Israel: Did Heads of Mossad and Shin Bet Leak Plans for Attack on Iran?
November 4th, 2011Via: Guardian:
Israel’s prime minister has ordered an investigation into alleged leaks of plans to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, it has been reported.
According to the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Jarida, the main suspects are the former heads of the Mossad and the Shin Bet, respectively Israel’s foreign and domestic intelligence agencies.
Netanyahu is said to believe that the two, Meir Dagan and Yuval Diskin, wanted to torpedo plans being drawn up by him and Ehud Barak, the defence minister, to hit Iranian nuclear sites. Tzipi Livni, leader of the opposition Kadima party, is also said to have been persuaded to attack Netanyahu for “adventurism” and “gambling with Israel’s national interest”.
The paper suggested that the purpose of the leaks was to prevent an attack, which had moved from the stage of discussion to implementation. “Those who oppose the plan within the security establishment decided to leak it to the media and thwart the plan,” it said.
Both Dagan and Diskin oppose military action against Iran unless all other options – primarily international diplomatic pressure and perhaps sabotage — have been exhausted. In January the recently retired Dagan, a hawk when he was running the Mossad, called an attack on Iran “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard”.
“Flaking”: What NYPD Calls Planting Drugs on Innocent People to Meet Arrest Quotas
November 4th, 2011Via: New York Post:
A former NYPD narcotics detective snared in a corruption scandal testified it was common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas.
The bombshell testimony from Stephen Anderson is the first public account of the twisted culture behind the false arrests in the Brooklyn South and Queens narc squads, which led to the arrests of eight cops and a massive shakeup.
Anderson, testifying under a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, was busted for planting cocaine, a practice known as “flaking,” on four men in a Queens bar in 2008 to help out fellow cop Henry Tavarez, whose buy-and-bust activity had been low.
“Tavarez was … was worried about getting sent back [to patrol] and, you know, the supervisors getting on his case,” he recounted at the corruption trial of Brooklyn South narcotics Detective Jason Arbeeny.
“I had decided to give him [Tavarez] the drugs to help him out so that he could say he had a buy,” Anderson testified last week in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
He made clear he wasn’t about to pass off the two legit arrests he had made in the bar to Tavarez.
“As a detective, you still have a number to reach while you are in the narcotics division,” he said.
NYPD officials did not respond to a request for comment.
Fukushima Residents’ Urine Now Radioactive
November 4th, 2011Via: Japan Times / Kyodo:
More than 3 millisieverts of radiation has been measured in the urine of 15 Fukushima residents of the village of Iitate and the town of Kawamata, confirming internal radiation exposure, it was learned Sunday.
Both are about 30 to 40 km from the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, which has been releasing radioactive material into the environment since the week of March 11, when the quake and tsunami caused core meltdowns.
“This won’t be a problem if they don’t eat vegetables or other products that are contaminated,” said Nanao Kamada, professor emeritus of radiation biology at Hiroshima University. “But it will be difficult for people to continue living in these areas.”
Kamada teamed up with doctors including Osamu Saito of Watari Hospital in the city of Fukushima to conduct two rounds of tests on each resident in early and late May, taking urine samples from 15 people between 4 and 77.
Radioactive cesium was found both times in each resident.
SWAT Team Kills Marine Veteran at Home
November 4th, 2011Via: Courthouse News Service:
A widow says a regional SWAT team killed her husband, a Marine veteran, in a botched raid not even aimed at him, riddling their house with 72 bullets while she and their 4-year-old son were in it.
Vanessa Guerena says police refused to allow paramedics to help her husband, 26-year-old Jose Guerena, after the SWAT team shot him repeatedly while serving a search warrant on May 5.
“No shots were ever fired at members of the Pima Regional SWAT Team from inside the Guerena home,” the widow says in her Pima County Court complaint. She says her husband was “peacefully sleeping in his bed” after returning home from the night shift at a mine when the police killed him.
“After the shooting, the Pima Regional SWAT Team denied entry to anyone, including paramedics, into the Guerena home for over an hour.”
The raid apparently was aimed at her husband’s brother, who did not live with them.
Guerena says that the affidavit in support of the search warrant “misrepresented and failed to include complete and material information about Joseph Guerena.”
The complaint states: “The Pima Regional SWAT Team was serving a warrant based on an alleged investigation into the activities of Jose Guerena’s brother, Alejandro Guerena, who was not a resident of Jose Guerena’s home. No evidence was found that Jose Guerena was engaging in criminal activity, that any criminal activity was occurring at Jose Guerena’s home, or that any evidence of criminal activity would be found in the Guerena home.”
Tucson media reported that the SWAT team shot Guerena more than 20 times.
Guerena says that when she pleaded with officers to allow paramedics to care for her wounded husband, “Rather than provide help, the Pima Regional SWAT team forcefully and violently drug [sic] Vanessa Guerena from her home. A frightened, crying, and traumatized Joel Guerena, age four, exited a short time later of his own volition wearing his Spider-Man pajamas.
“Over an hour after the shooting and after sending in two robots, members of the Pima Regional SWAT Team finally entered the Guerena home where Jose Guerena was pronounced dead a short time later.”
Apple to Require Sandboxing in Mac App Store Apps in March 2012
November 4th, 2011The iOSification of OSX is now fully underway. How long will it be before every executable on the platform requires Apple’s blessing?
Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.
As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.” Nobody deserves to have to die – not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing.
Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.
—‘Steve Jobs, The Pioneer Of The Computer As A Jail’
What do Cryptogon readers think of apps on their computers and in general? DO NOT WANT.
Via: Naming Things:
Apple announced today that, starting in March 2012, all apps on the Mac App Store will be required to run in the so-called “App Sandbox”.
The sandbox is an environment that locks down the Mac in ways that match (and exceed) the limitations found on iOS. A sandboxed app doesn’t have direct access to any files or frameworks on the system. It can’t access the network or any devices.
For the app, nothing else exists on the system except for those files and APIs that the operating system explicitly makes accessible to it:
By default, the sandboxed app doesn’t really have anything of its own. Even files in its own Application Support subfolder may be deleted by the operating system if it wants to e.g. reclaim some disk space. The sandbox analogy is quite fitting indeed — inside it, an app’s data has all the permanence of a sand castle.
Do you feel entitled, punk?
Since the Mac isn’t a phone, most apps need to do something more persistent than e.g. rendering a nice image of a collapsing sand castle. To enable these apps to perform their job, Apple has created a list of permitted capabilities called “entitlements”.
Here is the complete list of available entitlements:
…
That’s it. (There are also a couple of temporary exception entitlements that will be going away. If your app uses Apple Events or Mach ports, Apple may grant you a temporary license to keep doing so, if you can make your case convincingly.)
Need to access hardware using something else than USB, for example Thunderbolt, FireWire or Bluetooth? Tough luck. (Just because these interfaces are on your Mac doesn’t mean Apple wants anyone to use them via 3rd party software.)
Need to communicate with processes that your app didn’t directly start, or perhaps take screenshots? Not going to happen.
Maybe you’d like to read and write files in a known location on a network disk? Not possible, unless you pop up the Open/Save dialog for every file.
Greek PM Scraps Bailout Referendum
November 3rd, 2011Via: MSNBC:
Two officials close to the Greek prime minister say he has scrapped his plan to hold a referendum on the latest European debt deal for Greece after the main opposition leader said he would back it.
The two officials said George Papandreou made the comments during an emergency Cabinet meeting Thursday. One also said the premier would not resign despite mounting pressure, and would await the outcome of Friday’s confidence vote in his government.
Hotel Guests Recruited with Homeland Security TV Spots
November 3rd, 2011Via: USA Today:
The Department of Homeland Security is recruiting hotel guests to join the fight against terrorism.
Starting today, the welcome screens on 1.2 million hotel television sets in Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Holiday Inn and other hotels in the USA will show a short public service announcement from DHS. The 15-second spot encourages viewers to be vigilant and call law enforcement if they witness something suspicious during their travels.
During the PSA, which starts with a woman exiting a yellow taxi in front of a train station, a narrator says, “Maybe you see something suspicious. Can you be sure? If you see something, say something to authorities.”
The PSA, which will be interspersed with other messages on the welcome screen, will be the same in all 5,400 hotels that LodgeNet serves. It ends by telling viewers to contact “local authorities.”
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says that reaching the “millions of guests that stay at hotels and motels each year is a significant step in engaging the full range of partners in our Homeland Security efforts.”
The federal government gained access to hotel TV sets by forming a partnership with the hotel industry’s largest association — the American Hotel & Lodging Association — which connected DHS with LodgeNet, the industry’s largest TV-content provider.
By entering hotels at a time when the hospitality industry is on the rebound, the government has the power to tap a growing, captive audience. Recent research from LodgeNet says 98% of hotel guests turn on their hotel TV, and the average guest keeps it on for more than three hours per day.
Ann Parker, a LodgeNet spokeswoman, describes the PSAs as “well done and professional” and says the decision to air them was not difficult.
“It’s about everyone doing their part to help keep each other and the country safe,” she says.
Big Picture Gallery: Thailand Flood Reaches Bangkok
November 3rd, 2011Via: Boston Globe:
Flood waters inundating Thailand north of Bangkok since July have made the journey south and reached the capital. The disaster is responsible for 400 deaths in Thailand and neighboring Cambodia and Vietnam. Thailand is the world’s biggest rice exporter, but the floods have wiped out over a quarter of the country’s crop. The government has declared a five-day holiday for the capital to allow residents time to evacuate. Damages could top six billion dollars in Thailand’s worst flooding in 50 years. Collected here are images of the water as it moves south to Bangkok, and how residents there are dealing with the disaster.
System D: The Shadow Superpower
November 3rd, 2011Via: Foreign Policy:
Forget China: the $10 trillion global black market is the world’s fastest growing economy — and its future.
…
You probably have never heard of System D. Neither had I until I started visiting street markets and unlicensed bazaars around the globe.
System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of “l’economie de la débrouillardise.” Or, sweetened for street use, “Systeme D.” This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a kitchen.
I like the phrase. It has a carefree lilt and some friendly resonances. At the same time, it asserts an important truth: What happens in all the unregistered markets and roadside kiosks of the world is not simply haphazard. It is a product of intelligence, resilience, self-organization, and group solidarity, and it follows a number of well-worn though unwritten rules. It is, in that sense, a system.
It used to be that System D was small — a handful of market women selling a handful of shriveled carrots to earn a handful of pennies. It was the economy of desperation. But as trade has expanded and globalized, System D has scaled up too. Today, System D is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world — close to 1.8 billion people — were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes.
Kids selling lemonade from the sidewalk in front of their houses are part of System D. So are many of the vendors at stoop sales, flea markets, and swap meets. So are the workers who look for employment in the parking lots of Home Depot and Lowe’s throughout the United States. And it’s not only cash-in-hand labor. As with David Obi’s deal to bring generators from China to Nigeria, System D is multinational, moving all sorts of products — machinery, mobile phones, computers, and more — around the globe and creating international industries that help billions of people find jobs and services.
Scale Of MF Global Bankruptcy Remains To Be Seen
November 3rd, 2011Via: AgWeb:
How deep this goes and the pending ripple effect to farm country, are still unknown. MF Global is a major clearing house for many agriculture traders and brokerage firms, and that could have severe effects on farmers who are actively trading.


