Australian boy, 14, held on Bali drugs charge

Australia is trying to secure the return of a 14-year-old boy arrested in Indonesia for alleged marijuana possession, the Australian foreign minister has said.
The boy has been held at Denpasar police headquarters in Bali since he was arrested on Tuesday accused of buying a small quantity of marijuana from a man on Kuta beach.
His lawyer, Muhammad Rifan, said he faced a maximum sentence of six years in an adult prison if convicted of possessing 7g of marijuana, which under Indonesian law is treated the same as heroin or cocaine.
Kevin Rudd, the Australian foreign minister, said he had sent Australia's ambassador to Denpasar. "I've indicated to him that his number one priority in the immediate period ahead is how we support this young boy and his family and do everything we can to obtain his early return to Australia," Rudd told reporters in Sydney.
The boy, from Morrisset Park north of Sydney, was on holiday with his parents when he was arrested.
Rifan said Julian McMahon, an Australian lawyer representing two Australians on death row in Bali for smuggling heroin in 2005, said the boy might only get a few months' jail or avoid prison if he could prove he had a drug problem for which he had received counselling. Australian media have reported the boy is the youngest Australian to be arrested under Indonesia's tough drug laws.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the boy told police he bought the marijuana because he felt sorry for the alleged dealer who said he had not eaten for a day.
McMahon said most foreigners were arrested in these circumstances when they bought drugs from police informants.
Indonesia has some of the world's strictest drug laws and people convicted of smuggling or possessing drugs can be executed by firing squad. More than 140 prisoners are on death row in Indonesia, including more than 50 foreigners.
@'The Guardian'

What Steve Jobs Understood That Our Politicians Don’t

Josh? It’s Steve Jobs. We have a really big problem

Did Dropping Acid Make Steve Jobs More Creative?

It's a Wonderful Machine (1998)

99%

'My little nightstick's going to get a workout tonight'

Supreme Court orders Google Australia to release details of creators of website

#OccupyWallStreet (Livestream)

Participating in a Lynching: No Longer a "Serious" Crime in California

Outpost 13: The Atrocity Exhibition

"Eurydice in a Used Car Lot. Margaret Travis paused in the empty foyer of the cinema, looking at the photographs in the display frames. In the dim light beyond the curtains she saw the dark-suited figure of Captain Webster, the muffled velvet veiling his handsome eyes. The last few weeks had been a nightmare - Webster with his long-range camera and obscene questions. He seemed to take a certain sardonic pleasure in compiling this one-man Kinsey Report on her . . . positions, planes, where and when Travis placed his hands on her body - why didn’t he ask Catherine Austin? As for wanting to magnify the photographs and paste them up on enormous billboards, ostensibly to save her from Travis . . . She glanced at the stills in the display frames, of this elegant and poetic film in which Cocteau had brought together all the myths of his own journey of return. On an impulse, to annoy Webster, she stepped through the side exit and walked past a small yard of cars with numbered windshields. Perhaps she would make her descent here. Eurydice in a used car lot?"
J.G. Ballard, Chapter One: 'The Atrocity Exhibition', The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).
An excerpt from Outpost 13's adaptation of JG Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition. Uploaded with permission from the filmmakers. More information at ballardian.com/​outpost-13-atrocity-exhibition.
Presenting ‘Outpost 13: The Atrocity Exhibition’, a video directed by Mark C and produced by Outpost 13: Stuart Argabright, Mark C and Kent Heine. The full 35-minute film is based on J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, and is part of a performance piece that debuted in Porto, Portugal at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, with o13 performing the soundtrack live.
Narration from Ballard’s text by David Silver with Jen Jaffe and Esther Ahn. Images by Robert Longo, Adrienne Altenhaus and others.
Outpost 13:
Mark C: guitar, synthesizers, vocals
Stuart Argabright: synthesizers, laptop, vocals
Kent Heine: bass
"The Concentration City. In the night air they passed the shells of concrete towers, blockhouses half buried in rubble, giant conduits filled with tyres, overhead causeways crossing broken roads. Travis followed the bomber pilot and the young woman along the faded gravel. They walked across the foundation of a guard-house into the weapons range. The concrete aisles stretched into the darkness across the airfield. In the suburbs of Hell Travis walked in the flaring light of the petrochemical plants. The ruins of abandoned cinemas stood at the street corners, faded billboards facing them across the empty streets. In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac. He wandered through the deserted suburbs. The crashed bombers lay under the trees, grass growing through their wings. The bomber pilot helped the young woman into one of the cockpits. Travis began to mark out a circle on the concrete target area."
J.G. Ballard, Chapter One: 'The Atrocity Exhibition', The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).
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The Anti-Politics of #OccupyWallStreet

Hypereconomics

ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald

WikiLeaks cable shows Anwar Awlaki responsible for the deaths of dozens of innocent people in Yemen -- oh, wait: is.gd/JnBfAC

This Is Only Getting Bigger: 20,000 Rally in New York to Support Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street protests spreading

Obama, Clinton & Fred Shuttlesworth (Selma 2007)

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WTF???

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Judge Refuses to Sanction CIA for Destroying Waterboarding Videos

A federal judge won’t hold the CIA in contempt for destroying videotapes of detainee interrogations that included the use of a torture technique known as waterboarding, ruling instead Wednesday that the spy agency merely committed “transgressions” for its failure to abide by his court order. Punishing the Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein of New York ruled, “would serve no beneficial purpose.” (.pdf)
Hellerstein wrote that CIA officials responsible for producing the tapes in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit might “not have been aware of the videotapes’ existence before they were destroyed.” The judge also said officials who ordered the tapes’ destruction in 2005 might not have been “aware of court orders requiring identification or production of the videotapes.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the long-running FOIA case and asked for a contempt finding, had requested that Judge Hellerstein order depositions and discovery to ascertain if CIA officials destroyed the 92 videotapes of post 9/11 interrogations of terrorism suspects after they had notice of court orders to produce them.
The judge declined.
“I will not allow additional discovery,” the judge said. He added that the CIA has admitted that some of the videos showed the CIA using waterboarding torture techniques. Footage on one tape, he said, had shown an interrogator who “continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose.” The Obama administration has declined to prosecute CIA officials for torture, citing legal memos that authorized the techniques.
Hellerstein said because of the tapes’ destruction, the CIA “improved protocols for the retention of records potentially relevant to an investigation or a judicial, congressional, or administrative proceeding.”
The judge said the tapes’ destruction “exposed serious flaws” in the CIA’s document-retention procedures, and he noted that the CIA in August “adopted new document preservation and destruction protocols to insure against similar transgressions in the future.”
Alexander Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney, blasted Hellerstein’s ruling.
“While today’s decision recognizes that the CIA violated a court order when it destroyed the torture tapes, we are profoundly disappointed by the court’s unwillingness to label as contempt what it describes as the CIA’s ‘dereliction.’ We also strongly disagree with the court’s finding that the CIA has ‘remedied’ the destruction,” Abdo said in a statement. “The truth is that the CIA destroyed evidence of torture, and the destruction of this evidence has made it harder to hold high-level officials accountable for the abuse that they authorized.”
The CIA in 2007 admitted to destroying the tapes of interrogations of alleged al-Qaeda members Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. A special prosecutor last year found that CIA officials should not be charged for the tapes’ destruction.
A year before the tapes were destroyed, Hellerstein ordered the CIA “to produce or identify all responsive documents” in response to the ACLU’s request for “records concerning the treatment of individuals apprehended after September 11, 2001, and held by the United States at military bases or detention facilities outside the United States.”
Hellerstein ordered the CIA to pay the ACLU’s legal expenses.
David Kravets @'Wired'

:)

_struct David Johnson

That's a fucking big balaclava. RT @VictoriaPolice : Pedestrian struck by car in Balaclava bit.ly/rnYtn1

John Pilger: The smearing of a revolution

The high court in London will soon decide whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct. At the appeal hearing in July, Ben Emmerson QC, counsel for the defence, described the whole saga as "crazy". Sweden's chief prosecutor had dismissed the original arrest warrant, saying there was no case for Assange to answer. Both women involved said they had consented to have sex. On the facts alleged, no crime would have been committed in Britain.
However, it is not the Swedish judicial system that presents a "grave danger" to Assange, say his lawyers, but a legal device known as a temporary surrender, under which he can be sent on from Sweden to the United States secretly and quickly. The founder and editor-in-chief
of WikiLeaks, who published the greatest leak of official documents in history, providing a unique insight into rapacious wars and the lies told by governments, is likely to find himself in a hell hole not dissimilar to the "torturous" dungeon that held Private Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower. Manning has not been tried, let alone convicted, yet on 21 April President Barack Obama declared him guilty with a dismissive "He broke the law".
This Kafka-style justice awaits Assange whether or not Sweden decides to prosecute him. Last December, the Independent disclosed that the US and Sweden had already started talks on his extradition. At the same time, a secret grand jury - a relic of the 18th century long abandoned in this country - has convened just across the river from Washington, in a corner of Virginia that is home to the CIA and most of America's national security establishment. The grand jury is a "fix", a leading legal expert told me: reminiscent of the all-white juries in the South that convicted black people by rote. A sealed indictment is believed to exist.
Under the US constitution, which guarantees free speech, Assange should be protected, in theory. When he was running for president, Obama said that "whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal". His embrace of George W Bush's "war on terror" has changed all that. Obama has pursued more whistleblowers than any of his predecessors. The problem for his administration in "getting" Assange is that military in­vestigators have found no collusion or contact between him and Manning. There is no crime, so one has to be concocted, probably in line with Vice-President Joe Biden's absurd description of Assange as a "hi-tech terrorist".

Petty and perfidious

Should Assange win his high court appeal, he could face extradition directly to the US. In the past, US officials have synchronised extradition warrants with the conclusion of a pending case. Like their predatory military, US jurisdiction recognises few boundaries. As Manning's suffering demonstrates, together with the recently executed Troy Davis and the forgotten inmates of Guantanamo, much of the US criminal justice system is corrupt.
In a letter addressed to the Australian government, Britain's most distinguished human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce, who now acts for Assange, wrote:

Given the extent of the public discussion, frequently on the basis of entirely false assumptions . . . it is very hard to attempt to preserve for him any presumption of innocence. Mr Assange has now hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of potential extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two different alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own country, and . . . his personal safety has become at risk in circumstances that are highly politically charged.

These facts, and the prospect of a grotesque miscarriage of justice, have been drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. Deeply personal, petty, perfidious and inhuman attacks have been aimed at a man not charged with any crime, yet held isolated and under house arrest - conditions not even meted out to a defendant who is facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife...

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@'New Statesman'

prodnose Danny Baker 

David Cameron wants everyone to pay up their credit cards. Well can't the banks do that for us? I mean, we bailed them out...

Bianca Chang - Recent Works, June 2011

Stop-motion builds and photos of recent works created for Sydney's A4 Paper Festival 31st May - 5th June presented by the Paper Convention. All photos by Jacob Ring.

abditum Griffin Boyce 

Sealed court dockets concerning Birgitta Jonsdottir in the #WikiLeaks Grand Jury scribd.com/doc/67742787 #twitter

HA!

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(Thanx HerrB!)

The World's Best Subway Maps

London

Washington DC

Montreal

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Massachusetts Echoes Wisconsin as Budget Curbs Union Power

Steve Schapiro: Taxi Driver

As analogue lovers, there’s no telling in how much we adore film photographs. Seeing one’s shots on actual prints and compiled in a book brings visual elation and self-gratification. ‘Photos on Pages’ is a new series that features photo-books by great photographers. In this first volume, the spotlight is on Steve Schapiro and his exclusive photography for Taxi Driver...

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White Supremacist Ex-Con Arrested in Double Murder

A 31-year-old white supremacist once associated with a neo-Nazi gang known as the “Aryan Death Squad” and his female companion are in custody in northern California as suspects in two murders and the disappearance of a disabled veteran.
David Joseph Pedersen, convicted of threatening to murder federal Judge Edward Lodge of Idaho in 2001, was arrested Wednesday near Marysville, Calif., in a stolen car with his companion, 24-year-old Holly Ann Grigsby, of Portland.
They both have been identified by authorities in Washington state as suspects in the brutal Sept. 28 slaying in Everett, Wash., of Pedersen’s stepmother, 69-year-old Leslie Mae Pederson.
A bloody pillow covered her head and her hands were tied with duct tape, according to police who found a sword near the victim. A medical examiner determined she died from “incised wounds of the neck” and ruled her death a homicide.
Her husband, David Jones “Red” Pedersen, a 56-year-old disabled veteran, remains missing from the home, according to authorities who say in court documents they aren’t sure if he is a suspect or another victim. Family friends say he had difficulty traveling in a car because of his medical problems.
David “Joey” Pedersen and Grigsby had been visiting his father and stepmother just prior to the killing and disappearance. Grigsby’s father, Fred Grigsby, of Portland, Ore., told The Associated Press that his daughter has a history of drug addiction and has associated with white supremacists...

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Bill Mortin @'SPLC'

Israeli police arrest 18-year-old Jewish suspect in mosque arson case

Jonas Mekas occupies Wall Street

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Cookin'

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♪♫ The Beatles - Hey Bulldog

Herman Cain Tells Poor And Jobless “Don’t Blame Wall St., Blame Yourself”

#SteveWorkers

Wu_Ming_Foundt Wu Ming Foundation

Steve Workers says: Planet Earth is like one big Foxconn plant. Don't kill yourself, organize! Beat the crap out of your boss! #SteveWorkers

Wu_Ming_Foundt Wu Ming Foundation 

Here's a blog devoted to Steve Workers, the guru of the working class steveworkers.tumblr.com #SteveWorkers

Steve Wozniak Remembers Steve Jobs

Help the Next Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs made machines. They’re machines you can type on, or talk on, or listen to music on. He didn’t just tinker with gadgets. He changed what they did. He made machines do what machines had never done before.

But there was one machine he couldn’t fix: his body.

Jobs died yesterday at 56 because of a glitch in his programming. The glitch was cancer. A lot of smart people are trying to fix this glitch in future releases of the human body. But that’s going to take a while. In the meantime, there’s something you can do to help people such as Jobs. You can supply replacement parts for the machines that keep them alive. You can sign up as an organ donor.

Two years ago, Jobs got a liver transplant to prolong his life. Apparently his cancer, which began in his pancreas, had damaged his liver. To get the liver, Jobs went to Tennessee, because the waiting list in Northern California was too long. There weren’t enough livers to go around. Lots of other people in Northern California needed livers but couldn’t get them, because they didn’t have the kind of money or savvy Jobs did. They couldn’t afford to fly around the country, go through extensive evaluations at multiple transplant centers, and guarantee their availability within an hour for the next liver that became available.

Go to the data page of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network and look at the numbers. More than 100,000 people are on waiting lists for organs. Sixteen thousand are waiting for livers. Ninety thousand are waiting for kidneys. Three thousand are waiting for hearts. In the past decade and a half, more than 100,000 people—on average, more than 6,000 per year—were removed from the lists not because they got organs, but because they died. Another 30,000 were removed because they became too ill. Right now, more than 3,000 people are waiting for livers in California. Most of them have been waiting more than two years.

Earlier this year, when Jobs took a leave from Apple because of deteriorating health, I asked whether he should have received his transplant in the first place. As bioethicist Arthur Caplan has noted, almost none of the 1,500 people who received liver transplants in the U.S. when Jobs did, in the first quarter of 2009, had cancer. That’s because there’s no evidence that transplants stop metastatic cancer. The much more likely scenario is that the cancer continues to spread and soon kills the patient, destroying a liver that could have kept someone else alive for many years. Among liver recipients, cancer patients have the worst survival rate. While more than 70 percent of liver recipients in Jobs’ age bracket are still alive and functioning five years later, Jobs lasted only half that long.

Spending that liver on Jobs seems unfair, given the scarcity of organs. But why should we accept scarcity? Jobs didn’t. He used his influence to prod California to enact a new law that requires applicants for a driver's license to be asked whether they'd like to be organ donors. He recognized that the wait for organs doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. If more organs become available, people like Jobs can get transplants, possibly prolonging their lives, without sentencing others on the waiting list to death.

In the hours since the world learned of Jobs’ death, I’ve seen lots of people posting tributes to him online. They say he was one of a kind. They say he did things nobody else could do. But medically, he was one of thousands. And the thing he needed most was something any of us can do. He needed an organ donor. There are 100,000 people behind him—people who didn’t have his wealth or connections—still waiting.

If you want to honor Jobs and his donor, don’t just recycle your computer. Recycle your body. Register as an organ donor, and spread the word. You can help the next Steve Jobs reboot the machine that matters most.
William Saletan @'Salon' 

Family donates organs of boy hit by train

Fuck Off!

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Fred Shuttlesworth RIP

A hero died today. The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth was not merely a prominent and important leader of the Civil Rights era. He was a repeated victim of terrible violence who remained dedicated to nonviolence and a symbol of what genuine courage represents-- the refusal to compromise ones principles in the face of fear. His courage in the face of physical danger is an inspiration to all of us. Read his obituary.
I've chosen to use this mugshot of Shuttlesworth because to me it symbolizes how oppression and adversity can reveal strength, and how defiance in and of itself can be a kind of grace. As the Times obituary recounts, Shuttlesworth was arrested dozens of times, brutally assaulted, targeted by politicians and police, and the victim of repeated attempted murder. He neither backed down nor succumbed to cynicism or the use of violence himself.
What's more, Shuttlesworth demonstrates that pacifism is natural partners with radicalism, pugnacity, and a refusal to compromise. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King are such toweringly complex and symbolically rich figures-- and our public consciousness has such little space for history-- that there is an unfortunate tendency to think of the Civil Rights movement as being defined only by the conciliatory message of King and the combative message of Malcolm X. This itself is a reductive reading of history. But Shuttlesworth was at once dedicated to the vehicle of nonviolence that King espoused and yet was fiery and obstinate as well. And he came from the same poor background that defined the lives of many of the black Americans living during the Civil Rights era and continues to define the lives of too many today.
A culture makes choices in the virtues it celebrates. What is celebrated determines what is valued and what is valued determines what endures. It is necessary for us to remember men like Fred Shuttlesworth, and in doing so to remember that what should endure in memory is real heroism, real sacrifice, and real principle.
Freddie @'L'Hôte'

JPBarlow John Perry Barlow

The 1% and their support systems are a cancer on the economy. #OccupyWallStreet may become chemotherapy.

attackerman attackerman

Wow. My friend Jim Carafano is losing his fucking mind. fxn.ws/radJdz

Rudi Zygadlo - Achtung (Go Easy, Come Easy)

Dropped from App Store, Siri Assistant to stop working Oct. 15

(Thanx Sander!)

Bin Laden death: 'CIA doctor' accused of treason

A Pakistani commission investigating the US raid that killed Osama Bin Laden says a doctor accused of helping the CIA should be tried for high treason.

Dr Shakil Afridi is accused of running a CIA-sponsored fake vaccine programme in Abbottabad, where Bin Laden was killed, to try to get DNA samples.
He was arrested shortly after the 2 May US raid that killed the al-Qaeda chief.
The commission has been interviewing intelligence officials and on Wednesday spoke to Bin Laden family members.
Pakistan, which was deeply embarrassed by the raid, has described the covert US special forces operation as a violation of its sovereignty.
A government commission, headed by a former Supreme Court judge, has been charged with discovering how the US military was able to carry out the raid deep within Pakistan without being detected.
It is also investigating how Bin Laden was able to hide in Abbottabad, a garrison town, for several years.
DNA sought After questioning Dr Afridi, the commission said that in view of the record and evidence it was "of the view that prima facie, a case of conspiracy against the State of Pakistan and high treason" should be launched against him.
Washington has been arguing that Dr Afridi should be freed and allowed to live in the US.
In the weeks after the Bin Laden raid, reports emerged that Dr Afridi, a senior Pakistani doctor, had been recruited by the CIA to organise the phoney vaccine drive.
After having tracked down a Bin Laden courier to a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, the CIA wanted to confirm Bin Laden's presence by obtaining a DNA sample from the residents.
It is not clear if any DNA from Bin Laden or any family members was ever obtained.
After the raid, Pakistani authorities took three of Bin Laden's widows and two of his daughters into custody.
The commission said on Thursday that statements had been taken from them and they were no longer required for its investigation.
@'BBC'