and released into police custody.

Sheriff Israel identified the killer as 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, who was in custody. Israel said Cruz had been “expelled for disciplinary reasons”. (The sheriff’s office had previously released incorrect spellings of his name.)

Israel said: “He had countless magazines, multiple magazines. One AR-15. I do not know if he had a second.”

The rise of big data policing rests in part on the belief that data-­based decisions can be more objective, fair, and accurate than traditional policing.

Data is data and thus, the thinking goes, not subject to the same subjective errors as human decision making. But in truth, algorithms encode both error and bias. As David Vladeck, the former director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission (who was, thus, in charge of much of the law surrounding big data consumer protection), once warned, "Algorithms may also be imperfect decisional tools. Algorithms themselves are designed by humans, leaving open the possibility that unrecognized human bias may taint the process. And algorithms are no better than the data they process, and we know that much of that data may be unreliable, outdated, or reflect bias."

Algorithmic technologies that aid law enforcement in targeting crime must compete with a host of very human questions. What data goes into the computer model? After all, the inputs determine the outputs. How much data must go into the model? The choice of sample size can alter the outcome. How do you account for cultural differences? Sometimes algorithms try to smooth out the anomalies in the data—­anomalies that can correspond with minority populations. How do you address the complexity in the data or the "noise" that results from imperfect results?

Sometimes, the machines get it wrong because of racial or gender bias built into the model. For policing, this is a serious concern. [...]

As Frank Pasquale has written in his acclaimed book The Black Box Society, "Algorithms are not immune from the fundamental problem of discrimination, in which negative and baseless assumptions congeal into prejudice. . . . And they must often use data laced with all-­too-­human prejudice."

Inputs go in and generalizations come out, so that if historical crime data shows that robberies happen at banks more often than at nursery schools, the algorithm will correlate banks with robberies, without any need to understand that banks hold lots of cash and nursery schools do not. "Why" does not matter to the math. The correlation is the key. Of course, algorithms can replicate past biases, so that if an algorithm is built around biased data, analysts will get a biased result. For example, if police primarily arrest people of color from minority neighborhoods for marijuana, even though people of all races and all neighborhoods use marijuana at equal rates, the algorithm will correlate race with marijuana use.

The algorithm will also correlate marijuana with certain locations. A policing strategy based on such an algorithm will correlate race and drugs, even though the correlation does not accurately reflect the actual underlying criminal activity across society. And even if race were completely stripped out of the model, the correlation with communities of color might still remain because of the location. A proxy for racial bias can be baked into the system, even without any formal focus on race as a variable. [...]

As mathematician Jeremy Kun has written, "It’s true that an algorithm itself is quantitative—­it boils down to a sequence of arithmetic steps for solving a problem. The danger is that these algorithms, which are trained on data produced by people, may reflect the biases in that data, perpetuating structural racism and negative biases about minority groups."

Big data policing involves a similar danger of perpetrating structural racism and negative biases about minority groups. "How" we target impacts "whom" we target, and underlying existing racial biases means that data-­driven policing may well reflect those biases.

It is an announcement that could hardly be better designed to get the blood of the average Belgian boiling.

The European commission has said drinkers in the country have probably been paying over the odds for their favourite beers for years.

AB InBev, the world’s biggest brewing company, has been accused by Brussels of charging less for its popular Jupiler and Leffe beers in France and the Netherlands than in Belgium, and using its dominant position in the Belgian market to get away with it.

Such news would undoubtedly prove a blow to drinkers in any country. For Belgians, however, where beer is one of the few unifying cultural artefacts of its multilingual society, the ruling is particularly galling.

Margrethe Vestager, the commissioner in charge of competition policy, said in a statement on Thursday: “Belgian consumers may have had to pay more for their favourite beers.

“Our preliminary finding is that AB InBev may have deliberately prevented cheaper beer imports out of France and the Netherlands from reaching consumers in Belgium. Such practices would breach EU competition rules, because they deny consumers the benefits of the EU single market – choice and lower prices.”

After a year-long investigation, the commission said it believed there was evidence that AB InBev had been pursuing “a deliberate strategy” for at least eight years to prevent supermarkets and wholesalers from buying Jupiler and Leffe at lower prices in the Netherlands and France and importing them into Belgium.

It is claimed the company changed the packaging of Jupiler and Leffe beer cans in the Netherlands and France to make them harder to sell in Belgium.

It is also alleged they removed French text from cans in the Netherlands, and Dutch text from its cans in France, to prevent their sale in the French and Dutch speaking parts of Belgium, respectively.

The brewer is further accused of limiting Dutch retailers’ access to key products and promotions in order to prevent them from bringing less expensive beer products to Belgium.

AB InBev is based in Leuven and has a £38.8bn turnover. Last year it completed a merger worth £76.5bn with SAB Miller.

It said it was working constructively with the commission on the complaints and that integrity was a core principle of the company.

A spokesman said: “It would not be appropriate for us to comment further concerning the European commission’s decision to issue a statement of objections in relation to certain alleged practices on the Belgian beer market, other than that we have been working constructively with the EC since the investigation was announced in June 2016.

“Thursday’s announcement is a procedural step. A statement of objections is not a final decision on the outcome of the case. As a company, we take compliance very seriously.”

Belgium says loot boxes are gambling, wants them banned in Europe

Last week, Belgium's Gaming Commission announced that it had launched an investigation into whether the loot boxes available for purchase in games like Overwatch and Star Wars Battlefront 2 constitute a form of gambling. Today, VTM News reported that the ruling is in, and the answer is yes.

The Google translation is a little sloppy, as usual, but the message is clear enough. "The mixing of money and addiction is gambling," the Gaming Commission declared. Belgium's Minister of Justice Koen Geens also weighed in, saying, "Mixing gambling and gaming, especially at a young age, is dangerous for the mental health of the child."

Geens, according to the report, wants to ban in-game purchases outright (correction: if you don't know exactly what you're purchasing), and not just in Belgium: He said the process will take time, "because we have to go to Europe. We will certainly try to ban it."

And now, things will start to get interesting. I've reached out to the Gaming Commission for more information, and will update if I receive a reply.

Destiny 2 developer Bungie is updating the game to fix a piece of armor featuring a symbol associated with a hate group, the studio announced today.

“It’s come to our attention that a gauntlet in Destiny 2 shares elements with a hate symbol,” Bungie said on Twitter. “It is not intentional. We are removing it.” The studio also apologized for the error, saying that the armor “does NOT represent our values” and adding, “We renounce hate in all forms.”

2/2 Our deepest apologies. This does NOT represent our values, and we are working quickly to correct this. We renounce hate in all forms.

— Bungie (@Bungie) September 12, 2017

Bungie did not specify the piece of armor at issue, referring to it only as gauntlets. But in a thread about the announcement on the Destiny subreddit, a Redditor named xxbiohazrdxx appears to have figured it out. The armor in question appears to be Road Complex AA1, a pair of legendary gauntlets for the Hunter class.

The upper arm region of the gauntlets bears a symbol that, when right-side up, looks like a gray chevron between two horizontal gray bars. Between that symbol and its mirror image lie four vertical white bars. All of these markings appear on a lime green background.

But if you’re looking at it horizontally, Road Complex AA1’s design bears a strong resemblance to the logo of Kek, a satirical “religion” created by members of the white nationalist movement that describes itself as the “alt-right.” Here’s some background on Kek from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog:

Kek “adherents” created a whole cultural mythology around the idea, describing an ancient kingdom called “Kekistan” that was eventually overwhelmed by “Normistan” and “Cuckistan.” They created not only a logo representing Kek — four Ks surrounding an E — but promptly deployed it in a green-and-black banner, which they call the “national flag of Kekistan.”
The Kekistan banner is modeled after a Nazi war flag: The Kek logo sits in the center instead of a swastika, and green replaces red in the color scheme. Note also that the E inside the four K’s looks like three vertical bars. In recent months, white nationalists have flown the Kekistan flag at events across the U.S. — including the “Unite the Right” rally a month ago in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a white supremacist killed one peaceful protester and injured numerous others.

It’s unclear if Bungie is going to remove the Road Complex AA1 armor from Destiny 2 entirely, or just update its design to change the symbols on it. We’ve reached out for further details, and will update this article with any information we receive.

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