Bicycle Rush Hour in Utrecht (For son#1!)

Vancouver kiss couple: video shows police charge

Fresh video footage appearing to show Vancouver's famous riot couple seems to end speculation that the picture was faked, and indicates that sympathy more than passion was the motivation behind the kiss that was captured on camera.
The footage, uploaded to YouTube, seems to show Australian Scott Jones comforting his girlfriend, Alex Thomas, after she was knocked to the ground by an officer's riot shield.
The photo of the couple, taken by photographer Richard Lam, became a global sensation and was taken as Lam was documenting the riot that began after the hometown Canucks lost ice hockey's Stanley Cup to the Boston Bruins. The picture became an internet sensation and fuelled speculation that the embrace was staged.
The video shows the crowd retreating as the couple find themselves caught in the path of two riot police. Both officers collide with the pair with their shields, knocking them to the ground. The couple appear to be holding up their arms up in defence. The camera moves on, returning to show the man comforting the distraught woman.
Jones and Thomas have been inundated with offers to describe the events surrounding the famous kiss and had said they did not want the "extra stress" of media appointments. But they are now believed to have hired celebrity publicist Markson Sparks PR.
Jones is an aspiring comedian. "I think for Scott, it's a tremendous opportunity for him to springboard his acting and standup comedy," Markson told the Toronto Star. "Overseas people know more about that photo than the Stanley Cup." He said the couple's global exposure could be worth a potential $10m.
Dominic Rushe @'The Guardian'

Onstage and in autobiography, Bob Mould retraces raging youth to melodic middle age

Onstage at the Birchmere last week, Bob Mould set down his sky-blue Stratocaster and picked up a book.
It was the story of a teen who flees an abusive home, starts a band, hits the road, gets hooked, gets sober, goes solo, comes out of the closet, detours into electronic music, works a stint in pro wrestling, reinvents himself as a DJ and finally decides to write it all down.
It was his autobiography.
Performing songs and reading from his book for the first time ever, the 50-year-old punk legend punctuated his recollections with overwhelmed sighs. “It’s very reminiscent of May of 1989 all of a sudden,” Mould said from the stage, nervously pushing his glasses up his nose.
He was referring to his solo debut after the implosion of Husker Du, the hair-on-fire hard-core punk trio Mould formed in Minneapolis in 1979. Triangulating indelible extremes in melody, volume and speed, the band’s breakneck sound would ripple across the ’90s and beyond, influencing Nirvana, Foo Fighters and every band since that’s ever tried to coax an angry barre chord from an electric guitar...

Continue reading

Chris Richards @'The Washington Post'

More older Australians seek treatment for heroin addiction

The number of Australians receiving pharmacotherapy treatment for dependence on opioid drugs such as heroin continues to rise, and the proportion of older clients is also increasing, according to a report released today by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).
The findings of the National Opioid Pharmacotherapy Statistics Annual Data Collection: 2010 report show that on a snapshot day in 2010 there were over 46,000 clients who received pharmacotherapy for opioid dependence.
‘There was a rise of just over 2,600 clients between 2009 and 2010 which is consistent with the growth of pharmacotherapy treatment we have seen in recent years,’ said Amber Jefferson of the AIHW’s Drug Surveys and Services Unit.
‘Since 2006, there has been a shift towards older clients receiving treatment, with the proportion of clients aged 30 years and over rising from 72% to 82% and the proportion of clients aged under 30 falling in 2010.’
‘While the number of clients receiving pharmacotherapy for opioid dependence increased in 2010, the number of clients below the age of 30 has dropped since 2006.’
‘The ratio of male to female clients has remained the same over recent years, with males making up about two-thirds of all clients,’ Ms Jefferson said.
Also consistent with findings in previous years, methadone was the most common pharmacotherapy drug, with close to 7 out of 10 clients receiving this form of treatment. The remaining clients received either buprenorphine or buprenorphine/naloxone.
‘There was a small rise in the number of dosing point sites in Australia, up from 2,157 in 2009 to 2,200 in 2010,’ Ms Jefferson said.
Most opioid pharmacotherapy dosing point sites were located in pharmacies.
The number of clients per dosing point site across Australia has been rising slowly in recent years, with 21 clients per dosing site in 2010 compared with 19 in 2006.
The AIHW is a major national agency set up by the Australian Government to provide reliable, regular and relevant information and statistics on Australia’s health and welfare.
Click here for more information and to download report
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Lumberjack

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Smoking # 99

Please Kill Me

The transatlantic cocaine market

Ai Weiwei, Diplomacy, and Freedom

Making Books Is Fun (1947)

Back before inkjets, printing was a time-comsuming laborious process, that took teams of people working together to produce just one book. Now days, any crabby person can sit at home and crank out stuff on a blog or even make internet video. This movie will make you happy as you watch others toil for 'The Man' under primitive conditions...LOL!
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Seized Phone Offers Clues to Bin Laden’s Pakistani Links

Australian immigration detention centres are less open and transparent than Guantanamo Bay

♪♫ Public Enemy - By The Time I Get To Arizona

♪♫ DJ Spooky/Chuck D - By The Time I Get To Arizona (Remake)

The Art of Chuck D

Lulzsec releases law enforcement files. And a song

Notorious hacking group, Lulzsec, has just released a heap of Arizona law enforcement files. The group says it did this, "not just to reveal their racist and corrupt nature but to purposefully sabotage their efforts to terrorize communities fighting an unjust "war on drugs"."

The group is also promoting a fan-made rap song (below). It claims to be a new genre which some have dubbed hackstep although the group itself calls it, Hackcore.
The post came with a bittorent file link with raw information plus numerous alleged logins and passwords of law enforcement officials. One password is claimed to be, "12345".
The claimed file leaks are being investigated and we'll have more as they appear.
The leak puts paid to claims by the global media and other hacking groups that the Lulzsec is in disarray due to leaders being arrested and exposed.
The full unedited statement is below:-
CHINGA LA MIGRA BULLETIN #1 6/23/2011
We are releasing hundreds of private intelligence bulletins, training manuals, personal email correspondence, names, phone numbers, addresses and passwords belonging to Arizona law enforcement. We are targeting AZDPS specifically because we are against SB1070 and the racial profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona. The documents classified as "law enforcement sensitive", "not for public distribution", and "for official use only" are primarily related to border patrol and counter-terrorism operations and describe the use of informants to infiltrate various gangs, cartels, motorcycle clubs, Nazi groups, and protest movements. Every week we plan on releasing more classified documents and embarassing personal details of military and law enforcement in an effort not just to reveal their racist and corrupt nature but to purposefully sabotage their efforts to terrorize communities fighting an unjust "war on drugs". Hackers of the world are uniting and taking direct action against our common oppressors - the government, corporations, police, and militaries of the world. See you again real soon! ;D
Nick Ross @'ABC'

LulzSec Releases Arizona Law Enforcement Data, Claims Retaliation For Immigration Law

Public Intelligence
Chinga La Migra

Policing the Police: The Apps That Let You Spy on the Cops

After the recent Vancouver riots, it became clear that the world is surveiling itself at an unprecedented scale. Angry citizens gave police one million photos and 1,000 hours of video footage to help them track down the rioters. If we aren't living in a surveillance state run by the government, we're certainly conducting a huge surveillance experiment on each other.
Which is what makes two new apps, CopRecorder and OpenWatch, and their Web component, OpenWatch.net, so interesting. They are the brainchildren of Rich Jones, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate who describes himself as "pretty much a hacker to the core." Flush with cash and time from a few successful forays into the app market, nine months ago Jones decided to devote some of his time to developing what he calls "a global participatory counter-surveillance project which uses cellular phones as a way of monitoring authority figures."
CopRecorder can record audio without indicating that it's doing so like the Voice Memos app does. It comes with a built-in uploader to OpenWatch, so that Jones can do "analysis" of the recording and scrub any personally identifying data before posting the audio. He said he receives between 50 and 100 submissions per day, with a really interesting encounter with an authority figure coming in about every day and a half.
To me, something like OpenWatch could help solve a major problem for investigative reporting in an age when newsrooms are shrinking. We've still got plenty of people who can bulldog an issue once it's been flagged, but there are fewer and fewer reporters with deep sourcing in a community, fewer and fewer reporters who have the time to look into a bunch of different things knowing that only one out of a hundred might turn into a big investigation. Perhaps providing better conduits for citizens to flag their own problems can drive down the cost of hard-hitting journalism and be part of the solution for keeping governments honest.
At first, the app did not have grand aspirations. Jones built it for some friends who'd gotten into some trouble with the law and who could have been aided by a recording of their interaction with law enforcement. But Jones' worldview began to seep into the project. Informed by Julian Assange's conception of "scientific journalism," Jones wanted to start collecting datapoints at the interface of citizens and authority figures.
"It's a new kind of journalism. When people think citizen media, right now they think amateur journalism ... I don't think that's revolutionary," Jones told me. "I don't think that's what the '90s cyberutopianists were dreaming of. I think the real value of citizen media will be collecting data."
Already, CopRecorder is in the hands of 50,000 users, who've just happened to stumble on the app one way or another. Jones hopes that they'll upload their encounters with authority figures so that he can start to build a database of what citizens' encounters are like in different places. Then, he figures, patterns will emerge and he'll be able to point out to the world exactly where the powerful are abusing their authority...