The United States government filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against former NSA and CIA contractor Edward Snowden for violating non-disclosure agreement with both agencies with the publication of his new book. Nicole Lafond from talkingpointsmemo.com talks about the legal case…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The suit alleges that Snowden did not submit his book for proper review to either agencies to ensure there was no release of intelligence-related information. While the lawsuit does not seek to stop the publication of Snowden’s new book, “Permanent Record” — released on Tuesday — it rather seeks to to keep any earnings from going to Snowden.

“Edward Snowden has violated an obligation he undertook to the United States when he signed agreements as part of his employment by the CIA and as an NSA contractor,” Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Division Jody Hunt said in a statement. “The United States’ ability to protect sensitive national security information depends on employees’ and contractors’ compliance with their non-disclosure agreements, including their pre-publication review obligations. This lawsuit demonstrates that the Department of Justice does not tolerate these breaches of the public’s trust. We will not permit individuals to enrich themselves, at the expense of the United States, without complying with their pre-publication review obligations.”

Read the lawsuit on talkingpointsmemo.com

#1 international and New York Times bestselling author Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything, pens a letter to the young advocates… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Usually, a commencement address tries to equip graduates with a moral compass for their post-university life. You hear stories that end with clear lessons like “Money can’t buy happiness,” “Be kind,” “Don’t be afraid to fail.”

But my sense is that very few of you are flailing around trying to sort out right from wrong. Quite remarkably, you knew you wanted to go not just to an excellent college, but to an excellent socially and ecologically engaged college. A school surrounded by biological diversity and suffused with tremendous human diversity, with a student population that spans the globe. You also knew that strong community mattered more than almost anything. That’s more self-awareness and self-direction than most people have when they leave graduate school—and somehow you had it when you were still in high school.

Which is why I am going to skip the homilies and get down to business: the historical moment into which you graduate—with climate change, wealth concentration, and racialized violence all reaching breaking points.

How do we help most? How do we best serve this broken world? We know that time is short, especially when it comes to climate change. We all hear the clock ticking loudly in the background.

But that doesn’t mean that climate change trumps everything else. It means we need to create integrated solutions, ones that radically bring down emissions while tackling structural inequality and making life tangibly better for the majority. This is no pipe dream; we have living examples from which to learn. Germany’s energy transition has created 400 thousand jobs in renewables in just over a decade, and not just cleaned up energy but made it fairer, so that many energy grids are owned and controlled by hundreds of cities, towns, and cooperatives.

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Buy Klein’s new release here:

On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal

Kindle price: $12.99

For more than twenty years, Naomi Klein has been the foremost chronicler of the economic war waged on both people and planet—and an unapologetic champion of a sweeping environmental agenda with justice at its center. In lucid, elegant dispatches from the frontlines of contemporary natural disaster, she pens surging, indispensable essays for a wide public: prescient advisories and dire warnings of what future awaits us if we refuse to act, as well as hopeful glimpses of a far better future. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal gathers for the first time more than a decade of her impassioned writing, and pairs it with new material on the staggeringly high stakes of our immediate political and economic choices.

These long-form essays show Klein at her most prophetic and philosophical, investigating the climate crisis not only as a profound political challenge but as a spiritual and imaginative one, as well. Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of “perpetual now,” to the soaring history of humans changing and evolving rapidly in the face of grave threats, to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of “climate barbarism,” this is a rousing call to action for a planet on the brink.

With reports spanning from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef, to the annual smoke-choked skies of the Pacific Northwest, to post-hurricane Puerto Rico, to a Vatican attempting an unprecedented “ecological conversion,” Klein makes the case that we will rise to the existential challenge of climate change only if we are willing to transform the systems that produced this crisis.

“My First Black Boyfriend,” an essay collection by the comedian and filmmaker Chris Rock, is coming out next year, according to Peter Libbey from the New York Times… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Chris Rock, the Emmy-winning comedian and two-time Oscars host, has been talking about race and relationships since he began doing standup in the 1980s. Those who haven’t seen him onstage will soon be able to read his thoughts on these perennially thorny issues in “My First Black Boyfriend,” a collection of his essays set for publication in fall 2020.

“A lot of celebrities write books, and they don’t always have something to say. I think Chris Rock has something to say,” said Deb Futter, the senior vice president and co-publisher of Celadon, which is publishing the book. The essays, she added, “point out things that maybe need to be pointed out in our crazy world.”

Celadon, a division of Macmillan, declined to make Rock available for an interview.

During his 2017 “Total Blackout Tour,” the comedian was candid about his recent divorce and the role he played in the breakdown of his marriage. “At times, Mr. Rock sounded like a man confessing his sins, turning vulnerability into his latest provocation,” Jason Zinoman wrote in his review of a performance in Durham, N.C.

Rock, 54, joined the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in 1990 and appeared in the final season of “In Living Color” as a special guest star. His first HBO special aired in 1994, followed by “Bring the Pain” in 1996, for which he won two Emmy Awards. He has produced and directed both TV (“The Rundown With Robin Thede,” “Everybody Hates Chris”) and film (“Top Five,” “I Think I Love My Wife”) and will appear in the Eddie Murphy movie, “Dolemite Is My Name,” next month.

His first book, “Rock This!,” came out in 1997 and was a New York Times best seller. Rock wrote about several of his favorite topics at the time, including President Bill Clinton and the O.J. Simpson saga, as well as racial dynamics in the United States and the differences he sees between men and women.

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Veteran journalist Cokie Roberts, winner of three Emmys and a legend and trailblazer in broadcasting, has died at the age of 75, CNN announced… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Cokie Roberts worked in television, public radio and publishing for over 40 years. She began her tenure at ABC as a contributor for “This Week with David Brinkley” and later became ABC’s chief congressional analyst.

Roberts is survived by her husband Steve V. Roberts and her children Lee Roberts and Rebecca Roberts, her grandchildren Regan, Hale and Cecilia Roberts and Claiborne, Jack and Roland Hartman, along with nieces, nephews, and cousins.

“We will miss Cokie beyond measure, both for her contributions and for her love and kindness,” Roberts’ family said in a statement on Tuesday.

Roberts passed away on Tuesday “due to complications from breast cancer,” the family’s statement said.

“She will be dearly missed. Cokie’s kindness, generosity, sharp intellect and thoughtful take on the big issues of the day made ABC a better place and all of us better journalists,” ABC News president James Goldston said in a statement.

Roberts began her career in the 1960s at WNEW and KNBC-TV. She joined CBS News in 1974 and then NPR in 1978, for which she covered Capitol Hill and reported on the Panama Canal Treaty. She also served as a correspondent for “The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour” and as a contributing senior news analyst for PBS.

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Richard Sandomir from the New York Time reports Anne Rivers Siddons, whose popular novels, set largely in the South, took female characters on emotional journeys that touched on the region’s racial and social attitudes, died on Wednesday at her home in Charleston, S.C. She was 83… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Anne Rivers Siddons, whose popular novels, set largely in the South, took female characters on emotional journeys that touched on the region’s racial and social attitudes, died on Wednesday at her home in Charleston, S.C. She was 83.

Her stepson David Siddons said the cause was lung cancer.

Ms. Siddons had been an advertising copywriter and a magazine writer when she started writing novels in the 1970s. Her breakthrough, “Peachtree Road” (1988), was a generational saga about Atlanta’s evolution since World War II, told through two cousins.

Ms. Siddons was urged by her friend the writer Pat Conroy to write a novel that would reflect her ambivalence about Atlanta, her adopted home. She had long admired the city’s vigor but felt that its relentless growth had gone too far.

“As Ms. Siddons offered argument after argument about why she couldn’t do the book,” The Atlanta Journal and Constitution wrote in 1988, “she mentioned that a woman friend of hers had just died. ‘The South killed her the day she was born; it just took her that long to die.’”

Hearing that, Mr. Conroy told her, “That’s the opening of your great book about Atlanta.”

It was indeed the first line of the prologue in “Peachtree Road,” in which she replaced “she” with the name of a lead character, Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable.

“Peachtree Road” invited comparisons to “Gone With the Wind,” an earlier sweeping novel with Atlanta as its backdrop. In his review in The Journal and Constitution, Bob Summer wrote that Ms. Siddons had evoked the city as well as Margaret Mitchell had.

He added, “Ms. Siddons skillfully weaves bright threads of humor, nuance and an exacting observation of the social mores of the times she is writing about; surely she is the Jane Austen of modern Atlanta.”

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The diary of Renia Spiegel, murdered by Nazis in 1942 and referred to by some as the “Polish Anne Frank,” will be published by her family after sitting in a vault for decades according to BBC… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust is being released by members of Renia Spiegel’s family.

The book has been compared to the diary of Anne Frank.

Her sister Elizabeth said: “I have read only some of it because I used to cry all the time.”

Elizabeth, who changed her name from Ariana, remembers her sister as “a very quiet and a very pensive girl”.

She told BBC arts correspondent Rebecca Jones her older sister was “like my surrogate mother”.

“She was very intelligent. She was the head of the literary programme in her school. And she was very, very kind and always thoughtful.”

Renia Spiegel, from Przemysl, south-east Poland, began her book, which is released in the UK on 19 September, when she was 15. Its pages give a first-hand account of bombing raids, being forced to go into hiding and the disappearance of other Jewish families from the Przemysl ghetto set up by the Nazis in 1942.

But amidst the tales of horror, Renia – who had aspired to be a poet – described falling in love for the first time with a boy called Zygmunt Schwarzer. They shared their first kiss hours before the Nazis reached her home town.

She was shot dead in July 1942 at the age of 18 by German soldiers who discovered her hiding in the attic of a house after she had escaped from the ghetto.

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Libraries and Archivists Are Scanning and Uploading Books That Are Secretly in the Public Domain according to Karl Bode from Vice… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

A coalition of archivists, activists, and libraries are working overtime to make it easier to identify the many books that are secretly in the public domain, digitize them, and make them freely available online to everyone. The people behind the effort are now hoping to upload these books to the Internet Archive, one of the largest digital archives on the internet.

As it currently stands, all books published in the U.S. before 1924 are in the public domain, meaning they’re publicly owned and can be freely used and copied. Books published in 1964 and after are still in copyright, and by law will be for 95 years from their publication date.

But a copyright loophole means that up to 75 percent of books published between 1923 to 1964 are secretly in the public domain, meaning they are free to read and copy. The problem is determining which books these are, due to archaic copyright registration systems and convoluted and shifting copyright law.

As such, a coalition of libraries, volunteers, and archivists have been working overtime to identify which titles are in the public domain, digitize them, then upload them to the internet. At the heart of the effort has been the New York Public Library, which recently documented why the entire process is important, but a bit of a pain.

Back in the 1970s, the Library of Congress operated a Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE) indicating which books had renewed copyright. Digital copies of these notices can be found in the Internet Archive and at over at Stanford University.

Historically, it’s been fairly easy to tell whether a book published between 1923 and 1964 had its copyright renewed, because the renewal records were already digitized. But proving that a book hadn’t had its copyright renewed has historically been more difficult, New York Public Library Senior Product Manager Sean Redmond said.

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