US imposes sanctions on Venezuelan president’s wife

The US Treasury went after Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s inner circle Tuesday, imposing sanctions on his wife, vice president and other close associates.

Treasury named Cilia Adela Flores de Maduro, a former attorney general and the president’s wife, as one of the figures who has helped Maduro retain his grip on power, along with Vice President Delcy Rodriguez.

The other officials sanctioned are described as members of Maduro’s inner circle — Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez.

US imposes sanctions on Venezuelan president’s wife AFP

Low pay, poor prospects, and psychological toll: The perils of microtask work

Microtask platforms recruit humans to do the rating, tagging, review-writing, and poll-taking work that can’t quite be automated with an algorithm yet. In the US, the most common such platform is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, but other platforms are prominent in other parts of the world. …

In the US, accounting for all paid and unpaid work, Mechanical Turk workers made just $6.54 per hour on average, with a median of $5.63 per hour. That’s significantly lower than the minimum wage in most states, and lower than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

And around the world, workers were invariably paid less than US microtask workers. The average hourly pay for all workers across the five platforms was just $3.31 (and that includes the US’ relatively “high” wages!) with a median hourly pay of $2.16. This doesn’t necessarily reflect a tendency for lower wages in poorer countries, either. The UN survey showed “that a substantial proportion of workers earn below their local minimum wage.”

Low pay, poor prospects, and psychological toll: The perils of microtask work Ars Technica

A 124-year-old statue reviled by Native Americans – and how it came down

In the middle of the night and with dozens of Native Americans watching, San Francisco city workers tied safety ropes around a 124-year-old bronze statue and pulled. Carefully, they dislodged the piece from a granite platform and laid it on top of a flatbed truck. It was a moment stoked with meaning. After decades of effort, the Early Days statue, a symbol of colonization and oppression to many, was gone.

A 124-year-old statue reviled by Native Americans – and how it came down Guardian

An arsenic soup could be contaminating public water supplies after Hurricane Florence

As floodwaters from Hurricane Florence continue to rise in North Carolina, they’re overwhelming the infrastructure that separates two basins of coal ash from the public water supply. It now appears water containing arsenic, mercury, lead, and other heavy metals from at least one of the basins has leaked into Sutton Lake, breached a dam, and entered Cape Fear River.

Duke Energy, which owns the basins, said it couldn’t rule out that coal ash might be escaping into the river, according to the Associated Press. The river is a water supply for Wilmington, a city of about 60,000.

An arsenic soup could be contaminating public water supplies after Hurricane Florence Quartz

Multiple Online Banking Systems Go Down in Britain

Payment chaos: For bottom-line-obsessed bank executives, IT systems are an expense to be slashed. The results are in. …

RBS, the largely state-owned lender that has cost British taxpayers almost a hundred billion pounds in bailouts, losses, fines and legal fees, also has a rich history of outages, including a major blackout in 2012 that lasted for over a week, disrupting customers’ wages, payments and other transactions. The outage was allegedly caused by an “inexperienced” RBS tech operative’s blunder. For the duration of the blackout, the only means many customers had of accessing basic banking services was to visit the local branch.

That, however, didn’t stop RBS from embarking on a branch closure rampage, blaming the growth of internet banking for its decision to close one in four of its branches. Now, it can’t manage to keep those web-based services up and running, leaving customers even worse off. Even as the lender has increasingly digitized its services, it has consistently downsized its IT services team. In 2017 it revealed that it planned to axe 900 IT jobs by 2020 and is doubling down on its outsourcing of IT roles to India to reduce costs.

Multiple Online Banking Systems Go Down in Britain Wolf Street

FEMA Stopped Paying For Hotels For Displaced Puerto Ricans. Now Some Are Homeless.

It’s been a year since Hurricane Maria upended Jennyfer Ortiz’s life. The single mother fled Puerto Rico with her two children after their house in the mountain town of Orocovis lost power. They have been using a government-funded program to pay for a hotel in the Bronx, but that ended last week, forcing Ortiz, her 20-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter into a homeless shelter.

FEMA Stopped Paying For Hotels For Displaced Puerto Ricans. Now Some Are Homeless. Huffington Post

Cuts to Cancer Research, Head Start, and Women’s Shelters Among $226 Million Diverted to Pay for Child Detention

Along with tens of thousands of children and families, cancer patients, Americans with substance abuse disorders, and victims of domestic violence are among the casualties of President Donald Trump’s detention of young immigrants—according to government documents outlining the administration’s plan to divert millions of dollars away from programs serving those populations.

Yahoo News reported that in order to continue detaining more than 13,000 children currently in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is proposing that up to $266 million be taken from other government health programs.

Cuts to Cancer Research, Head Start, and Women’s Shelters Among $226 Million Diverted to Pay for Child Detention MintPress News

‘Evil’: Worst Fears Realized as ICE Arrests Dozens of Family or Guardians Attempting to Retrieve Children From Detention

Confirming the fears of many immigrant families who have declined to step forward and claim children who are being held in detention facilities, a new report shows that more than 40 people have been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after doing just that.

‘Evil’: Worst Fears Realized as ICE Arrests Dozens of Family or Guardians Attempting to Retrieve Children From Detention Common Dreams