As the Obama administration and congress and the media in the US get all sanctimonious about the allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria as a prelude to ramping up fervor for a bombing campaign (today’s rationale as the equivalent to Iraq’s WMD), Foreign Policy magazine comes out with an exclusive report on how it was the CIA that facilitated Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons back in the 1980s. [Read more…]
I had thought that on domestic matters involving its Jewish population, and especially when it came to issues involving women, the state of Israel was quite enlightened and egalitarian, except of course for the ultra-Orthodox segments of the populations who are hopelessly sexist. [Read more…]
It looks like Edward Snowden and The Guardian are broadening the base of outlets for the NSA revelations, making it harder for governments to crack down on them. In addition to the Washington Post, the German Der Spiegel and the Brazilian O Globo that have already been part of the release program, today comes the announcement that the New York Times and ProPublica are also working on stories from the NSA documents. [Read more…]
The editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger revealed that on July 20, an extraordinary event took place in his newspaper’s London offices. After a series of increasingly threatening demands from the British government to hand over the materials that Edward Snowden had given them, they arrived at an agreement that in return for the government not taking legal action to stop further publication of the materials, which under the UK’s legal system could have held up the process, the editors would agree to physically destroy the computers and other hardware that contained the information, although they pointed out that in this electronic age, such an action was purely symbolic since copies existed in other countries. [Read more…]
Portugal is one of those countries that decided that increased austerity for its people was the way to go in dealing with its financial crisis and the result has been massive hardship for many. This has led to protests outside parliament and other venues where prominent government leaders are assembled. A professional opera singer Ana Maria Pinto attended one such protest last October that took an unexpected turn. [Read more…]
Today the German news magazine Der Spiegel has released more information based on NSA revelation by Edward Snowden that the US has been systematically spying on UN governments and delegations.
Der Spiegel said the European Union and the U.N.’s Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), were among those targeted by U.S. intelligence agents. [Read more…]
I have written before of how one failing of our politics is that it focuses more on how we feel about the people who are on the side of the issues, and less on the issues themselves. Here is another example of that phenomenon, with a contributor to the liberal website Balloon-Juice smacking down Noam Chomsky. [Read more…]
The provincial government of Quebec is reportedly moving forward on legislation that would ban the wearing of some religious apparel by public employees. [Read more…]
More revelations have emerged that despite the NSA’s claims of strict safeguards to prevent abuse of its spying capabilities, the it systematically violated its pown privacy requirements in thousands of cases and committed even more illegal acts, with a judge ruling back in 2011 that the NSA had also been deliberately misleading the courts about what it has been doing. What a surprise! This information emerged as a result of the declassification of some documents in the wake of the uproar over what the Snowden revelations told us about the government spying on its own citizens. [Read more…]
A few days ago I linked to a story of Kadra Abdi, a young Somali-American woman who was profiled and harassed by immigration authorities on her return from a trip to Sweden. Now comes along an even worse story of TSA harassment on a domestic trip of Aditya Mukerjee, a young man of Indian origin. Mukerjee gives detailed account of his ordeal. [Read more…]