No Agenda Episode 603 - "Revolution of Dignity"

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No Agenda Episode 603 - "Revolution of Dignity"
  No Agenda Episode 603 - "Revolution of Dignity"
    Revolution of Dignity
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    Art By: Kosmo
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  Credits
    Revolution of Dignity
    Executive Producers: Brad R. King, Christopher Kilgour, Vic Ogburn, Dennis Goad
    Associate Executive Producers: Bill, Steve Carr, Claudia Gerber, Matt Astbury
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    Art By:Kosmo
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    TODAY
      Presidential Proclamation -- Greek Independence Day: A National Day of Celebration of Greek and American Democracy, 2014
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 19:00
        The White House
        Office of the Press Secretary
        For Immediate Release
        March 24, 2014
        GREEK INDEPENDENCE DAY: A NATIONAL DAY OF
        CELEBRATION OF GREEK AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, 2014
        - - - - - - -
        BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
        A PROCLAMATION
        Almost two centuries ago, the people of Greece laid claim to their independence and began a long struggle to restore democracy to its birthplace. Greek Americans crossed oceans to fight for the freedom of their ancestral homeland, and through two World Wars and a Cold War, Greece and the United States stood side-by-side. On Greek Independence Day, we honor the deep connections between our two nations and celebrate the democratic ideals at the heart of our shared history.
        America's form of government owes much to the small group of Greek city-states that pioneered democracy thousands of years ago. Just as Hellenic principles guided our Founders, Greek antiquity has inspired generations, from writers and activists to architects and inventors. Greek Americans have contributed as leaders of culture, community, business, and government. Through the generations, they have helped shape our enduring democracy -- a Nation that accepts our obligations to one another and understands that we must rise and fall as one.
        Greece is a valued NATO ally, and our friendship remains as strong as ever. As Greece takes tough action to rebuild its economy and bring relief to the Greek people, the United States offers our continued support. Today, let us reaffirm a bond that extends beyond government, connects our peoples, and inspires all who strive to choose their own destiny.
        NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 25, 2014, as Greek Independence Day: A National Day of Celebration of Greek and American Democracy. I call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.
        IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-fourth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand fourteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-eighth.
        BARACK OBAMA
      Letter from the President -- -- IDLs -- War Powers Resolution
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 19:29
        The White House
        Office of the Press Secretary
        For Immediate Release
        March 25, 2014
        Dear Mr. Speaker: (Dear Mr. President:)
        As I initially reported on October 14, 2011, and most recently reported on December 13, 2013, the United States is pursuing a comprehensive strategy to help the governments and people of central Africa in their efforts to stop the atrocities committed by the Lord's Resistance Army. In furtherance of that strategy, U.S. military personnel with appropriate combat equipment have deployed to Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Central African Republic to support regional forces from the African Union's Regional Task Force that are working to apprehend or remove Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and other senior leaders from the battlefield and to protect local populations.
        Regional forces have consistently identified air mobility support with increased range and speed as one of the most-needed capabilities to pursue the remaining Lord's Resistance Army leaders across a wide swath of one of the world's poorest, least governed, and most remote regions. To enhance U.S. support to these regional forces, U.S. aircraft, aircrews, and support personnel deployed to central Africa on March 23 and 24, 2014. The approximately 150 additional personnel will principally operate and maintain U.S. aircraft to provide air mobility support to foreign partner forces.
        The total number of U.S. military personnel deployed to the central Africa region for this mission is now approximately 280. The aircraft and personnel providing the enhanced air mobility support will deploy to the Lord's Resistance Army-affected areas of central Africa episodically, as they are available, consistent with other Department of Defense requirements.
        During these deployments, the number of U.S. Armed Forces deployed to the central Africa region will fluctuate, and may increase to as many as approximately 300.
        As I previously reported, U.S. forces will not themselves engage Lord's Resistance Army forces unless necessary in self-defense.
        This deployment is in furtherance of the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States, including the policy expressed in the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and
        Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009, Public Law 111-172, enacted May 24, 2010. I have approved this deployment pursuant to my constitutional authority to conduct U.S. foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive.
        I am making this supplemental report as part of my efforts to keep the Congress fully informed, consistent with the War Powers Resolution (Public Law 93-148). I appreciate the support of the Congress in this matter. A classified annex to this report provides additional detail.
        Sincerely,
        BARACK OBAMA
      Mudslides Explained: Behind the Washington State Disaster
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 21:25
        A fatal mudslide in rural northwestern Washington State over the weekend underscores the dangers of this fast-moving natural hazard.
        On Saturday morning, a mudslide moved down the Stillaguamish River near the small former fishing village of Oso, Washington. Authorities have confirmed eight dead, eight injured, and as many as 108 people missing or unaccounted for as of Monday morning. The one-square-mile (2.6-square-kilometer) track of the mudslide also destroyed about 30 homes.
        Jim O'Connor, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Portland, Oregon, told National Geographic that the mudslide, which was up to 15 feet (4.5 meters) deep in some areas, was caused by ground made unstable by heavy rainfall.
        "This area has had slides in small increments over the last several years, but this took a huge bite of the hillslope this time," says O'Connor.
        Not only has there been a lot of precipitation in the area over the past few months, but the Stillaguamish River also has been eroding away the base of the hillside, or "undercutting it," making it less stable, says O'Connor.
        "A whole section of a hillside, about 700 feet [213 meters] high above the river, collapsed all at once," says O'Connor. "It's amazing how much terrain it ended up covering."
        This house on Highway 530 near Arlington, Washington, was destroyed by the mudslide on Saturday.
        Photograph by Lindsey Wasson, The Seattle Times-Pool/Getty
        What Is a Mudslide?
        A mudslide, also called a debris flow, is a type of fast-moving landslide that follows a channel, such as a river. A landslide, in turn, is simply when rock, earth, or other debris moves down a slope. (See photos of a mudslide and a video on landslides.)
        Mudslides occur after water rapidly saturates the ground on a slope, such as during a heavy rainfall. According to O'Connor, it doesn't take high relief in the topography to create a slide. Rather, it just takes a pull of gravity strong enough to bring down material that is made fluid enough by water.
        Mudslides tend to happen during wet seasons, says O'Connor. For the Pacific Northwest, that's generally during winter or spring.
        Mudslides are also often triggered by earthquakes or by disturbances in hillsides caused by fires or human activity.
        In the United States, mudslides and landslides result in an average of 25 to 50 deaths a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
        The fast-moving mudslide razed this nearby house.
        Photograph by Lindsey Wasson, The Seattle Times-Pool/Getty
        How Are Mudslides Prevented?
        Strategies to decrease the risk of mudslides include draining water off hillsides, armoring the bases of hills so they are not undercut by rivers, and "loading the toe," says O'Connor. In the case of "loading the toe," engineers put heavy mass, such as large rocks, at the base of a hill to try to anchor the slope and prevent it from coming loose.
        O'Connor says the piles of rock that are often seen at the base of roadcuts are the most visible example of that strategy.
        O'Connor adds that when it comes to the Stillaguamish River area, the valley is scalloped with the evidence of many past slides.
        "This isn't a situation where [the authorities] should have done something [to prevent it] because there is so much terrain there that this could have happened to," he says.
        The CDC recommends that people exercise caution around steep slopes during rainfall. Immediate signs of a pending slide include tilting trees and sudden increases or decreases in rivers.
        Follow Brian Clark Howard on Twitter and Google+.
    NSS2014
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Forward To A Safer World
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: JustOneMinute
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:19
        The NY Times describes the 'progress' made by Team Obama in pursuit of the President's nuclear weapons- free vision. I can't pick a favorite for "Most Ludicrous", but three passages stand out. First:
        THE HAGUE '-- Japan announced on Monday that it would turn over to Washington a large cache of weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium, a decades-old research stockpile that is large enough to build dozens of nuclear weapons, according to American and Japanese officials.
        The move is the biggest single success in President Obama's five-year push to secure the world's most dangerous materials...
        Japan won't be nuking us or anyone - whew! Yes, obviously this has symbolic significance to true 'bad guys' like Iran or North Korea, who in turn won't be swayed by the Japanese example. And since you ask:
        The nuclear fuel being turned over to the United States, which is of American and British origin, is a small fraction of Japan's overall stockpile.
        And the second nominee:
        Mr. Obama's initiative to lock down plutonium and uranium around the world was supposed to have been just the first step in an ambitious agenda to seek ''the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,'' as he said in Prague in 2009. Now, the downturn in relations with Russia has dashed hopes of mutual reductions in the world's two largest arsenals. At the same time, North Korea has resumed its program, Pakistan and India are modernizing their weapons, and the United States Senate has not taken up any of the treaties Mr. Obama once described as vital.
        No treaties from the Dem-controlled Senate? More on that:
        But Mr. Obama's agenda has also run into major troubles in the Senate. In 2009 and 2010 the White House promised to reintroduce the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was defeated in the Senate during the Clinton administration. It has never been put back in front of the Senate, for fear of a second rejection. Even seemingly noncontroversial legislation, including passage of two nuclear terrorism conventions that deal with the physical protection of materials, has been stuck.
        The Times is ready to throw up their hands:
        ''The Obama team came in thinking a lot of things would be easier than they turned out to be,'' said Matthew Bunn, a professor at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
        That was 'arrogant cowboy diplomacy' when Bush did it, probably because the 'naive' label did not hang well on Cheney, Runsfeld and Powell.
        And our third nominee:
        Nonetheless, the effort to secure dangerous nuclear materials in Russia and the former Soviet states has been one of the big successes of the post-Cold War era, Just last year Ukraine, then still under the control of the now ousted President Victor F. Yanukovych, sent more than 500 pounds of weapons-grade uranium from a reactor back to Russia. Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons '-- left over after the fall of the Soviet Union '-- two decades ago. Had the weapons and materials remained in Ukraine, the current standoff with Russia might have taken on far more dangerous dimensions.
        Peace through disarmament, and how did that work out? Maybe if the Ukraine had nukes this Crimea debacle wouldn't have happened at all. And maybe the Times wants to mention the quasi-border guarantees offered by the US. Or not.
        The nuclear freeze was big on college campuses during Obama's formative years and he has learned nothing since.
      Nuclear power in the new Cold War - CNBC
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Mon, 24 Mar 2014 15:46
        Critics, however, argue that nuclear technology can easily be misused to create weapons.
        Tehran is widely suspected of using the cover of civilian technology to reprocess spent fuel into a bomb, a threat world powers have struggled to contain. Elsewhere, Pakistan, India and North Korea all eventually violated non-proliferation protocols by using technology misappropriated for illicit programs.
        "Once you export this technology and don't have direct control over it, no matter how safe you say it is, it can come back to bite you," said Mark Cooper, a senior fellow of economic analysis at the Institute for Energy and Environment at Vermont Law School and an implacable critic of nuclear power.
        Cooper pointed out that China and Russia "are subsidizing the bejesus out of their technology," which means privately owned U.S. companies can't really compete.
        (Read more: Going nuclear'--and small'--with a new type of reactor)
        In a June 2013 report, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) called boosting the U.S. nuclear export sector "a national security imperative," given the encroachment of China, Russia and India'--which struck its own civilian nuclear deal with the U.S. back in 2004.
        However, the CSIS paper stated that unlike the state-subsidized projects of Russia and China, "U.S. firms are currently at a competitive disadvantage in global markets, due to restrictive and otherwise unsupportive export policies," the think tank said.
        In order to prevent nuclear cheating, the U.S. only provides nuclear expertise via a "123 Agreement" to 21 countries. However, it currently lacks accords with key demand hubs in Asia and the Middle East ''areas where nuclear power is expected to soar, and ripe targets for Russian financing. Observers also say the rules need updating to reflect the realities of the marketplace.
        "Without a strong commercial presence in new nuclear markets, America's ability to influence nonproliferation policies and nuclear safety behaviors worldwide is bound to diminish," the CSIS paper said.
        Jane Nakano, an energy security fellow at CSIS, said in an interview that the current regulatory structure of the U.S. nuclear markets is a barrier to it mounting a direct challenge to its global competitors. Nuclear technology is "quite expensive in the U.S.," where a plant can run upward of $10 billion, Nakano said, "but in many countries the financing is a national program."
        Yet Vermont Law's Cooper said the U.S. "would be better off exporting much more benign technology," and should forget about getting into the nuclear game. He stressed "the agony we go through once we lose control of the technology. Is it worth the risk?"
        '--By CNBC's Javier E. David. Follow him @TeflonGeek
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Studenten komen tot vijf meter van Obama tijdens NSS-top | Binnenland | NU.nl - Voor het laatste nieuws
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 13:00
        Twee studenten zijn erin geslaagd om tijdens de NSS-top binnen te komen als journalist, terwijl ze dat niet zijn. Ze kwamen op meters afstand van Barack Obama en Mark Rutte.
        De studenten, Jesse Frericks en Niek Jan van den Hout, studeren Information Security Management. Het binnenkomen van de zwaar beveiligde top was voor hen een test of ze in staat zouden zijn zwakheden in de beveiliging ontdekken. Daarmee hopen ze dat een volgende editie van de top wel goed wordt beveiligd.
        De zaak is opmerkelijk, omdat de top met draconische beveiligingsmaatregelen was omkleed. Zo werden snelwegen afgesloten, dertienduizend politieagenten en achtduizend militairen ingezet en een stortvloed aan andere maatregelen genomen.
        De studenten startten een eigen nieuwssite met een paar artikelen erop en vroegen bij de Nederlandse Vereniging van Journalisten met succes een perskaart aan. "Daarvoor moesten we de inschrijfformulieren van onze opleiding sturen. Dat heeft niets met journalistiek te maken en toch kregen we een perskaart", vertelt Frericks tegenover NU.nl.
        Met de website en de perskaart werd een aanvraag gedaan om te worden toegelaten tot de NSS. De aanvraag werd afgewezen, omdat studenten niet welkom waren. Toen de top begonnen was en de registratie voor journalisten was gesloten, besloten de twee alsnog te proberen binnen te komen.
        ToegelatenHet tweetal werd vervolgens wel toegelaten. "Ondanks dat de registratie gesloten was, bleken er formulieren voor een last minute registration te liggen. Die hebben we ingevuld", stelt Frericks.
        "We voldeden niet aan de voorwaarden. Zo moesten we bijvoorbeeld een brief van de hoofdredacteur hebben.Daarvan hebben we gezegd dat we die niet hadden."
        De studenten werden nu na 'een grondige background check', ondanks de eerdere afwijzing, wel toegelaten en kwamen letterlijk op minder dan vijf meter afstand van Obama. De persconferentie met de Amerikaanse president was aanvankelijk ook niet voor alle journalisten toegankelijk.
        Frericks benadrukt dat alleen een touw hem nog scheidde van en de Amerikaanse president.
        Bekijk een video die de studenten maakten tijdens de persconferentie:
        FoutVolgens Thomas Bruning van de Nederlandse Vereniging van Journalisten lijkt het er sterk op dat er een fout is gemaakt. "De studentenperskaart wordt alleen aan studenten van een communicatie of journalistieke opleiding verstrekt", stelt hij tegenover NU.nl.
        "De studentenperskaart heeft een beperkte waarde, maar dit is natuurlijk wel slordig. De zaak is een goede reden om de procedure goed tegen het licht te houden."
        Een zegsman namens de NSS-top ziet in de actie geen probleem. "De bedoeling was dat niet heel Nederland met een paspoort op het terrein zou komen. We vinden het niet ernstig dat er een enkeling doorheen is gekomen die geen journalist is", stelt hij.
        Volgens het Ministerie is iedereen goed gecontroleerd en is er geen beveiligingsprobleem. De beveiliging van Obama was volgens de woordvoerder 'optimaal'. "Als deze studenten iets geprobeerd zouden hebben dan hadden ze nu waarschijnlijk niet meer geleefd."
        Na¯efDe studenten vinden de reactie van de NSS-organisatie 'na¯ef'. "Het doel van de grootschalige veiligheidsoperatie was juist om ongewenste personen buiten de deur te houden, anders is het toch onbegrijpelijk dat er dertienduizend politieagenten worden ingezet om de veiligheid te garanderen", stelt Frericks.
        "Wij zijn Obama tot op zeer korte afstand genaderd en dan ga je ons vertellen dat zijn veiligheid gegarandeerd is? Dat lijkt ons niet. Wij hebben met relatief simpele middelen accreditatie verkregen. Als wij het kunnen, dan kan iedereen het."
        Door: NU.n/Brenno de Winter
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Secret Service incident in Netherlands was on heels of car wreck during Obama's Miami trip - The Washington Post
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 13:15
        By Carol D. Leonnig, David Nakamura and Michael Birnbaum, Published: WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26, 9:32 PM ETE-mail the writers Aa As the U.S. Secret Service arrived in the Netherlands last weekend for a presidential trip, managers were already on high alert to avoid any further em­barrassing incidents involving agents.
        The agency's director had admonished supervisors after two counter-sniper officers suspected of drinking were involved in a March 7 car accident during a presidential visit to Miami, according to several people with knowledge of the incident. The driver passed a field sobriety test and was not arrested.
        So in Amsterdam on Saturday night, Secret Service supervisor George Hartford had the Miami incident in mind when he issued a warning to a group of agents gathered for dinner: Go out if you want, but stay out of trouble.
        By the next morning, Hartford was pounding on the hotel door of a 34-year-old junior agent who had passed out drunk in a hallway and later had to be lifted into his room by several hotel employees, according to a hotel spokesman and two other people familiar with the incident. The agent claimed to have no memory of the events.
        That night on the town has created another highly public embarrassment for the elite Secret Service, which is still attempting to recover from a tawdry drinking-and-prostitution scandal two years ago during a presidential trip to Cartagena, Colombia.
        The new incident '-- which unfolded in the hotel where President Obama was scheduled to arrive the following day '-- prompted immediate condemnation Wednesday from lawmakers in Washington. Sen. Ronald H. Johnson (R-Wis.) said the agency has a ''systemic'' problem of rowdy and inappropriate behavior by its agents, who are sworn to protect the president and other senior officials from harm.
        White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters flying on Air Force One on Wednesday that Obama had been briefed on the Netherlands hotel incident. The president believes ''that everybody representing the United States of America overseas needs to hold himself or herself to the highest standards,'' Carney said, adding that Obama retains confidence in Secret Service Director Julia Pierson.
        After the unconscious agent was found in the hall Sunday morning, the hotel staff alerted White House staff that it had relayed the news to Secret Service managers, according to the people familiar with the incident. After a series of interviews, agency managers concluded that the passed-out agent and two others who went drinking with him had violated new rules meant to prevent improper conduct on official trips.
        In Amsterdam '-- a city of 1 million with an international reputation for partying, open drug use and legalized prostitution '-- the trio had stayed out drinking until about 2:30 a.m. Sunday, though all were scheduled to start work at 10 a.m., according to a preliminary investigation. The time frame would put them in violation of a ban on drinking in the 10 hours before an assignment.
        Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said one of the agents involved was sent home Sunday afternoon and the other two went back early Monday morning; all are on administrative leave. Pierson, who traveled with Obama aboard Air Force One to the Netherlands, signed off on the decision, he said.
        The alleged misconduct did not jeopardize the president's visit or cause ''operational issues,'' Donovan said. Obama's safety was ''not affected by the three getting sent home.''
        The men, all members of the agency's Counter Assault Team (CAT), had to be temporarily replaced by other agents in the country until additional agents could be flown in to meet up with Obama's entourage at his next destination, Brussels, the people familiar with the matter said.
        Those with knowledge of the internal investigation said the incident infuriated managers because it came less than three weeks after the traffic accident in Miami, which led to the two officers involved being sent home. Local police gave one of the officers a field sobriety test on suspicion of drunk driving but released him with a citation for the accident and no additional charges, those familiar with the incident said.
        The two officers, who serve in the uniformed division, notified their superiors of the accident. They were ordered to return to Washington under Pierson's ''no tolerance'' policy, an official familiar with the matter said. The two men continue to work for the agency.
        It was one of several times in her year-long tenure that Pierson reiterated to her senior aides the need for all personnel to abide by agency rules of conduct, the official said.
        The pivotal events in the Netherlands played out at the Huis Ter Duin hotel, a 254-room facility facing the North Sea in the resort town of Noordwijk, between Amsterdam and The Hague. Hotel officials initially denied an incident involving a drunk Secret Service agent after it was first reported by The Washington Post; by late Wednesday, a spokesman had confirmed key details.
        Huis Ter Duin spokesman Stephan Stokkermans said the three guests involved in the incident, whom he declined to identify, under hotel privacy rules, arrived in an apparently intoxicated condition at the hotel early Sunday morning by taxi.
        ''They came in, they waved to the team at the reception desk,'' Stokkermans said. ''It was clear they had a good time, but they didn't need any help.''
        Later that morning, he said, a hotel employee discovered one of those guests sleeping in the hallway about 10 feet from his room, which had a key-card-style lock. It was about 30 feet from the nearest elevator, and the employee summoned co-workers for assistance.
        ''In the end, there were two persons helping the man back to his room, plus the employee who found him,'' Stokkermans said.
        It is a common enough event at the Huis Ter Duin that the hotel has protocols for guests that are found sleeping in hallways or on couches, which happens every two or three weeks, Stokkermans said.
        ''What you do at that moment is you try to awaken the guest and investigate their condition,'' he said. ''Then you assist the guest to his room. And if the guest is part of a group, then you inform the head of the group.''
        According to two people familiar with the incident, the three are all GS-13-level agents. One of the three was serving as ''team leader'' on the trip, but he does not hold a supervisory position in the agency, officials said.
        The team leader and a colleague told Secret Service managers they had no indication when they returned to the hotel that their co-worker was so inebriated, the people familiar with the investigation said.
        At home, the news sparked fresh outrage from members of Congress. Some cited the incident as evidence contrary to the findings of a December report from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General, which asserted that the Secret Service does not have an agency-wide cultural problem that encourages and tolerates personal misconduct.
        ''It shows that the report was a cover-up and a whitewash,'' said Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. ''There are significant cultural problems there that need to be addressed, systemic problems.''
        Rep. Bennie Thompson (Miss.), the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said the Netherlands case was the first report of potential misconduct he and colleagues had heard about since Pierson assumed leadership of the Secret Service a year ago. ''But for a person charged with protecting the president to be found unconscious in a hotel hallway puts a real question mark in the minds of a lot of people as to whether or not those rules have been understood,'' Thompson said.
        In the Netherlands, the scandal spread quickly and local media devoted reporters to calling lists of Amsterdam watering holes. And in Noordwijk, drivers puttering in the Huis Ter Duin lobby said they had been besieged with text messages from friends asking about the incident. But none said they had heard any gossip about it until the news broke.
        Birnbaum reported from Noordwijk. Scott Wilson in Brussels and Wesley Lowery, Ed O'Keefe and Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
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      Huis ter Duin boos op krant VS | NOS
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 13:49
        Huis ter Duin boos op krant VS | NOSHotel Huis ter Duin wil dat de Amerikaanse krant The Washington Post een artikel rectificeert. In het artikel staat dat drie Amerikaanse agenten van de geheime dienst zich ernstig hebben misdragen in het hotel in Noordwijk. Het hotel ontkent dat dat daar is gebeurd.
        Het hotel herkent zich niet in het artikel. "Wij zoeken op dit moment contact met The Washington Post om te zeggen dat wij deze berichtgeving niet waarderen", zegt commercieel directeur Stephan Stokkermans.
        BewusteloosThe Washington Post meldde dat de drie medewerkers die president Obama hadden moeten beschermen in Nederland zondag voortijdig terug naar de VS zijn gestuurd. Ze waren zaterdagavond gaan stappen en een van hen werd bewusteloos gevonden in een hotellobby, schrijft The Washington Post. Het hotel zou contact hebben opgenomen met de Amerikaanse ambassade waarna het balletje is gaan rollen.
        In eerste instantie meldde de krant dat het om een hotel in Amsterdam ging, maar veranderde dat later in hotel Huis ter Duin waar Obama en zijn gevolg overnachtten.
        Zeer gedisciplineerd"De Amerikaanse delegatie bestond uit 500 gasten, daarvan hebben er 250 in Huis ter Duin overnacht. En wij hebben geen incident gehad dat in het bericht omschreven wordt", zegt directeur Stokkermans. "Sterker nog, de mensen die wij in huis hebben gehad waren zeer gedisciplineerd, zeer attent en hebben een heel ander gedrag vertoond."
        Obama tevredenPresident Obama heeft een nacht in het hotel doorgebracht. Bij zijn vertrek uit Huis ter Duin heeft Obama aan de directeur laten weten dat hij het erg naar zijn zin heeft gehad in het hotel.
        Stokkermans wil niet zeggen in welke kamer Obama sliep. Wel zegt hij dat de president geen speciale wensen had. "Het is niet zo dat we bepaalde types M&M's in huis moesten halen."
        12:09 in Binnenland
        De vrijlating van Van der Graaf levert veel discussie op. Hoe komt hij vrij en wat gebeurt er daarna met hem?
        11:27 in Buitenland
        De zoektocht naar de verdwenen Maleisische Boeing is hervat nu de weersomstandigheden zijn verbeterd.
        09:59 in Binnenland
        Afnemers moeten vaker onaangekondigd een bezoek brengen aan leveranciers, zeggen de onderzoekers.
        09:00 in Binnenland
        Het gedrag van Amerikaanse geheim agenten brengt de Secret Service opnieuw in grote verlegenheid.
        14:38 in Opmerkelijk
        Vanaf nu is er nog maar (C)(C)n haarstijl toegestaan voor alle Noord-Koreaanse mannen. De Kim Jong-un coupe.
        14:02 in Binnenland
        "Een vergissing op internet is geen fraude", schrijft Nationale ombudsman in jaarverslag.
        13:59 in Binnenland
        Er zijn twee verdachten opgepakt, maar de politie zoekt nog wel getuigen.
        13:33 in Binnenland
        Huis ter Duin ontkent de inhoud van een artikel in The Washington Post waarin het hotel wordt genoemd.
        13:24 in Binnenland
        De brandweer is met groot materieel uitgerukt. Het is nog niet duidelijk of er giftige stoffen zijn vrijgekomen.
        Meer nieuws tonen
        13:07 in Buitenland
        Door een mislukte raketstoot zijn de ruimtevaarders twee dagen langer onderweg.
        13:03 in Buitenland
        De stakingen breiden zich de komende dagen uit naar het vliegverkeer.
        12:43 in Economie
        Minder geboortes leidt tot banenverlies bij zorginstelling in Zuidoost-Brabant.
        12:32 in Binnenland
        De vleessector wil snel verbeteringen doorvoeren om de veiligheid van vlees te garanderen.
        12:22 in Binnenland
        Marten Fortuyn wil graag in gesprek gaan met Volkert van der Graaf en wil weten waarom hij zijn broer vermoordde.
        12:18 in Buitenland
        Bisschop Tebartz-van Elst kwam in opspraak door de kostbare verbouwing van zijn ambtswoning.
        12:10 in Buitenland
        Obama is vandaag in Belgi voor de Amerikaans-Europese topconferentie.
        12:09 in Binnenland
        De vrijlating van Van der Graaf levert veel discussie op. Hoe komt hij vrij en wat gebeurt er daarna met hem?
        12:04 in Buitenland
        Een rechtbank in Turkije heeft besloten dat de blokkade van Twitter voorlopig opgeven moet worden.
        11:51 in Binnenland
        Op sociale media wordt gemengd gereageerd op de voorwaardelijke vrijlating van Volkert van der Graaf.
        11:42 in Politiek
        Dijksma en Schippers vinden dat de overheid weer verantwoordelijk moet worden voor toezicht op de productie van vlees.
        11:28 in Binnenland
        Onderzoeksraad voor Veiligheid wil dat vleesbedrijven elkaar aanspreken op risicovol gedrag
        11:27 in Buitenland
        De zoektocht naar de verdwenen Maleisische Boeing is hervat nu de weersomstandigheden zijn verbeterd.
        11:26 in Binnenland
        Volgens de jury behoort Yo-Yo Ma tot de meest geliefde en avontuurlijke musici van deze tijd.
        11:20 in Buitenland
        Het stuk oceaan waarin gezocht wordt naar vlucht MH370 is erg ruw, zegt een Nederlandse oceanograaf.
        De NOS maakt gebruik van cookies. In verband met de cookiewet vragen wij hiervoor eenmalig toestemming.Cookies toestaan
        Naar boven
      Secret Service agents on Obama detail sent home from Netherlands after night of drinking - The Washington Post
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 05:10
        Three Secret Service agents responsible for protecting President Obama in Amsterdam this week were sent home and put on administrative leave Sunday after going out for a night of drinking, according to three people familiar with the incident. One of the agents was found drunk and passed out in a hotel hallway, the people said.
        The hotel staff alerted the U.S. Embassy in the Netherlands after finding the unconscious agent Sunday morning, a day before Obama arrived in the country, according to two of the people. The embassy then alerted Secret Service managers on the presidential trip, which included the agency's director, Julia Pierson.
        Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan confirmed Tuesday evening that the agency ''did send three employees home for disciplinary reasons'' and that they were put on administrative leave pending an investigation. Donovan declined to comment further.
        According to two people familiar with the Amsterdam incident, the three are members of the Secret Service's Counter Assault Team, known in the agency as CAT.
        The alleged behavior would violate Secret Service rules ­adopted in the wake of a damaging scandal in Cartagena, Colombia, in April 2012, when a dozen agents and officers had been drinking heavily and had brought prostitutes back to their hotel rooms before the president's arrival for an economic summit.
        Under the requirements, anyone on an official trip is forbidden to drink alcohol in the 10 hours leading up to an assignment. As members of the advance team for a presidential trip, the CAT members would have been called to duty sometime Sunday for a classified briefing ahead of the president's arrival on Monday. Drinking late into the night Saturday evening and Sunday morning would have violated that rule.
        Obama landed in the Netherlands on Monday for the start of a high-stakes week-long trip to ­Europe and Saudi Arabia in the midst of a tense standoff with Russia over its annexation of Crimea. The agents involved in the misconduct were among hundreds of U.S. personnel from the Secret Service, the military, the State Department and other agencies sent to prepare for his arrival and ensure his safety, including during his attendance at the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague with dozens of world leaders.
        The president's visit started with a brief stop at the Rijksmuseum, a fine-arts museum in Amsterdam, with Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Obama traveled from The Hague to Brussels on Tuesday night.
        The three involved in the drinking incident were GS-13-level agents, according to one person familiar with the investigation of the case. One of the three was a ''team leader'' on counter­assault, but he was not in a supervisory position in the agency, the person said.
        All three people familiar with the case requested anonymity in order to discuss details of the ongoing investigation. Pierson traveled on Air Force One with Obama, and she is scheduled to remain on the trip with the president as he continues to Rome and Saudi Arabia, one of the people said.
        The Counter Assault Team's job is to protect the president if he or his motorcade comes under attack and to fight off assailants and draw fire while the protective detail removes the president from the area.
        Two former agency employees with experience on foreign trips described the counterassault team as one of the most elite units in the agency, responsible for ''the last line of defense'' for the president. Those selected for CAT are required to be highly skilled shooters and extremely physically fit, with a demanding training regimen, said the two former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal operations.
        There are also high expectations for personal conduct on the squad, they said. On foreign trips, one former agent recalled, the counterassault team often worked shifts as long as 12 hours, the former agents recalled, and agents were expected to get rest during their time off to be in prime condition.
        ''They received the best technical training in the service,'' said one of the former agents. ''They were the only team constantly training '-- training on assaults, on evacuations, all sorts of things. They were very squared away. It was really difficult to get on CAT.''
        In the Cartagena scandal, the Secret Service employees' actions were discovered when one prostitute got into a noisy dispute with agents in a hotel hallway about an agent's refusal to pay her fee. Colombian police reported the incident to the U.S. Embassy there.
        Obama said at the time that the agents' behavior was unacceptable. ''We're representing the people of the United States, and when we travel to another country I expect us to observe the highest standards, because we're not just representing ourselves,'' he said in Cartagena.
        The revelations in Cartagena led to the removal of 10 agents from their jobs, multiple federal and congressional investigations, and the rules aimed at preventing similar activity in the future. Mark Sullivan, the Secret Service director at the time, apologized for his employees' conduct. Sullivan retired in February 2013 after 30 years in the agency.
        Scott Wilson in The Hague contributed to this report.
      Geheim agenten Obama op non-actief na drinkgelag in Nederland - Nucleaire top Den Haag - VK
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 05:09
        Redactie '' 26/03/14, 03:46
        (C) getty.
        Drie geheim agenten die de Amerikaanse president Obama moesten bewaken in Amsterdam zijn naar huis gestuurd na een avondje stappen in Nederland. ‰(C)n van de leden van de Secret Service werd zondagochtend dronken en bewusteloos gevonden op de gang van een hotel, aldus de Washington Post.
        (C) epa.
        Hotelpersoneel lichtte de Amerikaanse ambassade in Nederland in. Die gaf vervolgens een seintje aan de directeur van de Secret Service, Julia Pierson. De agenten werden zondag meteen op non-actief gesteld, nog voor de president in Nederland arriveerde.
        Een woordvoerder van de Secret Service bevestigt tegen de Washington Post dat er drie werknemers naar huis zijn gestuurd 'om disciplinaire redenen'. Volgens de Amerikaanse krant waren alle drie agenten leden van het Counter Assault Team, CAT. Zij worden gezien als een elite unit; Het is hun taak om de president te beschermen als hij wordt aangevallen.
        Prostitu(C)esHet is niet de eerste keer dat beveiligers van de Amerikaanse president zich misdragen. In 2012 ging een groep agenten in Colombia zich te buiten aan drank en prostitu(C)es. Daarna werden de regels voor reisjes aangescherpt. Geheim agenten mogen niet drinken als ze in de 10 uur daarna moeten werken. De agenten in Nederland hoefden op zondag nog niet de president te beschermen, maar moesten wel een veiligheidsbespreking bijwonen.
        Na het incident in Colombia zei Obama dat het gedrag van de beveiligers onacceptabel was. 'We vertegenwoordigen het Amerikaanse volk, en als we naar een ander land reizen verwacht ik dat we de lat hoog leggen omdat we niet alleen onszelf vertegenwoordigen.'
        De onthullingen in Colombia leidden tot het ontslag van tien geheim agenten. De toenmalige directeur bood zijn excuses aan en trad enkele maanden later af.
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      FACT SHEET: Cooperation at Japan's Fast Critical Assembly
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:23
        The White House
        Office of the Press Secretary
        For Immediate Release
        March 24, 2014
        Japan has been one of the United States' staunchest allies in the global effort to minimize, and when possible eliminate, the use of sensitive nuclear materials at research facilities. This strong partnership has helped the international community ensure that these materials never find their way into the hands of criminals, terrorists, or other unauthorized actors.
        At the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit, Japan and the United States announced a pledge to remove all highly-enriched uranium (HEU) and separated plutonium from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA)'s Fast Critical Assembly (FCA). This effort will eliminate hundreds of kilograms of sensitive nuclear material.The FCA came online in 1967 for the purpose of studying the physics characteristics of fast reactor cores. With the technology available at that time, HEU and plutonium were believed to be required for these experiments.Recent advancements in technology and decades of experience have opened the door for FCA continuing, and even expanding, its mission without the need for HEU or separated plutonium fuels. The United States and Japan will work together to design new enhancements to the FCA that will allow for important new research. The FCA will become the world's first major fast critical facility to convert from HEU and separated plutonium fuels, marking a significant milestone for global nuclear security.In 2006, the United States and Japan successfully converted the Kyoto University Research Reactor from highly enriched uranium (HEU) to low enriched uranium (LEU) fuel. Unlike HEU, LEU cannot be used to produce a nuclear weapon. JAEA has also voluntarily promoted the conversion of several of its research reactors, successfully eliminating hundreds of kilograms of HEU from civilian commerce.
      Joint Statement by the United States and the Netherlands on Climate Change and Financing the Transition to Low-Carbon Investments Abroad
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:23
        The White House
        Office of the Press Secretary
        For Immediate Release
        March 24, 2014
        The Netherlands and the United States share a common interest in urgent action to address global climate change. We affirm the importance of reaching a global climate change agreement in 2015 that can attract broad and ambitious participation. The agreement should reflect the continuous evolution of capabilities of countries in tackling this global challenge. It should also take account of the important role played by the private sector, sub-national actors, and civil society in finding solutions to addressing carbon pollution while improving the resilience of nations to the impacts of climate change. Our two countries pledge to continue our cooperation towards adopting such an agreement at the United Nations climate conference in Paris in 2015.
        We reaffirm our support of internationally agreed commitments to scale up the mobilization of climate finance and recognize that different forms of financing are needed to support countries making the transition to a low-emission, climate resilient economy. We strive to deploy public resources to catalyze private climate finance in and to developing countries.
        We emphasize that our work to scale up climate friendly investments in developing countries is most effective when combined with reducing public incentives for high-carbon infrastructure. To this end, the Netherlands is joining the United States, the United Kingdom, and others in agreeing to end support for public financing of new coal-fired power plants abroad except in rare circumstances. This includes our bilateral development finance institutions and projects financed through the multilateral development banks, where it should be noted that the Netherlands is a member of mixed constituencies. Complementing action already taken by the United States, our two countries are working together to promote a technology-neutral standard in the OECD Export Credit Group that limits support for high carbon intensity power plants by export credit agencies.
      Joint Statement on Countries Free of Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU)
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:22
        The White House
        Office of the Press Secretary
        For Immediate Release
        March 24, 2014
        Today, twelve nations agreed upon a joint statement marking the elimination of highly enriched uranium from within their borders. We welcome this statement and the leadership role these nations are playing in a growing global trend away from highly enriched uranium in civilian uses.
        Statement by Leaders of Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Georgia, Hungary, Mexico, Republic of Korea, Romania, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, and Vietnam
        Gathered in The Hague on the occasion of the third Nuclear Security Summit, leaders of Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Georgia, Hungary, Mexico, Republic of Korea, Romania, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, and Vietnam, wish to highlight the elimination of highly enriched uranium (HEU) from within our borders. Noting the extensive security measures and significant financial costs associated with the possession of this material, and the technology that has been developed to fuel research reactors with low enriched uranium (LEU) fuel and to conduct the vast majority of experiments and to produce isotopes without the use of HEU, the removal of HEU from our territories has had clear and tangible benefits.
        We express our appreciation to the Russian Federation, the United States of America and the International Atomic Energy Agency for their assistance in converting research reactors from HEU fuel to LEU fuel and in related HEU removal efforts. This material, once removed, shall be appropriately secured until ultimately disposed of or downblended to LEU and utilized for civilian purposes.
        We, along with Kazakhstan and Singapore, applaud other countries that have similarly eliminated HEU and encourage all countries to support HEU minimization efforts to the greatest extent feasible, including those in a position to do so to eliminate all HEU from their territories in advance of the fourth Nuclear Security Summit to be held in 2016.
      Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Rutte of the Netherlands After Bilateral Meeting
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:21
        The White House
        Office of the Press Secretary
        For Immediate Release
        March 24, 2014
        Gallery of HonorThe RijksmuseumAmsterdam, The Netherlands
        10:49 A.M. CET
        PRIME MINISTER RUTTE: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Netherlands. Welcome to Amsterdam. And, Barack, welcome to this very special location.
        We are standing here on historic grounds, surrounded by the finest paintings that Holland has produced and only a stone's throw away from the house of John Adams, the first American ambassador to the Netherlands and second President of the United States. It's a location that symbolizes the enduring partnership between the U.S. and the Netherlands. Our shared history and heritage go back a long way.
        As an historian, it was a special moment for me when earlier this morning I was able to show President Obama two original documents from our National Archives that played an important role in the age-old friendship between our two countries. The first was our own Declaration of Independence, the Plakkaat van Verlatinghe of 1581, which inspired Thomas Jefferson and his peers. The second was the American-Dutch Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1782, another remarkable document from an age when peace between countries was usually a heartfelt affair. And today, friendship is still at the heart of the relationship between the United States and the Netherlands, along with trade, shared values, and joint responsibilities.
        Since that first treaty we have worked together in the growing awareness that economic prosperity, a safe and stable world and international cooperation go hand in hand. With this in mind, the President and I talked about a wide range of subjects, starting with a joint climate initiative and the new steps we will take today in that regard. The Netherlands is joining with the United States and a group of other countries in a bid to stop international public funding of new coal-fired power plants, for example, by multilateral development banks. We want to achieve an international level playing field to ensure that private and public parties invest in green growth wherever possible.
        We also discussed the important topic of the Transatlantic Investment Partnership between the EU and U.S. Once concluded, this agreement will create more economic growth and jobs on both sides of the Atlantic. Importantly, it will set new standards that will benefit global trade and third countries as well. This partnership will bolster our excellent bilateral economic ties even further.
        During our conversation I stressed how much we value this partnership. The Netherlands is the world's third largest investor in the United States and we are home to some 1,800 American businesses.
        And of course, we also spoke about the major international security issues in Syria, Iran and Ukraine. Concerning the last, we both regard Russia's attempts to annex the Crimea as a flagrant breach of international law and we condemn its actions in the strongest possible terms. The presence of so many world leaders in the Netherlands this week presents an important opportunity for the international community to discuss this subject, as well as other pressing issues that affect our common interests.
        Finally, we looked ahead at the Nuclear Security Summit today and tomorrow. President Obama deserves all the credit for getting this topic high on the agenda. In 2010, Washington hosted the first summit on this seat. In 2012, it was Seoul's turn. And now the Netherlands is proud to host the summit today and tomorrow in The Hague that will bring us closer to the goal of securing potentially dangerous nuclear material.
        Barack, your presence underlines the importance of the summit, and this event, too, demonstrates the strength of the bilateral ties between our countries and of our joint commitment to peace, security and democracy. I'm delighted to be able to hear from you publicly here at this splendid location.
        Again, thank you for coming.
        PRESIDENT OBAMA: Mark, thank you. And it is a splendid location. I'm so grateful for your kind words. We were very pleased to welcome you back in 2011 to the White House, and I appreciate your warm welcome today. This is my first visit to Amsterdam and to The Hague and to the Netherlands, and I'm so pleased that I've had a chance already to meet some wonderful students. I want to thank the Mayor and the curator for their hospitality as well. I'm proud to be with some of the Dutch masters who I studied in school, and to see just the extraordinary traditions of this great country.
        I'd be remiss if I did not mention that I'm proud of both of our teams at the Olympics. So in addition to painting, you really know how to speed skate. (Laughter.)
        As the Prime Minister said, we just had an excellent opportunity to experience the museum and to see those documents, including the Treaty of Friendship that John Adams negotiated more than 200 years ago, as a reminder of the historic ties between our countries. And this is -- of all the press conferences I've done, this is easily the most impressive backdrop that I've had to a press conference.
        Of course, we're here for our third Nuclear Security Summit. And I want to thank His Majesty, King Willem-Alexander, as well as Mark, the people of the Netherlands, for all the preparations that go into bringing together so many heads of state. This is just one more example of Dutch leadership -- not just on nuclear security, but on many global challenges.
        As you know, the Netherlands is one of our closest allies, and our cooperation underscores a larger point -- our NATO allies are our closest partners on the world stage. Europe is the cornerstone of America's engagement with the world. And today we focused on several priorities -- in Europe and beyond.
        First, we obviously spent a considerable amount of time on the situation in Ukraine. Europe and America are united in our support of the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people. We're united in imposing a cost on Russia for its actions so far. Prime Minister Rutte rightly pointed out yesterday the growing sanctions would bring significant consequences to the Russian economy. And I'll be meeting with my fellow G7 leaders later today, and we'll continue to coordinate closely with the Netherlands and our European partners as we go forward.
        Second, I thanked the Prime Minister for the Netherlands' strong commitment and contributions to NATO. Dutch forces have served with distinction in Afghanistan and joined us in confronting piracy off the Horn of Africa. Through NATO, the Netherlands contributed to the deployment of Patriot air batteries in Turkey and are making important investments in NATO defense capabilities. Dutch forces are also making critical contributions to the international stabilization mission in Mali. So, across the board, the Dutch are making their presence felt in a very positive way, and we're very grateful for that.
        Third, we discussed how we can keep expanding the trade that creates jobs for our people. We're already among each other's largest trade and investment partners, but we can always do more. And so I appreciated the Netherlands' strong support for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or T-TIP, which can fuel growth both in the United States and in Europe, especially for our small and medium-sized companies.
        Fourth, we discussed a range of global challenges. And as the United States and the P5-plus-1 partners continue negotiations with Iran, we have the basis for a practical solution that resolves concerns over Iran's nuclear program. But at the same time, I think it's important that everyone remember during these negotiations we'll continue to enforce the overall sanctions architecture that helped bring Iran to the table in the first place.
        I also wanted to commend the Netherlands for its leadership in the international effort to destroy Syria's chemical weapons, and that includes your role as the host of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. And more broadly, our two countries are going to keep working together to deliver humanitarian assistance to the Syrian people.
        And, finally, we reaffirmed our shared determination to confront climate change and its effects, including rising sea levels, which obviously is something that the Netherlands is concerned about, given your experience with seas and tides. We're pleased that the Netherlands has joined our initiative that will virtually end all public financing for coal-fired plants abroad. It's concrete action like this that can keep making progress on reducing emissions while we develop new global agreements on climate change.
        So, a final note. When John Adams was negotiating the treaty that we saw earlier, he wrote that the Dutch have -- and I'm quoting here -- have always ''distinguished themselves by an inviolable attachment to freedom and the rights of nations.'' That was true then; it remains true today.
        So, Mark, I want to thank you and the Dutch for your hospitality, for your organization, for your partnership and for your leadership on the world stage. And I want to thank you for sharing these extraordinary paintings with me this morning.
        Dank u wel. Thank you. (Applause.)
        END11:00 A.M. CET
      FACT SHEET: Italy Highly Enriched Uranium and Plutonium Removals
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:21
        The White House
        Office of the Press Secretary
        For Immediate Release
        March 24, 2014
        Italy has been a global leader in nuclear nonproliferation, working with the United States since 1997 to eliminate more than 100 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and separated plutonium.
        At the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit, the United States and Italy announced the successful removal of all eligible fresh HEU and plutonium from Italy. These shipments were completed via a joint effort between the Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration's Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) and Italy's Societ Gestione Impianti Nucleari (SOGIN). This is the thirteenth shipment of material from Italy to the United States under this program.
        At the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit, Italy and the United States pledged to work together to remove this material prior to the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit. The material was located at three SOGIN facilities in Italy (EUREX Plant - Saluggia, IPU and OPEC Plants - Casaccia, and ITREC Plant - Trisaia). More than 17 kilograms of HEU and plutonium were removed, including UK and U.S.-origin material stemming from research and development activities in Italy. Prior to removal, the material was securely stored under International Atomic Energy (IAEA) safeguards. In order to complete this project, GTRI and SOGIN needed to overcome significant technical challenges including:
        Development of new gloveboxes for plutonium packaging;The development of a new process to convert HEU from a solution to an oxide;Coordination of uranium shipments from the three separate locations;Development of novel packaging configurations for the consolidation of plutonium materials within Italy; andTraining and certification of personnel for specialized packaging operations.Despite the significant technical challenges, the team was able to successfully complete the operation on schedule. Other significant contributors included Italy's nuclear regulator (ISPRA), which ensured the material was processed and packaged to allow for safe transport; Italy's Ministries of Defense and Interior, which ensured the security of the shipment while in transport in Italy; and the UK's International Nuclear Services, which provided for the secure transport of the material from Italy to the United States.
        This material will be stored at secure facilities in the United States until it is disposed of or downblended to LEU and utilized for civilian purposes. The United States and Italy plan to continue to work together to eliminate additional stocks of special nuclear material to make sure they never fall into the hands of terrorists, and are prepared to help other countries do the same.
      Joint Statement by the United States and Italy on the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:21
        The White House
        Office of the Press Secretary
        For Immediate Release
        March 24, 2014
        Italy and the United States of America are pleased to announce that they have jointly completed the removal of approximately 20 kilograms of excess highly enriched uranium (HEU) and separated plutonium from Italy.
        At the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit, Italy and the United States pledged to work together to remove this material prior to the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit. This removal entailed extremely complex operations that required the development of new gloveboxes for plutonium packaging, the development of a new process to convert HEU from a solution to an oxide, the coordination of uranium shipments from three separate locations, the development of novel packaging configurations for the consolidation of plutonium materials within Italy, and the training and certification of personnel for specialized packaging operations.
        The material was safely packaged in transport containers certified by regulators in both the United States and Italy. The United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) worked seamlessly together and in accordance with all relevant regulations and internationally-recognized recommendations throughout the operation to ensure the safe and secure transport of this material. Despite the significant technical challenges, the team was able to successfully complete the operation on schedule.
        Italy and the United States plan to continue to work together to eliminate additional stocks of special nuclear material to make sure they do not fall into the hands of terrorists. They also pledge to work with others in the international community to assist them with the elimination of such materials.
      FACT SHEET: Belgium Highly Enriched Uranium and Plutonium Removals
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:20
        The White House
        Office of the Press Secretary
        For Immediate Release
        March 24, 2014
        Belgium has been a global leader in nonproliferation, working with the United States since 2006 to minimize highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium inventories in Belgium through the return of a significant amount of HEU and plutonium to the United States.
        At the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit, the United States and Belgium announced the successful removal of all excess fresh HEU and plutonium from Belgium. This shipment was completed via a joint effort between the Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration's Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) and Belgium's Studiecentrum voor Kernenergie - Centre d'‰tude de l'(C)nergie Nucl(C)aire (SCK-CEN). This is the third shipment of material from Belgium to the United States under this program.
        At the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit, Belgium and the United States pledged to work together to remove this material prior to the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit. The material supported research and development activities in Belgium and was located at two sites - the SCK-CEN facilities in Mol and the European Joint Research Center Institute for Reference Materials and Measurements (IRMM) in Geel. Prior to removal, the material was securely stored under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. In order to complete this project, GTRI and SCK-CEN needed to overcome significant technical challenges to address materials in unique and unusual forms including:
        Development of a new glovebox facility for plutonium packaging;Training and certification of personnel in specialized packaging operations; andValidation of certificates for a U.S. - designed nuclear material package in Belgium.Despite the significant technical challenges, the team was able to successfully complete the operation on schedule. Other significant contributors included Belgium's nuclear regulator (FANC), which ensured the material was processed and packaged to allow for safe transport; Belgium's Ministries of Interior and Economy, which ensured the security of the shipment while in transport in Belgium; and the UK's International Nuclear Services, which provided for the secure transport of the material from Belgium to the United States.
        This material will be stored at secure facilities in the United States until it is disposed of or downblended to Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) and utilized for civilian purposes. The United States and Belgium plan to continue to work together to eliminate additional stocks of special nuclear material to make sure they never fall into the hands of terrorists, and are prepared to help other countries do the same.
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      De Morgen excuseert zich voor Obama-cartoon
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 18:40
        Het afgelopen weekend pakte de krant De Morgen uit met een Obama-special naar aanleiding van de komst van de Amerikaanse president naar Belgi deze week. Ook de wekelijkse satirische bijdrage "The Daily Herald" was volledig gewijd aan de president. Een cartoon die daarin afgebeeld stond, lokte internationaal heel wat reacties uit. Op de cartoon zie je hoe de Russische president Vladimir Poetin een foto ingestuurd zou hebben waarin hij het Amerikaanse presidentile paar een apengezicht geeft (foto in tekst).
        Op pagina 2 van de krant excuseert De Morgen zich vandaag voor die naar eigen zeggen smakeloze grap over de Amerikaanse president. "Wanneer je het fragment ontdoet van zijn context van een satirische pagina in een voorts doorwrochte themabijlage, dan komt inderdaad in plaats van een aangebrande grap een beeld van onversneden racisme naar voor. Dat risico is vooraf onvoldoende ingeschat", klinkt het.
        "De denkfout die ook ditmaal gemaakt werd, is de overtuiging dat racisme algemeen niet meer aanvaard wordt en dat er dus veilig mee gelachen kan worden", gaat het verder. Volgens de krant is te licht vergeten dat, met name in de Verenigde Staten, de gelijkstelling tussen zwarten en apen nog geregeld opduikt.
        De krant biedt dan ook haar verontschuldigingen aan aan al wie zich beledigd voelt door de betreffende passage. "Wij pleiten in dit geval schuldig aan slechte smaak", zeggen ze. "Wij blijven ons aan de kant scharen van al wie tegen elke vorm van racisme strijdt. Aarzel niet ons erop te wijzen als we een keer uit de bocht gaan."
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    6 Week Cycle
      The FBI Is Hiding Details About An Alleged Occupy Houston Assassination Plot | VICE News
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 03:08
        The Federal Bureau of Investigation has some explaining to do this week, after a federal judge ordered the agency to provide a more thorough explanation to justify why it withheld information from a graduate student's Freedom of Information Act request for documents regarding an alleged 2011 assassination plot against leaders of Houston's Occupy movement.
        The requests '-- which were filed last year by Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral candidate Ryan Noah Shapiro, who is researching the plot '-- sought all records ''relating or referring to Occupy Houston, any other Occupy Wall Street-related protests in Houston, Texas, and law enforcement responses.'' Shapiro noticed a reference to the plot in FBI documents about the Occupy movement that were unsealed in 2012 after a civil-rights group filed a FOIA request.
        An FBI document that Shapiro showed to VICE News describes the plot against Occupy Houston:
        ''An identified [redacted] as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protestors [sic] in Houston, Texas, if deemed necessary'.... [Redacted] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles.''
        The FBI said it had identified 17 pages of records relevant to Shapiro's FOIA request, but it only released five of them, all highly redacted. Shapiro then filed suit against the FBI.
        FBI FOIA Chief David Hardy defended suppressing the information in a motion to dismiss Shapiro's lawsuit. Hardy noted that the request concerned material that the FBI had given to local authorities who were investigating ''potential criminal activity'' by Occupy Houston protesters. The FBI was working with them to assess potential terrorist threats posed by Occupy Houston and determine whether it had advocated overthrowing the US government. Hardy .
        The FBI and the Department of Justice invoked the Bureau's ''general investigative authority'' and its ''lead role in investigating terrorism and in the collection of terrorism threat information'' as a basis for its exemption from FOIA, but this did not convince Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of the US District Court for the District of Columbia. She agreed with Shapiro that the FBI's justification was ''overly-generalized and not particular.''
        ''At no point does Mr. Hardy supply specific facts as to the basis for the FBI's belief that the Occupy protestors [sic] might have been engaged in terroristic or other criminal activity,'' Collyer wrote in an opinion that denied part of the FBI's motion to dismiss. ''Neither the word 'terrorism' nor the phrase 'advocating the overthrow of the government' are talismanic, especially where FBI purports to be investigating individuals who ostensibly are engaged in protected First Amendment activity.''
        VICE News asked the Department of Justice for its reaction to Judge Collyer's opinion, but it declined to comment.
        Shapiro, who currently has more than 700 active FOIA requests and four other pending lawsuits with the FBI, told VICE News that he's not surprised that the FBI is stonewalling.
        ''The FBI is again hiding behind vague unsupported allegations of 'terrorism' and threats to national security to withhold these documents,'' he said. ''Not only is this far-fetched, it highlights that we as a nation need to foster a broader understanding of 'national security.' ''
        Shapiro is doubtful that the FBI has truthfully acknowledged the records relevant to his requests, and wonders whether the Bureau investigated the plot to assassinate US citizens on domestic soil for exercising their First Amendment rights.
        ''Here we have an FBI investigation of purported possible terrorism and attempts to overthrow the American government by a protest group, and the discovery during this investigation of an actual terrorist plot to assassinate the leaders of that protest group,'' he said. ''And yet, the FBI is claiming it amassed only 17 pages total on all of the above? Well, beyond implausible, the FBI's claim is preposterous.''
        Jeffrey Light, Shapiro's attorney, told VICE News that the FBI's standing as a law enforcement agency only goes so far.
        ''Just because you are a law enforcement agency, by definition, doesn't mean that everything that you do is for law enforcement purposes,'' he explained. ''You could be, for example, monitoring political activists. That's not a law enforcement purpose. The argument is that there's not enough information.''
        Collyer has given the FBI until April 9th to provide a more detailed explanation for its exemptions, which the Bureau can submit to the court under seal.
        Follow Maxwell Barna on Twitter: @Maxwell_BarnaNJ
        Photo via Flickr
      Florida Prosecutor Finds Fatal Shooting of Tsarnaev Friend Justified - NBC News.com
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:58
        The Chechen man with ties to the dead Boston bombing suspect was wielding a pole like a javelin when an FBI agent shot him in self-defense last year, a Florida prosecutor said Tuesday.
        Ibragim Todashev, a 27-year-old mixed martial arts fighter, was killed last May in his Orlando home '' but only after his sudden, physical outburst threatened the lives of the officers inside, said State's Attorney Jeffrey Ashton in his detailed report to the FBI.
        Officers with the Massachusetts State Police and FBI agents were questioning Todashev about his relationship with Tamerlan Tsarnaev and their connections to a grisly triple homicide on Sept. 11, 2011, in Waltham, Mass.
        Todashev was in the midst of writing a statement admitting to ''some involvement'' in that slaying when he grew agitated with authorities and pounced.
        Orange County Corrections Department / via APThis police mugshot provided by the Orange County Corrections Department in Orlando, Fla., shows Ibragim Todashev after his arrest for aggravated battery in Orlando on May 4, 2013.
        One of the state police officers interviewing Todashev noticed his shifting demeanor, and began warning other investigators via text about his ''heightened concern,'' the Florida prosecutor wrote.
        Chaos followed, the report said: Todashev flipped the coffee table he was writing on. It struck an FBI agent who was sitting with them. Then Todashev dashed to the kitchen.
        The state police officer said he noticed him holding a pole ''in the style of a javelin, with the end of the pole pointed toward [the officer] as if intended to be used to impale rather than strike.''
        As Todashev advanced, the injured special agent fired three to four shots. He hit him at the right side of his torso. Todashev fell to the ground but he was not incapacitated.
        The officers described him getting up and making a ''low angled lunge'' at them. The special agent fired another three to four shots, killing Todashev.
        Some of the bullets hit Todashev in the head and back.
        Ashton wrote that he was at first concerned about that detail, but determined that the ''angle of entry of these particular shots would be difficult to achieve in any orientation other than a shooter greatly elevated above his target '... or shooter and target on the same level'' with the target on his hands and knees or trying to get up.
        Essentially, the special agent was acting in self-defense, Ashton concluded.
        ''The one common thread among all was the observation that [Todashev] was, at his core, a fearless fighter. Perhaps on this occasion, he simply reverted to that basic aspect of his personality and chose to go down fighting,'' Ashton wrote.
        Todashev's death had been shrouded in mystery, and there were calls for an independent investigation. His father, Abdul-Baki Todashev, has claimed that his son was tortured and then shot as many as 13 times.
        Todashev's associate, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was fatally wounded in a shootout with cops last April after prosecutors say he and his brother, Dzhokhar, detonated twin bombs at the Boston Marathon.
        Sources told NBC News that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Todashev were being investigated for taking part in the September 2011 murders in Massachusetts in a possible drug deal gone bad.
        '-- Erik OrtizFirst published March 25 2014, 7:31 AM
    SnowJob
      FISA Transparency and Modernization Act of 2014
      Does it matter re: EO 12333?
      The RAS test
        This is nothing new!
        Definition
          An identifier will meet the Reasonable Articulable Suspicion Standard if
          based on the factual and practical considerations of everyday life on
          which reasonable and prudent persons act, there are facts giving rise to
          a reasonable articulable suspicion that the identifier is associated
          with one of the specified Foreign Powers.
        Less than probable cause in Maryland traffic stops
          Reasonable articulable suspicion (RAS) is defined by Maryland's Courts
          as less than probable cause and significantly less than a preponderance
          of the evidence; however, a stop based on RAS of intoxication, and not
          based on the officer witnessing a traffic violation, does require some
          reasonable articulation of the basis for the stop and not merely an
          inchoate or incomplete or unparticularized suspicion or hunch of
          possible criminal activity.
      NYTimes: Obama to Call for End to N.S.A.’s Bulk Data Collection
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Snowden welcomes Obama's plans for NSA reform as 'turning point' | World news | theguardian.com
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 23:12
        The National Security Agency whistleblower, Edward Snowden, has welcomed plans by Barack Obama to end the practice of systematically storing Americans' telephone data.
        In a statement through the American Civil Liberties Union, Snowden said the plans outlined by Obama were a ''turning point''.
        Obama confirmed on Tuesday that the US plans to end the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' telephone records, admitting that trust in country's intelligence services had been shaken and pledging to address the concerns of privacy advocates.
        At the same time, leaders of the House intelligence committee said they were close to a deal with the White House to revamp the surveillance program. Another reform proposal, the USA Freedom Act, would go further.
        Snowden said none of these reforms would have happened without the disclosures he precipitated. ''I believed that if the NSA's unconstitutional mass surveillance of Americans was known, it would not survive the scrutiny of the courts, the Congress, and the people,'' Snowden said.
        "The very first open and adversarial court to ever judge these programs has now declared them 'Orwellian' and 'likely unconstitutional.' In the USA Freedom Act, Congress is considering historic, albeit incomplete reforms. And President Obama has now confirmed that these mass surveillance programs, kept secret from the public and defended out of reflex rather than reason, are in fact unnecessary and should be ended.
        "This is a turning point, and it marks the beginning of a new effort to reclaim our rights from the NSA and restore the public's seat at the table of government."
        Obama conceded that the Snowden revelations had caused trust in the US to plunge around the world.
        ''We have got to win back the trust not just of governments, but, more importantly, of ordinary citizens. And that's not going to happen overnight, because there's a tendency to be sceptical of government and to be sceptical of the US intelligence services,'' Obama said at a news conference in The Hague, where world leaders are gathered for a summit on nuclear security.
        Obama said he believed that reform proposals presented to him by the US intelligence agencies were ''workable'', and would ''eliminate'' the concerns of privacy campaigners. ''I am confident that it allows us to do what is necessary in order to deal with the threat of a terrorist attack, but does so in a way that addresses people's concerns,'' he said.
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      The NSA's 'Reasonable Articulable Suspicion' legitimizes surveillance of just about anyone | End the Lie '' Independent News
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 18:17
        By Mike Cotugno
        Contributing writer for End the Lie
        The Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a chart of primary source documents compiled from newspapers and the government regarding the NSA and the recent domestic spying scandals.
        In these documents, there is a treasure trove of startling information that has yet to be discussed by both the mainstream and alternative media.
        There are many slides to go over, but on this first of a series of articles, we will be covering a top secret course on ''Reasonable Articulable Suspicion'' (RAS).
        What is RAS? RAS is the standard by which the NSA deems you to be someone they can spy on because of your alleged relation or connection to someone they regard as a threat.
        On page four of 17, the RAS is defined as follows:
        An identifier will meet the Reasonable Articulable Suspicion Standard if based on the factual and practical considerations of everyday life on which reasonable and prudent persons act, there are facts giving rise to a reasonable articulable suspicion that the identifier is associated with one of the specified Foreign Powers.
        Let us address the absolutely bizarre and dubious standard. This is completely up to interpretation, which was done purposely, with the intent of legitimizing almost any search of a U.S. citizen's electronic communications. This is a dangerous precedent that could make anyone a potential threat due to ambiguous standards and definitions.
        In fact, on another leaked document (see page 8 here) the Office of Deputy General Counsel for the NSA describes RAS as the lowest standard of proof needed to investigate an individual.
        (Click image to see full size)
        Perhaps even more startling, they expand on the lax attitude towards spying on civilians on page six of the same document:
        Note that the standard [RAS]does not present a particularly high hurdle. The level of evidence demanded by the standard is considerably less than proof by a preponderance of the evidence, meaning that here one need not show it is likely than not that a number is associated with [REDACTED list of Foreign Powers].
        The problem is that all of the specified Foreign Powers have been redacted in all documents so we cannot know what countries or groups of countries would be considered grounds for the NSA to spy on U.S. citizens.
        This means that you could potentially have family in Yemen or Iran and if you decide to contact them through any means of electronic communication you can potentially be flagged as being ''associated'' with a Foreign Power.
        In the next of the series, I will divulge the NSA's techniques to de-anonymize TOR browser users and their goal to eliminate anonymity on the web completely.
        I'd love to hear your opinion, take a look at your story tips and even your original writing if you would like to get it published. I am also available for interviews on radio, television or any other format. Please email me at [email protected]
        Please support alternative news and help us start paying contributors by donating, doing your shopping through our Amazon link or check out some must-have products at our store.
        Top Search Terms Used to Find This Page:Help Spread Alternative News
      RAS TEST-Reasonable and Articulable Suspicion
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 18:15
        The two top members of the House Intelligence Committee unveiled a bill Tuesday that would end the government's bulk collection of metadata under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), including telephone, email and internet metadata.
        The bill, according to committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Ranking Member Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., is "very, very close" to what the White House is proposing related to metadata collection.
        "What we basically are doing is, number one, ending bulk collection," Ruppersberger said at a press conference. "The government will no longer, with our new bill, be able to have the metadata."
        It's unclear that the House proposal or the similar plan outlined Tuesday by the White House will have enough support to make it through a divided Congress.
        Under the House proposal, the government will have to pass what is called a RAS test: a ''Reasonable and Articulable Suspicion'' that an individual phone number is associated with terrorism. If that test is passed, the government could request metadata phone records from phone companies for that person with "two hops'' -- extending out to two more individuals.
        The new bill would also prohibit the government from using the metadata program to obtain actual communications content or personally identifiable information, and it does not require phone companies to hold their metadata for any longer than they already do.
        "We think that we have found a way to end the government's bulk collection of telephone metadata and still provide a mechanism to protect the United States and track those terrorists who are calling into the United States to commit acts of terror," Rogers told reporters.
        Rogers and Ruppersberger met with the White House about their legislation yesterday, a meeting that Rogers said was "helpful."
        "Basically, we've been working with the White House throughout the whole process, and the White House includes the intelligence community and everyone else," Ruppersberger said, "I believe we're very, very close. The White House understands that we need to do something to deal with the issue of holding bulk collection because of the perception of our constituents."
        The new piece of legislation has nine additional co-sponsors, including six Republicans and three Democrats. But a timetable for consideration of the bill has not been set.
        "We're not going to say a timeline by -- between now and June or July or August, we don't know," Rogers said, "We think that the more people that understand what we've done and how -- what it looks like, the more support we're going to get for it moving forward."
        First published March 25 2014, 10:33 AM
      Obama ''reform'' seeks new framework for illegal NSA spying
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: English
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 14:16
        By Thomas Gaist and Joseph Kishore26 March 2014The Obama administration is preparing to propose legislative changes to the bulk telephone data collection program run by the US National Security Agency. While few details are available, the new framework would reportedly require the NSA to request data from telecommunications companies, which would keep the information on their own servers.
        The changes, first revealed in a New York Times article on Tuesday, are part of an effort to create a new framework for parts of the vast, unconstitutional police-state spying apparatus, while heading off popular outrage. The ''reforms,'' which would affect only one of the many NSA programs revealed by Edward Snowden, are designed to ensure that, in all their essentials, the powers of the intelligence agencies remain in place.
        In its article , ''Obama to Call for End to NSA's Bulk Data Collection,'' the Times describes the proposed measures as ''a far reaching overhaul of the National Security Agency's once-secret bulk phone records program.'' If the administration's proposals are implemented, the Times wrote, ''the NSA would end its systematic collection of data about Americans' calling habits.''
        In fact, as an Obama administration official acknowledged in an official statement, the government intends to retain ''as many [surveillance] capabilities of the program as possible.''
        Under the proposed changes, the spy agencies will need to obtain a new type of authorization from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to access the data stored by telecommunications companies. The FISC operates behind closed doors with no accountability, and has a history of granting the NSA virtually everything it asks for.
        Once acquired, these authorizations will be open-ended, allowing for indefinite surveillance of targets. As noted by the Times, ''The new type of surveillance court orders envisioned by the administration would require phone companies to swiftly provide records in a technologically compatible data format, including making available, on a continuing basis, data about any new calls placed or received after the order is received.''
        The authorizations, according to the Times, ''would also allow the government to swiftly seek related records for callers up to two phone calls, or 'hops,' removed from the number that has come under suspicion'...''
        Phone companies would be required to keep data for 18 months, rather than the five years that such information is currently stored by the NSA. ''A senior administration official said that intelligence agencies had concluded that the operational impact of that change would be small because older data is less important.''
        Speaking at a news conference in The Hague, President Obama confirmed that at the center of the proposed changes was an attempt to alter public ''perceptions'' about the spying programs. ''We have got to win back the trust not just of governments, but, more importantly, of ordinary citizens.'' There is a ''tendency to be skeptical of government and to be skeptical of the US intelligence services,'' Obama said.
        The ''skepticism'' of the world's population is the product of the exposure, thanks to Snowden, of a massive and blatantly illegal spying program, erected in direct violation of the Constitution. For these acts, Snowden has been hounded by the US political establishment, including the Obama administration, which has demanded his prosecution.
        The reforms would ''eliminate'' the concerns of NSA critics, Obama added. In other words, the fig leaf measures are aimed at delegitimizing further opposition to the spy agencies while giving political cover to sections of the Democratic and Republican parties that have postured as critics.
        Any changes to the NSA program will have to work their way through Congress before being enacted. Top Congressional representatives are promoting their own version of the surveillance reforms. Republican Mike Rogers (chairman of the House Intelligence Committee) and Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger (the top Democrat on the committee, whose district includes the NSA headquarters) have sponsored the ''End Bulk Collection Act,'' which is broadly in line with Obama's proposal.
        Echoing Obama's remarks, Ruppersberger said that he and Rogers ''knew we had to deal with the perception and get the confidence of the American people.''
        Making clear the backroom discussion between the Obama administration and the Congressional representatives close to the NSA, Rogers added, ''We think the White House is now moving toward our position on this. We've been sharing text with them for the past few weeks.''
        The Rogers/Ruppersberger proposal reportedly contains broad language allowing for the government to demand data even for targets not associated with a terrorism investigation. Anyone the government deems to be ''in contact with, or known to, a suspected agent of a foreign power,'' based on ''reasonable articulable suspicion,'' can be targeted, along with those who are two ''hops'' removed.
        The Congressional proposal would also only require approval from the FISC after the data is collected from the telecommunications companies. If the court deems a request invalid, the NSA would supposedly be forced to delete any data it had collected.
        Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Agency'--who is also close to the NSA and has branded Snowden a ''traitor'''--declared her support for the White House proposal, saying it ''is a worthy effort.'' Feinstein added, ''I have said before that I am open to reforming the call records program as long as any changes meet our national security needs and address privacy concerns, and that any changes continue to provide the government with the means to protect against future terrorist attacks.''
        By ''national security needs,'' Feinstein means the continued ability of spy agencies to spy on the population of the United States and the world.
        The ''reform'' measures relating to the telephone data program are also part of an effort to cover up the far more expansive programs that have also been exposed by Snowden, including those giving the NSA access to virtually all Internet communications data via the so-called PRISM program and other operations.
        Asked about any measures that would affect PRISM, Rogers said, ''I don't believe that foreign collection on foreign soil is something that we need to change. I think we would be foolish and irresponsible if we disrupted them for any political purpose.''
        PRISM is billed as a foreign intelligence program, but it in fact gathers information on all manner of communications by accessing the servers of US Internet companies. According to reports based on Snowden documents, PRISM is the number one source of raw intelligence for NSA reports.
        Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
      House Intelligence Leadership Introduces Legislation to End NSA Bulk Telephone Metadata Program While Preserving Counterterrorism Capability | Congressman Mike Rogers: Representing Michigan's 8th District
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 01:21
        Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Ranking Member C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) today introduced the FISA Transparency and Modernization Act of 2014. The bipartisan legislation ends bulk collection of metadata under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, including telephone, email, and internet metadata. The bill also codifies a ban on the bulk collection of bulk firearm sales records, library records, medical records, tax returns, educational records, and other sensitive personal records.
        The bill's cosponsors include: Congressman Miller (R-FL), Congressman Conaway (R- TX), Congressman King (R-NY), Congressman LoBiondo (R-NJ), Congressman Nunes (R-CA), Congressman Westmoreland (R-GA), Congresswoman Bachmann (R-MN), Congressman Pompeo (R-KS), Congressman Thompson (D-CA), Congressman Langevin (D-RI), and Congresswoman Sewell (D-AL).
        For the past several months, the Committee has been evaluating a number of ways to increase transparency and restore trust in critical national security programs. This proposal allows the government to obtain only the metadata it uses to safeguard the United States against terrorists and other foreign bad actors in a targeted, individualized way with robust judicial review.
        If the government has a reasonable and articulable suspicion that an individual phone number is associated with terrorism, the government could, under a program with significant court and congressional oversight, direct communication companies to query their records and provide the government with numbers connected with that suspect number. This capability could be used to detect early indicators of domestic terrorism. The FISA Transparency and Modernization Act of 2014 requires judicial review every step of the way. The government would be required to seek court approval before and after obtaining metadata from communication companies.
        Before the government could direct a company to provide targeted metadata, the government must create, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) must approve, selection procedures to ensure it only obtains metadata associated with legitimate terrorist and foreign intelligence targets.After the government directs a company to provide targeted metadata, the government must submit the evidence supporting its request to the FISC for judicial review. If the court disapproves, it can order the government to purge any metadata it received. Additionally, this legislation prohibits the government from using this new targeted metadata procedure to obtain any communications content or any personally identifiable information, and it does not require that companies keep any records for any period longer than they normally would. Just as under the current program, the Government would not be able to use this new authority to listen to phone calls or read the content of emails.
        Chairman Rogers said: ''We look forward to working with our colleagues in the House and Senate to enact a bipartisan proposal that will ensure the highest levels of privacy and civil liberties while still maintaining the tools our government needs to keep us, and our allies, safe.''
        Ranking Member Ruppersberger said: ''Our bipartisan approach delivered a true victory for our country, as our proposal enhances transparency and privacy protections while maintaining the capability our Intelligence Community needs to protect our country.''
        The men and women at NSA are working hard to protect our country and its citizens from terrorist attacks and there is no question that they are required to follow the law. Their service is appreciated. There are a number of other proposals in Congress to end bulk collection, but many would not maintain the capability our Intelligence Community needs to protect our country and our allies.
        In the FISA Transparency and Modernization Act of 2014, there are additional provisions to enhance Americans' understanding and trust in the government's use of national security tools.
        The bill also aims to strengthen oversight America's intelligence collection efforts. A provision in the bill championed by Congressman Mike Thompson (D-CA) requires the FISC to keep Congress informed of any significant interpretation of a FISA court opinion.
        A provision championed by Congressman Jim Langevin (D-RI) creates an independent privacy advocate that can be appointed to argue against the government's position to guarantee that judges hear both sides of a case. ''I am proud to cosponsor this bill, and I appreciate the Chairman and Ranking Member including my provisions to allow the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to appoint an independent privacy amicus with legal or technical expertise, to ensure there are independent checks on government surveillance within the FISC's process.''
        A provision championed by Congressman Terri Sewell (D-AL) requires a declassification review of every decision, order or opinion issued by the FISC that includes a significant construction or interpretation of the law. ''This bill strikes a balance between protecting the NSA's ability to collect critical data and increasing the transparency of our intelligence programs. Safeguarding the privacy of all Americans is paramount, as is ensuring that our intelligence community can continue to protect against terrorist threats directed against the American people,'' said Rep. Sewell.
        Congressman Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) added: ''This bipartisan proposal was drafted carefully and thoughtfully with the protection of civil liberties and privacy as a main priority. As a cosponsor, I believe this bill will help restore the trust of the American people while still safeguarding our nation from national security threats.''
        Congressman Mike Pompeo (R-KS) said: ''This legislation ensures that Americans' civil rights are protected while keeping them safe from foreign threats. This good government reform brings transparency and accountability in a way that ensures that our intelligence agencies are working closely with Congress and the Courts to succeed in their mission.''
        ###
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      NSA critics express 'deep concern' over route change for House reform bill | World news | theguardian.com
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 04:16
        Congressional critics of the bulk collection of telephone records by the National Security Agency fear that its allies are circumventing them in the House of Representatives.
        The House parliamentarian, who oversees procedural matters, has determined that a new bill that substantially modifies the seminal 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will go through the intelligence committee rather than the judiciary committee, a move that two congressional aides consider ''highly unusual.''
        Seemingly an arcane parliamentary issue, the jurisdiction question reveals a subterranean and intense fight within the House about the future course of US surveillance in the post-Edward Snowden era. The fight does not align with partisan divides, with both sides claiming both Republican and Democratic support.
        The bill, authored by Republican Mike Rogers of Michigan and Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, would largely get the NSA out of the business of collecting US phone data in bulk. Rogers and Ruppersberger, both staunch advocates of the NSA and until now just as staunch defenders of bulk collection, are the leaders of the intelligence committee.
        Yet the House judiciary committee thought it was the natural choice for primary legislative jurisdiction over the Fisa Transparency and Modernization Act, introduced on Tuesday. While the intelligence committee oversees US spy activities, the judiciary committee has oversight responsibilities over surveillance law.
        The judiciary committee is also a stronghold of support for a rival bill, the USA Freedom Act, two of whose principal sponsors are its top Democrat and a former GOP chairman. The Freedom Act also ends NSA bulk collection, but includes more civil libertarian provisions, such as the prior approval of a judge to force phone companies to turn over customer data and a threshold requirement of relevance to an ongoing investigation to secure such approval.
        Ruppersberger, in a press conference on Tuesday, blasted the USA Freedom Act, saying it would make Americans ''less safe.''
        But the USA Freedom Act, despite also being centrally concerned with intelligence policy, was given primarily to the judiciary committee, raising an expectation on the committee that the same would hold for Rogers and Ruppersberger's bill despite the committee affiliations of its sponsors.
        A congressional aide who would only speak on condition of anonymity said it was ''new and different that a bill that amends Fisa wouldn't come to us first." The House parliamentarian, Thomas Wickham, declined to comment.
        Representative Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, issued a statement on Wednesday expressing ''deep concern'' about the jurisdictional switch.
        ''I am deeply concerned that today, for what appears to be the first time ever, a Fisa reform bill has been sent first to the House intelligence committee. The House judiciary committee must assert its critically important role with regard to Fisa reform efforts so as to ensure that our constitutional liberties are properly protected as we seek to promote national security,'' Nadler said.
        The suspicion amongst some Hill staffers is that the next step for Rogers and Ruppersberger, after securing approval from the full intelligence committee, will be to attempt to get their bill to the House floor without putting it before the judiciary committee at all.
        Circumventing the judiciary committee, staffers said, would reflect the difficulties Rogers and Ruppersberger would have winning the panel's backing for their bill.
        While on the surface the bill has similarities with the USA Freedom Act, the intelligence leaders' proposal would not require a judge's approval before the government compels telecoms or internet providers to turn over customer data, which an aide called a ''fatal flaw'' of the bill for the judiciary panel.
        Yet the USA Freedom Act itself faces significant congressional obstacles.
        Despite possessing 142 co-sponsors in the House, the bill has been bottled up in a judiciary subcommittee since January. The committee chairman, Republican Bob Goodlatte of Wisconsin, has given it lukewarm support. Its backers say the bill might be modified or even renamed as a way to shore up its prospects.
        Advocates detect hostility from House leadership of both parties, to say nothing of the NSA and the Obama administration. The administration has, to the committee leadership's frustration, studiously denied expressing any opinion on the bill, which panel members read as opposition.
        Both camps are claiming the Obama administration for their own. Rogers and Ruppersberger, appearing to cut off the USA Freedom Act at the pass, declared themselves ''very, very close'' on Tuesday to a deal with the White House over surveillance. Hours later, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a USA Freedom Act supporter, said Obama's forthcoming surveillance reform proposals show ''it's very clear now that the administration agrees with us.''
        But in an indication of the USA Freedom Act's uncertain course, Wyden, joined by fellow Senate bulk-surveillance critics Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky and Democrat Mark Udall of Colorado, urged the president to end bulk surveillance unilaterally, without recourse to Congress.
        All sides are waiting for Obama's specific proposals, which the administration expects to unveil this week.
        The GOP leadership permitted a floor debate in July on an amendment that would have killed NSA bulk surveillance outright, and which came close to passage. The amendment's architect, Republican Justin Amash of Michigan, backs the USA Freedom Act. But the speaker of the House, John Boehner, came out on Tuesday in favor of Rogers and Ruppersberger's bill, and Boehner has great influence over what will come to the House floor.
        Representatives for Boehner and the House intelligence committee did not return requests for comment.
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Readout of the President's meeting with CEOs
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 18:54
        The White House
        Office of the Press Secretary
        For Immediate Release
        March 21, 2014
        Today, the President and senior members of his team met with Executives from several leading U.S. tech companies as part of a continuing dialogue with the private sector, civil society, and others on issues surrounding intelligence, technology and privacy. The President used this opportunity to update the CEOs on our progress in implementing the principles and reforms he announced on January 17, including the new Presidential Directive he issued to govern our intelligence activities that will ensure that we take into account our security requirements, but also our alliances; our trade and investment relationships, including the concerns of our companies; and our commitment to privacy and basic liberties.
        The President reiterated his Administration's commitment to taking steps that can give people greater confidence that their rights are being protected while preserving important tools that keep us safe. The President also updated the CEOs on the comprehensive ''big data'' review being led by John Podesta, which looks at how ''big data'' will affect the way we live and work; the relationship between government and citizens; and how the public and private sectors can spur innovation and maximize the opportunities and free flow of this information while minimizing the risks to privacy.
        The following Executives attended:
        Reed Hastings, Co-Founder & CEO, NetflixDrew Houston, Founder & CEO, DropboxDr. Alexander Karp, Founder & CEO, PalantirAaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO, BoxEric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, GoogleMark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO, Facebook From the Administration, the following attended:
        Secretary of Commerce PritzkerSenior Advisor Valerie JarrettCounselor John PodestaAssistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Lisa MonacoNational Economic Council Director Jeff ZientsDeputy Director of the National Security Agency Rick Ledgett
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Google's Terms "Might Legally Permit" Accessing Gmail To Find Leakers
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: Valleywag
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:32
        S
        Over the past few weeks, I've heard a few stories about Google or Twitter employees letting it slip that they can check your email or read your DMs'--the kind of hushed anecdotes that are hard to prove. But, somehow, Google's statement denying recent allegations makes that NSA-fueled paranoia feel more concrete.
        Last night, Google general counsel Kent Walker made the "unusual move" of directly addressing Michael Arrington's claim that that company spied on his Gmail. (After news broke that Microsoft looked into a reporter's Hotmail, Arrington wrote a blog post alleging that a Google employee who leaked information to his Gmail was soon out of a job.)
        Walker told Re/code:
        "Mike makes a serious allegation here '-- that Google opened email messages in his Gmail account to investigate a leak," Kent Walker, Google general counsel, said in a statement. "While our terms of service might legally permit such access, we have never done this and it's hard for me to imagine circumstances where we would investigate a leak in that way."
        "Might legally permit" and "hard for me to imagine" are not phrases you want to see in the same sentence as a company's denial.
        Just last week Google successfully jumped a major legal hurdle in a lawsuit that it surreptitiously data-mined millions of student emails through Apps for Education, a suite of tools that "has 30 million users worldwide and is provided by the company for free to thousands of educational institutions in the United States."
        Lucky for the $380 billion company, a district judge in California "refused to let the case proceed as a class action," so the plaintiffs need to use their own financial resources to pursue the case.
        It's not just Google. Re/code points out that other tech companies are also protected by the rules around using their free products.
        It turns out the Microsoft's terms of service allows it to access user communication in order to "protect the rights or property of Microsoft or our customers."
        Moreover, the terms of service of Google and Yahoo's free, hosted email services afford it similar privileges.
        This concludes your daily reminder that if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. Thanks for playing.
        [Image via @TEDchris]
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Hacked emails show what Microsoft charges the FBI for user data | The Daily Dot
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Mon, 24 Mar 2014 15:19
        BY KEVIN COLLIER AND FRAN BERKMAN
        Microsoft often charges the FBI's most secretive division hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to legally view customer information, according to documents allegedly hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army.
        The SEA, a hacker group loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, is best known for hijacking Western media companies' social media accounts. (These companies include the Associated Press, CNN, NPR, and even the Daily Dot.) The SEA agreed to let the Daily Dot analyze the documents with experts before the group published them in full.
        The documents consist of what appear to be invoices and emails between Microsoft's Global Criminal Compliance team and the FBI's Digital Intercept Technology Unit (DITU), and purport to show exactly how much money Microsoft charges DITU, in terms of compliance costs, when DITU provides warrants and court orders for customers' data.
        In December 2012, for instance, Microsoft emailed DITU a PDF invoice for $145,100, broken down to $100 per request for information, the documents appear to show. In August 2013, Microsoft allegedly emailed a similar invoice, this time for $352,200, at a rate of $200 per request. The latest invoice provided, from November 2013, is for $281,000.
        None of the technologists or lawyers consulted for this story thought that Microsoft would be in the wrong to charge the FBI for compliance, especially considering it's well within the company's legal right to charge "reasonable expenses." Instead, they said, the documents are more of an indication of just how frequently the government wants information on customers. Some of the DITU invoices show hundreds of requests per month.
        For ACLU Principal Technologist Christopher Soghoian, the documents reiterated his stance that charging a small fee is a positive, in part because it creates more of a record of government tracking. In 2010, Soghoian actually chided Microsoft for not charging the Drug Enforcement Agency for turning over user records when instructed to by courts, noting that companies like Google and Yahoo did.
        Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agreed, and told the Daily Dot the government should be transparent about how much it pays.
        "Taxpayers should absolutely know how much money is going toward this," he said.
        Compared with the National Security Agency, which has seen many of its programs exposed by former systems analyst Edward Snowden, DITU has a low profile. But it runs in the same circles. Multiple law enforcement and technology industry representatives described DITU to Foreign Policy as the FBI's liaison to the U.S.'s tech companies, and the agency's equivalent to the NSA.
        To that note, DITU is mentioned as a little-noticed detail from Snowden slides that detail the NSA's notorious PRISM program, which allows it to collect users' communications from nine American tech companies, including Microsoft. One slide explicitly mentions DITU's role in getting data from those companies.
        PRISM screengrab via freesnowden.is
        It's impossible to fully verify the documents' authenticity without confirmation from someone with direct knowledge of Microsoft and DITU compliance practices, and those parties refused to comment. But there are multiple signs that indicate the documents are legitimate.
        "I don't see any indication that they're not real," Cardozo said. "If I was going to fake something like this, I would try to fake it up a lot more sensational than this."
        That the SEA twice attacked Microsoft with a phishing attack before leaking these documents is well documented. On Jan. 11, the day of the second attack, the SEA hijacked the company's blog and Twitter account. One representative told the Verge that day that it was part of a bigger plan: "We are making some distraction for Microsoft employees so we can success in our main mission," the hacker said.
        In a blog post nearly two weeks later, Microsoft admitted: "[W]e have learned that there was unauthorized access to certain employee email accounts, and information contained in those accounts could be disclosed. It appears that documents associated with law enforcement inquiries were stolen."
        A source familiar with several of the email addresses of the Microsoft employees in the emails confirmed the addresses were authentic.
        When reached for comment, the company reiterated its stance that it complies with government demands as required by law. A spokesperson added that "as pursuant to U.S. law, Microsoft is entitled to seek reimbursement for costs associated with compliance with a valid legal demands. ... To be clear, these reimbursements cover only a portion of the costs we actually incur to comply with legal orders."
        A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment and deferred questions to Microsoft, "given that SEA claims to have stolen the documents" from there.
        Indeed, there's plenty of history for communications companies charging compliance costs for cooperating with intelligence agencies' request for people's information. The CIA pays AT&T more than $10 million annually for access to its phone records, government officials told the New York Times. The Guardian, referencing other documents provided by Snowden, has reported that the NSA paid millions to Microsoft and the other eight companies used in PRISM for compliance costs.
        Only the earliest of the Microsoft invoices provided by the SEA, dated May 10, 2012, breaks down requests by type of legal request, and it shows them to all explicitly come legally, though nothing in the documents indicates the later invoices refer to illegal surveillance. User information by a subpoena costs $50, a court order $75, and a search warrant $100. The requests come from FBI offices all around the U.S.
        Later invoices to DITU don't break down requests to subpoena and court order, though the format is otherwise similar, and costs begin to rise to $100 and $200 per request.
        And though the costs vacillate slightly depending on the invoice, they appear to be roughly in line with industry standards. Ashkan Soltani, who coauthored a Yale study on how much it costs agencies like the FBI to track targets by tapping phone companies for their cellphone locations, said that the range of costs seen in the SEA documents'--$50 to $200 per order to Microsoft'--"did seem a fair cost."
        The invoices don't make explicit the exact type of information Microsoft charges DITU to provide, which may account for the price changes.
        The biggest suspicion espoused by the experts we spoke with was just how apparently easy it was for the SEA to acquire this sort of information. If the documents aren't forged, that means Microsoft and the FBI simply email invoices and references to a presumably classified process.
        "I'm surprised that they're doing it by email," Soltani said. "I thought it would be a more secure system."
        Illustration by Jason Reed
    Common Core
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Producer Madtom's email
        Adam,
        Please withhold my name if you choose to share any of this information on
        the show. In the education field, it can be very dangerous to express
        opinions which are contrary to the norm or current mode of thinking. You
        can refer to me by my handle, Madtom.
        First, my credentials: I returned to college in a few years ago to pursue
        a second Bachelor of Science degree in Science Education at one of the
        schools in [a large University System.] You could call me a
        slave-trainer in training.
        I will be
        student teaching in the fall, and after I graduate I will be certified to
        teach any science subject (biology, chemistry, physics,
        etc) at the middle school or high school
        level in my state.
        I was finishing up Show #601 this afternoon and heard your discussion
        regarding engineering and science which really got me going. You are
        absolutely correct - engineering is not science, but these lines are being
        blurred in the classroom today. The institution where I am receiving my
        teacher education is very STEM focused which irks me to no end. In fact,
        Science, Technology, and Math Education students take many of the same
        classes together as the individual programs (math, science, and technology)
        are really just sub programs of the STEM Education Program. Your
        assessment of STEM is accurate - my professors continually stress the idea
        that what I teach my students must be useful to students in the future when
        they go to get a job. There are definitely many problems with STEM, and
        things are about to get worse with the introduction of new science
        standards called the Next Generation Science Standards, commonly
        abbreviated as NSGS. Their website is here:
        http://www.nextgenscience.org/next-generation-science-standards.
        The Next Generation Science Standards have just recently been finalized.
        When they ultimately get implemented, or when states implement their own
        version of them, it will serve to strengthen the concept of STEM and Common
        Core. As a trained scientist, the most egregious part of the Next
        Generation Science Standards is the integration of engineering design into
        *ALL* science classes. You can find information on this here:
        http://www.nextgenscience.org/sites/ngss/files/Appendix%20I%20-%20Engineering%20Design%20in%20NGSS%20-%20FINAL_V2.pdf.
        From the document, page 1 "The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
        represent a commitment to integrate engineering design into the structure
        of science education by raising engineering design to the same level as
        scientific inquiry when teaching science disciplines at all levels, from
        kindergarten to grade 12."
        My perhaps cynical view is that with the addition of engineering design
        into the science standards two things will happen. First, the science
        itself will suffer as emphasis is shifted away from learning actual
        science. Second, technology education programs will suffer because in
        order to do technology education correctly, you must have a strong
        foundation in science. Furthermore, I fear that school districts will end
        up cutting Technology Education programs when money becomes tight with the
        rationale that the material will be covered in science classrooms.
        Because, in general all students must take at least some science at the
        high school level, this will become an effective way to train our future
        workers.
        I also wanted to point out that these Next Generation Science Standards
        have been aligned with the Common Core State Standards. Information
        regarding it's connection to the math portion of Common Core can be found
        here:
        http://www.nextgenscience.org/sites/ngss/files/Appendix-L_CCSS%20Math%20Connections%2006_03_13.pdf.
        Information regarding its connection to literacy can be found here:
        http://www.nextgenscience.org/sites/ngss/files/Appendix%20M%20Connections%20to%20the%20CCSS%20for%20Literacy_061213.pdf.
        From the Common Core Math integration pdf, page 1, "Science is a
        quantitative discipline, so it is important for educators to ensure that
        students' science learning coheres well with their learning in
        mathematics. To achieve this alignment, the NGSS development team worked
        with the CCSSM writing team to ensure the NGSS do not outpace or otherwise
        misalign to the grade-by-grade standards in the CCSSM."
        The NGSS are coming. They were written in cooperation with 26 different
        State Partners. A full list can be found here:
        http://www.nextgenscience.org/lead-state-partners. I'm sure they will be
        quickly adopted nation wide.
        Their FAQ really sums up the philosophy behind all of this. From the FAQ
        (emphasis mine): "Science--and therefore science education--is central to
        the lives of all Americans, preparing them to be *informed citizens* in a
        democracy and *knowledgeable consumers*. If the nation is to compete and
        lead in the global economy and if American students are to be able to
        pursue expanding employment opportunities in science-related fields, all
        students must have a solid K-12 science education that prepares them for
        college and careers." Find the FAQ at:
        http://www.nextgenscience.org/frequently-asked-questions#1.1.
        Thank you Adam for all that you do to make the Best Podcast in the Universe
        possible. Please relay my thanks to John as well. I hope you find this
        information to be of use.
      The Next Generation Science Standards
      Registered to Achieve Inc in Washington DC - The Common Core people!
      The Need for New Science Standards
      The Sponsors
      Lead State Partners
      From their FAQ: Why new science standards? Why now?
        Science—and therefore science education—is central to the lives of
        all Americans, preparing them to be informed citizens in a democracy and
        knowledgeable consumers. If the nation is to compete and lead in the
        global economy and if American students are to be able to pursue
        expanding employment opportunities in science-related fields, all
        students must have a solid K–12 science education that prepares them for
        college and careers.
        [---]
        The time is right to take a fresh look and
        develop Next Generation Science Standards.
      Nation Science Teachers Association
        Competitions
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Sir Borislav Marinov's email about common core and agenda 21
        No agenda show saves the day - again.
        Two days after NA show 600 one of my third graders NA Knight Sir Simeon
        came home almost crying and asked me the question whether we[the people]
        are killing the earth through global warming. I thought I had more time to
        prepare them for this subject but I was surprised it came so soon. By my
        calculations they were going to study climate as part of geography classes
        in fifth grade.
        I asked why did they discuss that subject and turns out this was part of
        their scholastics reading and comprehension test. They had to read a
        government propaganda text and answer a multiple choice question. They did
        not remember the answers but they had to pick which answer is wrong. Three
        of the answers were how bad global warming is and the fourth answer they
        had to select(as the only thing that is not true) was something like "The
        chill spells are on the raise". There was no answer like "all of the above
        is a fiction/wrong."
        I immediately showed them the John Coleman's youtube video "How the Global
        Warming Scare Began".
        The next day my wife was wondering why Sir Yassen is not getting out of
        school - she found him preaching to a classmate how global warming is a
        scam and why you don't vote on science.
        Thanks for helping me keep the government propaganda away from my kids head.
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Stanford Report: How public opinion about new OECD PISA test scores is being manipulated
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Indiana Ends Common Core Education Standards
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 00:49
        Gov. Mike Pence signed a bill rejecting Common Core standards for Indiana. Photo: Bill Clark/Roll Call
        Indiana's experiment with Common Core is over.
        Gov. Mike Pence signed legislation today requiring the state to come up with its own academic standards, making Indiana the latest state to pull its support for the national education standards known as Common Core.
        ''I believe our students are best served when decisions about education are made at the state and local level,'' the Republican governor said, adding:
        By signing this legislation, Indiana has taken an important step forward in developing academic standards that are written by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers, and are uncommonly high.''
        Indiana was among the first states to adopt Common Core standards in 2010 when Mitch Daniels, another Republican, was governor. Pence, elected two years later, has watched as Indiana became a battleground in the fight over the standards.
        >>>Read More: Indiana's Uncommon Ruckus Over Education Standards
        Pence's signature comes 10 days after the Indiana legislature voted to remove the state from Common Core.
        Heritage Foundation education analyst Brittany Corona praised Pence for ending the ''one-size-fits-all national standards,'' and setting a precedent for the other 45 states currently under Common Core to follow. Corona said:
        Indiana now has an opportunity to improve on its previous state standards'--which were among the best in the nation'--by utilizing those standards in conjunction with standards from other high-performing states such as Massachusetts. Most importantly, Indiana's actions put educational decision-making back in the hands of Hoosiers, where it belongs.''
        At least 15 other states aren't using, or have grown increasingly wary of, Common Core. The map below shows the current status of states that never adopted the standards, downgraded their involvement, or paused implementation.
        This story was produced by The Foundry's news team. Nothing here should be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of The Heritage Foundation.
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Gates Foundation Lobbies for Feds to Collect Data on College Graduates' Lives
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Sun, 23 Mar 2014 13:27
        The study, titled "College Blackout," argues that the proposed system, the Student Unit Recording System, would allow a more nuanced approach to studying the value of higher education. This requires knowing the life story of every student and tracking information like income after college and major simultaneously. The data already exists, the study argues, though spread out across a number of government institutions, like the Social Security Administration and the IRS.
        While private institutions and some states keep these records, the study argues that the federal government should have this information pooled in one place.
        What currently prevents such a database is a 2008 law that bans the project. "Without the ban," the study explains, "the Department of Education could use student-level data already collected and stored by schools, states, and the federal government; safeguard it; and link it across schools and to other data sources '' a structure known as a student unit record data system."
        The three main arguments the Gates Foundation paper proposes are that such private information is already in possession of the government, just distributed among a number of federal departments; that only the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) opposes the system; and that the benefits of having a better feel for the performance of a school outweigh the costs of having the federal government track the career success of millions long after they have graduated.
        The villains of the Foundation's story are the heads of the NAICU, who are portrayed as a nefarious lobby of wealthy insiders who overthrow an earnest effort to record data that would hold their institutions accountable. The NAICU fears such a system, the study claims, because it is "largely independent of state money or oversight," which makes the group dependent on tuition dollars. As President Obama threatened to link those dollars that come from federal loans to a student unit record system, the NAICU opposes such a system, the study claims.
        That narrative quickly falls apart as soon as the study quotes the chair of NAICU who fought for the ban on the student unit record system, David Shi. Shi suggested that such a system ''would put at risk fundamental privacy rights, especially the rights of students to control their academic records.'' Upon explaining how the system would work '' "For example, educational data could be connected to earnings data from the Social Security Administration and de-identified to provide files to the Department of Education, aggregated by program or institution, that exclude students' names, Social Security numbers, and other identifying information" '' the concerns are clear.
        The study attempts to dispel these concerns by arguing that a secure system is needed to protect against hackers, to "to establish procedures that would limit the potential for hacking, theft, or inadvertent release of private data."
        This misses the point. For those who saw how the National Security Agency was able to listen to 70 million phone calls of innocent Americans in a month, spy on Congresspeople, and track online gamers, hackers aren't the threat. The federal government is the threat, and allowing its reach to expand into decades of one's life in the job market is a legitimate concern, not a fabrication of a cabal of oligarchs.
        A Young America's Foundation poll found that 53% of millennials '' the age group that would be monitored by the new student unit record system '' opposed the NSA's indiscriminate spying vehemently.
        Another poll, released this January by the Anzalone Liszt Grove Research firm, finds that this attitude extends to all Americans: 59% of Americans want to see the NSA's current intelligence system reformed to prevent it from collecting data in as prodigious a quantity as it currently does. The problem for Americans with yet another system of government surveillance is not the fact that hackers might get ahold of the information '' it's that the government will definitely get ahold of the information.
      KrazyTA Explains What Bill Gates Wants for His Own Children | Diane Ravitch's blog
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 00:41
        The most famous line ever written by John Dewey was this:
        ''What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.''
        Our frequent commenter KrazyTA has been exploring what our leading reformers''who see themselves as our best and wisest educational visionaries''want for their own children. After Bill Gates spoke to the teachers at the annual conference of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to explain why the Common Core was absolutely necessary and was the key to teachers' creativity, KrazyTA inquired into the practices at the elite Lakeside School in Seattle, where Bill was a student and where his own children are enrolled.
        This is what he found:
        ''Strangely, when I went to the Lakeside School website'--you know, where Bill Gates and his children went/go to school'--I found not a single mention of Common Core, standardization and electric plugs. Not to mention that they weren't coupled with terms like ''innovation'' and ''teaching.''
        ''Worse yet, not a single mention of how ''college and career readiness'' has been lacking there up until now either. Am I missing something? Anyway, let's see what sort of institution crippled Mr. Bill Gates.
        ''Let's start with ''About Lakeside.''
        First, their mission statement:
        [start quote]
        ''The mission of Lakeside School is to develop in intellectually capable young people the creative minds, healthy bodies, and ethical spirits needed to contribute wisdom, compassion, and leadership to a global society. We provide a rigorous and dynamic academic program through which effective educators lead students to take responsibility for learning.
        ''We are committed to sustaining a school in which individuals representing diverse cultures and experiences instruct one another in the meaning and value of community and in the joy and importance of lifelong learning.
        [end quote]
        Second, ''Mission Focus'':
        [start quote]
        ''Lakeside School fosters the development of citizens capable of and committed to interacting compassionately, ethically, and successfully with diverse peoples and cultures to create a more humane, sustainable global society. This focus transforms our learning and our work together.
        [end quote]
        Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=120812
        ''Academics Overview'' with the subtitle ''A Commitment to Excellence'':
        [start quote]
        ''Lakeside's 5th- to 12th-grade student-centered academic program focuses on the relationships between talented students and capable and caring teachers. We develop and nurture students' passions and abilities and ensure every student feels known.
        ''The cultural and economic diversity of our community, the teaching styles, and the approaches to learning are all essential to Lakeside academics. We believe that in today's global world, our students need to know more than one culture, one history, and one language.
        ''Each student's curiosities and capabilities lead them to unique academic challenges that are sustained through a culture of support and encouragement. All students will find opportunities to discover and develop a passion; to hone the skills of writing, thinking, and speaking; and to interact with the world both on and off campus. Lakeside trusts that each student has effective ideas about how to maximize his or her own education, and that they will positively contribute to our vibrant learning community.
        [end quote]
        Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=120814
        ''Let's switch gears'--or at least websites. Even more strangely, I found that stuff like class size matters:
        [start quote]
        ''Finally, I had great relationships with my teachers here at Lakeside. Classes were small. You got to know the teachers. They got to know you. And the relationships that come from that really make a difference'...
        [end quote]
        ''More of this nonsense [?] can be found in the link below, like the fact that Lakeside School has a student/teacher ration of 9:1 and average class size of 16.
        Link: http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/bill-gates-tells-us-why-his-high-school-was-a-great-learning-environment/
        ''Well, I could on and on but I fear we need to rescue the little tykes in the Gates family from such horrors as, well, feast your eyes on this bit of barbarity regarding the Study Year Abroad:
        [start quote]
        ''Since 1964, School Year Abroad has sent high school juniors and seniors to study abroad in distinctive cities and towns throughout Europe and Asia where their safety and security is a priority. Widely considered the 'gold standard' of high school study abroad programs, SYA's rigorous academic curriculum, paired with complementary educational travel and varied extracurricular activities, ensure students are in an optimal position to return to their home schools or proceed to college.
        [end quote]
        Link: http://www.sya.org/s/833/index.aspx?sid=833&gid=1&pgid=1001
        ''Nuff said. Will you be joining Eva M and the pro-charterite/privatizer commenters on this blog for the upcoming ''Save the Children of the Poor Millionaires & Billionaires Rally: A New Civil Rights Movement For The Truly Downtrodden'' '-- catered, don't you worry, by Wolfgang Puck.
        I hope the above will put you at ease.''
        ðŸŽ
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      Fourth-graders get PETA propaganda disguised as Common Core - EAGnews.org powered by Education Action Group Foundation, Inc.
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 02:37
        SHRUB OAK, N.Y. '' The mandated increase in ''informational texts'' called for in the Common Core national standards has opened up a word of possibilities for classroom activists who wish to present politically radical ideas to their students.Fourth graders in New York's Lakeland Central School District '' and their parents '' found that out when Jessica Fiorillo's son brought home a reading that turned out to be taken directly from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' (PETA) website. Word for word.
        This is not unusual for Common Core reading texts. While the idea is for students to learn how to comprehend what they read, the texts are frequently left-wing political statements that many believe are designed to influence their opinions.
        The reading, which argues why classrooms shouldn't have pets, was given to students as a lesson on ''text structure.''
        The reading is titled, ''Should Animals Be Kept in the Classroom?''
        ''Many teachers bring animals into their classrooms with good intentions, like wanting to teach you and your classmates responsibility or teach you about the animals themselves. However, rabbit, mice, rats, guinea pigs, frogs, snakes, fish, and other animals used as teaching ''tools'' are too often abused and neglected,'' it reads.
        It then provides graphic examples of alleged abuse of animals in classroom settings, including a snake being microwaved, chinchillas being beaten, acid being poured on pigs and a lamb being duct-taped to the outside of the building and ''left alone overnight in freezing temperatures.''
        The reading is filled with emotionally charged words and phrases in an obvious attempt to sway children's feelings.
        ''I was disgusted, appalled and in complete disbelief that a school would basically send home a guide on how to kill household pets. My husband after first reading it thought it was a handout from PETA not school work,'' Fiorillo told EAGnews.
        But it was school work. Students then answer questions about the reading, including, ''What is the main idea of the article? Use evidence from the text to support your answer.''
        ''Why do you think the author chose this text structure? How does using this text structure help you understand more about keeping animals in the classroom? Use evidence from the text to support your answer,'' is another series of questions.
        Upset, Fiorillo emailed the teacher with her concerns but it went unreturned. Fiorillo says her husband visited the principal to do the same. She says the principal was ''shocked and made facial expressions like he was in awe.''
        ''The principal actually said to my husband that this was part of the common core curriculum,'' Fiorillo told EAGnews.
        The informational text appears to be lifted directly from a PETA website called PETAkids.com.
        ''There is no reason for a child to see this. If it involved reading comprehension there are many other topics that would have worked,'' Fiorillo said.
        Comments
      White House Report: Race to the Top Setting the Pace for Gains across the Education System
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 19:27
        The White House
        Office of the Press Secretary
        For Immediate Release
        March 25, 2014
        More support for educators and increases in student achievement are among signs of progress as anniversary of President Obama's signature education reform approaches
        WASHINGTON, DC '' In the four years since the Obama Administration announced its first Race to the Top grants, the President's signature education initiative has helped spark a wave of reform across the country, according to the attached report released today by the White House and Department of Education.
        As the four-year anniversary of those grants approaches this week, ''Setting the Pace'' finds that the President's education reform agenda has helped raise standards for students, better support teachers and school leaders, and turn around low-performing schools. Ultimately, these efforts have led to signs of encouraging progress among the nation's students.
        Among the report's key findings are:
        States that received Race to the Top funds to reform their K-12 education systems serve 22 million students and 1.5 million teachers in more than 40,000 schools.
        These states represent 45 percent of all students and a similar percentage of all low-income students. Some of the most encouraging signs of progress have come in states that have done the most to embrace the types of reforms called for in Race to the Top, including Tennessee, Hawaii and the District of Columbia.
        All Race to the Top grantees have taken key steps toward focusing on college- and career-readiness for all students and supporting hard-working teachers and principals, including developing a number of new tools and resources, providing coaching for educators, and expanding options for students.
        ''Race to the Top set out to advance a simple idea: that the most powerful ideas for improving education come not from Washington, but from educators and leaders in states throughout the country. Now, nearly four years in, change is touching nearly half the nation's students '' for an investment that represents less than 1 percent of education spending,'' U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. ''We know this work is never easy, but what is most encouraging is that despite some debate in state legislatures and here in Congress, state and district leaders have had the courage to put their plan into action.
        ''The Obama Administration is focused on expanding opportunity for America's students to ensure not only that they have a shot at achieving the American dream, but that the next generation of American workers can continue to compete in the global economy,'' said Cecilia Mu±oz, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. "The Race to the Top program has helped spur the change and improvement needed in our education system, demonstrating that by working together across the federal government, with governors and school boards, principals and teachers, businesses and non-profits, parents and students '' we can provide the education that our young people need and deserve, to prepare for college and a successful career.''
        At 80 percent, the nation's high school graduation rate is the highest in American history, thanks to comprehensive, state-led efforts inspired in part by Race to the Top. In addition, student test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are the highest since the test was first given 20 years ago.
        With an initial budget of just more than $4 billion '' less than 1 percent of total education spending in America '' Race to the Top unleashed a flurry of pent-up education reform activity at the state and local level. Importantly, these efforts have created partnerships among parents, educators, and state and community leaders to continue this progress in the months and years ahead.
        Today's report highlights examples of the most innovative and effective reforms that are taking place in states across the country to prepare students for college and careers, support educators, and spur innovative educational strategies. From Massachusetts' work to increase access to Advanced Placement (AP) classes by training more than 1,100 middle and high school teachers, to Tennessee's efforts to support its educators by coaching 30,000 on new state standards and equipping 700 teacher-leader coaches, to Florida's investment in programs to get the best and brightest educators to the highest-needs areas, to Maryland's development of STEM curriculum models for use in language programs statewide, states are leading the way with plans tailored to meet the unique needs of their educators and students. This federal support, paired with state and local investment and leadership, is getting results for students and educators.
        Looking at these examples and the progress made across our education system, the report finds that while much work remains, Race to the Top has empowered and reinforced the best ideas at the state and local level. By staying on course, America can continue to make progress toward ensuring that every child has an opportunity to get a world-class education and the skills he or she will need to succeed in today's economy '-- and tomorrow's.
        ''Encouraged and supported by Race to the Top, states are taking major steps forward for our nation's students,'' the report concludes. ''There will never be a moment to declare victory in this race '' the work will continue for many years to come. But America's educators remain committed to support all our children on their path to a prosperous future. State and local leaders share that commitment. Staying on course is critical while this hard work is underway.''
        Setting The Pace - 2014
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    F-Russia / Ukraine
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      BBC News - John Kerry gives Sergei Lavrov two large Idaho potatoes
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Mon, 24 Mar 2014 14:58
        13 January 2014 Last updated at 23:51
        You say potato, I say kartofel: Mr Kerry said that he wanted to surprise his Russian counterpart with a quality American gift US Secretary of State John Kerry has presented his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov with two Idaho potatoes as a gift during a meeting in Paris.
        Mr Kerry said that Mr Lavrov had mentioned Idaho state's most famous export the last time the pair met.
        The Russian foreign minister seemed to appreciate the gift, commenting that they were "impressive."
        The two men are in France to negotiate details of a peace conference on Syria scheduled for 22 January.
        Idaho potatoesThe term refers to any potato grown in the state of Idaho, although it is most frequently used to describe Russet potatoes from the stateIdaho potatoes are large, starchy potatoes with brown skin and white fleshBecause of their high starch content, Idaho potatoes are good for baking and mashing as well as making potato chipsFans say that Idaho's growing season of warm days and cool nights, mountain-fed irrigation and rich volcanic soil give Idaho potatoes their unique textureThey have discussed the possibility of "localised ceasefires" in Syria ahead of the peace in Switzerland.
        Tension between Washington and Moscow has risen in recent months because of intelligence leaked by ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
        The 30-year-old has temporary asylum in Russia after leaking details of US electronic surveillance programmes.
        'Carrot-and-stick'
        Mr Lavrov, speaking in English, suggested the potatoes may have symbolic use as the Syria negotiations approach.
        "The specific potato which John handed to me has the shape which makes it possible to insert potato in the carrot-and-stick expression. So it could be used differently," he said.
        Mr Kerry said that there was "no hidden meaning.... and no metaphor" behind the gift.
        "We were having a good conversation in the course of the Christmas break over the subject of Idaho, which was where I was at the time, and he recalled the Idaho potatoes as being something that he knew of, so I thought I would surprise him and bring him some good Idaho potatoes," he said.
        In return the Russian side presented Mr Kerry with a pink fur hat for State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
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      Siemens CEO meets Putin and commits company to Russia - FT.com
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 13:47
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      Gazprom and Siemens to extend Strategic Partnership Agreement
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 13:45
        March 26, 2014, 17:55The Gazprom headquarters hosted today a working meeting between Alexey Miller, Chairman of the Company's Management Committee and Joe Kaeser, President and CEO of Siemens.
        The meeting participants discussed the current state and development prospects for the partnership between the companies. It was pointed out that for more than 20 years of the cooperation the companies had successfully delivered a number of joint projects, particularly, implementation of automation and informatization systems, procurement of gas compressor and electrical equipment as well as turbines for Gazprom's facilities.
        The parties supported the idea to extend the existing Strategic Partnership Agreement signed by Gazprom and Siemens in December 2011. The document provides for furthering the strategic cooperation in the Russian and international markets, including such sectors as gas production and transmission, underground storage and use as well as automation systems engineering and innovative development, power generation and energy saving technologies.
        BackgroundSiemens is a major manufacturer of electronics and electric tools within such sectors as information technologies and communication, automation and control systems, power industry, transport and healthcare.
        Gazprom and Siemens are promoting the cooperation in the following areas: innovations, automation, IT, telemechanics and telecommunications; power generation; compressor station equipment; offshore oil and gas field development technologies; security systems for buildings and structures; energy saving and environmental protection; novel medical technologies; project finance.
        All news for March 2014
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      HERE WE GO UKRAINE-BBC News - Ukraine agrees to 50% gas price hike amid IMF talks
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:44
        26 March 2014Last updated at 16:21 ET Ukraine's interim government says it will raise gas prices for domestic consumers by 50% in an effort to secure an International Monetary Fund (IMF) aid package.
        An official at Ukraine's Naftogaz state energy company said the price rise would take effect on 1 May, and further rises would be scheduled until 2018.
        Ukrainians are accustomed to buying gas at heavily subsidised rates.
        But the IMF has made subsidy reform a condition of its deal.
        Ukraine currently buys more than half of its natural gas from Russia's Gazprom, and then sells it on to consumers at below market prices.
        Yury Kolbushkin, budget and planning director at Naftogaz, told reporters that gas prices for district heating companies would also rise by 40% from 1 July.
        IMF negotiators are still in Kiev to negotiate a package of measures worth billions of dollars to help Ukraine's interim government plug its budget deficit and meet foreign loan repayments.
        Deal expectedThe IMF is also asking Ukraine to crack down on corruption and end central bank support for the Ukrainian currency.
        On Tuesday, Ukraine's finance minister Olexander Shlapak said the country was seeking $15-20bn (£9-12bn) from the IMF.
        The Financial Times has reported that a rescue package worth about $15bn is close to being agreed, and could be announced as early as Thursday.
        An agreement with the IMF is necessary to unlock further financial support from the EU and US.
        Financial help is urgently required as Ukraine has been forced to plunder its foreign currency reserves, and the economy is expected to contract by 3% this year, according to the country's finance ministry.
        In the US, arguments in Congress over reforms to the IMF have held up plans to offer Ukraine $1bn in loan guarantees.
        The EU says its financial support, potentially worth 1.6bn euros (£1.3bn) is contingent on the IMF deal being agreed.
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      100% RELIANT ON RUSSIAN GAS
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: aangirfan
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:15
        The UK's biggest gas company Centrica will start importing Russian gas from October 2014, Reuters reports.UK to start directly buying Russian gas
        (Thanks to dognamedblue for the link)Europe needs Russia's gas!Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania rely 100% on Russian gas.
        Gas reliance on Russia is 93% in Slovakia, 83% in Poland, 81% in Hungary, 66% in the Czech Republic and 61% in Austria.Ukraine's prime monster, Arse Yatsenyuk, says Russia could use energy as a 'new nuclear weapon'.Europe - gas dependence on Russia,
        Who gains if European countries switch their gas supplier?Europe could get gas fromthe US and Qatar
        K.O. - Le blog de Wendy~~~
        "Russia's two metal giants have emerged as big winners from Indonesia's new mining law, after leading a drive to get Jakarta to stick to its controversial mineral ore export ban in the face of opposition from miners and Asian buyers."In its six-month lobbying campaign last year, United Company Rusal and Norilsk Nickel delivered a blunt message to Indonesian officials: We will only invest billions of dollars in smelters if you ban bauxite and nickel ore exports."
        Russia's leading role in the Indonesian mining revolution
      BBC News - Lithuania pleads for US gas exports to counter Russia
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:37
        25 March 2014Last updated at 14:16 ET Lithuania's energy minister has called on the US Senate to speed up the export of natural gas to Europe.
        Jaroslav Neverovic said that Lithuania was being forced to pay a "political price" for being entirely dependent on Russian gas supplies.
        The crisis in Ukraine has led to calls for the US to ease its current restrictions on gas exports.
        Some analysts have suggested that doing so would help challenge Russia's dominance in the sector.
        In his statement to a US Senate committee, Mr Neverovic urged members to do everything within their power to release natural gas resources "into the world market".
        "A law enacted in your country some 75 years ago denies us access to your abundant and affordably priced energy resources," he said.
        The energy minister said customers in Lithuania were having to pay 30% more for natural gas than other European nations, because they were "beholden to a monopolistic supplier."
        "This is not just unfair," said Mr Neverovic. "This is abuse of monopolist position."
        'Penalising' Russia Continue reading the main storySince energy exports are the mainstay of the still inefficient and lagging Russian economy, this is a penalty with teeth''
        End QuoteDavid MontgomeryNERA Economic ConsultingThe crisis in Ukraine has seen the US and European Union impose sanctions targeting members of the Russian political elite.
        They have had their European and US assets frozen, and travel bans have been put in place to restrict their movements.
        However, some analysts have argued that these moves are symbolic and any sanctions would only work if they impacted the wider Russian economy.
        On Tuesday, David Montgomery, a senior vice president at NERA Economic Consulting, suggested that boosting US natural gas exports could hurt the Russian government.
        He estimated that increased US competition could drive down Russia's revenues from natural gas exports by as much as 30% over the next five years, and by as much as 60% in the longer term.
        "Since energy exports are the mainstay of the still inefficient and lagging Russian economy, this is a penalty with teeth," he added.
        Politics, or economics?However, Edward Chow, a senior fellow at Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said any such move was unlikely to have an immediate impact.
        Mr Chow said that Russian exports of natural gas were equivalent to "twice the combined capacity" of the seven US government approved liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects, which would only be completed by the end of this decade.
        "Certainly increased exports of oil and gas from the US and other countries would reduce, over time, the significance of Russian exports, but none of this will happen quickly," he said.
        Mr Chow argued that in order to reduce Russia's influence it was crucial that European countries developed their own gas resources.
        "Russia is even more reliant on the European market as the destination of 80% percent of its oil and gas exports," he said in his testimony at the hearing.
        "So, who is more reliant on whom? This has more to do with the exercise of political will rather than of economic leverage."
      Lithuania pleads to US Senate for Gas Exports, Complains of "Political Price" of Dependency on Russia
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:37
        About the only good coming out of ridiculous tit-for-tat sanctions on Russia is the possibility of revised US energy policy, and Lithuania is pleading for it.
        The BBC reports Lithuania Pleads for US Gas Exports to Counter Russia
        Lithuania's energy minister has called on the US Senate to speed up the export of natural gas to Europe.
        Jaroslav Neverovic said that Lithuania was being forced to pay a "political price" for being entirely dependent on Russian gas supplies.
        In his statement to a US Senate committee, Mr Neverovic urged members to do everything within their power to release natural gas resources "into the world market".
        "A law enacted in your country some 75 years ago denies us access to your abundant and affordably priced energy resources," he said.
        The energy minister said customers in Lithuania were having to pay 30% more for natural gas than other European nations, because they were "beholden to a monopolistic supplier."
        "This is not just unfair," said Mr Neverovic. "This is abuse of monopolist position."
        OK But Wait Until 2020That quite the nerve complaining about the US monopoly when it is Russia that has the monopoly in Europe.
        Moreover, it will take years for the US to get ready.
        Edward Chow, a senior fellow at Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said Russian exports of natural gas were equivalent to "twice the combined capacity" of the seven US government approved liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects, which would only be completed by the end of this decade.
        OK Lithuania, you can have US natural gas. You just have to wait until 2020 to get it.
        Be Careful About Agreeing to US Sanction Games
        Inquiring minds may wish to read Russia Sanctions Lithuania for Supporting Ukraine.
      BBC News - Lithuania pleads for US gas exports to counter Russia
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 14:08
        25 March 2014 Last updated at 18:16
        There have been calls for the US to ease its restrictions on natural gas exports Lithuania's energy minister has called on the US Senate to speed up the export of natural gas to Europe.
        Jaroslav Neverovic said that Lithuania was being forced to pay a "political price" for being entirely dependent on Russian gas supplies.
        The crisis in Ukraine has led to calls for the US to ease its current restrictions on gas exports.
        Some analysts have suggested that doing so would help challenge Russia's dominance in the sector.
        In his statement to a US Senate committee, Mr Neverovic urged members to do everything within their power to release natural gas resources "into the world market".
        "A law enacted in your country some 75 years ago denies us access to your abundant and affordably priced energy resources," he said.
        The energy minister said customers in Lithuania were having to pay 30% more for natural gas than other European nations, because they were "beholden to a monopolistic supplier."
        "This is not just unfair," said Mr Neverovic. "This is abuse of monopolist position."
        'Penalising' Russia
        Since energy exports are the mainstay of the still inefficient and lagging Russian economy, this is a penalty with teethDavid Montgomery, NERA Economic ConsultingThe crisis in Ukraine has seen the US and European Union impose sanctions targeting members of the Russian political elite.
        They have had their European and US assets frozen, and travel bans have been put in place to restrict their movements.
        However, some analysts have argued that these moves are symbolic and any sanctions would only work if they impacted the wider Russian economy.
        On Tuesday, David Montgomery, a senior vice president at NERA Economic Consulting, suggested that boosting US natural gas exports could hurt the Russian government.
        He estimated that increased US competition could drive down Russia's revenues from natural gas exports by as much as 30% over the next five years, and by as much as 60% in the longer term.
        "Since energy exports are the mainstay of the still inefficient and lagging Russian economy, this is a penalty with teeth," he added.
        Politics, or economics?
        However, Edward Chow, a senior fellow at Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said any such move was unlikely to have an immediate impact.
        Mr Chow said that Russian exports of natural gas were equivalent to "twice the combined capacity" of the seven US government approved liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects, which would only be completed by the end of this decade.
        "Certainly increased exports of oil and gas from the US and other countries would reduce, over time, the significance of Russian exports, but none of this will happen quickly," he said.
        Mr Chow argued that in order to reduce Russia's influence it was crucial that European countries developed their own gas resources.
        "Russia is even more reliant on the European market as the destination of 80% percent of its oil and gas exports," he said in his testimony at the hearing.
        "So, who is more reliant on whom? This has more to do with the exercise of political will rather than of economic leverage."
      "Give me your tired, your poor, Your critical masses". We'll take your nukes and then sell you gas.
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: RT - News
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 19:22
        Published time: March 24, 2014 17:37Edited time: March 25, 2014 04:46Reuters/Gleb Garanich
        Japan agreed to transfer a share of its highly enriched uranium and weapons grade plutonium stockpiles to the US as part of the global effort to secure nuclear materials. Other nations are also urged to deposit excess nuclear materials in the US.
        On the eve of the two-day Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague, US and Japanese leaders arranged a deal on ''final disposition'' in the US of well over 300 kilograms of weapons grade plutonium and an unspecified quantity of highly enriched uranium (HEU) that will be ''sent to a secure facility and fully converted into less sensitive forms."
        This quantity of plutonium is enough to produce 40-50 warheads. The total quantity of HEU currently stocked in Japan is estimated at approximately 1.2 tons. According to The New York Times, some 200 kilograms of HEU is currently designated for the US.
        After Barack Obama announced in Prague in 2009 an ambitious agenda to seek ''the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,'' the American president has been pressing his foreign counterparts, both in Asia and Europe, demanding they either get rid of their excess nuclear materials via the US, or tighten security of stockpiles at home.
        Two more countries, Belgium and Italy, have also agreed to hand over excess nuclear materials to the US and issued separate joint statements with the White House, Reuters reported.
        ''This effort involves the elimination of hundreds of kilograms of nuclear material, furthering our mutual goal of minimizing stocks of HEU and separated plutonium worldwide, which will help prevent unauthorized actors, criminals, or terrorists from acquiring such materials,'' US President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in a joint statement released by the White House on Monday.
        There is no information whether the deal between Japan and the US has a financial side; nuclear materials, of course, have a solid market value.
        After the Russian-American HEU-LEU agreement came to an end in 2013, the US nuclear power generation industry is likely to face a sharp fuel price surge and shortage.
        For two decades, the US was buying nuclear fuel from Russia for a dumping price. This fuel was made from down blended Soviet military grade highly enriched uranium, which constituted up to 40 percent of nuclear fuel for America's 104 nuclear reactors (America's 65 nuclear power plants generate over 19 percent of electric power in the country).
        In the meantime, the United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC), the leading US nuclear fuel supplier remains in dire straits and plans to voluntarily file for bankruptcy in the first quarter of 2014 in order to restructure.
        The US also has problems with producing plutonium, used not only in nuclear warheads, but for space exploration as well; only plutonium can produce enough power for long missions to distant planets in the Solar system.
        Tokyo also reportedly possesses several dozen tons of plutonium-uranium hybrid fuel called MOX, which it intends to burn in 16 reactors the country plans to restart. All Japanese nuclear power generating facilities halted operation following the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in March 2011.
        The nuclear materials designated for transfer to the US have been kept for decades at Japan's research reactor site in Tokaimura, where it was used for research.
        During the Cold War era, the US and UK reportedly handed over some 331 kilogram of plutonium to Japan to be used for developing breeder reactor technology.
        After decades of research, practically all fast (breeder) reactor projects around the world, including Japanese ones, are now closed down. The only country that currently possesses operating breeder reactor power generation facility is Russia.
        In 1999, the Tokaimura facility witnessed an accident involving a highly enriched uranium solution. Two workers mishandled radioactive fluid and died as a result, while over 300 were exposed to high doses of radiation.
        The New York Times maintains that while the nuclear materials at the Tokaimura facility are of American and British origin, Japan also has vast stockpiles, up to nine tons of plutonium, created at the country's nuclear power stations as a byproduct of burning uranium for electric power generation. Once Japan restarts some of its nuclear reactors, there will be even more plutonium generated.
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      The Hague Declaration
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 19:14
        The White House
        Office of the Press Secretary
        For Immediate Release
        March 24, 2014
        1. We, the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, the President of the European Council and the President of the European Commission met in The Hague to reaffirm our support for Ukraine's sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence.
        2. International law prohibits the acquisition of part or all of another state's territory through coercion or force. To do so violates the principles upon which the international system is built. We condemn the illegal referendum held in Crimea in violation of Ukraine's constitution. We also strongly condemn Russia's illegal attempt to annex Crimea in contravention of international law and specific international obligations. We do not recognize either.
        3. Today, we reaffirm that Russia's actions will have significant consequences. This clear violation of international law is a serious challenge to the rule of law around the world and should be a concern for all nations. In response to Russia's violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to demonstrate our determination to respond to these illegal actions, individually and collectively we have imposed a variety of sanctions against Russia and those individuals and entities responsible. We remain ready to intensify actions including coordinated sectoral sanctions that will have an increasingly significant impact on the Russian economy, if Russia continues to escalate this situation.
        4. We remind Russia of its international obligations, and its responsibilities including those for the world economy. Russia has a clear choice to make. Diplomatic avenues to de-escalate the situation remain open, and we encourage the Russian Government to take them. Russia must respect Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty, begin discussions with the Government of Ukraine, and avail itself of offers of international mediation and monitoring to address any legitimate concerns.
        5. The Russian Federation's support for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe's Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine is a step in the right direction. We look forward to the mission's early deployment, in order to facilitate the dialogue on the ground, reduce tensions and promote normalization of the situation, and we call on all parties to ensure that Special Monitoring Mission members have safe and secure access throughout Ukraine to fulfill their mandate.
        6. This Group came together because of shared beliefs and shared responsibilities. Russia's actions in recent weeks are not consistent with them. Under these circumstances, we will not participate in the planned Sochi Summit. We will suspend our participation in the G-8 until Russia changes course and the environment comes back to where the G-8 is able to have a meaningful discussion and will meet again in G-7 format at the same time as planned, in June 2014, in Brussels, to discuss the broad agenda we have together. We have also advised our Foreign Ministers not to attend the April meeting in Moscow. In addition, we have decided that G-7 Energy Ministers will meet to discuss ways to strengthen our collective energy security.
        7. At the same time, we stand firm in our support for the people of Ukraine who seek to restore unity, democracy, political stability, and economic prosperity to their country. We commend the Ukrainian government's ambitious reform agenda and will support its implementation as Ukraine seeks to start a new chapter in its history, grounded on a broad-based constitutional reform, free and fair presidential elections in May, promotion of human rights and respect of national minorities.
        8. The International Monetary Fund has a central role leading the international effort to support Ukrainian reform, lessening Ukraine's economic vulnerabilities, and better integrating the country as a market economy in the multilateral system. We strongly support the IMF's work with the Ukrainian authorities and urge them to reach a rapid conclusion. IMF support will be critical in unlocking additional assistance from the World Bank, other international financial institutions, the EU, and bilateral sources. We remain united in our commitment to provide strong financial backing to Ukraine, to co-ordinate our technical assistance, and to provide assistance in other areas, including measures to enhance trade and strengthen energy security.
      Joint Statement by the United States and Ukraine
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 19:29
        The White House
        Office of the Press Secretary
        For Immediate Release
        March 25, 2014
        On the occasion of the third Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague, the United States and Ukraine today reaffirm their strategic partnership and emphasize the important role of nuclear nonproliferation in that relationship. The United States values its 20-year partnership with Ukraine on these issues. Our nonproliferation partnership dates from Ukraine's 1994 decision to remove all nuclear weapons from its territory and to accede to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear-weapon state. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the United States, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland welcomed these Ukrainian actions, and they reaffirmed their commitment to Ukraine to respect the independence, sovereignty, and existing borders of Ukraine. The United States government reaffirms that commitment today to the new Ukrainian government and the people of Ukraine, including in Crimea. The United States government condemns Russia's failure to abide by its commitments under the Budapest Memorandum with its unilateral military actions in Ukraine. Russia's actions undermine the foundation of the global security architecture and endanger European peace and security. Ukraine and the United States emphasize that they will not recognize Russia's illegal attempt to annex Crimea. Crimea is an integral part of Ukraine. The United States will continue to help Ukraine affirm its sovereignty and territorial integrity. As the people of Ukraine work to restore unity, peace, and security to their country, the United States will stand by their side.
        The United States and Ukraine reiterate their commitment to upholding their nuclear nonproliferation commitments. The United States recognizes the importance of the 2012 removal of all highly enriched uranium from Ukraine. This removal again highlighted Ukraine's leadership in nuclear security and nonproliferation, as we collectively work together to secure the world's vulnerable nuclear material. As part of its support for this effort, the United States committed in 2010 to work with Ukraine to construct a Neutron Source Facility at the Kharkiv Institute for Physics and Technology. This month construction of the Neutron Source Facility was completed. The facility, equipped with the most up-to-date technology to operate at the highest safety standards, provides Ukraine with new research capabilities and the ability to produce industrial and medical isotopes for the benefit of the Ukrainian people.
        This state of the art facility is representative of the modern, European state the Government of Ukraine is committed to building. To build on this important cooperation, the United States will continue to provide technical support for the Neutron Source Facility as Ukraine completes the necessary final equipment installation, testing, and start-up to make the facility fully operational as soon as practical.
        This successful effort reflects broad U.S.-Ukrainian cooperation on nuclear security and nonproliferation. Our countries recently extended the U.S.-Ukraine Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Umbrella Agreement and the U.S.-Ukraine Agreement Concerning Operational Safety Enhancements, Risk Reduction Measures, and Nuclear Safety Regulation for Civilian Nuclear Facilities in Ukraine.
        The United States and Ukraine intend to continue to partner to prevent nuclear proliferation by improving Ukraine's ability to detect nuclear materials on its borders, to provide physical protection at sites with nuclear or radioactive materials, and to maintain an adequate export control system in order to help realize the goals of the Nuclear Security Summits.
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Leader of US-backed Ukrainian fascist Right Sector militia killed in police shootout
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: English
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 14:15
        By Alex Lantier26 March 2014Oleksandr Muzychko, a leader of the Right Sector fascist paramilitary group that led street fighting against riot police during last month's Western-backed putsch in Kiev, was shot and killed in the western Ukrainian city of Rivne late Monday.
        The Ukrainian Interior Ministry confirmed that he was killed in a police operation, underscoring continuing tensions inside the far-right Western-backed regime in Kiev.
        There were conflicting accounts of the killing. According to Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Yevdokimov, Muzychko opened fire on a police squad that was sent to arrest him and several of his confederates at a caf(C) in Rivne. He opened fire, wounding one of the policemen, who returned fire, fatally wounding Muzychko. Three of his armed bodyguards were captured. Yevdokimov called Muzychko the leader of a ''criminal gang.''
        Ukrainian opposition legislator Oleksandr Doniy claimed, however, that Muzychko died in a gangland-style killing by assailants who stopped his car, tied his hands behind his back, and shot him.
        Doniy is affiliated to the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), a Washington, DC-based outfit whose Facebook page reposts material from Right Sector. The UCCA's mission statement specifies that it will ''cooperate with the United States government in creating an equitable world order.''
        Former senior Ukrainian intelligence officials speaking to Russian news agency RIA Novosti said that the killing of Muzychko was an operation carried out under the direct orders of Ukrainian intelligence chief Valentin Nalivaichenko. ''The goal of the operation was not to capture, but to neutralize Muzychko, to take him off stage,'' they said.
        Right Sector members in Rivne threatened to respond to Muzychko's death by killing officials in the Kiev regime, calling the official account of Muzychko's killing an ''outright lie.''
        "We will avenge ourselves on [Interior Minister] Arsen Avakov for the death of our brother. The shooting of Sashko Bily [Muzychko's nom de guerre] is a contract killing ordered by the minister," said Roman Koval, a Right Sector fighter in Rivne.
        The most influential leader of Right Sector after Right Sector presidential candidate Dmytro Yarosh, Muzychko personified the fascist character of the forces embraced by Washington and the European Union (EU) in their drive for regime change in Kiev. In 2007, he pledged to fight ''communists, Jews, and Russians for as long as blood flows in my veins.''
        After the putsch, he was filmed slapping Ukrainian prosecutors and threatening Ukrainian legislators with an assault rifle. He also repeatedly threatened officials in Rivne. He was put on the Ukrainian police's wanted list after these incidents, on March 12.
        At the time of his death, Muzychko was also under investigation for involvement in Ukrainian organized crime. He also faced an international arrest warrant, for torturing Russian prisoners while fighting on the side of Islamist Chechen separatists against Russia in 1994-95.
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      Obama: No, Romney Was Wrong. Russia Is Weak, Not Strong. - Yahoo News
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      What the Hell Is Transnistria, and Is Russia About to Invade It? | VICE News
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        Mon, 24 Mar 2014 21:06
        Now that Crimea has been saved by Vladimir Putin's benevolent decision to legally annex it, observers are trying to figure out what to make of a Russian troop build-up on its border with Ukraine. Of particular note in these discussions has been the republic of Transnistria.
        Never heard of Transnistria? That's okay, because not only have most people never heard of it, there are several different ways in which people have never heard of it. For instance, it's sometimes known as Transdniestria. Or, for wonks who want to have never heard of it on a more formal basis, it's called the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, or Pridnestrovie. But no matter what name you use when shrugging your shoulders and looking confused because you've never heard of it, Transnistria is a breakaway region of Moldova '-- a country situated between Romania and Ukraine '-- that makes up much of what would otherwise be the border between Moldova and Ukraine.
        Interest in Transnistria ticked up sharply Sunday thanks in part to remarks made by General Philip Breedlove, NATO's supreme allied commander in Europe, during a Q&A session at the Brussels Forum. "There is absolutely sufficient [Russian] force postured on the eastern border of Ukraine to run to Transnistria if the decision was made to do that," Breedlove said. "And that's very worrisome."
        A quote like that was all the ammo journalists needed to, in that finest of journalistic traditions, gin up readers by scaring the shit out of them. The Russians are massing on the border of Ukraine in preparation for a blitzkrieg through the country in order to reach the breakaway state of Transnistria! In reality, however, Breedlove went on to speak about the difference between capabilities and intent. As he said, the capability is clearly there for Russia to carry out such an operation, but Russia's intent is far more difficult to determine.
        Maybe Putin is playing one of his nine-dimensional chess games and Transnistria would fill an unforeseeable role. Or maybe annexing it would simply suit his sense of humor.
        Transnistria broke away from Moldova in 1990 because people there thought Moldova was going to become part of Romania, and the citizens of Transnistria apparently had a huge aversion to becoming Romanian. Bitter fighting ensued, and in 1992 peace was achieved thanks in part to a contingent of 1,500 Russian peacekeepers. The country hasn't been widely recognized internationally, making it another one of those conflict leftovers, thefrozen state. And like a lot of frozen states, the region has become a thoroughfare for smuggling; Transnistria in particular is home to a robust organized crime presence.
        While people in Transnistria appear to be super eager to become a part of Russia, they're also fans of controlling their own destiny, as evidenced by all of the voting they do about it: A 1989 vote to rejigger borders and create a Pridnestrovian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. A 1991 vote to stay in the Soviet Union. A 1991 vote to become a fully independent state outside the Soviet Union. A 1995 vote to allow Russian troops to remain in the country. A 1995 vote that addressed some aspects of independence. A 2006 independence referendum that addressed others.
        That's six votes for independence, dependence, interdependence, and/or codependence in 25 years.
        Anyway, this is all great news for as far as the world of pundits and speculation is concerned. Lots of Russian speakers? Check! A breakaway republic populated by Cold War enthusiasts? Check! Russian troops already there? Check! Vlad Putin feeling like a Russian Chuck Norris with tanks? Check!
        Plus, if Russia took Transnistria, Ukraine would have Russian troops on three borders instead of two. That could mean the Russians would then grab Odessa and get what remains of Ukraine's fashionable beach-front real estate.
        Conclusion: Transnistria is Crimea Jr.
        Transnistria (in red), situated on what would be Moldova's eastern border with Ukraine. Image via
        There are three problems with that analysis. First, looking at a map, it's plain to see that it'd be a real pain in the ass for Russian forces to get there. Transnistria is bordered by Moldova and Ukraine and doesn't have any access to the Black Sea. Russia is not on the best of terms with Ukraine right now, which means Ukraine would no doubt make transportation to and supply of Transnistria an unholy pain for Russia. Moldova would flip out if Russia were to take over and wouldn't be much help either. So even if the Russians could somehow get to the region, it would be very difficult to keep Transnistria fully supplied with fur hats and Lenin statues.
        Secondly, the place is basically just the east bank of a river, meaning it lacks what military folks call ''strategic depth." The territory is slightly larger than Rhode Island if you took Rhode Island and rolled it out into one of those long, skinny clay snakes kids make in grade school. The clay snake that is Transnistria is about 120 miles long and on average about 8 miles wide, and is home to about half a million people.
        In other words, if a Russian soldier got out of his transport to take a leak, he might accidentally violate an international border '-- there's no room for units to maneuver, back up, turn around, etc. So if it came down to a fight, Russia might have serious trouble holding onto Transnistria. As it stands now, military planners there probably live in fear of a Ukrainian soldier forgetting to set the parking break on his tank and accidentally conquering them.
        Third, what on Earth is Putin supposed to do with Transnistria? All he'd have at the end of the day is a skinny stretch of riverfront property sandwiched between a panicked Moldova and a bitter Ukraine. Crimea, on the other hand, offered military, nationalistic, and natural-resource value. Maybe Putin is playing one of his nine-dimensional chess games and Transnistria would fill an as-yet unforeseeable role. Or maybe annexing it would simply suit his sense of humor. Regardless, he has the capability to take Transnistria, but as Breedlove pointed out, there's no telling what his intent is.
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      US and NATO use Ukrainian crisis to advance military build-up in Eastern Europe
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        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:16
        By Patrick O'Connor24 March 2014Statements issued by White House and NATO officials over the weekend on the Ukrainian crisis, including allegations that Russia is poised to invade several of its neighbours, point to advanced preparations by US imperialism for a heightened military build-up across Eastern Europe.
        US President Barack Obama today begins a four-day trip to Europe, beginning in The Hague, Holland. On the sidelines of a pre-scheduled Nuclear Security Summit there, Obama has convened a meeting on Ukraine involving the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan'--the G8 minus Russia.
        After working with Germany to orchestrate a regime-change operation in Ukraine, Washington's aim is to diplomatically isolate Vladimir Putin's administration and consider further damaging economic sanctions against Russia, while also developing trade and energy mechanisms that bring Ukraine and other Eastern European states under the strategic control of the US and EU. On Wednesday, Obama will meet in Brussels with European Union officials and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
        NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, US Air Force General Philip Breedlove, yesterday issued a bellicose denunciation of Russia. He accused the Putin administration of building up its military forces on Russia's western borders and of preparing to intervene into Transnistria, a part of the former Soviet republic of Moldova that has a significant ethnic Russian population and which attempted to become independent following the disintegration of the USSR. Breedlove also raised the spectre of Russian troops invading the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
        ''The [Russian] force that is at the Ukrainian border now to the east is very, very sizeable and very, very ready,'' Breedlove declared at an event held by the German Marshall Fund think-tank. ''There is absolutely sufficient force postured on the eastern border of Ukraine to run to Transnistria if the decision was made to do that, and that is very worrisome.''
        After referring to the Russian annexation of Crimea, the NATO commander asked: ''How do we change our deployment? How do we change our readiness? How do we change our force structure such that we can be ready in the future? We need to think about our allies, the positioning of our forces in the alliance and our readiness of our forces in the alliance, such that we can be there to defend against them if required, especially in the Baltics and other places.''
        Breedlove added that Russia was now acting as ''an adversary'' of NATO'--underscoring the active preparations of the US and its European allies to launch a war against Russia.
        Obama's deputy national security adviser Tony Blinken, speaking on CNN yesterday, backed Breedlove's statements, declaring that it was ''deeply concerning to see the Russian troop build-up on the border.'' Blinken added that ''it's possible that they're preparing to move in [to Ukraine].''
        Polish Defence Minister Tomasz Siemoniak declared on Saturday that Washington ''must increase its [military] presence in Europe, also in Poland.'' During US Vice President Joe Biden's visit to the country last week, Siemoniak explained, ''There was a clear expectation from our side, and also from all NATO allies [in] Eastern Europe, that we expect a larger military presence of the US and that this eastern flank of NATO must be strengthened.''
        Siemoniak added that it was ''natural'', given developments in Ukraine, to discuss the prospect of a permanent, major US base in Poland.
        These statements, which follow the US deployment of twelve F16 fighter jets and 300 troops to Poland earlier this month, underscore the brazen hypocrisy of the White House and its allies. Washington is now drumming up a war scare over alleged Russian troop movements within the country's own borders, while at the same time the US armed forces are being deployed in a provocative effort to cordon off Russia from its neighbours.
        The installed regime in Kiev is also ratcheting up the rhetoric. Foreign Minister Andrii Deshchytsia yesterday appeared on US television and stated that the prospect of military conflict with Russia was ''very high'' and ''growing.'' He added: ''We are ready to respond'... It's very difficult to keep people restrained, and they are patriots of their homeland ... [It] would be difficult for them just simply sit or stay and look at Russia invading their country.''
        Deshchytsia's reference to ''patriots of their homeland'' is an allusion to the extreme right-wing and nationalist forces that formed the base of the Washington-European operation in Ukraine, have been brought into top government posts and are being integrated into the armed forces.
        Defence Minister Igor Tenyukh, one of several senior government figures who are members of the fascistic Svoboda party, yesterday bemoaned the failure of Ukrainian forces in Crimea to attack Russian troops. Over the weekend, Russian forces secured control of the Belbek air base, one of the few remaining bases in Crimea still occupied by Ukrainian troops.
        Speaking to journalists in Kiev, Tenyukh declared that ''our commanders had the authorisation to use force.'' However, he complained: ''Unfortunately, the commanders made decisions on the spot. They chose not to use their weapons in order to avoid bloodshed.''
        Having installed a regime in Ukraine that includes forces intent on triggering a war between the US and Russia, the White House is now preparing to build up its military capacities. Republican congressman Mike Rogers, chair of the House of Representatives intelligence committee, yesterday told NBC's ''Meet the Press'' that Obama's rhetoric did not ''match the reality on the ground.'' He demanded military aid that the Ukrainian government ''can use to really protect and defend themselves.''
        Obama's deputy national security adviser Tony Blinken responded by declaring that the prospect of directly arming Ukraine was currently being reviewed.
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      German foreign minister Steinmeier woos Ukrainian oligarchs
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        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 19:24
        By Peter Schwarz25 March 2014At the weekend, German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Social Democratic Party, SPD) visited Donetsk in eastern Ukraine to pay his respects to the oligarchs of the industrial metropolis. First to receive him was Rinat Akhmetov in his glass-clad corporate headquarters, where they held a private conversation lasting one hour.
        With an estimated fortune of $18 billion, Akhmetov is the richest man in Ukraine. His investment company, System Capital Management (SCM), controls large parts of eastern Ukraine's steel and coal industries, and plays a leading role in the food and transport industries, as well as commercial agriculture. Akhmetov also enjoys influence with the regional media and is president of the Shakhtar Donetsk Football Club, which he built up into the leading Ukrainian club with massive financial support.
        For a long time, the ''Godfather of Donetsk'' was regarded as the eminence grise of Viktor Yanukovich, who was deposed as president on February 22. Akhmetov financed Yanukovich's election campaigns in 2004 and 2010, and has sat as a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament since 2006 for Yanukovich's Party of Regions. However, he has always hedged his bets in all political directions. Yanukovich's rival Yulia Timoshenko has also benefited from the financial drip feed of the richest Ukrainian oligarch.
        Following the extensive private discussion with Aktemov, ''the German foreign minister appeared very pleased'', reported Stefan Braun, who accompanied Steinmeier to Donetz as a correspondent for the S¼ddeutsche Zeitung.
        ''He had come to find out whether 'those' who hold sway here economically and politically support the changes in the country'', Braun quoted the foreign minister. ''And now, following the conversation with Akhmetov, he had the impression, 'It is accepted that there will be a new Ukraine'.''
        Steinmeier's comment is a damning indictment of his own policy. For weeks, he has personally been telling politicians of all parties in the Bundestag (parliament) and the media that a democratic transformation had taken place in Ukraine, bringing a new government to power that enjoys the trust and support of the people. Now, the German foreign minister mentions in passing that the oligarchs ''hold sway economically and politically'' and that he needs their support in order to complete the desired ''changes in the country''.
        Apparently, Steinmeier managed to convince Akhmetov that the ''changes'' are in his interest.
        The goal of the putsch in Kiev supported by Germany, the US and other European countries was never ''democracy and freedom'', but rather the exploitation of the raw materials and cheap labour of Ukraine by Western corporations and the imperialist penetration into the territory of the former Soviet Union, at the expense of Russia. This goal also corresponded to the means employed: open collaboration with the fascists of Svoboda and the Right Sector, who intimidated and terrorised any opposition to the new government.
        Akhmetov is the living embodiment of the parasitic group of oligarchs who unscrupulously plundered the state-owned property, amassed enormous fortunes and shifted a large part of their wealth to safety abroad. Three years ago, he made headlines when, for '‚¬156 million, he bought the most expensive private home in London ever sold in the British capital.
        Steinmeier's cap-in-hand trip to Donetsk was aimed at assuring the ''Godfather of Donetsk'' and all the other Ukrainian oligarchs that their illegitimate wealth was not in any danger from the imperialist takeover, and that they will be able to continue exploiting the Ukrainian working class.
        After seeing Akhmetov, Steinmeier paid a visit to another Donetsk oligarch, the new governor of the Donbass region, Sergei Taruta. The visit almost did not take place because thousands of pro-Russian demonstrators blocked access to the Governor's Palace.
        Like Akhmetov, Taruta controls parts of the Ukrainian steel industry. Moreover, he has also bought the former Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland, and two steel plants in Poland and Hungary. With an estimated fortune of $660 million, he ranks well below Akhmetov on the list of wealthy Ukrainians, reaching a humble 55th place.
        Taruta does not owe his office to anything resembling a democratic election, but was elevated into the influential posts by the (also unelected) new Ukrainian president, Olexandr Turchynov.
        In his home city of Dnipropetrovsk, Turchynov has also appointed an oligarch as governor: Ihor Kolomojskyj, who made his fortune in oil, iron, and food, ranking as the third most wealthy Ukrainian, with $2.4 billion, and is also a donor to Vitali Klitschko. Steinmeier did not visit him, presumably due to lack of time.
        Instead, he paid his respects to Sergey Tihipko (estimated fortune $370 million) in Kiev. This oligarch from Dnipropetrovsk made his money in the banking sector and has been politically active since the 1990s. Among other positions, he was National Bank chief and economics minister. In 2010, he unsuccessfully contested the presidential election. From March 2010 to February 2014, he was deputy prime minister of Ukraine. If he contests the presidential elections in May, he could possibly expect European support.
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      Leading US-backed Ukrainian politician calls for annihilation of Russia
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        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 19:25
        By Mike Head25 March 2014Yulia Tymoshenko, a former Ukrainian prime minister and leading backer of the new regime installed by last month's coup, has called for Ukrainians to take up arms against Russians and for the Western powers to reduce Russia to ashes.
        In a phone call leaked online, Tymoshenko urged the murder of Russians and Russian President Vladimir Putin. ''It's about time we grab our guns and kill those katsaps [a derogatory Ukrainian word] together with their leader,'' she said. (Available from the original source here and with RT's English translation here).
        Tymoshenko also advocated the nuclear slaughter of the eight million Russians who remain on Ukrainian territory. She confirmed the authenticity of the conversation on Twitter, while claiming her call for the use of nuclear weapons was edited.
        The phone conversation with Nestor Shufrych, former deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, was uploaded on YouTube on Monday by user Sergiy Vechirko. Shufrych had denied its veracity.
        The leaked tape is a damning exposure of the lies constructed by the US and its allies that the crisis over Ukraine and Crimea was triggered by Russian aggression. It reveals the real face of the regime installed with the support of fascistic forces in Ukraine.
        The phone call took place on March 18, hours after the Crimea accession treaty was signed in the Kremlin, following the Crimean referendum vote to join Russia.
        Enraged by the referendum, Tymoshenko declared that she were in charge ''there would be no f***ing way that they would get Crimea.'' Tymoshenko, who plans to run in Ukraine's presidential election, insisted that she would have found ''a way to kill those a*****es.''
        Indicating her support in Western ruling circles, the ex-PM vowed: ''I hope I will be able to get all my connections involved. And I will use all of my means to make the entire world rise up, so that there wouldn't be even a scorched field left in Russia.''
        Tymoshenko, who was released from jail on embezzlement charges immediately after the Kiev coup, typifies the layer of oligarchs and extreme right-wing nationalists who, with the backing of the US and European Union, orchestrated the removal of President Viktor Yanukovich's government after he rejected an EU treaty that would have imposed brutal austerity and free-market measures.
        Tymoshenko rose to power in the pro-US and EU ''Orange Revolution'' in 2004, becoming prime minister from 2007 to 2010. Before her political career, she was a gas industry tycoon'--by some estimates one of the richest people in the country. In 2005, she placed third in the Forbes magazine's list of the world's most powerful women.
        She was charged with corruption during criminal investigations in 2010, and sentenced to seven years in prison for misspending about $US500 million and embezzling $120,000. She was released on February 22, following a revision of the Ukrainian criminal code that effectively decriminalised the actions for which she was imprisoned.
        This is not the first such revealing telephone leak in the Ukraine crisis. In February, a tape recorded US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, Victoria Nuland, declaring ''F**k the EU'' as she discussed installing the future Ukrainian government with the US ambassador to the country, Geoffrey Pyatt.
        Another recent incident further highlighted the character of the forces unleashed in Ukraine. Passengers travelling from Russia to Moldova via Ukraine's territory were robbed by an ultranationalist gang.
        ''To the horror of passengers'...people dressed in the uniform of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) got into carriages and began a 'document check,''' the Russian Foreign Ministry reported yesterday. ''People who showed Russian passports were then made to hand over their money and golden jewelry.''
        A similar fate befell passengers travelling from the Ukrainian city of Krivoy Rog to the Russian capital, the NTV channel reported, except that Ukrainian border officers were involved, grabbing passports from Russian citizens and demanding cash.
        Last week, a video on YouTube pointed to the work of pro-regime fascist thugs in Kiev. Led by Igor Miroshnichenko, a Svoboda party MP notorious for his anti-Semitism, a gang broke into the offices of Ukraine's state television, NTU, and forced its president to sign a resignation letter (see ''Svoboda thugs attack head of Ukrainian national television'').
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      Readout of the Vice President's Call with Romanian President Traian Basescu
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        Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 19:28
        The White House
        Office of the Vice President
        For Immediate Release
        March 24, 2014
        In a telephone call today, the Vice President spoke with Romanian President Traian Basescu about tensions in Ukraine and the broader region as a result of Russia's military actions. The two leaders consulted on next steps to support Ukraine, including to the OSCE monitoring mission, as well as the need to intensify sanctions against Russia should it continue on the current course. The Vice President also reaffirmed our steadfast commitment to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and agreed on the need to take additional steps to collectively strengthen our Alliance defenses.
    Agenda 21
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      One Reason It May Be Harder to Find Flight 370: We Messed Up the Currents | Mother Jones
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        Sun, 23 Mar 2014 23:33
        How climate change factors into the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight.
        '--James West on Fri. March 21, 2014 9:01 AM PDT
        A photo released on March 20 by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority shows satellite imagery of objects that may be debris of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. Australian Maritime Safety Authority
        Scientists say man-made climate change has fundamentally altered the currents of the vast, deep oceans where investigators are currently scouring for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight, setting a complex stage for the ongoing search forMH370. If the Boeing 777 did plunge into the ocean somewhere in the vicinity of where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean, the location where its debris finally ends up, if found at all, may be vastly different from where investigators could have anticipated 30 years ago.
        The search of 8,880 square miles of ocean has yet to turn up signs of the missing flight.
        Even if thefragments captured in satellite imagesare identified as being part of the jet, which Malaysian officials say deliberately flew off course on March 8, investigators coordinated by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority will still have an enormous task to locate remaining parts of the plane and its flight recorders. Among the assets deployed in the search'--including a multinational array of military and civil naval resources'--are data modelers, whose task will be reconciling regional air and water currents with local weather patterns to produce a possible debris field. "Data marker buoys" are being dropped into the ocean to assist in providing "information about water movement to assist in drift modeling," John Young from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority told a press conference in Canberra on Thursday.
        While longer-term climate shifts are unlikely to play into day-to-day search and rescue efforts, these large climate-affected currents'--among them the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the world's most powerful ocean system'--are an essential factor in oceanographers' understanding of the literal undercurrents of search operations.
        According to interviews with three climate scientists who specialize in the region of the world where investigators are focusing their search, the winds of the Southern Indian Ocean bordering the Southern Ocean have been shifting southwards and intensifying over the last 20 to 30 years, in part due to a warming atmosphere and the hole in the ozone layer. Ocean currents are also tightening around Antarctica, shifting whole climate systems towards the South Pole.
        "Both the ozone hole and greenhouse gases are working together to change the winds over the Southern Ocean."
        Two currents impact this area of the ocean: the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which races almost unbridled around the bottom of the world, and the Indian Ocean Gyre, which swirls around the outskirts of the Indian Ocean, including up the west coast of Australia. The potential plane debris spotted via satellite is in "this sort of boundary between the circumpolar current and the gyre; both of those currents are shifting south," says Steven Rintoul, an expert on the southern oceans with Australia's foremost scientific research agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)'‹, in Hobart. "And it looks like that's largely due to human activities, but not just greenhouse gases. Both the ozone hole and greenhouse gases are working together to change the winds over the Southern Ocean."
        The debris is being searched for in "the boundary between the circumpolar current and the gyre," says the CSIRO's Steven Rintoul. (Approximate locations.) Google Earth/NASA
        Unlike the current patterns of the Northern Hemisphere oceans, where scientists have a lot more historical data to rely on, this southwards shift was a pattern only first detected by satellite starting in the early 1990s. "Over the 20 years, since 1993, we've seen the current shift southward by about half a degree of latitude, or about 30 or 40 miles or so, on average," Rintoul says. That may not sound like a lot, but it has substantially altered our understanding of the oceans here. Previously, it was thought these mega-currents were locked into the trenches and mountains of the deep sea floor, says Rintoul, in the same way poured molten metal must conform to a mold. "It was a surprise to see them shifting at all. In some regions the shifts are much greater, up to 400 miles."
        As winds and ocean currents have been driven south, there have been alarming side effects, says Rintoul. "We have seen changes in the last few years that even 5 or 10 years ago we would have thought highly unlikely," he says. The sea is hotter, for example, and less salty: "There's warming, and freshening of the deep ocean and the surface ocean, shifts in the latitude of the major currents, and changes in the ice driven in part by the wind, and in part by the ocean."
        These shifts are happening in oceans that are vital to understanding our global climate system, says Joellen Russell, an associate professor in biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona who has explored and studied the southern oceans. The ocean currents here are so powerful, because the water column is so deep'--between 1.2 to 2.5 miles'--and so consistently cold: "It's the one place that the deep abyssal waters'--apart from the North Atlantic'--connect to the surface," she says. "This is where you see the lungs of the ocean working, where you get oxygen in, and you bring up carbon-rich and nutrient rich waters to the surface. It's what makes it so productive." The Antarctic Circumpolar Current transports 130 million cubic meters of water per second eastwards. The next most powerful current, the Gulf Stream, carries around 40 million per second, Russell says.
        But it's that very deepness, coldness, and power that allows these oceans to absorb so much of the heat that manmade climate change is generating. "The Southern Ocean takes up something like 70 percent'--plus or minus 30 percent'--of all the anthropogenic heat that goes under the ocean," says Russell. "This is one of the few areas of the global ocean that is immediately and definitely playing a role in the temperature on land, because it's taking up all this anthropogenic heat and carbon. The whole ocean is doing that, but here it's doing it more than it ought to, which is giving us a moment of grace."
        "This is one of the few areas of the global ocean that is immediately and definitely playing a role in the temperature on land."
        The westerly winds here have increased by about 20 percent over the last 20 years, according to Russell's 2006 investigation into the trends, messing with the overall system that we rely on for our climate stability'--and potentially shortening this so-called "grace" period where the oceans are giving us a helping hand. "It can do loads of things to the climate system," says Matthew England, joint director of Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. "It can decrease the amount of carbon you can get into the oceans'...It can also affect the temperatures off the Antarctic ice shelf, which is a real worry."
        Australian search and rescue officers scour the ocean for signs of missing flight MH370. Australian Department of Defence
        The southern oceans are a place of wild extremes, says Russell, conditions which have made studying'--and searching'--these oceans difficult, dangerous, and expensive. "The Southern Hemisphere winds are 30 percent stronger than the Northern Hemisphere winds," she says. "They don't have speed bumps, in the same way that the Rockies and the Himalayas provide in the Northern Hemisphere. They just get a little, tiny tickle from the Andes. But mostly they just roar." On the surface of the oceans, she says, there are "miserable winds" and "huge enormous, towering seas," and underneath the surface, driving currents. "Mother nature can crush your boat like a beer can." Bad for science, and also a concern, Russell says, for any ongoing search efforts.
        "When things happen in the Indian [Ocean], we find out a how little infrastructure we actually have in place," Russell says, referring to everything from ports from which boats can be deployed, to data installations to monitor the changing oceans.
        That means scientists are playing catchup with the data, says Matthew England from UNSW, and there are basic holes in our understandings of the ocean. "The reality is that the ocean there is very poorly measured," he says. "We have some evidence from satellites, but not nearly enough measurements, not nearly enough understanding of the flow patterns there. We largely rely on models to piece that together. There's a bit of guesswork there."
        All three scientists agree that new technology is making data collection in this vast unknown a little easier, though there's a lot ground to make up. "Argo floats" are battery-powered autonomous robots that park themselves under the surface of the ocean and transmit all sorts of useful data that can help scientists map the ocean, and the climate, more clearly. "For us, this is our revolution, this is our Hubble space telescope. This is the tool that has completely changed the game," says Rintoul.
        Deploying an "Argo float" in the Southern Ocean Alicia Navidad/CSIRO
        But Russell warns there still so many more secrets to unlock before we can truly understand how we are changing some of Earth's most powerful systems. "This is one of those grand challenges, one of those big things that is really hard. We have to grapple with Mother Nature and try to say, 'Look lady, give us your secrets! We won't get rough with you, please don't get rough with us!'"
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      Disasters Cost More Than Ever '-- But Not Because of Climate Change | FiveThirtyEight
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        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 03:00
        In the 1980s, the average annual cost of natural disasters worldwide was $50 billion. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy met that mark in two days. As it tore through New York and New Jersey on its journey up the east coast, Sandy became the second-most expensive hurricane in American history, causing in a few hours what just a generation ago would have been a year's worth of disaster damage.
        Sandy's huge price tag fit a trend: Natural disasters are costing more and more money. See the graph below, which shows the global tally of disaster expenses for the past 24 years. It's courtesy of Munich Re, one of the world's largest reinsurance companies, which maintains a widely used global loss data set. (All costs are adjusted for inflation.)
        In the last two decades, natural disaster costs worldwide went from about $100 billion per year to almost twice that amount. That's a huge problem, right? Indicative of more frequent disasters punishing communities worldwide? Perhaps the effects of climate change? Those are the questions that Congress, the World Bank and, of course, the media are asking. But all those questions have the same answer: no.
        When you read that the cost of disasters is increasing, it's tempting to think that it must be because more storms are happening. They're not. All the apocalyptic ''climate porn'' in your Facebook feed is solely a function of perception. In reality, the numbers reflect more damage from catastrophes because the world is getting wealthier. We're seeing ever-larger losses simply because we have more to lose '-- when an earthquake or flood occurs, more stuff gets damaged. And no matter what President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron say, recent costly disasters are not part of a trend driven by climate change. The data available so far strongly shows they're just evidence of human vulnerability in the face of periodic extremes.
        To identify changes in extreme weather, it's best to look at the statistics of extreme weather. Fortunately, scientists have invested a lot of effort into looking at data on extreme weather events, and recently summarized their findings in a major United Nations climate report, the fifth in a series dating back to 1990. That report concluded that there's little evidence of a spike in the frequency or intensity of floods, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes. There have been more heat waves and intense precipitation, but these phenomena are not significant drivers of disaster costs. In fact, today's climate models suggest that future changes in extremes that cause the most damage won't be detectable in the statistics of weather (or damage) for many decades.
        On Earth, extreme events don't happen in a vacuum. Their costs are rising, sure, but so is overall wealth. When we take that graph above and measure disaster cost relative to global GDP, it changes quite a bit.1
        Occasionally, big disasters bring outsize costs '-- especially the Kobe earthquake in 1995, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Honshu earthquake in 2011 '-- but the overall trend in disaster costs proportional to GDP since 1990 has stayed fairly level. Of course, wealthy countries hold all of the sway in worldwide cost estimates, which tips the scales when we're looking for a ''global'' perspective on extreme events. U.S. hurricanes, for example, are responsible for 58 percent of the increase in the property losses in the Munich Re global dataset.
        That's just the property bill. There's a human toll, too, and the data show an inverse relationship between lives lost and property damage: Modern disasters bring the greatest loss of life in places with the lowest property damage, and the most property damage where there's the lowest loss of life. Consider that since 1940 in the United States 3,322 people have died in 118 hurricanes that made landfall. Last year in a poor region of the Philippines, a single storm, Typhoon Hayain, killed twice as many people.
        We can start to estimate how countries may weather crises differently thanks to a 2005 analysis of historical data on global disasters. That study estimated that a nation with a $2,000 per capita average GDP '-- about that of Honduras '' should expect more than five times the number of disaster deaths as a country like Russia, with a $14,000 per capita average GDP.2 (For comparison, the U.S. has a per capita GDP of about $52,000.)
        In the 20th century, the human toll of disasters decreased dramatically, with a 92 percent reduction in deaths from the 1930s to the 2000s worldwide. Yet when the Boxing Day Tsunami struck Southeast Asia in 2004, more than 225,000 people died.
        So the frequency of disasters still matters, and especially in countries that are ill-prepared for them. After 41 people died in two volcanic eruptions in Indonesia last month, a government official explained the high stakes: ''We have 100 million people living in places that are prone to disasters, including volcanoes, earthquakes and floods. It's a big challenge for the local and central governments.''
        When you next hear someone tell you that worthy and useful efforts to mitigate climate change will lead to fewer natural disasters, remember these numbers and instead focus on what we can control. There is some good news to be found in the ever-mounting toll of disaster losses. As countries become richer, they are better able to deal with disasters '-- meaning more people are protected and fewer lose their lives. Increased property losses, it turns out, are a price worth paying.
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      Clinton wants 'mass movement' on climate change - Wire Nation/World - The Sacramento Bee
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Mon, 24 Mar 2014 04:12
        TEMPE, Ariz. -- Hillary Rodham Clinton says young people understand the significant threat of climate change and that she hopes there will be a mass movement that demands political change.
        The potential 2016 presidential candidate says at a Clinton Global Initiative University panel that young people are much more committed to doing something to address climate change. Clinton says it isn't "just some ancillary issue" but will determine the quality of life for many people.
        The former secretary of state cited global warming as a major issue that students could face in the future.
        She made the comments Saturday during an interview with late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel at Arizona State University. The weekend gathering also features former President Bill Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea.
        ' Read more articles by KEN THOMAS
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Global Warming Will Not Cost the Earth, Leaked IPCC Report Admits
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 02:33
        The economic costs of 'global warming' have been grossly overestimated, a leaked report - shortly to be published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - has admitted.Previous reports - notably the hugely influential 2006 Stern Review - have put the costs to the global economy caused by 'climate change' at between 5 and 20 percent of world GDP.
        But the latest estimates, to be published by Working Group II of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, say that a 2.5 degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures by the end of the century will cost the world economy between just 0.2 and 2 percent of its GDP.
        If the lower estimate is correct, then all it would take is an annual growth rate of 2.4 percent (currently it's around 3 percent) for the economic costs of climate change to be wiped out within a month.
        This admission by the IPCC will come as a huge blow to those alarmists - notably the Stern Review's author but also including everyone from the Prince of Wales to Al Gore - who argue that costly intervention now is our only hope if we are to stave off the potentially disastrous effects of climate change.
        Sir Nicholas (now Lord) Stern was commissioned by Tony Blair's Labour government to analyse the economic impacts of climate change. Stern, an economist who had never before published a paper on energy, the environment, or indeed climate change, concluded that at least two per cent of global GDP would need to be diverted to the war on global warming.
        Stern's report has been widely ridiculed by economists, whose main criticism was that its improbably low discount rate placed an entirely unnecessary burden on current generations. Even if you accept the more alarmist projections of the IPCC's reports on "global warming", the fact remains that future generations will be considerably richer than our own - and therefore far more capable of mitigating the damages of climate change when or if they arise.
        But Stern's Review, published at the height of the global warming scare, was seized on by policy makers around the world as the justification for introducing a series of economically damaging measures, including carbon taxes, more intrusive regulation and a drive to replace cheap, efficient fossil fuels with expensive, inefficient renewables.
        This is why Lord Stern has been variously described as "the most dangerous man you've never heard of" and been held responsible for some of the worst economic excesses of the green movement.
        As Bishop Hill wrote:
        When you see wind farms covering every hill and mountain and most of the valleys too, you can blame Stern. If you can't pay your heating bills, ask Stern why this has happened. When children are indoctrinated and dissenting voices crushed, it is at Nicholas Stern that you should point an accusing finger. When the lights start to go out in a few years time, it's Stern who will have to explain why.
        Despite years of having mainstream economists pointing to the flaws in the Stern Review there has been an almost unanimous collective shrug from the media, more interested in climate porn than the wellbeing of their neighbours.
        These measures make no economic sense whatsoever, as economist Andrew Lillico argues here.
        So the mitigation deal has become this: Accept enormous inconvenience, placing authoritarian control into the hands of global agencies, at huge costs that in some cases exceed 17 times the benefits even on the Government's own evaluation criteria, with a global cost of 2 per cent of GDP at the low end and the risk that the cost will be vastly greater, and do all of this for an entire century, and then maybe '' just maybe '' we might save between one and ten months of global GDP growth.
        Unfortunately, those expecting the IPCC's Working Group II's report to effect a new note of realism in global economic policy on climate change may be disappointed.
        That's because the Summary for Policymakers (the only part of the IPCC's reports that policymakers tend to read) will - as usual - strike a much more alarmist tone than the contents of the more detailed report actually justify.
        "Basically, it has been Pachauri-ised," says Benny Peiser of the independent think tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Peiser is referring to the IPCC's jet-setting chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian former railway engineer who has consistently put an alarmist complexion on all the IPCC's Summaries for Policymakers.
        As evidence for this, economist Richard Tol - a Working Group II author - asked yesterday for his name to be removed from the Summary For Policymakers. He said:
        "The message in the first draft was that through adaptation and clever development these were manageable risks, but it did require we get our act together."
        "This has completely disappeared from the draft now, which is all about the impacts of climate change and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. This is a missed opportunity."
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      An American Oil Find That Holds More Oil Than All of OPEC - ABC News
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 02:16
        ABC US News | ABC Business NewsCopyDrillers in Utah and Colorado are poking into a massive shale deposit trying to find a way to unlock oil reserves that are so vast they would swamp OPEC.
        A recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated that if half of the oil bound up in the rock of the Green River Formation could be recovered it would be "equal to the entire world's proven oil reserves."
        Both the GAO and private industry estimate the amount of oil recoverable to be 3 trillion barrels.
        "In the past 100 years '-- in all of human history -- we have consumed 1 trillion barrels of oil. There are several times that much here," said Roger Day, vice president for operations for American Shale Oil (AMSO).
        The Green River drilling is beginning as shale mining is booming in the U.S. and a report by the International Energy Agency predicts that the U.S. will become the world's largest oil producer by 2020. That flood of oil can have major implications for the U.S. economy as well as the country's foreign policy which has been based on a growing scarcity of oil.
        The IEA report does not detail where the American oil will be coming from, but the largest deposit is the Green River formation which has yet to tapped in any significant way.
        This tantalizing bonanza, however, remains just out of reach, at least for now. The cost of extracting the Green River oil at the moment would be higher than what it could be sold for. And there are significant environmental obstacles.
        The operation might require so much water it would compete with Denver and agriculture for vital supplies, the GAO report warned, could pollute underground streams, affect fish and other wildlife, and kick up so much dirt it would leave national monuments in a cloud of dust.
        Nevertheless, the federal government has authorized six experimental drilling leases on federal land in an effort to find a way to tap into the riches of the Green River Formation.
        Day's American Shale has a lease on 160 acres 40 miles northwest of Rifle, Colo. It has already produced oil on a pilot basis, and now stands poised, if it gets the necessary government permissions, to produce on a larger scale.
        Getting oil from Green River shale is a different proposition than getting gas and oil from other sites by using the controversial method of "fracking," fracturing the underground rock with pressurized, chemical-infused water.
        The hydrocarbons in Green River shale are more intimately bound up with the rock, so that fracking cannot release them. The shale has to be heated to 5,000 degrees Farenheit before it will give up its oil.
        Producers have been trying to accomplish that in one of two ways: Either they bring the shale to the surface and then cook it , or they sink a deep shaft and place an electric heater at the base, a process called in-situ. AMSO has been testing in-situ with mixed success.
        "We put in a 600 kilowatt electric heater in, 2,100 feet below the surface," said Day. "The idea was that this would heat the shale and cause the conversion of solid hydrocarbons into liquid oil and gas. These, then, would be brought to the surface."
        Things have not gone smoothly.
        "We plugged it in the first week in January," said Day, referring to the heater. "It burned out like your toaster, only this is a toaster that costs several million dollars to repair. Just in the past month we've figured out what went wrong. We expect to re-install in December. If we're lucky, we'll put heat in the ground again before the end of the year."
        If everything pans out and if AMSO gets the green light from the federal government, the company's half-dozen wells initially might produce about 1,000 barrels a day. Later, at peak production, Day estimates they could produce "100,000 barrels a day for 30 years."
        Enefit, an oil producer headquartered in Estonia, has been producing oil from oil shale in Europe for more than 30 years, according to the CEO of its Utah subsidiary, Enefit American Oil. Rikki Hrenko says Enefit brings the shale to the surface, then heats it in retorts.
        "It's more labor intensive to have to mine the shale," Hrenko said. "But the economics are still quite feasible." She puts the break-even price at about $65 a barrel. The cost of producing in Utah, she thinks, will be only slightly higher than in Estonia.
        Enefit doesn't lease its Utah site from the U.S. government; it owns it. "We purchased it March 2011," Hrenko says. The company's goal is to have all the necessary permits by the end of 2016, start construction, and to be producing oil commercially in 2020 at the rate of 25,000 barrels a day.
        Among the hurdles faced by would-be Green River producers are environmental costs, first among them being water consumption, according to the GAO report. Current estimates on how much water might be needed to realize the potential of Green River oil "vary significantly," the report admits. But water in the arid west already is in short supply, and ranchers and environmentalists eye warily the oil industry's potential thirst.
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      UK professor refuses to put his name to 'apocalyptic' UN climate change survey | Mail Online
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:36
        Prof Richard Tol said UN academics were exaggerating climate changeComes as a blow to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate ChangePanel to publish its first update in seven years on the impacts of climate changeBy Ben Spencer
        PUBLISHED: 18:29 EST, 25 March 2014 | UPDATED: 11:13 EST, 26 March 2014
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        Criticism: Professor Richard Tol demanded his name be removed from a climate change report, accusing the UN of being too alarmist
        A climate scientist has accused the United Nations of being too alarmist over global warming '' and demanded his name be removed from a crucial new report.
        Professor Richard Tol, an economist at the University of Sussex, said fellow UN academics were exaggerating climate change and comparing it to the 'apocalypse'.
        His comments are a blow to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which on Monday will publish its first update in seven years on the impacts of climate change.
        Previous IPCC reports on climate impact have been plagued by errors that damaged the body's credibility.
        Most famously, it said in 2007 that glaciers in the Himalayas could disappear by 2035, a claim it has since withdrawn.
        Scientists are meeting in Japan this week to agree the wording of the final document, which will be used to inform policy decisions of governments around the world.
        Leaked drafts of the report predict that by the end of the century man-made global warming will have done serious harm to the global economy, displaced hundreds of millions of people and created violent conflict. Chapters on flooding, water supply and agriculture estimate huge impacts.
        Prof Tol, the lead co-ordinating author of the report's chapter on economics, was involved in drafting the summary for policymakers '' the key document that goes to governments and scientists. But he has now asked for his name to be removed from the document.
        He said: 'The message in the first draft was that through adaptation and clever development these were manageable risks, but it did require we get our act together.
        'This has completely disappeared from the draft now, which is all about the impacts of climate change and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. This is a missed opportunity.'
        Professor Tol told the BBC: 'You have a very silly statement in the draft summary that says that people who live in war-torn countries are more vulnerable to climate change, which is undoubtedly true.
        But if you ask people in Syria whether they are more concerned with chemical weapons or climate change, I think they would pick chemical weapons '' that is just silliness.'
        'Exaggerating': A scene from the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow. Professor Tol said said fellow UN academics were exaggerating climate change and comparing it to the 'apocalypse'
        The report is the second of three IPCC reports addressing the causes, impacts and solutions to climate change.
        Last September the first report summarised the physical science of climate change, concluding that scientists are 95 per cent certain that humans are the 'dominant cause' of global warming.
        The second part will set out the impact a warming world will have on people, economies, animals and natural ecosystems.
        The third part, to be finalised next month, will summarise possible mitigation '' what we can do to reduce the problem.
        Prof Tol does not dispute the view that climate change is caused by man '' but he says its impact has been exaggerated. However, others say his figures underestimate the economic impact of climate change.
        Bob Ward, of the London School of Economics, said: 'Prof Tol's contribution to the IPCC report has been under scrutiny because he inserted '' at a very late stage, so avoiding the IPCC expert review process '' a section which publicised his own work.
        'The section contained a number of errors. Prof Tol has expressed extreme reluctance to correct the errors in his work and it does not surprise me that he alone among the 410 authors of this report has refused to endorse the summary.'
        But Professor Tol said: 'Mr Ward is wrong on all scores. No new material was introduced after the expert or indeed the government review. Rather, material was moved from one chapter to another.
        'That material was taken from 18 different studies, only two of which by me. All errors that were identified, including a minor one by Mr Ward, have been corrected. No IPCC author is ever asked to endorse the Summary for Policy Makers.'
        Share or comment on this article
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      snopes.com: Global Warming -- 1922
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Mon, 24 Mar 2014 20:59
        Claim: A 1922 newspaper article reported that "radical change in climatic conditions" was melting Arctic ice and disrupting wildlife.Examples: [Collected via e-mail, December 2009]The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulafft, at Bergen, Norway.Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.
        Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
        I apologize, I neglected to mention that this report was from November 2, 1922. As reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post - 88 years ago!
        Origins: One of the key issues in the global warming debate is whether modern scientists have sufficient data and tools to determine that current warming trends are indicative of long-term climatic changes rather than relatively short-term weather pattern variability. The text above seemingly provides an example of the pitfalls of mistaking the latter for the former, purportedly reproducing a 1922 newspaper article warning that the Arctic ocean was experiencing a radical change in climatic conditions which was warming its waters, melting ice, and disrupting wildlife.The text in the above example is a genuine transcript of a 1922 newspaper article, an Associated Press account which appeared on page 2 of the Washington Post on 2 November of that year:
        That article in turn was based on information relayed by the American consul in Norway to the U.S. State Department in October 1922 and published in the Monthly Weather Review:The Arctic seems to be warming up. Reports from fisherman, seal hunters, and explorers who sail the seas about Spitzbergen and the eastern Arctic, all point to a radical change in climatic conditions, and hitherto underheard-of high temperatures in that part of the earth's surface.In August, 1922, the Norwegian Department of Commerce sent an expedition to Spitzbergen and Bear Island under the leadership of Dr. Adolf Hoel, lecturer on geology at the University of Christiania. Its purpose was to survey and chart the lands adjacent to the Norwegian mines on those islands, take soundings of the adjacent waters, and make other oceanographic investigations.
        Ice conditions were exceptional. In fact, so little ice has never before been noted. The expedition all but established a record, sailing as
        far north as 81° 29' in ice-free water. This is the farthest north ever reached with modern oceanographic apparatus.The character of the waters of the great polar basic has heretofore been practically unknown. Dr. Hoel reports that he made a section of the Gulf Stream at 81° north latitude and took soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters. These show the Gulf Stream very warm, and it could be traced as a surface current till beyond the 81st parallel. The warmth of the waters makes it probable that the favorable ice conditions will continue for some time.
        In connection with Dr. Hoel's report, it is of interest to note the unusually warm summer in Arctic Norway and the observations of Capt. Martin Ingebrigsten, who has sailed the eastern Arctic for 54 years past. He says that he first noted warmer conditions in 1918, that since that time it has steadily gotten warmer, and that to-day the Arctic of that region is not recognizable as the same region of 1868 to 1917.
        Many old landmarks are so changed as to be unrecognizable. Where formerly great masses of ice were found, there are now often moraines, accumulations of earth and stones. At many points where glaciers formerly extended far into the sea they have entirely disappeared.
        As interesting as this nearly century-old article might be from a modern perspective, however, it isn't substantive evidence either for or against the concept of anthropogenic global warming. As documented elsewhere, the warming phenomena observed in 1922 proved to be indicative only of a local event in Spitzbergen, not a trend applicable to the Arctic as a whole.Last updated: 1 July 2013
        Urban Legends Reference Pages (C) 1995-2014 by snopes.com.This material may not be reproduced without permission.snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Bank$ters
      Citi Fails Fed Stress Test '... The REAL Story
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: Zero Hedge
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 05:36
        Bloomberg reports that Citigroup has failed the Fed's new round of stress tests:
        Citigroup Inc.'s capital plan was among five that failed Federal Reserve stress tests, while Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of America Corp. passed only after reducing their requests for buybacks and dividends.
        Citigroup, as well as U.S. units of Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, HSBC Holdings Plc and Banco Santander SA, failed because of qualitative concerns about their processes, the Fed said today in a statement. Zions Bancorporation was rejected as its capital fell below the minimum required. The central bank approved plans for 25 banks.
        In reality, Citi "flat lined" - went totally bust - in 2008. It was insolvent.
        And former FDIC chief Sheila Bair said that the whole bailout thing was really focused on bringing a very dead Citi back from the grave.
        Indeed, the big banks - including Citi - have repeatedly gone bankrupt.
        For example, the New York Times wrote in 2009:
        Over the past 80 years, the United States government has engineered not one, not two, not three, but at least four rescues of the institution now known as Citigroup.
        So why did the U.S. government give Citi a passing grade in previous stress tests?
        Because they were rigged to give all of the students an "A".
        Time Magazine called then Secretary Treasury Tim Geithner a ''con man'' and the stress tests a ''confidence game'' because those tests were so inaccurate.
        But the bigger story is that absolutely nothing was done to address the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, or to fix the system:
        The faulty incentive system - huge bonuses that encourage reckless risk-taking by bankers - are still hereAnother big problem - shadow banking - has only gotten worseIndeed, the only the government has done is to try to cover up the problems that created the 2008 crisis in the first place ... and to throw huge amounts of money at the fattest of the fatcats.
        Remember, Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof has demonstrated that failure to punish white collar criminals '' and instead bailing them out- creates incentives for more economic crimes and further destruction of the economy in the future.
        Indeed, professor of law and economics (and chief S&L prosecutor) William Black notes that we've known of this dynamic for ''hundreds of years''. (Actually, the government has ignored several thousand years of economic wisdom.)
        Heck of a job, guys ...
        Average:Your rating: NoneAverage: 5(1 vote)
      Former BofA CEO Ken Lewis Banned As Public Co. Officer | Crooks and Liars
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 04:28
        (h/t Heather at VideoCafe) On Up with Chris Hayes, he showed a video that truly must be seen to be believed. After a Occupy Wall Street solidarity march in Santa Cruz, California, protesters decided to put their money where their mouths were Read more...
      Credit card companies seek new ways to increase payment security
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 02:25
        Credit card companies seek new ways to increase payment security4 hours agoIn the wake of some wide-ranging breaches in credit card data, Mastercard and Visa this month announced an initiative to increase payment security, including expanding chip technology in the U.S.
        "The recent high-profile breaches have served as a catalyst for much-needed collaboration between the retail and financial services industry on the issue of payment security," Ryan McInerney, president of Visa Inc., said in a statement this month.
        The integrated circuit cards generate a unique code for every transaction, which make it nearly impossible for the cards to be used for counterfeit activity, security officials said. The smart card technology is widely used in Europe, Asia and Canada.
        MasterCard and Visa had previously imposed an October 2015 deadline for U.S. banks and merchants to implement the new technology. The new initiative, which includes banks, credit unions, merchants, manufacturers and industry trade groups, will also work on ways to better protect online and mobile transactions.
        The new security measures can't come soon enough.
        On Saturday, MasterCard said it was investigating reports that the California Department of Motor Vehicles may have experienced a breach of credit card data involving online transactions for agency services.
        MasterCard is "aware of and investigating" reports of a potential breach, spokesman Seth Eisen told The Los Angeles Times. He said the company was communicating with its customers but could provide no details on information that may have been compromised or how many cardholders may be affected.
        Eisen urged cardholders to review their account statements and to call the number on the back of their card if they notice any unusual activity. He also emphasized that the MasterCard system itself had not been affected.
        A DMV spokesman reached by The Times on Saturday morning declined to comment.
        Security blogger Brian Krebs - who broke the story of the blockbuster breach of Target customers' credit card data last year - cited several financial institutions that received private alerts this week from MasterCard about compromised cards used for charges marked "STATE OF CALIF DMV INT."
        It remains unclear how many people might be affected, but Krebs reported that one bank received a list from MasterCard of more than 1,000 cards that were potentially exposed.
        Krebs reported that the information stolen included credit card numbers, expiration dates and three-digit security codes printed on the back, but it remained unclear if other sensitive information - such as driver's license or Social Security numbers - was also taken.
        The potentially problematic transactions were believed to have been made between Aug 2, 2013, and Jan. 31 of this year, Krebs reported.
        According to the latest information released by the DMV, more than 11.9 million online transactions were conducted with the agency in 2012, marking a 6% increase from the year before. Online services include transactions such as payments of registration fees and the purchase of specialized license plates.
        Last year, an estimated 40 million Target customers' credit and debit card accounts were illegally accessed from Nov. 27 to Dec. 15, while as many as 70 million shoppers may have had their names and home and email addresses stolen over an indeterminate amount of time.
        Also last year, Neiman Marcus Group said data from more than 1 million of its customers' payment cards may have been nabbed by hackers who breached the upscale retailer's system. Malicious software was surreptitiously installed to collect, or "scrape," payment card information from July 16 to Oct. 30, leaving 1.1 million cards "potentially visible" to hackers, the company said.
        In January, Neiman Marcus said it was informed by Visa, MasterCard and Discover that 2,400 cards had since been used fraudulently.
        Explore further:MasterCard, Visa plan group focused on security
        (C)2014 Los Angeles TimesDistributed by MCT Information Services
        More from Physics Forums - General Physics
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        Sex chromosomes have reverted to autosomes multiple times in fliesAt the GSA Drosophila Research Conference, scientists will present evidence of many reversals of sex chromosome to autosomes in flies. They identified nine independently evolved sex chromosomes in a wider variety of fly species ...
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        Caffeinated fruit flies help identify potential genes affecting insecticide resistanceTo understand genetic mechanisms underlying insecticide resistance, scientists employed fruit flies and caffeine, a stimulant surrogate for xenobiotics in lab studies on resistance.
        Gene mutations in flies and humans produce similar epilepsy syndromesAt the Genetics Society of America Drosophila Research Conference, scientists will report new findings that build on and expand their previous discovery that mutations in the 'prickle' gene in Drosophila were responsible ...
        Javascript is currently disabled in your web browser. For full site functionality, it is necessary to enable Javascript. In order to enable it, please see these instructions.(C) Phys.org' 2003-2013, Science X network
        Credit card companies seek new ways to increase payment security4 hours agoIn the wake of some wide-ranging breaches in credit card data, Mastercard and Visa this month announced an initiative to increase payment security, including expanding chip technology in the U.S.
        "The recent high-profile breaches have served as a catalyst for much-needed collaboration between the retail and financial services industry on the issue of payment security," Ryan McInerney, president of Visa Inc., said in a statement this month.
        The integrated circuit cards generate a unique code for every transaction, which make it nearly impossible for the cards to be used for counterfeit activity, security officials said. The smart card technology is widely used in Europe, Asia and Canada.
        MasterCard and Visa had previously imposed an October 2015 deadline for U.S. banks and merchants to implement the new technology. The new initiative, which includes banks, credit unions, merchants, manufacturers and industry trade groups, will also work on ways to better protect online and mobile transactions.
        The new security measures can't come soon enough.
        On Saturday, MasterCard said it was investigating reports that the California Department of Motor Vehicles may have experienced a breach of credit card data involving online transactions for agency services.
        MasterCard is "aware of and investigating" reports of a potential breach, spokesman Seth Eisen told The Los Angeles Times. He said the company was communicating with its customers but could provide no details on information that may have been compromised or how many cardholders may be affected.
        Eisen urged cardholders to review their account statements and to call the number on the back of their card if they notice any unusual activity. He also emphasized that the MasterCard system itself had not been affected.
        A DMV spokesman reached by The Times on Saturday morning declined to comment.
        Security blogger Brian Krebs - who broke the story of the blockbuster breach of Target customers' credit card data last year - cited several financial institutions that received private alerts this week from MasterCard about compromised cards used for charges marked "STATE OF CALIF DMV INT."
        It remains unclear how many people might be affected, but Krebs reported that one bank received a list from MasterCard of more than 1,000 cards that were potentially exposed.
        Krebs reported that the information stolen included credit card numbers, expiration dates and three-digit security codes printed on the back, but it remained unclear if other sensitive information - such as driver's license or Social Security numbers - was also taken.
        The potentially problematic transactions were believed to have been made between Aug 2, 2013, and Jan. 31 of this year, Krebs reported.
        According to the latest information released by the DMV, more than 11.9 million online transactions were conducted with the agency in 2012, marking a 6% increase from the year before. Online services include transactions such as payments of registration fees and the purchase of specialized license plates.
        Last year, an estimated 40 million Target customers' credit and debit card accounts were illegally accessed from Nov. 27 to Dec. 15, while as many as 70 million shoppers may have had their names and home and email addresses stolen over an indeterminate amount of time.
        Also last year, Neiman Marcus Group said data from more than 1 million of its customers' payment cards may have been nabbed by hackers who breached the upscale retailer's system. Malicious software was surreptitiously installed to collect, or "scrape," payment card information from July 16 to Oct. 30, leaving 1.1 million cards "potentially visible" to hackers, the company said.
        In January, Neiman Marcus said it was informed by Visa, MasterCard and Discover that 2,400 cards had since been used fraudulently.
        Explore further:MasterCard, Visa plan group focused on security
        (C)2014 Los Angeles TimesDistributed by MCT Information Services
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        Sex chromosomes have reverted to autosomes multiple times in fliesAt the GSA Drosophila Research Conference, scientists will present evidence of many reversals of sex chromosome to autosomes in flies. They identified nine independently evolved sex chromosomes in a wider variety of fly species ...
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    LGBBTQQIAAP
      Obama in Saudi Arabia
        "I have no patience for countries that try to treat gays or lesbians or
        transgender persons in ways that intimidate them or are harmful to them."
        - President Barack Obama August 6, 2013
        On Friday President Obama will be visiting Saudi Arabia "to mend fences"
        with the Saudi's. Mend fences with the Saudi's?!?!?
        Fact: In Saudi Arabia homosexual conduct is punishable by death.
        Fact: In Saudi Arabia gays are often banned from schools, thrown in jail,
        and even whipped simply for the crime of being gay.
        When it comes to Saudi Arabia, President Obama makes it clear that he has
        infinite patience "for countries that try to treat gays or lesbians or
        transgender persons in ways that intimidate them or are harmful to them."
        By remaining silent we abandon LGBT individuals in Saudi Arabia who
        continue to be executed for who they love. The voices that protested
        Russia's laws should be a million times louder against Saudi Arabia's laws
        yet the world remains silent as Saudi Arabia executes gay men.
      AllOut & American Apparel Broke Promise to Russian & Global Gays
      Fox News Still Uses "Homosexual" To Describe Gay People | Blog | Media Matters for America
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 23:17
        Referring to gay people as "homosexual" is a practice that's quickly falling out of favor with major news outlets due the term's often pejorative connotation and frequent use by opponents of LGBT equality. But Fox News has yet to update its language when referring to gay and lesbian people.
        On March 23, The New York Times published a piece exploring the often derogatory connotation of the term "homosexual." Writing for the Sunday Styles section, the Times' Jeremy Peters noted that experts increasingly view "homosexual" as an offensive and stigmatizing term, even if many people still see the term as relatively "innocuous" (emphasis added):
        To most ears, it probably sounds inoffensive. A little outdated and clinical, perhaps, but innocuous enough: homosexual.
        But that five-syllable word has never been more loaded, more deliberately used and, to the ears of many gays and lesbians, more pejorative.
        " 'Homosexual' has the ring of 'colored' now, in the way your grandmother might have used that term, except that it hasn't been recuperated in the same way," said George Chauncey, a Yale professor of history and an author who studies gay and lesbian culture.
        Consider the following phrases: homosexual community, homosexual activist, homosexual marriage. Substitute the word "gay" in any of those cases, and the terms suddenly become far less loaded, so that the ring of disapproval and judgment evaporates.
        Some gay rights advocates have declared the term off limits. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or Glaad, has put "homosexual" on its list of offensive terms and in 2006 persuaded The Associated Press, whose stylebook is the widely used by many news organizations, to restrict use of the word.
        George P. Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, has looked at the way the term is used by those who try to portray gays and lesbians as deviant. What is most telling about substituting it for gay or lesbian are the images that homosexual tends to activate in the brain, he said.
        "Gay doesn't use the word sex," he said. "Lesbian doesn't use the word sex. Homosexual does."
        Peters highlighted use of the term by anti-gay figures like Rush Limbaugh, whose comments on the "homosexual" NFL prospect Michael Sam and the efforts of the "homosexual lobby" to defeat Arizona's anti-gay discrimination bill smack of contempt.
        Use of the term is also pervasive at Fox News - and not just from the likes of the network's hate group mouthpiece Todd Starnes, who recently warned that "Christians are trading places with homosexuals" in the military. Just as the network insists on misgendering transgender subjects, Fox also has no qualms about regularly referring to gay men and lesbians by a term many of them shun.
        Fox employees from Megyn Kelly to Sarah Palin continue to use the word "homosexual" to describe gays and lesbians. Fox Supreme Court reporter and pro-discrimination champion Shannon Bream teased a forthcoming segment on "homosexual adoption":
        Fox's "Medical A-Team" member and anti-LGBT pop psychologist Keith Ablow uses the term "homosexual sex" while criticizing pro-gay advertisements.
        And Fox's Bill O'Reilly was recently mocked for a segment in which he attacked the Girl Scouts for "leaning left," seizing in particular on the organization's employment of a spokesman who participated "in a punk rock band with homosexual overtones":
        Then there's the network's Fox Nation website. Far from merely promoting anti-gay policy positions, Fox Nation has repeatedly suggested that gay people are perverted "radicals" who want to recruit the nation's children to their "lifestyle." (As Peters observed in his Times piece, that claim featured prominently in activist Anita Bryant's anti-gay crusade in the 1970s.)
        In 2011, Fox Nation picked up a report in the right-wing Washington Times on efforts in U.S. government agencies to combat anti-gay harassment in the workplace. Fox Nation dubbed it "radical homosexual sensitivity training":
        After President Obama endorsed a gay-inclusive Boy Scouts - which right-wing media depicted as a threat to Scouts' safety - Fox Nation reported that Obama had urged the Scouts "to welcome homosexuals":
        Perhaps most offensive was Fox Nation's 2010 report on Home Depot's participation in the Southern Maine Pride Festival. The article asked whether Home Depot sought "to introduce children to the homosexual lifestyle" (the event featured children's booths) and only included the word "gay" in scare quotes:
        The Times' piece laid bare the ugly connotations many gay men and lesbians detect in "the h-word," which it's exceedingly difficult to argue is merely a neutral term to describe the gay community. A look at how Fox News has used the term - to otherize, pathologize, and and marginalize - makes clear why so many gays and lesbians find it offensive.
    Shut Up Slave!
      Exclusive: John Cornyn Rips Chuck Schumer's Media 'Shield Law'
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 04:20
        by Matthew Boyle26 Mar 2014, 7:46 PM PDTpost a comment''This is a bad idea and one whose time has not come,'' Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), the Senate minority whip, told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview. ''Believe me, we will not be rolled over.''
        Schumer's ''Free Flow of Information Act'' passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in September, and he recently said he already has the 60 votes needed to pass the bill on the floor. ''We'll get a few more Republicans, not many more, but we have the 60 votes,'' Schumer told reporters in New York last week.
        He's bluffing, Cornyn retorts.
        ''If he had the votes to pass it, it already would have been passed,'' Cornyn says, adding, ''This isn't about passing legislation, this is about distracting the public's attention and changing the subject from the failed policies of this administration. I think you could put this in that same category.''
        Schumer's proposal would exempt a ''covered journalist'' from subpoenas and other legal requirements to expose their confidential sources in leak investigations and other areas. Other lawmakers have proposed similar ideas in the past, but the effort gained new momentum after a series of revelations about controversial tactics the Justice Department was using to target journalists.
        For instance, the Department of Justice secretly monitored Fox News reporter James Rosen in the course of a leak investigation, even claiming in a court filing he was a subject of investigation himself. In another instance, the government had secretly monitored numerous phone lines used by the Associated Press, including one in the U.S. Capitol.
        Cornyn says Schumer's proposal is fatally flawed and may be an unworkable idea altogether.
        ''They want to pick and choose which journalists are covered,'' the Texan Republican told Breitbart News. ''In other words, if you're a blogger they might not cover you, but if you work for the New York Times they might. Given the changes in the way we get information and the way we consume news, that really smacks to me in essence of government licensing who's an official 'journalist' for the purposes of a shield law and who's not. If there is one thing I can glean from the First Amendment, it is that government should not be in the business of licensing the news media.''
        In practice, defining who is considered a ''journalist'' and protected under the law from having to disclose confidential sources is a thorny legal problem. On the one hand, the law's drafters don't want to provide blanket immunity to everyone. But anointing a government-approved class of scribes cuts against the nature of journalism, which almost by definition is frequently critical of the government.
        ''It's totally inconsistent with the notion of a free press and the First Amendment,'' Cornyn said.
        His ''fundamental problem'' with the bill, though, is that it would exempt journalists from being subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury if they witness a crime.
        ''For example, if you've witnessed a crime taking place, you or I would both have to respond to a grand jury subpoena and come to testify to what we've seen. This idea of saying you could have information about a crime and you are immunized to having to partake in a basic act of American citizenship strikes me as pretty odd to say the least,'' he says.
        Cornyn, who just breezed past a primary challenge from Rep. Steve Stockman, notes it's more than a bit ironic that Senate Democrats are championing the bill while their party's president wreaks havoc on press freedoms.
        Cornyn believes the bill's timing '' and the administration's backing of it '' appears to be aimed at alleviating criticism of the Justice Department's secret attainment of Associated Press phone conversations and the administration's similar actions against Fox News's James Rosen, among other media targeting.
        ''You remember when this was recently resurrected?'' Cornyn asks. ''It was essentially an attempt to deflect... from the Department of Justice and this administration... the criticism they were taking [from] James Rosen and other traditional journalists. So, I really question the timing of all of this.''
        Finally, Cornyn raises concerns about the proposal's champion '' Schumer.
        The mere fact that Schumer is the one pushing this bill is something that should send alarm bells off throughout the Congress, Cornyn says.
        ''My antennae are always very sensitive whenever he is on the march,'' he says, noting the New York Democrat openly declared war on the Tea Party in a Center for American Progress speech earlier this year.
        Cornyn says that the bill would very likely exclude bloggers and would definitely exclude citizen journalists and other new media practitioners, those who may practice journalism but not in the employ of a major newspaper or television network, from being government-defined ''journalists.'' As such, it could end up hurting conservatives because many of the most widely-read new media figures are on the right.
        ''Well, you remember, a few years ago there was a discussion about the Fairness Doctrine, and whether they would go after talk radio,'' Cornyn says.
        ''Talk radio, I think, the left feels as a threat. Now, you know, you start to put the dots together and the FCC's recent discussion about placing monitors in newsrooms, you begin to see that this administration wants to control the information that people get and particularly any information that might be critical of them '' which is, as you pointed out in the first instance... the function of a free press: to give people unbiased and factual information they can use to make their own decisions, not to collaborate with government in squashing speech that people find unfavorable,'' he adds.
        Cornyn says he will ''absolutely'' be whipping against the bill and doubts the Republican-controlled House would pass it anyway.
      Intelligence Official Cited for ''Unauthorized Disclosure'' to Congress: Oversight on the Rocks
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 03:43
        March 25, 2014
        Just over a year ago, an official at the Defense Department gave congressional oversight committees a document that had the potential to embarrass the Secretary of Defense and the Pentagon's Office of Inspector General. The document, a report the IG's office had drafted but not released, reflected negatively on then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta because it said that, when he was director of the CIA, he mishandled highly classified information about the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. And it spelled trouble for the IG, a Pentagon watchdog, because it showed that the IG had been sitting on politically sensitive information.
        Now, the IG, an authority whose responsibilities include investigating executive branch misconduct and protecting the rights of whistleblowers, maintains that sharing that document with Congress was prohibited.
        The IG's office has asserted that, in giving the unclassified report to Congress, Dan Meyer, who now holds a sensitive post in the intelligence community, made an ''unauthorized disclosure,'' according to a document obtained by the Project On Government Oversight and to people familiar with the matter.
        At a time when major national security controversies are testing the Constitutional system of checks and balances and the ability of whistleblowers to expose problems, a memorandum from the IG's office concerning Meyer's disclosure to Congress lays out principles that constrain Defense employees from giving Congress information it needs to perform its oversight role.
        The Project On Government Oversight reported in June 2013 that the IG's office had been on the verge of releasing the report discussing Panetta in late 2012 but instead was sitting on it. POGO also posted a version of the unpublished report on the Web.
        The IG then conducted a probe to determine which of its employees, if any, had given the report to POGO. Sources said the IG was unable to determine that any of its employees did so.
        In the course of the probe, Meyer acknowledged giving a draft to a Senate Intelligence Committee staffer and to the chief of staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, according to the IG memorandum and people familiar with the matter.
        The memorandum from Brett A. Mansfield, Deputy Chief of Staff at the IG's office, refers to ''the unauthorized disclosure of an OIG draft report'' without identifying the report; people familiar with the matter said that was a reference to the investigation involving Panetta. The memorandum also spelled out strictures against sharing unpublished IG reports with Congress.
        For example, it says, ''In general the OIG does not provide draft reports to outside stakeholders to include members of Congress and their staff.'' It adds that Meyer was ''reminded of his responsibility to ensure the protection of sensitive information to include information marked For Official Use Only (FOUO),'' a designation commonly employed to keep various kinds of unclassified material from public release. It says that ''the lack of FOUO markings does not make information automatically releasable'''--implying that releasing information to Congress is not an official use. It discusses restrictions on ''draft and pre-decisional information.'' And it says that the only people who had the authority to approve Meyer's disclosure to Congress were the Inspector General or a particular subordinate.
        The memo seems to convey that sharing information with Congress is subject to some of the same restrictions as releasing information to the public.
        The restrictions laid out in the memo have parallels in an ongoing dispute between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA. The committee is locked in a battle with the CIA over access to information about highly controversial CIA activities'--the detention of prisoners in secret overseas jails and the use of interrogation techniques widely regarded as torture. Committee Chairman Diane Feinstein (D-CA) recently described the conflict as a ''defining moment'' for congressional oversight.
        Feinstein said that the CIA had tried to assert that some of the CIA documents her committee was reviewing had been labeled ''deliberative'' and ''privileged,'' a designation she rejected.
        ''We have discussed this with the Senate Legal Counsel who has confirmed that Congress does not recognize these claims of privilege when it comes to documents provided to Congress for our oversight duties,'' Feinstein declared on the Senate floor.
        For people with information about government misconduct, Dan Meyer's disclosure to Congress shows pitfalls of working within the system.
        President Obama and senior intelligence officials have said former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden should have aired his concerns about intelligence-gathering within governmental channels instead of divulging information to the media. Unlike Snowden'--or Panetta'--Meyer is not accused of spilling Top Secret information. Meyer has been faulted for releasing a politically sensitive but unclassified document to congressional offices statutorily required to conduct oversight of intelligence and defense activities. The document addressed the alleged mishandling of classified information by the head of his department, the secretary of Defense.
        Ironically, Meyer's current job in the office of the Director of National Intelligence involves helping to create safe channels for whistleblowers as envisioned in a directive by President Obama.
        Meyer is a former Navy officer who became a whistleblower decades ago, when he informed the Senate Armed Services committee of misconduct by investigators looking into an explosion on the battleship Iowa. Since then, his career has involved protecting whistleblowers and helping the government field information from them. When he gave the report involving Panetta to Congress, he was working in the Defense Department IG's office in a job requiring him to advocate on behalf of employees who believed they had uncovered wrongdoing or had been retaliated against for reporting it. Currently, he is detailed to a similar post as Executive Director for Intelligence Community Whistleblowing and Source Protection at the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG), a watchdog for the Director of National Intelligence.
        Contacted by POGO, Meyer referred questions to the ICIG, which offered no comment. The Defense IG also declined to comment.
        The report Meyer shared with Congress said that, as CIA director, Panetta exposed highly classified information related to the raid that killed Bin Laden to a producer of the movie Zero Dark Thirty at a June 2011 CIA event honoring participants in the raid and others who contributed to the hunt. The report also accused Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers of giving filmmakers the protected name of a special operations planner involved in the mission.
        At a time when the government has been cracking down on whistleblowers and national security leaks, the Zero Dark Thirty case showed a security lapse at the highest levels of the CIA. It showed members of the Obama Administration going to substantial lengths to help the makers of a Hollywood movie about a national security success. And it showed the Pentagon's Inspector General, an internal watchdog, sparing leaders at the Pentagon from the public accountability that could result from a potentially damaging report.
        The Defense IG inquiry into Zero Dark Thirty was prompted by an August 2011 request from Representative Peter King (R-NY), then chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, who said he was concerned that Hollywood filmmakers had reportedly received ''top level access to the most classified mission in history.''
        More than a year later, by which time a presidential campaign had run its course, the Defense IG had yet to release the results of its probe.
        Meyer received a copy of the unpublished Zero Dark Thirty report in December 2012 and soon after gave it to congressional oversight committees, sources said.
        In June 2013, days after POGO published a copy, the Defense IG released a final version of the report that included no mention of Panetta's disclosure of classified information or of Vickers' disclosure.
        Though the final version made no mention of the Panetta findings, CIA documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to Judicial Watch show that the Defense IG believed them strongly enough to refer them to the CIA.
        ''We are referring to you for appropriate action the unauthorized disclosures of DoD information by the former Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to a movie producer not authorized to receive the information,'' James R. Ives, the Defense Department's acting deputy inspector general for Intelligence and Special Program Assessments, said in an undated memo to the CIA's deputy inspector general.
        While it is unclear when the Ives memo was sent to the CIA, it is clear from the contents of the memo that the Defense Inspector General's office had established by September 2012 that Panetta's remarks at the event attended by the filmmaker contained Top Secret information. That means the Defense IG had confirmed the finding before the November 2012 presidential election and months before the OIG released its official, Panetta-free report in June 2013.
        In a statement quoted by the Associated Press, Panetta has said he did not know the filmmaker was present when he made his remarks.
        When Meyer conveyed the unpublished report to Congress, the Defense Inspector General's office was headed by an acting IG, Lynne M. Halbrooks, who lobbied to be appointed to the job on a permanent basis. Customarily, before the president formally presents a nominee for Senate confirmation, the White House asks Department senior management to sign off on the nominee.
        (President Obama later selected someone else, Jon T. Rymer; Halbrooks currently serves as his deputy.)
        By the time the report came to light, Panetta had left the government.
        In a statement on the matter last year, Halbrooks described the version of the Zero Dark Thirty report that POGO obtained as a ''pre-decisional working-draft '... [that] was not authorized to be released.'' Halbrooks disputed POGO's account, saying, ''I strongly disagree with any assertion that DoD IG has been 'sitting on the report.'''
        But another document obtained by POGO shows just how close the agency came to making its original, uncensored Zero Dark Thirty report public more than half a year before POGO revealed it. An internal email from November 2012 shows the Defense IG's spokesperson outlining detailed plans to publicize the report almost immediately.
        ''Just want to have it publicly released on a day when it will actually get some media attention'--for instance, not the Friday after Thanksgiving,'' the spokesperson said.
        The Defense IG's handling of the Zero Dark Thirty report has been seized upon by a variety of critics. Two weeks ago, it was the turn of John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who pleaded guilty last year to a felony for disclosing the name of a covert operative to a journalist. The headline of his Los Angeles Times op-ed written from a federal prison in Pennsylvania: ''I got 30 months in prison. Why does Leon Panetta get a pass?''
        Adam Zagorin is a journalist in residence for the Project On Government Oversight. Adam's work dives into many different areas including corruption and the financial arena.
        Topics:Government Accountability, National Security
        Related Content:Inspector General Oversight, Information Access, DOD Oversight, Defense
        Authors:Adam Zagorin
    Ministry of Truth
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      MSNBC is in serious trouble - POLITICO.com
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:53
        This is the story of MSNBC in a nutshell: It rose to prominence on its criticism of George W. Bush, peaked during Barack Obama's historic 2008 campaign, and, by criticizing Republicans and championing liberal causes, sustained its viewership in the years that followed.
        Until now.
        MSNBC suffered harder loses in 2013 -- in terms of both viewership and revenue -- than either of its competitors at Fox News and CNN, according to Nielsen data featured in a new Pew Research report. Prime-time viewership declined by a staggering 24 percent (nearly twice the loss sustained by CNN and four-times that sustained by Fox News). Daytime viewership fell by 15 percent, even as it rose at both of the other networks.
        On the revenue side, MSNBC was projected to decline by 2 percent, while both CNN and Fox News were projected to experience growth of 2 percent and 5 percent, respectively. MSNBC was expected to bring in $475 million in revenue: less than half what CNN will make and roughly one-quarter of what Fox News will make.
        Conventional wisdom has it that cable news doesn't have much of a future: The audience is old and getting older, the television landscape is growing more and more fractured, appointment viewing is becoming a thing of the past, etc. Certainly, every cable news network lost viewers last year. But this version of events often ignores the incredible revenue gains made each year by Fox News (like a rocket) and CNN (far more gradual, but we're still talking billions).
        MSNBC isn't seeing that growth, and it's not clear how it will. In a world where liberals wanted to be outraged by George Bush every night, or celebrate the rise of Barack Obama, MSNBC had a theory of the case. But now Obama's presidency has turned into a slog, and MSNBC isn't compelling. Prime time is just hours of what often seems like feigned outrage. And the daytime strategy -- giving shows to kids in their 20s and 30s, in an apparent bid to reach the youths -- is comically bad, and rendered absurd at every commercial break when the catheter ads come on.
        2016 will help MSNBC, as it will help all cable news networks, but that's not a long-term business strategy. The network needs to figure out what it's going to do in the off years. There are a few powerful brands that are worth maintaining -- Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Morning Joe -- but the rest is in need of a restart.
        Read more about: MSNBC
      Ronan Farrow: Awesome on Twitter, Awful on Television | Variety
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Mon, 24 Mar 2014 15:23
        Ronan Farrow has the kind of resume that's difficult to match. He graduated from college at the tender age of 15; went on to collect degrees from Yale Law School and Oxford U., the latter on a Rhodes scholarship; and worked at the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs and for the Obama administration.
        SEE MORE:From the March 11, 2014 issue of Variety
        Impressive as all that is, none of those credentials finishes among the top three reasons MSNBC gave him his own show last month. In ascending order, they are: the endless promotional value that comes with his being the progeny of Mia Farrow; his movie-star good looks; and most important of all '... he's awesome on .
        That may sound trivial, but to think otherwise is naive. There are plenty of policy wonks out there with resumes that can fill a phone book, but very few of them boast a built-in audience on the strength of their online personality.
        Farrow somehow manages to be a combination of funny, charming or insightful in every single tweet without the usual mistake Twitter stars make: They just plain overdo it.
        Which makes it all the more mystifying that MSNBC's savvy move to bring him to TV has turned out to be such a dud, drawing mostly negative reviews.
        It's an interesting test case in the tricky translation to a different platform of a star best known in social media. The logic behind making such a conversion seems as sound as it is simple: Bringing over someone with a powerful direct connection to 238,000 followers gives a TV show a running start in the ratings. But somewhere on the way to TV, Farrow's appeal got lost.
        That said, neither he nor the nature of Twitter is principally at fault.
        Sure, before the man so much as opened his mouth, his face seemed to bear some blame. His eerie resemblance to his alleged is-he-or-isn't-he father Frank Sinatra is a distraction. Or maybe Farrow is just too damned handsome; those limpid pools he calls eyeballs are so mesmerizing it's easy to lose track of what he's saying.
        But being too telegenic isn't really the problem here. In his opening weeks on the air, Farrow has seemed tentative and ill at ease, prone to stumbling on his words. More to the point, he just doesn't resemble the guy who is so dazzling on social media.
        But concluding that the kind of personality that succeeds on Twitter is just a totally different animal than the type conducive to good TV would be wrong. Because it's actually MSNBC that needs to fall on its sword for failing Farrow; the network put him in a format that doesn't capture the essence of his Twitter persona.
        Cable news basically has two different types of personality-driven shows. The first is where the anchor takes a backseat to the commentator he or she is interviewing. The job is to tee up the topic at hand and ask intelligent questions, but to otherwise get out of the way and let the news be the star. That's the format MSNBC gave Farrow, and it's the wrong one.
        What the network should have done was give him the kind of forum that makes people like Keith Olbermann or Bill O'Reilly famous, in which the questioner and commentator are essentially the same person; those they interview are really just furniture. It's here where Farrow could have employed the wit and opinion he puts to such good use on Twitter, but is totally muffled in his current vehicle.
        It's not too late for MSNBC to make the kind of switch that will allow Farrow to recapture his voice. If the network is simply hoping that with enough air time he won't come off so green, that would represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what isn't working. There's no sense in tapping talent from social media if the TV world can't recreate the kind of environment that made that talent so compelling in the first place.
        For all variety's headlines, follow us @variety on twitter
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      New technology, new money, new newsrooms, old questions: The State of the News Media in 2014 >> Nieman Journalism Lab
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 05:26
        Pew's annual omnibus report finds that the transition to digital, and the influx of new money and new ideas, only represents a sliver of activity in the broader media.
        Inside the media universe, 2013 seemed to be a year of momentum. New money was being injected into the news business from all sides, from dot-com billionaires to baseball owners to venture capitalists making bets at the intersection of technology and content. At the same time, users were finding news and video through new platforms, whether through an explosion in social media or via the personal window of mobile.
        In Pew Research Center's latest State of the News Media report, just out, you get a glimpse of how the worlds of journalism and technology are continuing to merge and the impact that convergence has on the business and editorial prospects of media companies.
        A majority of Americans now say they get news through a digital platform: 82 percent reported using a desktop or laptop, while 54 percent got news through mobile devices, according to Pew. Half of social media users share or repost news stories, while 46 percent discuss news on those sites. Audiences are also spending more time watching their screens: 63 percent of U.S. adults now watch online video, and of that, 36 percent watch news video.
        At the same time, the companies that are helping to redefine digital news are expanding aggressively: Pew estimates that digital news operations, from the small hyperlocal shops up to the likes of ProPublica, The Huffington Post, and Vice have produced almost 5,000 full-time editorial jobs. Not enough to make up for a decade of losses in newspapers, but significant.
        RELATED ARTICLE
        Press Publish 9: Pew's Amy Mitchell on the ''challenged'' state of the news media in 2013
        Traffic-wise, those companies are also challenging legacy media operations for audience. In April, May, and June of 2013, The Huffington Post averaged 45 million unique monthly visitors, which put it behind only Yahoo News as the top news site. BuzzFeed averaged 17 million monthly unique visitors, almost on par with The Washington Post's 19 million monthly unique visitors.''This year, what we saw was individuals tied to technology with a deep understanding of technology and digital content begin to tackle news reporting in a way we haven't seen before,'' said Amy Mitchell, director of journalism research for Pew.
        But the State of the News Media report also offers a dose of cold water to the digital media excitement: That new cash flowing in '-- whether through VCs, philanthropy, or personal investment '-- represents only 1 percent of the overall funding for journalism. Pew estimates that for-profit digital native news outlets pull in between $500''$700 million in advertising annually, which is just around 1 percent of all news-related advertising across sectors.
        While the consumption of news on new platforms is rising, it still occupies a small space in the overall news industry, said Mitchell. ''It's all here, and real,'' Mitchell said of the digital newcomers, ''but also step back and look at the whole picture of news that consumers are receiving, and where does this fit in that? And it's a small piece, at this point.''
        On the business side, Pew found that audience-derived revenue '-- through paywalls, cable subscriber fees, and other sources '-- was growing both as a dollar figure and as a share of overall revenues. But it's uncertain whether that increase is driven by a more paying readers or if news companies are just squeezing more money out of existing customers.
        Mitchell said there's still plenty of uncertainty in the business models for news. Nonprofit news outlets need to find sources outside of foundation funding; most news companies are still heavily dependent on advertising; and digital news sites are still developing new sources of revenue. ''There is that big question mark next to the dollar sign that lets people think about what the future of sustainability is,'' Mitchell said.
        Circulation revenue at daily newspapers was up 5 percent for the year, driven largely by new paywall plans. But newsstand sales of magazines fell by 2 percent. While cable news audiences declined, local TV news saw modest increases in viewership, and evening network newscasts were up.
        That's all just the tip of the iceberg: As always, this is a huge report, with a wealth of information for media nerds. Pour a nice cup of tea, find a comfy chair, and set aside some time for reading. Here, in no particular order, are some of the more interesting takeouts from this year's State of The Media report:
        How news makes money in 2013Pew estimates the U.S. news industry generates around $63''65 billion a year. But advertising remains the backbone of the business, making up two-thirds of revenue for news organizations. The area seeing the most growth is audience revenue, which includes subscriptions (digital or print), premium services (like Politico Pro), TV bills (cable and satellite), and the types of voluntary contributions that go to nonprofit news.
        Daily newspaper subscriptions make up almost 70 percent of audience revenue, totaling $10.4 billion in 2013. But Pew's research suggests that media companies aren't pulling in new paying customers, but rather extracting more money from a shrinking pool. Giving to public radio stations was down by 3 percent in 2012, but the $400 million raised was still the second-highest dollar amount in 16 years. Similarly, Pew points out that newspaper and magazine circulation numbers are flat overall as subscription revenues are up.
        According to data from eMarketer, digital advertising on the desktop web generates more than 3— the money of mobile. In 2013, desktop advertising brought in $33 billion, up a smidge from the previous year. Mobile jumped to $9.6 billion in 2013 from $4.4 million the previous year.
        The report also included a good comparison graphic of revenues from digital-only outlets:
        Digital newsrooms are expanding rapidly, but sustainable business models remain elusiveTo get a better look at the emerging digital-only news environment, Pew surveyed 468 digital-only outlets, with 30 qualifying as ''major'' news organizations under Pew's definitions. Combined, all these shops represent almost 5,000 full-time editorial jobs (though that figure also includes all of Vice's 1,100 headcount, editorial or not). The 30 bigs, which include places like HuffPo, Gawker, BuzzFeed, Mashable, Business Insider, and ProPublica, accounted for about 3,000 of the new jobs created by digital-first news organizations. Of the other sites, 241 have three or fewer full-time staffers.
        Pew found that many of the new newsrooms focused their reporting on topic areas left vacant by downsized print newsrooms. The digital outlets fell into three areas: local or hyperlocal news (think The New Haven Independent or West Seattle Blog), investigative reporting on the local, state or international level (ProPublica or the New England Center for Investigative Reporting), and international news. The focus on international news has expanded in recent years, with some, like GlobalPost, focusing solely on foreign reporting, but others like Vice, BuzzFeed, and Quartz expanding into overseas operations.
        Who's coming onboard? The hiring mix includes both legacy journalists and newcomers. At the investigative outlets, the balance is on people from traditional backgrounds. Kevin Davis of the Investigative News Network told Pew that 80 percent of 600 staffers at the 92 newsrooms in the INN come from legacy backgrounds. Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget estimates 10 to 15 precent of his staff came from legacy media companies. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo told Pew half his editorial staff have legacy backgrounds, but that he also tends to hire younger people. BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith told Pew 20 to 30 percent of his editorial staff are on their first job.
        Jobs report: For the time being, hiring seems to be disproportionately happening in the digital newsrooms. Using data from the American Society of Newspaper Editors' annual newsroom census, the total number of full-time newsroom jobs in 2012 was 38,000. Between 2003 and 2012, 16,200 newsroom jobs were lost, according to ASNE. Similarly, Ad Age's Data Bank reports that the number of magazine jobs has decreased by 26 percent in the past decade. (Pew also points out that job losses at Patch make the numbers for digital-only hiring less than rosy.)
        Online video continues to growOne indication of how people watch online video: 88 percent of smartphone owners watch online video, and 53 percent watch news video. By comparison, only 35 percent of those who don't have smartphones watch online video. Younger viewers are also more likely to watch online video. Nine in ten 18- to 19-year-olds watch online videos, and 48 percent reported watching news videos. That matches the viewership of the 30 to 49 demographic, and is much greater than the other age groups.
        User-submitted video has become a part of most news operations, particularly for events like natural disasters, emergencies, and protests. But the number of people participating in creating those videos is relatively small: 36 percent of U.S. adults have reportedly shot video on their cellphone as of July 2013. Only 14 percent of social media users have posted photos of a news event to a social network and 12 percent have posted video. As for the audience submitting videos, photos, or writing to their favorite news outlet: Pew says 11 percent of ''online news consumers'' have provided a news outlet with content. That amounts to 7 percent of U.S. adults posting news video.
        While digital video advertising is a small part of the overall digital ad pie '-- and even smaller still in the overall advertising picture '-- it's growing. According to stats from eMarketer, video ads are growing 43.5 percent year over year. In 2013, digital video advertising revenue was estimated at $4.15 billion, up from $2.89 billion in 2012. However, according to the data, video advertising is only 10 percent of all digital ad revenue and 2 percent of all ad revenue.
        Complicating things further is the fact that the online video advertising marketplace has quickly become crowded. Google, by way of YouTube, is the top online video property and the top destination for ads in the space, according to Pew. eMarketer projects that YouTube will pull in $850 million in video advertising in 2013, which would be about 20 percent of the overall video ad market. Fighting for the rest of that money are news organizations big and small, as well as places like Facebook. The slice of pie gets smaller when you factor in that news outlets share their revenue with ad networks.
        RELATED ARTICLE
        What to do when your video is winning social media, but it's a copy that's getting the clicks?
        On the local level: An audit of 32 local TV stations finds almost all (all but four) have video displayed on their homepages. The amounts vary among sites, and just half of the stations offer live-streaming video of their on-air programming. Interestingly, 24 of the stations have mobile apps that allow users to watch video. However, the type of video varied: More apps allowed users to watch clips, while fewer offered the option to watch live broadcasts. Pew found that many of the news sites host the videos on the sites themselves, rather than using YouTube or another service.A big year for the business of local TVIn the local TV business, 2013 was dominated by business moves. In 2013, 290 stations were sold, up from only 95 the year before. The total value on those transactions in 2013 was $8.8 billion, according to data from BIA/Kelsey.
        That's changed the TV map around the country in a number of ways. According to Pew, a increasing number of stations in the same market are working through joint service agreements, meaning the stations are separately owned but operated together. Those agreements now exist in 94 markets, up from 55 in 2011, reaching almost half of the 210 local TV markets in the U.S.
        The consolidation in local TV has also meant a shift in how news is produced by local stations. One in four stations do not produce the programs they air, according to data provided to Pew by the Radio Television Digital News Association. At the same time, content sharing is on the rise: More than three-quarters of local stations share stories with newspapers, radio stations, or other outlets in their community.
        One interesting market: New Orleans. There, The Times-Picayune partners with WVUE, the Fox affiliate, where the station provides weather and video to the paper, and the paper's reporters collaborate with TV reporters on projects and appear on air. Meanwhile, The New Orleans (n(C)e Baton Rouge) Advocate, which has risen as a competitor to The Times-Picayune, has a similar agreement with TV station WWL, recently sold by Belo to Gannett.
        The hours of TV news being produced are still relatively high. The average hours of weekday news programming dropped by six minutes in 2012, but weekend newscasts increased by 11 percent on Saturday and 5 percent on Sunday in 2012. The biggest area of increase has been pre-dawn news, as the number of stations producing newscasts at 4:30 a.m. jumped to 634 in 2012, up from 245, according to Nielsen.
        Getting a mix of news on social mediaThe distribution of news across social networks remains a mixed picture. As Pew reported last year, Facebook users are more likely to bump into news than seek it out. Facebook reaches far more adults in the U.S. than any other platform at 64 percent of the population. Still, only 30 percent of adults get news on Facebook. The numbers fall sharply from there. While 51 percent of adults use YouTube, only 10 percent get news there. As for Twitter, 16 percent of adults in the U.S. are sending and/or reading tweets, but only 8 percent are getting news there.
        Facebook and search have become important to publishers as new pathways to stories. But Pew found that people who arrive on news stories through Facebook and search spend less time engaging with a site once they land there.
        This may be a surprise to media watchers who clock endless hours on Twitter, but Pew found that sentiment on issues in the news on Twitter differs from those in the broader public. After the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, Twitter conversation overwhelmingly supported stricter gun control, 64 percent to 21 percent. But a Pew Research Center survey during the same period found a close split in opinion, with 49 percent favoring more gun control and 42 percent saying they support protecting the rights of gun owners.
        Full disclosure: Nieman Lab director Joshua Benton was a prerelease reviewer of parts of the report.
      ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      Revealed: Visitor logs show full extent of Pierre and Pamela Omidyar's cozy White House ties | PandoDaily
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 02:23
        By Paul CarrOn March 23, 2014
        [White House officials] know who to call at The Times, they know who to call at The Post. With us, who are they going to call? Pierre? '-- Jeremy Scahill, First LookMedia
        Last month, Pando's Mark Ames reported that Omidyar Networks, the philanthropic organization operated by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pamela, had co-invested with the US government in opposition groups that played a key role in organizing Ukraine's recent revolution.
        Unsurprisingly, given Omidyar is now running First Look Media, a journalistic enterprise dedicated to exposing US government wrongdoing around the world, some FLM staffers and supporters rushed to cry foul over our report.
        USA Today's Rem Rieder argued that Omidyar Network's investments were a non-issue as they had been disclosed years earlier. Other supporters pointed out that, just because the Omidyars co-invested with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and appeared to share their policy on regime change in Ukraine, didn't mean that they had actively collaborated with the government on investment strategy.
        This narrative of Pierre Omidyar being politically and financially separate from the Obama White House is a vitally important one. In recent weeks, the site's reporters have taken their fight right to the President's doorstep with headlines like ''The White House Has Been Covering Up the Presidency's Role in Torture for Years,'' claiming that the administration has deliberately withheld thousands of documents relating to the CIA's role in detention and interrogation of prisoners. Any sniff that First Look's owner, publisher and chief editorial recruiter has close ties to the White House could undermine the whole premise of the organization.
        Speaking to the Daily Beast, documentary maker Jeremy Scahill mentioned his boss explicitly when comparing the cozy relationship between other news organizations and the White House. First Look, he insisted, would be different'...
        I think that the White House, whether it is under Republican or Democrat, they pretty much now [sic] who they are dealing with. There are outlets like The Daily Beast, or The Huffington Post that have risen up in the past decade, but they are very quickly just becoming part of the broader mainstream media, and with people that have spent their careers working for magazines or newspapers or what have you, and the White House believes they all speak the language on these things. With us, because we want to be adversarial, they won't know what bat phone to call. They know who to call at The Times, they know who to call at The Post. With us, who are they going to call? Pierre? Glenn?''
        Scahill's question is a good one '-- and it's also very easy to answer: If the White House has a problem with First Look, it's a pretty safe bet they'll pick up the phone and call Pierre Omidyar.
        After all, according to records made available under Obama's 2009 transparency commitment, Omidyar has visited the Obama White House at least half a dozen times since 2009. During the same period, his wife, Pamela Omidyar, who heads Omidyar Network, has visited 1600 Pennsylvania Ave at least four times, while Omidyar Network's managing partner, Matthew Bannick, has visited a further three. In all, senior Omidyar Network officials made at least 13 visits to the White House between 2009-2013. (In fact the logs indicate that, on several occasions, Omidyar visited the White House more than once in the same day. To avoid unfairly inflating the numbers, I've removed same-day duplicates from all the totals cited in this article.)
        To put the numbers in perspective, Omidyar's six visits compare to four visits during the same period by NBCUniversal chief Stephen Burke, two by Fox News boss Roger Ailes, two by MSNBC's Phil Griffin, one by New York Times owner Arthur O Sulzberger, and one each by Dow Jones' Robert Thompson, Gannett/USA Today's Gracia Martore and Omidyar's fellow tech billionaire turned media owner, Jeff Bezos.
        In fact Pando could only find three media titans who had earned more White House visitor loyalty points than Omidyar: CNN's Jeffrey Zucker (7), former Post owner Donald Graham (9) and queen of all media, Arianna Huffington (11). According to records, neither The Daily Beast's Tina Brown or Barry Diller were invited at all '-- nor, by the way, was Rupert Murdoch.
        Even compared to other major tech leaders, Omidyar is a special case. LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman visited the White House twice during the same period, as did Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. Omidyar also beat out Marissa Mayer (5), Eric Schmidt (5), John Doerr (4), Dick Costolo (3), Evan Williams (3), Jack Dorsey (2), Larry Ellison (1) and poor old Reed Hastings who wasn't invited at all, until this week. According to records, other people not important enough to make it through the door include Pando investors Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.
        (In fairness, it should be noted that Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg (7) clocked at least one more visit than Omidyar '-- and on one occasion, records show, even scored herself a ride home to San Francisco on Air Force One. Which, I suppose, is what happens when Larry Summers is your mentor.)
        Hell, even compared to famous investors, Omidyar holds his own: positioned, as he is, squarely between Warren Buffett (5) and George Soros (7).
        The raw numbers can only tell half the story, though. What's much more interesting '-- and potentially far more troubling for the owner of a soi-disant ''adversarial'' publication trying to paint itself as a stranger to the White House '-- is who Omidyar and his wife/co-founder met during their visits to the White House.
        Again, the public data is our friend: From it we learn that, yes, Pierre Omidyar had many of the kind of meetings you might expect from the founder of eBay: For example, in 2009, he met with Beth Noveck, then Obama's deputy chief CTO, who now works in a similar role for the UK government. That same year, Omidyar further cemented his relationship with the Obama White House when the President personally appointed him to sit on the President's Commission on White House Fellowships, helping to nominate young future leaders to gain ''experience working at the highest levels of the federal government.'' (Other appointments to the Commission that year included Tom Brokaw and General Wesley Clark.)
        Dig deeper in the visitor logs, however, and we find several meetings involving both Pierre and Pamela Omidyar which apparently have less to do with the former's tech credentials than with Omidyar Network's desire to shape US foreign policy.
        On 16th April 2010, Pamela Omidyar visited the White House for four hours to meet with Gayle Smith, Senior Director of the National Security Council in charge of ''global development'' and ''democracy.''
        The National Security Council, which the president heads, was created by Truman in 1947, under the National Security Act, to act as a liaison between government and the military/intelligence community. This included providing a bridge between the government and the CIA, which was created in the same year under the same act. More recently the NSC, which oversees the ''kill lists,'' has been implicated in the targeted assassinations of American citizens and was responsible for controlling the ''high value detainee interrogation group,'' which was criticized for its inhumane treatment of prisoners in 2013 by the Guardian's'... Glenn Greenwald. More recently, the NSC was involved in the decision not to declassify thousands of CIA documents, prompting outrage from reporters at Omidyar's First Look Media.
        While we can't know what was discussed at the meeting '' not least because a spokesperson for Pierre and Pamela Omidyar declined to comment for this story '' it's possible that Pamela Omidyar and Smith touched upon Omidyar Network's future international investment plans. After all, before joining the NSC, Smith worked as chief of staff at USAID.
        In any case, the following month, another senior official from Omidyar Network was invited to the White House. This time, it was Matthew Bannick, Omidyar Network's managing partner who made the trip to DC. According to White House records, the meeting was between ''BANNICK, MATTHEW J'' and ''POTUS'' '-- that is, the President of the United States himself.
        Records show that Bannick and the President met in the Roosevelt Room for about an hour. That was apparently not enough time to conclude whatever business Omidyar Networks wished to transact with the White House, as Bannick returned to Pennsylvania Ave the very next day to meet the First Lady. The following day, Bannick was back for a third meeting, this time with Peter Rundlet, then deputy assistant to the President. A little over two weeks later, Pamela Omidyar also swung by to meet Rundlet.
        These meetings clearly were very fruitful '-- at least for Rundlet. Just three months after meeting Pamela Omidyar and Matthew Bannick, Rundlet decided to quit his job at the White House and go to work as ''vice president for investments'' for a humanitarian group called ''Humanity United.'' The founders of that group? Pierre and Pamela Omidyar.
        After Rundlet's departure, the Omidyars and Bannick stayed away from the White House for almost a year, until suddenly in 2011 they were back with a vengeance. In June and July of 2011, Pierre and Pamela Omidyar and Matthew Bannick have a total five entries on the White House visitor log, including another visit with the President, on 18th July, this time in his private residence. It was two months after that meeting that Omidyar Network announced its co-investment with USAID in Ukraine's Center UA'--which described itself as an ''active participant'' in the Ukraine revolution earlier this year'--as well as in pro-democracy groups in Nigeria, Chile and India.
        The last recorded visit by Omidyar to the White House was in December 2012, just ten months before it was revealed that he had hired Glenn Greenwald, keeper of Edward Snowden's secrets, to launch a site exposing the misbehavior of the US government. Since then, according to all the records Pando has been able to find, no representative of Omidyar Networks has visited the White House, nor have any more co-investments between Omidyar and USAID been announced publicly.
        But the key word there is publicly. Just because Omidyar is now painting himself as an outsider, doesn't mean he's any less close to his old friends in Washington.
        In February of this year, the Intercept published one of its first reports, bylined to Greenwald and Scahill, exposing the involvement of the NSA in foreign drone attacks '-- a program overseen by the National Security Council. That same month USAID official Sarah Mendelsen testified before the House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs about the importance of the US government's ongoing partnerships with private donors and NGO including, specifically, Omidyar Network'...
        ''In 2012, USAID launched ''Making All Voices Count: A Grand Challenge for Development,'' a $55 million public-private partnership with UKAID, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Omidyar Network and the Open Society Foundations to support innovation and research that will enable citizens to engage with their governments and improve the ability of governments to listen and respond to their citizens. The first round of challenge grants received over 500 applications proposing innovative ways to use technology to enable citizens to better use public information. We are working closely with our colleagues at the State Department to support local civil society efforts to prevent new restrictions from being enacted. And we are leading a process, together with other governments, private donors, and non-governmental organizations to explore new innovative ways to support civil society around the world.
        The political trajectory of a country is ultimately a U.S. national security issue, and as such, we are intimately involved in advancing U.S. national security interests. Several of the countries we will discuss today [including Ukraine] are of high national security interest to the United States, and they are also in the category of requiring very long-term democracy efforts.
        Accordingly, the investments we make in these closed societies will pay dividends in the future. We know this to be true in many countries where we have worked, where institutions and processes we supported became leading elements ushering in more democratic and accountable governments. That is the story of millions of dollars of USAID investments in Serbia, Georgia, and now Burma.
        Serbia, Georgia and Burma are, of course, all places where USAID-backed pro-US color revolutions were successful. And now we have Omidyar Network investing in USAID's newest overseas programs, ''advancing U.S. national security interests'' in USAID's words.
        With Omidyar Networks refusing to comment, we can't know the full details of what Pierre and Pamela Omidyar discussed with the President and other top White House officials before they co-invested with USAID to bring democracy (and revolution) to foreign shores. And we can't know if, for all of Jeremy Scahill's snark, those same White House officials have attempted to use their relationship with the Omidyars to influence First Look's reporting.
        (I emailed Scahill for comment on this article [48+ hrs ago] but he had not responded by press time. A request for comment from First Look Media [48+ hrs ago] received no response by press time. A request for comment from the White House [12+ hrs ago] received no response by press time.)
        What we do know for sure is this: for all of First Look's bluster about Omidyar's outsider status, his relationship to the White House is at least as close as any other media tycoon. Moreover, his direct business relationship with the Obama administration, through Omidyar Network's co-investments with USAID and his donation of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the World Bank to promote micro-lending in emerging markets, adds another layer of coziness which most of the biggest media barons don't even enjoy.
        * * * *
        And yet'...
        If Pierre Omidyar's willingness to whitewash his establishment background and recast himself as a fiercely independent thorn in Obama's side comes as a shock to First Look readers (or staffers), it probably shouldn't. After all, Omidyar is the undisputed king of the fake origin story.
        In a now deleted article, Wired UK editor David Rowan busted eBay for completely fabricating its folksy beginnings in order to secure favorable press coverage. The main characters in the fairytale: Pierre and Pamela Omidyar'...
        It was the warm, smalltown story of a corporate giant's humble beginnings that enticed Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, even the fact-obsessed New Yorker. When Pam Wesley wanted to boost her collection of Pez sweet dispensers, her fiance, Pierre Omidyar, built a website for her to trade them. That website grew to be the huge online auction house eBay, one of the internet gold rush's few success stories '' even though, in the words of the company's PR chief, Mary Lou Song, it began simply ''as kind of a love token''.It was a touching tale, recounted in endless profiles on both sides of the Atlantic, with only one flaw: it was a lie. As Song admits in a new book by Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, she invented the story five years ago to generate publicity for an otherwise dull tech company. ''No one wants to hear about a 30-year-old genius who wanted to create a perfect market,'' Song confesses. So she constructed what corporate PRs call a ''creation myth'', and hoodwinked some of the world's most respected reporters.
        According to Rowan, some of those hoodwinked reporters were ''furious'' when they discovered the truth about Pierre and Pamela Omidyar: that the couple had allowed staffers to spread a romantic, completely false creation myth about eBay in order to conceal their real, purely market-driven motives for going into the auctions business.
        With the stakes so much higher this time around, we can only hope that American journalists don't fall for the same stunt twice.
        [Illustration by Brad Jonas for Pando]
        * * * *
        Editor's note: All figures cited above are taken from the publicly available White House Visitor Access Records, as of November 2013. Pando has removed any duplicate same-day records from the totals. We have also taken steps to filter out erroneous records as well as attempting to verify possible misspellings and name variations (where doubt remains, we have removed records from the count). We'll update this article to reflect any subsequent errors we discover. Note that the publicly available records do not include any visits which the administration considers sensitive on national security grounds, nor do they include all visits to the Vice President's residence. More on the types of visits not included in the public data can be found here.
        Update: An earlier version of this post spelled Beth Noveck's name as Novech.
      First Look says Omidyar to stay out of newsroom | Capital New York
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 02:19
        First Look Media C.E.O. and publisher Pierre Omidyar has set aside a reported $250 million for the growing network of websites, but is vowing to stay out of their daily editorial affairs.
        A statement on the company's website on Monday said that the eBay co-founder "has no involvement in the newsroom's day-to-day operations."
        "All editorial decisions at First Look'--from story assignments and blog posts to headlines and style guides'--are made exclusively by our team of editors and reporters. Questions of journalism'--what issues to cover, and how best to cover them'--belong entirely to our journalists," the statement continued.
        The post on editorial independence followed a report by Pando Daily's Paul Carr this weekend on visits paid to the White House by Omdiyar and his wife, Pamela, as well as representatives of their philanthropic group, Omidyar Network. Carr argued that Omidyar's ties to the Obama White House could present a conflict of interest for a news organization ostensibly built on reporting on the administration's intelligence policies.
        MORE ON CAPITALADVERTISEMENTOmidyar founded First Look using his considerable personal resources last year after hiring Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill to found their own investigative "digital magazine," The Intercept, in the wake of their Edward Snowden scoop. The former Gawker editor John Cook joined the site as its editor in chief this week.
        First Look also recently hired another firebrand, Matt Taibbi, away from Rolling Stone to start his own digital enterprise.
        Jay Rosen, an advisor to First Look, characterized the Monday statement in a tweet as "First Look Media continu[ing] to define itself."
        MORE:Author: Nicole Levyfollow this reporter
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    Obama Nation
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      TSA wants law enforcement at checkpoints - Yahoo News
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        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 21:31
        HomeMailNewsSportsFinanceWeatherGamesGroupsAnswersScreenFlickrMobileMoreCelebrityShineMoviesMusicTVHealthShoppingTravelAutosHomesYahoo NewsSearch NewsSearch WebSign InMailHelpAccount InfoHelpSuggestionsYahoo
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      ALRP ANPR Technology MPH-900 Number Plate Reader licenase plate camera
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 13:40
        Frequently Asked Questions about LPR/ALPR/ANPR Systems
        ''We are a small department. How can the MPH-900 be used by my department?''The size of your department does not affect the need for ALPR. Small, medium, and large departments are currently deploying the MPH-900, and experiencing incredible success in their individual missions. ALPR aids in missions,such as:
        Recovery of Stolen VehiclesTerrorist InterdictionIdentification of suspended and revoked driversAMBER AlertsSecures sensitive areas with Geo-fencingGang and narcotic interdictionCollection of Delinquent Taxes, Fines, and FeesHomeland Security InitiativesHighway and Traffic Safety''What is OCR?''OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, and is an acronym heard often when discussing ALPR. OCR refersto the camera's ability to scan the images of letters and numbers on a license plate, and then translate those images into text. The images of license plates are scanned by infrared light housed in each camera head. The infrared light scans the images of license plates and then simultaneously translates those images into computerized text in the span of milliseconds. ALPR uses OCR to capture up to 3600 plates per minute.
        ''What is the MPH-900 install process?''An ELSAG representative will help your department install and set-up your new ALPR system. The system iscomprised of two, three, or four cameras magnetically mounted to the trunk of your patrol car. The MPH-900 software is installed on your existing MDT. The Operations Center Suite Software can be installed on a ''home-based'' server to wirelessly collect data and upload current hot lists to the patrol cars.
        ''My department's budget is tight, but we really want to purchase the cameras. How can we pay for them?''ELSAG North America is committed to helping your agency obtain the MPH-900. Many agencies have funded their ALPR cameras with grant money. Grant money can be obtained on the state, local, and federal level. Also, many corporations, foundations, and insurance companies are eager to support law enforcement through funding. ELSAG North America will assist your agency with identifying avenues of funding.Click here for more information on grant assistance.
        ''What happens if our department experiences technical issues with the system?''ELSAG North America is committed to helping our customers 24/7! This literally means that someone will answeryour call and talk you through your technical issue 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Our customers are our number1 priority.
        ''Is it possible to custom design our system?''Absolutely! ELSAG North America specializes in custom designed solutions to each agency's needs. We have created many new solutions based on feedback from our agency customers. We are experienced in custom designs and installation, and are excited to further your agency mission with our Advanced License Plate readers!
        ''How many plates can the MPH-900 read?''A two'camera MPH'900 system can capture up to 1,800 license plates per minute!
        ''My department is in Canada. Can your MPH-900 read Canadian license plates? ''The MPH-900 can read plates from all 50 states, Canada, and Mexico, Day and Night. No other ALPR system can come close to the accuracy rate of the MPH-900.
        ''How will the MPH-900 aid in investigations? ''The MPH-900 captures a color image of the license plate, date and time stamps, and GPS coordinates of the vehicle. This data can be reviewed in relation to investigations and can help lead to critical breaks such as placing a suspect at a scene, witness identification, pattern recognition or the tracking of suspect individuals.
      LAPD says every car in Los Angeles is part of an ongoing criminal investigation - Boing Boing
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 15:39
        The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to figure out what the LAPD is doing with the mountains (and mountains) of license-plate data that they're harvesting in the city's streets without a warrant or judicial oversight. As part of the process, they've asked the LAPD for a week's worth of the data they're collecting, and in their reply brief, the LAPD argues that it can't turn over any license-plate data because all the license-plates they collect are part of an "ongoing investigation," because every car in Los Angeles is part of an ongoing criminal investigation, because some day, someone driving that car may commit a crime.
        As EFF's Jennifer Lynch says, "This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity."
        This reminds me of the NSA's argument that they're collecting "pieces of a puzzle" and Will Potter's rebuttal: "The reality is that the NSA isn't working with a mosaic or a puzzle. What the NSA is really advocating is the collection of millions of pieces from different, undefined puzzles in the hopes that sometime, someday, the government will be working on a puzzle and one of those pieces will fit." The same thing could be said of the LAPD.
        In another interesting turn in the case, both agencies fully acknowledged the privacy issues implicated by the collection of license plate data.
        LAPD stated in its brief:
        "[T]he privacy implications of disclosure [of license plate data] are substantial. Members of the public would be justifiably concerned about LAPD releasing information regarding the specific locations of their vehicles on specific dates and times. . . . LAPD is not only asserting vehicle owners' privacy interests. It is recognizing that those interests are grounded in federal and state law, particularly the California Constitution. Maintaining the confidentiality of ALPR data is critical . . . in relation to protecting individual citizens' privacy interests"
        The sheriff's department recognized that ALPR data tracked "individuals' movement over time" and that, with only a license plate number, someone could learn "personal identifying information" about the vehicle owner (such as the owner's home address) by looking up the license plate number in a database with "reverse lookup capabilities such as LexisNexis and Westlaw."
        The agencies use the fact that ALPR data collection impacts privacy to argue that'--although they should still be allowed to collect this information and store it for years'--they should not have to disclose any of it to the public. However, the fact that the technology can be so privacy invasive suggests that we need more information on where and how it is being collected, not less. This sales video from Vigilant Solutions shows just how much the government can learn about where you've been and how many times you've been there when Vigilant runs their analytics tools on historical ALPR data. We can only understand how LA police are really using their ALPR systems through access to the narrow slice of the data we've requested in this case.
        Los Angeles Cops Argue All Cars in L.A. Are Under Investigation [Jennifer Lynch, EFF]
        (via /.)
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      The US Is Now Spending 26% Of Available Tax Revenue To Pay Interest
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: Zero Hedge
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 01:26
        Submitted by Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog,
        By the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire had become a has-been power whose glory days as the world's superpower were well behind them.
        They had been supplanted the French, the British, and the Russian empires in all matters of economic, military, and diplomatic strength. Much of this was due to the Ottoman Empire's massive debt burden.
        In 1868, the Ottoman government spent 17% of its entire tax revenue just to pay interest on the debt.
        And they were well past the point of no return where they had to borrow money just to pay interest on the money they had already borrowed.
        The increased debt meant the interest payments also increased. And three years later in 1871, the government was spending 32% of its tax revenue just to pay interest.
        By 1877, the Ottoman government was spending 52% of its tax revenue just to pay interest. And at that point they were finished. They defaulted that year.
        This is a common story throughout history.
        The French government saw a meteoric rise in their debt throughout the late 1700s. By 1788, on the eve of the French Revolution, they spent 62% of their tax revenue to pay interest on the debt.
        Charles I of Spain had so much debt that by 1559, interest payments exceeded ordinary revenue of the Habsburg monarchy. Spain defaulted four times on its debt before the end of the century.
        It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that an unsustainable debt burden soundly tolls the death knell of a nation's economy, and its government.
        Unfortunately, it can sometimes take a rocket scientist to figure out what the real numbers are; governments have a vested interest in not being transparent about their debts and interest payments.
        In the Land of the Free, for example, the government routinely doesn't count interest payments that they make to the Social Security Trust Fund.
        They've managed to convince people that those debts don't matter 'because we owe it to ourselves.'
        Apparently in their minds, solemn promises made to retirees simply don't count.
        It's like a person who is in debt up to his eyeballs with both credit card companies and family members has no compunction about stiffing Grandpa.
        Obligations are obligations, no matter who they're owed to.
        Taking this into account, total US interest payments in Fiscal Year 2013 were a whopping $415 billion, roughly 17% of total tax revenue. Just like the Ottoman Empire was at in 1868.
        Here's the thing, though'' it's inappropriate to look at total tax revenue when we're talking about making interest payments.
        The IRS collected $2.49 trillion in taxes last year (net of refunds). But of this amount, $891 billion was from payroll tax.
        According to FICA and the Social Security Act of 1935, however, this amount is tied directly to funding Social Security and Medicare. It is not to be used for interest payments.
        Based on this data, the amount of tax revenue that the US government had available to pay for its operations was $1.599 trillion in FY2013.
        This means they actually spent approximately 26% of their available tax revenue just to pay interest last year'... a much higher number than 17%.
        This is an unbelievable figure. The only thing more unbelievable is how masterfully they understate reality'... and the level of deception they employ to conceal the truth.
        Average:Your rating: NoneAverage: 4.7(18 votes)
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      To fight crime in your community, stop using cash
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 23:11
        A new study has found that paying welfare benefits via debit card, rather than cash, caused a 10 percent drop in crime.
        Researchers have long noted that cash plays a critical role in street crime, due to its liquidity (it's easy to access and everyone accepts it) and anonymity (it leaves no paper trail). In poorer neighborhoods, public assistance payments used to be a significant source of circulating cash: recipients would cash their assistance checks at the bank, pocketing the money and making them attractive targets for criminals.
        But starting in the 1990s that changed, as the Federal government gradually phased out paper welfare checks in favor of electronic debit cards (the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) program). Along with a team of researchers, Richard Wright of the University of Missouri studied the effects of this change in his home state and found that it was directly responsible for a hefty 10 percent drop in the overall crime rate there.
        The graphic below looks at crime trends in Missouri before and after the switch from cash to debit cards, for all crimes and broken down by individual crimes. In most crime categories the change before and after the switch is striking - upward trends in assault, burglary, car theft and robbery are completely reversed.
        The authors ran some more robust regression analysis and found that "burglary, assault, and larceny decreased by 7.9 percent, 12.5 percent, and 9.6 percent, respectively." To double-check their work, they looked at arrest rates and found that corresponding drops in arrest rates supported their findings. They also looked at the incidence of rape, which showed little change pre- and post-EBT switch. Because rape is "typically unrelated immediate acquisition of cash," this didn't come as a surprise.
        To put these results in perspective, the overall 10 percent decrease in crime corresponded to 47 fewer crimes per 100,000 people per county per month as a direct result of switching welfare benefits from cash to credit. This finding is fairly astonishing and raises some interesting questions.
        First, did the drop in crime occur simply because criminals decided to pack up and move elsewhere? The authors tested for this and found no evidence that criminals simply switched counties, noting that this finding was "consistent with criminological literature indicating that offenders tend to operate within their own geographical awareness space."
        Second, what if we expand the definition of "elsewhere" to include virtual as well as physical space? It stands to reason that a shift from paper to electronic currency would cause a concomitant shift from physical to virtual crime - if criminals can't pick your pocket, maybe they'll figure out how to pick your bank account. Wright's study didn't dig into these questions, but as society gradually shifts from physical to virtual currency in bitcoins and beyond, they will become increasingly crucial.
        Finally, to what extent can we extrapolate from these findings nationally? Wright and his co-authors tantalizingly note that the widespread drop in crime in the U.S. over the past several decades corresponds to a decline in the proportion of transactions involving cash. While there are a wide variety of explanations for this, the paper notes that "a significant fraction of the decline has yet to be identified empirically." While a lot more research is needed on this questions, Wright's paper strongly suggests that less cash = less crime.
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    #MH370
      BBC News - Airbus to supply 70 jets to China, worth more than $10bn
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 05:05
        26 March 2014Last updated at 16:28 ET European aviation giant Airbus has signed a deal to supply 70 jets, worth more than $10bn (£6bn), to China's state-owned purchasing agency.
        The deal had been on hold because of a row between the EU and outside countries over carbon emissions tax on flights.
        The breakthrough came during a state visit to France by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping.
        The order includes 27 long-haul A330s and 43 smaller A320 planes.
        China also signed a new 10-year agreement allowing Airbus to continue building planes in the northern city of Tianjin until 2025.
        Earlier, Airbus' helicopter division announced a deal to provide 1,000 civilian helicopters to China over the next 20 years.
        The three biggest European economies, Germany, France and the UK, have all been clamouring to improve their trade links with China.
        Last year, France had a trade deficit with China of about 26bn euros (£22bn), which accounts for approximately 40% of France's total foreign trade deficit.
        French president Francois Hollande told his Chinese counterpart that he wanted to "re-balance trade between our two countries".
        Aerospace already accounts for 29% of French exports to China.
        A fifth of Airbus's global production takes place on the Chinese mainland.
        China and France also signed 50 trade agreements in a number of other areas, including the nuclear, financial and automotive sectors.
      One Reason It May Be Harder to Find Flight 370: We Messed Up the Currents | Mother Jones
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Sun, 23 Mar 2014 23:33
        How climate change factors into the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight.
        '--James West on Fri. March 21, 2014 9:01 AM PDT
        A photo released on March 20 by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority shows satellite imagery of objects that may be debris of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. Australian Maritime Safety Authority
        Scientists say man-made climate change has fundamentally altered the currents of the vast, deep oceans where investigators are currently scouring for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight, setting a complex stage for the ongoing search forMH370. If the Boeing 777 did plunge into the ocean somewhere in the vicinity of where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean, the location where its debris finally ends up, if found at all, may be vastly different from where investigators could have anticipated 30 years ago.
        The search of 8,880 square miles of ocean has yet to turn up signs of the missing flight.
        Even if thefragments captured in satellite imagesare identified as being part of the jet, which Malaysian officials say deliberately flew off course on March 8, investigators coordinated by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority will still have an enormous task to locate remaining parts of the plane and its flight recorders. Among the assets deployed in the search'--including a multinational array of military and civil naval resources'--are data modelers, whose task will be reconciling regional air and water currents with local weather patterns to produce a possible debris field. "Data marker buoys" are being dropped into the ocean to assist in providing "information about water movement to assist in drift modeling," John Young from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority told a press conference in Canberra on Thursday.
        While longer-term climate shifts are unlikely to play into day-to-day search and rescue efforts, these large climate-affected currents'--among them the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the world's most powerful ocean system'--are an essential factor in oceanographers' understanding of the literal undercurrents of search operations.
        According to interviews with three climate scientists who specialize in the region of the world where investigators are focusing their search, the winds of the Southern Indian Ocean bordering the Southern Ocean have been shifting southwards and intensifying over the last 20 to 30 years, in part due to a warming atmosphere and the hole in the ozone layer. Ocean currents are also tightening around Antarctica, shifting whole climate systems towards the South Pole.
        "Both the ozone hole and greenhouse gases are working together to change the winds over the Southern Ocean."
        Two currents impact this area of the ocean: the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which races almost unbridled around the bottom of the world, and the Indian Ocean Gyre, which swirls around the outskirts of the Indian Ocean, including up the west coast of Australia. The potential plane debris spotted via satellite is in "this sort of boundary between the circumpolar current and the gyre; both of those currents are shifting south," says Steven Rintoul, an expert on the southern oceans with Australia's foremost scientific research agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)'‹, in Hobart. "And it looks like that's largely due to human activities, but not just greenhouse gases. Both the ozone hole and greenhouse gases are working together to change the winds over the Southern Ocean."
        The debris is being searched for in "the boundary between the circumpolar current and the gyre," says the CSIRO's Steven Rintoul. (Approximate locations.) Google Earth/NASA
        Unlike the current patterns of the Northern Hemisphere oceans, where scientists have a lot more historical data to rely on, this southwards shift was a pattern only first detected by satellite starting in the early 1990s. "Over the 20 years, since 1993, we've seen the current shift southward by about half a degree of latitude, or about 30 or 40 miles or so, on average," Rintoul says. That may not sound like a lot, but it has substantially altered our understanding of the oceans here. Previously, it was thought these mega-currents were locked into the trenches and mountains of the deep sea floor, says Rintoul, in the same way poured molten metal must conform to a mold. "It was a surprise to see them shifting at all. In some regions the shifts are much greater, up to 400 miles."
        As winds and ocean currents have been driven south, there have been alarming side effects, says Rintoul. "We have seen changes in the last few years that even 5 or 10 years ago we would have thought highly unlikely," he says. The sea is hotter, for example, and less salty: "There's warming, and freshening of the deep ocean and the surface ocean, shifts in the latitude of the major currents, and changes in the ice driven in part by the wind, and in part by the ocean."
        These shifts are happening in oceans that are vital to understanding our global climate system, says Joellen Russell, an associate professor in biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona who has explored and studied the southern oceans. The ocean currents here are so powerful, because the water column is so deep'--between 1.2 to 2.5 miles'--and so consistently cold: "It's the one place that the deep abyssal waters'--apart from the North Atlantic'--connect to the surface," she says. "This is where you see the lungs of the ocean working, where you get oxygen in, and you bring up carbon-rich and nutrient rich waters to the surface. It's what makes it so productive." The Antarctic Circumpolar Current transports 130 million cubic meters of water per second eastwards. The next most powerful current, the Gulf Stream, carries around 40 million per second, Russell says.
        But it's that very deepness, coldness, and power that allows these oceans to absorb so much of the heat that manmade climate change is generating. "The Southern Ocean takes up something like 70 percent'--plus or minus 30 percent'--of all the anthropogenic heat that goes under the ocean," says Russell. "This is one of the few areas of the global ocean that is immediately and definitely playing a role in the temperature on land, because it's taking up all this anthropogenic heat and carbon. The whole ocean is doing that, but here it's doing it more than it ought to, which is giving us a moment of grace."
        "This is one of the few areas of the global ocean that is immediately and definitely playing a role in the temperature on land."
        The westerly winds here have increased by about 20 percent over the last 20 years, according to Russell's 2006 investigation into the trends, messing with the overall system that we rely on for our climate stability'--and potentially shortening this so-called "grace" period where the oceans are giving us a helping hand. "It can do loads of things to the climate system," says Matthew England, joint director of Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. "It can decrease the amount of carbon you can get into the oceans'...It can also affect the temperatures off the Antarctic ice shelf, which is a real worry."
        Australian search and rescue officers scour the ocean for signs of missing flight MH370. Australian Department of Defence
        The southern oceans are a place of wild extremes, says Russell, conditions which have made studying'--and searching'--these oceans difficult, dangerous, and expensive. "The Southern Hemisphere winds are 30 percent stronger than the Northern Hemisphere winds," she says. "They don't have speed bumps, in the same way that the Rockies and the Himalayas provide in the Northern Hemisphere. They just get a little, tiny tickle from the Andes. But mostly they just roar." On the surface of the oceans, she says, there are "miserable winds" and "huge enormous, towering seas," and underneath the surface, driving currents. "Mother nature can crush your boat like a beer can." Bad for science, and also a concern, Russell says, for any ongoing search efforts.
        "When things happen in the Indian [Ocean], we find out a how little infrastructure we actually have in place," Russell says, referring to everything from ports from which boats can be deployed, to data installations to monitor the changing oceans.
        That means scientists are playing catchup with the data, says Matthew England from UNSW, and there are basic holes in our understandings of the ocean. "The reality is that the ocean there is very poorly measured," he says. "We have some evidence from satellites, but not nearly enough measurements, not nearly enough understanding of the flow patterns there. We largely rely on models to piece that together. There's a bit of guesswork there."
        All three scientists agree that new technology is making data collection in this vast unknown a little easier, though there's a lot ground to make up. "Argo floats" are battery-powered autonomous robots that park themselves under the surface of the ocean and transmit all sorts of useful data that can help scientists map the ocean, and the climate, more clearly. "For us, this is our revolution, this is our Hubble space telescope. This is the tool that has completely changed the game," says Rintoul.
        Deploying an "Argo float" in the Southern Ocean Alicia Navidad/CSIRO
        But Russell warns there still so many more secrets to unlock before we can truly understand how we are changing some of Earth's most powerful systems. "This is one of those grand challenges, one of those big things that is really hard. We have to grapple with Mother Nature and try to say, 'Look lady, give us your secrets! We won't get rough with you, please don't get rough with us!'"
      Plane-crash film to move forward despite similarities with flight MH370 | Culture | The Guardian
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Mon, 24 Mar 2014 14:52
        Art imitating life? '... Deep Water contains similarities to the ongoing situation with flight MH370. Photograph: Mak Remissa/EPA
        An Australian drama about a plane which crashes on its way to China is to move forward despite unfortunate similarities with missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.
        Alister Grierson's film Deep Water will centre on the fate of a group of passengers who survive when their plane goes down during a flight to Beijing. The film-maker, whose 3D cave diving disaster movie Sanctum is one of the highest-grossing Australian films of all time, admitted the plot of his film tallied in some ways with real-life events.
        "The similarities and timing is interesting and I can see why anecdotally the two things link up. It's a tricky thing," he told Mail Online. "But in simple terms, Deep Water is about an accident that happens on an aeroplane which goes down in the ocean, and the survivors trying to stay alive afterwards. It's more complicated than that as there's villains and sharks, but it's a fun action/adventure with thrills and spills and scares.
        "Nobody knows what has happened with the Malaysian aeroplane. We're yet to find out whether it will be revealed as a malfunction or even found."
        Grierson said Deep Water would not hit cinemas for around two years, allowing the furore around real-life events to die down before the movie debuts on the big screen. Likely to be a Chinese co-production, the film began pre-production in Queensland just prior to 8 March, when MH370 went missing during its flight from Kuala Lumpur international airport to Beijing capital international airport.
        Grierson was handpicked by James Cameron to use the Canadian film-maker's 3D Fusion Camera System on Sanctum. The film opened in February 2011 and subsequently took more than $100m (£60.5m) at the global box office.
        Images taken by Chinese and French satellites and separate sightings of scattered debris have now become the focus of the search for flight MH370 in the Indian ocean. On Sunday, Malaysian authorities said new French satellite images showed "potential objects" related to the flight in the seas off Australia.
      AP News : Pilots' mental health a concern amid jet mystery
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Mon, 24 Mar 2014 15:44
        DAVID KOENIGPublished: YesterdayDALLAS (AP) - Reinforced doors with keypad entries. Body scanners and pat-downs. Elaborate crew maneuvers when a pilot has to use the restroom. All those tactics are designed to keep dangerous people out of the cockpit. But what if the pilot is the problem?
        With no answers yet in the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370; investigators have said they're considering many options: hijacking, sabotage, terrorism or catastrophic equipment failure. Nobody knows if the pilots are heroes who tried to save a crippled airliner or if one collaborated with hijackers or was on a suicide mission.
        Whatever the outcome, the mystery has raised concerns about whether airlines and governments do enough to make sure that pilots are mentally fit to fly.
        "One of the most dangerous things that can happen is the rogue captain," said John Gadzinski, a Boeing 737 captain and aviation-safety consultant. "If you get somebody who - for whatever reason - turns cancerous and starts going on their own agenda, it can be a really bad situation."
        Malaysia Airlines said this week that its pilots take psychological tests during the hiring process.
        "We will obviously look into all these and see whether we can strengthen, tighten all the various entry requirements and examinations," CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said. He did not describe the tests.
        Many U.S. airlines also perform mental health screenings when pilots and crew apply for jobs.
        "The airlines have a lot of data on what a successful pilot looks like, and the mental aspect is a big part of that," says Brad Tate, a pilot for a leading U.S. airline. He said he's known applicants who were rejected because of their performance on a standardized mental test.
        "I have never once flown with somebody who I questioned their mental health," Tate says.
        Once a pilot is hired, however, U.S. airlines rarely if ever test a pilot again for mental health, say several experienced pilots. According to Federal Aviation Administration rules, U.S. pilots must pass a physical exam annually or every six months, depending on their age, but there is no specific requirement for a mental-health test. Buried in 333 pages of instructions, the FAA tells doctors that they should "form a general impression of the emotional stability and mental state" of the pilot.
        The FAA does require pilots to report any use of prescription drugs, substance abuse, arrests for drunken driving, "mental disorders of any sort" and if they have attempted suicide. Some conditions disqualify a person from being an airline pilot, including bipolar disease, a "severe" and repeated personality disorder, and psychosis. To a large degree, though, pilots are on the honor system. If they don't tell their doctor or check a box on a government form that they're depressed or suicidal, there is no certainty anyone will ever find out.
        About 400,000 U.S. pilots - from the airlines to private aviation and student pilots - apply for a medical certificate each year. From 2008 through 2012, only 1.2 percent were rejected, according to the FAA, which did not say how many failed due to mental-health issues.
        In 2010, the FAA lifted a 70-year-old ban on pilots taking antidepressants. Randy Babbitt, then the FAA administrator, said one reason for dropping the ban was a belief that pilots were secretly taking the drugs but just not telling anyone. Federal health officials estimate that nearly 10 percent of the adult population suffers from mood disorders, and aviation officials assume that the rate among pilots is about the same.
        The FAA declined to make an official available for an interview.
        Gregory Ostrom, a doctor in Elgin, Ill., estimates that he has seen 200 pilots a month for the past 13 years and calls them "great people." The most common mental issue he sees is obsessive-compulsive behavior - pilots are perfectionists. But he admits that his examinations aren't psychiatric in nature.
        "Nobody sits down and says, 'Tell me about your home life,'" he said.
        Ostrom said he relies on his experience observing patients to know whether to question a pilot's emotional state. About once every three years he is concerned enough to refer somebody to the FAA for a decision on mental fitness, and those are almost always student pilots, he said. Even if there was a formal psychiatric review, Ostrom is not sure that it would make flying any safer. People can snap months after seeming normal during an exam.
        "A person who is suicidal today may not have been for the last 10 years, but his circumstances may have changed dramatically," he said.
        Doctors who issue medical clearances must be approved by the FAA. Most are generalists, not psychiatrists, and that troubles New York attorney Jonathan Reiter. He sued JetBlue Airways and reached a confidential settlement on behalf of 35 passengers after a pilot had a nervous breakdown in the middle of a cross-country flight in 2012. He said the pilot got his medical clearance from an osteopath in Florida.
        "They hand this off to someone who's not trained in psychiatric investigation, and there's no requirement to conduct a psychiatric interview, even a rudimentary one," Reiter said. "The whole vetting process is paying lip service to the issue of mental illness."
        There are about 72,000 airline pilots in the U.S. There have been no fatal accidents on a so-called mainline U.S. airline since 2001, and none on a regional carrier since a Colgan Air plane hired by Continental Airlines crashed in 2009 near Buffalo, N.Y., killing all 49 people on the plane and one on the ground. That crash was blamed on pilot error. The largest pilots' union says the safety track record validates the screening system.
        "You're sitting down with a doctor twice a year, going through a series of questions related to a lot of matters," said Lee Moak, president of the Air Line Pilots Association. "We have the safest airspace in the world. This is another indicator that our members are healthy physically and mentally."
        It is rare for the public to hear about a pilot having a mental breakdown, but not unprecedented:
        - The JetBlue pilot who left the cockpit and ran through the cabin, ranting about Jesus and al-Qaida. Passengers tackled him, and the co-pilot made an emergency landing in Texas. The 49-year-old pilot had passed his medical exam three months earlier. He was charged with interfering with a flight crew but found not guilty due to insanity. A later psychiatric evaluation was sealed by the court.
        - On a cargo flight in 1994, an off-duty FedEx pilot facing a disciplinary hearing attacked the cockpit crew with a hammer and a spear gun before being subdued.
        Pilot suicide is suspected in some deadly crashes in other countries:
        - A top aviation official in Mozambique said that a preliminary investigation into a November 2013 crash that killed 33 people pointed to a deliberate act by the pilot, who apparently locked the co-pilot out of the cockpit. The investigation is continuing.
        - In 1999, U.S. investigators determined that the co-pilot of an EgyptAir plane deliberately crashed into the Atlantic shortly after takeoff from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. All 217 people on board died.
        - In 1997, SilkAir Flight 185 plunged into a river in Indonesia, killing all 104 aboard. U.S. investigators said that the pilot probably crashed on purpose, but an Indonesian investigation was inconclusive.
        - In 1982, a Japan Airlines jet plunged into Tokyo Bay while approaching Haneda Airport. The captain, who had previously been grounded for mental illness, reversed some of the engines. Twenty-four of the 174 people on board were killed.
        ___
        Joan Lowy in Washington and Jim Gomez in Manila contributed to this report.
        Contact David Koenig at http://www.twitter.com/airlinewriter
      Pilots' mental health a concern amid jet mystery: Little mental health guidance in 333 pages of FAA instructions
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        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 19:15
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    EUROLand
      Spain: One million march in Madrid against austerity
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        Source: English
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:14
        By Alejandro L"pez24 March 2014Under the banner ''No more cuts!'' hundreds of thousands of workers, pensioners and youth took to the streets Saturday in Spain's capital, Madrid. They were demonstrating against austerity measures, evictions, unemployment and poverty.
        The genesis of the demonstration was one month ago when eight columns of protesters, which organisers called the ''Marches of Dignity'', set out from different cities across Spain to converge on Madrid. Hundreds of thousands more people joined on Saturday, travelling by train, cars and buses. According to organisers, the demonstration was 1 million strong.
        The main organisers were the Andalusian Workers' Union (Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores, SAT), the Movement of Mortgage Victims (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, PAH) and the Civic Front ''We Are The Majority'' (Frente C­vico Somos Mayor­a, FCSM) of the former leader of the United Left (Izquierda Unida, IU), Julio Anguita. Added to this, another 300 organisations supported the protesters, ranging from feminist groups, to pseudo-left parties such as Izquierda Anticapitalista, En Lucha and El Militante, to trade unions and anti-austerity organisations. They were joined by many organisations that emerged out of the mass ''Indignados'' protests of 2011.
        Chants of ''Rise! Rise! We will fight!'''--''No to unemployment, no to exile, no to insecurity. March, march, march for dignity'''--''What do we want? Work!'' could be heard. One bloc of young protesters chanted, ''No to unemployment, exile, or precariousness''.
        Marchers held handmade placards denouncing the austerity measures of the ruling Popular Party (PP) government. In addition to red flags, there were flags of the Andalusian region, the Second Spanish Republic, and the anarcho-syndicalists. Many wore the T-shirts of the anti-eviction organisation Stop Evictions (Stop Desahucios) and PAH, whilst many others wore green, white and blue T-shirts representing the social movements or ''waves'' against cuts in public services.
        Protesters also chanted against laws and recent measures carried out by the government. Marchers shouted ''Free unrestricted abortion!'' directed at the Church and the government's latest abortion law that will turn the clock back 30 years. Another chant was ''no person is illegal'' and ''they did not die, they were murdered'', in reference to the 15 migrant workers who drowned on February 6 trying to reach Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in North Africa. Police shot over 150 rubber bullets at the migrants as they were trying to reach shore.
        In addition to students, unemployed and pensioners, teachers, firemen, miners, health care workers, civil servants and many others participated. Factory workers from the on-going struggles in Panrico and Coca-Cola also marched in defence of their jobs.
        At the end of the demonstration, a group of mostly young protesters clashed with police, throwing stones and firecrackers, as the police used tear gas and rubber bullets. Figures released by the emergency service said that 101 people were injured (67 of them police), and 27 arrested, three of them minors.
        On the same day in Berlin, a solidarity protest was held by mostly Spanish youth forced to emigrate due to the economic conditions in Spain. Eva told the online newspaper Pºblico, ''We're here because it's important that they know they have the support of the exiles, of those of us who have been forced to leave. We are also here to fight for our right to return, because if things continue like they are it will be impossible.''
        In anticipation of the demonstration, Madrid's authorities closed down the centre of the city for 12 hours and mobilized 1,750 anti-riot police, in addition to the hundreds of National Police and other security forces. According to the organisers, 100 buses had been stopped and searched by the infamous Civil Guard before they reached Madrid.
        The Madrid regional PP government immediately launched a smear campaign against the protesters. Madrid's premier, Ignacio Gonzlez, provocatively declared, ''The same things you find in their manifesto are also in the political programme of Golden Dawn, a Greek neo-Nazi group''. On the same day, he stated, ''Today the radical left is protesting on the streets. We hope that they do so as long as they don't destroy everything.''
        Even more provocative was the speech of his number two, the premier's adviser Salvador Victoria, who declared, ''The Europe that will be drawn for the next few years should be seen as a reference of individual liberties against the threats of socialists, social-democrats and communists.''
        The latest demonstration once again shows the readiness of the working class to fight against the austerity measures. Since the crisis erupted in 2008, the PP government and its Socialist Party (PSOE) predecessor have imposed billions of euros in cuts, gutting public health care and education. They have imposed new labour laws facilitating redundancies, flexibility and destroying job security.
        The class tensions in Spain are brewing a social explosion. Unemployment has risen to 6 million, (26 percent of the active population). Of these, 37 percent have lost all welfare benefits. Some 630,000 families now receive no income whatsoever. According to the NGO Caritas there are currently 3 million people living on less than '‚¬307 per month, whilst Eurostat confirms the existence of 13 million people (28 percent of the population) living in risk of poverty or social exclusion. In 2008 it was 23 percent.
        This has led to resistance on the part of the workers and unemployed. An average of 27 protests are held every day and 184 strikes broke out between January and February amounting to 2,668,556 lost hours, an increase of nearly 6 percent from the same period the year before.
        The support for official politics is at an all-time low. Polling for the PP and the PSOE has slumped to 32 percent and 26 percent respectively, the lowest joint-turnout since the transition to democracy in 1978. The unions also fare badly. The latest poll shows that 24 percent of those who left the unions in the last year did so because these organizations ''did not do anything'', 19 percent because of ''differences with other members'', and 14 percent because ''they were not important''.
        It is under these conditions that the recent mass demonstration must be put into context. The ruling class is depending ever more on the pseudo-left parties and social movements that organised Saturday's protests to channel disgruntled workers and unemployed into empty protests. Most of these groups orbit the Communist Party-led IU, which is imposing cuts in collaboration with the PSOE in the regional government of Andalusia. In two years, the regional government has cut health care by 10.8 percent and education by 8.6 percent, totalling '‚¬2.6 billion.
        Workers must break with the bankrupt perspective of pressure politics being promoted by these organisations and people like Diego Canamero, spokesman of the SAT, one of the main organisers of the demonstration. In an interview before the march he stated that the main aim of the protest was to create ''a tide of citizens that will restore the dignity of the capital'', adding that ''Either the government responds to our demands or it must pack its bags.''
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    Hillary 2016
      ENDA-Employment Non-Discrimination Act - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 03:49
        The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is legislation proposed in the United States Congress that would prohibit discrimination in hiring and employment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity by employers with at least 15 employees.
        ENDA has been introduced in every Congress since 1994 except the 109th. Similar legislation has been introduced without passage since 1974.[1] The bill gained its best chance at passing after the Democratic Party broke twelve years of Republican Congressional rule in the 2006 midterm elections. In 2007, gender identity protections were added to the legislation for the first time. Some sponsors believed that even with a Democratic majority, ENDA did not have enough votes to pass the House of Representatives with transgender inclusion and dropped it from the bill, which passed the House and then died in the Senate. President George W. Bush threatened to veto the measure. LGBT advocacy organizations and the LGBT community were divided over support of the modified bill.
        In 2009, following Democratic gains in the 2008 elections, and after the divisiveness of the 2007 debate, Rep. Barney Frank introduced a transgender-inclusive version of ENDA. He introduced it again in 2011, and Sen. Jeff Merkley introduced it in the Senate. President Barack Obama supports the bill's passage.
        Evidence of employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity[edit]In states that have anti-discrimination policies in place, LGB complaints are equivalent to the number of complaints filed based on sex and fewer than the number of complaints filed based on race.[2][3][4]
        The Williams Institute estimates the number of LGBT employees as follows: 7 million private sector employees, 1 million state and local employees, and 200,000 employees of the federal government. Thirty percent of state and local LGBT employees live in California and New York. In comparison, LGB people make up only one half of one percent of state and local employees in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming combined.[5] This suggests that the need for policies to address discrimination may vary markedly from state to state. Surveys that seek to document discrimination on the basis of perceived sexual orientation and/or gender identity are often conducted with a pool of self identified LGBT people, making it difficult to ascertain the impact of this type of discrimination on non-LGBT individuals.
        One source of evidence for hiring discrimination against openly gay men comes from a field experiment that sent two fictitious but realistic resumes to roughly 1,700 entry-level job openings. The two resumes were very similar in terms of the applicant's qualifications, but one resume for each opening mentioned that the applicant had been part of a gay organization in college. The results showed that applicants without the gay signal had an 11.5 percent chance of being called for an interview; openly gay applicants had only a 7.2 percent chance. The callback gap varied widely according to the location of the job. Most of the overall gap detected in the study was driven by the Southern and Midwestern states in the sample '' Texas, Florida, and Ohio. The Western and Northeastern states in the sample (California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and New York) had only small and statistically insignificant callback gaps.[6]
        Transgender people may experience higher rates of discrimination than the LGB population. A survey of transgender and gender non-conforming people conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality found 90 percent of respondents experienced harassment, mistreatment, or discrimination on the job or took actions like hiding who they are to avoid it.[7] In comparison, a review of studies conducted by the Williams Institute in 2007 found that transgender people experienced employment discrimination at a rate 15 to 57 percent.[8]
        It is unclear whether LGBT individuals earn more or less than the general population. In a survey conducted by Harris Interactive, 38 percent of LGBT people report incomes less than $35,000, compared to 33 percent of all U.S. adults over age 18.[9] Some organizations believe that no such gap exists, and that LGBT individuals may in fact have higher incomes than non-LGBT families.
        Provisions[edit]The current version of the bill under consideration in Congress prohibits private employers with more than 15 employees from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Religious organizations are provided an exception from this protection, similar to that found in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Non-profit membership-only clubs, except labor unions, are similarly exempt.
        All versions of the bill, irrespective of the military's changing policies with respect to service by open gays and lesbians, have provided an exclusion for the military as an employer of members of the armed forces, though not as an employer of civilians.[10]
        Since the 111th Congress, the legislation has included language to prevent any reading of the law as a modification of the federal definition of marriage established in the Defense of Marriage Act (1995).[11] Since the 110th Congress, a related provision aimed at non-marital legal relations like civil unions and domestic partnerships prevents requiring an employer to treat unmarried and married couples similarly.[12]
        Legislative activity[edit]Senate vote on Employment Nondiscrimination Act of 1996.[13] Both yes
        One yes, one didn't vote
        One yes, one no
        Both no
        On May 14, 1974, the fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, Reps. Bella Abzug (D-NY) and Ed Koch (D-NY) introduced H.R. 14752, the "Equality Act", which would have added sexual orientation to the protected classes specified in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibited discrimination in employment and access to public accommodations and facilities.[14]
        In the early 1990s, supporters of the legislation decided to focus on employment. Rep. Gerry Studds introduced the Employment Non-Discrimination Act on June 23, 1994.[15] The legislation failed in 1994 and 1995.[16] In 1996, the bill failed on a 49''50 vote in the Senate and was not voted on in the House.[17][18] Its level of support in the Senate may have represented an attempt by some to compensate for their recent support of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which prohibited the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages.[citation needed] These early versions of ENDA did not include provisions to protect transgender people from discrimination[19] and ENDA was not introduced in the 109th Congress.
        110th Congress[edit]House vote on Sexual Orientation Employment Nondiscrimination Act of 2007 by congressional district.[20] Democratic aye
        Republican aye
        Abstention or no representative seated
        Democratic no
        Republican no
        In the 110th United States Congress there were two versions of the bill, both of which provided employment protections similar to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.[21] Reps. Barney Frank, Chris Shays, Tammy Baldwin, and Deborah Pryce introduced H.R. 2015 on April 24, 2007. It included gender identity within its protections. It defined gender identity as "gender-related identity, appearance, or mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, with or without regard to the individual's designated sex at birth." It allowed employers to require adherence "to the same dress or grooming standards for the gender to which the employee has transitioned or is transitioning."[22]
        When that bill died in committee, Frank introduced H.R. 3685 on September 27, 2007, which did not include gender identity and contained exemptions concerning employer dress codes. It was endorsed by the Education and Labor Committee on October 18 and the House of Representatives passed it on November 7, 2007, by a vote of 235 to 184, with 14 members not voting.[23] Frank introduced a separate piece of legislation to prohibit discrimination in employment on the basis of gender identity.[24]
        Some LGBT activist organizations refused to support H.R. 3685 because of its failure to cover gender identity.[25][26] An exception was the Human Rights Campaign, which received wide criticism from the LGBT community for supporting a non-inclusive ENDA.[27] The LGBT activist organizations that refused to support H.R. 3685 argued that not including transgender people undermined the underlying principle of ENDA.[28] They claimed that failure to include gender identity/expression weakened the protection for the portion of the LGBT population that most needed its protections: gender non-conforming people, who they claimed are discriminated against in greater numbers than their gender-conforming compatriots.[citation needed] Others argued that this was ENDA's best chance of passing Congress in thirty years, that civil rights victories have historically been incremental, that concerns about the legislation's protections were unfounded, and that forgoing a chance to provide immediate workplace protections to millions of lesbians, gays and bisexuals was politically and morally wrong.[29]
        111th Congress[edit]On June 24, 2009, Frank introduced H.R. 3017 to ban workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity,[30] with 114 original cosponsors, up from 62 cosponsors for the trans-inclusive bill of 2007."[30] The lead Republican cosponsor was Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL).[31]Republican Main Street Partnership members Mark Kirk (R-IL), Mike Castle (R-DE), Todd Russell Platts (R-PA), Judy Biggert (R-IL), and Leonard Lance (R-NJ) were among the original cosponsors.[32] The bill was referred to the House Education and Labor Committee, which held a hearing on the legislation on September 23, 2009.[33] At the end of the 111th Congress, H.R. 3017 had 203 cosponsors in the House.[34]
        On August 5, 2009, Sen. Jeff Merkley introduced ENDA legislation (S. 1584) that included gender identity,[35] with 38 original cosponsors including Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Susan Collins (R-ME), Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Chris Dodd (D-CT).[36] Sen. Merkley said "It's certainly possible that this could be passed by year's end, though the [congressional] schedule is very crowded."[37] As of March 13, 2010, S. 1584 had 45 co-sponsors and was pending before the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee,[35] which held a hearing on the legislation on November 5, 2009.[38]
        112th Congress[edit]On April 6, 2011, Frank introduced an ENDA bill (H.R. 1397) in the House to ban workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.[39]
        On April 14, 2011, Sen. Jeff Merkley introduced an ENDA bill (S. 811) in the Senate.[40] The bill had 39 original cosponsors. On June 19, 2012, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions held a hearing on the bill, the first such hearing to include testimony by a transgender witness.[41]
        Senate vote on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2013.[42] Both yes
        One yes, one didn't vote
        One yes, one no
        One no, one didn't vote
        Both no
        113th Congress[edit]On April 25, 2013, Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) introduced an ENDA bill in the House (H.R. 1755) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) introduced an ENDA bill in the Senate (S. 815).[43]
        On July 10, 2013, the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee approved ENDA by a 15''7 vote. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) announced he would offer 3 amendments when the Senate takes up the measure.[44]
        A cloture vote in the Senate was held on November 4, 2013, with 61 voting in favor and 30 against, allowing the Senate to avoid a filibuster and to hold a vote in the following days.[45][46] Republican senators Kelly Ayotte (NH), Susan Collins (ME), Orrin Hatch (UT), Dean Heller (NV), Mark Kirk (IL), Rob Portman (OH), and Pat Toomey (PA) voted for cloture,[47] joining 52 of 53 Democratic senators and both independent senators.[48] Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) both supported the legislation, but were unable to attend the cloture vote.[49][50]
        After rejecting an amendment by Sen. Toomey to expand the religious exemptions, by a vote of 43''55,[51] and accepting by unanimous voice vote an amendment by Sen. Portman to prevent government retaliation against religious institutions,[52] the Senate approved ENDA on November 7, 2013, 64''32.[42][53] Arizona Republicans Jeff Flake and John McCain unexpectedly[51] joined Sen. Murkowski and the seven Republicans who had supported three days prior. Once again, both independents and 52 of 53 Democrats supported, this time with McCaskill in attendance but Pennsylvania senator Bob Casey, who supported the bill's passage,[54] absent.
        Arguments[edit]In favor of ENDA[edit]Political proponents of the law intend it to address cases where gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees have been discriminated against by their employers because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Currently, these employees are unable to find protection in the courts because sexual orientation is not considered to be a suspect class by the federal courts and by many U.S. states. Proponents argue that such a law is appropriate in light of the United States Constitution's guarantees of equal protection and due process to all. Advocates argue that homosexuality is not a "choice" but a personal identity, a claim supported by the American Psychology Association (APA), and that all working people have a right to be judged by the quality of their work performance and not by completely unrelated factors.[55] According to a study published in 2001 by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, reports of discrimination based on sexual orientation are roughly equal to those on race or gender.[56] The APA also states that there is significant discrimination against homosexuals in the workforce.[55]
        The Congressional Budget Office in 2002 estimated that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's complaint caseload would rise by 5 to 7% as a result of the proposed law.[57] Assessments of the impact of comparable state policies also show a minimal impact on caseload.[58] Regarding constitutionality, the act incorporates language similar to that of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,[21] which has consistently been upheld by the courts.
        In 1994, Barry Goldwater, a hero among the conservative and libertarian movements, became honorary chairman of a drive to pass a federal law preventing job discrimination on the bias of sexual orientation.[59]
        In opposition to ENDA[edit]Ed Vitagliano, director of research for the American Family Association (AFA), a conservative Christian organization, wrote in 2007 that there was "no real problem of discrimination against homosexuals."[60] He expressed concern about the impact of anti-discrimination laws on religious organizations. He cited a lack of clarity around whether the narrow exemption would apply to support staff and lay employees in addition to churches and clergy.[61] Consumer surveys show that self-identified gay individuals likely have higher incomes than the average US household,[62] and ENDA opponents argue that many gay people hold positions of cultural influence as well.[60]
        Another conservative Christian group, the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), claims that the legislation would have a negative impact on school children by eliminating schools' ability to avoid hiring transgender teachers. The group claims that parents are not being adequately informed of the presence of transgender teachers in their children's classrooms. It argues that children should not be "subjected to [a transgender] man's bizarre sexual transformation", claiming that transgender individuals are "seriously mentally disturbed". The TVC argues that individuals cannot change their sex, even with surgery, and that it is impossible to transition from one sex to another.[63]
        Libertarians argue that laws against private sector discrimination are acts of coercion that infringe on employers' property rights and freedom of association.[64]
        The Catholic Church said ENDA goes beyond prohibiting unjust discrimination and poses several problems. It notes, for example, that the bill: (1) lacks an exception for a "bona fide occupational qualification," which exists for every other category of discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, except for race; (2) lacks a distinction between homosexual inclination and conduct, thus affirming and protecting extramarital sexual conduct; (3) supports the redefinition of marriage, as state-level laws like ENDA have been invoked in state court decisions finding marriage discriminatory or irrational; (4) rejects the biological basis of gender by defining "gender identity" as something people may choose at variance with their biological sex; and (5) threatens religious liberty by punishing as discrimination the religious or moral disapproval of same-sex sexual conduct, while protecting only some religious employers.[65]
        Legislative history[edit]CongressShort titleBill number(s)Gender identity included?Date introducedSponsor(s)# of cosponsorsLatest status103rd CongressEmployment Non-Discrimination Act of 1994H.R. 4636NoJune 23, 1994Gerry Studds(D-MA)137Died in the House Subcommittee on Select Education and Civil RightsS. 2238NoJuly 29, 1994Ted Kennedy(D-MA)30Died in the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources104th CongressEmployment Non-Discrimination Act of 1995H.R. 1863NoJune 15, 1995Gerry Studds(D-MA)142Died in the House Subcommittee on the ConstitutionS. 932NoJune 15, 1995Jim Jeffords(R-VT)30Died in the Senate Committee on Labor and Human ResourcesS. 2056NoSeptember 5, 1996Ted Kennedy(D-MA)3Failed in Senate (49''50)105th CongressEmployment Non-Discrimination Act of 1997H.R. 1858NoJune 10, 1997Christopher Shays(R-CT)140Died in the House Subcommittee on Employer-Employee RelationsS. 869NoJune 10, 1997Jim Jeffords(R-VT)34Died in the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources106th CongressEmployment Non-Discrimination Act of 1999H.R. 2355NoJune 24, 1999Christopher Shays(R-CT)173Died in the House Subcommittee on Employer-Employee RelationsS. 1276NoJune 24, 1999Jim Jeffords(R-VT)36Died in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions107th CongressEmployment Non-Discrimination Act of 2001H.R. 2692NoJuly 31, 2001Christopher Shays(R-CT)193Died in the House Subcommittee on Employer-Employee RelationsEmployment Non-Discrimination Act of 2002S. 1284NoJuly 31, 2001Ted Kennedy(D-MA)44Died in the Senate108th CongressEmployment Non-Discrimination Act of 2003H.R. 3285NoOctober 8, 2003Christopher Shays(R-CT)180Died in the House Subcommittee on Employer-Employee RelationsS. 1705NoOctober 2, 2003Ted Kennedy(D-MA)43Died in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions110th CongressEmployment Non-Discrimination Act of 2007H.R. 2015YesApril 24, 2007Barney Frank(D-MA)184Died in the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil LibertiesH.R. 3685NoSeptember 27, 2007Barney Frank(D-MA)9Passed the House (235''184), died in the Senate111th CongressEmployment Non-Discrimination Act of 2009H.R. 3017YesJune 24, 2009Barney Frank(D-MA)203Died in the Judiciary, House Administration, Education and Labor, and Oversight and Government Reform committees. Hearings held September 23, 2009 in Education and Labor committee.H.R. 2981YesJune 19, 2009Barney Frank(D-MA)12Died in the House Judiciary CommitteeS. 1584YesAugust 5, 2009Jeff Merkley(D-OR)45Died in the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Hearings held November 5, 2009.112th CongressEmployment Non-Discrimination Act of 2011H.R. 1397YesApril 6, 2011Barney Frank(D-MA)171Died in the Education and the Workforce, House Administration, Oversight and Government Reform, and Judiciary committees.S. 811YesApril 14, 2011Jeff Merkley(D-OR)43Died in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee. Hearings held June 12, 2012.113th CongressEmployment Non-Discrimination Act of 2013H.R. 1755YesApril 25, 2013Jared Polis(D-CO)201Referred to the Education and the Workforce, House Administration, Oversight and Government Reform, and Judiciary committees.S. 815YesApril 25, 2013Jeff Merkley(D-OR)56Passed in Senate (64''32), awaiting vote in the House.References[edit]^"Nondiscrimination legislation historical timeline". National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Retrieved November 1, 2011. ^"The State of the Workplace: for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Americans". Human Rights Campaign. Retrieved December 15, 2013. ^Evidence Discrimination based on sexual orientation occurs at a similar rate as sex and race at 4.7 per 10,000, as compared to discrimination based on sex at 5.4 and race at 6.5.^Ramos, Christopher. "Evidence of Employment Discrimination on the Basis of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity: Complaints Filed with State Enforcement Agencies, 1999''2007". The Williams Institute. Retrieved December 16, 2013. ^"Estimates of LGBT Public Employees". The Williams Institute. Retrieved Accessed April 30, 2011. ^Tilcsik, A. (2011). Pride and prejudice: Employment discrimination against openly gay men in the United States. American Journal of Sociology, 117, 586''626.^Grant, Jamie M. "Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey.". National Center for Transgender Equality and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. ^Badgette, M.V. Lee. "Bias in the Workplace: Consistent Evidence of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Discrimination". The Williams Institute. Retrieved December 16, 2013. ^Witeck, Bob. "Ending Employment Discrimination in America: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics About America's LGBT Families". Retrieved December 16, 2013. ^103rd Congress: "For purposes of this Act, the term 'employment or employment opportunities' does not apply to the relationship between the United States and members of the Armed Forces."; 112th Congress: "In this Act, the term 'employment' does not apply to the relationship between the United States and members of the Armed Forces."^111th and 112th Congresses: "In this Act, the term 'married' refers to marriage as such term is defined in section 7 of title 1, United States Code (commonly known as the 'Defense of Marriage Act')."^112th Congress: "Nothing in this Act shall be construed to require a covered entity to treat an unmarried couple in the same manner as the covered entity treats a married couple for purposes of employee benefits."^S 2056 '' Employment Nondiscrimination Act of 1996 '' Voting Record^(October 13, 2007) U.S. Congressmember Bella S. Abzug Stonewall.org. Accessed October 20, 2007.^[Congressional Record, 103rd Congress, 2d Session, 140 Cong. Rec. E 1311; Vol. 140 No. 81 (June 23, 1994).]^Wendland, Joel. (April 9, 2007) A New Beginning for ENDA The Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law. Accessed October 20, 2007.^Bull, Chris. (May 13, 1997) No ENDA in sight '' Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 1996 The Advocate. Accessed October 20, 2007.^Manley, Roslyn. (June 17, 2003) New "Unified" Bill to Replace ENDA: A Left Coast Perspective TG Crossroads. Accessed October 20, 2007; MetroWeekly: Chris Geidner, "Double Defeat," September 15, 2011, accessed February 10, 2012^H.R. 3685^H.R. 3685 (110th): Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2007 (On Passage of the Bill)^ abCivil Rights Act of 1964^Weiss, Jillian Todd. (April 26, 2007) The text of ENDA Transgender Workplace Diversity Blog. Accessed October 20, 2007.^Final Vote Results For HR 3685^Eleveld, Kerry. (September 29, 2007) ENDA to Be Separated Into Two Bills: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity The Advocate. Accessed October 20, 2007.^http://www.thetaskforce.org/activist_center/ENDA_oct1_letter^http://nosubstitutes.org^Schindler, Paul (October 4, 2007). "HRC Alone in Eschewing No-Compromise Stand". Gay City News. Archived from the original on April 9, 2008. Retrieved December 17, 2013. ^Smith, Nadine (September 29, 2007). "A Moment of Truth". The Bilerico Project. Retrieved March 22, 2012. ^Aravosis, John (October 8, 2007). "How did the T get in LGBT?". Salon.com. Retrieved March 22, 2012. ^ abFrank Introduces Trans-Inclusive ENDA|News|Advocate.com:^Johnson, Chris (November 30, 2011). "Pro-LGBT Republican endorses Romney". Washington Blade. Retrieved June 25, 2009. ^Search Results '' THOMAS (Library of Congress)^"Congressional hearing on ENDA: great success!". Bilerico.com. ^Search Results '' THOMAS (Library of Congress):^ abSearch Results '' THOMAS (Library of Congress):^"Merkley, Collins, Kennedy, Snowe Introduce Legislation To End Workplace Discrimination, August 5, 2009". U.S. Senate. Retrieved October 6, 2012. ^Harmon, Andrew (August 5, 2009). "ENDA Possible by Year's End". The Advocate. Retrieved August 5, 2009. As Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives, Merkley successfully managed the enactment of Oregon's state version of ENDA, the Oregon Equality Act. Teigen, Kristin (August 5, 2009). "Senator Jeff Merkley Introduces the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA)". BlueOregon (Mandate Media). Retrieved March 22, 2012. ^"Employment Non-Discrimination Act: Ensuring Opportunity for All Americans". Washington Blade. June 12, 2012. ^Geidner, Chris. "ENDA Introduced '' With 92 Fewer Co-Sponsors Than at the End of the 111th Congress". MetroWeekly. Retrieved April 7, 2011. ^"Merkley, Kirk, Harkin, Collins Introduce Legislation to End Workplace Discrimination". Office of Senator Jeff Merkley. Retrieved April 14, 2011. ^Johnson, Chris. "Trans advocate testifies before Senate on ENDA". Retrieved October 6, 2012. ^ ab"Roll Call Vote On Passage of the Bill (S. 815 As Amended)". www.senate.gov. Retrieved November 7, 2013. ^Benen, Steve. "ENDA introduced with bipartisan backing". Retrieved April 25, 2013. ^"Senate panel advances trans-inclusive ENDA". Washington Blade. ^"Reid sets up Senate vote Monday for ENDA". Washington Blade. October 31, 2013. ^"Gay rights advances in Senate". Politico. November 4, 2013. ^"ENDA Prevails in the Senate, 61-30". Sate. November 4, 2013. ^"Roll Call Vote On Cloture on the Motion to Proceed (Motion to Invoke Cloture on the Motion to Proceed to S. 815". www.senate.gov. Retrieved November 7, 2013. ^Terkel, Amanda (November 4, 2013). "ENDA Vote: Senate Clears Major Hurdle On Bill Barring LGBT Workplace Discrimination". The Huffington Post. Retrieved November 7, 2013. "A spokesman for Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said the senator supports ENDA but was unfortunately unable to make it back from a funeral in time for the vote." ^Brydum, Sunnivie (November 4, 2013). "Senate Passes ENDA on Procedural Vote". The Advocate. Retrieved November 7, 2013. "Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican who voted for the bill in committee, was absent from the chamber when roll call was taken." ^ abBrydum, Sunnivie (November 7, 2013). "BREAKING: Senate Approves ENDA". The Advocate. Retrieved November 7, 2013. ^Cox, Ramsey (November 6, 2013). "Senate adopts ENDA amendment designed to protect churches". The Hill. Retrieved November 7, 2013. ^Peters, Jeremy W. (November 7, 2013). "Senate Approves Ban on Antigay Bias in Workplace". The New York Times. Retrieved November 7, 2013. ^"Casey Statement on Senate ENDA Vote". casey.senate.gov. November 7, 2013. Retrieved November 7, 2013. ^ abExamining the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA): The Scientists Perspective American Psychological Association. Accessed May 22, 2010.^Rubenstein, William B. (January 30, 2002) Do Gay Rights Laws Matter?: An Empirical Assessment The Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law. Accessed October 20, 2007.^(April 24, 2002) CBO Cost Estimate: S. 1284 Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2002 Congressional Budget Office. Accessed October 20, 2007.^"Employment Discrimination against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People in Oklahoma". The Williams Institute. Retrieved May 1, 2011. ^"Barry Goldwater, GOP Hero, Dies". Washington Post. Retrieved November 2, 2013. ^ abViagliano, Ed (September 2007). "How ENDA could begin an Uncivil war". American Family Association Journal (American Family Association). Retrieved May 22, 2010. ^Vitagliano, Ed. "How ENDA Could Begin an Uncivil War". American Family Association Journal. Retrieved April 30, 2011. ^CMI's 3rd Annual Gay and Lesbian Consumer Index Community Marketing, Inc. Accessed May 22, 2010/^"Why It Matters". Traditional Values Coalition. Retrieved April 30, 2011. ^"Context Matters: A Better Libertarian Approach to Antidiscrimination Law". Cato Unbound. Retrieved December 12, 2012. ^"Questions and Answers About the Employee Non-Discrimination Act". United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Retrieved November 4, 2013. External links[edit]
    HCDG
      FAQs about the Supreme Court Case - Hobby Lobby Case
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 03:20
        We've got answers for you.FAQFWhat is the difference between Hobby Lobby's case and the other federal mandate case the Supreme Court decided to hear, Conestoga Wood?The Green family and their family businesses filed Hobby Lobby in Oklahoma, and the Hahn family filed Conestoga Wood in Pennsylvania '' that's about where the differences end. The Hahns are a Mennonite family that objects to potentially life-terminating drugs and devices. The Greens and the Hahns raised nearly identical legal claims in the courts below. The en banc U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Greens and their family businesses, including Hobby Lobby, in June 2013, and a divided panel of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Hahns and Conestoga Wood in July 2013. The Supreme Court will hear both cases on March 25.
        FWhy is Hobby Lobby challenging the federal mandate to provide four specific potentially life-terminating drugs and devices?The legal challenge by the Greens and their family businesses, including Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., has always been about one thing: upholding deeply held religious convictions lived out by compassionate family business owners '' and protected by the law of the land.
        The Greens' and their family businesses' court challenge is based on their commitment to life, and the fact that four specific drugs and devices potentially terminate life.
        Providing these objectionable drugs and devices violates the deeply held religious convictions of the Greens '' the sole owners of their family businesses '' that life begins at conception. Yet refusing to comply with the federal mandate would subject them to an untenable choice of paying substantial fines or discontinuing the outstanding and affordable health insurance plan currently provided to their valued employees.
        Therefore, the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed that the provision violates the rights of the Greens and their family businesses to exercise their religion under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
        FIs Hobby Lobby preventing its employees from buying contraceptives under its plan?Not at all. The Greens and their family businesses respect the individual liberties of all their employees. The Greens and their family businesses have no objection to the other 16 FDA-approved contraceptives required by the law that do not interfere with the implantation of a fertilized egg. They provide coverage for such contraceptives under their health care plan. Additionally, the four objectionable drugs and devices are widely available and affordable, and employees are free to obtain them.
        FBut isn't Hobby Lobby depriving its women employees of health care?Just the opposite: the Greens and their family businesses, including Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., offer their employees '' nearly 70 percent of whom are women '' a robust benefit plan that includes coverage for preventive care and almost all of the contraceptives required under the Affordable Care Act. That plan includes an on-site clinic with no co-pay at Hobby Lobby headquarters, and all full-time employees are eligible to enroll in a generous benefit plan: including medical, dental, prescription drugs, along with long-term disability and life insurance, and a 401(k) plan with a generous company match.
        FWhy should a large corporation be able to claim religious rights?Most Americans today believe that all business should be run not just for profit, but also to serve a wider social purpose: that companies should have a ''corporate conscience.'' The Greens, the sole owners of the family businesses, could not agree more. All of the family members have agreed to operate all aspects of Hobby Lobby and their other family businesses according to their deeply held religious convictions. They do this in ways that greatly benefit their employees, the public and a wide range of charities, from orphanages around the world to ministries across America.
        Hobby Lobby's minimum full-time hourly wages are now more than 90 percent above the federal minimum wage. Minimum wages for part-time employees are also well above the average for retail. Hobby Lobby has increased its minimum wage for full-time hourly employees by $1 an hour for five years in a row.
        And again, Hobby Lobby offers a health care plan far more generous than most in the retail industry, including providing almost all of the contraceptives required under the Affordable Care Act at no additional charge.
        Moreover, the Greens and their family businesses are fully committed to a true work-life balance for their employees. To allow employees to spend time with their families, the Hobby Lobby stores are open only 66 hours per week and close most nights at 8 p.m. In particular, as part of that commitment to employees and their families, Hobby Lobby stores are closed on Sundays '' the most productive and profitable day of the week for any retail business.
        Finally, the Greens live out the greater purpose to which they have committed their businesses through selfless giving. In 2010, Founder and CEO David Green and his wife, Barbara, signed on to the Giving Pledge, agreeing to donate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. A generous portion of the profits of the Green family businesses is devoted to charitable and ministry organizations.
        [An interesting discussion of this issue can be found here.]
        FWhat if corporate owners wanted to deprive their employees of transfusions or any health care at all based on their religious beliefs? Isn't this a bad precedent to set?Absolutely not. This case is about a compassionate family and their businesses living out their deeply held religious convictions in a way that does not threaten the health and well-being of their employees. The U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has held they are protected under federal law. Under that law, courts are required to strike sensible balances between religious freedom and other interests. There's never been a case claiming that kind of exemption, and if there were, courts would probably strike the balance differently than they did here.
        These family business owners who also live out those deeply held religious convictions in their care and concern for their employees, offering pay, work schedules and benefits, including a robust health care plan, that are far more generous than those generally found in the retail industry.
        FAs an admittedly Christian-run company, does Hobby Lobby discriminate against other faiths?The Greens and their family businesses, including Hobby Lobby, respect the religious beliefs of all their employees and customers and do not discriminate. It's worth noting that among the beneficiaries of the Greens' and their family businesses' giving is Yad Vashem, the center for Holocaust research, education and commemoration in Jerusalem.
        FWhat result does the company anticipate at the U.S. Supreme Court?The Greens and their family businesses believe that the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has correctly applied the law, and they are hopeful that the nation's high court will recognize the sincerity of their deeply held religious convictions and affirm the appeals court's decision.
        FWhen are oral arguments and a decision expected?Oral arguments have been scheduled for Tuesday, March 25, 2014. A decision should be announced sometime before the end of the court term in June 2014.
        FIs Hobby Lobby imposing the religious views of its owners on its employees?Of course not. The Greens and their family businesses support the individual liberties of all their employees. The very notion turns the facts and the law on its head. In fact, it is the federal mandate that violates the deeply held religious beliefs of the Greens by forcing them to violate the law or violate their belief that life begins at conception '' a choice no company should have to make. And by threatening extensive fines, the mandate would place a substantial burden on the Greens' practice of their faith under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That's why a federal appeals court ruled in their favor. Meanwhile, Hobby Lobby offers coverage for 16 of 20 drugs and devices included in the mandate in its health plan, and the four objectionable drugs and devices are widely available and affordable, and employees are free to obtain them.
        "Hobby Lobby is a great place to work."Matt Tucker
        "Faith plays into every aspect of what my family does with the company."Lauren Green McAfee
        ''For our family, faith is a definitive piece of who we are.''Tyler Green
        "I appreciate how David and Barbara Green truly live out their religious values but also respect the beliefs of others."Bridgette Johnson
        "At Hobby Lobby, I am part of a family, not a corporation."Hiep Hoang
        "Hobby Lobby offers great work-life balance, closing every day in time for me to have dinner with my family, as well as every Sunday."Maria Costillo
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      Home | The Hobby Lobby Case
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 03:17
        A short description of the caseWHAT'S AT STAKEWhat They're SayingR On March 25, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., a landmark case addressing the constitutionally guaranteed rights of business owners to operate their family companies without violating their deeply held religious convictions.Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. will be decided before the end of the Supreme Court's term in June 2014.The nation's highest court accepted the federal government's appeal of a June decision by the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals that a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate to provide potentially life-terminating drugs and devices in employee insurance plans places a substantial burden on the religious freedoms of Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., which is solely owned by founder David Green and his family.
        The Greens and their family businesses '' who have no moral objection to providing 16 of the 20 FDA-approved contraceptives required under the HHS mandate and do so at no additional cost to employees under their self-insured health plan '' took the unusual step in October of joining the government in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case, despite the family's victory in the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.
        A short description of the caseWhat they're sayingWhat's At StakeZThe U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take up Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., a landmark case
        "Hobby Lobby is a case of extraordinary importance. It tests our nation's commitment to protect individuals and groups in the full and free exercise of their rights of religious conscience."- Christopher Wolfe, Emeritus Professor at Marquette University and Co-Director of the Thomas International Center
        "The Greens are doing more than just trying to relieve themselves from an unjust burden placed upon them by their government. They are standing up for the right of each and every one of us to practice our faith in all aspects of our lives including our business enterprises."- Francis J. Beckwith, Professor of Philosophy & Church-State Studies at Baylor University
        No one can demand that religion should be relegated to the inner sanctum of personal life, without influence on societal and national life.Pope Francis
        Every American who loves freedom should shudder at the precedent the government is trying to establish by denying Hobby Lobby the full protection of the First Amendment.Rick Warren, Pastor of Saddleback Church
        Our religious convictions aren't reduced to mere opinions we hide in our hearts and in our hymns. Our religious convictions inform the way we live.Russell Moore, President of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission
        Stay informed about the caseIn the NewsRSS Feed WJustices Seem Open to Religious Claims by CompaniesIn a long and lively argument that touched on medical science and moral philosophy, the Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed ready to accept that at least some for-profit corporations may advance claims based on religious freedom.
        Read More DSupreme Court Hears Landmark Hobby Lobby CaseHobby Lobby co-founder Barbara Green: "Our family started Hobby Lobby built on our faith and together as a family. We've kept that tradition for more than forty years and we want to continue to live out our faith in the way we do business."
        Read More DRick Warren: If the Contraceptive Mandate Passes, it Will Ruin a Core U.S. IdeologyDoes our Constitution guarantee the freedom of religion, or does it merely allow a more limited freedom to worship? The difference is profound. Worship is an event. Religion is a way of life.
        Read More DHobby Lobby's Steve Green Stands on Faith Against HHS MandateThe greatest misconception about the Green family and this case, Steve Green says, ''is that we are trying to impose our religion on these workers or others. Not at all! That would violate our religion to do that." Yet through that religion, he said, they can face any court ruling with peace of mind.
        Read More DAre Firms Entitled to Religious Protections?Hobby Lobby's founder objects to the health law, but the government says for-profit companies aren't entitled to religious-freedom protections.
        Read More DReligious Exemptions Are Vital for Religious LibertyIn one of the most religiously diverse nations on earth, religious exemptions protect people in situations where legislative or executive acts might otherwise unnecessarily force them to violate their consciences.
        Read More DRestricting Religion Will Not Unite UsWe may long for the day when people become more accepting of one another, but achieving that end by forcing people to violate their own conscience tears at the already frayed cords that bind us together as a nation.
        Read More DAffordable Care Act - Or War on Conscience?A month doesn't pass without the administration issuing another exemption from a mandate previously held out as nonnegotiable... Why not exempt employers for issues of conscience?
        Read More DHobby Lobby Owners Deserve Their Religious RightsIf a corporation can have an "imputed racial identity" based on the race of its owners, it can have "imputed religious identity" based on the religion of its owners.
        Read More DGovernment Can't Have it Both Ways on Religious FreedomThe government cannot force families to abandon their faith just to earn a living.
        Read More DContraception Mandate DoublecrossThe conscience clause that the Green and Hahn families rely upon is consistent with scores of federal and state laws dating back more than 40 years.
        Read More DThe Basic Right of a Free PeopleAs a nation, we should insist that our laws should encourage and support, not penalize, citizens who seek to consistently adhere to their moral convictions.
        Read More DUnderlying Hobby LobbyWhen individuals or groups are denied participation, or equal participation, in the political process, the laws are apt to become oppressive as to them. This poses a serious danger for religious liberty.
        Read More DA Hobson's Choice: Religious Freedom in the Business WorldThe government burdens the businesses exercise of religion by forcing them to either renounce their religious beliefs or pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines each year.
        Read More DCorporate Personhood: For Me But Not for Thee?The law does not ask courts to pretend that corporations are robots because corporations are owned and operated by people.
        Read More DAccommodations, Religious Freedom, and the Hobby Lobby CaseRFRA says, for all of us, that religious freedom matters, that it matters to policy winners and losers alike, and that if we can accommodate religious believers' practices and objections, then we should.
        Read More DOur Legal Heritage Favors Religious FreedomThe best of our legal heritage favors recognition of religious freedom exercised by family-run businesses and closely held companies.
        Read More DBusinesses and the Right to Pursue Moral ValuesValues are good for some companies, just not Hobby Lobby?
        Read More DIn a Battle of Semantics, the Family Businesses Win with Scientific FactsNo matter how the government spins the issues and tries to frame the semantics, the science, history, and tradition are on the side of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga.
        Read More DChallenge to Affordable Care Act Contraceptive Mandate Could Save Nation from Dangerous PathDoes running a business mean you have to silence your conscience? Next month, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that will decide that question.
        Read More DHigh Court Should Nix Contraception OrderThe First Amendment's language on freedom of religion could not be more clear: ''Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.''
        Read More DMandates Make Martyrs Out of Corporate OwnersThe government can't force individuals to forfeit their free exercise rights when they incorporate a business...
        Read More DWhy is RFRA Still Valid Against the Federal Government?Does the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) entitle a for-profit corporation to an exemption from the requirement of providing employees with health coverage that includes contraception, on the ground that the owners of the corporation have religious objections to providing such coverage?
        Read More DCongress Answered This Question: Corporations are CoveredThe threshold issue in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores is whether any plaintiff's free exercise of religion is substantially burdened within the meaning of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
        Read More DObama's War on the First AmendmentHobby Lobby has courageously stood up for its religious principles against this requirement despite the threat of fines of $1.3 million daily for not complying with this Obamacare mandate.
        Read More DHobby Lobby Files Supreme-Court Brief Challenging DOJ ArgumentsThe Green family's lawyers argue that the owners of the craft store chain ''exercise their faith through Hobby Lobby, and those beliefs are entitled to protection."
        Read More DSTRANGE: Defending Faith from Federal BulliesAs Attorney General of Alabama, I am proud to see our state, along with 20 other states, stand shoulder to shoulder with the Becket Fund in opposing the Department of Health and Human Services mandate.
        Read More DJindal Warns of 'Silent War' on Religion in Reagan Library SpeechLouisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal blasted the "silent war" that he said is undermining the nation's basic principles in a major speech Thursday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
        Read More DThe Green Family, the HHS Mandate, and Religious FreedomToday the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, will submit its brief in the Supreme Court case Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby. The case will determine whether the Green family will be forced to choose between four bad options.
        Read More DHobby Lobby Supreme Court Brief Counters Government "Divide and Conquer" Attempt to Violate Business Owners' Religious RightsHobby Lobby asked the U.S. Supreme Court today to protect them from being forced to violate their deeply held religious beliefs or be forced to pay severe fines.
        Read More DObama's Blind Spot on Religious LibertyPresident Obama gave a lovely speech at the recent National Prayer Breakfast '-- and one is reluctant to criticize. But pry my jaw from the floorboards. Without a hint of irony, the president lamented eroding protections of religious liberty around the world.
        Read More DReligious Liberty Should Trump HHS MandateThe Green family, through the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, will file its brief with the Supreme Court Monday seeking relief from paying a daily fine of potentially more than $1.3 million for refusing to violate their Bible-based views on life.
        Read More D56 Briefs Support Hobby Lobby In Supreme Court CaseSupporters include bi-partisan legislators; 20 state governments; law professors and constitutional experts; Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders and organizations; and business and women's groups.
        Read More DU.S. Supreme Court Justices Take Hobby Lobby's Case Challenging Federal MandateThe U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear Hobby Lobby's case regarding the federal mandate for family businesses to provide four specific potentially life-terminating drugs and devices
        Read More DU.S. Supreme Court to Weigh If the Federal Mandate Can StandThe U.S. Supreme Court agrees to take up two potential landmark cases examining whether the federal mandate infringes on the rights of family businesses to religious freedom under the Constitution and federal law
        Read More DThe Federal Mandate and the First AmendmentIn 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corporation v. Sebelius, two cases on the rights of family business owners to operate their companies without violating their deeply held religious convictions
        Read More D1993 Religious Freedom Act is at Heart of Hobby Lobby CaseNearly 20 years after the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was signed into law, the Greens and their family businesses, including Hobby Lobby, challenge the federal government to protect their Constitutionally guaranteed right to religious freedom
        Read More DU.S. Supreme Court to Hear Landmark Hobby Lobby CaseThe U.S. Supreme Court agrees to take up Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., a landmark case addressing the Constitutionally guaranteed rights of business owners to operate their family companies without violating their deeply held religious convictions
        Read More DHobby Lobby Asks Supreme Court to Take Its AppealHobby Lobby asks the U.S. Supreme Court to review its case and decide whether the Green family will be required to provide four specific potentially life-terminating drugs and devices in violation of their religious beliefs
        Read More DUnited States Appeals Hobby Lobby Decision to Supreme CourtWashington, D.C. '-- Today, the United States government asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take the Hobby Lobby case...
        Read More DHobby Lobby Wins Preliminary InjunctionAfter landmark U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, district court grants preliminary injunction
        Read More DHobby Lobby Gets 11th Hour Victory Against the MandateAfter landmark U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, trial court orders government to halt enforcement
        Read More DVICTORY: U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals Overturns Denial of Hobby Lobby InjunctionSends case back to district court for further proceedings and quick resolution
        Read More DU.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals Grants Hobby Lobby Full Court HearingWASHINGTON, DC '' On Friday, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals granted Hobby Lobby's petition for en banc hearing, agreeing to place Hobby Lobby's appeal before the entire court rather than...
        Read More DNine U.S. Senators & Two Representatives: Religious Freedom Includes Hobby LobbyBrief confirms that the bi-partisan Religious Freedom Restoration Act protects Hobby Lobby from the federal mandate to provide four specific potentially life-terminating drugs and devices
        Read More DHobby Lobby Forced to Ask Supreme Court to Halt Federal MandateU.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals denies relief from federal mandate to provide four specific potentially life-terminating drugs and devices
        Read More DHobby Lobby Seeks Emergency Relief from Federal MandateAppeals to U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals to protect Constitutionally guaranteed right to operate family businesses according to deeply held religious convictions
        Read More DFederal Court: Hobby Lobby Must Violate Deeply Held Religious ConvictionsBecket Fund appeals on behalf of the Greens and their family businesses
        Read More D"Hobby Lobby is a great place to work."Matt Tucker
        "Faith plays into every aspect of what my family does with the company."Lauren Green McAfee
        ''For our family, faith is a definitive piece of who we are.''Tyler Green
        "I appreciate how David and Barbara Green truly live out their religious values but also respect the beliefs of others."Bridgette Johnson
        "At Hobby Lobby, I am part of a family, not a corporation."Hiep Hoang
        "Hobby Lobby offers great work-life balance, closing every day in time for me to have dinner with my family, as well as every Sunday."Maria Costillo
        TSign up for the email newsletterStay Up to Date
        Thank you for your support
      Our Company : Hobby Lobby - Hobby Lobby
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 03:16
        Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., located in Oklahoma City, OK, started as an extension of Greco Products, a miniature picture frames company founded in a garage by David Green in 1970. Hobby Lobby officially began operation on August 3, 1972 with a mere 300 square feet of retail space, and has been growing ever since.Today, Hobby Lobby is considered a leader in the arts and crafts industry. We have 603 stores across the nation that average 55,000 square feet and offer more than 67,000 crafting and home decor products. Hobby Lobby is listed as a major private corporation in Forbes and Fortunes list of America's largest private companies, and our company carries no long-term debt.At Hobby Lobby, we value our customers and employees and are committed to:Honoring the Lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with biblical principles.Offering our customers exceptional selection and value in the crafts and home decor market.Serving our employees and their families by establishing a work environment and company policies that build character, strengthen individuals and nurture families.Providing a return on the owner's investment, sharing the Lord's blessings with our employees, and investing in our community.We believe that it is by God's grace and provision that Hobby Lobby has endured. He has been faithful in the past, and we trust Him for our future.Hobby Lobby is THE place to shop with everyday Super Selections and Super Savings! Store hours are Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. and all Hobby Lobby stores are closed on Sunday.
        Our other affiliated companies headquartered in Oklahoma City include Mardel and Hemispheres.
    PedoBear
      'Demmink was w(C)l in beeld bij onderzoek seksfeestjes' - AD.nl
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 22:07
        bewaarDoor: redactie22-3-14 - 08:19 bron: ANPOud-officier: 'Chauffeur topman vertelde over seks in dienstauto'Archiefbeeld van Demmink. (C) ANP.Oud-topman Joris Demmink van het ministerie van Veiligheid en Justitie was wel degelijk in beeld bij het zogeheten Rolodex-onderzoek naar betrokkenheid van hooggeplaatste personen bij seksfeestjes met minderjarige jongens. Dat zegt de Amsterdamse oud-hoofdofficier van justitie Hans Vrakking in een interview met NRC Handelsblad van vandaag.
        Minister van Ivo Opstelten van Veiligheid en Justitie zei begin deze maand nog dat Demmink 'op geen enkele wijze' in het onderzoek is voorgekomen. Volgens Vrakking had de chauffeur van Demmink tegen de BVD (nu AIVD) verteld dat de topman in de dienstauto af en toe seks had met jongens.
        Rolodex-onderzoekVrakking was eind jaren 90 de initiatiefnemer van het Rolodex-onderzoek. Hij vraagt zich in de krant af hoe het kon dat de toenmalig secretaris-generaal van het ministerie van justitie Harry Borghouts op de hoogte was van het zeer geheime onderzoek. 'Waar ben je mee bezig', zou Borghouts verbolgen hebben gevraagd over het feit dat Demmink door de politie werd onderzocht.
        Borghouts zegt zich 'absoluut niet te kunnen herinneren' dat hij Vrakking heeft gebeld. Vrakking spreekt zich voor het eerst uit over de zaak, aldus NRC Handelsblad, omdat er nu mensen worden verhoord naar aanleiding van beschuldigingen van pedofilie van Demmink.
        Verder gaf een andere voormalig topambtenaar van justitie onlangs een interview in de Volkskrant over de zaak. 'Ik voel me niet langer door mijn ambtseed belet opheldering te verschaffen', aldus Vrakking in de NRC.
        Demmink en drie andere namen genoemdBegin deze maand bij de start van een nieuw onderzoek naar betrokkenheid van hooggeplaatste personen bij seksfeestjes met minderjarige jongens, werden behalve de naam van topambtenaar Joris Demmink ook die van drie hoofdofficieren van justitie genoemd.
        Dat bleek uit de getuigenis van Leendert de Koter die destijds, in 1997, betrokken was bij het Rolodexonderzoek als rechercheur van de criminele inlichtingendienst. De namen van Demmink en de drie officieren - Holthuis, Wabeke en Wooldrik - zijn aangedragen door de Rijksrecherche, zo verklaarde De Koter.
        Reactie OpsteltenOpstelten herhaalt in een reactie dat Demmink 'op geen enkele manier is voorgekomen in het Rolodex-onderzoek'. Volgens de minister is 'alles onderzocht dat onderzocht moest worden. Zowel door de AIVD als door het Openbaar Ministerie. De uitkomst was steeds dat er nog geen begin van juistheid is gebleken ten aanzien van de geruchten en aantijgingen.'
        SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVERENRapporteer een fout in het artikel aan onze redactieMeer overgerelateerd nieuwsMeer over(C) 2014 De Persgroep Digital. Alle rechten voorbehouden.Lees de gebruiksvoorwaarden. - Privacy
        Volg het nieuws op onze zustersite in Belgi www.hln.be.
      'Turkije chanteerde justitietop met Demmink'
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: WT Newsfeed
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 21:04
        UTRECHT - In ruil voor een Nederlandse veroordeling van de Koerd Baybasin met vals bewijs, houdt Turkije informatie over misbruik van minderjarige jongens door voormalig topambtenaar Joris Demmink voor zich. Zo chanteerde Turkije de Nederlandse justitietop. Daarvan is ex-politieman Klaas Langendoen overtuigd, zo verklaarde hij maandag als getuige voor de rechtbank in Utrecht.
        In Utrecht wordt een reeks getuigen gehoord op verzoek van stichting De Roestige Spijker. Die onderzoekt het vermoeden dat jongensmisbruik door de toen hoogste baas van justitie Demmink actief in de doofpot is gestopt.
        Voormalig chef van de Criminele Inlichtingendienst (CID) Langendoen baseert zijn conclusie op eigen speurwerk in Turkije. Hij deed onderzoek op verzoek van de advocate van twee Turkse slachtoffers die zeggen door Demmink te zijn misbruikt. Langendoen sprak de twee jongens. Ze vertelden hoe ze door Demmink werden misbruikt en wezen hem aan in een fotoboek van Langendoen.
        Andere hints voor zijn conclusie kreeg Langendoen van een Turkse journalist. Die toonde een video-interview met een chauffeur die jongens moest ronselen voor Demmink. Ook verstrekte hij een rapport waaruit de chantagedeal tussen de Turkse oud-premier Tansu ‡iller en toenmalig minister van justitie Winnie Sorgdrager zou blijken.
        Volgens Langendoen kunnen ex-bordeeljongens bevestigen hoe 'het systeem' uit het Rolodex-onderzoek werkte, waarin hooggeplaatste pedofielen jongens konden misbruiken.
        Demminks advocaten haalden aan dat op de betrouwbaarheid van Langendoens onderzoek valt af te dingen. Hij wordt betaald door het advocatenkantoor van Baybasin, die munitie verzamelt voor een herziening van zijn levenslange straf. Het is ook het advocatenkantoor van de Turkse slachtoffers.
        Langendoen beaamde dat hij richtlijnen voor fotoconfrontaties niet heeft toegepast. Maar rechercheurs die dat w(C)l doen, schitteren door afwezigheid in onderzoeken naar de doofpotaffaire.
      DEMMINK, HEROIN, PEDOPHILE RINGS
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: aangirfan
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 19:26
        In a court in Holland, a former police chief, Klaas Langedoen, has said that 'Turkey blackmailed Joris Demmink' the former boss of the Dutch Justice Ministry.
        'Turkije chanteerde justitietop met Demmink ... - De Telegraaf - Translate this page
        Demmink has been accused of sexually abusing boys in Turkey.
        Langedoen, the former chief of the Dutch Criminal Investigation Department (CID), carried out an investigation in Turkey.The blackmail deal was reportedly arranged between former Turkish Prime Minister Tansu ‡iller and the then Dutch Minister of Justice Winnie Sorgdrager.Baybasin
        Reportedly Turkey blackmailed Demmink so as to get a Kurd called H¼seyin Baybasin put in jail.However, reportedly, Demmink was keen to prevent Baybasin talking about top peole and criminal activitiesand was happy to have Baybasin put in jail.Baybasin is linked to top Turkish government officials involved in heroin smuggling.He became active in the movement to gain greater autonomy for the Kurds and became an enemy of the Turkish government.He took refuge in Holland but was later jailed by the Dutch.Strop om nek Joris Demmink trekt zich strakker, de Baybasin affaire - Translate this pageJORIS DEMMINK allegedly had a role in a child abuse scandal. He was Director General at the Dutch Ministry of Justice.How might the CIA and Mossad control the Netherlands? Are some top Dutch people involved in child abuse and the drugs trade?1. In 1996, Marc Dutroux was arrested in Belgium.
        Documents in the case pointed at the involvement of Dutch politicians in the Dutroux child abuse scandal.
        (Joris Demmink - Wikipedia)The child abuse gangs are well documented. But the child abuse gangs work for the security services. So they are well protected.
        In 1998 Dutch prosecutors in Amsterdam were working on the'Rolodex case'in which high-ranking people were suspected of being members of a child abuse gang.
        (911:Joris Demmink scandal - Wikicompany)Among the suspects were a former cabinet minister, the personal counsel of queen Beatrix and two leading criminal prosecutors.
        The police was preparing to make arrests, when the whole operation was shut down.
        It was later reported, in the so called 'Runderkamp-papers', that a top official in the Ministry of Justice in the Hague, Joris Demmink, played a role in the Rolodex affair.He was suspected of being a member of the child abuse gang.
        He was suspected of leaking information to the suspects.
        Demmink
        In 1998 Dutch TV broadcasted two items about criminals smuggling young children into the Netherlands from Eastern Europe for sexual purposes.
        The TV documentary included telephone-taps from the Rolodex-case.
        (911:Joris Demmink scandal - Wiki.)Reportedly, in these taps one can hear a very high ranking official from the Ministry of Justice named 'Joris' 'ordering' some children for the weekend.
        In 2002 Joris Demmink was appointed Director General at the Dutch Ministry of Justice.
        In 2003 two Dutch magazines published long and detailed stories about Joris Demmink abusing under-aged prostitutes in a public park in the south of the country (city of Eindhoven).
        In 2007 a lawyer for Turkish-Kurdish 'businessman' H¼seyin BaybaÅŸin accused Demmink of sexually abusing children. BALLIN is reportedly a Bilderberger.2. Ernst Hirsch Ballin was born to a Jewish father. (Ernst Hirsch Ballin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
        Reportedly he is a member of Bilderberg. (Bilderberg 2009 Attendance List)
        He has been the Dutch Minister of Justice.
        In 1994, in the so-called IRT (regional detective squad) affair, Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin, and interior minister Ed van Thijn, were forced to resign.
        It became known that the inter regional detective squad (IRT), with permission from both departments, had been bringing in billions of guilders worth of cocaine and other drugs into Holland.
        (Chronology of the Netherlands )
        In 1996 a parliamentary inquiry commission published its report on the IRT affair.
        The commission found that large quantities of drugs had been smuggled into the country and marketed with the help and connivance of the government.
        The commission chairman, Maarten van Traa, was killed in a traffic accident shortly after the report was published.
        Guusje ter Horst3. In August 2006 Guusje Ter Horst was fined for drunk driving.
        In 1980, a coup took place in Suriname, a former Dutch colony.This coup was led by led Desi Bouterse, who is said to be a drugs gangster.
        Joris Demmink and Suriname.Bouterse, who has been linked to the drugs trade.Allegedly, the Netherlands was involved in the coup.
        A report on the coup disappeared "while in the hands of Jorris Demmink."
        dossiers on Suriname
        According to a former official, Demmink had a sexual relationship with a young member of the Suriname military who was linked to Bouterse.dossiers on Suriname
        In 1994, in Holland, it became clear that Dutch police and government officials had been involved in bringing drugs into Holland and selling them to the public (The IRT affair).(Chronology of the Netherlands )
        Baybasin"Baybasin ... said that Turkey had put pressure on the Netherlands to arrest him by threatening to disclose information on Demmink's abuse of minors in Turkey."Michel Nihoul was central to the Dutroux child kidnapping and murder affair. Dutroux is believed to have been working for the security services.The Netherlands, and its neighbours, appear to be rather sick?In 2000, Nick Davies wrote in The Guardian
        (When sex abuse can lead to murder World news The Guardian):
        "Terry... had come across some of the paedophiles the detectives were investigating - in Amsterdam, where he said they had become involved with a group of exiled British child abusers who had succeeded in commercialising their sexual obsession.
        "The exiled paedophiles were trafficking boys from other countries; running legitimate gay brothels and selling under-aged boys 'under the counter'; they had branched out into the production of child pornography.
        "And they had killed some of them.
        "One boy had simply been shot through the head, Terry said: he had been causing trouble and had been executed in front of several paedophiles.
        "Another, he believed, had been thrown into one of the canals.
        "But the one about whom he spoke the most was a boy who had been tortured and killed in the most painful fashion in the course of producing a pornographic video."
        When sex abuse can lead to murder World news The Guardian
        DEMMINK; CHILD ABUSE; NARCOTICS; FORTUYN .Joris Demmink and his party have been photographed and recorded while raping children in Marmaris, Turkey
    Mac n Cheese
      CANDANAVIANS MAC AND CHEESE-''Manufacturing Taste'' by Sasha Chapman | The Walrus | September 2012
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 00:46
        Tell me what you think of Kraft Dinner, and I will tell you who you are. If you belong to Canada's comfortable class, you probably think of the dish as a childish indulgence and a clandestine treat. The bite-sized tubular noodles are so yielding and soft, you will say a little sheepishly, and next to impossible to prepare al dente. The briny, glistening orange sauce tastes a little bit sweet and a little bit sour '-- at once interesting, because of the tension between the two flavour poles, but not overly challenging or unfamiliar. And its essential dairyness connects it to that most elemental of foods: a mother's milk. KD is the ultimate nursery food, at least if you were born and raised in Canada, where making and eating cheese has been a part of the culture since Champlain brought cows from Normandy in the early 1600s '-- a tradition nearly as venerable as the fur trade. It may be the first dish children and un-nested students learn to make (''make,'' of course, being a loose term; ''assemble'' may be more accurate). This only strengthens its primal attractions.If you recently immigrated to Canada, you will have a very different association with KD, as a dish that polarizes family meals. Your children nag you for it, having acquired a taste for it at school, or at the house next door. And if you count yourself among the 900,000 Canadians who use food banks each month, you may associate the iconic blue and yellow box with privation: a necessary evil while you wait for your next cheque to arrive, bought with your last dollar, and moistened with your last spoonfuls of milk.
        The point is, it's nearly impossible to live in Canada without forming an opinion about one of the world's first and most successful convenience foods. In 1997, sixty years after the first box promised ''dinner in seven minutes '-- no baking required,'' we celebrated by making Kraft Dinner the top-selling grocery item in the country.
        This makes KD, not poutine, our de facto national dish. We eat 3.2 boxes each in an average year, about 55 percent more than Americans do. We are also the only people to refer to Kraft Dinner as a generic for instant mac and cheese. The Barenaked Ladies sang wistfully about eating the stuff: ''If I had a million dollars / we wouldn't have to eat Kraft Dinner / But we would eat Kraft Dinner / Of course we would, we'd just eat more.'' In response, fans threw boxes of KD at the band members as they performed. This was an act of veneration.
        True, Canada is just one outpost in Kraft's globalized food system. The company's iconic brands are on the rise in emerging markets, which is to say in the ancient cultures beyond the borders of North America, Europe, and Australia. In China, another Kraft product, the Oreo, has been re-engineered for the Asian market, with such success that it is now the country's number one cookie. But this is history repeating itself: our own food system was colonized long ago by Kraft, a company that has always striven to give us (or at least our consumer, magpie selves) what we want: cheaper food that is faster to prepare. We have been only too happy to drink the Kool-Aid, another Kraft brand.
        KD's popularity is a symptom of a world that spins distressingly faster and faster. We devote a total of forty-two minutes to cooking and cleaning up three meals a day '-- six fewer minutes than we spent in 1992. Over half the dinners we consume at home involve a prepared or semi-prepared food. As the clock ticks, we spend more of every food dollar on these shortcuts.
        But what does it mean if a national dish is manufactured, formulated by scientists in a laboratory in Glenview, Illinois, and sold back to us by the second-largest food company in the world? Kraft Foods employs 126,000 people worldwide, and raked in $54.4 billion in 2011. By the end of this year, it will formally split into two divisions '-- North American groceries and global snacks '-- no doubt to go forth and multiply. Kraft Canada isn't just manufacturing 120 million boxes of powdered cheese and noodles at its factory in the desolate Montreal suburb of Mont-Royal. It is manufacturing taste. In so doing, it has left an indelible mark on what and how we eat, and therefore how we live. At the Canadian corporate headquarters in Don Mills, in Toronto '-- where three flags, for Canada, Ontario, and Kraft Foods, fly outside the doors '-- the ''one percent'' doesn't refer to the ¼ber-wealthy, but to the tiny fraction of Canadians who do not stock a single Kraft product in their pantries.
        Despite our ever-present nostalgia for the foods of childhood, tastes and recipes are always evolving. We have no definitive version of macaroni and cheese, or any dish for that matter. The word ''macaroni,'' first coined in Italy, describes any short tubular pasta; there, the cheese of choice was often Parmesan. Although I have yet to uncover a primary source to prove the point, I would wager that macaroni, which first became fashionable in England in the eighteenth century, most likely reached Britain in the trunks of travellers. (Thomas Jefferson is said to have introduced it to Virginia.) The dish soon grew so popular among anglophones that ''macaroni'' became slang for a dandy who favoured outlandish wigs, which is why Yankee Doodle ''stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.''
        The Italian recipe typically featured the noodle, rather than a cheesy sauce, in the starring role, but English cooks inverted this relationship, adding English cheeses, such as cheddar, and egg yolks, to create a creamier, more pudding-like dish. An early domestic iteration, published in Modern Practical Cookery in 1845, calls for puff pastry to line the baking dish. Its author, Mrs. Nourse, gives instructions to stew the noodles in a cream thickened with egg yolks, with a little ''beaten mace'' and ''made mustard'' to sharpen the flavours before grating Parmesan or Cheshire cheese over top.
        Liz Driver, the culinary historian who introduced me to the recipe, believes the macaroni Mrs. Nourse used would have been imported from Italy, and was probably far superior to much of the Canadian-made pasta available today, which Italians consider too soft for their taste. Driver is the curator of Campbell House, a Toronto heritage building where she teaches open-hearth cooking in the nineteenth-century kitchen, and keeps a collection of vintage cast iron pots piled under her desk.
        She showed me into the formal drawing room, where we sat like museum pieces, surrounded by a games table and a writing desk. ''Macaroni and cheese was considered sophisticated, as proven by the fact that it was served in a puff pastry''lined pan,'' she noted in the hushed, measured tones of someone who has spent her life in libraries. Occasionally, we were interrupted by visitors who must have wondered why we weren't in costume, playing whist.
        Mrs. Nourse's Cheshire cheese notwithstanding, there was plenty of local cheddar for making macaroni puddings in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time, Canada was known for little else, food-wise, perhaps one reason we remain so enamoured with mac and cheese. As Heather Menzies writes in her excellent history By the Labour of Their Hands: The Story of Ontario Cheddar Cheese , commercial cheese making in Ontario took off in the mid''nineteenth century, helped along by a depression in the wheat market, and the prevalence of the wheat midge, which was devastating crops. ''The milk crop never fails,'' trumpeted a letter to the editor in an 1865 edition of Canada Farmer . In the age before pasteurization, cheese was often safer '-- and much longer lasting '-- than fluid milk. More plentiful than the English original, Canadian cheddar soon became a staple among the English working class. By the turn of the twentieth century, there were 1,242 cheddar factories in Ontario, where the bulk of Canadian cheese making happened, and cheddar exports '-- some 234 million pounds in 1904 '-- were second only to timber. More than a century later, we export only 19 million pounds of cheese, five million of which is cheddar, while we import more than 55 million. Although we cannot wholly lay the decline of cheese craft in Canada at the feet of James Lewis Kraft, it did correspond with the rise of Kraft's processed cheese empire.
        In 1893, the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition displayed the blueprint for the century of middle-class consumerism that followed. North American society was changing rapidly: cities such as Chicago had sprung up seemingly overnight, and industry, not agriculture, was in ascendance. Following two decades of social, economic, and political upheaval, the public hungered for the rosy promise of progress. One cannot overstate the fair's influence on the North American imagination: it drew 30 million visitors when only 63 million people lived in the US. Model houses touted the new middle-class lifestyle, featuring electric stoves, washing machines, doorbells, and fire alarms. Exhibitors hawked new refrigeration technology, canned meats, desiccated soups, synthetic lard substitutes, and saccharin derived from coal tar. New food preparation technologies were marketed as more sanitary, more efficient, and more economical than anything nature or home cooks could provide on their own.J. L. Kraft, who had grown up on a dairy farm in Ontario, headed off to Chicago a decade after the world's fair. Fascinated by the promise of innovation, he resolved to find a modern, more profitable way to distribute cheese. Even at the height of production, the quality of Canadian cheddar available domestically remained variable, in part because the best was reserved for export. ''No matter how wholesome it was when it left the manufacturer, it often reached the market in a state of extinct virtue,'' observed Kraft, who had seen the amount of spoilage and waste first-hand, while working as a clerk in a general store in Fort Erie, Ontario. He arrived in the US with $65 and a plan to launch a wholesale cheese business.
        There he joined the ranks of dairy experts who were searching for ways to make cheese production more efficient. All cheese is an ancient expression of ''milk's leap towards immortality,'' as Clifton Fadiman so poetically put it, and an extremely effective method for preserving a dairy surplus. You need just three main ingredients: milk, rennet (to curdle it into a solid), and microbes (to convert lactose into acid, which deepens the flavour and prevents the curds from spoiling or harbouring disease).
        Emulsifying salts help stabilize processed cheese by taking calcium from the milk protein and exchanging it with sodium. This allows the proteins to hold water, thickening the cheese. Early attempts to make processed cheese resembled a kind of re-solidified, long-keeping fondue; the Swiss, not surprisingly, were the first to figure out that these ''melting salts'' would keep the cheese stable (i.e., emulsified), just as a few spoonfuls of wine or lemon keep a traditional fondue runny.
        By the beginning of World War I, J. L. Kraft was experimenting with a similar process, which he developed over a double boiler. His formula hinged on a combination of citric acid and phosphates (the emulsifying salts). While not the first to develop a processed cheese, he was the first to win a patent (in 1916) and, eventually, to capitalize on it. His method paved the way for Velveeta (1928), Kraft Dinner (1937), Cheez Whiz (1952), and Kraft Singles (1965). The discovery that emulsifying salts could be used to make processed cheese turned out to be the great innovation '-- and some would say tragedy '-- of twentieth-century cheese making. It standardized the process and ruled out variation, good or bad, at every stage.
        The idea for boxed macaroni and cheese came during the Depression, from a salesman in St. Louis who wrapped rubber bands around packets of grated Kraft cheese and boxes of pasta and persuaded retailers to sell them as a unit. In 1937, the company began to market them as Kraft Dinner, promising to feed a family of four for 19 cents (US). The boxes had a good shelf life and could be kept in a pantry for about ten months; back then, many Canadian households did not yet own a refrigerator.
        In 1939, two years after KD launched in Canada and the US, Kraft's Canadian sales had already reached $8 million. A mere six years later, at the end of World War II, sales had nearly doubled to $14 million, helped in large part by government requisitions for the armed forces, and at home by war rationing and general privation, which made meatless entrees more common. Demographic shifts also played a part: as fewer families retained servants and more women went to work, they had less time to prepare meals. Corporate cookbooks rose to prominence in Canadian kitchens at this time. It is significant that expert cooking advice took hold when life was uncertain: the Depression, and then the war, shook the nation's confidence, and people felt comforted by instructions from professionals.
        Meanwhile, the Canadian cheese industry began to flounder. Exports to its biggest market, the UK, dropped off in the '20s as the standard of living rose for the British worker, which meant families could afford more meat. And the world wars, which all but halted exports, nearly killed the industry. Even so, Heather Menzies believes it would have rallied in the '60s, had political leaders chosen to protect craft cheese. They even had a report telling them how. Instead, they chose to favour the interests of large-scale producers, a group dominated by American corporations such as Kraft. Canada's local cheese factories watched as the British market collapsed and their own milk supply dried up.
        Big American companies signed contracts with local dairies, effectively binding the suppliers to sell most if not all of their production to them. This squeezed out the smaller cheese factories, and more dairy went to making processed cheese instead of artisanal types. At the height of its influence, in 1971, Kraft controlled more than 50 percent of cheese production in Canada.
        Meanwhile, demographics continued to shift. Canada's population was growing, thanks to the baby boom and immigration. The middle class was moving to the suburbs, and still more women went to work outside the home. Food manufacturers saw opportunity in this, and flogged their products on television and in magazines and newspapers, promising status and convenience. Sales of processed cheese took off. By 1973, Kraft Canada was the largest single advertiser in Canadian magazines and, with General Foods, the biggest advertiser on television. Tom Quinn, a former Kraft Canada president, told Menzies, ''If we did anything right, it was merchandising and advertising. We created the demand.''
        In the world of modern food manufacturing, Kraft Dinner Original remains a fairly simple formula, with only ten ingredients. (My own recipe also calls for ten, if you lump together the natural flavours, as labellers do.) But KD has spawned generations of mac and cheese dinners, each one a greater feat of engineering than the last, and each one less recognizable as something we could make in our own kitchens. In 1999, the company launched Kraft Dinner Cup, a line that now includes Kraft Dinner Triple Cheese in a microwaveable package. It contains twenty-one ingredients, including ''cheese flavours.'' Cheddar is eighth on the list. A version sold only in the US, described as Triple Cheese Cheesy Made Easy, contains forty-two ingredients, depending on how you count them.
        Yet KD Original has not changed much in seventy-five years, from the consumer's point of view. What has changed is how it is engineered and manufactured. ''The early sauces would have been nearly all cheese, except for the emulsifying salts,'' says Art Hill, a cheese scientist at the University of Guelph, in Ontario. But as dairy became a commodity in the intervening years, profits came from manufacturing it for the lowest cost and the highest volume possible, and from developing new ''cheese products'' that over time were made with less and less cheese.
        Today KD Original probably contains more whey than cheese. Kraft won't say how much cheese is in the foil packet, but you can read between the lines on the label and make an educated guess. One scientist, who asked not to be quoted, estimates that cheese would account for no more than 29 percent of the sauce's solids. Driven by the commodity markets rather than taste, processed food formulas often change according to the going rates of their ingredients: when whey powder is cheap, for example, a cheese sauce might include more of it.''New processes come along, and we need to stay competitive,'' offers Robert Gordon, a food engineer and one of about fifteen macaroni and cheese developers at Kraft's Glenview campus. Citing proprietary reasons, he speaks in general terms about what he does; any time the conversation in our conference call gets too specific, a manager of corporate affairs in Toronto interrupts. ''Our primary goal,'' she says, ''is to ensure it meets Canadians' expectations for KD.''
        Manufactured foods originally appealed to consumers because they were beacons of progress '-- which they were, if you bought in to the premise that food is just fuel, and if you measured success by how cheaply and quickly a meal could be prepared. But as convenience foods became more common and cooking from scratch less so, people began to miss the connection they once had to how food was produced, on the farm and in the kitchen. They craved the meals their mothers once cooked, the real mac and cheese, homemade. So Kraft cannily adjusted its marketing strategy, creating an ersatz nostalgia for the very thing KD had supplanted. ''Mama's in the kitchen making mac and cheese,'' ran one American marketing slogan. Another announced: ''Two new Kraft home cooked dinners, the quick kind you cook up fresh.''
        People feel a strong emotional connection to the KD label, says Jordan Fietje, senior brand manager for Kraft Dinner, who takes pains to highlight his company's sacred covenant with matriarchs. Like many other Kraft employees, he is inordinately fond of the phrase ''our promise to moms.'' The slogan makes sense. Food is about ritual, tradition and conviviality, and what your mother made for Sunday dinner, which means it is also about identity. The clich(C) is not wrong: we are what we eat, and our choices both reflect and shape who we are.
        Manufactured food has its attractions: it is cheaper and lasts longer, and engineers can manipulate moisture, salt, and sugar content to appeal to a broader market, or to target a social group's preferences. But as much of our food production has shifted to manufacturing '-- 44 percent of Canadian agricultural output is now destined for processing '-- products, especially the ones dreamt up by scientists and nutritionists in corporate labs, are made a long way from the consumer. We increasingly rely on professionals to teach us how to cook (if we ever learn), dieticians and nutritionists to tell us what to eat, and scientists to engineer the food we buy.
        Food scientists must be multidisciplinary, with training in chemistry, microbiology, engineering, and nutrition. Immersed in their laboratories, they can forget the real goal of their experiments '-- which is to feed people, says Chris Findlay, the garrulous CEO of Compusense, a consultancy in Guelph. He has spent a lifetime advising multinationals on how to launch and refine food products so they will appeal to consumers, and has worked for the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, in countries such as Sudan and South Korea. Although he does not work directly for Kraft Canada, his company has partnered with Kraft on four continents.
        By the early twentieth century, manufacturers had begun using professional tasters to help ensure quality control. Technology enabled new ways of delivering nutrition, but the food developed by scientists and produced by machines didn't always taste good. ''You can break down food into protein, fat, carbohydrates, but you can't tell just from the chemical properties what it will taste like,'' Findlay says. This proved especially troublesome for the US military, which had been working to develop cheap, nutritious, and easy-to-store rations for soldiers.
        In the '40s and '50s, the US Army Quartermaster Food and Container Institute began studying ''food acceptance,'' and so began the field of sensory analysis, or the study of perception. Corporations were quick to discover its uses in evaluating consumer goods. Most large food companies now have sensory analysis labs; many also employ consultants like Findlay to learn more about a product and whether there might be room for something new in its market category.
        What is true elsewhere holds up in the food industry: try to please everyone, and you'll end up pleasing no one '-- or, as Findlay remarks in his faint Scottish brogue, ''Between two stools, fools fall through.'' He boasts that if he gives test subjects three samples to taste, he can predict where on the sensory map they will fall '-- rather like Van Houtte's coffee profiling surveys, which promise to determine whether you prefer your coffee bold and woodsy or velvety and fruity, by asking you whether you like jam on your toast. The universal product and the average consumer do not exist, which is why, in addition to Kraft Dinner Original, you will find dozens of KD products on grocery shelves, from extra creamy to white cheddar, whole wheat, and even versions fortified with vegetables, fibre, or flax seed.
        Sensory analysis relies heavily on trained testers rather than consumers to dissect the sight, smell, and taste of a product and its competitors by developing a list of attributes to describe them. At Compusense, this data is entered into a computer program that uses statistical methods to create a sensory map of the various traits and where each product falls on the graph. To illustrate how this works, Findlay offers to make me a map for the boxed macaroni and cheese category, with one condition: first I must spend the day as a human detector, trained (rather like a bomb-sniffing dog) to use my senses for one of his panels.
        Afew days later, I find myself at a table in a room full of strangers, staring at a hospital tray that holds my tools for the next two hours: a cup of distilled water, a few crackers, another empty cup with a lid, a white napkin, and a plastic spoon. The first sample arrives: a Styrofoam cup labelled number 943. One of Findlay's employees, Sheila Fortune, stands in front of a blank whiteboard in a lab coat and demonstrates the procedure. Opening the plastic cup by a centimetre, she takes quick ''bunny sniffs'' to detect the aroma of the steam that billows out. Each of the testers scribbles down descriptions: butter, brine, starch, the tang of processed cheddar, a sweet aromatic. Next, we remove the lid and note the visuals: straight, thin noodles in an unctuous slick of saffron orange. A few bubbles cling to the pasta. Following Fortune's instructions, we taste and expectorate the sample. We will have eleven more macaroni and cheese dishes placed before us over the next two hours.
        The range of flavours surprises: my notes list hundreds of descriptors. At a certain point, the analysis can verge on the absurd, as in Auberon Waugh's decree that wine writing should be camped up at all costs, and that ''bizarre and improbable side-tastes should be proclaimed: mushrooms, rotting wood, black treacle, burned pencils, condensed milk, sewage, the smell of French railway stations or ladies' underwear'...anything to get away from the accepted list of fruit and flowers.''
        I am reminded of Waugh as I stare at my sheet. One sample smells like baby barf '-- butyric acid, Findlay explains, a common attribute in Parmesan cheese. ''Paint thinner'' describes another. Findlay nods his head and laughs. What I am detecting, he says, is rancidity and off-flavours. ''There are all sorts of reasons for that; you just have to know something about food processing,'' he says, before recounting the time a panel detected the smell of exhaust in a barbecued product and everyone trooped out to the parking lot to verify the odour.
        By the time the session ends, we have covered the whiteboard with a list of traits to describe the product. Fortune will feed sixteen of them into software that generates a new survey for us to fill out as we taste the products again. This time, though, we dine alone, in front of a computer screen in a white booth, under bright white light. (Some studies use a red light, to neutralize the sample's colour so testers can't see whether a wine is white or red, or a steak is bloody or grey.) Portions appear like clockwork in the hatch in front of us as we click through the computer survey. In the afternoon, Fortune generates a sensory map of the products we tasted, to show where on the taste spectrum each one falls. KD Original is the cheesiest, yellowest, and saltiest. KD Smart Vegetables Original, made with half a serving of freeze-dried cauliflower, is distinctly pungent and sour, with overtones of boiled brassica.
        From inside the belly of the food-producing beast, one thing becomes clear: this is not a way to make food, but a way to manufacture fuel '-- for our bodies, and for the hungry consumer market. The food industry, like any empire, depends on expansion for success: to survive, it must continue to increase both its output and its consumer base.
        Outside the lab, at the dinner table, taste remains the physical manifestation of memory; it is impossible to eat something without relating or comparing it to an earlier, often a childhood, experience. Taste's relationship to memory becomes especially poignant after you leave home '-- as immigrants, caught between two worlds, know well. Helen Vallianatos, an anthropologist at the University of Alberta, who studies the food habits of the province's South Asian and Middle Eastern communities, notes that many of her subjects remark on how their sensibilities change almost imperceptibly over time. On trips back home, she says, some are surprised to discover that the dishes they once loved now seem too rich, too spicy, too strange, now that they have become accustomed to a different way of eating. She has a special interest in how food and identity are intertwined, and how food helps construct identity: when you cannot eat the food you remember, who are you?
        Another common observation among new arrivals to Canada concerns the fast pace of life. Ask immigrants to define Canadian food, and they most often name hamburgers, pizza, and pasta. But one brand turns up again and again in field studies: Kraft, as in ''Dinner'' and ''Singles.''
        Canada's emerging markets reflect similar realities to global ones: as our South Asian and Chinese populations have risen, Kraft Canada has rolled out ethnic-specific programs to appeal to immigrants, who may arrive here with traditional recipes and expectations of leisurely, old-fashioned meals, but soon discover that our food culture doesn't leave much time for tradition at the table.
        Visible minorities represent the fastest-growing segment of our population '-- they comprised 16.3 percent of Canadians in 2006 '-- and they may offer Kraft its best chance to expand the domestic market. Our foreign-born population is projected to increase four times faster than the rest by 2031. Because most product development takes place south of the border, Kraft Canada lacks the resources to create products specific to our country's changing demographics. Instead, it hires anthropologists and other researchers to find ''modern families'' (i.e., visible minorities and immigrants) and send sheltered executives to observe them. The corporation has also hired spokespeople to develop and promote recipes within their own communities, and to bring new perspectives to the team of home economists who cook in the 6,000-square-foot kitchens at its headquarters in Don Mills.
        As befits a company that trades in nostalgia, Kraft's corporate office feels like a step back in time. Four important-looking men in suits huddle outside the concrete building, BlackBerrys drawn and at the ready. The ''girls,'' as everyone calls the group of middle-aged women who are the face of Kraft products, are inside working away in the kitchen. These are the home economists and dieticians who develop recipes for the company's magazines, websites, and newsletters. The North American Kraft Recipe Library contains about 30,000 entries, enough to fill 300 cookbooks. Michele McAdoo, who has spent seventeen years cooking for Kraft, pushed out 1,000 recipes to nearly one million Canadians in her email blasts last year, to promote home cooking with Kraft products.As much as Kraft influences and shapes us as consumers, it also spends considerable resources pursuing us. It conducts pantry studies about every five years, and has compiled a list of 1,100 ingredients and 200 kitchen tools found in Canadian homes. ''We look at ingredients and tools with a 60 percent and higher incidence and then develop our recipes accordingly,'' says McAdoo.
        Today cumin and coriander waft through the demonstration kitchen. Smita Chandra, an elegant South Asian immigrant in a gold-embroidered fuchsia top, is browning ground chicken in a wok for keema, a spiced meat dish. In a girlish voice that channels Glinda the Good Witch, she recalls how exotic macaroni and cheese seemed when she was growing up in India. She drops a spoonful of cumin from a round stainless steel tin, just like the ones you see in kitchens all over the subcontinent, and says, ''Dad would make us mac and cheese when Mother didn't feel like cooking. We so looked forward to those nights.'' The keema she is preparing will be mixed with KD instead of the usual basmati rice.
        The recipes Chandra prepares taste pretty good and are quick to throw together. But they could be done just as well without Kraft products, as in the case of a chicken dish that calls for Miracle Whip, a completely unnecessary and less healthful ingredient than the traditional yogourt. Then there's the processed aftertaste KD lends to her chicken keema, which would have been simpler, anyway, to make with rice; even the best spices and an extra dose of cayenne can't mask it.
        While promoting its products to specific ethnic groups, Kraft Canada discovered another market: Canadian cooks who grew up in a multicultural environment, exposed to many styles of cuisine at home, in restaurants, and through travel. A year after Chandra joined the demonstration team, Kraft hired renowned Toronto chef Susur Lee as a spokesperson for the Chinese community, an idiosyncratic choice if ever there was one. Lee's cooking is notoriously cerebral and complicated, and when the announcement came out last year it was hard to imagine him writing recipes that any home cook '-- let alone those in search of convenience '-- could duplicate. Yet it turned out to be an inspired choice. Omnivorousness may define modern Canadian cuisine, and the open-mindedness that accompanies it makes for one of the most exciting aspects of our burgeoning food culture. If anyone can speak to the fusion that informs Canadian cuisine, and the multiculturalism of cooking, it is Lee.
        He stands out among an elite group of chefs who succeed at fusion, the overexposed cooking fad of the '90s. The style has its critics (including me); when new combinations seem rootless and random, it devolves into ''confusion'' cuisine. Lee, however, keeps an open mind in the kitchen, and borrows freely from different cultures to create his dishes without ever bewildering (or, worse, boring) his guests. He demonstrates a deep knowledge of various cuisines, and an ability to uncover the connections between seemingly disparate styles, which is why he can successfully pair a Shanghai lion's head meatball with Alsatian cabbage and potatoes from Lyons.
        ''When I think of fusion, I think of culture, of the deep root of recipes,'' he says, sitting on a black leather couch at his eponymous restaurant in Toronto. ''Like Peking duck.'' As Lee well knows, even the most classic dish begins with an adaptation. The restaurant, which still sports the kitschy red, white, and green neon sign left over from the previous Italian occupants, looks much more Chinese than any of his other Toronto endeavours, decked out inside in deep red and gold, with black lacquer. Antique prints adorn one of the walls, and at the door hangs an old black and white photograph of his extended family in Hong Kong, and a ''re-entry permit'' sign above.
        I ask him how immigration changed his approach to cooking. ''When you arrive in Canada, you start to reflect on who you are,'' he replies.
        Tastes are always changing. Lee does not eat Kraft Dinner, but his three sons do. It's one thing for tastes to develop organically, however, and quite another for them to be influenced by government or corporate interests. A few years ago, the Martin Prosperity Institute, at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, published a paper by geographer Betsy Donald entitled ''From Kraft to Craft: Innovation and Creativity in Ontario's Food Economy,'' a rosy, if at times unrealistic, report about the economic benefits of an artisanal cheese renaissance in Canada. As part of her research, she interviewed Lee, who told her, ''True innovative cooking comes from a deep understanding of, and respect for, different cultural roots and certain openness to new ideas. This is in contrast to the rigidity of more traditional cooking cultures like French and southern European. What I find so exciting about Toronto, and North American urban society in general, is the possibility for the betterment of the human condition through experiencing on a daily basis differentness and diversity.''
        Differences '-- whether in people, cultures, or even cheese '-- are Canada's greatest strength, and life would be exceedingly dull without them. They shape and define who we are. But differences can never be manufactured in any meaningful way by a large food conglomerate, which always seeks to standardize. So the question is: are we content to have our national dish come from a laboratory in Illinois, or do we want to have a hand in its (and our) creation? If we can't be the authors of our own meals, who are we? To cook and live life to the fullest, Lee tells me, ''I need a good foundation. I have to know who I am.''
    MIC
      '‹Software problems will set back F-35 joint strike fighter another year '' report '-- RT USA
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 21:43
        Published time: March 26, 2014 00:55Joint Strike Fighter F-35 (AFP Photo)
        Delivery of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will be more than a year behind schedule due to ongoing software problems, according to a US government report. The delay marks the latest snag in the ongoing saga of the world's most expensive aircraft.
        According to a new Government Accountability Office report, the F-35's mission management system software needs a vast debugging effort to meet the plane's various requirements.
        ''Challenges in development and testing of mission systems software continued through 2013, due largely to delays in software delivery, limited capability in the software when delivered, and the need to fix problems and retest multiple software versions,'' the GAO auditors wrote.
        ''The Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) predicts delivery of warfighting capabilities could be delayed by as much as 13 months. Delays of this magnitude will likely limit the warfighting capabilities that are delivered to support the military services' initial operational capabilities'--the first of which is scheduled for July 2015'--and at this time it is not clear what those specific capabilities will be because testing is still ongoing.''
        The GAO said the plane needs eight million new lines of software code to overcome the current functionary glitches.
        The report added that only 13 percent of the Block 2B segment of software had been tested as of last January. The target for this prime operational component of the plane was 27 percent.
        Earlier this year, the Pentagon's chief weapons tester, Michael Gilmore, provided an in-depth report to Congress on the F-35's technical features, emphasizing what he calls the "unacceptable" characteristics of the aircraft's Block 2B software, according to a draft obtained by Reuters in January.
        "Initial results with the new increment of Block 2B software indicate deficiencies still exist in fusion, radar, electronic warfare, navigation, electro-optical target system, distributed aperture system, helmet-mounted display system, and datalink," Gilmore's report said.
        Due to the high number of technical problems, the 2B software overhaul would not be finished until November 2015 - 13 months later than originally planned, the report predicted. This scenario would delay release to the F-35 fleet until July 2016, a year after the Marine Corps anticipated having ''initial operating capability'' with its version of the joint strike fighter.
        The all-in-one plane, designed for a host of potential missions, is to have similar versions for the US Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.
        GAO auditors questioned whether the US government can still afford the F-35 program. Plans are for the purchase of 2,457 planes for the US military by 2037. Development and acquisition costs are estimated to be about $400 billion.
        To remain on schedule for 2037, the Pentagon must ''steeply'' increase spending on the program over the next five years, the GAO said, to the tune of $12.6 billion per year for the next 23 years for only research and acquisition costs. Pentagon brass has called the $1 trillion estimated operation and maintenance costs ''unaffordable,'' the GAO reported.
        In response to the GAO findings, the F-35 program's head, Maj. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, said in a statement that "software continues to remain our number one technical risk on the program, and we have instituted disciplined systems engineering processes to address the complexity of writing, testing and integrating software."
        The report, released Monday, detailed only the latest problems with what some have dubbed''the jet that ate the Pentagon,'' plagued with chronic cost overruns and delayed deliveries.
        The Lockheed Martin fighter jet's price tag is estimated to end up costing US taxpayers more than $1 trillion, factoring in maintenance expenses. Though, the Pentagon said in August that the program's estimated cost was ''slashed'' to a trim $857 billion.
        Critics of the plane's many functions say it's too loaded down to be any more capable than the older, less-expensive F-16 fighter jet, which the F-35 is to replace along with F/A-18s, and A-10s.
        The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, which started in 2001, is 70 percent over initial cost estimates and years behind schedule. Despite its fantastic price tag, the F-35 has even failed to generate the number of jobs its proponents had originally promised to Congress.
        In January, the Center for International Policy said Lockheed had ''greatly exaggerated'' its claim that the F-35 program will sustain 125,000 American jobs in 46 US states in an effort to win support for the program.
        In addition to the US, Lockheed is making F-35 versions for Australia, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and Turkey. Israel and Japan have placed orders for the fighter jet. South Korea ordered 40 joint strike fighters on Monday '' the same day as the release of the GAO report.
        Despite the myriad problems in the F-35's development, the first trans-Atlantic flight of an F-35 fighter jet is set for July, as the plane will take part in two international air shows near London, Reuters reported.
    BTC
      Bitcoins are property, not currency, IRS says regarding taxes - Reuters
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        Archived Version
        Source: bitcoin - Google News
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:31
        By Kevin Drawbaugh and Patrick Temple-West
        WASHINGTONTue Mar 25, 2014 7:03pm EDT
        Bitcoins created by enthusiast Mike Caldwell are seen in a photo illustration at his office in Sandy, Utah, September 17, 2013.
        Credit: Reuters/Jim Urquhart
        WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Wading into a murky tax question for the digital age, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service said on Tuesday that bitcoins and other virtual currencies are to be treated, for tax purposes, as property and not as currency.
        "General tax principles that apply to property transactions apply to transactions using virtual currency," the IRS said in a statement, meaning that bitcoins would be taxed as ordinary income or as assets subject to capital gains taxes, depending on the circumstance.
        Bitcoin, the best-known virtual currency, started circulating in 2009. Its present market value is around $8 billion, with up to 80,000 transactions occurring daily, according to accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.
        Recent incidents have brought the currency under new regulatory scrutiny, such as the failure of Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based exchange that filed for bankruptcy after losing an estimated $650 million worth of customer bitcoins.
        Unlike conventional money, bitcoin is generated by computers and is independent of control or backing by any government or central bank, which its proponents like, but which also has led to calls for more guidance on U.S. tax treatment.
        The IRS supplied that in its statement, which dealt a blow to bitcoin "miners," who unlock new bitcoins online. The IRS said miners must include the fair market value of the virtual currency as gross income on the date of receipt.
        This change "is a disincentive to start looking for bitcoins," said John Barrie, a partner with law firm Bryan Cave LLP, who advises charities that receive bitcoins as donations.
        NOT LEGAL TENDER
        The IRS also said that virtual currency is not to be treated as legal-tender currency to determine if a transaction causes a foreign currency gain or loss under U.S. tax law.
        For other forms of gains or losses involving virtual currency, the IRS explained how to determine the U.S. dollar value of virtual currency and said taxable gains or losses can be incurred in related property transactions.
        "The character of gain or loss from the sale or exchange of virtual currency depends on whether the virtual currency is a capital asset in the hands of the taxpayer," the IRS said.
        If a taxpayer holds virtual currency as capital - like stocks or bonds or other investment property - gains or losses are realized as capital gains or losses, the agency said.
        However, when virtual currency is held as inventory or other property mainly for sale to customers in a trade or business, ordinary gains or losses are generally incurred, the IRS said.
        Capital gains and losses are taxable and deductible at different rates and amounts than ordinary gains and losses.
        Democratic Senator Tom Carper, who chaired a Senate committee hearing last year on bitcoin, said in a statement that the IRS guidance "provides clarity for taxpayers who want to ensure that they're doing the right thing and playing by the rules when utilizing bitcoin and other digital currencies."
        MINERS HURT
        New bitcoins come from a process called mining. Computer programmers around the world compete to crack an automatically generated code and the first to do so is rewarded with a small stash. This happens about every 10 minutes.
        Some online retailers will accept bitcoins as payment. The maximum potential number of bitcoins in circulation is 21 million, compared with around 12 million currently.
        On the IRS guidance, William Lewis, a lawyer in Sunnyvale, California, who represents a start-up company creating a platform for virtual currencies, said: "This is going to be unfavorable to bitcoin miners because they're going to have to include in income the fair market value of the virtual currency on the date they mined it.
        "It's going to make life difficult for a lot of people who have been mining over the past year, who have to go back and see what the values were on those dates when they mined it."
        (Additional reporting by Douwe Miedema; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)
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    Vaccine$
      Let the Gamification Begin | American Marketing Association
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        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:10
        Drug makers are investing in gamification to improve patient engagement and compliance. Is pharma gaming the new prescription for better health? Could playing games actually be good for your health? That's what many pharmaceutical marketers are aiming to show as they increasingly invest in gamification, which is the use of applying game-thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage audiences. In the near future, pharma marketers could be communicating important information to consumers and patients in more game-like ways'--for example, floating avatars squishing abnormal cells until they vanish or a user-operated cartoon scientist running a virtual drug-development lab. Or even animated zombies that walk around a virtual maze, rewarding diabetic players with gold coins to unlock the next level of the game after checking their insulin levels. As pharma looks to find new ways to engage its audience, drug makers like Merck and Boehringer Ingelheim are investing their innovation dollars in developing complex, multi-tiered games that look more like something from the makers of Farmville than a pharma company.
        ''What I think we're starting to see a critical mass of games for health,'' says Paul Cummings, senior fellow at Fairfax, Va.,-based tech services firm ICF International and co-author of the report, ''Gaming to Engage the Healthcare Consumer.'' ''What we're starting to do is see a saturation of'--or at least the use of'--games for eliciting behavior changes across a variety of spectrums, and I think the pharma community is seeing the value. We've had years of games for health and research, and we're now starting to see how we can apply those concepts to the pharma industry.''
        The pharma industry wants to attract the attention of tech-savvy millennials who've grown up immersed in apps and mobile technology. And with patients taking a more active role in their medical care and the industry's move toward a value-based reimbursement model, the increase in gamification can be attributed to a rapidly changing health care space. According to John Bretz, vice president at ICF International, ''The customer is very different and the marketplace has changed. One of the big drivers behind that is the Affordable Care Act, and this has really jump-started a lot of inertia and interest in innovation because organizations are struggling to communicate complex information to their key stakeholders'--and there's a lot of it.''
        A Game a Day Keeps the Doctor AwayBig pharma hopes that by employing gamification it will help tackle one of the biggest problems in health care: patient adherence. Getting people to take better care of themselves means they should take their medications as prescribed, eat the right foods, get proper exercise and follow the doctor's orders. One way gamification addresses this challenge is by creating a virtual environment that encourages the user to have fun and feel a sense of empowerment: winning points, badges or status and advancing through a hierarchy of different levels (think Angry Birds). By creating an enjoyable gaming experience, patients are more likely to engage and improve their self-care.
        According to Michael Fergusson, CEO of Ayogo, a Vancouver-based startup that develops games and apps promoting wellness-related behavioral changes, ''You can continue to build health care applications that are designed to be dreary on purpose or you can acknowledge psychology and say, 'The best way to get somebody to do something is to get them to want to do it, to make it enjoyable or satisfying for them.' The one thing that's true about games is people engage with games because they enjoy them'--because they're satisfying in some really important way'--and our job is to translate some of that understanding with how to do that in health care.''
        Fergusson and his company have joined forces with Merck to create the drug maker's Type 2 Travellers Project, a game for patients with Type 2 diabetes. Players pick an avatar and then compete in activities to win gold coins and advance to the next level while using tools to help manage their diabetes and learn why it's important to stick to their prescribed regiment.
        According to Fergusson, Ayogo also includes game-based achievements, but the awards in their games serve dual purposes: They are useful to the player for advancing to the next level of the game and they also represent a real accomplishment'--and with that comes an emotional commitment. ''In Type 2 Travellers, all of the modes of participation that a patient has with the system, all the ways in which they can interact with other people [and] the curriculum, earns them a currency. Then they can use that currency to do things that are fun and what we call 'free play,' '' Fergusson says. ''Some of them are just intended to be fun, but some of them are supposed to be fun and useful. '... There's this currency arbitrage'--your initial participation gives you access to something bigger.''
        A Real Game ChangerJohn Pugh, global innovation team leader at Boehringer Ingelheim, began working on the pharma company's first social game for Facebook, called Syrum, back in 2010. He initially launched a beta version of the game as a basic concept to test it with people just in the health care industry, seeking out their ideas and feedback. He was initially expecting to get between 500-1,000 people to play the game but ended up with 10,000 beta testers'--and was ''overwhelmed with ideas.''
        ''We use gaming as a way of learning, and a way of engaging with people is something that we wanted to learn more about,'' Pugh says. ''So I started thinking about, 'Well, how do we go about building a game which is going to give us that experience and that learning?' I spent about a year thinking about it and investigating it, and then we started working on Syrum back in 2010, and it's taken that long for it to come about.'' Pugh has been using those ideas and crowdsourcing even more to further develop the game.
        The initial response was so great, in part, because Syrum is a social game on Facebook, a departure from pharma's more traditional and conservative marketing strategies for increasing patient engagement. ''I think it was the first time really that pharma had poked its head out from behind its corporate hideout and did something that was pretty different, and I think it was a pretty brave approach,'' says Pugh. ''If it hadn't been for all of the work that happened beforehand, I'm not sure that Boehringer would have gone with it. I think it was unsuitably different enough to really catch people's attention. '... I could have built Syrum and put it onto a website somewhere, or I could have put it onto the biggest social platform in the galaxy, which is Facebook. That's what I did'--and that's another reason why a lot of people found it attractive.''
        Similar in nature to Zynga's Farmville (except the farmland setting gets traded for a laboratory), Syrum allows players to create and run their own virtual pharmaceutical company by placing them in a virtual lab and challenging them to create and develop simulated medicines, run clinical trials and bring the newly formulated drugs to market in an effort to improve world health.
        According to Pugh, Syrum positions Boehringer as a company that wants to understand new technologies and new communication channels. ''It wants to engage with its customers and with its patients, and it wants to be seen as a company that is an attractive place to work for,'' he says.
        Syrum has already launched in Europe but will come to the U.S. this spring. ''We launched it in Europe, but we didn't launch it in the U.S., and the reason for that is I wanted to get it just right because it's the biggest market,'' Pugh says. ''We've been spending the last several months redeveloping the game, making sure that it's playable on the iPad'--which wasn't in the first scope'--and putting into effect all the feedback that we got back from those 10,000 testers.
        Pugh is most excited about the social elements within Syrum, which give users the opportunity to collaborate and build products together. He's interested in how U.S. consumers will receive the story. According to Pugh, games such as Grand Theft Auto are successful because of their compelling story lines'--users are eager to get to the next level. ''[Syrum] isn't your normal kind of story,'' Pugh says. ''It's pretty far out and a little bit strange, and then there are some other things we've been discussing recently that are really exciting. Perhaps the ability to pay to get further ahead in the game or to buy certain elements in the game using real money, and then having that money go to charity or something like that. If we can build those things in the future, that would make it not just a game that helps explain some of the processes in the pharma industry, but [a game that] actually does good as well by donating money.''
        Up Close: Does Gamification Improve ROI?Gamification aims to bolster patient engagement and health outcomes, but a big question remains: Does it really help improve ROI? And can you measure the impact of gamification?
        A Spoonful of Metrics Helps the Gamification Go Down According to Bretz at ICF International, organizations are engaging in gamification not only to boost engagement and quality care, but also because they anticipate ROI for their efforts. Health care organizations have plenty of options for spending their innovation dollars, so measurable ROI in gamification is important. The key to proving a return, he says, requires identifying the right metrics. ''If you don't know what [the metrics] are and you don't know how to find them, you're going to have a disconnect. '... You know the old saying, 'If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.' You have to have the appropriate metrics set up at the end of the day so that you can evaluate how the overall experience was received.''
        Understanding the Players Before you can report the ROI, however, marketers must make sure to have a strong grasp on their gamification strategy'--which will factor into the overall metrics. Cummings from ICF International says, ''I say this to everybody who develops games: 'The important takeaway is that you really need to understand what it means to do it right, and doing it right really takes a lot of knowledge outside of technology. It takes an understanding of the community, strong subject matter experts, people who understand communications. '... Sometimes validation might come in the form of engagement, but, ultimately, you're trying to create behavior change then show behavior change through research.''
        This was originally published in the Spring 2014 issue of Marketing Health Services.
      Mumps Outbreak Involves Highly Vaccinated Students
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        Archived Version
        Source: Activist Post
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 01:45
        Kenny ValenzuelaActivist PostResearch links posted below:
        You can find more of Kenny Valenzuela's informative videos at Experimental Vaccines. BE THE CHANGE! PLEASE SHARE THIS USING THE TOOLS BELOW
    Rubbleization
      Venezuelan Central Bank Opens Dollar Trade as New Exchange System Introduced | venezuelanalysis.com
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        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 13:08
        Santa Elena de Uair(C)n, 25th March 2014, (Venezuelanalysis.com) - On Monday morning Venezuela's new SICAD II exchange rate system came into force, which authorities argue has helped to lower the value of the dollar on the black market.
        On the first day of trading the Venezuelan currency sold for an average of 51.86 bolivars to the dollar, according to data from the Central Bank's website. This is far higher than the government's fixed exchange rate, but lower than the black market rate.
        Companies and individuals were able to buy and sell dollars in cash and bonds for the first time in four years, under the new mechanism called SICAD II. People may now make bids through financial intermediaries, who then forward the bid to the central bank, which matches buyers with sellers and approves transactions.
        This marks a new strategy to combat the rampant black market trade, which the government tried to reign in with stricter regulations at the end of last year. In February, the bolivar was valued at an all-time low on the black market, at nearly 90 to the dollar. The vast difference between the official and parallel rate made buying dollars through government systems the most profitable business in the country.
        Under previous systems, it's been estimated that one in three dollars in the country was misused or stolen, Economy Vice-Minister Rafael Ramirez said.
        Now, in a controversial change of policy, the government is trying a different tact; trade will be more open to the public, at a rate that so far values the bolivar 88 percent lower than before. It has already dealt a sharp blow to the speculative black market; the parallel dollar dropped from 74 to around 56 to the bolivar, just slightly above the SICAD II's trade average.
        The central bank will only intervene when ''erratic'' fluctuations appear in the exchange rate, according to the market rules published on March 11th.
        Luis Vicente Le"n, president of the market researching firm Datanlisis, was dubious of the government's next move. He argued that it was normal that the parallel dollar dropped, because ''people have expectations that the government will release a large amount of foreign currency, and that people will have access to it''.
        Nevertheless, he warned that if the government then lowers the official SICAD II rate ''in hope of preventing a subsequent devaluation, there won't be a way to meet all the demand that will be generated, in which case the drop in the parallel market rate will be absolutely transitory and we'll soon see it rise again.''
        The government will maintain its official exchange rate at 6.3 bolivars per dollar. According to Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, more than 80 percent of Venezuela's dollars will continue to be provided at the highly subsidized official rate, for use by public institutions and first necessity imports. This subsidy is expected to protect people from inflation in key areas, such as basic food products, medicine and transportation (petrol).
        He said SICAD II will only cover 7 to 8 percent of Venezuela's foreign currency needs.
        Earlier this year Economy Vice President Rafael Ramirez estimated the government under SICAD II would sell about US$30 million every day. However, he recently announced that the system plans to ''sell whatever it takes'' to keep businesses from resorting to the black market.
        ''How much and how often...is something that will be determined by the behavior of the market,'' he stated.
        Ramirez said that anyone, including foreign residents and tourists, who wishes to trade may do so, as long as they meet the minimum requirements set by the bank or similar institution and the market rules. Currency exchange centers placed in airports will communicate directly with the SICAD II trade averages.
        He also mentioned that the mechanism is one of a series of incentives the government is creating to prevent currency from leaving the country to be invested in off-shore accounts.
        Venezuela's largest business group Fedecamaras has said the system shows a step ''in the right direction.'' But some foreign companies, like Colombian airline Avianca and car company Chrysler, have continued to scale back operations in Venezuela, citing longstanding difficulties in accessing dollars.
        On March 13th, while addressing a peace conference in Anzoategui, Ramirez again called for the private sector to work more closely with the government, reminding them that the current economic measures being set in place are the product of proposals made by both workers' unions and private businesses.
        Published on Mar 25th 2014 at 4.06pm
    NWO
      HK, US sign tax information agreement
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: Global Times
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 03:33
        Hong Kong and the United States Tuesday signed an agreement on exchange of tax information.Hong Kong's Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury,K C Chan, on behalf of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region( HKSAR) government, signed the agreement with the US consul general to Hong Kong and Macao, Clifford A Hart on behalf of US government.
        It is the first tax information exchange agreement (TIEA) signed by Hong Kong, after the legal framework for entering into TIEAs with other jurisdictions was put in place in July last year.
        Chan said the signing of the TIEA with the US demonstrates Hong Kong's continued commitment to fulfill its international obligations on promoting tax transparency.
        Chan added, "The TIEA with the US has adopted highly prudent safeguard measures to protect taxpayers' privacy and confidentiality of information exchanged."
        The TIEA will become effective after Hong Kong has completed the necessary legislative procedures for bringing the agreement into force.
        By leaving a comment, you agree to abide by all terms and conditions (See the Comment section).
    NA-Tech
      MEME 4.01 Jon Postel Interview
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 03:03
        MEME 4.01MEME 4.01David Bennahum: [Some people say,] "Well, who made you king?"
        Jon Postel: Exactly. It comes up from time to time.
        DB: What do you say to that?
        JP: I say, "This is the way it is."
        --Jon Postel, keeper of the Internet's top-level domain names, in MEME 4.01
        Jon Postel died on Friday, October 16, 1998. What follows is the transcript of an interview I had with Jon in 1995. This interview, and its introducton ,was posted to this Web site in early 1998. I have left the rest of the text as it was originally. -- David Bennahum
        Sometime by the end of 1998 you'll likely find a whole new kind of Internet address-- new suffixes like .BIZ or .WEB or .SEX-- suffixes which will mark a change in the way the Internet is governed. In a sense, those who control the names on the Net control everything, because when all metaphor is said and done, the Internet is mostly a big pile of words. Words, like MTV.COM or ALTAVISTA.COM and HARVARD.EDU have become brands with real financial value. And for a long, long time one person controlled the issuance of new words. His name is Jon Postel. The Economist magazine recently called him "God."
        From his office in Southern California, this scientist has been responsible for administering name disputes at the highest-level of the Internet's naming architecture. It is he who decided whom in a foreign country would be given control of a two-letter code. It is he who held, as Fortune magazine put it, "control of the little black book of Internet addresses that enables the Internet to work."
        When the Internet existed as a collective of mainly academic, governmental and military sites, this system was politically acceptable. Postel's been involved with the Internet for over 20 years, since the time it was called ARPANET, and his central control of Names was a simple, efficient way of managing what was the Net's ur-database. But in 1993 when the National Science Foundation transferred administration of sub-domain names, names like MICROSOFT.COM and MEMEX.ORG, to Network Solutions, a Virginia-based company, the old-boy network began to falter. With commercial entities relying on the Internet for commerce and brand expansion, the question of adjudication, control and accountability for the issuance of new "top-level domains" became a matter of great interest. The idea of one man-- Postel-- controlling a database of increasing value became politically untenable.
        In May 1997 the National Science Foundation announced that it would not renew its contract with Network Solutions. In July, the Clinton administration announced it would transition the management of names to the private sector, and called for public input. Swamped with feedback, the consensus-building process stalled. Since then, Clinton has called in Ira Magaziner, a long-standing advisor, to manage the process. Word is that the resulting governing body will probably resemble a Board of Directors, with Postel as a member.
        In September 1995, I interviewed Jon Postel. That week, Postel was in the midst of his first big public-relations crisis-- Network Solutions had announced it would charge a $50 registration fee per domain-- ending years of free registration. Postel spoke candidly about the inner workings of running the very hub of the Internet. What follows is an exclusive transcript of our conversation.
        For those of you interested in learning more about the history of the Internet, I invite you to visit the archives of "Community Memory," a discussion list I moderate on the origins and evolution of computer technology and cyberspace. From http://memex.org/community- memory.html you can follow instructions to subscribe.
        David Bennahum: How are you?
        Jon Postel: Frazzled.
        DB: I would imagine. Is that a normal, usual state?
        JP: No, things are particularly interesting this week.
        DB: What's going on?
        JP: Well, the InterNIC decided that this was the time to introduce charging for registering domain names, and there are a few people that seem to think it's necessary to discuss this. For some reason, they all want to discuss it with me.
        DB: Why is that?
        JP: Well...
        DB: Well, I have this impression that you're somehow deeply involved with these issues.
        JP: Yes, I have been... Somehow, being involved in the network for a long time, I have gotten this role of being involved with what they call the technical aspects of the administration of the Internet. And one of them is how to set up these domain names. So in some sense, I'm in charge of what are the top-level domain names. Up until now, everybody has been fairly comfortable with the InterNIC actually doing the work of defining these top-level domain names. But basically, when somebody sends you a message saying "I'd like a new top-level domain name," that gets handed to me, and I explain to them why that's a bad idea. Then they pretty much go away and we go on as before. But now, with the InterNIC introducing charging, there's a lot of suggestions that they are in a monopoly position, and this is not healthy, so that we have to have somehow competing registry services, and that means that there be some other domain names around that are roughly equivalent to the existing ones, so people have some choices about what names they choose and who they do business with.
        DB: I don't really understand how that would work. What does that mean for practical purposes?
        JP: Well, suppose there's a .COM name. Maybe there can be some other domain names like BUSINESS or BIZ or REST or something, and some other company was in charge of doing the registration in the U.S. domain. So then you'd say, "Gee, I'm thinking of getting a domain name. Do I want to get it from the InterNIC, or do I want to get it from New Company #1? Gee, the InterNIC charges fifty bucks and this other company charges thirty bucks. Maybe I'll get it from this other company.
        DB: But the cost is so low, it doesn't really matter.
        JP: It's really quite bizarre, because it's more of a perception issue than a practical matter. For anybody that's really serious about having a network connection, paying something like fifty dollars a year to have a domain name is, like, not really a problem. You're really only talking about the really top-level names, which are presumably the things that get these to big companies or universities or big organizations where they would spend more money thinking about it to write the check than actually writing the check would cost.
        DB: I guess part of what's happened is that the InterNIC has, in a way, become part of big... There's some big business now involved with it that wasn't there before.
        JP: It's been big business for a year. I mean, I was talking to somebody else, and they were saying, "Well, do you think this is a place where the research community and the business community will go parting their ways and go separate directions?" I said, "No, I don't think so, because the business community has already taken over the Internet." You know, maybe there are these vestiges left behind of some academic influenced interests, but this is just a step on the transition of making it all a business oriented situation.
        DB: And that's changing the rules of the game, I guess, to some degree.
        JP: Yes, the rules of the game has gradually changed. Domain names are free; domain names cost money. That's one of the rules changes. There really isn't very much argument that charging for domain names to at least recover the cost of doing the job is a problem. There's really nobody arguing that fifty dollars is too much in principle, or that it's wrong to charge for domain names. But there are people who are saying, "If fifty dollars is more than it actually costs to provide the service, then having only one company being able to do this puts them in a monopoly rip-off position, and this is bad."
        DB: What company is that?
        JP: Network Solutions.
        DB: Network Solutions, yeah? How much money can they really be making off of this?
        JP: Well, there's very wild speculation. There's a data point that's about a hundred thousand names in the system now, and $50 a year, a name -- that's $5 million a year. Does it really cost $5 million a year to run the Internet?
        DB: Probably not.
        JP: And maybe, maybe not. Okay? What happens in the future? If more names become... Okay, that's a... If all the people who just have names now, just current names, and that's $5 million a year, every year, for all time, okay...?
        DB: Mmm-hmm.
        JP: What about all the additional people? If there's doubling every year, then there ought to be 200,000 names next year. SO that's $10 million.
        DB: Then it will become serious.
        JP: So suppose it did cost $5 million to run it. It probably doesn't cost $10 million to run it, even if there are twice as many names. So should the price go down over time? Or something. So there's a lot of speculation there about is this the appropriate amount of money, and who is going to do what about keeping it under control, and is it in a position to make a huge amount of money over the next few years until somebody thinks of another system.
        DB: Is InterNIC actually owned by Network Solutions?
        JP: The InterNIC job is a... Well, it's a little complicated. There's a perceived need to have something like an InterNIC. So there's this job role or function that needs to be done to the network. In ancient times, it was done by different organizations, funded by the Department of Defense, when back in the early days, all of the network stuff was developed under the Defense Department. Several years ago, when we said, "Okay, this is transitioning from a defense situation to a generalized, government-sponsored research thing," NSF [National Science Foundation] stepped up to say, "Okay, we're going to fund this network, this NIC function, and we'll call it InterNIC." So they put out a solicitation saying, "People who would like the InterNIC job, please send their proposals and tell us how you would do it." And that resulted in NSF picking Network Solutions to do the InterNIC job, this registration job. So there is an agreement between Network Solutions and NSF that, for some amount of money from NSF, Network Solutions will do this job. Then, this was before the major growth of the .COM domain. So the amount of money involved per year from NSF was probably not enough to do the job that needed to be done. But also at the time of the solicitation, there were some comments in it that your proposal should have a plan for how you would make this InterNIC job self-supporting by charging fees. So even back several years ago, when this was put in place, the notion that fees might have to be charged was already in people's minds. Now, it turns out that the way NSF runs these programs is that they just start them off and let them run, and without a whole lot of busybody meddling and by micro- management. But then about part-way down through the contract date, they invoke a review. NSF goes off and finds ten or twenty people from the community, whatever they think the community is, that broad spectrum of techies and users and company people and university people, and just a whole variety, lots of different points of view represented, and they have this review where the contractor comes in and explains what they've been doing for the last whatever it is, 18 months, and what they're planning to do for the next 18 months, the problems they have and what solutions they have and what they've accomplished and what they've failed to accomplish,. And then the review panel goes off in secret, and cooks up a report, and sends the report in to NSF, and says, "This is what we thought of your project, and this is what we think you ought to do to make it better for the next time period." So they had a review of the InterNIC back in December [1994]. And one of the really strong recommendations by the review panel was, "These guys should be charging for these commercial registrations; NSF shouldn't be paying for that." So here it is nine months later, and they're saying, "Okay, here's our charging plan."
        DB: Right. And that opened up a whole new can of worms.
        JP: Right. And then people say "That's like you're changing the rules. We're going to argue about it." I mean, any time there's any rule that gets changed, there's a whole bunch of people that jump up and say, "You changed the rules; we're going to argue about it."
        DB: What's interesting now, I guess, is that at least back then, and even as of last December, the NSF had some role, but now my understanding is that NSF is basically gone.
        JP: No. NSF is still...they still have this cooperative agreement with Network Solutions, and it has another year or so to run. There's still a relationship there until that agreement runs out. Whether or not NSF is now putting as much money into Network Solutions as they have been in the past is an open question. I suppose it would be a matter of record, and you could get that information from the government eventually. But I don't know that anybody is saying too publicly what their current financial arrangement is.
        DB: But in a way, NSF is the nominal authority, right?
        JP: You know, following the Golden Rule. They've been paying for this operation, and then having something to say about how it's done. That's very prudent.
        DB: But once the operation was paid for by the public, then I wonder who is in charge.
        JP: Right. Well, that's like the next thing to get worked out. What's going to be the plan when the cooperative agreement ends? And what is going to be the... Right now, if you said, you know, "Network Solutions is really screwing up and I'm really upset about it; I want to go talk to their boss and get them straightened out," well, you would go talk to NSF and raise the issues there, because NSF is paying them. But when that agreement runs out, what is the oversight committee for Network Solutions?
        DB: Right. It would seem like there isn't any, in a way.
        JP: Right. So I think that's an important problem. So I think that something will be developed in the next year, before that contract runs out, to create an oversight body for Internet registries in general. And then that could answer... And that might be in parallel or part of the project of looking at, "Well, how do we set up another registry?" since there is some competition in this game. So I think that the whole process has to be developed here for saying, "Okay, this is the way that these registries get chartered and set up. This is the way that oversight is done. This is how we can put some registry out of business if they're screwing up too much." So there's a whole process plan that has to be developed fairly quickly now, to (a) enable us to put in a competing registry, and (b) to be the ground rules for what happens when this agreement runs out.
        DB: I guess for the first time, when that agreement runs out, the Internet will be really out of the hands of the government completely, in a sense.
        JP: Well, an important part of the whole thing, yeah. I mean, everyone has been very good about this. They got this whole thing started. They put a lot of money into it, all the up-front costs of getting it all started. And they've gradually let go of pieces here and there, but not like dumping it all at once. So they've been very supportive and they've been careful about turning it over to the community to manage on its own, or turning it over to commercial businesses to do parts of it, you know, in a style that keeps it running. The government doesn't want it to crash, because they depend on it. So they don't want to just slash everything off all at once and have a big crash. Because they care about it. They want it to start working. But if it's mainly a commercial business, then they want it to be supported by the commercial world.
        DB: Do you have a main undermining concern as this transition takes over? like your worst-case scenario?
        JP: Well, I guess I'm concerned about creating this process for creating and controlling and overseeing registration. I guess that's the thing that I think is missing and is needed right now. But I think it can be developed. I mean, it can be done. I guess my one concern is that some crazy people will go off and do something stupid in the meantime.
        DB: Such as?
        JP: Well, there has been some talk about just going and setting up an alternate registry without working up a plan.
        DB: Mmm. How could you do that, really?
        JP: Well, of course, it's difficult.
        DB: Has it ended up that flexible that someone could just go off and do this right now?
        JP: Well, not really. I mean, technically it's conceivable. But for it to be effective, you'd have to get a large part of the community to follow you, and I just don't think that's going to happen.
        DB: So your role now from the technical side is that you had for a long time been the final arbiter of a lot of these domain name issues. What does that mean? Like, someone would say to you, "There's a conflict. I have this name, this person has it already or wants it..."
        JP: But only for the top-level names. I've really been very careful to delegate all of the secondary issues and all of the lower level names for other people to worry about. It's their problem.
        DB: What's an example of, like, a top-level name?
        JP: .COM, .EDU, .ORG are top-level names. But also country codes, like France is FR and Germany is DE and...
        DB: So did you come up with those?
        JP: Well, that list... We were very clever, accidentally very clever a long time ago, in that somebody said, "Well, what if I want to use my country as a top-level domain?" I said, "Oh, I don't know..." It turns out that there's a list maintained by ISO, the International Signage Organization, of two-letter codes for countries. And I said, "Okay, we'll use the two-letter codes from the ISO Document 3156 list for country codes, and if you're not on that list you don't get a country code." [SENTENCE DROWNED OUT BY SIRENS ON THE STREET] ...what people come on to. "We think we're a country, and we want a country code." "Are you on the list? Yes or no? If you're not on the list, you don't get a country code. If you're on the list, and you're in that country and nobody else has got it first, then here you go." So it made it much tougher.
        DB: So you'd only get involved with these issues at that high level.
        JP: Right. Now, one of the things that does come up is, supposing somebody in Jordan, say, says, "I'd like to have a country code for Jordan," and we look at his credentials, and he says, yeah, he really lives there and he has a domain name server and everything is cool and he can actually do the job -- then we allocate the Jordan country code to this particular individual. Then, you know, a few months later, somebody else comes along and says, "I'd like the country code to Jordan." I say, "Well, we already gave it to this other guy." And he says, "Oh, that guy's a real jerk, and besides that, I'm from the government, and I should have it. So then I get involved in trying to sort that out. Usually we say, "Why don't you two guys meet and agree between yourselves who's going to do it, and tell us the results." Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. It's sometimes dragged on for months and months.
        DB: How can someone actually have a country code to themselves? It would seem that would be something that no one could get hold of, that they'd have to get a sub-code within the country?
        JP: Well, basically we delegate the country code to someone to manage the path of that country, of that community. Then they set up some structure where maybe within the country they have, you know, a branch for education and a branch for commercial use and a branch for something else, and they delegate those to somebody, and then somebody manages that. Or like, in the U.S. what was done is, they said, "Okay, we'll use geography as the basis." So in the U.S. there's a branch for each state, and then in each state there's a branch for each city, to delegate it out. If somebody manages Boston, Massachusetts, then anybody in Boston who wants a domain name under that structure just calls up the guy who manages Boston. The whole domain name system was really intended to try to put a lot of structure into the names so that you could deal with somebody fairly local to you to get a domain name, if you were just an end user.
        DB: Which has worked out pretty well in the end.
        JP: Well, where there is structure, it's worked out pretty well. But that's the problem with the COM Domain, is that it's basically flat, that every company in the world decides that they ought to do something about COM. So there's this huge file.
        DB: But you don't really deal with that, because it's below your level of...
        JP: Yes. That's InterNIC's problem.
        DB: So it's constantly dealing with competing claims over...
        JP: Mmm-hmm.
        DB: I see. So there must be some... These companies are probably accustomed to working under a legal framework or something...,
        JP: Right.
        DB: ...so there must be some frustration on their part that there's like this bunch of guys that sit around that just decide everything, and, like, they say, "Well, who made you king?"
        JP: Exactly. It comes up from time to time.
        DB: What do you say to that?
        JP: I say, "This is the way it is." And I really think, in the whole thing about trademarks and domains, it's an example of this whole different scheme of naming runs into... It goes along for years and years, and everything is fine, and then as it becomes much more commercial, it runs into the realities from another world. It's really difficult, because it turns out the trademark world is not all that clean, and two different companies can have the same word trademark, just they're in slightly different businesses. So you can have the Acme Moving Company and the Acme Laundry or something, and they can both have the word "Acme," but they're in different businesses so it's okay. Then you go look at the domain name system, and you say, "Well, they were both registered in COM, and so they can't both be ACME.COM.
        DB: Right. That's a problem. I've read that, like, Procter & Gamble had taken out BADBREATH.COM and HALITOSIS.COM...
        JP: Well, that's silly, but that's their choice. If they want to pay fifty dollars a year to keep all those names, then I suppose we'll be happy to have their money.
        DB: What is your typical day like? Is it involved mostly with the management of the Internet?
        JP: My typical day is to go to try to keep my research projects running. I mean, all this domain name stuff is supposed to be about 10 percent of my time.
        DB: And is that still the case?
        JP: Well, this week it's not.
        DB: I can see that. But normally I guess it might be, because it's pretty self-automating at this point.
        JP: I mean, at the level I'm involved at, at the top level, there's years that have gone by and there's been no top level domain, and like new country codes maybe two or three a month or something. And I just check a couple of things and say, "Yeah, it looks okay" or "No, they need more information." That's about it. So at that level, this job of managing naming the top level domains is really pretty simple. But when something like this situation comes up, then it gets to be pretty intense. So it's lumpy.
        DB: What are the research projects that you're involved with?
        JP: Oh, we're doing research on high speed networks and distributive systems, just things like that. Computer science things.
        DB: Who's the "we"?
        JP: Well, I work for the Information Sciences Institute .
        DB: What is that, actually? I'm not familiar with it.
        JP: It's a research institute that's part of the University of Southern California. Basically, we fit as the institute that projects here... Somebody who comes up with an idea for some advanced computer science thing, we go find a sponsor for that research, they send us money, and we do the research.
        DB: So you've been involved in networking for a long time now.
        JP: Right.
        DB: Is that your entire professional career, basically?
        JP: Yeah.
        DB: When did you start out?
        JP: Well, I started out as a student at UCLA when the ARPANET was first created. So I got involved in the ARPANET project at UCLA, and I've been involved in network-related things ever since.
        DB: And how old were you at that point when...
        JP: That would be telling.
        DB: Is that okay? Are you bashful about your age?
        JP: Well, I'm 52 now. So it was a long time ago. Last October, BBN put on... BBN built the IMPs [Interface Message Processor, allows any computer to communicate to another on the Net through an IMP, thereby solving the problem of multiple translation tables between different computer systems] components for the ARPANET, and they put on a 25th anniversary of the ARPANET party.
        DB: In Boston, right? Yeah. And how was that?
        JP: Oh, it was great. And it was good to see a lot of the people that were involved at the very beginning and see what they're doing now. And it's interesting, quite a few of them are still involved in networking related things.
        DB: Are you part of a community?
        JP: Oh, yeah.
        DB: I mean, understanding a general trend in terms of how people's lives have...of the people involved... Are there any common themes in terms of the path they've taken, or not really?
        JP: No, not really. a whole variety of things have happened to them.
        DB: But looking back at this whole period, from the beginning to the end, did you think that it was going to lead to this, that the Internet would become this kind of...
        JP: Well, I think at the very beginning, we didn't have much thought of what it would grow into. I mean, in the early days of the ARPANET, I'm pretty sure that most of the people thought, "Okay, we're doing this as network for ARPA, and it's going to have basically the key universities that are doing ARPA-sponsored research, and that's probably pretty much it."
        DB: At what point did you begin to see that maybe this was becoming bigger than...
        JP: Well, the program basically started saying, "We're going to connect up these four sites [in 1969] and do some experiments and see if it really works, and we'll connect up to 15 sites over the next year, and that will be it" -- and was the original plan. So then it stayed 15 sites for a little while, and then they started saying, "Well, there's these other people that want to get connected." And basically, when they started connecting at military bases, because the military wanted to use this network for their normal communications, we said, "Mmm, now we're getting people who are users of the technology and not people who are fundamentally experimenting with it." So we could see that it could like keep growing for a long time. I don't know that anybody really said, "Okay, well, in 1995 we'll have 50 million users or something." I don't think anybody had that in mind. But I think that actually fairly early on, you could see that this was going to be a growing thing over the long, long term, because there just kept being additional things to be connected.
        DB: You bring up this distinction between experimenters and users.
        JP: The first set of people that got connected or really involved, as it were, are people who were computer science researchers and trying to do new things for operating systems or do things for communications technology, or maybe new programming language or something, but they were computer science researchers in some sense, and using the network as part of their research was part of the game plan. But then after a while, you got people who said, "Well, my main problem is I've got this database over here, and I need to access it over there, and I don't care how your network works; I just want to get my questions into the database and get my answers back." So I guess I would characterize that as a user view.
        DB: I guess originally with the experimenters it was self- running or self-governing in the pure sense, because they really manage their problems themselves.
        JP: Right.
        DB: How did the influx of users impact on the network in terms of the way it was run?
        JP: Well, that had some effect, because in the very early days, there was like this thing about, "Well, on Tuesday morning don't expect things to work, because there's a tryout of the new version of the IMP code. So okay, fine. Now we have users on there who are saying, you know, "on a 24-hour-a-day basis I want to be able to access my database, and I don't care about your experiments with IMP code." You just have to say, "Well, gee, I guess we have to have a back room network or something to do our experiments on and be pretty sure it's going to work before we put it into real time!" There are other things, like you need to have a place to call when you think it's broken, and things like that. So other things for the users to call up and get information about what's happening. So you get into those kinds of things.
        DB: One thing that is impressive about the Internet's history was the way that management was handled, that something like that was able to do in this collaborative way. It seemed like it was very easy, I guess.
        JP: Well...
        DB: Is that true? I mean, easy to set up the structure that managed the thing, it looks like.
        JP: Well, I think we've been pretty fortunate that people have been so cooperative. I think part of it is that people who use it, find it so valuable that they are willing to cooperate in ways that they might not be in another environment. If they say, "Well, what do I get by cooperating and doing things maybe slightly different than I would prefer, but going along with the group?" versus, you know, "What would the outcome be if I demanded my rights here and demanded we do it my way?" -- I think most people have seen pretty quickly that they get a lot of value by cooperating and they get almost nothing by insisting on having it done their way.
        DB: Right. But I guess that collaborative structure is under stress now, in a way.
        JP: It's been under stress all along.
        DB: If you look back at this period of time what are the points that stand out as being particularly crucial ones in terms of how this thing developed? Real forks in the road, as it were.
        JP: Well, certainly the key thing was the transition from the ARPANET to the Internet, and coming up with the TCP and IP protocols that are network technology dependent. The early ARPANET protocols knew a lot about how IMPs worked, and therefore, we not generalizable across the system...you know, from ARPANET to Internet to satellite networks and so on. So the idea that there was going to be several networks of different kinds of physical technology and different kinds of layers really drove this creation of an Internet protocol. And making this Internet protocol so simple that essentially any physical network could do it was really very important, in that... So now we have an Internet that originally ran on ARPANET and Ethernet and back to satellite networks. And the ARPANET is gone, the satellite network is gone, we have Ethernets, but they're somewhat different than those original ones, and we have new kinds of hardware networks --and the Internet keeps rolling along. There's nothing changed there. So I think that was a key step in the network evolution. And the actual... And in terms of management significant events, the transition from people using the old ARPANET protocols to using Internet protocols on the ARPANET was a very difficult transition, and a very significant amount of management effort went into that.
        DB: In terms of an the development of TCP, is there anyone that would stand out to you as being a main contributor to that?
        JP: Well, I think you have to give Vint Cerf a lot of credit for that, in that he and Bob Kahn developed the overall protocol idea, and then Vint was a professor at Stanford University for a brief time and had a group of students there that were there with him to develop the first program, the first code version, and documented that. So that was an early version of it that was the basis for lots of later development experience.
        DB: There's something that I find interesting in terms of the Internet as a model. At this point today, in the mid- Nineties, Internet is seen as the most exciting part of computing in the public's eye. But it's something that was basically created not by private companies but by a consortia managed by government. I'm wondering if there's a lesson to be learned there, that there are times when these things are worthwhile, these consortia.
        JP: Oh, yeah. I think so. A lot of these things that are actually effective were developed by a fairly small group of people, and then popularized through a very large group. I think the current World Wide Web activity follows that model. I mean, basically, this one small group led by Tim Berners- Lee in Switzerland developed the Web's structure, if you will, of the technical mechanisms that would make it work, and this group at Illinois and NCSA developed a really good user interface tool [Mosaic]. And that pair of things, developed in small little groups, but then made available to everybody, made a tremendous difference and made this really interesting application. And now what's happening is that people are very concerned about working and making products that have a consortium to make the next version. I think that's a reasonable model of how some of this stuff works. This particular venture is not too strongly managed by the government, although there's some oversight.
        DB: But I guess what it did is, it created a level playing field, in that the base infrastructure wasn't owned by any one company.
        JP: Right. But I think that the really key thing to look at here is that both, let's say, in the TCP situation and in the Web situation, there was essentially a version of a system that was completely freely available, that wasn't tied to any particular company. I think that was very important in terms of the development. In the TCP situation, the specifications were publicly openly available, first of all, in that the government had sponsored the programming of it at Berkeley in the UNIX environment. And that code was fairly freely available. There was some funniness about licensing, but it was pretty easy to get. So that made it fairly easy for a company that wanted to go into business with a TCP-based product to bootstrap off of that code and do something. I think that the same is true with the Web situation. The Web browser code was pretty easily available, the data structure was publicly documented. That open public availability not tied to any particular company I think is a tremendous advantage for getting some good technologies spread around.
        DB: As you look at the public's perception of all this, do you feel there are some huge misconceptions, the way that people have about the Internet?
        JP: Well, there has to be. And one of the things I'm beginning to be more conscious of is that when you get into an environment where you say the number of users doubles every year...
        DB: Right.
        JP: Right? Let's say that in two years, three-quarters of the people are new, and they've only been there for on the average a year. So they have no history. They have no context for what went before. And so, it's very easy for these people to have misconceptions about how things got to be the way they are. And there's not a lot of history books out there. There's a lot of books about, you know, How To Use The Internet For the Complete Idiot thing. But there's hardly anything that teaches historic development of it. Or very few of those people are actually interested in reading anything about it. So people will see something that looks a little odd, and they will invent a reason for it (people like to have reasons for things), and then somehow that gets locked into their head. And you get into some conversation with somebody later on, and they say, "Well, this was done because such-and-such." And you think, "Well, nobody ever thought that." It's really very strange. So I'm sure that a lot of the users out there have a lot of misconceptions as to why things are the way they are. Because there's just no...
        DB: They have no context.
        JP: Compared to the however many million users there are, hardly any of them were around five years ago when it was being decided.
        DB: Exactly. If you had a particular message or something that you wanted to tell us about new-user, what would it be?
        JP: Well, there's an interesting question. Well, I don't know. Maybe the answer is do your homework. Before you go off too excited about the brilliant brainstorms you've had, or arguing about why things are the way they are, maybe you should do some digging to see if you can find a document that will talk about it in terms of why the decisions were made.
        DB: I think one of the ironies of all this stuff is that as we simplify it and make it easier for people to use, in a way we make it more complex. Because the people have no sense of history, they have no sense of how it came into being, and in a way, therefore, it becomes harder for them to understand.
        JP: Yeah.
        DB: Because it's hidden behind all these pretty icons and stuff. Then it creates two classes of people, it seems, those who know how it works and the vast majority who don't.
        JP: Well, that's true in every other field. How many of us actually know how the electrical system works, how a distributional system works. We think we know there's these big wires that come from someplace where there's the hydroelectric plant, and there are transformers that are linked to our house, and then other things happen. I'm sure it's a lot of more complicated than that!
        DB: As this continues to expand outward at this dramatic rate, do you have certain concerns about how it's growing? Not necessarily technical concerns; maybe social concerns.
        JP: Well, I certainly do have some concerns about, you know, there being haves and have-nots, between people who know how to use it and other people who don't. I do share concerns that people have about the potential for there being haves and have-nots, people who are way up to speed with this stuff and use it all the time and people that are not involved in this world at all. I don't really know much about what to do about that, but I think that it would be good for society to look for ways to make sure everybody had access to this.
        DB: The implication there is that it's important to have access to this.
        JP: Yeah. Especially as more government functions are put on the Web so that you can access information about legislation or city services or whatever by Web... I guess what I would imagine is something like public libraries maybe should have a whole row of workstations as webstations, that people could go into and do whatever they want to do on them, and maybe there should be other places to do that.
        DB: I guess on the other extreme of the have-nots is the... I actually spent yesterday reading the Unibomber Manifesto, all 35,000 words of it. I'm probably one of like twenty people that did. But there's clearly a cry of rage from this person about technology. I mean, obviously he's got problems, because he also kills people. But to some degree when I was reading it, I was thinking, "Wow, I'll bet you a lot of people feel the same way he does." Just "I'll never understand this stuff. It's magic. And I'm a have-not."
        JP: Yeah. Well, that's why I think things like the Web are important, and to the extent that we can make it, in some sense magic, but something that people can use by, you know, point-and-click stuff, I think we'll be... Society can be better if everybody can have access to it and it would be easier to use. In Santa Monica, which is right here in the L.A. area, they have had a project for a long time on computer access to city functions and information. They put up a bunch of hardcopy or scrolling teletype E-mail kinds of things mostly, a little server, that stuff. And they put a bunch of workstations and terminals in their public libraries, and they got quite a lot of interaction with a few homeless people coming to the library and would sit there and interact with the city government people quite diligently. I think that was a big surprise to a lot of people.
        DB: Because...
        JP: Well, I mean, it wasn't part of their thinking of how this would be used. So I think there is some potential there. By providing free access to it in some places, I think there is quite a lot of potential for having people who might otherwise be considered have-nots to participate.
        Subscirbe to MEME via e-mail.
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        MEME is published by David S. Bennahum. Duplication for non-commerical use is permitted. Contact me if you have questions. Direct comments, bugs and so on to me at davidsol@panix.com.
        MEME 4.01MEME 4.01David Bennahum: [Some people say,] "Well, who made you king?"
        Jon Postel: Exactly. It comes up from time to time.
        DB: What do you say to that?
        JP: I say, "This is the way it is."
        --Jon Postel, keeper of the Internet's top-level domain names, in MEME 4.01
        Jon Postel died on Friday, October 16, 1998. What follows is the transcript of an interview I had with Jon in 1995. This interview, and its introducton ,was posted to this Web site in early 1998. I have left the rest of the text as it was originally. -- David Bennahum
        Sometime by the end of 1998 you'll likely find a whole new kind of Internet address-- new suffixes like .BIZ or .WEB or .SEX-- suffixes which will mark a change in the way the Internet is governed. In a sense, those who control the names on the Net control everything, because when all metaphor is said and done, the Internet is mostly a big pile of words. Words, like MTV.COM or ALTAVISTA.COM and HARVARD.EDU have become brands with real financial value. And for a long, long time one person controlled the issuance of new words. His name is Jon Postel. The Economist magazine recently called him "God."
        From his office in Southern California, this scientist has been responsible for administering name disputes at the highest-level of the Internet's naming architecture. It is he who decided whom in a foreign country would be given control of a two-letter code. It is he who held, as Fortune magazine put it, "control of the little black book of Internet addresses that enables the Internet to work."
        When the Internet existed as a collective of mainly academic, governmental and military sites, this system was politically acceptable. Postel's been involved with the Internet for over 20 years, since the time it was called ARPANET, and his central control of Names was a simple, efficient way of managing what was the Net's ur-database. But in 1993 when the National Science Foundation transferred administration of sub-domain names, names like MICROSOFT.COM and MEMEX.ORG, to Network Solutions, a Virginia-based company, the old-boy network began to falter. With commercial entities relying on the Internet for commerce and brand expansion, the question of adjudication, control and accountability for the issuance of new "top-level domains" became a matter of great interest. The idea of one man-- Postel-- controlling a database of increasing value became politically untenable.
        In May 1997 the National Science Foundation announced that it would not renew its contract with Network Solutions. In July, the Clinton administration announced it would transition the management of names to the private sector, and called for public input. Swamped with feedback, the consensus-building process stalled. Since then, Clinton has called in Ira Magaziner, a long-standing advisor, to manage the process. Word is that the resulting governing body will probably resemble a Board of Directors, with Postel as a member.
        In September 1995, I interviewed Jon Postel. That week, Postel was in the midst of his first big public-relations crisis-- Network Solutions had announced it would charge a $50 registration fee per domain-- ending years of free registration. Postel spoke candidly about the inner workings of running the very hub of the Internet. What follows is an exclusive transcript of our conversation.
        For those of you interested in learning more about the history of the Internet, I invite you to visit the archives of "Community Memory," a discussion list I moderate on the origins and evolution of computer technology and cyberspace. From http://memex.org/community- memory.html you can follow instructions to subscribe.
        David Bennahum: How are you?
        Jon Postel: Frazzled.
        DB: I would imagine. Is that a normal, usual state?
        JP: No, things are particularly interesting this week.
        DB: What's going on?
        JP: Well, the InterNIC decided that this was the time to introduce charging for registering domain names, and there are a few people that seem to think it's necessary to discuss this. For some reason, they all want to discuss it with me.
        DB: Why is that?
        JP: Well...
        DB: Well, I have this impression that you're somehow deeply involved with these issues.
        JP: Yes, I have been... Somehow, being involved in the network for a long time, I have gotten this role of being involved with what they call the technical aspects of the administration of the Internet. And one of them is how to set up these domain names. So in some sense, I'm in charge of what are the top-level domain names. Up until now, everybody has been fairly comfortable with the InterNIC actually doing the work of defining these top-level domain names. But basically, when somebody sends you a message saying "I'd like a new top-level domain name," that gets handed to me, and I explain to them why that's a bad idea. Then they pretty much go away and we go on as before. But now, with the InterNIC introducing charging, there's a lot of suggestions that they are in a monopoly position, and this is not healthy, so that we have to have somehow competing registry services, and that means that there be some other domain names around that are roughly equivalent to the existing ones, so people have some choices about what names they choose and who they do business with.
        DB: I don't really understand how that would work. What does that mean for practical purposes?
        JP: Well, suppose there's a .COM name. Maybe there can be some other domain names like BUSINESS or BIZ or REST or something, and some other company was in charge of doing the registration in the U.S. domain. So then you'd say, "Gee, I'm thinking of getting a domain name. Do I want to get it from the InterNIC, or do I want to get it from New Company #1? Gee, the InterNIC charges fifty bucks and this other company charges thirty bucks. Maybe I'll get it from this other company.
        DB: But the cost is so low, it doesn't really matter.
        JP: It's really quite bizarre, because it's more of a perception issue than a practical matter. For anybody that's really serious about having a network connection, paying something like fifty dollars a year to have a domain name is, like, not really a problem. You're really only talking about the really top-level names, which are presumably the things that get these to big companies or universities or big organizations where they would spend more money thinking about it to write the check than actually writing the check would cost.
        DB: I guess part of what's happened is that the InterNIC has, in a way, become part of big... There's some big business now involved with it that wasn't there before.
        JP: It's been big business for a year. I mean, I was talking to somebody else, and they were saying, "Well, do you think this is a place where the research community and the business community will go parting their ways and go separate directions?" I said, "No, I don't think so, because the business community has already taken over the Internet." You know, maybe there are these vestiges left behind of some academic influenced interests, but this is just a step on the transition of making it all a business oriented situation.
        DB: And that's changing the rules of the game, I guess, to some degree.
        JP: Yes, the rules of the game has gradually changed. Domain names are free; domain names cost money. That's one of the rules changes. There really isn't very much argument that charging for domain names to at least recover the cost of doing the job is a problem. There's really nobody arguing that fifty dollars is too much in principle, or that it's wrong to charge for domain names. But there are people who are saying, "If fifty dollars is more than it actually costs to provide the service, then having only one company being able to do this puts them in a monopoly rip-off position, and this is bad."
        DB: What company is that?
        JP: Network Solutions.
        DB: Network Solutions, yeah? How much money can they really be making off of this?
        JP: Well, there's very wild speculation. There's a data point that's about a hundred thousand names in the system now, and $50 a year, a name -- that's $5 million a year. Does it really cost $5 million a year to run the Internet?
        DB: Probably not.
        JP: And maybe, maybe not. Okay? What happens in the future? If more names become... Okay, that's a... If all the people who just have names now, just current names, and that's $5 million a year, every year, for all time, okay...?
        DB: Mmm-hmm.
        JP: What about all the additional people? If there's doubling every year, then there ought to be 200,000 names next year. SO that's $10 million.
        DB: Then it will become serious.
        JP: So suppose it did cost $5 million to run it. It probably doesn't cost $10 million to run it, even if there are twice as many names. So should the price go down over time? Or something. So there's a lot of speculation there about is this the appropriate amount of money, and who is going to do what about keeping it under control, and is it in a position to make a huge amount of money over the next few years until somebody thinks of another system.
        DB: Is InterNIC actually owned by Network Solutions?
        JP: The InterNIC job is a... Well, it's a little complicated. There's a perceived need to have something like an InterNIC. So there's this job role or function that needs to be done to the network. In ancient times, it was done by different organizations, funded by the Department of Defense, when back in the early days, all of the network stuff was developed under the Defense Department. Several years ago, when we said, "Okay, this is transitioning from a defense situation to a generalized, government-sponsored research thing," NSF [National Science Foundation] stepped up to say, "Okay, we're going to fund this network, this NIC function, and we'll call it InterNIC." So they put out a solicitation saying, "People who would like the InterNIC job, please send their proposals and tell us how you would do it." And that resulted in NSF picking Network Solutions to do the InterNIC job, this registration job. So there is an agreement between Network Solutions and NSF that, for some amount of money from NSF, Network Solutions will do this job. Then, this was before the major growth of the .COM domain. So the amount of money involved per year from NSF was probably not enough to do the job that needed to be done. But also at the time of the solicitation, there were some comments in it that your proposal should have a plan for how you would make this InterNIC job self-supporting by charging fees. So even back several years ago, when this was put in place, the notion that fees might have to be charged was already in people's minds. Now, it turns out that the way NSF runs these programs is that they just start them off and let them run, and without a whole lot of busybody meddling and by micro- management. But then about part-way down through the contract date, they invoke a review. NSF goes off and finds ten or twenty people from the community, whatever they think the community is, that broad spectrum of techies and users and company people and university people, and just a whole variety, lots of different points of view represented, and they have this review where the contractor comes in and explains what they've been doing for the last whatever it is, 18 months, and what they're planning to do for the next 18 months, the problems they have and what solutions they have and what they've accomplished and what they've failed to accomplish,. And then the review panel goes off in secret, and cooks up a report, and sends the report in to NSF, and says, "This is what we thought of your project, and this is what we think you ought to do to make it better for the next time period." So they had a review of the InterNIC back in December [1994]. And one of the really strong recommendations by the review panel was, "These guys should be charging for these commercial registrations; NSF shouldn't be paying for that." So here it is nine months later, and they're saying, "Okay, here's our charging plan."
        DB: Right. And that opened up a whole new can of worms.
        JP: Right. And then people say "That's like you're changing the rules. We're going to argue about it." I mean, any time there's any rule that gets changed, there's a whole bunch of people that jump up and say, "You changed the rules; we're going to argue about it."
        DB: What's interesting now, I guess, is that at least back then, and even as of last December, the NSF had some role, but now my understanding is that NSF is basically gone.
        JP: No. NSF is still...they still have this cooperative agreement with Network Solutions, and it has another year or so to run. There's still a relationship there until that agreement runs out. Whether or not NSF is now putting as much money into Network Solutions as they have been in the past is an open question. I suppose it would be a matter of record, and you could get that information from the government eventually. But I don't know that anybody is saying too publicly what their current financial arrangement is.
        DB: But in a way, NSF is the nominal authority, right?
        JP: You know, following the Golden Rule. They've been paying for this operation, and then having something to say about how it's done. That's very prudent.
        DB: But once the operation was paid for by the public, then I wonder who is in charge.
        JP: Right. Well, that's like the next thing to get worked out. What's going to be the plan when the cooperative agreement ends? And what is going to be the... Right now, if you said, you know, "Network Solutions is really screwing up and I'm really upset about it; I want to go talk to their boss and get them straightened out," well, you would go talk to NSF and raise the issues there, because NSF is paying them. But when that agreement runs out, what is the oversight committee for Network Solutions?
        DB: Right. It would seem like there isn't any, in a way.
        JP: Right. So I think that's an important problem. So I think that something will be developed in the next year, before that contract runs out, to create an oversight body for Internet registries in general. And then that could answer... And that might be in parallel or part of the project of looking at, "Well, how do we set up another registry?" since there is some competition in this game. So I think that the whole process has to be developed here for saying, "Okay, this is the way that these registries get chartered and set up. This is the way that oversight is done. This is how we can put some registry out of business if they're screwing up too much." So there's a whole process plan that has to be developed fairly quickly now, to (a) enable us to put in a competing registry, and (b) to be the ground rules for what happens when this agreement runs out.
        DB: I guess for the first time, when that agreement runs out, the Internet will be really out of the hands of the government completely, in a sense.
        JP: Well, an important part of the whole thing, yeah. I mean, everyone has been very good about this. They got this whole thing started. They put a lot of money into it, all the up-front costs of getting it all started. And they've gradually let go of pieces here and there, but not like dumping it all at once. So they've been very supportive and they've been careful about turning it over to the community to manage on its own, or turning it over to commercial businesses to do parts of it, you know, in a style that keeps it running. The government doesn't want it to crash, because they depend on it. So they don't want to just slash everything off all at once and have a big crash. Because they care about it. They want it to start working. But if it's mainly a commercial business, then they want it to be supported by the commercial world.
        DB: Do you have a main undermining concern as this transition takes over? like your worst-case scenario?
        JP: Well, I guess I'm concerned about creating this process for creating and controlling and overseeing registration. I guess that's the thing that I think is missing and is needed right now. But I think it can be developed. I mean, it can be done. I guess my one concern is that some crazy people will go off and do something stupid in the meantime.
        DB: Such as?
        JP: Well, there has been some talk about just going and setting up an alternate registry without working up a plan.
        DB: Mmm. How could you do that, really?
        JP: Well, of course, it's difficult.
        DB: Has it ended up that flexible that someone could just go off and do this right now?
        JP: Well, not really. I mean, technically it's conceivable. But for it to be effective, you'd have to get a large part of the community to follow you, and I just don't think that's going to happen.
        DB: So your role now from the technical side is that you had for a long time been the final arbiter of a lot of these domain name issues. What does that mean? Like, someone would say to you, "There's a conflict. I have this name, this person has it already or wants it..."
        JP: But only for the top-level names. I've really been very careful to delegate all of the secondary issues and all of the lower level names for other people to worry about. It's their problem.
        DB: What's an example of, like, a top-level name?
        JP: .COM, .EDU, .ORG are top-level names. But also country codes, like France is FR and Germany is DE and...
        DB: So did you come up with those?
        JP: Well, that list... We were very clever, accidentally very clever a long time ago, in that somebody said, "Well, what if I want to use my country as a top-level domain?" I said, "Oh, I don't know..." It turns out that there's a list maintained by ISO, the International Signage Organization, of two-letter codes for countries. And I said, "Okay, we'll use the two-letter codes from the ISO Document 3156 list for country codes, and if you're not on that list you don't get a country code." [SENTENCE DROWNED OUT BY SIRENS ON THE STREET] ...what people come on to. "We think we're a country, and we want a country code." "Are you on the list? Yes or no? If you're not on the list, you don't get a country code. If you're on the list, and you're in that country and nobody else has got it first, then here you go." So it made it much tougher.
        DB: So you'd only get involved with these issues at that high level.
        JP: Right. Now, one of the things that does come up is, supposing somebody in Jordan, say, says, "I'd like to have a country code for Jordan," and we look at his credentials, and he says, yeah, he really lives there and he has a domain name server and everything is cool and he can actually do the job -- then we allocate the Jordan country code to this particular individual. Then, you know, a few months later, somebody else comes along and says, "I'd like the country code to Jordan." I say, "Well, we already gave it to this other guy." And he says, "Oh, that guy's a real jerk, and besides that, I'm from the government, and I should have it. So then I get involved in trying to sort that out. Usually we say, "Why don't you two guys meet and agree between yourselves who's going to do it, and tell us the results." Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. It's sometimes dragged on for months and months.
        DB: How can someone actually have a country code to themselves? It would seem that would be something that no one could get hold of, that they'd have to get a sub-code within the country?
        JP: Well, basically we delegate the country code to someone to manage the path of that country, of that community. Then they set up some structure where maybe within the country they have, you know, a branch for education and a branch for commercial use and a branch for something else, and they delegate those to somebody, and then somebody manages that. Or like, in the U.S. what was done is, they said, "Okay, we'll use geography as the basis." So in the U.S. there's a branch for each state, and then in each state there's a branch for each city, to delegate it out. If somebody manages Boston, Massachusetts, then anybody in Boston who wants a domain name under that structure just calls up the guy who manages Boston. The whole domain name system was really intended to try to put a lot of structure into the names so that you could deal with somebody fairly local to you to get a domain name, if you were just an end user.
        DB: Which has worked out pretty well in the end.
        JP: Well, where there is structure, it's worked out pretty well. But that's the problem with the COM Domain, is that it's basically flat, that every company in the world decides that they ought to do something about COM. So there's this huge file.
        DB: But you don't really deal with that, because it's below your level of...
        JP: Yes. That's InterNIC's problem.
        DB: So it's constantly dealing with competing claims over...
        JP: Mmm-hmm.
        DB: I see. So there must be some... These companies are probably accustomed to working under a legal framework or something...,
        JP: Right.
        DB: ...so there must be some frustration on their part that there's like this bunch of guys that sit around that just decide everything, and, like, they say, "Well, who made you king?"
        JP: Exactly. It comes up from time to time.
        DB: What do you say to that?
        JP: I say, "This is the way it is." And I really think, in the whole thing about trademarks and domains, it's an example of this whole different scheme of naming runs into... It goes along for years and years, and everything is fine, and then as it becomes much more commercial, it runs into the realities from another world. It's really difficult, because it turns out the trademark world is not all that clean, and two different companies can have the same word trademark, just they're in slightly different businesses. So you can have the Acme Moving Company and the Acme Laundry or something, and they can both have the word "Acme," but they're in different businesses so it's okay. Then you go look at the domain name system, and you say, "Well, they were both registered in COM, and so they can't both be ACME.COM.
        DB: Right. That's a problem. I've read that, like, Procter & Gamble had taken out BADBREATH.COM and HALITOSIS.COM...
        JP: Well, that's silly, but that's their choice. If they want to pay fifty dollars a year to keep all those names, then I suppose we'll be happy to have their money.
        DB: What is your typical day like? Is it involved mostly with the management of the Internet?
        JP: My typical day is to go to try to keep my research projects running. I mean, all this domain name stuff is supposed to be about 10 percent of my time.
        DB: And is that still the case?
        JP: Well, this week it's not.
        DB: I can see that. But normally I guess it might be, because it's pretty self-automating at this point.
        JP: I mean, at the level I'm involved at, at the top level, there's years that have gone by and there's been no top level domain, and like new country codes maybe two or three a month or something. And I just check a couple of things and say, "Yeah, it looks okay" or "No, they need more information." That's about it. So at that level, this job of managing naming the top level domains is really pretty simple. But when something like this situation comes up, then it gets to be pretty intense. So it's lumpy.
        DB: What are the research projects that you're involved with?
        JP: Oh, we're doing research on high speed networks and distributive systems, just things like that. Computer science things.
        DB: Who's the "we"?
        JP: Well, I work for the Information Sciences Institute .
        DB: What is that, actually? I'm not familiar with it.
        JP: It's a research institute that's part of the University of Southern California. Basically, we fit as the institute that projects here... Somebody who comes up with an idea for some advanced computer science thing, we go find a sponsor for that research, they send us money, and we do the research.
        DB: So you've been involved in networking for a long time now.
        JP: Right.
        DB: Is that your entire professional career, basically?
        JP: Yeah.
        DB: When did you start out?
        JP: Well, I started out as a student at UCLA when the ARPANET was first created. So I got involved in the ARPANET project at UCLA, and I've been involved in network-related things ever since.
        DB: And how old were you at that point when...
        JP: That would be telling.
        DB: Is that okay? Are you bashful about your age?
        JP: Well, I'm 52 now. So it was a long time ago. Last October, BBN put on... BBN built the IMPs [Interface Message Processor, allows any computer to communicate to another on the Net through an IMP, thereby solving the problem of multiple translation tables between different computer systems] components for the ARPANET, and they put on a 25th anniversary of the ARPANET party.
        DB: In Boston, right? Yeah. And how was that?
        JP: Oh, it was great. And it was good to see a lot of the people that were involved at the very beginning and see what they're doing now. And it's interesting, quite a few of them are still involved in networking related things.
        DB: Are you part of a community?
        JP: Oh, yeah.
        DB: I mean, understanding a general trend in terms of how people's lives have...of the people involved... Are there any common themes in terms of the path they've taken, or not really?
        JP: No, not really. a whole variety of things have happened to them.
        DB: But looking back at this whole period, from the beginning to the end, did you think that it was going to lead to this, that the Internet would become this kind of...
        JP: Well, I think at the very beginning, we didn't have much thought of what it would grow into. I mean, in the early days of the ARPANET, I'm pretty sure that most of the people thought, "Okay, we're doing this as network for ARPA, and it's going to have basically the key universities that are doing ARPA-sponsored research, and that's probably pretty much it."
        DB: At what point did you begin to see that maybe this was becoming bigger than...
        JP: Well, the program basically started saying, "We're going to connect up these four sites [in 1969] and do some experiments and see if it really works, and we'll connect up to 15 sites over the next year, and that will be it" -- and was the original plan. So then it stayed 15 sites for a little while, and then they started saying, "Well, there's these other people that want to get connected." And basically, when they started connecting at military bases, because the military wanted to use this network for their normal communications, we said, "Mmm, now we're getting people who are users of the technology and not people who are fundamentally experimenting with it." So we could see that it could like keep growing for a long time. I don't know that anybody really said, "Okay, well, in 1995 we'll have 50 million users or something." I don't think anybody had that in mind. But I think that actually fairly early on, you could see that this was going to be a growing thing over the long, long term, because there just kept being additional things to be connected.
        DB: You bring up this distinction between experimenters and users.
        JP: The first set of people that got connected or really involved, as it were, are people who were computer science researchers and trying to do new things for operating systems or do things for communications technology, or maybe new programming language or something, but they were computer science researchers in some sense, and using the network as part of their research was part of the game plan. But then after a while, you got people who said, "Well, my main problem is I've got this database over here, and I need to access it over there, and I don't care how your network works; I just want to get my questions into the database and get my answers back." So I guess I would characterize that as a user view.
        DB: I guess originally with the experimenters it was self- running or self-governing in the pure sense, because they really manage their problems themselves.
        JP: Right.
        DB: How did the influx of users impact on the network in terms of the way it was run?
        JP: Well, that had some effect, because in the very early days, there was like this thing about, "Well, on Tuesday morning don't expect things to work, because there's a tryout of the new version of the IMP code. So okay, fine. Now we have users on there who are saying, you know, "on a 24-hour-a-day basis I want to be able to access my database, and I don't care about your experiments with IMP code." You just have to say, "Well, gee, I guess we have to have a back room network or something to do our experiments on and be pretty sure it's going to work before we put it into real time!" There are other things, like you need to have a place to call when you think it's broken, and things like that. So other things for the users to call up and get information about what's happening. So you get into those kinds of things.
        DB: One thing that is impressive about the Internet's history was the way that management was handled, that something like that was able to do in this collaborative way. It seemed like it was very easy, I guess.
        JP: Well...
        DB: Is that true? I mean, easy to set up the structure that managed the thing, it looks like.
        JP: Well, I think we've been pretty fortunate that people have been so cooperative. I think part of it is that people who use it, find it so valuable that they are willing to cooperate in ways that they might not be in another environment. If they say, "Well, what do I get by cooperating and doing things maybe slightly different than I would prefer, but going along with the group?" versus, you know, "What would the outcome be if I demanded my rights here and demanded we do it my way?" -- I think most people have seen pretty quickly that they get a lot of value by cooperating and they get almost nothing by insisting on having it done their way.
        DB: Right. But I guess that collaborative structure is under stress now, in a way.
        JP: It's been under stress all along.
        DB: If you look back at this period of time what are the points that stand out as being particularly crucial ones in terms of how this thing developed? Real forks in the road, as it were.
        JP: Well, certainly the key thing was the transition from the ARPANET to the Internet, and coming up with the TCP and IP protocols that are network technology dependent. The early ARPANET protocols knew a lot about how IMPs worked, and therefore, we not generalizable across the system...you know, from ARPANET to Internet to satellite networks and so on. So the idea that there was going to be several networks of different kinds of physical technology and different kinds of layers really drove this creation of an Internet protocol. And making this Internet protocol so simple that essentially any physical network could do it was really very important, in that... So now we have an Internet that originally ran on ARPANET and Ethernet and back to satellite networks. And the ARPANET is gone, the satellite network is gone, we have Ethernets, but they're somewhat different than those original ones, and we have new kinds of hardware networks --and the Internet keeps rolling along. There's nothing changed there. So I think that was a key step in the network evolution. And the actual... And in terms of management significant events, the transition from people using the old ARPANET protocols to using Internet protocols on the ARPANET was a very difficult transition, and a very significant amount of management effort went into that.
        DB: In terms of an the development of TCP, is there anyone that would stand out to you as being a main contributor to that?
        JP: Well, I think you have to give Vint Cerf a lot of credit for that, in that he and Bob Kahn developed the overall protocol idea, and then Vint was a professor at Stanford University for a brief time and had a group of students there that were there with him to develop the first program, the first code version, and documented that. So that was an early version of it that was the basis for lots of later development experience.
        DB: There's something that I find interesting in terms of the Internet as a model. At this point today, in the mid- Nineties, Internet is seen as the most exciting part of computing in the public's eye. But it's something that was basically created not by private companies but by a consortia managed by government. I'm wondering if there's a lesson to be learned there, that there are times when these things are worthwhile, these consortia.
        JP: Oh, yeah. I think so. A lot of these things that are actually effective were developed by a fairly small group of people, and then popularized through a very large group. I think the current World Wide Web activity follows that model. I mean, basically, this one small group led by Tim Berners- Lee in Switzerland developed the Web's structure, if you will, of the technical mechanisms that would make it work, and this group at Illinois and NCSA developed a really good user interface tool [Mosaic]. And that pair of things, developed in small little groups, but then made available to everybody, made a tremendous difference and made this really interesting application. And now what's happening is that people are very concerned about working and making products that have a consortium to make the next version. I think that's a reasonable model of how some of this stuff works. This particular venture is not too strongly managed by the government, although there's some oversight.
        DB: But I guess what it did is, it created a level playing field, in that the base infrastructure wasn't owned by any one company.
        JP: Right. But I think that the really key thing to look at here is that both, let's say, in the TCP situation and in the Web situation, there was essentially a version of a system that was completely freely available, that wasn't tied to any particular company. I think that was very important in terms of the development. In the TCP situation, the specifications were publicly openly available, first of all, in that the government had sponsored the programming of it at Berkeley in the UNIX environment. And that code was fairly freely available. There was some funniness about licensing, but it was pretty easy to get. So that made it fairly easy for a company that wanted to go into business with a TCP-based product to bootstrap off of that code and do something. I think that the same is true with the Web situation. The Web browser code was pretty easily available, the data structure was publicly documented. That open public availability not tied to any particular company I think is a tremendous advantage for getting some good technologies spread around.
        DB: As you look at the public's perception of all this, do you feel there are some huge misconceptions, the way that people have about the Internet?
        JP: Well, there has to be. And one of the things I'm beginning to be more conscious of is that when you get into an environment where you say the number of users doubles every year...
        DB: Right.
        JP: Right? Let's say that in two years, three-quarters of the people are new, and they've only been there for on the average a year. So they have no history. They have no context for what went before. And so, it's very easy for these people to have misconceptions about how things got to be the way they are. And there's not a lot of history books out there. There's a lot of books about, you know, How To Use The Internet For the Complete Idiot thing. But there's hardly anything that teaches historic development of it. Or very few of those people are actually interested in reading anything about it. So people will see something that looks a little odd, and they will invent a reason for it (people like to have reasons for things), and then somehow that gets locked into their head. And you get into some conversation with somebody later on, and they say, "Well, this was done because such-and-such." And you think, "Well, nobody ever thought that." It's really very strange. So I'm sure that a lot of the users out there have a lot of misconceptions as to why things are the way they are. Because there's just no...
        DB: They have no context.
        JP: Compared to the however many million users there are, hardly any of them were around five years ago when it was being decided.
        DB: Exactly. If you had a particular message or something that you wanted to tell us about new-user, what would it be?
        JP: Well, there's an interesting question. Well, I don't know. Maybe the answer is do your homework. Before you go off too excited about the brilliant brainstorms you've had, or arguing about why things are the way they are, maybe you should do some digging to see if you can find a document that will talk about it in terms of why the decisions were made.
        DB: I think one of the ironies of all this stuff is that as we simplify it and make it easier for people to use, in a way we make it more complex. Because the people have no sense of history, they have no sense of how it came into being, and in a way, therefore, it becomes harder for them to understand.
        JP: Yeah.
        DB: Because it's hidden behind all these pretty icons and stuff. Then it creates two classes of people, it seems, those who know how it works and the vast majority who don't.
        JP: Well, that's true in every other field. How many of us actually know how the electrical system works, how a distributional system works. We think we know there's these big wires that come from someplace where there's the hydroelectric plant, and there are transformers that are linked to our house, and then other things happen. I'm sure it's a lot of more complicated than that!
        DB: As this continues to expand outward at this dramatic rate, do you have certain concerns about how it's growing? Not necessarily technical concerns; maybe social concerns.
        JP: Well, I certainly do have some concerns about, you know, there being haves and have-nots, between people who know how to use it and other people who don't. I do share concerns that people have about the potential for there being haves and have-nots, people who are way up to speed with this stuff and use it all the time and people that are not involved in this world at all. I don't really know much about what to do about that, but I think that it would be good for society to look for ways to make sure everybody had access to this.
        DB: The implication there is that it's important to have access to this.
        JP: Yeah. Especially as more government functions are put on the Web so that you can access information about legislation or city services or whatever by Web... I guess what I would imagine is something like public libraries maybe should have a whole row of workstations as webstations, that people could go into and do whatever they want to do on them, and maybe there should be other places to do that.
        DB: I guess on the other extreme of the have-nots is the... I actually spent yesterday reading the Unibomber Manifesto, all 35,000 words of it. I'm probably one of like twenty people that did. But there's clearly a cry of rage from this person about technology. I mean, obviously he's got problems, because he also kills people. But to some degree when I was reading it, I was thinking, "Wow, I'll bet you a lot of people feel the same way he does." Just "I'll never understand this stuff. It's magic. And I'm a have-not."
        JP: Yeah. Well, that's why I think things like the Web are important, and to the extent that we can make it, in some sense magic, but something that people can use by, you know, point-and-click stuff, I think we'll be... Society can be better if everybody can have access to it and it would be easier to use. In Santa Monica, which is right here in the L.A. area, they have had a project for a long time on computer access to city functions and information. They put up a bunch of hardcopy or scrolling teletype E-mail kinds of things mostly, a little server, that stuff. And they put a bunch of workstations and terminals in their public libraries, and they got quite a lot of interaction with a few homeless people coming to the library and would sit there and interact with the city government people quite diligently. I think that was a big surprise to a lot of people.
        DB: Because...
        JP: Well, I mean, it wasn't part of their thinking of how this would be used. So I think there is some potential there. By providing free access to it in some places, I think there is quite a lot of potential for having people who might otherwise be considered have-nots to participate.
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      BBC News - Are we staring at a tech stock bubble?
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 03:01
        25 March 2014Last updated at 22:12 ET By Puneet Pal SinghBusiness reporter, BBC News, New YorkThe problem with bubbles on the stock market is that they're difficult to spot.
        At any given time the bulls will have you believe there is still room for stocks to rise further, while the bears will say the opposite.
        But one of the indicators of a bubble, say analysts, is when a huge number of firms that don't make any money look to sell shares and list on the stock exchange.
        That is why the rush in technology and internet companies listing in the US - following the likes of Facebook and Twitter - is raising concerns.
        Ian D'Souza, a professor of behavioural finance at New York University, says the trend is beginning to look like the dotcom bubble of 2000.
        Continue reading the main storyWe are now trying to calibrate where we are in bubble cycles, rather than asking the question: 'Is the starting valuation correct?'''
        End QuoteIan D'SouzaNew York University"One of the great indicators of a bubble is when young companies are trying to access the capital markets in great quantities," he says.
        "We've seen a proliferation of these at an accelerating rate over the past six months."
        Mr D'Souza says that nearly 75% of recent stock market debuts have been from loss-making firms.
        In the months leading to the 2000 stock market crash, 80% of initial public offerings (IPOs) were of loss-makers.
        "It's not just a hot market, it's an ultra-hot market if you compare it with pretty much the biggest bubble of all time from an IPO perspective," he adds.
        Betting on future?Loss makers like Twitter, Groupon and Zynga have all raised cash in recent years, generating huge valuations as a result of their stock market listings.
        Meanwhile other loss-making firms like Weibo - often referred to as China's version of Twitter - have also unveiled plans to raise hundreds of millions of dollars via share sales in the US.
        But analysts say they are optimistic about these companies because they have built up substantial user bases and, if they can monetise that popularity, could start making profits.
        Kathleen Smith of IPO investment advisory firm Renaissance Capital says the ability of firms such as Twitter to make a large amount of money is "further down the road".
        "So investors are looking at that [and] saying: 'This company is worth this because I can see it has a business model to be able to grow its level of profitability'.
        "'I am willing to pay this price with the assumption that this growth is going to prove out'."
        Ms Smith adds that while the number of IPOs has risen substantially this year - there have been 53 listings so far in the US in 2014 raising nearly $8.5bn (£5bn) - that is still half of what we saw during the same period in 2000.
        She also points to another key indicator - the performance of newly-listed shares on their first day of trading.
        In 1999 more than 100 companies saw their share price double on the first day. In 2000 there were 80. So far this year there have been just four.
        "That is the difference between what we are seeing now and a bit of the mania that happened in 1999-2000," she says.
        Continue reading the main storyAAA-rating
        The best credit rating that can be given to a borrower's debts, indicating that the risk of borrowing defaulting is minuscule.
        She adds that the very fact that investors have become anxious over a bubble being formed was also "a good thing for the market".
        Piggy backing?But Mr D'Souza argues it is not the big name firms that are the concern, but rather the smaller firms looking to cash in on the optimism surrounding tech stocks as a whole.
        He points to firms such as Facebook, Twitter and Alibaba which are either already making a profit or have a business model that is projected to make one.
        But many lesser-known companies have been trying to "piggyback" on their success.
        "So we have arguments like: 'this is the Facebook of China or the YouTube of Russia'," he says. "What you do from a psychological or behavioural point of view is that you anchor to these very successful well-known [names]."
        He explains that such comparisons create the often-false impression that these firms will be as successful as the ones they are being compared to.
        But Mr D'Souza says the biggest worry for him is that investors apparently recognise that bubbles are being created in the tech market, but seem willing to work within them.
        "We are now trying to calibrate where we are in bubble cycles, rather than asking the question: 'Is the starting valuation correct?'," he says.
      Revealed: Apple and Google's wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees | PandoDaily
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 02:36
        By Mark AmesOn March 22, 2014
        ''British medieval ordinances of Bristol cobblers in 1364 state, 'Masters are forbidden to poach workers from other members of the craft.'''
        '-- Orly Lobel,Talent Wants To Be Free
        Back in January, I wrote about ''The Techtopus'' '-- an illegal agreement between seven tech giants, including Apple, Google, and Intel, to suppress wages for tens of thousands of tech employees. The agreement prompted a Department of Justice investigation, resulting in a settlement in which the companies agreed to curb their restricting hiring deals. The same companies were then hit with a civil suit by employees affected by the agreements.
        This week, as the final summary judgement for the resulting class action suit looms, and several of the companies mentioned (Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm) scramble to settle out of court, Pando has obtained court documents (embedded below) which show shocking evidence of a much larger conspiracy, reaching far beyond Silicon Valley.
        Confidential internal Google and Apple memos, buried within piles of court dockets and reviewed by PandoDaily, clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple's Steve Jobs and Google's Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees.
        According to multiple sources familiar with the case, several of these newly named companies were also subpoenaed by the DOJ for their investigation. A spokesperson for Ask.com confirmed that in 2009-10 the company was investigated by the DOJ, and agreed to cooperate fully with that investigation. Other companies confirmed off the record that they too had been subpoenaed around the same time.
        Although the Department ultimately decided to focus its attention on just Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm and Pixar, the emails and memos clearly name dozens more companies which, at least as far as Google and Apple executives were concerned, formed part of their wage-fixing cartel.
        A confidential Google memo (above, left) titled ''Special Agreement Hiring Policy,'' dating from November 2006, divides the company's wage-fixing agreements into two categories: ''Do Not Cold Call'' and ''Sensitive Companies.'' Below that, the Google memo offers a brief chronology and list of companies:
        The following companies have special agreements with Google and are part of the ''Do Not Cold Call'' list.
        The first entry marks the beginning of Google's participation in the wage-suppression scheme:
        Effective March 6, 2005:
        ' Genentech, Inc.' Intel Corporation' Apple Computer' Paypal, Inc.' Comcast Corporation
        Until now, neither Paypal (owned by eBay), Comcast nor Genentech have been publicly mentioned as part of the wage-suppression cartel. Nor have they been publicly named in criminal or civil actions relating to this particular case, although both the DOJ and the state of California are currently pursuing a separate but related antitrust suits against eBay.
        The ''effective date'' of Google's first wage-fixing agreements, early March 2005, follows a few weeks after Steve Jobs threatened Google's Sergey Brin to stop all recruiting at Apple: ''if you hire a single one of these people,'' Jobs emailed Brin, ''that means war.''
        Jobs threatened Brin and Google on February 17, 2005; nine days later, Apple's VP for Human Resources sent out an internal email to Apple recruiting,
        All,
        Please add Google to your ''hands-off'' list. We recently agreed not to recruit from one another so if you hear of any recruiting they are doing against us, please be sure to let me know.
        Please also be sure to honor our side of the deal.
        That was February 26; on March 6, Google's identical non-solicitation agreement with Apple became ''effective.''
        This timeline is important to establish because it demonstrates precisely what makes this scheme illegal: secret cross-agreements between two or more parties to fix wages in the labor market, at a time when tech engineer wages were soaring, threatening profits.
        This is just a tiny sample of the ''overwhelming'' evidence used by both the Justice Department's antitrust division, and the District Court judge in San Jose, to debunk the company executives' claims that each had coincidentally implemented identical non-solicitation policies at the same time, with the same companies, without knowing what the other side was doing.
        From that point on, the secret cartel expanded. Later that year, in September 2005, eBay CEO Meg Whitman called Schmidt complaining that Google's recruiters were hurting profits and business at eBay. Schmidt emailed Google's ''Executive Management Committee'''--the company's top executives'-- summarizing Whitman's, and ''the valley'''s view that competing for workers by offering higher pay packages was ''unfair'':
        From: Eric SchmidtSent: Wednesday, September 7, 2005 10:52 PMSubject: Phone call from Meg Whitman
        DO NOT FORWARD
        Meg called to talk about our hiring practices. Here is what she said:
        1. Google is the talk of the valley because we are driving up salaries across the board. People are just waiting for us to fall and get back at us for our ''unfair'' practices now.
        2. Our recruiting practices are ''zero sum'' and it appears that somewhere in Google we are targeting EBay to ''hurt them'' and its the reputation that we are doing this against Yahoo, EBay and MSFT (I denied this.)
        Schmidt's email clearly prioritizes Whitman's and other CEOs' concerns over the rights of employees or the concept of fair competition, even ordering a Google executive to ''fire the recruiter [who offended Whitman] immediately.'' Schmidt's email ends:
        This was a rough call from a good friend. We need to get this fixed.
        Within weeks of Whitman's call to Schmidt, eBay was placed on a Google list of ''Sensitive'' companies, for whom Google placed fewer restrictions on its recruiters except at the executive recruitment level. It was at this time that Google began to internally formalize its illegal wage-suppression pacts'--and Schmidt was clearly worried about getting caught.
        In early October, 2005, Google's Senior VP for Human Resources, Shona Brown, emailed Schmidt a draft list of companies on their ''Do Not Call'' and ''Sensitive'' lists, and the policy protocols.Schmidt responded:
        ''This looks very good Eric''
        Schmidt was then asked if Google sales executive Omid Kordestani could share ''with Ebay/PP the rules as they pertain to them?''
        Schmidt responded:
        ''I would prefer that Omid do it verbally since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later? Not sure about this.. thanks Eric''
        Google's HR head at the time, Shona Brown, agreed with her boss, in lower-case ee cummings syntax:
        ''makes sense to do orally. i agree.''
        A year later, by the end of 2006, Google upgraded eBay to its ''Do Not Cold Call'' list, joining OpenTV, Nvidia Technologies, and Intuit along with the original five companies.
        Google's ''Sensitive'' companies list (right) had meanwhile grown to include AOL, AskJeeves, Clear Channel, Earthlink, IBM, Lycos, and NTL, a major British cable company known today as Virgin Media.
        Some of the companies Pando contacted for this article insisted, off the record, that they had not agreed to appear on Google or Apple's lists, and that there were no reciprocal non-solicitation agreements. Indeed, that same line of defense was used by many of the defendants in the current case.
        Of course, it's possible that Google, Apple or others simply added companies to their don't recruit lists without coordinating with them first. That said, as we see from the Whitman and Jobs emails above, addition to the list was frequently prompted by an angry phone call or heated discussion.
        One example of this is Dell who, despite not being listed in the civil suit or DOJ investigation, was included on Google's ''don't call'' list after an angry email from Michael Dell himself.
        On April 19, 2007, Dell wrote to Schmidt [typos Dell's'--M.A.]:
        Eric,
        I learned recently that Google extend an offer to one of our sales guys, [REDACTED].
        Not real happy about this and not the kind of think we would expect given our partnership.
        We should discuss next time we are together but I think we should have a general understanding that we are not actively recruiting from each other.
        Michael
        Two days later, Schmidt forwarded Dell's email to two top Google HR executives, and added his own comment up top:
        Lets put them on the ''don't call into Dell'' list for a while. Thanks eric
        We'll continue to press companies to comment on the record regarding any discussions which may have caused them to be added to Google or Apple's lists.
        * * * *
        Incredible as it may seem, the Techtopus was just getting started. Between the end of 2006 and early 2008, its tentacles multiplied, reaching into the lives of workers across the globe and across more industries.
        A confidential Google document titled ''Special Agreement Hiring Policy,'' dated January 7, 2008, expanded the categories and definitions of the company's secret deals. What started as a two-page memo in late 2006, had now grown to a list nine pages long.
        Under a new category, ''Restricted Hiring,'' the Google memo lists four firms and their subsidiares:
        Parent Companies:
        ' Microsoft' Novell' Oracle' Sun Microsystems
        These companies alone had a combined workforce of well over 200,000 employees. However, the protocols under ''Restricted Hiring'' limited the wage-theft pact to manager-level and above:
        ''For each of these 'Restricted Hiring' companies, Google has agreed to the following protocol.
        1. Not to pursue manager level and above candidates for Product, Sales, or G&A roles '-- even if they have applied to Google;
        2. However, there are no restrictions to our recruiting from these companies at individual contributor levels for PSG&A;
        3. Additionally, there are no restrictions at any level for engineering candidates.
        Under Google's ''Do Not Cold Call'' list, the number of companies doubled from five to 11, but the number of employees potentially affected grew several times more than that:
        The following companies (and by association their subsidiaries listed in Appendix A) have special agreements with Google and are part of the 'Do Not Cold Call' list.
        Parent Companies:
        ' Apple, Inc' Comcast Corporation' DoubleClick' Genentech' IBM Corporation (Junior hires okay'--also applies to subsidiaries)' Illumita' Intel Corporation' Intuit' Microsoft' Oglivy' WPP
        These combined workforce of just these eleven companies totaled over 775,000 in 2008. The antitrust lawsuit going to trial in May affects only 100,000 employees of seven tech firms (although three have since settled out of court), leaving most of the firms listed on Google's confidential documents out.
        But we're not done yet.
        Google's list of ''Sensitive Companies,'' requiring recruiters to check with Google's executives first (which could and did mean Google informing on the prospect to his or her employer), is as follows:
        Parent Companies:
        ' AOL, Inc.' Ask.com' Clear Channel Communications, Inc.' Dell, Inc.' Earthlink, Inc' Virgin Media, Inc. (Formerly NTL, Inc.)
        Beneath that list, a rather cryptic warning suggesting that all across industries, illegal non-solicitation agreements were common everywhere:
        ''Please be cautious when recruiting teams from any company to keep our candidates and potential employees safe from legal action. Most companies have non-solicit agreements which would limit or prohibit a candidate from asking a coworker to interview with us as well.''
        That passage alone is a stunning example of not just flagrantly illegal practices'--it also shows how few rights companies assume their employees are entitled to, rights that Americans take for granted'--such as the right to free speech, the right to assembly, the right to ask one's own co-worker if he or she would be interested in taking a better job somewhere else'...
        But back to the Techtopus: Finally, Google's 2008 memo lists 18 staffing agencies which Google has agreed not to recruit from:
        ''As a general rule, we should not be recruiting staffing talent from any of our approved staffing partners. The lists on the following page outline these partners for both the U.S. and International staffing.''
        Among the staffing agencies listed: Kelly Services (US and worldwide), Kforce, CDI Business Solutions, Adecco, and others.
        And Google isn't the only company that kept a list. Buried in the court dockets is an email from Apple recruiting manager David Alvarez to fellow Apple recruiting manager Jonathan Geyer, dated July 9, 2009, containing a document titled ''Hands Off (Do Not Call List).''
        That list includes the other six firms charged by the DOJ and originally named in the wage-suppression class action: Adobe, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar and Lucas. But the Apple ''Do Not Call'' list also includes an additional 21 companies not mentioned in the DOJ investigation or the class action suit. Among the companies that appear to have conspired with Apple to suppress their employees' wages:
        Microsoft, AMD, Best Buy, Cingular, Foxconn, Nvidia, and a handful of distributors like Mac Zone, PC Connection and PC Mall. Some of the companies are on Apple's ''Do Not Call List'' because, according to the memo, they share ''common board members'': Intuit, JCrew, Nike, and Genentech, whose CEO at the time, Arthur Levinson, sat on Apple's board of directors.
        All of the above is just what's in the mountain of pre-trial court documents. It's highly likely that more names will spill out during testimony. Pando will continue to report any new developments and also will be covering the summary judgment hearing next week.
        For now, it's enough to try to absorb what all of these cross-company, cross-industry secret labor-fixing agreements mean. Most labor stories about wage theft and corporate abuse tend to focus on low-wage earners and the most disadvantaged. Certainly it strains one's sensibilities to compare an exploited low-wage worker in the fast food or retail industry to tech engineers and programmers, who are far better compensated, live more comfortably, and rarely worry about putting food in their children's mouths.
        In terms of pathos, there is no comparison; minimum wage earners are struggling to survive, and nearly all of the well-educated, privileged-born people in the media world agree that tech industry workers are all a bunch of overpaid misogynist libertarian bros, a caricature that makes it perfectly fine to hate the entire class, and impossible to consider them as political comrades stuck in the same predicament as the rest of the non-multimillionaires in this country.
        What's more important is the political predicament that low-paid fast food workers share with well-paid hi-tech workers: the loss of power over their lives and their futures to the growing mass of concentrated power in Silicon Valley, whose tentacles are so strong now and so great, that hundreds of thousands of workers around the globe'--public relations and cable company employees in the British Isles, programmers and tech engineers in Russia and China (according to other documents which I'll write about soon)'--have their lives controlled and their wages and opportunities stolen from them without ever knowing about it, all the while being bombarded with cultural cant about the wisdom of the free market, about the efficiency of free knowledge, about the need to take personal responsibility and to blame no one but yourself for everything that happens in your life and your career.
        * * * *
        Editor's note: Comment from companies mentioned in this report
        Pando attempted to contact the companies mentioned by name in this report, requesting comment on the civil lawsuit (and in some cases, separate DOJ investigations). All of these requests were made at least two business hours before publication, in line with Pando's standard comment request policy.
        For ease of reading, due to the sheer volume of companies involved, except where specific facts are being disputed, we have grouped all of the comments below, rather than including them inline. We will continue to update the list below as we receive additional comment.
        An Intuit spokesperson responded with this statement:
        ''[T]he current lawsuit against eBay mentions Intuit, but we are not named as defendants in the suit.
        Regarding the civil case:
        Intuit entered into a settlement in the High Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation. We have agreed to resolve this matter without acknowledging any wrongdoing. We continue to believe our actions were fully compliant with the law. This was an expensive and burdensome case and we wanted to put it behind us. Intuit represents approximately 5 percent of the proposed class.
        Regarding Bill Campbell's role:
        Bill Campbell, chairman of Intuit's board, is a board member at Apple and had served as an advisor to Google. He is recognized across companies for being uniquely collaborative and procompetitive. Throughout Silicon Valley, he has played an important and productive role in building relationships that foster innovation.
        Regarding the current allegations from the High Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation: Then and today, Bill takes his fiduciary and advisory responsibilities at Intuit seriously, and we believe all of Bill's actions have fully complied with the law.''
        An eBay/PayPal spokesperson did not comment on the civil class action suit, but gave Pando the following statement regarding their separate DOJ investigation:
        ''eBay continues to believe that the Department of Justice and California Attorney General have taken an unprecedented and aggressive approach to their enforcement of antitrust laws in this instance. Nevertheless, eBay is engaging in discussions with the Department of Justice and California Attorney General regarding the possible resolution of this action and believes that a stay of the action will avoid unnecessary use resources while those discussions are pending.''
        An Intel spokesperson told Pando:''We don't think we violated any laws, and we are going to continue to defend ourselves.''
        A Virgin Media spokesperson told Pando:''Virgin Media operates solely in the UK. I appreciate Google also recruits here but I don't believe we're involved in what sounds like a US lawsuit.''
        An Adobe spokesperson told Pando:''Adobe does not comment on pending litigation.''
        A Kelly spokesperson said the company''does not comment on pending litigation against a customer.''
        A spokesperson for Nike told Pando''Nike is unaware of any such agreement and have no further comment.''
        A spokesperson for AMD declined to comment for this story.
        A spokesperson for AOL declined to comment for this story.
        A spokesperson for Cingular/AT&Tdeclined to comment for this story.
        A spokesperson for Delldeclined to comment for this story.
        A spokesperson for Oracle declined to comment for this story.
        A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment for this story.
        Adecco, Apple, Best Buy, CDI Business Solutions, Clear Channel, Comcast, Dreamworks, Foxconn, Genentech, Inc., Google, IBM, Illumita, Jcrew, Kforce, Lucasfilm, Mac Zone, Novell, Nvidia, Oglivy, OpenTV, PC Connection, PC Mall, Pixar, Sun Microsystemsand WPP either could not be reached, or had not responded to requests for comment as of publication time.
        * * * *
        Documents cited in this report:
        Google Policy 428-10
        Exhibit 1871
        Google 2006 Hiring Memo
        Hands-off list
        Hands-off list
        Exhibit 872
    Ottomania
      Turkey doubles down on Twitter block
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        Sun, 23 Mar 2014 14:19
        Adam Eltan | AFP | Getty Images
        Protesters hold placards reading 'do not touch my twitter ', 'communication right is a basic human right' and'cencorship to internet! A dream comes true' during a demonstration against the ban on Twitter during a demonstration against Turkish government in Ankara on March 22, 2014.
        Turkey doubled down on its decision to block Twitter at the weekend, amid near-unanimous international criticism of the ban, which the US has compared to book burning.
        Many users in the country reported that work-arounds that had previously given them access to the site, such as changing the domain name information on computers, could no longer overcome the ban.
        However, other methods, such as using virtual private networks, a technology whose use has soared since Turkey introduced the block late on Thursday night, still proved effective. So far the ban has been the target of a storm of criticism internationally while failing to restrain Twitter use in Turkey itself, which jumped in the wake of the government's move.
        Turkey's Telecommunication Authority imposed the ban in the midst of a corruption scandal in which Twitter has been used extensively to distribute seemingly incriminating voice recordings of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister, and many of his associates. Mr Erdogan has described some of the recordings as fabricated - such as one in which he appears to tell his son to hide large amounts of money from a corruption probe - while acknowledging others as authentic but illegally recorded.
        (Read more: Turkey Twitter ban slammed by politicians, public)
        In a note, Mr Erodgan's office said that Twitter had not complied with Turkish court rulings holding that certain Twitter accounts had violated people's privacy. "In order to prevent irremediable future grievances, access to Twitter has been blocked," it added. "The main ground for this measure is the continuous disregard of the court rulings...Twitter has been used as a means to carry out systematic character assassinations by illegally acquired recordings, fake and fabricated records of wiretapping [and] continuing violation of personal rights."
        However many lawyers say it is illegal and disproportionate under Turkish law to block the entire Twitter site, even though Mr Erdogan's government recently passed legislation in response to the leaks that increases its control over internet access.
        Internationally, Turkey appeared increasingly isolated because of its stance, with many of its traditional allies rounding on the ban.
        More from FT.com
        Turkish citizens defy Twitter ban to attack Prime MinisterErdogan strident in blaming conspiraciesThe Erdogan-Gulen showdown
        In an official blog, the US State Department described internet censorship as "21st century book burning" and "a threat to freedom of speech everywhere". It added: "A friend like Turkey has nothing to fear in the free-flow of ideas and even criticism represented by Twitter. Its attempt to block its citizens' access to social media tools should be reversed."
        Hillary Clinton, the former US Secretary of State, tweeted: "The freedom to speak out and to connect is a fundamental right. The people of Turkey deserve that right restored," while Britain, Germany, Canada and other nations all made clear their objections.
        Turkey doubled down on its decision to block Twitter at the weekend, which the US has compared to book burning. The FT reports.
    Out There
      Media Advisory: Press Conference in Brazil to Announce Discovery in Outer Solar System | ESO
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        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 15:10
        ann14021 '-- Announcement25 March 2014
        An international team of astronomers, led by Felipe Braga-Ribas (Observat"rio Nacional/MCTI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), has used telescopes at seven locations in South America, including the 1.54-metre Danish and TRAPPIST telescopes at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, to make a surprise discovery in the outer Solar System.
        This unexpected result raises several unanswered questions and is expected to provoke much debate. A press conference will be held in Brazil to present the new results and allow opportunities for questions.
        Note that all information regarding these findings is under strict embargo until 19:00 CET (15:00 BRT) on Wednesday 26 March 2014.
        When: The conference will be held on 26 March 2014 at 14:30 local time (BRT) and will take place in Portuguese with a summary in English.
        Who: The conference presenters are:
        Felipe Braga-Ribas, Observat"rio Nacional/MCTI, Rio de Janeiro, BrazilBruno Sicardy, LESIA, Observatoire de Paris, CNRS, Paris, FranceProf. Roberto Martins, Observat"rio Nacional/MCTI, Rio de Janeiro, BrazilProf. Julio Camargo, Observat"rio Nacional/MCTI, Rio de Janeiro, BrazilWhere: The event takes place in Observat"rio Nacional, Audit"rio do Grupo de Pesquisas em Astronomia (GPA), in the GPA/LINEA Building in Rua General Jos(C) Cristino, 77, Bairro de S£o Cristov£o, Rio de Janeiro - RJ, 20921-400, Brazil.
        How: To participate in the conference and receive additional material, bona fide members of the media must get accredited by sending an email to Dr. Gustavo Rojas (ESON Brazil) at eson-brazil@eso.org. Members of the media may also request the feed URL from the contacts below. Questions can be sent by email to eson-brazil@eso.org in Portuguese or English. A limited number of journalists can participate via GoToMeeting online (please request access from eson-brazil@eso.org).
        ContactsGustavo RojasESON Brazil, Universidade Federal de S£o CarlosS£o Carlos, BrazilTel.: +55 1633519795Cell.: +55 16991554847Email: eson-brazil@eso.org
        Richard HookESO, Public Information OfficerGarching bei M¼nchen, GermanyTel: +49 89 3200 6655Cell: +49 151 1537 3591Email: rhook@eso.org
    VIDEOS-CLIPS-DOCS
      VIDEO- TSA Calls For Armed Guards At Ticket Counters And Checkpoints Inside Airports - YouTube
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      VIDEO- Pres Carter "Every Phone Call YOU Make Or Receive IS RECORDED! Including Email" (Short Version) - YouTube
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        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 04:00
      VIDEO-NBC's Today Finds It 'Surprising' Obama Not On Fortune's List of 50 Greatest Leaders | MRCTV
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        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 03:55
        From the Thursday, March 20 Today show on NBC:
        Savannah Guthrie: ''We are back now at 8:14 with 'What's Trending Today.' And this morning, Fortune magazine is releasing its first list of the world's 50 greatest leaders. The issue's out tomorrow. We're going to get an exclusive look right now at who makes the list. Bill Clinton comes in at number five and makes the cover. There are a lot of other notable names here.
        ''Tell you what, though, there may be some talk about one leader who did not make the list, the leader of the free world, President Obama. Fortune tells us he was not overlooked, he just did not make the cut.''
        Natalie Morales: ''In the top 50.''
        Matt Lauer: ''Yeah, that's surprising.''
        >>> This video is featured in the Washington Examiner's ''Washington Secrets'' post by Paul Bedard as his March 24, 2014 Mainstream Media Scream
      VIDEO-Biden: 'Pass ENDA Now' | MRCTV
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        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 03:51
        MRC TV is an online platform for people to share and view videos, articles and opinions on topics that are important to them '-- from news to political issues and rip-roaring humor.
        MRC TV is brought to you by the Media Research Center, a 501(c) 3 nonprofit research and education organization. The MRC is located at: 1900 Campus Commons Drive, Reston, VA 20194. For information about the MRC, please visit www.MRC.org.
        Copyright (C) 2014, Media Research Center. All Rights Reserved.
      VIDEO-Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards on Hobby Lobby Case | MRCTV
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        MRC TV is an online platform for people to share and view videos, articles and opinions on topics that are important to them '-- from news to political issues and rip-roaring humor.
        MRC TV is brought to you by the Media Research Center, a 501(c) 3 nonprofit research and education organization. The MRC is located at: 1900 Campus Commons Drive, Reston, VA 20194. For information about the MRC, please visit www.MRC.org.
        Copyright (C) 2014, Media Research Center. All Rights Reserved.
      VIDEO-Obama's Top Concern is 'Nuclear Weapon Going off in Manhattan' | MRCTV
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        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 03:34
        MRC TV is an online platform for people to share and view videos, articles and opinions on topics that are important to them '-- from news to political issues and rip-roaring humor.
        MRC TV is brought to you by the Media Research Center, a 501(c) 3 nonprofit research and education organization. The MRC is located at: 1900 Campus Commons Drive, Reston, VA 20194. For information about the MRC, please visit www.MRC.org.
        Copyright (C) 2014, Media Research Center. All Rights Reserved.
      VIDEO-Obama: Sanctions to be Imposed if Russia Moves Further Into Ukraine 'Could Cause Some Disruptions to Each of Our Economies' | MRCTV
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        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 03:26
        patrick.goodenoughPatrick covered government and politics in South Africa and the Middle East before joining CNSNews.com in 1999. Since then he has launched foreign bureaus for CNSNews.com in Jerusalem, London and the Pacific Rim. From October 2006 to July 2007, Patrick served as Managing Editor at the organization's world headquarters in Alexandria, Va. Now back in the Pacific Rim, as International Editor he reports on politics, international relations, security, terrorism, ethics and religion, and oversees reporting by CNSNews.com's roster of international stringers.
        show more
      VIDEO-Sen. Murray: 'Stunning' that Supreme Court will Decide Hobby Lobby Case | MRCTV
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        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 03:15
        MRC TV is an online platform for people to share and view videos, articles and opinions on topics that are important to them '-- from news to political issues and rip-roaring humor.
        MRC TV is brought to you by the Media Research Center, a 501(c) 3 nonprofit research and education organization. The MRC is located at: 1900 Campus Commons Drive, Reston, VA 20194. For information about the MRC, please visit www.MRC.org.
        Copyright (C) 2014, Media Research Center. All Rights Reserved.
      VIDEO-"The TRUTHERS Who Perpetuate The Theory That The U.S. (GOVERNMENT) Orchestrated The Attacks On 9/11" - YouTube
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        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 02:49
      VIDEO- Putin Speaks English for CNN - YouTube
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        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 22:00
      VIDEO- Obama On Leno in favor of Homosexual propaganda to Russian kids - YouTube
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        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 21:40
      VIDEO-Terror War Profiteers Announce How They Will Protect YOUR 15 Y/O Daughter's Privacy From NSA Spying - YouTube
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        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 21:19
      VIDEO-What Happens If A US President Stops Speaking, And Nobody Claps | Zero Hedge
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        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:50
        ... does it mean that everyone saw right through the endless bluster, hollow rhetoric and empty promises of the man tasked with reading from a teleprompter, and currently in charge of one of the world's most totalitarian states? Because either someone is getting fired for forgetting to turn on the "applause" sign, or Europeans no longer care for the lies uttered by Obama on all topics NSA-related (and all other topics too). One wonders: how long until the US president finally gets the same treatment in his own country?
        Average:Your rating: NoneAverage: 4.6(38 votes)
      VIDEO-Remarks at the Launch of the Gender-Based Violence Emergency Response and Protection Initiative
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        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:33
        Good afternoon. Thank you, Uzra, for those kind words, and for your extraordinary service. I am honored to join so many remarkable people from so many corners of the globe for today's launch of the Gender-Based Violence Emergency Response and Protection Initiative.
        I want to thank Vital Voices and the Avon Foundation for Women, two terrific institutions for which I have great respect, for their support for this initiative. There are a lot of people with impressive titles here today, but only one of them is both a Global Ambassador and a musical Duchess. Thank you, Fergie, for joining us and for everything you've done to raise awareness about the issue that brings us all together today.
        Everyone in this room is familiar with the horrific statistics about gender-based violence. One in three women worldwide has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime. In some countries, it's double that rate. In any given year, more than a hundred million girls and tens of millions of boys under the age of 18 experience forced sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual violence. Today, there are more than 60 million child brides in the world. These numbers and these acts '' from rape to domestic violence to early forced marriage to so-called ''honor killings'' '' should shock the conscience of all people, from all walks of life, in all parts of our world.
        As Russia's intervention in Crimea, the Syrian civil war, and the conflict in the Central African Republic capture the headlines and the public's attention, some may ask why gender-based violence '' a deplorable act, but one that has been with us since time immemorial '' deserves high-level attention.
        All of you know as well as I do that the answer to that question is as simple as it is compelling. Gender-based violence '' wherever and whenever it takes place, here at home or around the world '' is an inexcusable crime and an affront to dignity and human rights. It robs people, disproportionately women and girls, of their potential and threatens their mental, physical, and reproductive health. It denies economic opportunity and undermines economic growth. And it imperils the safety and stability of communities and countries.
        Advancing gender equality is therefore not only the right thing to do '' it is the smart thing to do.
        That is exactly why we've pressed ahead with two important strategies '' the National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security, and the U.S. Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence Globally. At their core, both documents state unequivocally that sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation should never be a basis for discrimination '' and they should never be a basis for acts of violence. And both documents lay out concrete steps to translate those convictions into actions.
        We are working with our international partners to prevent and respond to gender-based violence in humanitarian emergencies from Syria to South Sudan. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, we are developing and operating early warning systems that alert authorities when violence '' including gender-based violence '' is about to break. Mindful that men and boys should be part of the solution, we are working with imams in Afghanistan and community leaders in Iraq to raise awareness on women's rights. And across the globe, we are helping guarantee that laws are enforced '' police, judges, and prosecutors are sensitized and trained, and survivors can safely and confidentially report crimes.
        The Gender-Based Violence Emergency and Protection Initiative we are launching today builds on, and complements, these efforts. It has three clear objectives.
        First, to provide immediate assistance to individuals facing extreme acts of gender-based violence. Working through local partners, we will be able to provide funding for medical expenses, emergency shelter, psychosocial support, and legal assistance to survivors, so that they are able not only to recover but to prosper.
        Second, to provide targeted training and advocacy support to the courageous men and women working to put an end to gender-based violence. We all know that reform and attitude change can only come from within societies. Those willing to take the risk to stand-up and raise their voices deserve our support.
        Third, to develop a robust regional and international network of service providers and activists in 11 countries across six geographic hubs. From Mexico to Mali and Tajikistan to Thailand, these networks will share data, lessons learned, and best practices, coordinate emergency responses, and work together on shared advocacy efforts.
        To make a lasting impact, we need to match the scope of this challenge with the intensity of our response. It will require each and every one of us to stay focused, to continue to marry words with deeds, and to never be content with cheering from the sidelines when we can join the global effort to end the epidemic of gender-based violence once and for all.
        Thank you very much.
      VIDEO- This Is a Generic Brand Video - YouTube
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        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:07
      VIDEO-THE FINANCIAL ARMAGEDDON BLOG: BREAKING NEWS: Ukraine CUTS Half ELECTRICITY SUPPLY TO CRIMEA
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        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 03:11
        This is going to lead Russia to cut gas to Ukraine. Europe is going to start to worry about it's own gas again. Germany is in a tough spot with its gas supplies now.Electricity supply to Crimea has been reduced by half and the region is experiencing rotating blackouts following two accidents on power lines coming from Ukraine, Crimea's energy company says.Earlier, Crimean Vice-PM Rustam Temirgaliev said that Ukrainian national energy company Ukrenergo reduced the electricity supply to Crimea by 50 percent. ''Ukrenegro reduced the power in its power lines cutting the amount of supplied energy by half,'' the top official told Kryminfo news agency.Temirgaliev also described the power shortages as ''blackmail'' on behalf of Kiev. Read More @ http://rt.com/news/ukraine-reduce-energy-crimea-721/
      VIDEO- The Best of George Carlin: Exposing our government and fall of humanity one joke at a time - YouTube
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        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 02:50
      VIDEO- President Obama Holds a Press Conference with Prime Minister Rutte of the Netherlands - YouTube
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        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 01:17
      VIDEO- Opening ceremony NSS2014 - YouTube
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        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 00:19
      VIDEO- Timber Clear Cutting Causes Washington Mudslide. - YouTube
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        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 23:13
      VIDEO-Reports: Creepy Staten Island Clown May Be Publicity Stunt CBS New York
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        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 23:08
        TRI-STATE NEWS HEADLINESFrom our newsroom to your inbox weekday mornings at 9AM.
        Sign UpNEW YORK (CBSNewYork) '-- Social media sites have been erupting with stories of a mysterious and creepy clown on Staten Island.
        But published reports Monday indicated that it might all just have been a viral marketing campaign by a horror movie production company and all four people who claimed to spot the clown might have been in on it.
        Reports: Creepy Staten Island Clown May Be Publicity Stunt1010 WINS' John Montone reportsPhotos on Twitter and Instagram in recent days have shown the bald clown, wearing a yellow uniform with green and purple sleeves, and a white collar. The clown is seen carrying two balloons, one green, the other yellow.
        The posters of the photos claimed the clown had been sighted near the Grasmere and Richmond Valley stations on the Staten Island Railroad, the Staten Island Advance reported Monday.
        The photos showed the clown at night. But comedian Vic Dibitetto also released a video last week, showing himself driving in a car past the clown in broad daylight.
        ''You'll never believe what I just saw back there. I had to make a U-turn. You got to see this. This is unbelievable, these f***ing morons in this city,'' Dibitetto said in the video. He goes on to drive past the clown in a bank parking lot on Richmond Avenue, and the clown points at him and waves.
        In the time since, the #SIClown hashtag has gone viral, and has been subject parody Twitter accounts and an assortment of tweets that seem to express everything from genuine fear to mockery.
        Even U.S. Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.) has joined in tweeting about the strange costumed character.
        But what was really going on with the clown? Published reports Monday night indicated that the people who posted the photos and videos might all have been in on the joke.
        The Staten Island Advance went on to report that the only people who posted images of the clown '' Vincent Innocente, Robert Privitera and Michael Leavy '' are all Facebook friends with one another and are all linked with Staten Island-based Fuzz on the Lens Productions. Comedian Dibitetto is also linked to the company, the newspaper reported.
        CBS 2'²s Scott Rapoport spoke to Dibitetto on the phone and asked him if the clown was a hoax or publicity stunt several times. Dibitetto said he swears it is not, Rapaport reported.
        But the newspaper quoted Leavy as essentially admitting to using the clown as a publicity stunt, saying the group was trying to ''get as many people associated with Fuzz on the Lens as possible.''
        Leavy would not comment to the newspaper on whether Fuzz on the Lens was involved in a possible upcoming adaptation of Stephen King's ''It.''
        The Staten Island clown resembled Pennywise the Dancing Clown from the 1990 horror miniseries based on King's novel.
        Check Out These Other Stories From CBSNewYork.com:
      VIDEO-FPI Eurasia Analyst Hannah Thoburn Discusses Ukraine on Bloomberg | Foreign Policy Initiative
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        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 19:18
        The Foreign Policy Initiative seeks to promote an active U.S. foreign policy committed to robust support for democratic allies, human rights, a strong American military equipped to meet the challenges of the 21st century, and strengthening America's global economic competitiveness.Read More
      VIDEO-Message to the Romanian Public
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        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 18:56
        This is an important year for Romania and for the transatlantic relationship. As Romania celebrates 10 years in NATO, the United States is grateful for your country's commitment to our alliance and to all we have done together to support peace, freedom, and democracy at home and abroad.
        Today, we are all watching events in Ukraine with concern, and we have jointly condemned Russia's military aggression and its attempt to annex Crimea. Together we also stand with the Ukrainian people as they seek to build a more peaceful, united, democratic and prosperous future.
        Over the past 10 years as NATO allies, Romania and the United States have worked together in the Balkans, in Afghanistan, in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. And as NATO allies we have made a solemn commitment to each other under article 5 of the NATO treaty. Today, I want to reaffirm to the Romanian people that the United States honors its commitments.
        The United States stands by Romania as a friend and an ally, and we look forward to continuing to broaden and deepen the very important work that we do together.
        Thank you.
        Back to Top
      VIDEO-The Secret About Online Ad Traffic: One-Third Is Bogus - WSJ.com
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        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 18:49
        March 23, 2014 6:47 p.m. ET
        Digital marketing is experiencing growing pains as marketers confront rampant fraud. WSJ's Suzanne Vranica reports on Digits. Photo: AP
        Billions of dollars are flowing into online advertising. But marketers also are confronting an uncomfortable reality: rampant fraud.
        About 36% of all Web traffic is considered fake, the product of computers hijacked by viruses and programmed to visit sites, according to estimates cited recently by the Interactive Advertising Bureau trade group.
        So-called bot traffic cheats advertisers because marketers typically pay for ads whenever they are loaded in response to users visiting Web pages'--regardless of whether the users are actual people.
        The fraudsters erect sites with phony traffic and collect payments from advertisers through the middlemen who aggregate space across many sites and resell the space for most Web publishers. The identities of the fraudsters are murky, and they often operate from far-flung places such as Eastern Europe, security experts say.
        The widespread fraud isn't discouraging most marketers from increasing the portion of their ad budgets spent online. But it is prompting some to become more aggressive in monitoring how their money is spent. The Internet has become so central to consumers, that advertisers can't afford to stay away.
        Related VideoWSJ's Suzanne Vranica and Mike Shields discuss the rollout of the Journal's new vertical section, CMO Today, which will focus on the radically changing marketing industry. Go to http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/
        Digital "is too important," says Roxanne Barretto, assistant vice president for U.S. digital marketing at L'Or(C)al SA, which recently uncovered evidence that an online ad purchase was affected by fraud and other problems. "Slowing down spend represents a missed opportunity to connect with our core audience."
        Spending on digital advertising'--which includes social media and mobile devices'--is expected to rise nearly 17% to $50 billion in the U.S. this year. That would be about 28% of total U.S. ad spending. Just five years ago, digital accounted for 16%.
        The big question is whether attitudes will change if signs of fraud increase. Many people in the ad business are worried. Ziff Davis Inc. Chief Executive Vivek Shah, the chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, said at the group's annual conference last month that Internet advertising was facing a "crisis."
        Several big advertisers'--including L'Or(C)al, General Motors Co. GM -1.90%General Motors Co.U.S.: NYSE$34.47-0.67-1.90%March 25, 2014 2:38 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 18.48MP/E Ratio 8.84Market Cap $55.87 BillionDividend Yield N/ARev. per Employee $709,71203/25/14 Sens. Markey, Blumenthal Have ...03/25/14 The Daily Docket: LightSquared...03/25/14 Morning Links: As Useful as a ...More quote details and news >>GMinYour ValueYour ChangeShort position and Verizon Communications Inc. VZ +0.57%Verizon Communications Inc.U.S.: NYSE$47.28+0.27+0.57%March 25, 2014 2:38 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 15.65MP/E Ratio 11.78Market Cap $194.62 BillionDividend Yield 4.49%Rev. per Employee $681,84403/23/14 The Secret About Online Ad Tra...03/21/14 AT&T Criticizes Netflix's 'Arr...03/20/14 Netflix Chief Says Broadband P...More quote details and news >>VZinYour ValueYour ChangeShort position '--have found that some of their online ad purchases were affected by fake traffic, people familiar with the situation say. Such examples threaten advertiser confidence in the effectiveness of digital compared with traditional media, such as television.
        "When you bundle bots, clicks fraud, viewablity and the lack of transparency [in automated ad buying], the total digital-media value equation is being questioned and totally challenged," says Bob Liodice, chief executive of the Association of National Advertisers trade group. Advertisers are beginning to question if they should increase their digital ad budgets, he says.
        Introducing a new home for the best coverage of marketing and advertising, tailored for chief marketing officers.
        Follow CMO Today on Twitter@wsjCMO
        "The clients we work with would love to spend more money in digital," says Quentin George, a co-founder of ad-technology consulting firm Unbound. "But until we give them more control and transparency on how the money is being spent, they will continue to have questions and hold money back."
        Given how much time consumers spend on mobile devices, social media and the Web, digital outlets should be drawing a much higher percentage of marketers' ad budgets, he says. Many factors affect the size of digital ad budgets, including, not just fraud, but difficulties in measuring audiences as well, executives say.
        Many ad executives only now are coming to grips with the reality of fraud. Part of the problem is that estimates of online ad fraud are difficult to nail down. Ad-fraud detection firm White Ops last year reported that fraudsters had stolen some $6 billion in the U.S. alone.
        Few marketers say they plan to cut back on digital advertising. Instead advertisers are getting more aggressive in monitoring what they are getting and in demanding reimbursement if fraud is uncovered.
        Verizon Wireless and L'Or(C)al, among others, in recent months demanded free ad space to make good on ad spending that was inflated by fraud, executives say.
        Marketers also are making deals in which they pay only on concrete evidence that consumers signed up for their products or services.
        And advertisers are turning to online-ad auditing firms to check for fraudulent traffic.
        Telemetry's investigation of Verizon's ad purchases found more than $1 million in fraud, people familiar with the matter say. Verizon has asked major ad exchanges and ad networks for free ads to make up for the fraud, the people say.
        Verizon is the eighth-largest advertiser in the U.S., spending $1.2 billion on ads last year, according to research firm Kantar Media.
        "We do use many different methods to ensure fraud does not occur, not only to ensure our dollars are well-spent, but to ensure our messages are reaching the right customers," a Verizon spokeswoman says.
        WSJD is the Journal's home for tech news, analysis and product reviews.
        L'Or(C)al, which uses Telemetry and other firms, says it found that some of its digital ad placements purchased through exchanges and in some cases directly from Web publishers were seen by bots. It also discovered other issues, such as ads being seen by people that don't live in the U.S.'--that is, beyond the ads' intended target.
        (Not all bots are used for fraud. Google Inc., GOOG +0.39%Google Inc. Cl AU.S.: Nasdaq$1162.49+4.56+0.39%March 25, 2014 2:38 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 1.89MP/E Ratio 31.82Market Cap $389.12 BillionDividend Yield N/ARev. per Employee $1,250,73003/25/14 HEARD ON THE STREET: Luxottica...03/25/14 EBay Reiterates Opposition to ...03/25/14 Shocking New Survey Reveals Ev...More quote details and news >>GOOGinYour ValueYour ChangeShort position for example, uses bots to find information on the Internet.)
        Verizon and L'Or(C)al have reworded their media contracts to ensure that the companies are protected from online-ad scams, such as video ads that play without volume, and pitfalls such as bot traffic.
        "In partnership with our agency, DigitasLBi, we put those types of mandates into our contracts so [publishers and exchanges] are held accountable," says L'Or(C)al's Ms. Barretto. The cosmetics company says such contract language has allowed L'Or(C)al to get free ad space as reimbursement for fraud and other problems.
        Advertisers hope that demanding make-good ads will pressure ad exchanges and ad networks to ensure that their inventories are properly vetted. Marketers also keep lists of sites that have fraudulent traffic and ask that when the free ads are given, they be placed on high-quality sites, which have low fraud rates.
        GM recently hired White Ops to audit some of the auto maker's online ad purchases, people familiar with the matter say. GM found evidence that some of its ads were served to bots, one of the people says.
        "We're aware of the concerns within the industry about ad fraud and are working to address those concerns as they pertain to our business," a GM spokeswoman says.
        Coca-Cola Co. KO +0.55%Coca-Cola Co.U.S.: NYSE$38.61+0.21+0.55%March 25, 2014 2:38 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 11.46MP/E Ratio 20.02Market Cap $169.19 BillionDividend Yield 3.16%Rev. per Employee $357,54203/23/14 The Secret About Online Ad Tra...03/18/14 CME to Challenge LME With Alum...03/09/14 In the Digital Age, Companies ...More quote details and news >>KOinYour ValueYour ChangeShort position is about to enlist White Ops to conduct a test of the beverage maker's U.S. ad purchases and is trying to determine how it can do so in other markets, a person familiar with the matter says.
        Lenovo Group Ltd. 0992.HK -1.79%Lenovo Group Ltd.Hong Kong$8.23-0.15-1.79%March 25, 2014 4:01 pm Volume : 31.92MP/E Ratio 14.00Market Cap $87.19 BillionDividend Yield 1.46%Rev. per Employee $8,233,85003/20/14 Lenovo Buys Patents From Unwir...03/18/14 Heard on the Street: Hong Kong...03/18/14 Lenovo to Seek Acquisitions fo...More quote details and news >>0992.HKinYour ValueYour ChangeShort position also is talking to ad-technology outfits about conducting a test. "Ultimately, this is about waste reduction," says Gary Milner, director of global digital marketing for the computer maker.
        '--Mike Shields contributed to this article.
        Follow CMO Today on Twitter@wsjCMO.
        Write to Suzanne Vranica at suzanne.vranica@wsj.com
      VIDEO-Houston ship lane remains shut as cleanup drags on; Exxon cuts output - chicagotribune.com
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 18:42
        The cleanup of an unknown amount of thick, sticky oil that spilled into Galveston Bay blocked the movement of about 60 ships between the Gulf of Mexico and one of the world's busiest petrochemical transportation waterways. (March 23)
        TEXAS CITY, Texas (Reuters) - The closure of the vital Houston Ship Channel looked set to extend to a fourth day after the Coast Guard struggled to finish cleaning up after an oil barge spill on Monday, threatening to force deeper production cuts at local refiners.Earlier on Monday, the Coast Guard had told ship operators that it should be able to reopen the waterway later in the day, resuming at least some supply of crude oil to more than one-tenth of the nation's refining capacity.
        "We will begin the process of a tapered ... not a floodgate resumption of marine traffic," Captain Brian Penoyer, commander of U.S. Coast Guard sector Houston-Galveston and captain of the Port of Houston, told reporters on Monday."We anticipate re-opening the Houston Ship Channel as soon as we can," he said.
        However the Port of Houston was still shut by evening, officials said, with the queue of waiting vessels growing to more than 90.
        Penoyer explained that traffic can't move again until there's no more oil in the water to cling to ships and be carried further. Also, any ships that were touched must be cleaned before moving through water deemed sufficiently clean.
        The closure of the channel on Saturday has led to a queue of more than 90 vessels trying to move into or out of the Gulf of Mexico. Shipping delays forced Exxon Mobil Corp to cut production at the nation's second-largest refinery.
        Exxon said production at its 560,500 barrel per day Baytown, Texas, refinery had been cut on Monday due to the closure of the Houston Ship Channel. The company expects further production cuts by mid-week if the channel remains shut.
        INVENTORIES CONSIDERED AMPLE
        Analysts on Monday were largely unconcerned, noting that ample inventories in the region provide a cushion for refiners.
        But a senior engineer at a Houston-area refinery that depends on crude deliveries through the ship channel was concerned about the requirement that the water be cleaned of any thick fuel oil before ships run back and forth to ensure they don't track it further upstream or into the Gulf.
        "We're toast," the engineer said. "I would say this is a big problem. Any delay is bad, but three days or more is really bad because we use the channel to bring crude and products in and out."
        The ship channel was shut on Saturday after a collision between a Kirby Inland Marine oil barge and a cargo ship, spilling some 4,000 barrels, or 168,000 gallons (636,000 liters), of residual fuel oil. The channel allows oil barges and cargo ships to sail from the Gulf Coast to refiners and terminals further inland.
        Penoyer said the thick viscosity of the oil made it recoverable by skimmers.
        A total of 46 ships were waiting to leave the port of Houston and 47 ships were waiting to come in, the Coast Guard said on Monday afternoon. Penoyer said a typical day in the channel includes movement of 60 to 80 large ships - tankers, freighters, containers and cruise ships - and 300 to 400 tug and barge movements.
        A warning to mariners issued by the Coast Guard on Sunday said portions of the Houston channel and its offshoots to Texas City and Galveston, Texas, along with a portion of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, could be closed through March 29 or longer, depending on the requirements of a cleanup.
        Five ships waited to come into the ports of Texas City and Galveston, Texas, and 12 ships waited to leave the ports, the Coast Guard said.
        Kirby Inland Marine is operated by Kirby Corp.
        Penoyer said Kirby "immediately" stepped forward to take responsibility for the response costs by hiring the cleanup crews.
        Cleanup crews have pumped all of the remaining fuel oil from the barge, which has been refloated and moved to a different position near the site of the collision in the channel.
        Marathon Petroleum Corp. declined on Monday to discuss operations at its 451,000-bpd Galveston Bay Refinery and 80,000-bpd Texas City refinery. Royal Dutch Shell's joint-venture 327,000 bpd Deer Park refinery was evaluating supply impacts and had contingency plans to mitigate them, a spokeswoman said.
        Fewer than 10 oil-covered birds have been recovered for cleaning, according Texas wildlife agencies.
        (Reporting by Erwin Seba in Houston, Selam Gebrekidan in New York, Terry Wade in Orlando; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe, Stephen Powell, Bernard Orr and Cynthia Osterman and Michael Perry)
      VIDEO- Time to grab guns and kill damn Russians: Tymoshenko tape leak - YouTube
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        Archived Version
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 18:38
      VIDEO-Briefing FISA Overhaul | Video | C-SPAN.org
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        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 18:11
        March 25, 2014Representatives Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), the respective chair and ranking member of the House Permanent Select'... read more
        Representatives Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), the respective chair and ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, held a news conference on their bipartisan legislation to improve the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). close
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      VIDEO-Groundbreaking number crunching tracks plane
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:12
        By Thom Patterson, CNN
        updated 8:58 AM EDT, Tue March 25, 2014
        STORY HIGHLIGHTS
        Satellite experts use "groundbreaking" process to track Flight 370's final hoursThe Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777's last position was "in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth"Satellite official: Hopefully, this will trigger a "mandate that all aircraft should be constantly tracked"(CNN) -- Monday's announcement by Malaysia's Prime Minister acknowledging that missing Flight 370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean opens the door to a big question: How did new number crunching confirm the Boeing 777's path?
        Now we know for sure "there's no way it went north," said Inmarsat Senior Vice President Chris McLaughlin.
        Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Monday that the plane was last tracked over the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth, Australia. Malaysian Airlines has informed passengers' relatives that "all lives are lost," a relative told CNN.
        Monday's announcement brings new questions about the mystery that has captivated the planet for more than two weeks. It also provoked a call that all airliners be constantly tracked.
        The mathematics-based process used by Inmarsat and the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) to reveal the definitive path was described by McLaughlin as "groundbreaking."
        "We've done something new," he said.
        Here's how the process works in a nutshell: Inmarsat officials and engineers were able to determine whether the plane was flying away or toward the satellite's location by expansion or compression of the satellite's signal.
        What does expansion or compression mean? You may have heard about something called the Doppler effect.
        "If you sit at a train station and you listen to the train whistle -- the pitch of the whistle changes as it moves past. That's exactly what we have," explained CNN Meteorologist Chad Myers, who has studied Doppler technology. "It's the Doppler effect that they're using on this ping or handshake back from the airplane. They know by nanoseconds whether that signal was compressed a little -- or expanded -- by whether the plane was moving closer or away from 64.5 degrees -- which is the latitude of the orbiting satellite."
        Each ping was analyzed for its direction of travel, Myers said. The new calculations, McLaughlin said, underwent a peer review process with space agency experts and contributions by Boeing.
        It's possible to use this analysis to determine more specifically the area where the plane went down, Myers said. "Using trigonometry, engineers are capable of finding angles of flight."
        What could wreckage tell us about Flight 370's fate?
        No surprise
        Experts said they weren't surprised by the news that the flight traveled along the southern track -- one of two possible paths revealed by satellite data last week. The possible northern track toward Pakistan would have been heavily monitored by radar. Pakistan had said it found no evidence of Flight 370 on its radar systems.
        "It was very difficult to believe that no watch captain" along the possible northern path "would've seen a burning or distressed aircraft in the sky during the course of their watch," said McLaughlin.
        Is the more pinpointed flight path now focused enough to increase the chances of finding wreckage from the plane?
        If the flight definitely ended far from land, does that support the theory that the plane was not hijacked? It's just one question of many that investigators likely will be pondering in the coming days.
        Hours before the Prime Minister's announcement, Australian officials said they had spotted two objects in the southern Indian Ocean that could be related to the flight, which has been missing since March 8.
        One object is "a gray or green circular object," and the other is "an orange rectangular object," the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said.
        "This is obviously a major tragedy," McLaughlin said. "The only thing you can hope is that from this, just as the Titanic resulted in (new safety legislation), that from this, there will be a mandate that all aircraft should be constantly tracked."
        READ: Search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: the technology
        READ: Experts, relatives ask: Where's the proof that MH370 fell into ocean?
        READ: MH370: Angry families march on Malaysian Embassy in Beijing
      VIDEO-Obama: I'm Concerned About a Loose Nuke Being Detonated in Manhattan | The Weekly Standard
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:06
        Speaking at a brief news conference in the Hague, President Obama said he's more worried about a loose nuke being detonated in Manhattan than he is about Russia:
        "With respect to Mr. Romney's assertion that Russia is our number one geopolitical foe, the truth of the matter is that America has a whole lot of challenges," said the president.
        "Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neigbors, not out of strength, but out weakness.
        "Ukraine has been a country which Russia had enormous influence for decades, since the break-up of the Soviet Union, and we have considerable influence on our neighbors, we generally don't need to invade them in order to have a strong cooperative relationship with them. The fact that Russia felt compelled to go in militarily and laid bear these violations of internationl law indicates less influence not more.
        "So my response then continues to be what I believe today, which is: Russia's actions are a problem. They don't pose the number one national security threat to the United States. I continue to be much more concerned when it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan," said Obama.
      VIDEO-President Obama Meets with YouTube Stars to Push Obamacare (VIDEO) | Variety
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Mon, 24 Mar 2014 22:03
        President Obama and other White House officials convened a first-ever summit last Thursday with YouTube personalities to advance the administration's goal of signing up young Americans for the government's health-care plan.
        The YouTube meeting '-- which included Obama impersonator Iman Crosson (a.k.a. Alphacat), The Fine Bros. comedy duo and the team behind Epic Rap Battles of History '' was aimed at generating awareness about health care enrollment on HealthCare.gov, which ends March 31 for 2014 coverage.
        The Obama-led Affordable Care Act has been vigorously opposed by Republicans, who were seeking to repeal or delay the enactment of the law '-- and the standoff with the administration led to the temporary U.S. government shutdown last fall. When the HealthCare.gov site launched in October, it was beset by technical glitches that prevented many from signing up.
        The White House is hoping the ''digital influencers'' will spread the health care message to their fanbases. Young adults are disproportionately without health insurance: In 2012, 27.2% of Americans 19 to 25 were uninsured, compared with 15.4% for the overall population, according the U.S. Census Bureau.
        Other YouTubers in attendance at the White House event were: Mark Douglas, Todd Womack and Ben Relles of BarelyPolitical, which created the ''Obama Girl'' viral video in 2008; Hannah Hart, creator of the ''Drunk Kitchen'' series; Michael Stephens of VSauce; Peter Shuckoff and Lloyd Ahlquist of Epic Rap Battles of History; Tyler Oakley; Funny or Die's Rachel Goldenberg, who has produced videos about the Affordable Care Act videos with celebs such as Jennifer Hudson, Eddie George and Olivia Wilde; and Mickey Meyer and Daniel Kellison of comedy network Jash, which features original content from talent including Sarah Silverman and Michael Cera.
        The event was orchestrated by Jash's Mickey Meyer and Daniel Kellison.
        For all variety's headlines, follow us @variety on twitter
      VIDEO-Crimea's New Attorney General Reacts to Her Internet Fandom
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Mon, 24 Mar 2014 15:03
        After the new Prosecutor of the Crimean republic, Natalia Poklonskaya, gave a press conference earlier this month, anime style fan art started appearing online. But what does Poklonskaya think of all that?
        In a recent interview (via The Voice of Russia), Russian television channel NTV asked the prosecutor what she thought about her newfound fame online.
        "This is the first I've heard of it," she replied. "Well, I want to be viewed as the Attorney General, and I want to be evaluated on the way in which I do my job. I'm putting tremendous effort into that."
        In another interview, which was uploaded on March 23, Poklonskaya said the reaction online was a "great surprise" to her. Honestly, she didn't quite seem to know how to react.
        Below, you can see both clips, with subtitles courtesy of YouTube users Batnik-subs and wintersodomy:
        On 2ch, Japan's largest forum, some net users tried to clarify the fan art, saying that she was being portrayed as an anime heroine'--and not a sex symbol. "The reporter made a huge mistake," wrote one 2ch user, adding that she was less a sex symbol in Japan and more of a cute symbol. Eh... "She got maaaaaaaaaaad at us," wrote another 2ch user.
        Recently, a Twitter account claiming to be Poklonskaya's popped up online, thanking people for the fan art. However, as Global Voices Online points out, Poklonskaya said in a March 19 interview that she doesn't have any social networking accounts, such as Twitter.
        The first tweet from @NPoklonskaya was on March 20, and this weekend she even tweeted in Japanese, thanking people for their creativity and adding, "I love you!" (ç§ã¯ã‚ãªãŸã‚'æ›ã—ã...ãã¾ã!). This hardly jives with her recent interview in which Poklonskaya said she wanted to be judged by her work'--and considering all that's going on in the region, re-tweeting anime fan art is probably the last thing she has time for. Needless to say, this account is probably fake.
        ã‚¯ãƒªãƒŸã‚æ¤'äº‹ç·é•·ãŒç§ã¯ã‚ãƒ‹ãƒã®ä¸>>äººå…¬ã§ã¯ãªãã[2ch]
        ã‚¯ãƒªãƒŸã‚æ¤'äº‹ç·é•·ãƒ'ã‚¯ãƒ­ãƒ"ã‚¹ã‚ãƒ¤¼šç§ã¯ã‚ãƒ‹ãƒã®ä¸>>äººå…¬ãã‚ƒãªããæ¤'äº‹ç·é•·ã [ãƒ­ã‚·ã‚ã®å£°]
        Natalia Poklonskaya finds out she's popular in internet [Batnik-subs@YouTube]
        Natalia Poklonskaya interview (eng subs) [wintersodomy@YouTube]
        To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter @Brian_Ashcraft.
        Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.
      VIDEO: FPI Board Member Dan Senor Discussed Ukraine on This Week
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source:
        Mon, 24 Mar 2014 04:11
        The Foreign Policy Initiative seeks to promote an active U.S. foreign policy committed to robust support for democratic allies, human rights, a strong American military equipped to meet the challenges of the 21st century, and strengthening America's global economic competitiveness.Read More
      VIDEO-The President Wants You to Get Covered Today: "Don't Just Think About It, Just Do It"
        Link to Article
        Archived Version
        Source: White House.gov Blog Feed
        Thu, 27 Mar 2014 01:15
        Watch on YouTube
        There are only 5 days left to get health insurance coverage for 2014 at HealthCare.gov before open enrollment ends on March 31. If you haven't signed up yet, the President wants you to get covered today.
        As the President says, ''No one's invincible. We all get sick, or get into accidents. Life happens. But you should never have to worry you'll lose everything to medical bills. That's why health insurance is so important.''
        If you're not covered, don't wait any longer '-- sign up today.
        And if you already have health insurance, tell your friends, family, and co-workers that they need to get covered, too. Visit WH.gov/GetCovered for tips on how to spread the word.
        Learn more:
      VIDEO-Obama CNN Dirty bomb
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        Wed, 26 Mar 2014 13:17
        President Obama takes a trip overseas and a jab at Russia as it sends 10,000 more troops to the Ukrainian border.
        If your browser has Adobe Flash Player installed, click above to play. Otherwise, click below.
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