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Pedro Gonçalves

Free Syrian Army rebels defect to Islamist group Jabhat al-Nusra | World news | The Gua... - 0 views

  • "No one should blame us for joining al-Nusra. Blame the west if Syria is going to become a haven for al-Qaida and extremists. The west left Assad's gangs to slaughter us. They never bothered to support the FSA. They disappointed ordinary Syrian protesters who just wanted their freedom and to have Syria for all Syrians."
Pedro Gonçalves

David Cameron faces EU cabinet crisis as ministers break ranks | Politics | The Guardian - 0 views

  • David Cameron is struggling to maintain Tory discipline over Europe after cabinet loyalists Michael Gove and Philip Hammond said on Sunday they would vote to leave the European Union if a referendum were to be held now.
  • Gove, the education minister, confirmed for the first time that he believes that leaving the EU would have "certain advantages", while Hammond, the defence secretary, later said he too would vote to leave if he was asked to endorse the EU "exactly as it is today".
  • Hammond, interviewed for Pienaar's Politics on BBC radio, later said: "If the choice is between a European Union written exactly as it is today and not being a part of that then I have to say that I'm on the side of the argument that Michael Gove has put forward."
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  • The prime minister says that, if elected with a majority in 2015, he would hold a referendum by 2017. This would take place after a renegotiation of Britain's membership terms.
  • The remarks, which follow similar calls by Lord Lawson and Michael Portillo last week for Britain to leave Europe, are particularly significant because they are the first cabinet ministers to say they would vote to quit if an immediate referendum were held.
  • Theresa May, the home secretary, said she too would abstain. But she declined to say whether she would vote to leave the EU if a referendum were held now. The prime minister will be in the US when the Commons vote is held.
  • Boris Johnson backed Tory backbench demands for an EU referendum bill and warned Cameron he must make it clear Britain is "ready to walk away" unless its relationship is fundamentally reformed,
  • But the mayor of London also suggested that leaving the EU would expose the idea that most of Britain's problems are self-inflicted. "If we left the EU, we would end this sterile debate, and we would have to recognise that most of our problems are not caused by 'Bwussels', but by chronic British short-termism, inadequate management, sloth, low skills, a culture of easy gratification and underinvestment in both human and physical capital and infrastructure," Johnson wrote in his Daily Telegraph column."Why are we still, person for person, so much less productive than the Germans? That is now a question more than a century old, and the answer is nothing to do with the EU. In or out of the EU, we must have a clear vision of how we are going to be competitive in a global economy."
  • The prime minister's decision to highlight the benefits of EU membership is likely to be welcomed by Obama, whose advisers expressed concern in the runup to Cameron's EU speech in January, when he outlined his referendum plan.
Pedro Gonçalves

David Cameron offers olive branch on EU referendum as Ukip soars | Politics | The Guardian - 0 views

  • The poll findings, showing Ukip on a record high in an ICM poll of 18%
  • The poll shows that support for the three main parties has drained away to Ukip, with each of them down four points on last month – Labour dropping to 34%, the Tories 28%, and the Liberal Democrats 11% – as Nigel Farage's party gained nine points.
  • For all three established parties to be falling back in the polls at the same time is unprecedented in the 29-year history of the Guardian/ICM series. The Tories are plumbing depths they have not experienced in over a decade.
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  • The president first described Britain's EU membership as an "expression of its influence" around the world, but then offered measured praise for the prime minister's plan to renegotiate Britain's EU membership terms after the next election. He said: "You probably want to see if you can fix what is broken in a very important relationship before you break it off – that makes some sense to me."
  • Earlier Cameron – in danger of looking as weak as John Major at the height of the Maastricht crisis – took comfort from the broad endorsement of his European strategy by Barack Obama at a joint White House Press conference.
  • But Obama said he would wait to see if the negotiations succeeded before making a final judgment, and repeatedly stressed the need for the UK to be engaged.
  • The Guardian/ICM poll is remarkable because barring a single month in 2002, the Conservatives have not dropped below 28% since Tony Blair's long honeymoon in 1997-98. The Lib Dems have not fallen below today's 11% in the series since September of 1997, the immediate aftermath of Blair's first victory. Labour's 34% score is its lowest since the immediate aftermath of Gordon Brown's ejection from power, in July 2010.
  • The poll also shows that there is a clear "Farage factor" in the personal leadership ratings. Last month voters were split down the middle on his performance with 28% saying Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, was doing a good job, and 29% a bad job, giving a net negative score of –1. Today, the balance of opinion is running 40%:23% in his favour, a net positive of +17.
Pedro Gonçalves

Chinese Army Cyberunit Apparently Attacking U.S. Targets Again - ReadWrite - 0 views

  • The New York Times is reporting that Unit 61398 has resumed operations and is actively engaged in hacking into any U.S. systems that might hold information considered to be of use for the People's Republic of China.
Pedro Gonçalves

Ad of the Day: Coca-Cola Tries to 'Open Happiness' Between India and Pakistan | Adweek - 0 views

  • Cola diplomacy runs the risk of coming across as painfully naive by oversimplifying a complex issue that's tangled up in a long history of imperialism, religious conflict and nuclear stand-off, to name a few factors. Coke frames this powder keg of a problem as, on some level, simply one of miscommunication—because that's small enough that the brand can then frame itself as the solution. Sure, more understanding and common ground isn't a bad thing, and Coke takes some pains to temper the portrayal of its own success, erring on the side of aspirational everyman/everywoman voiceover platitudes throughout the spot (e.g., "We are going to take minor steps so that we are going to solve bigger issues.") But really, what the brand is taking minor steps toward is selling more sugar water in a way that isn't explicitly about selling more sugar water, and has at least the veneer of a higher purpose.
  • the social-media zeitgeist holds that doing good is good for business. Yes, a warm-and-fuzzy video like this has some entertainment value, and it's is certainly more palatable—and arguably more effective—than a hard-sell product spot. But doesn't distilling a geopolitical conflict into short-form branded content do more harm than good by trivializing it? Or if everyone just drank a Coke, would they really get along?
Pedro Gonçalves

White House admits four US citizens were killed by drone strikes | World news | guardia... - 0 views

  • admitting for the first time that four American citizens were among those killed by its covert attacks in Yemen and Pakistan since 2009.
  • The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that between 240 and 347 people have been killed in total by confirmed US drone strikes in Yemen since 2002, with a further 2,541 to 3,533 killed by CIA drones in Pakistan.
Pedro Gonçalves

Beirut hit by double rocket attack | World news | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • It was the first attack to apparently target Hezbollah's stronghold in the south of the Lebanese capital since the outbreak of the two-year conflict in neighbouring Syria, which has heightened Lebanon's own sectarian tensions.
  • The rocket strikes came hours after the Hezbollah leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, a powerful supporter of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, said his fighters were committed to the conflict whatever the cost.
  • Syria's two-year uprising has polarised Lebanon, with Sunni Muslims supporting the rebellion against Assad and Shia Hezbollah and its allies standing by Assad. The Lebanese city of Tripoli has seen frequent explosions of violence between majority Sunnis and its small Alawite community.
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  • Until recently, Nasrallah insisted Hezbollah had not sent guerrillas to fight alongside Assad's forces, but in his speech on Saturday he said it had been fighting in Syria for several months to defend Lebanon from radical Islamist groups he said were driving Syria's rebellion.
  • At least 25 people have been killed in Tripoli in the north of Lebanon over the past week in street fighting, which has coincided with the battle for Qusair across the border.
Pedro Gonçalves

Generations are divided on feelings about Muslims after London attack | Matthew Goodwin... - 0 views

  • the number of citizens who think that conflict between groups is "largely inevitable" has risen by seven points to 40%, or that agreement with the suggestion that there will be a serious clash between British Muslims and white Britons has also risen, by nine points to 59%.
  • the percentage of respondents who view Muslims as compatible jumped by almost 10 points to 33%. Clearly, the numbers remain low, and point to wider challenges facing government and our local communities
  • Whereas expectations of a future clash between Muslims and non-Muslims are especially pronounced among citizens aged 60 and above (at 70%), among 18- to 24-year-olds this figure tumbles to 48%.
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  • Whereas only 21% of the older group view Muslims as compatible with British life, the figure among young Britons is almost twice as high, at 38%. Whereas almost half of the over-sixties view British Muslims as posing a serious threat to democracy, the equivalent figure among more recent generations is just 19%.
Pedro Gonçalves

Swedish riots spark surprise and anger | World news | The Observer - 0 views

  • "These people, they should integrate in this society and just try a little bit more to be like Swedish citizens."Scratch beneath the surface and this is a sentiment shared by many in a country that arguably has the world's most generous asylum policies. Sweden has taken in more than 11,000 refugees from Syria since 2012, more per head than any other European country, and it has absorbed more than 100,000 Iraqis and 40,000 Somalis over the past two decades. About 1.8 million of its 9.5 million people are first- or second-generation immigrants.
  • So it has come as a shock for many Swedes to discover the scale of resentment. It's not hard to find it. Aleks, whose parents came from Kosovo, says: "I hate the police. I hate the cops. I think setting fire to cars in the neighbourhood should stop, but I don't think throwing rocks at the cops should stop."
  • The trigger for the riots – police shooting dead a 69-year-old Portuguese man called Lenine Relvas-Martins
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  • Martins had been brandishing a knife on his balcony, angry after a confrontation with local youths. Police then broke into his house and shot him in front of his Finnish wife. They say she was at risk. She denies it.The police then inflamed the situation last Sunday, reportedly calling young people causing a disturbance "monkeys" and "negroes".
  • there's no doubt Husby has better facilities than deprived areas in Britain. But it is also more segregated. About 85% of people here have their origins outside Sweden.
  • "The politicians are thinking the wrong way. They want to help people, but you never help people when you put 30,000 to 50,000 in one place," complains the man painting at the library.
  • "For a lot of people who live in segregated areas, the only Swedes they meet are social workers or police officers. It's amazing how many have never had a Swedish friend."
  • A third of the 2,500 white, ethnic Swedes who lived in Husby 10 years ago have left.
  • Inequality has also grown faster in Sweden over the past decade than in any other developed country, according to thinktank the OECD, which puts the blame partly on tax cuts paid for by reductions in welfare spending.
  • According to official statistics, more than 10% of those aged 25 to 55 in Husby are unemployed, compared with 3.5% in Stockholm as a whole. Those that do have jobs earn 40% less than the city average.
  • Esmail Jamshidi, a 23-year-old medical student born and educated in Husby, says young people don't lack opportunities."It's a very recent development, this ghetto mentality," he says. "Immigrants come here, and most leave after a decade or two. A very small percentage of them don't, and this last group are left
  • The older generation of immigrants seems as puzzled by the anger as Swedes. Ali, the owner of Café Unic, a Persian cafe in Husby's main square, says he tried living in America but came back. "I love this country. I mean it," he says. "I'm telling my kids every day to remember that you are born here, in Sweden. I love this country because of the way they built it: because of my taxes, and other people's taxes, everyone has a nice place to live. It's a very, very nice and good idea."
Pedro Gonçalves

Swedish riots: if instability can happen here, what might unfold elsewhere? | Aditya Ch... - 0 views

  • We all know the cliches, but the reality is they no longer fit the country so well. Whether it's on the wealth gap, or welfare, or public services, Sweden is less "Swedish" than it has ever been. As in other continental capitals, the Stockholm version of the "European social model" is an increasingly tattered thing, albeit still appealed to by the political elites and still resonant in the popular culture.
  • parties of all persuasions have drifted rightwards over the past few years. It was the left that, in 2005, abolished inheritance tax, so that a Swede will now pay no duty on being left a million kronor, but will face a tax of 67% for starting their own business. And when it comes to privatising public services, Stockholm is way out in front of Westminster.
  • while much of the initial rise in inequality was about rich Swedes getting richer, increasingly poor Swedes are getting pushed backwards, either by unemployment and incapacity benefits getting relatively meaner, or by the rise in joblessness. On some measures, one in four young Swedes are out of work. In some towns, they are handed money to emigrate to richer Norway. Von Sydow lives in Oslo and observes: "In any local cafe, the barista will be a Swede."
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  • The first thing to observe about Sweden is how rapidly a gulf is opening up between rich and poor. Between 1985 and the late 2000s, according to the OECD thinktank, Sweden saw the biggest growth in inequality of all the 31 most industrialised countries. It's important not to overstate this: the country remains one of the most egalitarian in the world – but it is taking big steps in the wrong direction.
  • The Economist, that inflight magazine for the autodidactic plutocrat, recently wrote: "The streets of Stockholm are awash with the blood of sacred cows." It then went on to praise its school system as in the image of Milton Friedman. Except that as social-policy academic Joakim Palme observes, the school system has got worse on the Pisa international rankings.
  • Sweden's economy is still growing
Pedro Gonçalves

'Killer robots' pose threat to peace and should be banned, UN warned | Science | The Gu... - 0 views

  • "Machines lack morality and mortality, and as a result should not have life and death powers over humans,"
  • "States are working towards greater and greater autonomy in weapons, and the potential is there for such technologies to be developed in the next 10 or 20 years,"
  • Unmanned aerial vehicles were intended initially only for surveillance, and their use for offensive purposes was prohibited, yet once strategists realised their perceived advantages as a means of carrying out targeted killings, all objections were swept out of the way.
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  • Drone technology has already moved a step closer to a fully autonomous state in the form of the X-47B, a super-charged UAV developed by the US Navy that can fly itself, and which last week completed the first takeoff from an aircraft carrier. The drone is billed as a non-combat craft, yet its design includes two weapons bays capable of carrying more than 4,000lbs.Britain is developing its own next generation of drone, known as Taranis, that can be sent to tackle targets at long range and can defend itself from enemy aircraft. Like X-47B it has two in-built weapons bays, though is currently unarmed.
  • South Korea has set up sentry robots known as SGR-1 along the Demilitarized Zone with North Korea that can detect people entering the zone through heat and motion sensors; though the sentry is currently configured so that it has to be operated by a human, it is reported to have an automatic mode, which, if deployed, would allow it to fire independently on intruders.
  • the Pentagon is spending about $6bn a year on research and development of unmanned systems, though in a directive adopted last November it said that fully autonomous weapons could only be used "to apply non-lethal, non-kinetic force, such as some forms of electronic attack".
  • The possibility of "out of the loop" weapons raises a plethora of moral and legal issues, Heyns says. Most worryingly, it could lead to increasing distance between those carrying out the attack and their targets: "In addition to being physically removed from the kinetic action, humans would also become more detached from decisions to kill – and their execution."
Pedro Gonçalves

Social media and opposition to blame for protests, says Turkish PM | World news | The G... - 0 views

  • The dramatic events also exposed the complicity and almost complete government control of mainstream Turkish media, which has largely failed to report the protests."The Turkish media have embarrassed themselves," Caliskan said. "While the whole world was broadcasting from Taksim Square, Turkish television stations were showing cooking shows. It is now very clear that we do not have press freedom in Turkey."
  • Hasip Kaplan, an MP from the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy party, said: "After 1 June, the policy of 'for the people despite the people' is bankrupt. [The government] will have to listen to the people's opinions on mega-projects. Now is the time of participatory decision-making."
Pedro Gonçalves

NSA taps in to user data of Facebook, Apple, Google and others, secret files reveal | W... - 0 views

  • Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, that it was astonishing the NSA would even ask technology companies to grant direct access to user data."It's shocking enough just that the NSA is asking companies to do this," he said. "The NSA is part of the military. The military has been granted unprecedented access to civilian communications."This is unprecedented militarisation of domestic communications infrastructure. That's profoundly troubling to anyone who is concerned about that separation."
Pedro Gonçalves

NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily | World news | The ... - 0 views

  • The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.
  • The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.
  • The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".
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  • The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself.
  • The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order.
  • The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities.For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted.
  • In a letter to attorney general Eric Holder last year, they argued that "there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows.""We believe," they wrote, "that most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted" the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act.
  • The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth" and was "using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity." Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.These recent events reflect how profoundly the NSA's mission has transformed from an agency exclusively devoted to foreign intelligence gathering, into one that focuses increasingly on domestic communications.
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