https://blogs.psychcentral.com/blog/2017/08/life-as-a-registered-sex-offender-what-is-it-really-like%e2%80%a8/

Not long ago, I wrote a pair of research-based articles for Psychology Today, one discussing the different categories of sexual offending and the likelihood of recidivism, another on the way sex offenders are dealt with by the legal system. At the same time, I published a longer article on sexual offending for the Sex Offender Law Report. Taken together, these articles generated countless comments and emails – including several from therapists, offenders, and family members of offenders.

One of the more gratifying aspects of the blog-back (the blog feedback) with these articles was that offenders themselves were, in various ways, finding their stories in them. Several wrote lengthy emails sharing their personal experience and thanking me for giving them a voice. At that point, I realized that a voice by proxy is nowhere near as powerful or enlightening as the real thing. So I followed up with three of these individuals – two men and one woman – asking if they would participate in a Q&A about what it’s like to live as a registered sex offender. All three agreed.

Initially, I thought about utilizing the respondents’ answers in a narrative form, giving analysis and statistics along the way, and at some point I may do that. For now, however, I feel their answers are most meaningful exactly as I received them. That said, I have at times shortened and clarified the responses (with approval from the participants), and I combined two questions – one about being in therapy, the other about finding other forms of support – into one question. Otherwise, this material remains in its raw form, with no judgements, commentary, or analysis on my part. (If you want research-based information and commentary from me, you can find that in the articles mentioned above.) I have also chosen to refer to the respondents only by their initials: DG (male), JL (female), and ST (male). This was done to protect them and to encourage completely honest responses.

This article is split into three parts: offense and registration; family, friends, and romance; and work and recovery. Part one, with questions on the offense and the registration process, is presented below.

What was your offense? Was it for a one-time incident, or was it part of a larger pattern of sexual acting out, as with sexual addiction?

All three respondents were arrested for crimes involving a minor. DG solicited a minor for sex. JL had unlawful sex with a minor between the ages of 13 and 16 (who stated that he consented and never felt forced). ST pled no contest to electronic transmission of material harmful to a minor after getting caught in an Internet sting.

DG says, “Thankfully, I was arrested for a non-contact offense, though what I did was still classified as a felony.” JL says, “I have never been in trouble of any kind until this situation, where I simply allowed mutual feelings to control my better judgement.” ST says he was in a romance chat room with an expectation that everyone there was at least 18. “I engaged in a conversation with an individual who claimed to be in high school. She showed an interest in me, said I was cute, asked me to send an intimate image of myself, and asked to meet so we could hook up. Despite my reluctance and saying no at first, I agreed to do each of those things. Hours later, showing up to ‘her’ location, I was met by several undercover police officers.”
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The Covid-19 virus which has been ravaging France may not have originated in China, according to a study published by virologists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. The French strain may have been circulating locally and unrecognised before the global outbreak accelerated.

Tests on samples from 97 French and three Algerians infected with Sars-CoV-2 suggest that the virus may have been around in France before the pandemic started.

The sixteen-page study, by researchers affiliated with the prestigious Pasteur Institute in Paris, was first reported by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, and says that already on 10 January, France implemented “strengthened surveillance of Covid-19 cases,” five days after the World Health Organisation issued the first “Disease Outbreak News” on a “pneumonia of unknown cause” which was first reported by China on 31 December 2019.

Genetic analysis of the samples revealed that the dominant types of viral strains in France belonged to a “clade” or group with a common ancestor that did not come from either China or Italy.

“The French outbreak has been mainly seeded by one or several variants of this clade … we can infer that the virus was silently circulating in France in February,” write the researchers.

The earliest sample in the French clade was collected on 19 February from a patient who had no history of travel and no known contact with returned travelers.

The scenario “is compatible with the large proportion of mild or asymptomatic diseases,” in France, say the researchers.

However, “current sampling clearly prevents reliable inference for the timing of introduction in France,” making it impossible to go one step further and conclude that the virus existed in France even before it was discovered in China.
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Volcanic activity is escalating in a region of Iceland that has not erupted for 800 years, with scientists warning it could cause disruption for centuries to come.

Since 21 January, the Reykjanes peninsula south-west of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, has experienced more than 8,000 earthquakes and about 10cm of land uplift due to magma intrusions underground.

“It seems that after being relatively inactive for many centuries, this region is waking up,” said Dave McGarvie, a volcanologist at Lancaster University.

Situated close to the town of Grindavík and the popular Blue Lagoon tourist attraction, and only nine miles (15km) from Iceland’s international airport, the region last erupted about 800 years ago (though there have been more recent eruptions offshore). Geological evidence shows the area is fed by five volcanic systems, which seem to come to life in a coordinated way roughly every 1,000 years.

The last period of volcanic activity on the peninsula began in the 10th century and continued until the 13th. Unlike typical Icelandic volcanoes, which tend to wake for a few years and then die down, when this region gets going it appears to splutter on and off for up to 300 years, producing eruptive episodes (locally known as “fires”) lasting a few decades. Long thin cracks known as fissures extend up to five miles (8km), producing fountains of lava, usually without large amounts of ash or explosive activity.

The most recent “fires” occurred between 1210 and 1240 and covered about 50 sq km of land in lava. At least six separate eruptions occurred, each lasting weeks to months, interspersed with gaps of up to 12 years with no activity. Volcanic rock fragments and particles were carried tens of kilometres by the wind and written sources report the rockfall causing problems for livestock in the area.

If a similar series of eruptions occurred today, the Iceland GeoSurvey calculates that runways at Keflavík airport could be coated in 2cm of ash, temporarily halting all flights.

“Wind direction during times of ash production is critical – anything with a slight northerly aspect is going to cause problems for the international airport and the metropolitan area of Reykjavík,” said McGarvie.
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The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on Thursday to stop the Baltimore Police Department from testing one of the most expansive surveillance regimes in any American city, an aerial photography system capable of tracking the outdoor movement of every one of its 600,000 residents.

Last week the Baltimore Board of Estimates approved a police contract with Persistent Surveillance Systems LLC to let the company and police fly three airplanes outfitted with high-resolution cameras over the city. According to the contract, the imaging systems can photograph up to 32 square miles every second, allowing for the slow-motion reconstruction of virtually all outdoor movement.

Baltimore police representatives have previously stated that the intent of the Aerial Investigation Research program is for the planes to fly simultaneously, allowing them to record imaging for 90 percent of the city.

In their complaint, lawyers for the ACLU call the system a “society-changing threat to individual privacy and to free association” and argue that it violates constitutional rights to privacy and free association.

“The data collected through the AIR program will amount to a comprehensive record of the movements of Plaintiffs and nearly everyone in Baltimore — facilitating an unprecedented police power to engage in retrospective location-tracking,” the complaint says. “The AIR program would put into place the most wide-reaching surveillance dragnet ever employed in an American city, giving [Baltimore police] a virtual, visual time machine whose grasp no person can escape.”

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a community organization called Leaders for a Beautiful Struggle, which has advocated for racial justice and police reform in the city, as well as by two other Baltimore activists and community organizers. The ACLU argues that constant aerial surveillance would “undermine the ability of LBS to carry out political activities crucial to its mission.”

The Baltimore Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The deployment of the AIR program follows an all-too-familiar storyline of police technology after 9/11, in which tracking equipment developed for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan has been repurposed by the private surveillance industry and sold to American police departments, which quietly deploy it without public debate.
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Monsanto expected its herbicide dicamba to ruin other farmers' plants
The US agriculture giant Monsanto and the German chemical giant BASF were aware for years that their plan to introduce a new agricultural seed and chemical system would probably lead to damage on many US farms, internal documents seen by the Guardian show.

Risks were downplayed even while they planned how to profit off farmers who would buy Monsanto’s new seeds just to avoid damage, according to documents unearthed during a recent successful $265m lawsuit brought against both firms by a Missouri farmer.

The documents, some of which date back more than a decade, also reveal how Monsanto opposed some third-party product testing in order to curtail the generation of data that might have worried regulators.

And in some of the internal emails, employees appear to joke about sharing “voodoo science” and hoping to stay “out of jail”.

The new crop system developed by Monsanto and BASF was designed to address the fact that millions of acres of US farmland have become overrun with weeds resistant to Monsanto’s glyphosate-based weedkillers, best known as Roundup. The collaboration between the two companies was built around a different herbicide called dicamba.

In the Roundup system, farmers could spray glyphosate herbicides such as Roundup over the top of certain crops that Monsanto genetically engineered to survive being sprayed with the pesticide. This “glyphosate-tolerant” crop system has been popular with farmers around the world but has led to widespread weed resistance to glyphosate. The new system promoted by Monsanto and BASF similarly provides farmers with genetically engineered dicamba-tolerant soybeans and cotton that can be sprayed directly with dicamba. The weeds in the fields die but the crops do not.

Dicamba has been in use since the 1960s but traditionally was used sparingly, and not on growing crops, because it has a track record of volatilizing – moving far from where it is sprayed – particularly in warm growing months. As it moves it can damage or kill the plants it drifts across.

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The government has quietly drawn up proposals to lend other countries £1bn of public money so that they can buy British-made bombs and surveillance technology.

The move has been attacked by arms-control campaigners who say that taxpayers’ cash may end up fuelling conflict and human rights abuses.

The plan was revealed in a single sentence slipped into this month’s budget. Unveiling a new £2bn lending facility for projects supporting clean growth, the government also announced the creation of “a new £1bn (fund) to support overseas buyers of UK defence and security goods and services”.

It is understood that the fund will be overseen by UK Export Finance, which gives loans to help foreign countries, especially those with developing economies, buy British goods and services.

“Even in times of crisis, the government is showing that it will go to any length to sell as many weapons as possible,” said Andrew Smith of Campaign Against Arms Trade. “The arms deals being supported with this money could be used in enabling atrocities and abuses for years to come. Government should be regulating and controlling arms sales, not using public money and doing everything it can to promote them.”

The government sees the defence industry as a major contributor to Britain’s post-Brexit economy. The Department for International Trade has a specialist team to promote UK arms sales.

In 2018, the latest figures available, the UK won arms contracts worth £14bn. Between 2008 and 2018 the UK was the second biggest arms exporter in the world, with 19% of the market share. Three-fifths of arms sales over the period went to the Middle East.

Some £5.3bn of arms have been licensed to Saudi Arabia since the war in Yemen began. There are concerns that the Saudi-led coalition, which is fighting Houthi rebels in the country, may have committed human rights violations by targeting civilian infrastructure.
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The mobile phone industry has explored the creation of a global data-sharing system that could track individuals around the world, as part of an effort to curb the spread of Covid-19.

The Guardian has learned that a senior official at GSMA, an international standard-setting body for the mobile phone industry, held discussions with at least one company that is capable of tracking individuals globally through their mobile devices, and discussed the possible creation of a global data-sharing system.

Any move to create such a global tracking system would represent a major escalation in efforts to use mobile phone location data to help stem the pandemic, and would be likely to raise concerns among privacy and security experts.

Until now the use of mobile phone tracking in the fight against Covid-19 has been restricted to national governments, which are either monitoring data within their borders or in discussions with mobile operators and technology companies about doing so.

They include the US, India, Iran, Poland, Singapore, Israel and South Korea. The British government is engaged in talks with BT, the owner of the UK mobile operator EE, about using phone location and usage data to determine the efficacy of isolation orders.

The concept of an international mobile tracing scheme would go further, enabling authorities to monitor movements and potentially track the spread of the disease across borders. The GSMA represents the interests of 750 mobile phone operators and vendors across the world and helps set international standards for companies.

A person familiar with its exploratory talks said they were at an early stage and that decisions had not yet been made about whether to move ahead with the plan. The aim of such a global network would be to enact “contact tracing”, enabling authorities to use mobile location data to track who a person infected with Covid-19 may have come in contact with.

A spokesperson for GSMA strenuously denied it was currently involved in any project to create a global tracking system. “We are not involved in a project of this nature,” the GSMA spokesperson said. However the GSMA also said it would not comment on discussions that had taken place or ideas that were being explored.
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People in the DR Congo are suing Apple, Google, Tesla, Microsoft and Dell for employing children in cobalt mines and causing them injury or death.

A Congolese human rights activist has said he was forced to flee the country with his family after being linked to a lawsuit accusing the world’s largest tech companies of being complicit in the deaths of children in cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

In December, the Guardian revealed that a group of families from DRC were launching landmark legal action against Apple, Google, Tesla, Microsoft and Dell. They claim they aided and abetted the deaths and injuries of their children, who were working in mines that they say were linked to the tech companies.

Auguste Mutombo, executive director of Alternatives Plus, a DRC-based NGO that works to improve conditions in the artisanal mining sector, helped facilitate the field research that formed the evidence base for the suit.

He said that shortly after details of the lawsuit went public, he received dozens of death threats in person and via telephone, and text messages from people who claimed to be members of mining cooperatives.

Mutombo said he did not go to the police as he did not trust the authorities to protect him. Instead he moved his wife and children out of the country to a safe address in Zambia and went into hiding. He recently returned to DRC and said he wished to go public to try and force the authorities to protect his family from further threats.

“I was expecting some problems following the filing of the lawsuit, but the magnitude of the threats made me very fearful for the safety of my family and meant we had to go into hiding for the time that the lawsuit was in the media,” said Mutombo.

“In the past, there have been several cases of murders of human rights activists and the lawsuit threatens the economic interests of many companies in the region. It will not stop me doing my work, but there needs to be better protection for activists.”
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