The “Paypal 14″ are back in court. They are accused of participating in DDoS attacks on Paypal when Paypal – in conjunction with Visa and Mastercard – cut off financial services to Wikileaks.
The eventual outcome of the trial will define not just how we see DDoS but the larger question of the right to protest online.
The bankruptcy process will aid Orr—an unelected front-man for the banks—in selling off city assets, privatizing services, and reorganizing the city in the interests of the corporate and financial elite. The entire operation is aimed at maximizing the amount the banks, bond insurers and other financial institutions will extract from the looting of the city and its working class inhabitants.
While the media applaud the agreement reached between the P5+1 and Iran, Thierry Meyssan, a personal friend of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sees in it an abdication by the new Iranian government. As far as he is concerned, it is absurd to pretend that the two parties have solved a misunderstanding supposedly maintained for eight years by the aggressiveness of President Ahmadinejad. The truth is that Iran gave up its nuclear research and began to dismantle it without receiving anything in return except the gradual lifting of illegitimate sanctions. In other words, the country, brought to its knees, has surrendered.
To the likes of [New York Times columnist David] Brooks, Snowden was a disconcerting mystery; Glenn Greenwald, though, got him right away. “He had no power, no prestige, he grew up in a lower-middle-class family, totally obscure, totally ordinary,” Greenwald says. “He didn’t even have a high school diploma. But he was going to change the world – and I knew that.” And, Greenwald also believed, so would he. “In all kinds of ways, my whole life has been in preparation for this moment,” he says.
Where I’m from,
seeing cop cars drive
down the street feels a lot
like low-flying planes in New York
City. Where I’m from, routine traffic
stops are more like mine
fields, any wrong move
could very well mean your life.
I would think journalists would want to be very careful about embracing this pernicious theory of “privatizing” journalism given how virtually all of you are not only are paid for the journalism you do, but also have your own journalism funded by all sorts of extremely rich people and other corporate interests.
The escalation of military tensions between Washington and Beijing in the East China Sea is superficially over China’s unilateral declaration of an air defense zone. But the real reason for Washington’s ire is the recent Chinese announcement that it is planning to reduce its holdings of the US dollar.
The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd. It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble. This celebrity culture giddily licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is Michael Jackson, Britney Spears [or Miley Cyrus], enthralls the country … despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class.
U.S. pundits cheer when some African warlord or East European brute is dragged before an international tribunal, but not at the thought of justice being meted out to George W. Bush or other architects of post-9/11 torture and aggressive war on Iraq
Twelve years after the start of the war, Afghanistan is still a basket case, severely limiting Karzai’s ability to follow Maliki’s example. Karzai has spent years walking a political tightrope, objecting to night raids by US Special Forces, assailing American airstrikes that have killed many civilians—once even threatening to join the Taliban himself. Indeed, in his speeches to the loya jirga, Karzai stressed that civilian casualties are an explosive issue.
Furious Afghan president says US drones have struck a home in Helmand, killing a small child and wounding two women.
President Hamid Karzai has condemned the drone strike as yet another example of US disregard for civilian life. The strike comes in the midst of a standoff between the Afghan government and the US over a security deal.
‘232 media executives control the information diet of 277,000,000 Americans.’
