Mediaboss Marketing

During the past week, European liberals have joined in commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. The watershed deal, signed in 1998, ended 30 years of violence and conflict in Northern Ireland, known as the Troubles.

The 10 April anniversary was a chance for both the public and politicians to reflect on the work that went into the agreement and following peace, and to commemorate the victims of the conflict.

On the anniversary, Naomi Long, leader of ALDE Party member Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, spoke on the importance of the Good Friday Agreement, while highlighting the need for reforms:

As we mark the 25th anniversary of this historic agreement, I want to pay tribute to all those who played a role in the Good Friday Agreement.

However, the Good Friday Agreement was not perfect. The structures created rigid identity politics, which gives less weight in the Assembly and Executive to those who dont identify as unionist or nationalist.

If we are to move forward into the next 25 years with the optimism and hope offered by the Good Friday Agreement, then reform of the institutions for a new generation is key, she concluded.

In the Republic of Ireland, Tnaiste Michel Martin, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Minister for Defence and leader of ALDE Party member Fianna Fil, commented:

The ambition for the future has to be to realise both the potential of the Good Friday Agreement and to work out how we share this island in the future in a truly reconciled way and in a way that can give real opportunity to generations yet to be born.

ALDE Party member Fianna Fil hosted an event to honour the legacy of the Good Friday Agreement, including remarks from Bertie Ahern, Fianna Fil Taoiseach at the time and signatory of the Good Friday Agreement. ALDE Party Co-President and Irish Senator Timmy Dooley also took part in the event.

You can watch Fianna Fils anniversary video in full below or on YouTube.

In the European Parliament, MEPs marked the important anniversary during a plenary session on 29 March. During the ceremony, Barry Andrews MEP of Fianna Fil said:

"The peace in Northern Ireland is, in my view, one of the European Unions greatest achievements. It was the EU that provided the financial support through structural funds and the peace programme. It was the EU and its Single Market that made borders less relevant."

In his remarks to the plenary, European Council President Charles Michel added:

Peace in Ireland and in the European Union are staked to the same ideal. Exploiting the richness of diversity, rather than sowing division.

Photo credit: Alliance Party of Northern Ireland

See the rest here:
Liberals mark 25th Anniversary of Good Friday Agreement - ALDE Party

The NSW Liberals will decide who takes the mantle of Opposition Leader nearly a month after they lost government.

The April 21 party room meeting, called by Dominic Perrottet on Thursday afternoon, comes after the former premier stood down the night of the coalition's election loss on March 25.

The meeting falls a day after the expected declaration of results in the upper house, where Liberal candidate Rachel Merton is hoping to score one of the final sets.

Jordan Lane is another Liberal with just one foot through the door of the party room.

The electoral commission will conduct a recount of Ryde over the weekend, after the first two counts had Mr Lane 50 votes ahead of Labor's Lyndal Howison on a margin of 0.05 per cent.

Former NSW attorney-general Mark Speakman is favoured to take the Liberal leadership and the Opposition Leader title.

The moderate Cronulla MP has his party's support to become opposition leader but speculation is rife he may have a tilt at former prime minister Scott Morrison's federal southern Sydney electorate of Cook if he quits.

Mr Speakman is yet to confirm he will actually run to replace Mr Perrottet, with Alister Henskens and conservative Anthony Roberts the other names put forward.

The three are considered the party's most experienced MPs following the coalition's March 25 election loss but so far only Mr Roberts has confirmed he will contest the leadership.

It comes as rumours swirl Mr Morrison will announce his retirement in May.

The Nationals last week re-elected leader Paul Toole and deputy leader Bronnie Taylor in their first formal meeting since the election.

Mr Toole saw off a challenge from Dubbo MP Dugald Saunders, who fell short by two votes in the 16-member party room.

READ MORE

Originally posted here:
NSW Liberals land on date to consider leadership - The West Australian

Anne Pattel-Grey, the head of the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Divinity, has told Q+A that the referendum on the Voice to Parliament is not political but rather a question that goes tothe integrity of all Australians.

Professor Pattel-Grey was responding to a question from Q+A host Stan Grant about what the referendum may bring.

"What Australia needs to be conscious of is that this is not a political agenda, this is a moral and ethical agenda and this will determine the integrity of Australia, because individually every personhas a role to play," Professor Pattel-Gray said.

"Whether they vote yesor whether they vote nois going to be to the individual's question of integrity."

Professor Pattel-Grey then called on Australians to look within as she painted a bleak picture for Indigenous Australians if the yes vote did not win.

"The Statement from the Heart is a statement from the heart," she said.

"Our people laid their soulbare to you and made themselves vulnerable in extending the hand to this nation and asking you to recognise us and to give us a voice.

"This country has criminalised our children, they are highly incarcerated, we are even locking up 10-year-olds.

"What a shame to thiscountry.

"And yet what you decide is going to determine our future.

"We shared with you our pain, but we also shared our hope, and if we don't have that hope recognised, youare then damning us to hell, and you are going to kill a nation ofpeople."

The comments drew a strong response from federal president of the Young Liberals Dimitry Chugg-Palmer.

Mr Chugg-Palmer said he would consider voting for the Voice, despite the official position of the Liberal Party being to oppose thefederal government's model for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

"I really want to support the Voice," Mr Chugg-Palmer said, before adding that he wanted to see more details made public.

"I think it is so important that we do have a respectful debate on this topic and we do work through the very important details that we need to see.

"We still haven't seen legislation for what exactly the Voice is going to be.

"Raising those questions and raising those doubtsis not a way of trying to frustrate or stop it, it is about being honest and so that we know what it is we are voting for when we walk into the ballot box.

"I want to see us reconcile with First Australians.

"I think it is the right thing to give them a say on decisions that affect them,that is afundamentally Liberal principle.

"That's why there are plenty of Liberals out there that will be supporting the referendum."

With former US president Donald Trump facing felony charges in New York and a 2024 election on the horizon that US President Joe Biden intends to run in, the stakes are high in US politics.

And there are fears that Mr Trump will use the charges to push his own narrative in the media and garner more support for a second term as president.

British broadcaster Andrew Neil, who has met Mr Trump, said anyone's fears of that happening were likely to be realised.

"I've met Donald Trump and it's much worse than you think," Neil said of the former US president.

"Donald Trump is a lucky man, given his enemies, because hisenemies sometimes play into his hands, and he has been charged on this with falsifying business records.

"The District Attorney who is taking on Mr Trump campaigned on the issue ...so this is him trying to deliver.

"He has to prove something very difficult which is that this misdemeanour led to a felony which was the corruption of the campaign laws.

"That is going to be really difficult to do because asfar as I can see none of the campaign laws were broken."

He said the case was something Mr Trump would actually welcome.

"For Mr Trump, publicity is like oxygen for the rest of us," Neil said.

"He can't exist without it and he is in hiselement now, he is on the front of every newspaper and every broadcast."

Asked if this was the wrong thing to charge Mr Trump over, Neil said in his view it was.

"There are things Mr Trump needs to answer forin the courts," he said.

"His attempt to strong-arm the Georgia authorities just to find another 12,000 votes that would have tipped Georgia over into his camp and therefore may have changed the result of the 2020 election, that seems to me far more important than putting a wrong entry into the business ledger."

Asked by Grant if Trump would win in 2024, Neil said he could not be sure.

"Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, the only one with achance of beating Trump, he is now looking like yesterday's man," he said.

"But then comes the general election, so he even if Mr Trump still wins the Republican nomination, it is not clear that he wins the general election.

"Mr Biden has beaten him before and Mr Trump's candidates in themid-term elections last year in November 2022 all did very badly.

"And the non-Trump Republicans did rather well, so I don't think it is a foregone conclusion."

Watch the full episode of Q+A on iview.

Continued here:
Leader of Young Liberals will consider supporting Indigenous Voice to Parliament, despite party stance - ABC News

We stand in solidarity with the 120000 Treasury Board workers who overwhelmingly voted for a strike mandate.

Workers at the Treasury Board have been without a contract for more than a year while the cost of living soars.

Workers at the Canada Revenue Agency voted for a strike mandate last week. If the parties dont reach an agreement, Treasury board workers could be on strike right away and could be joined by the 35000 workers from the Revenue Agency as soon as Friday.

It is frustrating to see Trudeaus Liberals being okay with CEOs like Galen Weston being paid $11,79 million, but not okay with federal public service workers getting a decent wage offer that keeps up with inflation and recognizes people's hard work during the pandemic.

It's time for the Liberals to return to the negotiation table with a decent offer. Public service workers and Canadians deserve nothing less.

Read the original:
Jagmeet Singh is calling on the Liberals to go back to the table with ... - New Democratic Party

NSA leaders are fighting to persuade Congress to renew a controversial law that cuts red tape for intelligence agencies eavesdropping on foreign actors but which has also been improperly used hundreds of times to collect data on Americans.

So FISA Section 702 is up for renewal this year. And it is a vital source of intelligence. It is an authority that lets us do collection against a known foreign entity who chooses to use U.S. infrastructure, Rob Joyce, the National Security Agencys cybersecurity director, said Tuesday during a Center for Strategic and International Studies event. It makes sure that we don't afford the same protections to those foreign malicious actors who are on our infrastructure as we do the Americans who live here.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, gives the U.S. government the ability to digitally spy on foreign targets outside of the U.S. without a warrant. But civil-liberties groups have documented hundreds of times that U.S. citizens social-media interactions, phone calls, and emails have accidentally been gathered in 702-related surveillance. New America calls such violations inadvertent or unintentional yet extremely concerning because they reveal systemic problems that result from the scope and complexity of the Section 702 surveillance program. Even the court that oversees FISA cases has noted violations.

But supporters of the law describe it as integral to intelligence and law enforcement efforts. Section 702 is set to expire and is up for reauthorization this year with an expected debate to come. And NSA plans to advocate hard for keeping it, Joyce said.

I can't do cybersecurity at the scope and scale we do it today without that authority, and so we'll be working hard with Congress, with the administration, with our partners at FBI and others, DOJ, to figure out how we get 702 reauthorized. It's really vital.

New privacy laws, as well as privacy provisions in cybersecurity laws, are complicating things as well. The standards advanced in the European Unions five-year-old General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, have presented some roadblocks for intelligence agencies.

There were second-order effects that we didn'tI won't say we didn't appreciate, because there were people sounding the alarm. They were not fully considered in the weight of that, Joyce said.

For example, it became more difficult to force internet registries to disclose who owns a domain name.

The default was you couldn't know that thing. And so cybersecurity researchers all over the world lost the ability to follow connectivity between banned domains. So we've got to think about second-order reflections, Joyce said. There is a need for data privacy, but we've got to have rational connectivity to the rule of law processes that still makes cybersecurity effective.

TikTok and ChatGPT: our friendly AI overlords?

Joyce said the concern with TikTok isnt potentially exposing personal data of a subset of individuals but the possibility that the Chinese government could access every bit of metadata the platform gathers.

Do I think if I loaded TikTok on my phone, they're going to get to all the other sensitive things through that TikTok app tomorrow? Probably not. The cost of exposing to TikTok in that way to exploit one or a small set of users probably isn't worth it. But all the data, the metadata, that they do collect, that goes back to big servers, accessible to Chinathat's a problem, Joyce said.

TikTok CEO Shou Chew, who faced intense questioning from Congress last month, pledged that the app would remove U.S. users non-public data to servers that can only be accessed by U.S.-based employees. But the NSA cyber director said, echoing lawmakers' concerns, that even the algorithms pose a threat.

The idea that they own the algorithms that promote or suppress the content. That's a huge problem when you have millions upon millions of eyes consuming the content, and they can dial up something that is divisive, or they can dial down something that is threatening to the PRC. That's the advantage, he said.

ChatGPT, which holds some promise to improve daily operations in the Pentagon, also poses concern to cybersecurity, particularly when it comes to crafting more sophisticated phishing messages.

The technology's impressive. It is really sophisticated, Joyce said. Is it going to, in the next year, automate all of the attacks on organizations? Can you give it a piece of software and tell it to find all the zero-day exploits for it? No, but what it will do is it's going to optimize the workflow. It's going to really improve the ability for malicious actors who use those tools to be better or faster.

That includes phishing or fraud messages that read more like native English-language speakers.

And in the case of the malicious foreign actors, it will craft very believable native-language English text, that could be part of your phishing campaign or your interaction with a person or your ability to build a backstoryall the things that will allow you to do those activities or even malign influencethat's going to be a problem, Joyce said.

AI will also help certain hackers reach a new level, he said.

Is it going to replace hackers and be this super AI hacking? Certainly not in the near term, but it will make the hackers that use AI much more effective and they will operate better than those who don't, he said.

Read the original here:
NSA Pushes Eavesdropping Law, Hits TikTok, Braces for AI-Boosted Attacks - Defense One