Jonesing for some gourmet tri-tip and a solid buzz? Check out Cannabis Catering, a San Francisco-based outfit that specializes in marijuana cuisine. The brainchild of Chef Frederick Nesbitt, a California Culinary Academy-trained chef who has worked as personal chef for Jerry Rice and John Madden, Cannabis Catering offers four and five-course meals laced with ganja. The idea for Cannabis Catering came to Nesbitt when he learned that his friend's diabetic mother had been diagnosed with cancer. "I would bring back edibles [from the dispensary], but they're so high in high-fructose corn syrup that she was high off sugar rather than being medicated," he says. So Nesbitt began experimenting with his own pot food--starting with mashed potatoes.
Now Nesbitt cooks an array of cannabis-laced delectables. A sample menu might include salad, lobster bisque, whiskey tri-tip with a demi-glazed sauce (containing marijuana tincture or ground-up hashish), and an infused Belgian chocolate fountain. Each meal contains the equivalent of three to five pot cookies, but Nesbitt says he can customize the food depending on what customers want. "When you're eating a cookie, you're eating as much as you can in one portion. I'm spreading it out through a whole meal," he says. "The last thing I need is people freaking out on me." The meals costs approximately $100 per person, but Nesbitt won't dish out his goods unless his patrons have proper documentation (read: a medical marijuana card). "I'm trying to just feed people," he says. "This is one little ingredient of what I'm doing."
Andy Coulson said he knew of no illegal activity while editing the newspaper. Photograph: Reuters The prime minister's media adviser, Andy Coulson, freely discussed the use of unlawful news-gathering techniques while editor of the News of the World and "actively encouraged" a named reporter to engage in the illegal interception of voicemail messages, according to allegations published by the New York Times.
Coulson, who resigned as editor of the News of the World in January 2007 after its royal correspondent was jailed for intercepting voicemail messages, has always insisted that he had no knowledge of illegal activity when he edited the paper or at any time as a journalist. He told a Commons select committee last year: "I have never had any involvement in it at all."
The New York Times website published a trail to a story due to appear in its Sunday magazine. It made detailed allegations likely to bring intense new pressure on Coulson and the Metropolitan police force, which stands accused of favouring Rupert Murdoch's newspaper group by cutting short its investigation, withholding crucial evidence from prosecutors and failing to inform victims of the newspaper's crimes against them. Coulson declined to comment on the allegations. The News of the World and Scotland Yard have denied all the charges.
Coulson resigned after the imprisonment of his royal reporter, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, for "hacking" into the voicemail messages of eight public figures. When the Guardian revealed last year that the scandal involved other journalists at the paper and numerous other victims, Coulson said he had nothing to add to earlier denials of involvement, and the Conservative leader stood by him. David Cameron said: "I believe in giving people a second chance."
The New York Times, which has had an investigative team at work on the story since March, is citing two former News of the World journalists who specifically claim that Coulson was directly aware of his reporters' use of illegal techniques.
An unnamed former editor is quoted as claiming that Coulson talked freely about illegal news-gathering techniques, including phone-hacking, and that he personally had been at "dozens, if not hundreds" of meetings with Coulson where the subject came up. "The editor added that when Coulson would ask where a story came from, editors would reply 'We've pulled the phone records' or 'I've listened to the phone messages'."
In addition, Sean Hoare, a former reporter who used to be a close friend of Coulson, is quoted as saying that when he worked with Coulson at the Sun, he personally played recordings of hacked voicemail messages for him and that later, when he worked for Coulson at the News of the World, he "continued to inform Coulson of his pursuits. Coulson 'actively encouraged me to do it', Hoare said".
Hoare, who was sacked from the paper at a time when he had drink and drug problems, says he personally listened to the voicemail messages of celebrities such as David and Victoria Beckham and that he has spoken out now because he believes it was unfair for Goodman to get all the blame.
Coulson told the Commons media committee last year that he had never even heard Mulcaire's name and that Goodman had been the only reporter involved: "I am absolutely sure that Clive's case was a very unfortunate rogue case."
The New York Times claims to have spoken to a dozen former News of the World reporters and editors who say that phone-hacking was "pervasive" in Coulson's newsroom. "Everyone knew," according to an unnamed senior reporter. "The office cat knew." Most former reporters are unnamed, but Sharon Marshall is named as having witnessed hacking when working under Coulson from 2002-04. "It was an industry-wide thing," she said.
The paper says that Coulson ran a highly competitive newsroom "with single-minded imperiousness". Former News of the World journalists claim that there was a "do whatever it takes" mentality and that reporters were told to "get the story, no matter what". "They described a frantic, sometimes degrading atmosphere in which some reporters openly pursued hacking or other improper tactics to satisfy demanding editors," according to the New York Times.
The paper gives a specific example of the involvement of an editorial executive: "Matt Driscoll, a former sports reporter, recalled chasing a story about the soccer star Rio Ferdinand. Ferdinand claimed he had inadvertently turned off his phone and missed a message alerting him to a drug test. Driscoll had hit a dead end, he said, when an editor showed up at his desk with the player's private phone records." Driscoll was later dismissed and awarded £800,000 by a tribunal, which found that he had been bullied by Coulson.
Bill Akass, managing editor of the News of the World, dismissed the New York Times claims as "unsubstantiated". He said: "We reject absolutely any suggestion or assertion that the activities of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, at the time of their arrest, were part of a culture of wrongdoing at the News of the World and were specifically sanctioned or accepted at a senior level in the newspaper."
The New York Times goes on to quote unnamed sources from the Met suggesting that its inquiry into the phone hacking was hampered by a desire to avoid upsetting Britain's biggest selling newspaper: "Several investigators said in interviews that Scotland Yard was reluctant to conduct a wider inquiry in part because of its close relationship with the News of the World."
After a raid on Goodman's desk in August 2006, according to the New York Times, "several detectives said they began feeling internal pressure. One senior investigator said he was approached by someone from the department's press office, who was waving his arms in the air, saying 'wait a minute, let's talk about this'."
The investigator, who has since left Scotland Yard, added that the press officer stressed the department's "long-term relationship with News International". The investigator recalled furiously responding: "There's illegality here, and we'll pursue it like we do any other case." Scotland Yard says that operational decisions are made by police, not by press officers.
Former journalists told the New York Times that when Scotland Yard raided Goodman's desk, two senior journalists "stuffed reams of documents into trash bags and hauled them away". Police did not interview any other reporter or editor apart from Goodman. The material seized from Goodman and Mulcaire included paperwork which potentially implicated three named journalists. None was interviewed and, as the Guardian disclosed last year, the police failed to pass key paperwork to the Crown Prosecution Service.
The New York Times quotes an unnamed former senior prosecutor who was "stunned to discover later that the police had not shared everything. 'I would have said we need to see how far this goes' and 'whether we have a serious problem of criminality on this news desk', said the former prosecutor."
When the case came to court, police identified eight victims of the hacking. However, the New York Times claims that the officer responsible for the inquiry, the then assistant commissioner Andy Hayman, had been shown a "target list" of names and numbers taken from Mulcaire's home which ran to eight or 10 pages and which "read like a British society directory".
The Met told prosecutors that it would approach all known victims, but failed to do so. One who was approached, the then Respect MP George Galloway, told the New York Times that police warned him that his voicemail had been intercepted but refused to tell him who was responsible.
Scotland Yard denies cutting short its inquiry or being influenced by its relationship with the News of the World. The Press Complaints Commission was criticised after two inquiries into the affair failed to find evidence of wrongdoing other than that originally presented by police.
After revelations in the Guardian, the Commons media select committee held a second inquiry into the affair last year. Its report expressed concern "at the readiness of all of those involved – News International, the police and the PCC – to leave Mr Goodman as the sole scapegoat without carrying out a full investigation".
Coulson said tonight: "I absolutely deny these allegations."
The war in Afghanistan is an unwinnable quagmire and poor US intelligence is leading to the deaths of Australian soldiers, a visiting former CIA officer says.
Robert Baer, a decorated CIA field officer of two decades experience who had spent years in the Middle East, said any chances the US and its allies had of defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan had already been squandered. The Coalition was fighting an unwinnable war, he said, and this was the case because victory required reliable intelligence.
''[US intelligence agencies] have the same problem they had before 9/11. It is a system that doesn't work.''
That system sees CIA operatives and allied intelligence officers unable to gather reliable information because security concerns do not allow them to travel widely. And most do not speak the local language. ''They're all stuck behind the wire; they don't get out … it's like the crusades where you're stuck on your castle imagining what the natives are doing,'' he said.
Describing Washington DC as a ''blank spot on the map'', he said that despite the massive growth of the intelligence agencies post September 11, 2001, there remained systemic failings.
''American intelligence after 9/11 has been unable to co-ordinate … the FBI will not share with the CIA. CIA has operational databases which they won't share with even others inside the CIA.''
All of this led to a dysfunctional intelligence community unable to provide reliable, contemporary intelligence that could allow the Coalition to win in Afghanistan.
''Twenty-two American soldiers have been killed since Friday, and Australia has lost 21 men … Afghanistan is a quagmire and it can only be fought with an effective counter-insurgency. It cannot be fought with Abrams tanks and F16s,'' he said.
The author of four books and a film consultant, he has previously described how the CIA's role as a provider of human intelligence - on-the-ground intelligence gathering by field officers - has been steadily degraded under poor management.
Earlier this week Mr Baer said the Australian government should confront Washington with the poor intelligence on Afghanistan that was recently released by WikiLeaks.
''The Australians should take the WikiLeaks information to the US [administration] and say: please tell us you have better information than this,'' Mr Baer said.
Mr Baer is in Australia to speak at the Australian Security Industry Association Limited conference in Sydney.
Reading a recent lengthy and detailed Sydney Morning Heraldarticle detailing the latest charges against Wikileaks frontman Julian Assange, I can only nod my head knowingly.
This was always going to be the way things worked out. From the time last year when we all became aware of Assange, I felt a twinge of fear, an inner voice saying Something isn't right here. It took me a few weeks to articulate that feeling into a real, grounded rationale for my dread.
Long ago, before I moved to Australia, before I'd done any of the work that I'm known for within the technology community, I had some peripheral contact with the 'hacker' world (In this usage, 'hacker' means folks who break into computers, not the folks who stay up all night programming them in weird and wonderful ways).
One of the things I learned very early on was a simple rule of thumb to separate the accomplished from the n00bs and fools: only a n00b would brag about their exploits. Only a n00b would tell others that he'd broken the law. Those who do crimes keep silent about their darker doings. Those who wannabe, they're loud about it.
When Assange suddenly became the public face for the increasingly fascinating Wikileaks, it confused me on several levels.
First, why does Wikileaks need a public face? It's a dropbox service that promises anonymity to whistleblowers across the world. That kind of service is best kept low-profile, very nearly invisible except to those who might want to avail themselves of the service. If you need it, you'll know where to find it.
Second, why would Assange - or anyone, for that matter - consent to being the public face of Wikileaks? Wikileaks has worked hard to anger some of the most powerful institutions on the planet. In no particular order: the US Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the US Department of State, MI5 and ASIO. These are organisations with institutional memory and global reach. If you vex them, they have it within their capacity to make things very difficult for you. Possibly terminally so.
If this all sounds very much like a John LaCarre novel, that's because we're dealing with the stuff of Cold War thrillers: spies, secrets, dropboxes, whistleblowers and the great mass of ignorance which is the body politic. Information is power, and Wikileaks pricks a big hole in the plans of the powerful. So again, why would anyone willingly associate themselves with Wikileaks? Isn't that the equivalent of painting a great big target yourself?
Finally, what does this public exposure say about the long-term security and stability of Wikileaks?
An invisible organisation presents no surface that can be attacked, or compromised, or tortured into submission. An organisation that has resolved itself into the body of a single individual has placed an enormous burden on that individual - and placed them into substantial danger. Assange knows this, and all of his recent troubles in Sweden are, to his account, disinformation campaigns conducted by organisations seeking to thwart him and Wikileaks. This should have been expected. This is how that particular game is played. Everyone knows the rules. You can't scream and shout when your opponent makes a counter-move on the game board. You wouldn't need to scream and shout if your opponent has no idea who you are.
I don't mean to sound naive; these organisations are well-resourced and probably would have gotten to Assange eventually (Then again, given how long it's taken to find Osama Bin Laden, maybe not). Being visible gives Assange the protection of visibility. If he's taken down publicly, it could look bad. But whether or not Assange remains a free man, Wikileaks has been substantially weakened by his representation.
Faceless, pervasive and powerful, Wikileaks might have grown into the mirror image of al-Qaeda, a force which could terrify the rulers while simultaneously becoming folk heroes for the ruled. Instead, all the power of the State is landing on Wikileaks and Assange. Whatever remains of Wikileaks in a year's time will only be those components deemed to be unthreatening. Wikileaks will be compromised; that became inevitable as soon as we all got a look at Assange. Hence my dread.
As much as we might regret this, it will not bring an end to this new era of whistleblowing, any more than the court-mandated dismantling of Napster was the end of peer-to-peer file sharing. Indeed, just a few days after Napster disappeared, a new network, Gnutella, opened for business, and having learned from Napster's mistakes. Where Napster was centralised, Gnutella was distributed. Where Napster was noisy, Gnutella was quiet. Where Napster had a surface that could be sued into oblivion, Gnutella was slippery, and very hard to grasp. Gnutella is still around. Napster has been gone for a decade.
Any organisation that follows Wikileaks will learn from the mistakes made by Assange & Co. It will be invisible unless sought for, as pervasive as necessity requires, and much more impervious to attacks that attempt to corrupt its essential functions and integrity. Will it be perfect? No. This is a cat-and-mouse game, a process where both the forces of State control and the forces which seek to thwart the control of the State are both evolving, both learning from one another.
Within a few years, we'll be drowning in information from 'whistleblowers'. The State will try to swamp these new channels with meaningless or useless information in order to render them unusable. With so much, how can any of us know the truth, or know what truths are significant?
This presents the most interesting opening for 21st century journalism: investigative reporters will be those who have dedicated themselves to winnowing the wheat of truth from the chaff of noise, in order to share it with the rest of us. At the end, we're precisely where we started; the State tries to keep things hidden, while a few brave souls work hard to shine a little light into the dark places. The means will have changed, but the aims remain the same.
Mark Pesce is one of the pioneers in Virtual Reality and works as a writer, researcher and teacher.
Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg says a lawsuit by a man who claims to own a huge chunk of the popular social networking website is seeking to uncover unnecessary details about his private life to harass him. Zuckerberg is fighting a civil lawsuit filed by Paul Ceglia, an upstate New York resident who claims an 84 percent stake in the privately held company, believed to be worth several billion dollars.
Ceglia, an owner of a wood pellet fuel company who lives in Wellsville, New York, is trying to return the case to a New York state court, after Zuckerberg moved it to federal court.
"They filed this remand motion to harass defendants under the pretext of obtaining jurisdictional discovery into Zuckerberg's private life," lawyers for Zuckerberg said in a Monday filing in the federal court in Buffalo, New York.
Ceglia alleged in a June 30 lawsuit that a 2003 contract with Zuckerberg entitles him to control of Facebook. Forbes magazine in March estimated Zuckerberg was worth $4 billion.
Federal courts can hear cases from parties in different states. Zuckerberg, 26, considers himself a California citizen, while Ceglia said both men are New Yorkers.
"The higher the stakes, the more likely you want to take advantage of procedural moves to improve your chances of winning, or settling on the most favorable terms," said Adam Steinman, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark, New Jersey.
Steinman said "conventional wisdom" is often that defendants prefer federal court to state court, because cases might be dismissed faster or less likely to reach juries. "There could also be a 'home-field' advantage if a state judge were more sympathetic to a local plaintiff," he said.
It is unclear what details Ceglia hopes to uncover, or Zuckerberg wants to keep from being revealed.
Social networking companies such as Facebook have long faced concerns over privacy. They must balance users' concerns about how much personal information is made public with a need to generate revenue by sharing details with advertisers.
In May, Facebook introduced tools to give users more control over what information is shared.
Zuckerberg, a Dobbs Ferry, New York native, launched Facebook in February 2004 as a Harvard University sophomore. He dropped out after that year and moved to California.
Now based in Palo Alto, California, Facebook said it has more than 500 million users and 1,600 employees.
Terry Connors, a partner at Connors & Vilardo LLP in Buffalo who represents Ceglia, said he expects to respond to Zuckerberg's allegations in a court filing within two weeks.
Facebook, in an emailed statement, said "Ceglia's claim that Mark Zuckerberg lives in New York is another ridiculous and demonstrably false claim in an already absurd lawsuit."
In June, Zuckerberg said he had no date to take Facebook public. The next month, he told ABC News he was "quite sure" there was no contract ceding Facebook ownership rights.
A hearing on Ceglia's lawsuit is set for October 13.
The case is Ceglia v. Zuckerberg et al, U.S. District Court, Western District of New York, No. 10-00569.
Jonathan Stempel @'Reuters'
Not content to simply stop progress, however, the Koch brothers and various Koch-funded organizations have also been actively trying to roll back existing clean air and clean energy laws — both at the state and national levels. David Koch, who lives in New York City and whose company is based in Kansas, is secretly bankrolling the Proposition 23 effort to roll back California’s landmark clean energy law. Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity helped make opposition to “cap-and-trade” a Tea Party talking point and then launched its so-called “Regulation Reality” tour to attack Supreme Court-mandated Clean Air Act regulations being finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Today, a new Koch-backed national effort to protect the energy industry, dubbed “Rally for Jobs,” begins with rallies in Texas and will continue next week with events in New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois, and Ohio. While the American Petroleum Institute, Big Oil’s Washington lobbying arm, is the “presenting sponsor” of the Rally for Jobs tour, several Koch-backed groups are also involved:
• FreedomWorks, whose Koch-founded precursor, Citizens for a Sound Economy, received some $5.7 million from Koch foundations.
• Americans for Prosperity, which received at least $5.1 million from Koch Foundations from 2005-2008 and is an offshoot of the Koch-founded Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation, which itself received more than $6 million from Koch foundations.
• The American Highway Users Alliance, of which Koch Industries is a member.
• Americans for Tax Reform, which received $60,000 from Koch Foundations from 1997-2008.
• The Institute for Policy Innovation, which received $35,000 from Koch foundations.
• The National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, of which Koch Industries is a member.
• The National Taxpayers Union, which has received $20,000 from Koch foundations.
• The Natural Gas Supply Association, of which Koch Industries appears to be a member.
• The Texas Prosperity Project, on whose board of directors sits Bill Oswald, Government & Regulatory Affairs Director at Koch Industries.
• The Corpus Christi Chamber of Commerce, which recently held an event sponsored by Flint Hills Resources, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries.
