Friday, 9 September 2011

The Story of Demdike Stare

Missiles looted from Tripoli arms warehouse

(Click to enlarge)

A potent stash of Russian-made surface-to-air missiles is missing from a huge Tripoli weapons warehouse amid reports of weapons looting across war-torn Libya.
They are Grinch SA-24 shoulder-launched missiles, also known as Igla-S missiles, the equivalent of U.S.-made Stinger missiles.
A CNN team and Human Rights Watch found dozens of empty crates marked with packing lists and inventory numbers that identified the items as Igla-S surface-to-air missiles.
The list for one box, for example, written in English and Russian, said it had contained two missiles, with inventory number "Missile 9M342," and a power source, inventory number "Article 9B238."

Grinch SA-24s are designed to target front-line aircraft, helicopters, cruise missiles and drones. They can shoot down a plane flying as high as 11,000 feet and can travel 19,000 feet straight out.

Fighters aligned with the National Transitional Council and others swiped armaments from the storage facility, witnesses told Human Rights Watch. The warehouse is located near a base of the Khamis Brigade, a special forces unit in Gadhafi's military, in the southeastern part of the capital.
The warehouse contains mortars and artillery rounds, but there are empty crates for those items as well. There are also empty boxes for another surface-to-air missile, the SA-7.
Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch emergencies director, told CNN he has seen the same pattern in armories looted elsewhere in Libya, noting that "in every city we arrive, the first thing to disappear are the surface-to-air missiles."
He said such missiles can fetch many thousands of dollars on the black market.
"We are talking about some 20,000 surface-to-air missiles in all of Libya, and I've seen cars packed with them." he said. "They could turn all of North Africa into a no-fly zone."
There was no immediate comment from NTC officials.
The lack of security at the weapons site raises concerns about stability in post-Gadhafi Libya and whether the new NTC leadership is doing enough to stop the weapons from getting into the wrong hands...

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Ben Wedeman and Ingrid Formanek @'CNN'

Power without responsibility: Rupert Murdoch's Australian

The end of the NHS as we know it

What Wednesday's vote on the health and social care bill shows more clearly than anything is that many, if not most, of the political elite no longer care whether they are carrying out the wishes of the electorate, and barely pretend that we are any longer a democracy.

Thursday, 8 September 2011

'A Dangerous Method': David Cronenberg's Mild Manner and Outrageous Movies

Female Blogger Threatened With Defamation Suit For Writing About TSA 'Rape'

Vietnam Accused of Abusing Drug Addicts

Adrian Sherwood (On-U Sound) @ Dubspot! Live Streaming Workshop 09/08 + Dub Invasion

On Thursday, September 8th, at 6PM (EST), London’s Adrian Sherwood, the founder of On-U Sound, will come to Dubspot NYC to present a live, streaming workshop (RSVP HERE TO ATTEND IN PERSON). Sherwood was never interested in sounding like anyone else, and that ethos led to him working with the likes of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Prince Far I to Depeche Mode and The Bug. “The one thing I learnt early on was you got to have your own sound,” he says. As someone who considers himself tone deaf, the producer focused on creating new sounds and noises rather than melody. In the late 70s, he brought unique ideas to the table such as mixing backwards. The process involved adding effects to a song as it played in reverse, so that when you flipped it and played the track normally, those added sounds would play backwards. “I was one of the first people that did it,” Sherwood recalls. “In the 60s a lot of the hippies in the psychedelic movement, but not out of the reggae era, were doing that.” Sherwood even inspired Dubspot’s own team. “Listening to his music exposed me to whole new worlds of sound at a time when I was just starting to get deeper into my own productions,” says electronic music production instructor John Selway. Yet Sherwood’s impact on reggae in the UK stems from much more than his production work. He also brought together a number of artists, started distribution for a variety of small reggae labels all over the North, and released a significant amount of music through his own labels. His most influential label, On-U Sound, is celebrating its 30th anniversary with four releases this year. That celebration continues here in NYC the day after the workshop when Sherwood performs as part of the weeklong Dub Invasion Festival at Dominion with Brother Culture and Subatomic Sound System.

Q&A: Adrian Sherwood On The State Of Dub, On-U Sounds' 30th Birthday, And His Return To America

Arian Noveir: Paint Splattered Superheroes

Guatemala's Colom: Users share blame for drug violence

Consumers of illegal drugs share the blame for drug-related violence and killings, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom has told BBC Mundo.

"We've been called a narco-state, but consumers, they are narcos too," said Mr Colom.
He was speaking a few days before Guatemalans go to the polls on Sunday to elect his successor.
Whoever wins will face the challenge of rising violence, much of which is attributed to local and Mexican gangs.
Mexican cartels have expanded operations into the Central American nation, which is an important transit point for drugs smuggled from South America to the US.
Several presidential candidates are on the ballot paper, among them retired general and front-runner Otto Perez Molina and Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberto Menchu.
But after months of wrangling, Mr Colom's former wife, Sandra Torres, will not be contesting the election.
On Monday, her supporters abandoned their final appeal against her exclusion.
It was the culmination of a political drama that began in March, when Ms Torres filed for divorce, a move critics said was to avoid a constitutional ban on close relatives of the president running for the post.
Guatemalan judges ruled that despite her divorce, Ms Torres' candidacy still violated the constitution and she was therefore ineligible.
Up and down Lack of security is among voters' main concerns, according to recent opinion polls. Some candidates, including Mr Perez Molina, have accused President Colom of not being tough enough on organised crime.

Mr Colom, who was elected in 2007, said his term in office had seen a fall in the murder rate, while drugs worth some $10bn (£6bn) had been seized.

"Honestly, if you compare the results of this government with previous ones, there is no comparison regarding seizures and arrests," he told BBC Mundo's Ignacio de los Reyes.
Mr Colom was also clear that Guatemala alone could not tackle drug-related violence.
It was up to countries where drugs were consumed to control guns, funds and the chemicals that go towards producing drugs, to try to reduce consumption, he said.
"Cocaine goes up and guns come down," he said, referring to the trafficking of drugs through Central America and Mexico to the US, and the smuggling of illegal weapons over the US border.
@'BBC'

Phone hacking: even more News International emails deleted

It had been thought the Murdoch group had requested that emails be deleted on nine occasions, but a company hired to delete the messages yesterday said that it had done so on four more occasions.
The extra deletions, requested between December 2009 and June this year, included emails from the inbox of a user who had not accessed his account for eight years.
The deletions to the eight-year-old account were carried out a few months after the phone hacking scandal reignited amid reports that hacking at the News of the World was more prevalent than previously thought.
Some deletion requests related to two personal folders and a tranche of “bad or corrupted” files.
Many of the other deletions, performed by HCL Technologies, were carried out before News International ordered its staff in an internal memo to stop deleting emails earlier this year.
Keith Vaz, a Labour MP and chairman of the home affairs select committee, said the disclosures were “concerning” and that the committee would investigate the removal of any information that “pointed to the prevalence of phone hacking” at News International.
Nine previous requests to delete emails – between April last year and July this year – were already identified before lawyers for Delhi-based HCL Technologies wrote to Mr Vaz yesterday with the new information.
Mr Vaz said: “The request for deletion of folders and emails by News International is concerning.
“The committee will continue to investigate the issue of phone hacking and the removal of any information that could possibly point to the prevalence of phone hacking by those working in the organisation.”
The new letter to Mr Vaz shows that on Dec 9 2009, News International requested deletion of emails from the inbox of a user who had not accessed his email account for eight years.
On Feb 24 last year, the company asked for the deletion of personal folders under the name “Gabriel/uploaded”. A personal folder was also removed on Sept 28 last year.
The most recent request came on June 29 this year, when the company asked for deletion of “certain bad or corrupted files”.
HCL, which provides services under contract to News International, informed the committee last month that it was aware of the deletion of hundreds of thousands of emails on nine occasions between April 2010 and July 2011, but said it did not know of anything “untoward” behind the requests.
John-Paul Ford Rojas, Andrew Hough and Mark Hughes @'The Telegraph'

Inside The New York Post: What We Know About Murdoch's U.S. Tabloid And The Men Who Run It

How an omniscient Internet 'sextortionist' ruined the lives of teen girls

In the spring of 2009, a college student named Amy received an instant message from someone claiming to know her. Certainly, the person knew something about her—he was able to supply details about what her bedroom looked like and he had, improbably, nude photos of Amy. He sent the photos to her and asked her to have "Web sex" with him.
Instead, Amy contacted her boyfriend Dave, who had been storing the naked photos on his own computer. (Note: victim names have been changed in this story). The two students exchanged instant messages about Amy's apparent stalker, trying to figure out what had happened. Soon after the exchange, each received a separate threat from the man. He knew what they had just chatted about, he warned, and they were not to take their story to anyone, including the police.
Amy, terrified by her stalker's eerie knowledge, contacted campus police. Officers were dispatched to her room, where they took down Amy's story and asked her questions about the incident. Soon after, Dave received more threats from the stalker because Amy had gone to the police—and the stalker knew exactly what she had said to them.
Small wonder that, when the FBI later interviewed Amy about the case, she was "visibly upset and shaking during parts of the interview and had to stop at points to control her emotions and stop herself from crying." So afraid was Amy for her own safety that she did not leave her dorm room for a full week after the threats.
As for Dave, he suffered increased fear, anxiety, confusion, and anger; he later told a court that even his parents "had a hard time trusting anyone or even feeling comfortable enough to use a computer" after the episode.
Due in large part to the stress of the attack, Dave and Amy broke up.
But who had the mysterious stalker been? And how did he have access both to the contents of Dave's computer and to private discussions with police that Amy conducted in the privacy of her own room..?