Tuesday, Dec 30th
Last update11:22:13 AM GMT
News that certain mobile phone manufacturers have embedded technology in their devices that tracks owners' movements has raised alarms among privacy rights advocates even though it has been somewhat of an open secret since last year.
The controversy flared up this week when technology bloggers started commenting on a report by two security technology researchers that was presented at a conference in Santa Clara, Calif.
The Iraqi women all took nicknames — Linda, Susan, Kathy, Mary, Angel — to make it easier for the American soldiers to remember them. They had college educations and spoke English well enough to work as interpreters with U.S. combat units, jobs that came with a high mortality rate even off the battlefield: insurgents targeted them for assassination as collaborators.
Because of the lingering dangers for Iraqis who had allied themselves with the Americans, the State Department created a special visa to allow interpreters and other workers into the United States. For most of the women, the Special Immigrant Visa became a lifeline.
Syria endured its bloodiest day yet of the Arab Spring as mass protests against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad roiled dozens of town and cities across the country and security forces reportedly gunned down dozens of people.
Despite a string of government concessions earlier in the week, including the lifting of the hated 48-year-old emergency law, tens of thousands of demonstrators demanding greater political freedom and an end to Ba'ath party rule took to the streets after Friday prayers.
How climate science became the target of "the best-funded, best-organized smear campaign by the wealthiest industry that the Earth has ever known."
It's difficult to imagine how a guy who spends most of his time looking at endless columns of temperature records became a "fucking terrorist," "killer," or "one-world-government socialist." It's even harder when you meet Michael Mann, a balding 45-year-old climate scientist who speaks haltingly and has a habit of nervously clearing his throat. And when you realize that the reason for all the hostility is a 12-year-old chart, it seems more than a little surreal.
In 2008, New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget G. Brennan began leading a team of undercover investigators targeting the drug dealers who used Craigslist to advertise their wares. She sounded confident.
"It's like shooting fish in a barrel," she told the Daily News. That year, a Citigroup vice president, Mark Rayner, was caught moving ecstasy and cocaine from his Midtown offices using Craigslist. "We see lots of professionals, people with good jobs, doing it," Brennan said.
Three years later, drug dealing on the classified-ads website is still blatant and ubiquitous.
The Antarctic ozone hole is about one-third to blame for Australia's recent series of droughts, scientists say. Writing in the journal Science, they conclude that the hole has shifted wind and rainfall patterns right across the Southern Hemisphere, even the tropics.
Their climate models suggest the effect has been notably strong over Australia. Many parts of the country have seen drought in recent years, with cities forced to invest in technologies such as desalination, and farms closing.
Earth Day activists rallied on Main Street to protest against the practice of fracking in natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania, though others were completely opposed to any drilling in Marcellus Shale regions of the state.
Late Thursday afternoon, about three dozen Green Party of Pennsylvania members held up signs to ban fracking and protect water and other natural resources as they stood outside the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) office building and around the corner of Main and Swede streets.
Near my home in Utah, Rio Tinto's massive Bingham Canyon Mine is one of the biggest man-made excavations on Earth and has rendered a large area of local groundwater too polluted for human consumption.
Now, the Rio Tinto and Anglo American companies want to put a mine even bigger than Bingham at the headwaters of our planet's greatest wild salmon river systems in Bristol Bay, Alaska. It's an environmental tragedy waiting to happen.
Their Pebble Mine would be gouged out of an American paradise -- filled with salmon, bears, moose, caribou, wolves and whales -- that has sustained Native communities for thousands of years.
As the conventional wisdom goes – especially in the West – Israel is the "only democracy" in the Middle East. And that is so, particularly for its Jewish citizens. However Israel has been anything but democratic for the indigenous people of the land, the Palestinian Arabs.
By nature and precedence, foreign military occupation is temporary. Colonialism on the other hand, and more precisely civilian colonisation, is a socio-political system of ruling over another people.
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