Consequence Crossword: “True Bluey”
1 hour ago
Thursday 26 August 2010
Rules Committee to vote on measure urging removal of troops from Pakistan
The House Rules Committee will vote Monday evening on a resolution urging the removal of U.S. armed forces from Pakistan after newspapers published leaked documents suggesting that Pakistani intelligence has cooperated with Islamic extremist groups.
The privileged resolution, introduced by anti-war Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) was drafted before the revelation of the documents. Kucinich introduced the measure in response to a Wall Street Journal report last week, which said that the United States is conducting special military operations in Pakistan.
The United States has publicly worked to enlist Pakistan in its efforts to root out Islamic extremist groups such as al Qaeda and the Taliban from neighboring Afghanistan.
The House Rules Committee said Monday it will take up the measure at 6:30 p.m. Kucinich and his co-sponsor, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), argue the Obama administration has failed to notify Congress about armed forces in Pakistan, thereby violating the War Powers Act.
“The U.S. military has significantly increased its activity in Pakistan — both in troop presence and Predator attacks — at a time when there are, according to the CIA, very few al Qaeda members in that country,” Paul said in a statement last week. “This increasing U.S. military activity in Pakistan has little to do with protecting the United States and in fact is creating more enemies than it is defeating.”
If a vote is taken by the full House, Kucinich and Paul will likely receive time on the floor to speak on the issue. The leak of 92,000 secret documents by the organization Wikileaks on Sunday will probably further fuel the debate.
Since the resolution is privileged in nature — because it deals with war powers — it was scheduled to come up for a floor vote this week regardless of the leak issue. But the Rules Committee will make determinations on Monday about how the sensitive measure is brought to the floor.
The documents detailed in the leak show that the government believed Pakistani intelligence was covertly aiding the Afghan insurgency against the United States while Pakistan was taking American aid to help fight against it.
The Obama administration has strongly condemned the leak as a danger to national security, but war critics have used the information to argue the conflict has is increasingly becoming unwinnable.
Kucinich introduced a similar resolution earlier this year to force the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan immediately. It was easily defeated.
Jordan Fabian @'The Hill'
Jeff Koons CT Scanner for Advocate Hope Children's Hospital
RxArt is proud to introduce one of our most ambitious projects since our inception: an installation by world-renowned pop artist Jeff Koons at Advocate Hope Children's Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois. As a result of this groundbreaking collaboration, Koons' iconic characters find a permanent home on a CT Scanner and surrounding exam room in the hospital's radiology department. The installation—the first of it's kind—aims to soothe and cheer young patients and brighten the potentially frightening testing environment.
To transform the space, the Philips CT Scanner was painted a vibrant blue and decals featuring Koons' Monkeys were applied to the machine. His iconic Balloon Dog, Hanging Heart, and Donkey imagery were also installed to brighten the room as wallscapes. The addition of colorful new flooring completed the project, and the result is an awe-inspiring, playful escape that has completely revitalized the once-sterile room.
This project was made possible through the generosity of Kiehl's Since 1851 and Jeff Koons, who generously took no artist fee for his participation in this project.
More images
itsDanBull A cat in a bin is more newsworthy than the continuing plight of millions of flood victims in Pakistan. I wish news wasn't ruled by novelty
WikiLeaks post CIA documents on home grown terrorists
The CIA feels that nations across the globe would start co-operating with it less in the wake of the Headley case and growing instances of home grown terrorists and start believing that the U.S. is an exporter of terrorism, according to a secret document posted by WikiLeaks.
The CIA concluded that foreign governments would be less likely to cooperate with the U.S. on detention, intelligence-sharing, and other issues, the whistleblower site said.
“Primarily we have been concerned about Al-Qaeda infiltrating operatives into the United States to conduct terrorist attacks, but AQ may be increasingly looking for Americans to operate overseas,” said the document.
The CIA termed it as a thought provoking document. “These sorts of analytic products — clearly identified as coming from the Agency’s ‘Red Cell’ — are designed simply termed it to provoke thought and present different points of view,” CIA spokesperson, Marie Harf, told PTI.
The leaked document notes that Pakistani-American David Headley conducted surveillance in support of the LeT for the Mumbai attacks that killed 167 people.
“LeT induced him to change his name from Daood Gilani to David Headley to facilitate his movement between the US, Pakistan and India,” the CIA document said.
Headley had confessed to plotting the Mumbai attacks and LeT’s role in it.
“If the US were seen as an exporter of terrorism, foreign partners may be less willing to cooperate with the United States on extrajudicial activities, including detention, transfer, and interrogation of suspects in third party countries,” the document said.
“As a recent victim of high-profile terrorism originating from abroad, the US Government has had significant leverage to press foreign regimes to acquiesce to requests for extraditing terrorist suspects from their soil.
However, if the U.S. were seen as an “exporter of terrorism,” foreign governments could request a reciprocal arrangement that would impact US sovereignty,” the CIA said.
The CIA documents running into a few pages said contrary to common belief, the American export of terrorism or terrorists is not a recent phenomenon, nor has it been associated only with Islamic radicals or people of Middle Eastern, African or South Asian ethnic origin.
“This dynamic belies the American belief that our free, open and integrated multicultural society lessens the allure of radicalism and terrorism for US citizens. Late last year five young Muslim American men travelled from northern Virginia to Pakistan allegedly to join the Pakistani Taliban and to engage in jihad.”
The document said: “Their relatives contacted the FBI after they disappeared without telling anyone, and then Pakistani authorities arrested them as they allegedly attempted to gain access to al-Qaeda training facilities.”
It said if foreign regimes believe the U.S. position on rendition is too one-sided, favouring the U.S., but not them, they could obstruct U.S. efforts to detain terrorism suspects.
For example, in 2005 Italy issued criminal arrest warrants for U.S. agents involved in the abduction of an Egyptian cleric and his rendition to Egypt.
“The proliferation of such cases would not only challenge U.S. bilateral relations with other countries but also damage global counterterrorism efforts,” it said.
“If foreign leaders see the U.S. refusing to provide intelligence on American terrorism suspects or to allow witnesses to testify in their courts, they might respond by denying the same to the U.S.
In 2005 9/11 suspect Abdelghani Mzoudi was acquitted by a German court because the U.S. refused to allow Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a suspected ringleader of the 9/11 plot who was in U.S. custody, to testify.
“More such instances could impede actions to lock up terrorists, whether in the U.S. or abroad, or result in the release of suspects,” said the CIA document posted by WikiLeaks.
Pac-Man Hacked Onto a Touch-Screen Voting Machine Without Breaking "Tamper-Evident" Seals
This is your Sequoia touch-screen voting machine....
This is your Sequoia touch-screen voting machine with Pac-Man hacked onto it without disturbing any of the "tamper-evident" seals supposedly meant to protect it from hackers...
Any questions?...
Sequoia's voting machines, used in some 20% of U.S. elections, employ Intellectual Property (IP) still owned by a Venezuelan firm tied to Hugo Chavez. Sequoia itself is now owned by a Canadian firm called Dominion. (Though Dominion, like Sequoia itself before it, lied about the continuing Venezuelan/Chavez ties in its recent announcement of the acquisition, as detailed exclusively by The BRAD BLOG, to little notice, in June.)
The Pac-Man hack onto the Sequoia/Dominion voting machine was revealed this week. It was accomplished without breaking any of the "tamper-evident" seals that voting machine companies and election officials claim are used to ensure nobody can physically hack into them without being discovered.
"We received the machine with the original tamper-evident seals intact," the hackers from Princeton and University of Michigan report. "The software can be replaced without breaking any of these seals, simply by removing screws and opening the case."
Here's a video of Pac-Man running on the hacked Sequoia touch-screen voting machine...
This particular Sequoia DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) voting machine model is known as the AVC Edge. It used to be described on the Sequoia website and promotional materials as "tamperproof." It has been hacked previously and has failed time and again in recent elections, even though election officials continue to force voters to use the machines.
For example, the AVC Edge miscounted votes in New Jersey in 2008, the same election during which the systems also failed to even boot up when polls opened at a Hoboken precinct, forcing voters, including the state's then-Governor John Corzine, to wait some 45 minutes before they could cast votes on them at all. Whether those votes were recorded accurately as per the voters' intent, once the machines finally booted up, is scientifically impossible to know. Use of any touch-screen voting machine is the equivalent of a 100% faith-based election. No votes cast during an election --- none --- can be verified as having been accurately recorded on such systems.
Ever...
Continue reading
Ever...
Continue reading
Brad Friedman @'The Brad Blog'
Victory: Vedanta Mine Plan on Sacred Tribal Mountain Halted by Indian Government
The project has been delayed by four years because of the Dongria Kondh’s intense opposition locally – including the brandishing of bows and arrows – as well as from environmental and tribal rights group. Globally, a loosely coordinated campaign sought to persuade multi-national Vedanta's shareholders and financiers to distance themselves from the company. This is their magnificent victory as well – for Survival International and Amnesty International, various celebrity activists such as Bianca Jagger and Michael Palin, and numerous other loosely affiliated affinity campaigns, including most recently from Ecological Internet working with the Rainforest Information Centre.
“Yet again global people power has come to the aid of small, intact communities battling the ecosystem destroying economic growth machine. The Dongria Kondh’s amazing efforts should be placed in the context of a global people’s power movement to protect and restore ecosystems, and wrest control of land from industrial and speculative capitalism,” asserts Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet’s President.
“We are pleased to have contributed EI’s Earth Action Network’s [1] support – some 200,000 protest emails sent from nearly 100 countries [2] in a matter of weeks. I do not think it accidental that victory was achieved immediately after me and EI’s network, with John Seed and the Rainforest Information Centre, launched our protests. We got exactly what we wanted from this timely, well-organized and locally coordinated cyber protest – Ecological Internet’s specialty!”
### MORE ###
The project had been thrown into doubt last week when a government inquiry said that mining would destroy the way of life of the area's "endangered" and "primitive" people. The four-person committee also accused a local subsidiary of Vedanta of violating forest conservation and environment protection regulations. Because Niyamgiri Mountain is an important spiritual place, it had not thus far suffered the deforestation and degradation experienced by similar areas in India but contains an elephant reserve with Sambar, Leopard, Tiger, Barking Deer, various species of birds and other endangered species of wildlife. With the announcement, the area is free (for now) from the planned Vedenta bauxite mine.
Jairam Ramesh, India’s minister for environment and forests, said today that the government will issue what is termed a show-cause notice and take action against Vedanta. The news sent Vedanta’s shares down almost 6%, wiping almost £300m off the value of the business. "There are very serious violations of environment act and forest right act," Ramesh told Bloomberg. "There is no emotion, no politics, no prejudice in the decision. It is purely based on a legal approach." Vedanta, which can appeal against the decision, had wanted to expand its existing refinery in the area, generating a six-fold increase in capacity.
Survival campaigner Dr Jo Woodman said: "This is a victory nobody would have believed possible. The Dongria's campaign became a litmus test of whether a small, marginalised tribe could stand up to a massive multinational company with an army of lobbyists and PR firms and the ear of government…. Incredibly, the Dongria's courage and tenacity, allied with the support of many people in India, and Survival's supporters around the world, have triumphed."
This is the second time Ecological Internet’s Earth Action Network has recently achieved major conservation successes in India. Last year, also working with John Seed and the Rainforest Information Centre, Ecological Internet was able to single-handedly achieve major Asian elephant migration corridor protections [3].
### ENDS ###
[1] Earth Action Network’s current alerts are found at http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/alerts and you can subscribe to new alert notifications at: http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/subscribe/ and on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ecointernet
[2] Action Alert: UPDATE: India's Dongria Kondh Tribal Way of Life Threatened by British/International Vedanta Mining - http://forests.org/shared/alerts/send.aspx?id=india_mine
[3] Action Alert: Critical Elephant Corridor in India to be Severed - http://forests.org/shared/alerts/send.aspx?id=india_elephants
This release uses information provided by the Guardian:
Vedanta mine plan halted by Indian government
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/24/vedanta-mine-plan-halted-indian-government
DISCUSS RELEASE:
http://forests.org/blog/ | http://www.facebook.com/ecointernet | http://www.twitter.com/ecointernet
“We are pleased to have contributed EI’s Earth Action Network’s [1] support – some 200,000 protest emails sent from nearly 100 countries [2] in a matter of weeks. I do not think it accidental that victory was achieved immediately after me and EI’s network, with John Seed and the Rainforest Information Centre, launched our protests. We got exactly what we wanted from this timely, well-organized and locally coordinated cyber protest – Ecological Internet’s specialty!”
### MORE ###
The project had been thrown into doubt last week when a government inquiry said that mining would destroy the way of life of the area's "endangered" and "primitive" people. The four-person committee also accused a local subsidiary of Vedanta of violating forest conservation and environment protection regulations. Because Niyamgiri Mountain is an important spiritual place, it had not thus far suffered the deforestation and degradation experienced by similar areas in India but contains an elephant reserve with Sambar, Leopard, Tiger, Barking Deer, various species of birds and other endangered species of wildlife. With the announcement, the area is free (for now) from the planned Vedenta bauxite mine.
Jairam Ramesh, India’s minister for environment and forests, said today that the government will issue what is termed a show-cause notice and take action against Vedanta. The news sent Vedanta’s shares down almost 6%, wiping almost £300m off the value of the business. "There are very serious violations of environment act and forest right act," Ramesh told Bloomberg. "There is no emotion, no politics, no prejudice in the decision. It is purely based on a legal approach." Vedanta, which can appeal against the decision, had wanted to expand its existing refinery in the area, generating a six-fold increase in capacity.
Survival campaigner Dr Jo Woodman said: "This is a victory nobody would have believed possible. The Dongria's campaign became a litmus test of whether a small, marginalised tribe could stand up to a massive multinational company with an army of lobbyists and PR firms and the ear of government…. Incredibly, the Dongria's courage and tenacity, allied with the support of many people in India, and Survival's supporters around the world, have triumphed."
This is the second time Ecological Internet’s Earth Action Network has recently achieved major conservation successes in India. Last year, also working with John Seed and the Rainforest Information Centre, Ecological Internet was able to single-handedly achieve major Asian elephant migration corridor protections [3].
### ENDS ###
[1] Earth Action Network’s current alerts are found at http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/alerts and you can subscribe to new alert notifications at: http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/subscribe/ and on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ecointernet
[2] Action Alert: UPDATE: India's Dongria Kondh Tribal Way of Life Threatened by British/International Vedanta Mining - http://forests.org/shared/alerts/send.aspx?id=india_mine
[3] Action Alert: Critical Elephant Corridor in India to be Severed - http://forests.org/shared/alerts/send.aspx?id=india_elephants
This release uses information provided by the Guardian:
Vedanta mine plan halted by Indian government
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/aug/24/vedanta-mine-plan-halted-indian-government
DISCUSS RELEASE:
http://forests.org/blog/ | http://www.facebook.com/ecointernet | http://www.twitter.com/ecointernet
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
