Friday, May 31, 2013
Thursday, May 30, 2013
The NSA Building In Washington.
National Security Agency
“The National Security Agency (NSA) is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S. government communications and information systems, which involves information security and cryptanalysis/cryptography.
The NSA is directed by at least a lieutenant general or vice admiral. NSA is a key component of the U.S. Intelligence Community, which is headed by the Director of National Intelligence.
The Central Security Service is a co-located agency created to coordinate intelligence activities and co-operation between NSA and other U.S. military cryptanalysis agencies. The Director of the National Security Agency serves as the Commander of the United States Cyber Command and Chief of the Central Security Service.
By law, NSA's intelligence gathering is limited to foreign communications, although domestic incidents such as the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy have occurred.
Or more like a large town.
The Rob Ford Crack Thing Just Got Scary - Alexander Abad-Santos - The Atlantic Wire
Alexander Abad-Santos May 30, 2013
Laugh all you want about the increasing likelihood that the lumpy, goofy mayor of Toronto smoked crack on video and is in the process of covering it up, but The Toronto Star reports in today's paper that Rob Ford told his staff about the video, and told them he knew exactly where it was stashed ... which is alarming considering that exact address may be home to the men who may have killed to get their hands on the tape.
"Toronto Mayor Rob Ford told senior aides not to worry about a video appearing to show him smoking crack cocaine because he knew where it was," the Star's Robert Benzie and Kevin Donovan write. Apparently this occurred on May 17, the day when Gawker and the Star both reported viewing a video in which Ford smokes crack, and the day when Gawker announced it was going to start fundraising $200,000 in order to purchase the video. "Ford then blurted out the address of two 17th-floor units — 1701 and 1703 — at a Dixon Rd. apartment complex ...The mayor cited 'our contacts' as the source of his information," the Star's team adds. As of two weeks ago, it sounds like Ford thought he had control of the story.
About the mayoral staff and addresses, though: On Monday, a similar report surfaced from further down the chain at city hall, with The Globe and Mail reporting that a senior staffer had met with police and told them he or she knew the address — and exact unit number — where the video was being held, and that the "video originally belonged to an individual who may have been killed for its potentially valuable contents." The man who may have been killed for the video is Anthony Smith, a 21-year-old man pictured with Ford in several stories published about the video and someone who appeared to have had some knowledge of the alleged crack-smoking. Smith was shot and killed in March. Ford, as the Globe and Mail reported, said he did not know Smith.
Did Ford have direct contact with "our contacts" at this shady address? Maybe not: His chief of staff and director of logistics were the politicians with answers on the day the story broke. But how Ford came to knew of this address — especially if that turns out to be a murderous locale, in addition to a holding ground for a scandalous videotape — will be key as the truth continues to leak out. The Star's team says they've visited the units in question and that they have "been told by neighbours that numerous young men are seen coming and going there at all hours of the night and day. Nobody said they had seen Ford."
Another way into the story, of course, is the murder of Smith. If you find out who killed Smith, who may be the original owner of the video or had some knowledge of the video, then you could — if Smith was really killed for the video — work your way to the two apartment addresses, and perhaps make the connection to Ford and his office. Police on Thursday announced they had a arrested a second man in connection with Smith's shooting. The man is 23-year-old Hanad Mohamed of Toronto, who now — along with Nisar Hashimi — faces first-degree murder charges. "Sources familiar with the investigation said detectives have obtained search warrants for Mr. Mohamed's cellphone and homes and are looking for at least one other suspect," The Globe and Mail reported on Thursday.
That may be the trail back to the video, but it's also difficult to find out who's trying to sell it at the moment. Gawker has announced that it surpassed its goal of raising $200,000, but before that, Gawker editor John Cook wrote that his contact with the sellers had dropped off. "The last time we established contact with the people who are in possession of the video was this past Sunday, and we have not been able to reach them since," Cook wrote last Thursday. And he reiterated as much on Tuesday, when he announced the fundraising project had mets its goal:
I updated the Indiegogo campaign site yesterday morning to reiterate that there had been no movement on that front, and am repeating it here right now. You won't hear anything more from us about our attempts to get the video for some time. This will be a very delicate transaction. If the people who are in possession of the video are reading this: Please get in touch with our mutual friend, or with me at john@gawker.com. We did what you asked.
If Gawker's sellers are connected to Hashimi and Mohamed and the murder of Smith, the disappearance would make sense, but it also turns a great tabloid story into a grisly black-market tale of corruption, murder, drugs, and greed.
Update, 4:45 p.m. Eastern: In a press conference ostensibly about personnel that have left his staff in the last week, Ford was asked almost entirely about the video and his own future as mayor. "I'm not stepping aside," Ford said repeatedly. "I'm running in the next election," he added, insisting that he "can't wait" to get on the campaign trail. Faced with only more questions about his drug use, he asked a question of his own: "Anything else?" then walked away.
The Rob Ford Crack Thing Just Got Scary - Alexander Abad-Santos - The Atlantic Wire
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
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Natural Cures Not Medicine: How To Identify GMO foods At The Grocery Store
Half of America Is In or Near Poverty - and It's Getting Worse
The Census Bureau has reported that 15% of Americans live in poverty. A shocking figure. But it’s actually much worse. Inequality is spreading like a shadowy disease through our country, infecting more and more households, and leaving a shrinking number of financially secure families to maintain the charade of prosperity.
1. Almost half of Americans had NO assets in 2009
Analysis of Economic Policy Institute data shows that Mitt Romney’s famous 47 percent, the alleged ‘takers,’ have taken nothing. Their debt exceeded their assets in 2009.
2. It’s Even Worse 3 Years Later
Since the recession, the disparities have continued to grow. An OECD report states that “inequality has increased by more over the past three years to the end of 2010 than in the previous twelve,” with the U.S. experiencing one of the widest gaps among OECD countries. The 30-year decline in wages has worsened since the recession, as low-wage jobs have replaced formerly secure middle-income positions.
3. Based on wage figures, half of Americans are in or near poverty.
The IRS reports that the highest wage in the bottom half of earners is about $34,000. To be eligible for food assistance, a family can earn up to 130% of the federal poverty line, or about $30,000 for a family of four.
Even the Census Bureau recognizes that its own figures under-represent the number of people in poverty. Its Supplemental Poverty Measure increases, by 50%, the number of Americans who earn between one-half and two times the poverty threshold.
4. Based on household expense totals, poverty is creeping into the top half of America.
A family in the top half, making $60,000 per year, will have their income reduced by a total tax bill of about $15,000 ($3,000 for federal income tax and $12,000 for payroll, state, and local taxes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau agree that food, housing, and transportation expenses will deduct another $30,000, and that total household expenditures will be about $50,000. That leaves nothing.
Nothing, that is, except debt. The median debt level rose to $75,600 in 2009, while the median family net worth, according to the Federal Reserve, dropped from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010.
5. Putting it in Perspective
Inequality is at its ugliest for the hungriest people. While food support was being targeted for cuts, just 20 rich Americans made as much from their 2012 investments as the entire 2012 SNAP (food assistance) budget, which serves 47 million people.
And as Congress continues to cut life-sustaining programs, its members should note that their 400 friends on the Forbes list made more from their stock market gains last year than the total amount of the food, housing, and education budgets combined.
Arguments about poverty won’t end. Neither should our efforts to uncover the awful truth.
By Paul Buchheit
From -
https://www.salon.com/2013/05/30/half_of_americans_living_below_or_near_poverty_line_partner/
Monday, May 27, 2013
John Pilger: why iniquity of Tony Blair's Iraq crimes is on a par with Woolwich killing
The dust in Iraq rolls down the long roads that are the desert's fingers. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school playgrounds, consuming children kicking a ball; and it carries, according to Dr Jawad Al-Ali, "the seeds of our death".
An internationally respected cancer specialist at the Sadr teaching hospital in Basra, Dr Ali told me that in 1999, and today his warning is irrefutable.
"Before the Gulf war," he said, "we had two or three cancer patients a month. Now we have 30 to 35 dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48% of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with, then long after.
That's almost half the population. Most of my own family have it, and we have no history of the disease. It is like Chernobyl here; the genetic effects are new to us; the mushrooms grow huge; even the grapes in my garden have mutated and can't be eaten."
Along the corridor, Dr Ginan Ghalib Hassen, a paediatrician, kept a photo album of the children she was trying to save. Many had neuroblastoma. "Before the war, we saw only one case of this unusual tumour in two years," she said. "Now we have many cases, mostly with no family history. I have studied what happened in Hiroshima. The sudden increase of such congenital malformations is the same."
Among the doctors I interviewed, there was little doubt that depleted uranium shells used by the Americans and British in the Gulf war were the cause. A US military physicist assigned to clean up the Gulf war battlefield across the border in Kuwait said, "Each round fired by an A-10 Warhog attack aircraft carried over 4,500 grams of solid uranium. Well over 300 tons of DU was used. It was a form of nuclear warfare."
Although the link with cancer is always difficult to prove absolutely, the Iraqi doctors argue that "the epidemic speaks for itself". The British oncologist Karol Sikora, chief of the World Health Organisation's cancer programme in the 1990s, wrote in the British Medical Journal: "Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Iraq sanctions committee]." He told me, "We were specifically told [by the WHO] not to talk about the whole Iraq business. The WHO is not an organisation that likes to get involved in politics."
Recently, Hans von Sponeck, former assistant secretary general of the United Nations and senior UN humanitarian official in Iraq, wrote to me: "The US government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern Iraq where depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and environmental dangers." A WHO report, the result of a landmark study conducted with the Iraqi ministry of health, has been "delayed". Covering 10,800 households, it contains "damning evidence", says a ministry official and, according to one of its researchers, remains "top secret". The report says birth defects have risen to a "crisis" right across Iraqi society where depleted uranium and other toxic heavy metals were used by the US and Britain. Fourteen years after he sounded the alarm, Dr Jawad Al-Ali reports "phenomenal" multiple cancers in entire families.
Iraq is no longer news. Last week, the killing of 57 Iraqis in one day was a non-event compared with the murder of a British soldier in London. Yet the two atrocities are connected. Their emblem might be a lavish new movie of F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Two of the main characters, as Fitzgerald wrote, "smashed up things and creatures and retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess".
The "mess" left by George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq is a sectarian war, the bombs of 7/7 and now a man waving a bloody meat cleaver in Woolwich. Bush has retreated back into his Mickey Mouse "presidential library and museum" and Tony Blair into his jackdaw travels and his money.
Their "mess" is a crime of epic proportions, wrote Von Sponeck, referring to the Iraqi ministry of social affairs' estimate of 4.5 million children who have lost one or both parents. "This means a horrific 14% of Iraq's population are orphans," he wrote. "An estimated one million families are headed by women, most of them widows". Domestic violence and child abuse are rightly urgent issues in Britain; in Iraq the catastrophe ignited by Britain has brought violence and abuse into millions of homes.
In her book Dispatches from the Dark Side, Gareth Peirce, Britain's greatest human rights lawyer, applies the rule of law to Blair, his propagandist Alastair Campbell and his colluding cabinet. For Blair, she wrote, "human beings presumed to hold [Islamist] views, were to be disabled by any means possible, and permanently … in Blair's language a 'virus' to be 'eliminated' and requiring 'a myriad of interventions [sic] deep into the affairs of other nations.' The very concept of war was mutated to 'our values versus theirs'." And yet, says Peirce, "the threads of emails, internal government communiques, reveal no dissent". For foreign secretary Jack Straw, sending innocent British citizens to Guantánamo was "the best way to meet our counter-terrorism objective".
These crimes, their iniquity on a par with Woolwich, await prosecution. But who will demand it? In the kabuki theatre of Westminster politics, the faraway violence of "our values" is of no interest. Do the rest of us also turn our backs?
Sunday, May 26, 2013
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Friday, May 24, 2013
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Thursday, May 23, 2013
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Wednesday, May 22, 2013
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Saturday, May 18, 2013
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Wednesday, May 15, 2013
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After Savar tragedy, it’s time for international minimum wage | GulfNews.com
For Bangladeshis, the tragedy at the garment factory in Savar is a symbol of the nation’s failure. The crack that caused the collapse of the building has shown that if Bangladeshis do not face up to the cracks in their own systems, as a nation they will be lost in the debris. Today, the souls of those who lost their lives in the Rana Plaza tragedy are watching what the rest of us are doing and listening to what we are saying. The last breath of those souls surrounds us.
Has the nation learnt anything at all from this terrible loss of so many lives? Or will Bangladesh have completed its duty by merely expressing its deep sympathy? What should we do now, even as news of a deadly fire in another factory in Dhaka reaches us?
Important questions have been raised about the future of the garment industry. Pope Francis has said buyers are treating the garment workers like slave labourers. A very large foreign buyer, Disney, has decided to pull out of Bangladesh. Others may follow. If that happens, it will severely damage the nation’s social and economic future. This industry has brought about immense change in the society by transforming the lives of women. We cannot allow it to be destroyed. Instead, Bangladeshis must be united as a nation to strengthen the garment industry and foreign companies must play their part too.
I propose that foreign buyers jointly fix a minimum international wage for the industry. This may be around 50 cents an hour, twice the level typically found in Bangladesh. This minimum wage will be an integral part of reforming the industry, which will in turn help prevent future tragedies. We have to make international companies understand that while the workers are physically in Bangladesh, they are contributing to the businesses worldwide: They are stakeholders. Physical separation should not be grounds to ignore the well-being of these labourers.
Of course, we have to be prepared for a negative market reaction. Some will argue that Bangladesh will lose the competitiveness it has gained by offering the cheapest labour. To retain its competitiveness, Bangladesh will have to increase its attractiveness in other ways, for example, by increasing productivity and specialised labour skills, regaining buyers’ trust and ensuring workers’ welfare. However, until the nation is able to fix an international minimum wage, it will not be able to pull its workers from the grievous category of “slave labour” that the pope had placed them in.
Gaining support for a minimum wage will not be easy, but through sincere discussions with politicians, business leaders, citizens, church groups and the media in consumer countries, it can be achieved. In the past, I have tried to convince foreign buyers — but without success. Now, after the Savar tragedy, the issue has gained a new urgency. I want to mobilise my international and Bangladeshi friends to make stronger and more persistent efforts this time. It will not be necessary for all the companies to agree to a minimum wage at the same time. If some leading firms take the initiative, it will start the ball rolling.
There is also another practical way to help ensure better standards for Bangladeshi garment workers. Let us say a garment factory produces and sells a piece of clothing for $5 (Dh18.39), which is then packaged and shipped to New York. This $5 includes not only the production, packaging, shipment, profit and management cost, but also indirectly covers the share that goes to the cotton farmers, yarn mills and the cost of dying and weaving.
When US customers buy this item from a shop for $35, they feel happy that they have got it at a bargain. But everyone involved in the production collectively received $5. Another $30 was added in the US for taking the product to the final consumer. Now, with a little effort, we can make a huge impact in the lives of workers. Will a consumer in a shopping mall be upset if he or she is asked to pay $35.50 instead of $35? My answer is no, they will not even notice that. If we can create a Garment Workers Welfare Trust in Bangladesh, with that additional 50 cents, we can resolve most of the issues the workers face — safety, work environment, pension, health care, housing, children’s health, education, child care, retirement, old age and travel. Everything can be taken care of through this trust.
Bangladesh exports garments worth $18 billion each year. If all the garment buyers accept this proposal, the trust will receive $1.8 billion each year — that is $500 in the trust for each of the 3.6 million workers. All we have to do is to sell the item of clothing for $35.50 instead of $35 — a barely noticeable change to the price can work wonders.
More -
After Savar tragedy, it’s time for international minimum wage | GulfNews.com
Sunday, May 12, 2013
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