02.16.14

Weekend News: Surveillance, Espionage, Foreign Policy, and Assassination Debate

Posted in News Roundup at 5:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Surveillance revelations, European and Indonesian reactions to espionage, drone protesters arrested and abducted

Surveillance and NSA

• Since Spying to Benefit Monsanto Is Not Industrial Espionage, It’s Okay

  One of the examples I often raise to show how our government likely uses SIGINT to advantage specific businesses is the way the government helps Monsanto budge into markets uninterested in its products.

  One WikiLeaks cable showed the US embassy in Paris planned a “military-style trade war” to benefit Monsanto.

• Spying by N.S.A. Ally Entangled U.S. Law Firm

  The list of those caught up in the global surveillance net cast by the National Security Agency and its overseas partners, from social media users to foreign heads of state, now includes another entry: American lawyers.

  A top-secret document, obtained by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, shows that an American law firm was monitored while representing a foreign government in trade disputes with the United States. The disclosure offers a rare glimpse of a specific instance in which Americans were ensnared by the eavesdroppers, and is of particular interest because lawyers in the United States with clients overseas have expressed growing concern that their confidential communications could be compromised by such surveillance.

• NSA spied on U.S. law firm amid trade dispute, report says

• US law firm was ‘caught in NSA surveillance net’ in Indonesia – report

  An unnamed US law firm was caught up in surveillance involving the National Security Agency and its Australian counterpart, according to a report released on Saturday.

  The New York Times reported that a top-secret document obtained by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden showed the firm was monitored “while representing a foreign government in trade disputes with the US”.

  According to the Times, the government of Indonesia retained the law firm for trade talks which were under surveillance by the Australian Signals Directorate. The Australian agency offered to share information with the NSA.

• Indonesia: Australia and US need to clean up their mess

  Presidential adviser responds to ‘perplexing revelation’ that ASD spied on a law firm representing Indonesia in a trade dispute

• US law firm ensnared in spying by NSA ally

• ‘I always wonder if someone is listening’: NSA spied on American lawyers but sometimes got other governments to do the work for them

• Snowden leak: NSA snooped on Chicago law firm

  Chicago-based law firm Mayer Brown may have found itself snared by the National Security Agency’s wide-reaching surveillance program.

  The New York Times reports an American law firm representing a foreign government in trade disputes was monitored by the spy agency, possibly including “information covered by attorney-client privilege.”

• U.S. law firm ensnared in NSA surveillance: NYT report

  An unnamed U.S. law firm was caught up in the global surveillance of the National Security Agency (NSA) and its overseas partners in Australia, according to a newspaper report on Saturday.

  A top secret document obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shows the firm was monitored while representing a foreign government in trade disputes with the United States, according to The New York Times.

• Aust-Indo ties worsening: Plibersek

  Australia and Indonesia are now in “open conflict”, and repairing the “worsening” relationship is imperative, deputy opposition leader Tanya Plibersek says.

  In the week Australia’s ambassador to Jakarta, Greg Moriarty, was reportedly called into the country’s foreign affairs ministry for a “dressing down” over the Abbott government’s border protection policies, Ms Plibersek said it was crucial the government act now to settle the rocky relationship.

  “It’s absolutely vital that Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop get on with repairing the relationship with Indonesia,” Ms Plibersek told reporters in Sydney on Saturday.

  “It’s of enormous concern that a huge nation, a growing democracy a nation that’s vital to our security but also to our economic prosperity is now in open conflict and calling the Australian ambassador in for a dressing down.”

• Intel not for commercial use: Abbott

  Prime Minister Tony Abbott says Australia would never use its intelligence gathering for commercial purposes, after reports one of its spy agencies offered US counterparts information on trade talks with Indonesia.

  The New York Times says the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) offered to share with the US National Security Agency (NSA) its surveillance of an American law firm that was representing Indonesia in trade disputes with the US.

• The Privacy Worm Turns: Now You Can Spy On The NSA

• Video: US artist films NSA headquarters

  Artist Trevor Paglen has taken aerial photographs of the National Security Agency, National Reconnaissance Office and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to illustrate the scale of the secret state in the United States.

• NSA protest results in tens of thousands of phone calls, emails

• Russia’s Olympic Spying, Comcast Weds Time Warner & More…

  You needn’t wonder why we haven’t heard protests about this coming from Obama, Harper or Cameron. It’s long been established that the pot hasn’t the right to point a finger at the kettle. All three of these gentlemen might be well advised to keep quiet, lest they bring even more attention to their own online intelligence operations. Indeed, Bloomberg reports that recent revelations about the NSA are having a disastrous effect on the U.S. tech sector.

• Samsung Enterprise Mobility Push Receives Boost From NSA And US Army

  Samsung’s enterprise plans are reportedly given the seal of approval from the US military and security agencies

• NSA Drone Attacks Not What You Think: Scahill

• So why aren’t young Americans spooked by NSA surveillance?

  Young people are very aware of privacy. But they seem to worry more about what their teachers, parents, coaches and peers know about their online activities than what the US government might have on them.

• Former German Chancellor Surprised That NSA Continued to Spy on Merkel

• Ex-German chancellor Schroeder surprised at NSA spying on Merkel

  Gerhard Schroeder, a former German Chancellor, now says he was surprised to hear that the United States National Security Agency, or NSA, spied on his country’s current head of government after he left office almost a decade ago.

• Data protection: Angela Merkel proposes Europe network

  German Chancellor Angela Merkel is proposing building up a European communications network to help improve data protection.

• EPIC Receives A Settlement For Legal Fees From The NSA In Its FOIA Lawsuit Targeting Presidential Cybersecurity Directives

  Some semi-good news to report here. EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) has received a settlement from the NSA in its long-running lawsuit (dating back to late 2012) against the agency for its withholding of documents related Presidential Directive 54, a national security directive on cybersecurity.

• Privacy group reaches NSA settlement, appeals case

• NSA Spying Poses “Direct Threat to Journalism,” Watchdog Group Warns

• NSA’s mass surveillance of NZers online

  Part of my TEDx Queenstown talk next week is about mass surveillance online. How governments are building the modern Panopticon.

  I was therefore quite surprised yesterday when Prime Minister John Key said he has no reason to believe the NSA has undertaken mass surveillance on New Zealanders. To help the prime minister, let’s look at what we know about it and whether an objective person should come to the same conclusion.

  At the same time, let’s not overlook the FBI’s (NarusInsight) and GCHQ’s (Tempora) sterling efforts in collecting and making the data available to the NSA. In fact, the GCHQ collects even more metadata off international cables than the NSA.

• Utah – Achilles’ Heel of the Surveillance State

  What do they need all that water for? To cool the mega-computers housing the NSA’s huge store of intercepted data – virtually all the emails transmitted in the country and beyond, including phone calls and our all-important “meta data.” The heavily fortified Data Center will store all this purloined information in four halls, each 25,000 square feet, with an additional 900,000 square feet for bureaucratic high mucka-mucks and their administrative and technical peons. The electricity bill alone is estimated at $40 million annually.

• Former NSA Counsel Stewart Baker vs. Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg

  Former National Security Agency lawyer Stewart Baker and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg join us for a debate on Edward Snowden’s disclosure of the NSA’s massive spying apparatus in the United States and across the globe. Snowden’s leaks to The Guardian and other media outlets have generated a series of exposés on NSA surveillance activities — from its collection of American’s phone records, text messages and email, to its monitoring of the internal communications of individual heads of state. Partly as a consequence of the government’s response to Snowden’s leaks, the United States plunged 13 spots in an annual survey of press freedom by the independent organization, Reporters Without Borders. Snowden now lives in Russia and faces possible espionage charges if he returns to the United States. Baker, a former NSA general counsel and assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, is a partner at the law firm Steptoe & Johnson and author of “Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren’t Stopping Tomorrow’s Terrorism.” Ellsberg is a former Pentagon and RAND Corporation analyst and perhaps the country’s most famous whistleblower. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing the secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, prompting Henry Kissinger to call him “the most dangerous man in America.”

• How The NSA Is Turning Your Apps Against You

  According to reports, spy organizations are looking to so-called “leaky apps” to gather information. It’s a term we’ve used quite often in our Mobile Threat Monday stories, one that Lookout’s Principal Security Researcher Marc Rogers defines as “Any app which is passing any kind of sensitive information without encryption.”

• Dutch Minister of Interior Ronald Plasterk misled parliament by blaming NSA

  On Thursday, Dutchnews.nl reported that the Dutch Minister of Interior, Ronald Plasterk was asked by his political counterparts to explain why he supplied them with misleading information concerning the Dutch intelligence agencies illegal data collection practices. Dutch political party, Democrats 66 even went as far as filing a motion of no-confidence against Plasterk.

• NSA Protest Garnered “Substantial” Support, Organizers Say

  Tuesday’s protest against the National Security Agency resulted in “substantial support” according to official numbers released by organizers.

• World of surveillance is our responsibility

  Privacy should not have to be defended

• Ex-CIA agent Edward Snowden posters damaged by vandals at university

Surveillance and the UK

• UK Ministry of Justice downed by DDoS attack linked to NSA spying revelations

  Hackers took down the UK Ministry of Justice website for several hours earlier this week in a distributed denial of service attack [DDoS] that is part of the fall out from the US National Security Agency [NSA] spying revelations.

• Lunch with the FT: Glenn Greenwald

  At the time of our meeting, though, he was clearly angry about it. “One of the things about the Guardian that I really disliked is that they used Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and got a lot of benefit from publishing the material [diplomatic cables leaked by Bradley Manning] and then completely turned into being his leading demoniser.”

• Week of the Whistleblower

  So this com­ing week prom­ises to be inter­est­ing in the UK, with a num­ber of inter­na­tional whis­tleblowers gath­er­ing for a range of events and inter­views in Lon­don and Oxford.

• Two-thirds oppose plans for new NHS database that will see confidential medical records sold to private firms

• Bruce Schneier on NSA v. Private Meta-Data Storage (relevant to the NHS data debate)

• Let the NSA Keep Hold of the Data

  Giving it to private companies will only make privacy intrusion worse.

Surveillance and CIA

• Is it a CIA Trojan that drops into your computer or simply straight up corporate spyware?

Foreign Policy

• 5 Examples of US Government Efforts to Destabilize Black Nations

  Kwame Nkrumah helped Ghana gain its independence from its British colonizers in 1957. Nkrumah became the country’s first prime minister (1957) and first president (1960). As a Pan-Africanist, Nkrumah was eager to unite Africa, and specifically, help Ghana become completely independent from the colonial trade system by reducing its dependence on foreign capital, technology and material goods.

• Did CIA Official Suppress Benghazi Attack Narrative?

• Did CIA official suppress Benghazi narrative? Accounts raise new questions

  New information about the intelligence available in the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi attack raises questions about whether the former No. 2 at the CIA downplayed or dismissed reporting from his own people in Libya that it was a coordinated attack and not an out-of-control protest over an anti-Islam video.

• The Shortsighted Presidency

  America’s foreign policy is now trending on Twitter.

• War is business

  The successful Star Wars franchise captivated generations of worldwide audiences not only because it was – and still is – an enthralling science fiction drama, but also because it touches upon timeless social issues about the use and abuse of power, greed and humility, love and hate, trust and betrayal, domination and compassion, honour and envy.

  A movie like Revenge of the Sith can reveal much about what we value in our society because it can raise questions about the world that we live in now. For example, under what conditions do people change from being agents of peace and justice to being agents of death and destruction? Why does the wielding of absolute power end up corrupting people absolutely? And more importantly, what can we do as a people to right the wrongs committed from the abuse of such power?

• Syria at the Edge of ‘Shock Doctrine’

  Disappointed that President Obama didn’t bomb Syria last year, the neocons and other war hawks are using the frustrations over initial peace talks in Geneva to ratchet up pressure for a “humanitarian” military assault now, as Rob Prince explains.

• US hired Nazis to test CIA interrogation techniques

Drones

• First Pakistani to sue CIA over drones freed after kidnapping, torture

• Abducted anti-drone activist released, on his way to talk in the UK

• Drones: The Dark Side of power

  Drones have become weapon of choice in the “war on terror”.

• Reining in the Drones

  Key aspects of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 “war on terror” are finally winding down: U.S. troops have left Iraq and are leaving Afghanistan, but the troubling issue of lethal drones remains – and it is time for Congress to set new limits, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

• Activist Kareem Khan to keep fighting drones

  ‘Kidnapped’ Pakistani activist flies to Euorpe to renew his battle against drone strikes that killed his son, brother.

• Pakistani Planning to Sue CIA over Drones Freed after Kidnapping, Torture

• Abducted Pakistani drone activist free

• Dangerous seduction of drones

  Without declaring a war there, U.S. forces have hit Pakistan with more than 350 drones strikes since 2004. These U.S.-engineered operations have left a death toll of somewhere between 2,500 and 3,500 people, including almost 200 children.

• Hancock drone protesters released from jail early

  Twelve people sentenced to jail in connection with a 2012 protest at the Air National Guard Base at Hancock Field have been released early.

  Eleven of the protesters were released Friday from the Onondaga County Justice Center jail. Another protester was released earlier in the week.

  On Feb. 7, DeWitt Town Justice David Gideon sentenced the six men and six women to 15 days in jail after finding them guilty of disorderly conduct. He dismissed trespassing charges against them.

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Links 16/2/2014: Instructionals

Posted in News Roundup at 3:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

• An Introduction to the AWS Command Line Tool

• How to install Anaconda 1.9 in Ubuntu 13.10

• Set up a WordPress site on the Raspberry PI

• HOWTO: Switch to HDMI audio out automatically on Linux

• Set up a WordPress site on the Raspberry PI

• How I fixed my Fedora 20 system when it stalled before the display manager appeared

• How To Install Kernel 3.13.3 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint And Elementary OS

• How To Install Kernel 3.12.11 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint And Elementary OS

• How To Install Qmmp Audio Player 0.7.5 On Ubuntu 13.10,12.10,12.04, Linux Mint 16,14,13 And Elementary OS 0.2

• How To Install Kawaji Emoji Keyboard 0.2.1 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint And Elementary OS

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02.14.14

Skynet Watch in the Media (Friday)

Posted in News Roundup at 6:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Unwise policies that breed mistrust and even hatred continue to receive scrutiny from the media

Surveillance

• U.S. Tech’s Costly Trust Gap

  Since the intelligence contractor Edward Snowden began exposing surveillance programs by the National Security Agency last June, trust overseas in U.S. technology companies has plummeted. In some cases, sales have slowed. And foreign regulators have been licking their chops in anticipation of a crackdown. Estimates of the cost to these companies have ranged from $21.5 billion to $180 billion by 2016.

• The Pauls Are Leading the Way on Snowden, NSA

  Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) announced this week that he is suing the Obama administration in a class-action lawsuit over the surveillance excesses of the NSA, as revealed by documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Specifically, he is challenging the constitutionality of the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata.

• Technology Firms Urge Changes to NSA Spying

  Top execs from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, LinkedIn and Twitter have formed a coalition known as Reform Government Surveillance, and are urging changes to the NSA spying programs that would include a government agreement not to collect bulk data from Internet communications. Tumblr, Mozilla and Reddit also support the effort.

• NSA spying undermines checks and balances

  As the Framers conceived it, our system of government is divided into three branches — executive, legislative and judicial — each of which is designed to serve as a check on the others. If the president gets out of control, Congress can defund his efforts, or impeach him, and the judiciary can declare his acts unconstitutional. If Congress passes unconstitutional laws, the president can veto them, or refuse to enforce them, and the judiciary can declare them invalid. If the judiciary gets carried away, the president can appoint new judges, and Congress can change the laws, or even impeach.

• Wyden doesn’t support Paul’s NSA lawsuit

  Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.) on Thursday said he doesn’t support Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) lawsuit against President Obama and the National Security Agency.

  “I believe that legislation, not a Senate-brought lawsuit is the only effective way to stop this behavior of the NSA,” Wyden said in a statement provided to The Hill.

• The Day We Fought Back: by the numbers

  Thanks to everyone who participated on Tuesday. Together we demonstrated that activists, organizations, and companies can work in unison to fight mass surveillance, and laid a foundation for escalation over months to come.

• ARTHUR CYR: NSA lacks human touch

  Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has become prominent in the debate. This reflects not only the extent of continuing public alarm about the activity, but also the fact that Congress is exercising growing policy leadership in this realm as in others, including fiscal and budgetary matters.

• Obama DOJ’s New Abuse of State-Secrets Privilege Revealed

  For nine years, the U.S. government refused to let a Stanford PhD student named Rahinah Ibrahim back in the country after putting her on the no-fly list for no apparent reason. For eight years, U.S. government lawyers fought Ibrahim’s request that she be told why. Last April, despite his promise in 2009 to do so only in only the most extreme cases, Attorney General Eric Holder tried to block Ibrahim’s case by asserting the state secrets privilege, declaring under penalty of perjury that the information she wanted “could reasonably be expected to cause significant harm to national security.”

• You Know Who Else Collected Metadata? The Stasi.

  The East German secret police, known as the Stasi, were an infamously intrusive secret police force. They amassed dossiers on about one quarter of the population of the country during the Communist regime.

  But their spycraft — while incredibly invasive — was also technologically primitive by today’s standards. While researching my book Dragnet Nation, I obtained the above hand drawn social network graph and other files from the Stasi Archive in Berlin, where German citizens can see files kept about them and media can access some files, with the names of the people who were monitored removed.

Ethics

• Pete Seeger: Troubadour of Truth and Justice

  Pete Seeger’s life, like the arc of the moral universe famously invoked by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., bent toward justice. He died this week at 94. Pete sang truth to power through the epic struggles of most of the last century, for social justice, for civil rights, for workers, for the environment and for peace. His songs, his wise words, his legacy will resonate for generations.

• ‘Don’t Mess with My Drone Junk’: Bezos Has It All, A to Z, CIA Included

  That’s right, Bezos bought the grey Lady, that Washington Post-pone, and, alas, you think the WP is going to cover the Amazon contract with the guys and gals who take contracts out on us, them, anyone, with that drone thing, the favorite toy of Bezos’ Prozac mind – he wants drones all over Seattle first, to try out his 30 minute or you get it free delivery idea for orders for his useless shit, the upside down world of Maslow’s hierarchy of misneeds/deeds.

Drones

• The Terrible Toll of Secrecy

  xhaustive independent studies by the British Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal have documented that civilian casualties are endemic – the latest count is at least 440 since the drone campaigns began, according to the BIJ.

  And countless journalistic accounts have described how the strikes are counterproductive, increasing civilians’ sympathy for al Qaeda and its allies in Yemen today as in Pakistan and Afghanstan before, and as in Somalia next.

• Columnist: Obama’s Secret Drone War Is a Threat to National Security

  Every time you think the war on terror can’t get any weirder, it does.

• On the drone campaign in Pakistan

  Zara Shahid a student at Lahore University of Management Science in Pakistan, on why she values student activism on unofficial drone warfare

• Students join debate on drones

  A Cambridge student has launched a campaign to encourage British universities to cease investment in companies that produce drones.

  Sara Aslam, a Masters student in Modern South Asian studies, has started a petition which calls for higher education institutions to consider the human costs of the use of drones and to divest from drone technologies.

• Anti-drone activist picked up by his backers?

  In an interesting turn of events which indicate a visible policy change on the part of the agencies, Karim Khan, an anti-drone campaigner from North Waziristan, seems to have been picked up by the same people who had been accused of blowing off the security cover of three previous CIA station chiefs in Islamabad who used to supervise the US drone campaign, writes Amir Mir.

  [...]

  But hardly a few days before he was due to travel to Britain to brief parliamentarians from Britain, Germany and the Netherlands about the impact of the drone strikes in the tribal belt of Pakistan, up to 20 armed men stormed into his home in Rawalpindi on the night of February 4, 2014 and took him away without even telling his family members who they were and what they actually wanted.

War

• In the Darkness of Dick Cheney

  What are these words, after all, next to the iron realities of the post–September 11 world? The defense budget has more than doubled, including a Special Operations Command able to launch secret, lethal raids anywhere in the world that has grown from 30,000 elite troops to more than 67,000. The drone force has expanded from fewer than 200 unmanned aerial vehicles to more than 11,000, including perhaps 400 “armed-capable” drones that can and do target and kill from the sky—and that, following the computer directives of “pilots” manning terminals in Virginia and Nevada and elsewhere in the United States, have killed in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia an estimated 3,600 people.

• In Security Cases, Feds No Longer Get Benefit Of The Doubt

  And I’m Renee Montagne. Good morning. We have been hearing for months about how disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have shaken the intelligence community and spurred Congress to try to impose new limits on surveillance. In recent weeks, after-shocks from those leaks have been rippling through the courts as well. NPR’s Carrie Johnson reports some judges have signaled they’re no longer willing to take the government’s word when it comes to national security.

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Health Watch: Sleep, Pesticides, Legalised Drug Cartels, GMO, and Major Cuts to Health

Posted in News Roundup at 7:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Cuts to public health in the UK and increased subsidies to corporations that are harming everybody’s health

• The myth of the eight-hour sleep

  We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

• A Valuable Reputation

  In 2001, seven years after joining the biology faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped talking about his research with people he didn’t trust. He instructed the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings. “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia,” he liked to say, “is to keep careful track of your persecutors.”

• NHS hires drugmaker-funded lobbyist

  Conflict of interest concerns as Specialised Healthcare Alliance, funded by pharmaceutical companies, advises NHS England

• Pharma drug development only for wealthy countries?

• Landmark GM canola case to rest on negligence principle

  Lawyers representing a West Australian farmer who is suing his neighbour over genetically-modified canola which allegedly contaminated his property, say the court case will hinge on the principle of negligence.

  The landmark case was taken by Kojonup organic farmer Steve Marsh.

  The lawyers say neighbour Michael Baxter had a duty to contain his own crop of GM canola, and the contamination resulted in Mr Marsh losing his organic accreditation for 70 per cent of his property.

• Massive: Russia Considers Complete Ban on GM Food Production

  While the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association, along with Monsanto and other poison makers try to slip a labeling-by-choice campaign past citizens in the US, Russia is preparing a bill that would heavily restrict the import of genetically modified agricultural produce, as well as stop it altogether from being produced domestically.

• “Fakethrough!” New Report Shows How Easily Media Was Duped by Claims of GMO “Breakthroughs”

  Despite a full-court press defending the supposed benefits of genetically engineered “golden rice,” it has never entered production. According to Jonathan Latham of Independent Science News, the science media has utterly failed to report accurately on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) — on their failures and criticisms rather than just their potential successes. A transgenic high-protein cassava, a type of starchy edible root, was lauded in the scientific press but fizzled not long after. So did a supposedly virus-resistant sweet potato that was widely hailed in the media. According to Jonathan Latham of Independent Science News, these and others are just a few examples of what he says is the utter failure of the science media to report accurately and critically on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) — on their failures rather than just their touted successes.

• Will Monsanto Become The NSA Of Agriculture?

  Monsanto is best-known for its controversial use of genetically-modified organisms, and less well-known for being involved in the story of the defoliant Agent Orange (the company’s long and involved story is well told in the book and film “The World According to Monsanto”, by Marie-Monique Robin.) Its shadow also looms large over the current TPP talks: the USTR’s Chief Agricultural Negotiator is Islam A. Siddiqui, a former lobbyist for Monsanto. But it would seem that the company is starting to explore new fields, so to speak; as Salon reports in a fascinating and important post, Monsanto is going digital

• You’d Be Shocked at What These Fashion Editors Are Editing Out of Their Photos

• 7,000 key NHS clinical staff made redundant amid enforced cuts

  An “arbitrary” straitjacket on the NHS’s budget by Whitehall is leading to job losses, recruitment freezes and inadequate care for patients, the leader of the country’s doctors warns on Tuesday.

• Manawatu school removes wi-fi over cancer fear (radiation fears have been downplayed by lobbying and fake, companies-funded ‘studies’)

  Two Manawatu fathers have won a major battle in their fight to have wi-fi removed from their local school, TVNZ reports.

  Fathers Damon Wyman and David Bird have been leading a campaign to remove the wireless networking from Te Horo School and replace it with cable-based internet due to concerns it could cause cancer and other health problems.

  Science Media Centre manager Peter Griffin says the death of Te Horo pupil Ethan Wyman from a brain tumour was a tragedy for his family, friends and school mates, but that to blame it on wi-fi is wrong.

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Environment Watch: Extinction, Pollution, and Business Lobby Against Reforms

Posted in News Roundup at 7:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A look at some of the mess we are in (along with other species) and the role played by greed

• The Sixth Extinction Author Comes to Santa Barbara this Weekend

  Like it or not, everything dies. But these days, it seems, things are dying a little bit faster. From disappearing ice caps and bone-chilling polar vortices to historic drought and worldwide super storms, Mother Earth is behaving in ways well outside the norm with an ever increasing frequency matched perhaps only by the speed at which climate-change deniers are learning to bite their tongues.

• Monarch Butterfly In ‘Grave Danger’ Of Disappearing, Migration Reaches Record Low

  Have you noticed anything missing from your garden lately? Monarch butterflies, North America’s most recognized butterfly, are vanishing. According to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund, fewer Monarchs migrated in 2013 than in any year since researchers began keeping records two decades ago.

• 40 Koch Brothers Donors Exposed After Document Left at Hotel by Mistake Is Leaked

  A new document providing rare insight into the political machine of the Koch Brothers has surfaced revealing the names of up to 40 donors, as well as senior Koch officials, Washington Post reported.

• Huge fire after US oil train derails in North Dakota

• Scientist back from Japan: I’ve seen data showing highest radioactivity levels in ocean that have been observed recently — NHK: Nuclear waste may be leaking “directly from buildings” not only going into groundwater via tunnels (VIDEOS)

• SURPRISE: You’re Eating Fukushima Radiation and Bloody, Cancerous Tumors in Fish Contaminated By Radiation

• West Virginia ERs Report an Influx of Patients After Water Deemed Safe

  Emergency rooms surrounding the site of a West Virginia chemical spill are treating scores of patients with symptoms related to exposure to chemical-tainted water, the Charleston Daily Mail reports.

• Indiana biz groups challenge EPA climate change rules

  A coalition of national and state business groups launched an effort Thursday to fight new rules on greenhouse gas emissions that would affect Indiana more than most states.

  “We will block anything that is not in the interest of the American economy,” said the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Karen Harbert.

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Links 14/2/2014: Games

Posted in News Roundup at 6:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Links 14/2/2014: Applications

Posted in News Roundup at 6:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Links 14/2/2014: Instructionals

Posted in News Roundup at 6:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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