Suppose you’re in the supermarket shopping for groceries. While you’re strolling the aisle with your cart, a shadowy figure looms over your shoulder and changes the prices on the items you want to buy before you get a chance to pick them up.
As you reach for some vine tomatoes, you notice the price just jumped 20 cents. When you select some brie from among the cheeses, you witness the number on the sticker change right before your eyes. Ditto when you look for your favorite brand of granola.
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The fix is in: how banks allegedly rigged the US$5.3 trillion foreign exchange market |... - 0 views
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This is the essence of what regulators learned might be happening in the foreign exchange market, where US$5.3 trillion of dollars, euros and yen are traded every day. In June 2013, Bloomberg reported that traders at some of the world’s biggest banks worked to manipulate key currency rates, racking up profits and costing investors – including your retirement fund – hundreds of millions of dollars globally. They are accused of placing their own transactions ahead of trades requested by clients – known as front-running – which was the reason prices kept changing as people tried to make their own trades, like in the shopping analogy above. They bought euros or dollars, driving up the rate, and then profited by selling to other investors at a higher level.
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This week six of the currency-dealers being investigated – including JP Morgan, Citigroup and HSBC – agreed to pay a total of US$4.3 billion to regulators in the US, UK and Switzerland to resolve the allegations. The deal is likely only the first in a series of settlements and other penalties that will emerge from the ongoing investigations. The investors most concerned with the alleged manipulation are funds that invest internationally, such as hedge funds, the endowments of charitable or cultural institutions and insurance companies. But it also includes the mutual funds in which many of your 401K or IRA assets are likely invested.
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When institutions like these need to buy or sell assets across borders, they call a dealer at one of the big banks, which provides what is basically a wholesale version of the cambio currency kiosks you see at the airport. The dealer quotes a buying price and a selling price, and the fund chooses whether to buy or sell. In addition to trading with customers, the dealers trade among themselves, sometimes to manage their inventory and sometimes hoping to make money by taking speculative positions for a few minutes or even seconds. And that’s how we arrive at the scandal. Every day at 4pm in London, the market sets special “fixing” exchange rates that are used to value the funds’ international investments. The fixing price is set in a simple way: it’s just the average of all prices paid among dealing banks during the 30 seconds before and after the clock strikes 4. Many international fund managers prefer to trade currencies at exactly the fixing price because it’s simpler and smarter to trade at the same price used to value your portfolio. To make these transactions happen, international funds often place large orders with dealers at major banks before the fix.
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Suppose, for example, a pension fund with major investments in Europe knows it will receive a lot of new IRA money on November 30, when many US employees get paid. And suppose the fund plans to invest €100 million of that in European stocks. At 3:30pm that day the fund might instruct its bank to purchase €100 million at the fixing price. With this kind of advance order, the bank could book its own trades before the fund does, buying the euros it will later sell to the investor.
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The banks – or more accurately, specific dealers at specific banks – are accused of manipulating the fixing prices based on their knowledge of advance customer orders. In a nutshell, the accusation is that dealers from different banks got together before the fix and compared notes in chat rooms. Most currency trading is handled by 10 or so mega banks, so if just a few of them compared notes, they would have a good sense of whether the exchange rate would rise or fall during the fixing interval that day. The shadowy figure looking over your shoulder at the supermarket to see what you’re going to buy next is like the banks comparing their customer orders before the fix. To finish the supermarket analogy, we need to know how and why the dealing banks could raise the fixing rate to the disadvantage of international pension and mutual funds. Suppose once again that many customers have placed big orders to buy euros at the fix, and the banks figure the euro-dollar exchange rate will rise during the window. This would give them an incentive to buy a lot of euros before it’s set (remember the golden rule of trading: buy low, sell high).
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How Many Islamic State Fighters Are There? | Consortiumnews - 0 views
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As the United States slides back into war in the Middle East, the specter of Vietnam hovers over the endeavor with some observers wondering if wishful thinking will again replace hardheaded analysis about the risks and the costs, writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
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Why was I reminded of Vietnam on Saturday when Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Iraq to “get a firsthand look at the situation in Iraq, receive briefings, and get better sense of how the campaign is progressing” against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL? For years as the Vietnam quagmire deepened, U.S. political and military leaders flew off to Vietnam and were treated to a snow job by Gen. William Westmoreland, the commander there. Many would come back glowing about how the war was “progressing.”
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Dempsey might have been better served if someone had shown him Patrick Cockburn’s article in the Independent entitled “War with Isis: Islamic militants have an army of 200,000, claims senior Kurdish leader.” Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of Kurdish President Massoud Barzani, told Cockburn that “I am talking about hundreds of thousands of fighters because they are able to mobilize Arab young men in the territory they have taken.”
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While the Kurdish estimate may be high – it certainly exceeds “the tens of thousands,” maybe 20,000 to 30,000 that many Western analysts have claimed – the possibility that the Islamic State’s insurgency is bigger than believed could explain its startling success in overrunning the Iraqi Army around Mosul last summer and achieving surprising success against the well-regarded Kurdish pesh merga forces, too. So, on his flight back to Washington, Dempsey will have time to ponder whether he has the courage to pass on this discouraging word to President Barack Obama about ISIS or whether he will put on the rose-colored glasses like an earlier generation of commanders did about Vietnam, where Westmoreland insisted that the number of enemy Vietnamese in South Vietnam could not go above 299,000.
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ISIL, Turkey: The Dream of Restoring the Glories of Sublime Ottoman State , by Israa Al... - 0 views
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The ISIL’s funding father is Erdogan’s personal friend The name of the Saudi businessman Yassin al-Qadi has been linked to organizations classified as terrorist internationally. In particular, the foreign press and the Turkish opposition media describe him as “al-Qaeda’s funding father”. After the events of September 11/2001, al-Qadi- along with other figures- has been included in the world’s list of terrorists, and his name was stereotyped as a terrorist man. This made several countries ban him from entering into their territories, Turkey was one of them. Earlier, the Turkish media documented a photo scandal: Erdogan’s meetings with Yassin al-Qadi as well as long meetings with his son Bilal Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The scandal that was leaked by Turkish security elements came in the context of the case of corruption of which the son of the former Turkish Prime Minister has been accused. Based upon this, a large number of elements of the security corps were arrested being accused of plotting a coup against the government.
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Nevertheless, the French journalist Thierry Meyssan describes Yassin al-Qadi as a personal friend of both Dick Cheney (former U.S. Vice President) and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to him, al-Qadi visited Turkey four times during 2012, and “his plane used to land at the second airport of Istanbul, and was being welcomed by the Prime Minister personally, without going through the smart gate, and after cutting the security cameras’ power supply”. The Turkish Gmehoriet Newspaper intended to publish details about the investigations conducted by the Turkish judiciary on the same case, and mentioned that Recep Tayyip Erdogan introduced Yassine al-Qadi as a Saudi businessman visiting Turkey to invest and denied that he is a terrorist. It quoted him as saying: “I trust Mr. Al-Qadi just as I trust myself. He is an almsgiver”.
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The Turkish newspaper, after publishing Erdogan’s utterances before the Turkish judiciary, revealed that the Turkish police monitored 12 visits made by the Saudi man to Turkey. Seven out of these visits have been made with the help of Erdogan, the period when he was banned from entering Turkey, because his name was added as one of the world wanted terrorists in the list of the American FBI. The newspaper commented saying: “When the Turkish police was looking for al-Qadi, he was holding meetings with the Prime Minister”. Also, it published a photograph that showed separately the aforesaid man, Erdogan, and the Turkish intelligence chief Hakan Fidan, when they were going to a meeting that gathered them. The newspaper noted that Fidan himself met with al-Qadi 5 times when Al-Qadi has been banned from entering the Turkish territory.
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Yet, the interesting thing is the leaked recordings published by the newspaper that disclose that Yassin al-Qadi used to give orders to the Erdogan’s office. He used to call to inform them that he had decided today to meet with Erdogan, and that the latter should not engage in any other obligations. The newspaper reported details about the dates of the meetings between the two men, what implies that the meetings were being attended by Fidan and by the Egyptian businessman Osama Qutob; the son of Muhammad Qutob the brother of the Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutob who holds the Turkish citizenship and is living with his father in Turkey at present. This also mean that the meetings were taking place sometimes at the home of the Turkish businessman Mustafa Latif Topas in Istanbul, attended by Erdogan’s son and Moaz the son of al-Qadi. The recordings verify that Qutob was in charge of delivering the messages from the insurgents in the battlefield in Syria to Erdogan, what signifies that the meetings of these figures exceeded the issues of investment, and perhaps they exploited the title of a charity practice!
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Those returning from Turkey refer to the public sympathy in the pro-government Turkish street with the ISIL. Social networking websites publish photos of Islamic libraries in Istanbul selling “T-shirts” and goods with the ISIL logo on them. Perhaps this news is no longer shocking after what the German (ARD) Television has revealed regarding the opening of an office for the ISIL in al-Fateh Street in Istanbul, being ran by Turks. Through it, the process of supporting and supplying the Takfiri organization in Iraq and Syria with funds and fighters takes place.
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The German channel itself revealed in a video report aired by it that the ISIL has training camps on the Turkish territory: 1- The GAZIANTEP Camp: a training camp for the ISIL fighters According to the report published by the website of “Today’s Zaman”, an English-language newspaper in Turkey, the Governor of the Gaziantep (Erdal Ata) rushed to hold a press conference to deny what has been revealed by the German television. However, he spoke about the arrest of 19 elements that belong to the ISIL in the city, among those who came from European countries before committing them to trial.
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Additionally, the Lebanese journalist Hassan Hamade, in an earlier interview with Al-Manar, drew attention to the existence of three training camps in Turkey for the fighters of extremist organizations [3]. 2- The ORFA Camp, southeastern Turkey: a camp out of which the gunmen came when they attacked the Kasab city that its residents are predominantly Armenian.
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3- The OSMANIYA camp in Adana, southern Turkey: It is directly near the major bases of the U.S. Air Force in the Turkish territory. Yet, what is interesting is that the Osmaniya camp is a stone’s throw away from the gas pipelines points of intersection coming from Iraq and Central Asia that empty the freight in the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea. 4- The KARMAN camp, it is also in Adana but is much closer to Istanbul. Moreover, a document published by the French journalist Thierry Meyssan, earlier, revealed that Turkey facilitated the infiltration of 5,000 fighters, who belong to al-Qaeda, to the Syrian territory after receiving training in Libya.
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Perhaps the report of the American TV Network clarifies the argument of the Turkish journalist Orhan Kama Genghis: “The strongholds of the ISIL are located close to the Turkish border, and this did not happen coincidentally”. The Turkish journalist Kadri Gursel talks about the fact that the Turkish border territories have turned into an easy pathway facilitating the arrival and departure of the militants, where there are no formal procedures (visas, etc…) that could bother them, referring to the cooperation of the Turkish intelligence agency with the militants. Above and beyond, the Turkish opposition Republican People’s Party MP Muharram Ingee said that the ISIL leader “Mazen Abu Mohammed” received treatment in one of the Turkish government hospitals in the city of Hatay on April 2014, publishing a photo of the terrorist man in the hospital.
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Reviewing these data provide an early answer to the question of the Saudi writer, Nawaf Qadimi, who is known for his support for the Muslim Brotherhood, where the phenomenon of the ISIL leads us to evoke history. The Seljuks drew the policies to expand their influence and their tools were the advocates of takfir and the recruiting of fighters in the name of religion. Here is Erdogan in actual fact walking in the footsteps of the ancestors and painting policies, and the tools are the texts of takfir for which he is recruiting fighters in the name of religion itself! That is how history is enabling us to understand our present...
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Is the Government's Aerial Smartphone Surveillance Program Legal? | TIME - 0 views
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Still, is the Justice Department’s airborne dragnet program legal? The answer is “maybe.” Federal authorities have employed similar tools in the past. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is known to use a surveillance tool called a “stingray,” a portable transceiver that tricks cell phones within a certain area into relaying their locations, not unlike the equipment onboard the Marshals’ aircraft. A government vehicle with a stingray can net hundreds of nearby cell phones’ approximate locations just by driving through a typical neighborhood. The government has said it doesn’t need a probable cause warrant to use stingrays because investigators don’t collect the content of phone calls, just the locations of those phones. Government officials, meanwhile, have said they get court approval to use the devices. Much of the government’s warrantless use of stingray-style technology hinges on a 1979 Supreme Court decision titled Smith v. Maryland. Smith involved law enforcement’s use of a device called a pen register that, when attached to a suspect’s phone line, recorded the numbers of outgoing calls, but not the calls themselves. The Smith decision upheld the warrantless use of such devices because the suspect’s phone company would record the same data picked up by the pen register, and therefore the suspect had no reasonable expectation of privacy when it came to that information. Currently, the law requires a court to approve the use of a pen register, but investigators only have to show that the device’s use is “relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation,” a much weaker standard than a probable cause warrant requires.
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However, to get back to the Smith decision, wireless carriers do store your location history for several months to several years, information they obtain by keeping a record of the cell towers to which your device connects as you move from place to place. That could mean Americans don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy over their location data and the Smith precedent applies, making the DoJ’s aerial surveillance program legal. Still, that would be a matter for the courts to decide. “There are a lot of tricky questions whether a stingray or dirtbox operated by the government directly is a pen register, or the Fourth Amendment concerns dismissed by the Supreme Court 35 years ago in Smith v. Maryland are more applicable here,” Fakhoury said.
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Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney at the pro-privacy Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the Department of Justice could use the Smith precedent as legal justification for the airborne dirtbox program. However, Fakhoury also highlighted a key problem with that argument: Location. Pen registers aren’t intended to pick up location data beyond an area code, whereas the airborne dirtboxes can track a person down to a single building. Many courts, he said, have expressed that location data deserves greater constitutional protection than is afforded to other kinds of information.
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Civil rights groups are raising serious constitutional questions about the Justice Department’s use of dragnet technology onboard aircraft to collect data from suspects’ cell phones, as reported by the Wall Street Journal Thursday.
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The Justice Department said it could not confirm or deny the existence of the program. But a department official said that all federal investigations are consistent with federal law and are subject to court approval. That official also said the Marshals Service does not maintain any databases of cell phone information — meaning the program could possibly only be used to track the whereabouts of suspects on a case-by-case basis and that it’s vastly different in nature from the kinds of sweeping government surveillance programs first revealed by Edward Snowden.
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Syria to revive Middle East's biggest Industrial Zone as Army consolidates Sovereignty ... - 0 views
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After the Syrian Arab Army reestablished sovereignty over Syria’s biggest industrial zone, Sheikh Najjar, near Aleppo, it started the process of rebuilding the devastated and pillaged industrial powerhouse of the Middle East. The Syrian Arab Army also regained control over a number of other key locations in Aleppo, Homs, Daraa, Quneitra, Idleb, Lattakia and Deir Ez-Zor. Almost all of the buildings in the Middle East’s biggest industrial zone of Sheikh Najjar have been devastated, factories have been pillaged, entire production facilities have been shipped to Turkey and “rebel/terrorist-held” territories to fuel and finance the foreign-backed insurgency.
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Sheikh Najjar is located northeast of the city of Aleppo which has seen heavy fighting in and around the city since the onset of the foreign-backed insurgency in 2011. Syrian economists noted that the war has caused a forty percent contraction of Syria’s economy, that some fifty percent of the labor force is unemployed and that the country has an inflation of about fifty percent. The Syrian government has implemented economic countermeasures, with some success, is about to open a market for the export of gold to other Middle Eastern countries, and has entered into long-term economic and reconstruction agreements with, among others, China. The Sheikh Najjar industrial zone employed some 42,000 people after it was opened in 2004, only three years before core NATO member states and Israel actively began preparing for the war on Syria. It was the home of some 1,250 companies when it opened in 2004 and was built with the capacity to host about 6,000.
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The recapture and revival of the Sheikh Najjar Industrial Zone is a landmark victory and progress for the Syrian Arab Army, the elected Syrian government and for all those who participate in the peaceful political discourse. However, progress in all regions of the country is significant and contradicts western media reports, and governments, some of which call for an “intervention” and the support of “moderates” to bring peace and security to the country. As the US American historian Webster G. Tarpley noted, “there is no moderate opposition in Syria other than that which is in parliament and which participates in the Syrian political discourse”.
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shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Nov 14
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Luxembourg: a tax haven by any other name? | nsnbc international - 0 views
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tax-evasion Luxembourg DG-Competition EC PricewaterhouseCoopers
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The revelations that global and multinational businesses have been brokering “secret” tax deals with Luxembourg to avoid paying taxes in their home countries, may be the first time an entire country has been implicated in tax avoidance collusion. A cache of leaked agreements uncovered by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ) appears to show that major companies have used the tiny EU state to dramatically cut their tax liabilities.
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The ICIJ’s six-month investigation claims to have found household companies such as Aviva, HSBC, E-on, Tyco, Pepsi, IKEA and Deutsche Bank were among those which had taken advantage of legal tax avoidance schemes in Luxembourg. Luxembourg is routinely named as a tax haven on many of the world’s authoritative lists of tax havens, including the one compiled by me and my two co-authors, Richard Murphy and Christian Chavagneux. But Luxembourg has managed to remain “under the radar” not least because its politicians and bankers have been denying for years that it is, or ever was, a tax haven. The revelations suggest Luxembourg has been playing a double game. Luxembourg has been quick to comply with new regulations proposed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the EU. In 2011, the OECD global forum on transparency and exchange of information commended Luxembourg for introducing new rules governing banking information or information protected by secrecy rules.
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But at the same time, the revelations show that 340 well-known foreign companies have entered into secret agreements with the Luxembourg authorities, brokered by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. To take a random example that applies for many of these companies, the ICIJ have a letter to the Luxembourg tax administration written on a PwC letterhead, where FedEx lays down its plan to set up a limited liability company as a tax resident in Luxembourg – so subject in principle to Luxembourg’s corporate income tax. The letter then provides details of a proposed shareholding arrangement that will ensure, I quote, that “neither that Fedex SCS nor its shareholders will be subject to corporate income tax, Municipal Business Tax and Net Wealth tax in Luxembourg”. The letter implies that Luxembourg will serve in effect as a tax haven for Fedex.
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There have been a number of other highly publicised tax evasion and avoidance cases recently. For instance, many cases in the US involved branches or even key individuals working in branches of well-known Swiss and Israeli banks in the US, including UBS, Credit Swiss or Bank Leumi, or alternatively branches of American banks in Switzerland. But these tended to involve private firms. The Swiss government professed to have had no knowledge of such activities. Indeed, Swiss law prohibited Swiss banks, whether domestic or international, from providing any information on their clients to the Swiss state. This is a scandal with a difference. The leaked PricewaterhouseCoopers books imply there has been systemic collusion between companies from all over the world and the Luxembourg authorities in flagrant contravention of EU rules. The documents suggest that preferential tax treatments were guaranteed to these companies prior to their incorporation in Luxembourg.
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This is the first case of suspected collusion between a government and a foreign firm in tax avoidance matters that I am aware of. In that sense, the current scandal places Luxembourg on par with Greece whose officials allegedly provided misleading data on Greek national debt to the Commission. More embarrassingly, all this took place during the time when the current president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, served as the prime minister of Luxembourg from 1995-2013. It is difficult to imagine that the prime minister of such a small state was unaware such deals were taking place. There is a difference between the court of law and the court of public opinion. But we know from recent cases that the EU Commission has tended to follow the court of public opinion with criminal investigations of its own, as was the case of Amazon. It is likely that the Commission will now investigate these leaks and may impose fines on Luxembourg. I doubt Juncker can ride this one out.
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Woo-hoo! The IRS and Congress will be interested in this one too. Now if someone would kindly send the docs to Wikileaks, the nations of the world can prosecute companies for tax evasion. But this time, would you all, pretty please, prosecute some human beings too and no settlements without at least a couple of years behind bars?
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shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Nov 14
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Abbott to say No to Xi and the New Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank - Twice | nsnbc ... - 0 views
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banksters de-dollarization AIIB China dollar-collapse Australia
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Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott is expected to say no to Chinese President Xi about joining the new Chinese-led Asia Infrastructure Development Bank (AIIB) when he will meet Xi at the ASEAN summit in Beijing this week. Abbott’s no to joining the bank would come against the advise of Australian treasurer Joe Hockey and after intense U.S. pressure for Australia to reject the proposed participation.
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The decision to reject Australia’s participation in the 21 nation regional bank was made during a session of the Australian government’s National Security Committee and was explained as a “decision made on strategic grounds”. The decision has been criticized by several of Australia’s leading experts on economy. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) estimated in 2011 that Asia would require some US$750 per year through 2020 to meet the needs for regional infrastructure development. In 2012 the ADB merely lent US$7.5 billion reported Australia’s Treasury.
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A growing number of regional governments including Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar and many other are gravitating towards China as China increasingly opens up its economy and banking system for foreign businesses and investment.
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Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey repeatedly stressed that Australia’s national interests would be better served by joining the new AIIB while Abbott attempted to position the AIIB as a “unilateral institution”. While it is correct that China is the main investor into the bank, it is a 21 nation project and Abbott’s explanation is given little credence by objective economists who are aware of the inherent problems with U.S. dominance and the dominance of rogue corporate cartels who hold e.g the World Bank, the IMF and the US government in a state of capture.
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The development gains perspective, considering that the former Chief Economist of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) William White in 2013, and other top-economists are predicting that a collapse of the U.S. dollar and the Bretton Woods institutions has become unavoidable, that it may happened overnight, and that it is likely to happen sometime by the end of 2014 or the first half of 2015. A recent analysis of the development described U.S. pressure against nations’ joining the new Asia Infrastructure Development Bank as the choice between gold and gunfire, noting that the U.S. applies relative soft pressure against Australia, while it won’t hesitate to provoke civil wars in for example Thailand to prolong the (f)ailing new American Century, just a little bit longer.
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CNN poll: Spike in American fears of new 9/11 terrorism - CNN.com - 0 views
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The number of people who say that acts of terrorism are likely to occur around the anniversary of 9/11 has significantly increased from three years ago. A new CNN/ORC International survey indicates that 53% of Americans believe it's likely for acts of terrorism to take place at this time, up from 39% in 2011 during the 10th anniversary of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. "It's likely that the change is due to newfound concerns over ISIS, which seven in 10 Americans believe has operatives within the U.S. able to commit an act of terrorism at any time," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
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Most Americans, however, don't feel personally threatened by terrorism. Just over four in 10 say it's likely that they themselves or a family member will become a victim of terrorism -- not a significant change from most previous years. Women (49%) and senior citizens (48%) are most worried about terrorism, while men and younger Americans express much less worry, according to the poll.
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The power of propaganda. Hermann Goering, while awaiting execution for war crimes: "Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. … "Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.asp
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Israeli Law to be Extended to West Bank | nsnbc international - 1 views
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The Israeli ministerial committee approved a bill, on Sunday, to extend laws regulated by the Israeli Knesset into the occupied West Bank.
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adings before becoming law. Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank are, as of now, formally subject to military rule. The area’s 350,000 settlers, however, are effectively under the jurisdiction of Israeli civilian courts because parliament has already applied a clutch of laws to them, primarily criminal, tax and military conscription. The new draft bill would make it mandatory for the commander to issue, within a month and a half of a law’s passage in parliament, an identically-phrased military order, effectively ensuring that all ratified legislation also applies to settlers.
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Furthermore, according to the new bill, Israelis living in the occupied West Bank will be under Israeli law, while Palestinians living in the same areas would remain under military rule. Director of the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Centre, Issam Aruri, told Al Jazeera that this essentially means all Knesset permanent committees can exercise their oversight over the West Bank: “This means the Knesset may become responsible for certain parts of the West Bank, which may be a step towards the formal annexation of the occupied Palestinian territory without a formal announcement as such,” he said
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PNN further reports that Palestinian chief negotiator and PLO executive Dr. Saeb Erekat said that the Knesset’s approval on regulating Israeli law in the West Bank will be taken to the International Criminal Court. Dr. Erekat’s response to the news came during his meeting with UN peace envoy, Robert Serry, and councils of the US, England, Germany and France.
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Erekat pointed out that the Foreign Affairs, Negotiation Departments, Ministry of justice and other Palestinian organizations now prepare official papers for Palestinian state joining of a number of international treaties and documents, topped by the international court. (Palestine is recognized as a High Contracting Party, according to the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.) All Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, including those in East Jerusalem, have been declared illegal under international law.
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shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Dec 14
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Investigation finds 50,000 'ghost' soldiers in Iraqi army, prime minister says - The Wa... - 0 views
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war & peace Iraq U.S.-foreign-policy ghost-soldiers
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The Iraqi army has been paying salaries to at least 50,000 soldiers who don’t exist, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said Sunday, an indication of the level of corruption that permeates an institution that the United States has spent billions equipping and arming. A preliminary investigation into “ghost soldiers” — whose salaries are being drawn but who are not in military service — revealed the tens of thousands of false names on Defense Ministry rolls, Abadi told parliament Sunday. Follow-up investigations are expected to uncover “more and more,” he added.
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Abadi, who took power in September, is under pressure to stamp out the graft that flourished in the armed forces under his predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki. Widespread corruption has been blamed for contributing to the collapse of four of the army’s 14 divisions in June in the face of an offensive by Islamic State extremists.
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The United States is encouraging Abadi to create a leaner, more efficient military as the Pentagon requests $1.2 billion to train and equip the Iraqi army next year. The United States spent more than $20 billion on the force from the 2003 invasion until U.S. troops withdrew at the end of 2011. With entry-level soldiers in Iraq drawing salaries of about $600 a month, the practice of “ghost soldiers” is likely to be costing Iraq at least $380 million a year — though officials say that’s probably only a fraction of the true expense.
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“It could be more than triple this number,” said Hamid al-Mutlaq, a member of the parliamentary defense and security committee, pointing out that more thorough on-the-ground investigations are planned. “The people who are responsible for this should be punished. Iraq’s safe has been emptied.” The corrupt practice is often perpetrated by officers who pretend to have more soldiers on their books in order to pocket their salaries, experts say.
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The United States is focusing its efforts on three divisions in order to begin effective counteroffensive operations against the Islamic State, which controls around a third of the country’s territory. The Pentagon also has requested $24 million to train and equip tribal fighters and $354 million for Kurdish forces as part of its strategy to turn the tide against the Islamic State.
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shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Dec 14
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Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web | Electronic Front... - 0 views
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surveillance-state Web-fights-back Let's-Encrypt https
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Today EFF is pleased to announce Let’s Encrypt, a new certificate authority (CA) initiative that we have put together with Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, IdenTrust, and researchers at the University of Michigan that aims to clear the remaining roadblocks to transition the Web from HTTP to HTTPS.Although the HTTP protocol has been hugely successful, it is inherently insecure. Whenever you use an HTTP website, you are always vulnerable to problems, including account hijacking and identity theft; surveillance and tracking by governments, companies, and both in concert; injection of malicious scripts into pages; and censorship that targets specific keywords or specific pages on sites. The HTTPS protocol, though it is not yet flawless, is a vast improvement on all of these fronts, and we need to move to a future where every website is HTTPS by default.With a launch scheduled for summer 2015, the Let’s Encrypt CA will automatically issue and manage free certificates for any website that needs them. Switching a webserver from HTTP to HTTPS with this CA will be as easy as issuing one command, or clicking one button.
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The biggest obstacle to HTTPS deployment has been the complexity, bureaucracy, and cost of the certificates that HTTPS requires. We’re all familiar with the warnings and error messages produced by misconfigured certificates. These warnings are a hint that HTTPS (and other uses of TLS/SSL) is dependent on a horrifyingly complex and often structurally dysfunctional bureaucracy for authentication.
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The need to obtain, install, and manage certificates from that bureaucracy is the largest reason that sites keep using HTTP instead of HTTPS. In our tests, it typically takes a web developer 1-3 hours to enable encryption for the first time. The Let’s Encrypt project is aiming to fix that by reducing setup time to 20-30 seconds. You can help test and hack on the developer preview of our Let's Encrypt agent software or watch a video of it in action here:
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Let’s Encrypt will employ a number of new technologies to manage secure automated verification of domains and issuance of certificates. We will use a protocol we’re developing called ACME between web servers and the CA, which includes support for new and stronger forms of domain validation. We will also employ Internet-wide datasets of certificates, such as EFF’s own Decentralized SSL Observatory, the University of Michigan’s scans.io, and Google's Certificate Transparency logs, to make higher-security decisions about when a certificate is safe to issue.The Let’s Encrypt CA will be operated by a new non-profit organization called the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). EFF helped to put together this initiative with Mozilla and the University of Michigan, and it has been joined for launch by partners including Cisco, Akamai, and Identrust.
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shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jan 15
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BOSTON WRONG: Marathon Bombing Evidence "As Seen on TV" - WhoWhatWhy - 0 views
whowhatwhy.org/...athon-bombing-evidence-seen-tv
war & peace boston-bombings Tsarnaev-trial fake-video
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The story of the Boston Marathon Bombing is rife with contradictions, canards, misconceptions and blatant untruths. Boston Wrong is part of WhoWhatWhy’s attempt to set the record straight. This is the first in an occasional series of articles debunking the faulty stories and “facts” which persist, despite evidence to the contrary. *** Verbal intimations by government officials and a TV re-enactment have given some potential Boston Marathon bombing jurors the mistaken belief they have seen a video of suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev setting down a bomb-laden backpack in front of a restaurant. There’s just one problem: that footage has never been made available to the public. During jury selection on Jan. 26, Juror 186 said she believes Tsarnaev is guilty because of the “surveillance video from Lord & Taylor,” a department store across the street from the Forum restaurant. Early media reports suggested that the store’s dome surveillance camera captured Tsarnaev dropping his backpack at the spot of the second explosion.
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What the public has seen, however, is a re-creation of the footage in a made-for-TV docudrama by National Geographic called “Inside the Hunt for the Boston Bombers.” While the movie provides a disclaimer that some of the video has been re-created for effect, the purposefully grainy footage of an actor playing Tsarnaev doesn’t specifically mention that it’s a recreation. In fact, an Arizona production company filmed the re-enactment on a Phoenix street using extras and other actors.
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Tsarnaev’s attorneys have filed three motions asking that the trial be moved outside of Boston because of pre-trial publicity, arguing that Tsarnaev can’t get a fair hearing in the city. More than 68 percent of the potential jurors already think he’s guilty. That kind of lopsided number is no surprise when all the evidence some jurors need to convict is a made-for-TV docudrama.
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Why the United States Always Loses Its Wars | Global Research - 0 views
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America loses all its wars because it seems we’ve always been on the wrong side of history. Morally nor legally should any nation have the right to invade and occupy another sovereign nation, much less believe it can achieve victory in long, protracted wars. Yet in violation of all ethical precepts and all international laws, the sole global superpower citing its impunity through exceptionalism hypocritically insists it can maintain its moral high ground in its relentless pursuit of regime changes anywhere it so chooses on earth. We are the global village bully that’s hated by much of the world. And it’s pure self-aggrandizing bullshit to perpetrate the myth that America is hated because of our “freedom,” another rhetorical brainwashing lie. We now live in a fascist totalitarian police state run by a globalized crime syndicate of the central banking cabal. As of last April per a Princeton-Northwestern study the US has officially been designated an oligarchy. Last year after a group of ethnic Russians living in Crimea voted to become part of Russia, the Russian military claimed control over its own naval base there that the US-NATO had been lusting to steal after the unlawful overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected sovereign government. Ever since it’s been nonstop lies and propaganda propagated to demonize Putin as the aggressor when in fact all along it’s the American Empire that’s been recklessly pushing what could end up World War III against nuclear powered Russia. With US-NATO missiles installed on Russia’s doorstep in virtually every former Soviet eastern bloc nation, hemming Russia in, who’s really the aggressor here?
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Meanwhile, despite costing US taxpayers up to six trillion dollars and counting in Iraq alone and another trillion so far in Afghanistan in this age of increasing austerity, the albeit detached reverence for the US military and its abysmal losing war record fail to draw much notice or reflection, much less any real criticism or troubleshooting that might correct the same pattern of mistakes being repeated indefinitely. Another article in the same issue calls for resurrecting the draft as the feeble answer, something my ex-West Point roommate-former Afghan Ambassador-retired general and current Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member Karl Eikenberry has also publicly advocated. They are all missing the point, unwilling or unable to address the pink elephant in the global room. Respected author-activist David Swanson wrote an incisive rebuttal also confronting the Atlantic article for not answering the obvious question of why America loses at war. He makes the excellent point: The U.S. has killed huge numbers of men, women, and children, made itself hated, made the world more dangerous, destroyed the environment, discarded civil liberties, and wasted trillions of dollars that could have done a world of good spent otherwise. A draft would do nothing to make people aware of that situation. But Swanson merely glides over as a passing fact that the ruling elite is the only entity that stands to gain from war. He fails to emphasize that it is the elite’s power, money and influence that both initiates, but then by calculated design, willfully sabotages the chance of any US military victory after World War II. The reason is simple. If the US triumphed in war it would only delay the totalitarian New World Order from materialization. Only a weakened United States would expeditiously promote a one world government.
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As a brief historical review tracing events from the dawn of the twentieth century, media mogul Randolph Hearst used the false flag of the Spanish American War to “remember the USS Maine” sinking in the 1898 Havana harbor as its deceitful justification to ruthlessly, violently colonize Cuba and the Philippines, committing ethnic cleansing with estimates as high as near a half million dead Filipinos in that bloodbath. Then it was the “great” English statesman Winston Churchill who plotted the sinking of the Lusitania killing nearly 1200 of his own British citizens (along with 128 Americans) as the baited sacrifice secretly carrying arms to ignite the First World War that was supposed to end all wars.
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Then several years later the US encouraged South Korean incursions into Communist North Korea in order to manipulate North Korea into responding in kind. Guaranteeing South Korea full UN support, when the baited North Koreans retaliated by moving two miles inside the South Korean border, that June 1950 “transgression” immediately became the false pretense used to initiate the Korean War.
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in August 1964 President Johnson lied to the American people with the bogus claim that a US Navy ship was attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin to launch America’s longest running war in history (that is until this century’s everlasting war of terror). That false flag cost near 60,000 American lives and over 3 million dead Southeast Asians, in addition to being the first US humiliating war defeat in its history, marking the first of many consecutive losses.
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The smaller, less intensive military campaigns of Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua and El Salvador, the First Gulf War, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were all jingoistic saber rattling manipulations of imperialistic Empire overpowering far weaker opponents to take down former US allied dictators (or in the case of Saddam Hussein a preliminary step to the father-son neocon tag team), balkanizing a divide and conquer strategy for global hegemony and imperial war profiteering from the always lucrative drug trafficking trade.
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Meanwhile, the only true winners of all wars is the oligarch owned and controlled central banking cabal and its Wall Street 500. Once American Empire wreaks military havoc to achieve another ravaged failed state, be it Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, a second invasion that becomes the permanent occupation arrives in the form of IMF and World Bank loans. When the war destroyed nation cannot pay the bankster cabal’s loan shark extortion, privatization through transnational corporations rapidly descends as economic hit men-vultures move in for the final kill. The game’s been rigged, set up so no one but the filthy, gluttonous, bloodthirsty, psychopathic vampires comprising the ruling elite can possibly win from all this rigged warring death and destruction.
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The Zionist neocon creation with a little help from their Saudi-Israeli evil axis friends pulled off the coup of the century on 9/11, massacring 3,000 Americans as their sacrificial lambs, setting into motion the fabricated war on terror masking their actual war on Islam to ensure that a constant fresh supply of made-by-the-USA enemy materializes to justify permanent global violence. During the near ten years that Americans fought in Iraq near a half million Iraqis lost their life, mostly innocent civilians. That toll has only since risen with war still raging. The Islamic State jihadists that the US-Saudi-Israeli unholy alliance secretly created, trained, armed and has funded (just as it did al Qaeda for decades) invaded Iraq last June and is currently in control of more area in Iraq than the weak US puppet government in Baghdad with no end of sectarian violence in sight. Afghanistan looks no better with the puppet Kabul government holding less territory than the surging Taliban that has been waiting for the US military exodus by December 2014 leaving 10,800 US military advisors still remaining behind.
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The proxy wars leaving Libya as a corrupt and lawlessly violent failed state and Syria a stalemated quagmire with Islamic State mercenaries our not-so-secret friendly boots on the ground still unable to topple and remove Assad from power. Meanwhile, near a quarter of a million people have died in the war in Syria and an astounding 6.5 million have been displaced in that colossal human tragedy supported and caused by the United States.
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National Security Network | Obama's ISIL AUMF: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - 0 views
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This morning, the White House sent Congress the text of its proposed Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against the Islamic State. The proposed legislation includes strengths and weaknesses that deserve careful analysis and debate. Overall, the proposal would set important, if imperfect, limits on the war against the Islamic State, including: a three-year sunset clause, a careful definition of associated forces, and the repeal of the 2002 AUMF. But the proposal also includes a number of significant problems, including: a faux prohibition on large-scale ground combat operations that is effectively meaningless because of extremely poor wording, a lack of geographic limits, the potential application to ill-defined future “successors” of the Islamic State, and a failure to make clear the 2001 AUMF does not apply to the war against the Islamic State. This last step is important to prevent the current or future presidents from using the authority of the 2001 law to bypass any limitations in an Islamic State-specific authorization. The Obama Administration deserves credit for stepping up and offering an AUMF with some constructive provisions, but now the task is to use the congressional process to keep the good aspects, improve the imperfect aspects, and prevent worse provisions from being inserted into the proposal.
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Peace groups support a no-vote on the ISIL AUMF and repeal of the 2002 and 2003 AUMFs. If adopted anyway, they support the following limitations: *A one-year sunset clause *Geographic limitations *Definitively no combat troops on the ground *Repealing the open-ended war on terror authorization *Robust reporting requirements including civilian deaths
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'A Line in the Sand' in Fight to Release Thousands of Photos of Prisoner Abuse - The In... - 0 views
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A federal judge is demanding that the government explain, photo-by-photo, why it can’t release hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of pictures showing detainee abuse by U.S. forces at military prison sites in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a courtroom in the Southern District of New York yesterday, Judge Alvin Hellerstein appeared skeptical of the government’s argument, which asserted that the threat of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda exploiting the images for propaganda should override the public’s right to see any of the photos. He was “highly suspicious” of the government’s attempt to declare the whole lot of the photos dangerous. “It’s too easy and too meaningless,” he said. Since 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union has been fighting for the release of photos from military investigations into prisoner abuse beyond those that were leaked from Abu Ghraib. The additional pictures reportedly show sexual assault, soldiers posing with dead bodies, and other offenses. The exact number of photos has not been disclosed in court, though former Senator Joe Lieberman has previously said that there are nearly 2,100.
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Hellerstein first ordered the government to hand over a subset of the pictures in 2005. President Obama decided to release them in 2009, but Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the top American general in Iraq implored him not to. Congress then passed a law amending the Freedom of Information Act to allow the Secretary of Defense to certify that publishing the pictures could put American lives at risk, which then-secretary Robert Gates did. The ACLU continued to fight the issue in court, and last August, Hellerstein ordered that the government needed to justify withholding each picture individually.
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Egypt Joins Fight against the Petrodollar - Russia Insider - 0 views
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It is "quite natural" that business circles in both Russia and Egypt have raised the issue of the advisability of using their respective national currencies for bilateral payments, Russian President Vladimir Putin has told the Egyptian daily newspaper Al-Ahram.The President added that Russia already uses national currencies for trade with a number of CIS states, as well as China.“This practice proves its worth; we are ready to adopt it in our relations with Egypt as well. This issue is being discussed in detail by the relevant agencies of both countries,” Putin told Al-Ahram.
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shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Feb 15
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Thousands Join Legal Fight Against UK Surveillance - And You Can, Too - The Intercept - 0 views
firstlook.org/...-international-spying-campaign
surveillance state GCHQ NSA privacy-litigation war & peace
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Thousands of people are signing up to join an unprecedented legal campaign against the United Kingdom’s leading electronic surveillance agency. On Monday, London-based human rights group Privacy International launched an initiative enabling anyone across the world to challenge covert spying operations involving Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, the National Security Agency’s British counterpart. The campaign was made possible following a historic court ruling earlier this month that deemed intelligence sharing between GCHQ and the NSA to have been unlawful because of the extreme secrecy shrouding it.
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Consequently, members of the public now have a rare opportunity to take part in a lawsuit against the spying in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a special British court that handles complaints about surveillance operations conducted by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Privacy International is allowing anyone who wants to participate to submit their name, email address and phone number through a page on its website. The group plans to use the details to lodge a case with GCHQ and the court that will seek to discover whether each participant’s emails or phone calls have been covertly obtained by the agency in violation of the privacy and freedom of expression provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights. If it is established that any of the communications have been unlawfully collected, the court could force GCHQ to delete them from its vast repositories of intercepted data.
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By Tuesday evening, more than 10,000 people had already signed up to the campaign, a spokesman for Privacy International told The Intercept. In a statement announcing the campaign on Monday, Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, said: “The public have a right to know if they were illegally spied on, and GCHQ must come clean on whose records they hold that they should never have had in the first place. “We have known for some time that the NSA and GCHQ have been engaged in mass surveillance, but never before could anyone explicitly find out if their phone calls, emails, or location histories were unlawfully shared between the U.S. and U.K. “There are few chances that people have to directly challenge the seemingly unrestrained surveillance state, but individuals now have a historic opportunity finally hold GCHQ accountable for their unlawful actions.”
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shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Feb 15
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Venezuelan Opposition Mayor, Alias "The Vampire," Arrested for Role in Blue Coup Plot |... - 0 views
venezuelanalysis.com/11223
war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Venezuela coup-attempts Blue-Revolution color-revolutions
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Venezuelan opposition Mayor and longtime rightwing politician, Antonio Ledezma, has been arrested by the country’s intelligence services, SEBIN, for his alleged role in plotting to stage a coup against the democratically elected government of Nicolas Maduro. The planned coup was uncovered last week by security forces, just hours before several US backed Air Force officials had planned to partake in a bombing spree of strategic targets in the capital. They had hoped this would lead to the assassination of the country’s president and bring about regime change in the South American country. “Antonio Ledezma who, today, by order of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, was captured and is going to be prosecuted by the Venezuelan justice system, to make him answer to all of the crimes committed against the peace and security of the country and the Constitution… We’ve had enough of conspiracies, we want to work in peace!” announced Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro, amidst a chorus of cheers from onlookers.
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Last week, Ledezma, who is current Mayor of the Metropolitan Capital District of Caracas, signed a statement calling for a “National Transition Agreement” alongside opposition politicians, Maria Corina Machado and currently detained leader of the Popular Will party, Leopoldo Lopez. The document calls on Venezuelans to unite behind a plan to remove elected President Nicolas Maduro and sets out an action programme for the would be provisional government. This includes facilitating the return of “exiled” Venezuelans, prosecuting current members of government and reaching out to international financial lending agencies such as the International Monetary Fund. Circulated on February 11th, the statement was disclosed just a day before the attempted coup was set to unfold and was reportedly the signal to set the plan in motion.
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“It has no base in any juridic text, it is a putschist act of conspiracy that is unfortunately to the liking of thousands of opposition militants who have been indoctrinated to attack democracy,” Constitutional Lawyer, Jesus Silva, told Venezuelanalysis. Ledezma’s detention comes in the wake of several other arrests, including those of a number of airforce officials implicated in the plan. According to revelations made by the President of the National Assembly, Diosadado Cabello, on Wednesday night, Ledezma has since been named by one of the arrested officials under questioning. The confession links Ledezma to a plan to “eliminate” opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez last year in order to create “chaos” and destabilise the government. Fellow opposition politician and National Assembly legislator, Julio Borges, is also implicated in the assassination plan, which forced an intervention by the government in early 2014. At the time, Lopez’s wife, Lilian Tintori, stated that the government had acted to protect her husband’s safety.
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Although details surrounding Ledezma’s exact role in the recently discovered “Blue” coup plot are still unclear, it appears that the opposition politician is implicated beyond his call for a transitional government. Following the announcement of the coup plot last Thursday, the Maduro administration suggested that further arrests were to be made once there was sufficient evidence to prosecute the political ringleaders of the plan. “In these intelligence investigations, we have discovered a codified message, in another language, by an important leader of a party. On translating it, we found that it gave the details, the elements of the coup. We are about to capture the person who brought the script that they were going to read, the script they were going to read out was already written, and circulated by a person who I will name at the correct moment”, said Maduro, referencing a preplanned statement which was to be read out to the public following the aerial bombardment, announcing a “rebellion” of the armed forces against the government.
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It is not the first time that Ledezma has been implicated in a plan to violently overthrow the government. In 2002, he participated in an attempted coup which saw socialist president of the time, Hugo Chavez, ousted for a period of 47 hours. Last year, he was also named several times as a “principal ally” by currently detained terror plotter, Lorent Saleh. Saleh was one of the main underground activists fuelling the armed barricades known as guarimbas which last year claimed the lives of at least 43 Venezuelans. He had planned to go on a killing spree with the help of Colombian paramilitaries but was arrested before the plan could take place.
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Popularly known as “the vampire”, Ledezma began his political career in 1973 as a member of the “Democratic Action” Party. In 1989, he infamously became Governor of the Federal District of Caracas, when he oversaw one of the most violent periods in the history of the Caracas Metropolitan Police. The police body, which was since disbanded in 2010 due to its human rights violations, regularly opened fire on unarmed student protests, systematically repressed street vendors, pensioners and the unemployed, as well as regularly disappeared political activists. During this period he also oversaw the “Caracazo,” when up to 3000 people were killed and disappeared by security forces in the wake of violent protests against a government imposed austerity programme. This particular period of Ledezma’s career earnt him the reputation of “student killer” amongst working class Venezuelans. He is founder and current leader of the rightwing party known as the “Brave People’s Alliance”.
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shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Feb 15
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Reading the Runes in the Latest Report on Iran's Nuclear Program « LobeLog - 0 views
www.lobelog.com/eport-on-irans-nuclear-program
war & peace Iranian-nukes-myth negotiationIAEA-inspection report
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The latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s nuclear program contains much that is worth emphasizing. Iran is continuing to account for all its declared nuclear material (and the agency appears to have no reason to suspect the existence of undeclared nuclear material). Iran is also continuing to comply fully with the commitments it made to the United States and others on November 24, 2013 and which it has renewed since. Much of the commentary on the report on Iran will inevitably highlight Iran’s continuing failure to resolve two concerns the IAEA raised in May 2014. I, however, am surprised, that the IAEA director general omits all mention of two Iranian attempts, since the last IAEA report in mid-November, to address those and some other allegations that the IAEA is investigating. On December 2, Reuters reported that in a statement to the IAEA Iran had rejected accusations that it was stonewalling IAEA investigations. Instead, Iran had affirmed that it had given the IAEA “pieces of evidence” indicating that documents adduced by the IAEA as reasons for concern were “full of mistakes and contain fake names with specific pronunciations which only point towards a certain IAEA member as their forger.” (The member Iran probably had in mind was Israel). Yet there is no mention whatsoever of this Iranian rebuttal in the latest report, still less any detailed IAEA rebuttal of the rebuttal. Instead, the director general resorts to an exceptionally bland (and in the circumstances misleading) phrase: “Iran has not provided any explanations that enable the Agency to clarify the two outstanding practical measures [concerns].”
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In effect Iran is being asked to prove its innocence. But when it tries to do so, the evidence it submits is rejected out of hand because it calls into question the evidence that is being used to justify the suspicion of guilt. Is that consistent with due process? Also surprising is the omission of any mention of Iran’s offer of access to a suspected nuclear site at Marivan, reported by Reuters on December 11. A controversial annex to the IAEA’s November 2011 report referred to one member state having informed the agency that major high-explosives tests were conducted at Marivan in the first part of the last decade. Since the IAEA has not taken Iran up on the offer, it presumably believes that a visit to Marivan would serve no useful purpose. If that is the case, do they not owe it to Iran to withdraw the November 2011 charge relating to Marivan? If the agency isn’t arranging a site visit, it should explain to IAEA member states that it considers the information provided by “a member state” to have been unreliable or irrelevant.
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raise these questions not to criticise the IAEA secretariat, which continues to do a first-class job in Iran, as professional and objective as ever. Rather, I want to offset the hue and cry that opponents of a nuclear deal will raise over the reference in the latest report to Iran’s failure to provide explanations. I’m suggesting that there is more to this than meets the eye.
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Turning back to the positive, Iran is continuing to allow exceptional access to centrifuge assembly workshops, centrifuge rotor production workshops, and storage facilities. This access has enabled the IAEA to conclude that centrifuge rotor manufacturing and assembly are consistent with Iran’s replacement program for failed centrifuges. In other words, Iran is not manufacturing and diverting rotors to some clandestine enrichment facility. This is highly significant. Amid the endless furor over the number of centrifuges that Iran should retain under a comprehensive agreement, the public could be forgiven for failing to appreciate that, theoretically, Iran is far more likely to “sneak out”—using a clandestine enrichment facility—than to “break out” under the eyes of IAEA inspectors, using the centrifuges it wants to retain. I inserted “theoretically” to emphasize that at this point there is no evidence that Iran intends either to break out or to sneak out. And as long as the IAEA retains access to Iran’s rotor manufacturing, assembly, and storage facilities—which it will lose if the opponents of a deal have their way—we can all feel confident of a continuing absence of intention. In essence, the latest IAEA report contains nothing that would justify the United States and its allies declining to close a deal with Iran in the course of the coming four weeks. I, for one, am rooting for their success.