Monday 4 July 2011

avinunu Ali Abunimah

Israel & @IDFSpokesperson develop foolproof analytic technique to discover #Flotilla2 links to "terrorists" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degre…

Egypt: Explosion hits gas pipeline in northern Sinai

♪♫ Foo Fighters w/ Alice Cooper - Schools Out/I'm Eighteen

Alice Cooper Joins The Foo Fighters onstage at their sold out Milton Keynes, UK show on July 2nd, 2011

With Each Twist in Strauss-Kahn Case, City Sees Further Reflections of Itself

Diyya al-Najjar RIP

Info

Australian war prisoner scheme defied global law

Confidential Defence documents reveal that Australia's policies on handling captives in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 to 2003 were so contrived they ran the risk of being neither ethical nor in line with international law. The risk was starkly outlined in a top secret memo from the then chief of the Defence Force, Admiral Chris Barrie, to the then defence minister, Robert Hill, in February 2002, which warned that the prisoner ''arrangement may not fully satisfy Australia's legal obligations and in any event will not be viewed as promising a respect for the rule of law''.

Canberra joined the US offensive in Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11, 2001, promising that captives would be given the full protection of the Geneva Conventions.

But behind the scenes the allies split over the status of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Australia felt bound by the conventions, which meant captives would be treated as legitimate prisoners of war, while the US president, George Bush, labelled them ''unlawful combatants'' outside the Geneva protocols.

Canberra was torn between its treaty obligations and a desire not to obstruct the US.

The extent of the contortions this produced are exposed in documents which the Public Interest Advocacy Centre in Sydney obtained under freedom-of-information laws.

The documents, made available to the Herald and the ABC, relate to prisoners of war in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2004.

They reveal that:

Australian officials wrongly assumed the US would take a similar view of the legal rights of captives;

Australia came up with a legal convenience, the ''Afghan model'', to paper over the gap;

the model was based on the contrivance that the US would always be the formal ''detaining'' power when prisoners were taken, even if only one US soldier was operating with much larger numbers of Australians at the time of the capture;

the model was the result of ''a serious divergence of legal and policy views between coalition partners'';

as a result, Defence wanted as little publicity on it as possible;

nearly a year after Australian forces were sent to Afghanistan, Defence was still working on Australia having its own detainee capability but this was not done until 2010.

Astonishingly, the papers reveal that the Afghan model, described as interim, was carried by default into the Iraq conflict in 2003. This was despite a new policy being struck in March 2003 between the US, Australia and Britain to give Australia more say in how prisoners were treated. The ''trilateral agreement'' was never put into practice.

The situation reached absurd heights on April 11, 2003, when 66 prisoners rounded up by Australian SAS troops were deemed to have been ''captured'' by the sole US Army officer present.

''Defence may find it difficult, although not impossible, to coherently explain that [Australia] was not the detaining power,'' warns a high-level brief at the time. This week Admiral Barrie said his concerns were about the practicalities, not legalities, of the arrangement and, by the time of Iraq, Australia should have had its own capability.

An international law expert at the University of NSW, Andrew Byrnes, labelled the Defence policy a ''charade''.

The PIAC is calling for a full public inquiry. Its chief executive, Edward Santow, said: ''The papers show a failure of leadership in both the ADF and the Department of Defence.''

Deborah Snow & Anne Davies @'SMH'

Why Do People Believe Stupid Stuff, Even When They're Confronted With the Truth?

William Orbit - Water From A Vine Leaf (Cliff Child Remix)

Via

Google+ for Crowdsourcing Crisis Information, Crisis Mapping and Disaster Response

♪♫ The Small Hours - The Milkman Of Human Kindness

"Have to say this is rather fabulous." - Billy Bragg on Facebook

Al Qaeda: The Rebrand

HERE

Hacker Attack Disrupts Al-Qaeda Communications

Ali Abunimah Responds To Israeli Claims That Gaza Flotilla Is A 'Provocation'

@'Democracy Now'

Sven Blume - Space Dub

Download

01] Axs - D.E. XXII
[02] Leo Cavallo - PR Edit I
[03] Organon - Radial Velocity
[04] Organon - Red Shift
[05] Leo Cavallo - Null 01
[06] Alexander Ross - Expansion Dub
[07] Ilias Katelanos - Manao Soda
[08] SCB - 20/4
[09] Ilya Orange - Emtry Railways
[10] Faces - Disc Over ( Responz Dub]
[11] Marko Fürstenberg - Without You (s.W Remix)
[12] Axs - D.E. XV
[13] Morocan Lover - Deserted

Changing the rules of the TV interview

'It sounds like an interview with a satnav stuck on a roundabout.' LOL!

Cops Just Love Those Tasers

HA!

Via

6 Things Google+ Can Do That Facebook Can't

Music Rights Groups Raided By Police, Bosses Arrested For Fraud

Sunday 3 July 2011

Is Mark Zuckerberg in Google+ Circle?

Want Mark Zuckerberg in your circle of Google+ friends? Good luck finding the real one.

The Facebook founder apparently has not one, not two, but at least three profiles on Google's newly launched social network, billed as Facebook's biggest rival yet. While most people are temporarily blocked from joining Google+ due to demand, it looks like three versions of Zuckerberg made it past the velvet rope.

@pcmag

Lovely Jon mix for Soul Jazz Records

Killer schizophrenic mix from film buff Lovely Jon
Sounds Of The Universe continue with their Sotu Mix series which has included exclusive selections from Maxmillion Dunbar, Claremont56, Distal, West Norwood Cassette Library and DJ Haus (Hot City).
This is a rollercoaster ride of obscure cinematic ditties, hip hop, post-punk, freaky rock, soul and everything in between!

Download

Censorship tells the wrong story (Reporters Without Borders)

(Click to enlarge)
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Water Caught at 7000 FPS Is Mesmerizing

Inside
- How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social

When Country Was King

A fact that’s been nearly lost to music history in general, and to Southern Californians in particular, is that from the 1940s right through 1960, our part of the state was well known for country music. We had our own unvarnished sound before Buck Owens and Bakersfield rose to prominence in the early 1960s. Merle Travis and Wynn Stewart may be our most famous exports, but be sure to check out Skeets McDonald, Molly Bee, Cliff Crofford and Billy Mize—and they’re just the tip of the iceberg.
The performances of that time have a vitality and authenticity that’s lacking in today’s Nashville product. Once you’ve been introduced to the canon of SoCal country, you’ll be hooked. For this, we can thank the scores of Dust Bowl and southern migrants, who in the 1930s brought their fulsome musical traditions to the Golden State. To accommodate these newcomers and the impulses of those who already lived here, dance halls and honky-tonks blossomed like California poppies.
As we were discussing the genre’s recent past, Americana musician James Intveld, an avid student of the California-roots sound, asked me, “Have you ever written anything about the Riverside Rancho?” It was a simple question that led to the discovery of a wealth of glittering dance palaces and musky clubs that exist now only in memories...

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Elisabeth Greenbaum Kasson @'LA'

The Pentagon After Mr. Gates

How Oxycontin Has Spread Through America

I left a very white, very affluent Philadelphia suburb for NYU in 2007. When I go home, Oxys always come up in conversation with friends: Who got really "bad" (and can you believe it was him?!), who started selling, or what new pill-based friendship is the strangest. On one visit, I found pens gutted to be used as straws (to snort pills) and tin foil in my old best friend’s bedroom, to smoke Oxys.

In Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, suburban moms and dads enjoy a short commute to the city and send their kids off to a “Blue Ribbon School of Excellence” to prepare them for the educational institutions to which they aspire. Aside from school and work and partying in big houses, there is not much to do.

Boredom tends to inspire some creative takes on “fun.” Out of my town, for example, came the Jackass crew. Their worm snorting and reckless self-injury (shocking their testicles, paper-cutting their eyelids) might not have occurred if they had the resources of a city. When Jackass star Ryan Dunn died in a drunk-driving accident June 20, he crashed his car on Route 322, a road members of my community use regularly.

Drugs are another common way to escape boredom. Pop one pill and working at the local pizza parlor after school might not be such a drag.

Of all the prescription pills people used – Xanax, Klonopin, Percocet, Vicodin, Adderrall, Rittalin, Codeine – OxyContin, the brand name for slow-release oxycodone, is king. The most potent painkiller of its class (opioids like codeine, Percocet and Vicodin), Oxys are what you graduate to. Being hooked on percs wouldn’t make sense. Eventually, as tolerance increases and more pills are needed (not just to get high but to avoid withdrawal) Oxys seem like the way to go...

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Kristen Gwynne @'AlterNet'

The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret

On the cut-and-kill floor of Quality Pork Processors Inc. in Austin, Minnesota, the wind always blows. From the open doors at the docks where drivers unload massive trailers of screeching pigs, through to the "warm room" where the hogs are butchered, to the plastic-draped breezeway where the parts are handed over to Hormel for packaging, the air gusts and swirls, whistling through the plant like the current in a canyon. In the first week of December 2006, Matthew Garcia felt feverish and chilled on the blustery production floor. He fought stabbing back pains and nausea, but he figured it was just the flu—and he was determined to tough it out.
Garcia had gotten on at QPP only 12 weeks before and had been stuck with one of the worst spots on the line: running a device known simply as the "brain machine"—the last stop on a conveyor line snaking down the middle of a J-shaped bench [DC] called the "head table." Every hour, more than 1,300 severed pork heads go sliding along the belt. Workers slice off the ears, clip the snouts, chisel the cheek meat. They scoop out the eyes, carve out the tongue, and scrape the palate meat from the roofs of mouths. Because, famously, all parts of a pig are edible ("everything but the squeal," wisdom goes), nothing is wasted. A woman next to Garcia would carve meat off the back of each head before letting the denuded skull slide down the conveyor and through an opening in a plexiglass shield.
On the other side, Garcia inserted the metal nozzle of a 90-pounds-per-square-inch compressed-air hose and blasted the pigs' brains into a pink slurry. One head every three seconds. A high-pressure burst, a fine rosy mist, and the slosh of brains slipping through a drain hole into a catch bucket. (Some workers say the goo looked like Pepto-Bismol; others describe it as more like a lumpy strawberry milkshake.) When the 10-pound barrel was filled, another worker would come to take the brains for shipping to Asia, where they are used as a thickener in stir-fry. Most days that fall, production was so fast that the air never cleared between blasts, and the mist would slick workers at the head table in a grisly mix of brains and blood and grease...

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Ted Genoways @'Mother Jones'

War criminals in charge

HA???

Zizek "Assange is a terrorist in the same sense that Ghandi was a terrorist"

Wikihead: The most Terrifying Journalism in Recent Memory

@exiledsurfer

wikileaks WikiLeaks

Quote of the day: Goodman: "One minute left." Zizek: "Yeah, but one minute in this broader Christian sense where time is eternity."

If you can spare any money pass it on to sickle cell research (please)
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease

Sean Oliver - Furious Fire