One minute's silence to mark Ibrox stadium disaster

As a an 11 year old in Glasgow at the time I unfortunately remember this day all too well!

Detroit In Ruins

@'The Guardian'
Unfortunately Julian Temple's wonderful film 'Requiem For Detroit' appears to no longer be online, but this is frightening reading.

Bradley Manning/Wikileaks Timeline

HERE

@'Tastefully Offensive'

How WikiLeaks Enlightened Us in 2010

WikiLeaks: Who Helped Shape Julian Assange?

Henry David Thoreau: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849)

An argument that people should not permit governments to overrule their consciences, and that people have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. (Original title: Resistance to Civil Government)
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Radio People

Radio People is the latest project from Ohio-stalwart, Sam Goldberg. After a handful of solo releases under his own name on Weird Forest, 905 Tapes and the Emeralds-run Wagon & Gneiss Things labels, he debuted Radio People on an ultra-limited self-titled cassette on his own Pizza Night imprint. At that point, there was no way back and the only move was to push forward with this new cosmic beast. Two more short-run tapes followed and it was clear that this new chemically imbalanced synthesizer project wasn't just a quick hit one-off. Radio People is here to stay.
On this, his debut vinyl effort, Goldberg has compiled the best elements of those three, long-gone cassettes. This Dubplates & Mastering cut slab of wax is the strongest statement Goldberg has made, proving his talent lies far beyond ambient soundscapes and well into the world of pop-infused synthesizer chaos and kraut-inspired composition. Major hooks sit alongside dense planetary drones. Goldberg pairs rivers of polysynth tracery with deep shards of droning organs, minimal live percussion and a whole host of drum machine backbone. This really is the best of both worlds. Melodies suck you in, beats get your head bobbing and then you're sucked down a complex tonal wormhole of introspective loops and ambient synthscapes.
Pop song frameworks nestle themselves neatly beside somber soundscapes, sometimes jumping back and forth in the same track. Barely-there vocals foil the stasis, leaving the listener guessing and wondering if there's a ghost in the mix. Radio People's embracing of simple kraut rhythms to underscore the catchy, kosmische wanderings give this music an accessibility not present in much of Goldberg's previous work. It crosses boundaries and comes back and shows still untapped wells of talent and ideas in Goldberg's bag of tricks.

Pirate Party Leader Rick Falkvinge Resigns on 5th Anniversary

Five years ago the first Pirate Party was founded in Sweden. In the years that followed the Party shook up the political climate in its home country and the European Parliament where it holds two seats. Now, five years later, founder and chief architect Rickard Falkvinge is stepping down as leader. He will focus on promoting the Pirate position internationally, while Party deputy Anna Troberg will take over the reins.

It has been a long and tumultuous 5 years for the Pirate Party and its leader Rick Falkvinge. Riding on the wave of public protest after Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay’s servers in 2006, the Party soon became a political force to be reckoned with.
The Party gained interest from the mainstream media and at the Swedish general elections in the same year it became the third largest party outside parliament. Inspired by the small successes the Party booked in the first year, Pirate Parties were founded in dozens of other countries as well.
Fast forward three years and the Swedish Pirate Party peaked at over 50,000 members just before the European elections of 2009. In these elections the Pirate Party got more than 7% of the total votes earning them two seats in the European Parliament, a major victory.
Today the Pirate Party looks back on its short history as it celebrates its fifth anniversary. However, this festive day also brings a surprise that nobody saw coming. Rick Falkvinge, Pirate Party icon, founder and leader announced today that he is stepping down as leader. Effective immediately he will be replaced by his deputy, Anna Troberg.
According to Falkvinge, new leadership is what could take the Party to the next level.
“Anna has a cultural background which is precisely what the Pirate Party in Sweden needs at this point,” Falkvinge exclusively told TorrentFreak. “We are well established within the box of technical people, but need to break out of it. To do that, we need a leader who can explain why these issues are important in nontechnical terms. Anna is the perfect fit.”

However, the former Party leader isn’t hanging up his Pirate hat just yet. He stays on as the Party’s chairman while he broadens his scope. Freed from the political shackles, he will continue to fight for the same issues he’s championed for the last five years, but now more internationally oriented than before.
In the coming year Falkvinge intends to work as an ‘international evangelist’ for the Pirate movement and focus on Information Politics. Part of that will include a guest column here on TorrentFreak, as well as a new English-language blog at Falkvinge.net.
Looking back on the last five years it is impressive to see what the ‘Pirate’ movement started by Falkvinge has accomplished. There are now Pirate Parties in forty countries around the world, with city Councillors in Germany, Luxembourg and the Czech Republic and formerly a member in the German Parliament.
It will be interesting to see how the Parties fare in the coming half-decade, where privacy and technology issues are becoming more relevant than ever before. Meanwhile we congratulate Anna Troberg on her new position and wish her all the best. Rick Falkvinge – the man who made Pirates Political – is saluted for a half-decade of hard work as the Swedish Pirate Party leader.
Ernesto @'Torrent Freak'

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Billy the Kid fails to win pardon

WTF???

14 Fast Food Items Not Available In The U.S. That Should Be

What Is in Fast Food? A Newly Discovered Reason to Avoid Fast Food

The American Wikileaks Hacker

On July 29th, returning from a trip to Europe, Jacob Appelbaum, a lanky, unassuming 27-year-old wearing a black T-shirt with the slogan "Be the trouble you want to see in the world," was detained at customs by a posse of federal agents. In an interrogation room at Newark Liberty airport, he was grilled about his role in Wikileaks, the whistle-blower group that has exposed the government's most closely guarded intelligence reports about the war in Afghanistan. The agents photocopied his receipts, seized three of his cellphones — he owns more than a dozen — and confiscated his computer. They informed him that he was under government surveillance. They questioned him about the trove of 91,000 classified military documents that Wikileaks had released the week before, a leak that Vietnam-era activist Daniel Ellsberg called "the largest unauthorized disclosure since the Pentagon Papers." They demanded to know where Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, was hiding. They pressed him on his opinions about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Appelbaum refused to answer. Finally, after three hours, he was released. Appelbaum is the only known American member of Wikileaks and the leading evangelist for the software program that helped make the leak possible. In a sense, he's a bizarro version of Mark Zuckerberg: If Facebook's ambition is to "make the world more open and connected," Appelbaum has dedicated his life to fighting for anonymity and privacy. An anarchist street kid raised by a heroin- addict father, he dropped out of high school, taught himself the intricacies of code and developed a healthy paranoia along the way. "I don't want to live in a world where everyone is watched all the time," he says. "I want to be left alone as much as possible. I don't want a data trail to tell a story that isn't true." We have transferred our most intimate and personal information — our bank accounts, e-mails, photographs, phone conversations, medical records — to digital networks, trusting that it's all locked away in some secret crypt. But Appelbaum knows that this information is not safe. He knows, because he can find it...

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Nathaniel Rich @'Rolling Stone'

HA!

Er, can I have my money back please...

REpost: Natasha Veruschka - the 'Queen' of swords

Natasha Veruschka
Natasha currently holds seven world records in sword swallowing including the most swords swallowed by a female (13 twenty two inch long swords) and the longest sword swallowed by a female (twenty seven and a half inches long.)