Archive for the 'Dictatorship' Category
Pentagon Plans to Buy and Destroy All 10,000 Copies of Army Reservist’s Book About the War in Afghanistan
September 10th, 2010Update: To Protect State Secrets, Pentagon Buys and Destroys Book Via: ABC News: The Pentagon has purchased and arranged for the destruction of 9,500 copies of a book so it can protect classified information it contains. Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer’s memoir “Operation Dark Heart” had become a headache for the Defense Department which determined after […]
Obama Wins Right to Invoke “State Secrets” to Protect Bush Crimes
September 9th, 2010Via: Salon: In a 6-5 ruling issued this afternoon, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals handed the Obama administration a major victory in its efforts to shield Bush crimes from judicial review, when the court upheld the Obama DOJ’s argument that Bush’s rendition program, used to send victims to be tortured, are “state secrets” and […]
China Blacks Out Towns to Meet Energy Goal
September 8th, 2010Via: AP: Chinese steel mills and mobile phone factories are being idled and thousands of homes in one area are doing without electricity as local governments order power cuts to meet energy-saving targets set by Beijing. Rolling blackouts and enforced power cuts are affecting key industrial areas. The prosperous eastern city of Taizhou turned off […]
Ukrainian Journalist, Vasyl Klymentyev, Missing and Presumed Dead
September 8th, 2010Via: Guardian: On 11 August 2010, the investigative journalist Vasyl Klymentyev set off from his home in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city. It was 8.55am. As editor-in-chief of Kharkiv’s Novy Stil (New Style) newspaper – a small publication known for unearthing juicy scandals about corrupt local officials – Klymentyev had many enemies and was rather cautious. […]
Afghan Security Forces Beat Angry Customers to Prevent Run on Kabul Bank
September 8th, 2010Via: Guardian: Afghan security forces used batons on unruly customers scrambling to withdraw their savings today from the country’s biggest bank, which is mired in a scandal of corruption and mismanagement. Kabul Bank’s troubles have threatened to add a financial crisis to Afghanistan’s other woes, with military and civilian casualties at record levels as a […]
John Le Carre on Russia, Banking and the Deep State
September 8th, 2010Via: BBC: “I was laughed at, in a way, when the Cold War ended and the wall came down,” he told Today presenter Justin Webb. “‘Poor old Le Carre, what will become of him? Nobody’s spying anymore.’ “The reality is, the budgets have never been bigger, the recruitment has never been more wholesale.” Today’s Russian […]
The True Cost of the Iraq War: $3 Trillion and Beyond
September 7th, 2010Via: Washington Post: Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration’s 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war. But today, as the United States ends combat in […]
Augmented City 3D
September 6th, 2010My guess is that it’s going to look a lot more like this: …but maybe a bit of both. Via: Vimeo / Keiichi Matsuda: Augmented City 3D from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo. The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is […]
U.S. Navy Makes $3 Billion “Hostage Payment” to HP for Crappy Computer Network
September 6th, 2010Via: Wired: Normally, it’s hard to get anyone but the geeks fired up about information infrastructure. But the Navy Marine Corps Intranet isn’t your normal network. With 700,000+ seats, it’s the world’s second-biggest network, after the internet itself. NMCI’s technical complexities and hiccups are the stuff of dark legend around the Navy. The fights it’s […]
Belarus Web Activist Oleg Bebenin Found Hanged
September 6th, 2010Via: BBC: Officials in Belarus say a prominent opposition figure found hanged at his weekend home outside the capital, Minsk, on Friday committed suicide. Forensic examiners established that, apart from the noose mark on Oleg Bebenin’s neck, there were no other injuries, a local prosecutor said. Mr Bebenin, 36, founded Charter 97, a leading opposition […]
