Monthly Archives: June 2013
Journalist who brought down General McChrystal killed
Michael Hastings, a reporter who was believed to have been alone in the car when it struck a tree at high speed at 4:30 am in LA, died on Tuesday at the age of 33. He was known for intrepid, gonzo-style journalism that brought down a United States Army general. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/media/michael-hastings-award-winning-journalist-dies-at-33.html?ref=world The article quoted the […]
Monsanto receives award for developing GMO
Robert T. Fraley, Monsanto’s executive vice president and chief technology officer, will share the $250,000 World Food Prize with two other scientists who helped devise how to insert foreign genes into plants: Marc Van Montagu of Belgium and Mary-Dell Chilton of the United States. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/monsanto-executive-is-among-world-food-prize-winners.html?hp The crops are shunned in many countries and by many […]
Force-feeding Guatanamo inmates considered torture
“The UN and numerous other authoritative bodies have quite explicitly stated that the force-feeding that goes on in Guantanamo is torture. Forcing someone to accept treatment which they’re competent to refuse is an assault.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/22973263 A prisoner currently on hunger strike in Guantanamo Bay has described the pain and discomfort of the force feeding regime […]
FBI will likely continue killing with impunity
After contradictory stories emerged about an F.B.I. agent’s killing last month of a Chechen man in Orlando, Fla., who was being questioned over ties to the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, the bureau reassured the public that it would clear up the murky episode. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/us/in-150-shootings-the-fbi-deemed-agents-faultless.html?hp&_r=0 But if such internal investigations are time-tested, their outcomes are also […]
Cheney gives Snowden highest honor
It was “the highest honor you can give an American” to be called a traitor by Mr. Cheney, whom he denounced as “a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, […]
“The people have awakened” in Brasil, 200K protest
As many as 200,000 people have marched through the streets of Brazil’s biggest cities, as protests over rising public transport costs and the expense of staging the 2014 World Cup have spread. The way the initial marches were policed – with officers accused of firing rubber bullets and tear gas at peaceful protesters – further […]
China smart growth is template for the West
Rural China is once again the site of radical social engineering. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/asia/chinas-great-uprooting-moving-250-million-into-cities.html?src=me Over the past decades, the Communist Party has flip-flopped on peasants’ rights to use land: giving small plots to farm during 1950s land reform, collectivizing a few years later, restoring rights at the start of the reform era and now trying to obliterate […]
NYT ed board: 90% of pot arrests petty
The mindless push to make low-level possession arrests distracts the police from serious crime, wastes billions of dollars and alienates minority citizens from the law. It also brings disastrous consequences for young people, as convictions can lead to fines, jail time and temporary loss of federal student financial aid — not to mention criminal records […]
Turkey foreshadows US police state
The Turkish authorities widened their crackdown on the antigovernment protest movement on Sunday, taking aim not just at the demonstrators themselves, but also at the medics who treat their injuries, the business owners who shelter them and the foreign news media flocking here to cover a growing political crisis. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/world/europe/turkey.html?pagewanted=2&hpw In some of his toughest […]
US and UK eavesdrop with impunity
American and British intelligence agencies had eavesdropped on world leaders at conferences in London in 2009. The latest disclosures, in a new set of classified documents disclosed by Edward J. Snowden and appearing again in The Guardian, came the night before a meeting of the Group of 8 industrialized nations was to open in Northern […]
Immigration bill contains DHS national id system
Driver’s license photographs and biographic information of most Americans would be accessible through an expanded Department of Homeland Security nationwide computer network called E-Verify if the immigration legislation pending before the Senate becomes law. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/us/politics/as-immigration-bill-moves-forward-fear-of-an-id-system.html?ref=us The proposal already faces objections from some civil liberties lawyers and certain members of Congress, who worry about the potential […]
EU agrees on drone surveillance program
Three European aerospace companies called on Europe to launch its own independent drone programme to equip armies across the continent. “European sovereignty and independence in the management of information and intelligence would be guaranteed while at the same time delivering a robust system resilient against cyber attacks,” Northrop Grumman signed a $1.7 billion (1 billion […]
Bankster rate fixing scam begins the day in Singapore
Twenty of the world’s largest banks were censured by Singapore authorities on Friday over the attempted manipulation of local benchmark interest rates that is part of a larger rate-rigging scandal being investigated by global regulators. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/singapore-censures-20-banks-over-rates/ The financial institutions, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, were found to have allowed some of their traders […]
Snowden used encryption to first contact harrassed filmmaker
Laura Poitras, who won a MacArthur “genius” grant last year and was nominated for an Oscar for “My Country,” is already living and working outside the country after six years of being questioned at the border — “upwards of 40 times, probably more, I lost count” — and having her laptop seized, her notes copied. […]
Hong Kong protesters rally around Snowden
Chanting slogans like “Shame, U.S. government,” demonstrators marched from a downtown park to the United States Consulate nearby to urge that Edward J. Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor accused of leaking documents about United States surveillance programs, be allowed to remain in Hong Kong and protected from American law enforcement officials. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/asia/demonstrators-march-for-snowden-in-hong-kong.html?hp Saturday’s […]
Google launches internet surveillance balloons
Google is launching about 30 of the superpressure balloons from New Zealand from where they will drift around the world in near space on a controlled path. An Orlando-based firm, World Surveillance Group, sells similar equipment to the US Army and other government agencies. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22905199 Google calls the effort Project Loon and acknowledges it is […]
West continues to kill Afghan women and children
The United Nations reports that a coalition airstrike killed three children in eastern Afghanistan. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/06/14/world/asia/ap-as-afghanistan.html?ref=world The United Nations Children’s Fund cited the alleged incident in a statement this week condemning a steep rise in child casualties. The statement said an aerial attack by international forces killed three children in the eastern province of Kunar this […]
American judge in Hague pushes for war crime acquittals
The United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague president, an American, pressured other judges into approving the recent acquittals of top Serb and Croat commanders. Judge Meron, a United States citizen who was formerly an Israeli diplomat, applied “tenacious pressure” on his fellow judges in such a way that it “makes you think he […]
Another Bagladeshi sweat shop fire
A fire erupted at a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka on Thursday morning, sending employees fleeing in terror and raising more questions about safety conditions in Bangladesh less than two months after the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building claimed more than 1,100 lives. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/world/asia/another-garment-factory-scare-in-bangladesh.html?ref=world Labor activists who rushed to the burning […]
Government scientists dissuaded from speaking to media
One of the UK’s most influential science communicators is pressing the government to let more of its scientists speak to the media. “Some of the scientists who are advising government are amongst the best in the UK, yet, all too often, their voices are lost to the public and the media.” There is an argument […]
Dirty Babylon 