Looting At Several Supermarkets in Argentina; Two Dead, Hundreds Arrested; Military Deployed

December 22nd, 2012

Via: Reuters:

Two people were killed in Argentina on Friday as looters broke into supermarkets in several cities, stirring memories of the country’s devastating economic crisis 11 years ago.

Police fired teargas and rubber bullets to stop dozens of stone-throwing youths from looting a supermarket owned by French retailer Carrefour near the capital, a day after the unrest erupted in the Patagonian ski resort of Bariloche.

Government officials condemned the violence and sent 400 military police to the southern city, where raiders stormed a supermarket owned by the local unit of Wal-Mart and made off with flat-screen televisions and other goods.

The violence spread to the central city of Rosario, where two people were killed, and to the northern province of Chaco. About 250 people were arrested in total in four different provinces and police battled to avert fresh incidents in the urban sprawl that encircles Buenos Aires.

“When you see that they’re taking flat-screens, you know it’s not hunger,” said Daniel Scioli, governor of Buenos Aires province and an ally of President Cristina Fernandez.


How the Internet Became a Closed Shop

December 22nd, 2012

Via: Sydney Morning Herald:

A LITTLE over a decade ago, just before the masses discovered the digital universe, the internet was a borderless new frontier: a terra nullius to be populated by individuals, groups and programmers as they saw fit. There were few rules and no boundaries. Freedom and open standards, sharing information for the greater good was the ethos.

Today, the open internet we once knew is fracturing into a series of gated communities or fiefdoms controlled by giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and to a lesser extent Microsoft. A billion-dollar battle conducted in walled cities where companies try to lock our consumption into their vision of the internet. It has left some lamenting the ”web we lost”.


Delta Air Gets 22,000 Applications for 300 Attendant Jobs

December 22nd, 2012

Via: Bloomberg:

Delta Air Lines Inc. (DAL), the world’s second-largest carrier, received 22,000 applications for about 300 flight attendant jobs in the first week after posting the positions outside the company.

The applications arrived at a rate of two per minute, Chief Executive Officer Richard Anderson told workers in a weekly recorded message. Applicants will be interviewed in January and those hired will begin flying in June, for the peak travel season.

“We’re hunting for foreign-language speakers as we continue to expand to all points around the globe,” Anderson said. “We are experiencing a phenomenal response to the job posting.”


Military Turns to ESPN to Help Analyze Drone Footage

December 22nd, 2012

Via: USA Today:

Can SportsCenter teach the military something about combating terrorists?

After rapidly expanding the number of drones around the world, the Air Force is now reaching out to ESPN and other experts in video analysis to keep up with the flood of footage the unmanned aircraft are transmitting.

“They’re looking at anything and everything they can right now,” said Air Force Col. Mike Shortsleeve, commander of a unit here that monitors drone videos.

The remote-controlled aircraft are mounted with cameras that transmit real-time video of terrorism suspects to military analysts in the USA.

The amount of video streaming into this base, one of a number of sites that monitors and analyzes the images, is immense. Drone video transmissions rose to 327,384 hours last year, up from 4,806 in 2001.

Given the huge amount of feeds, the Air Force has launched an aggressive effort to seek out technology or techniques that will help them process video without adding more people to stare at monitors.

“We need to be careful we don’t drown in the data,” said David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and a senior military scholar at the Air Force Academy.


‘American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals’

December 22nd, 2012

Via: Bloomberg:

Generation Y professionals entering the workforce are finding careers that once were gateways to high pay and upwardly mobile lives turning into detours and dead ends. Average incomes for individuals ages 25 to 34 have fallen 8 percent, double the adult population’s total drop, since the recession began in December 2007. Their unemployment rate remains stuck one-half to 1 percentage point above the national figure.

Three and a half years after the worst recession since the Great Depression, the earnings and employment gap between those in the under-35 population and their parents and grandparents threatens to unravel the American dream of each generation doing better than the last. The nation’s younger workers have benefited least from an economic recovery that has been the most uneven in recent history.
‘Permanently Depressed’

“This generation will be permanently depressed and will be on a lower path of income for probably all of their life — and at least the next 10 years,” says Rutgers professor Cliff Zukin, a senior research fellow at the university’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. Professionals who start out in jobs other than their first choice tend to stay on the alternative path, earning less than they would have otherwise while becoming less likely to start over again later in preferred fields, Zukin says.

Michael Greenstone, who was chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 2009 and 2010, says the shift to a downwardly mobile society may be lasting. “Children are not earning as much as their parents, and I think we’re laying the seeds for that to continue into the future,” he says.

Research Credit: conceptualdecay


NYPD to Use Internet to Try to Stop Mass Shootings

December 22nd, 2012

Mmm hmm.

Via: New York Times:

Top intelligence officials in the New York Police Department met on Thursday to examine ways to search the Internet to identify potential “deranged” gunmen before they strike, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

“The techniques would include cyber-searches of language that mass-casualty shooters have used in e-mails and Internet postings,” Mr. Kelly said in a statement. “The goal would be to identify the shooter in cyberspace, engage him there and intervene, possibly using an undercover to get close, and take him into custody or otherwise disrupt his plans.”

The meeting came almost a week after a gunman killed 26 people, 20 of them children, inside Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

There are plans to send officers to Newtown and to scenes of other mass shootings to collect information, Paul. J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said.

Mr. Browne said the potential tactics included creating an algorithm that would search online “for terms used by active shooters in the past that may be an indicator of future intentions.”

Mr. Kelly said the technique was similar to those being used to spot terrorists’ chatter online. The new searches would target “apolitical or deranged killers before they become active shooters,” he said.

Research Credit: ottilie


MIT Discovers a New State of Matter, a New Kind of Magnetism

December 21st, 2012

Via: ExtremeTech:

Researchers at MIT have discovered a new state of matter with a new kind of magnetism. This new state, called a quantum spin liquid (QSL), could lead to significant advances in data storage. QSLs also exhibit a quantum phenomenon called long-range entanglement, which could lead to new types of communications systems, and more.


Obama Named Time’s ‘Person of the Year’: ‘Architect of This New America’

December 20th, 2012

Where does one even start?

Via: Stuff:

US President Barack Obama has been named Time magazine’s “person of the year” for 2012.

“We are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes, and Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America,” Time Editor Rick Stengel told NBC’s “Today” show, where he announced the selection on Wednesday.


Congress Uses School Massacre Hysteria as Distraction to Restore Indefinite Detention for Americans

December 20th, 2012

Via: Huffington Post:

Congress stripped a provision Tuesday from a defense bill that aimed to shield Americans from the possibility of being imprisoned indefinitely without trial by the military. The provision was replaced with a passage that appears to give citizens little protection from indefinite detention.

The amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 was added by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), but there was no similar language in the version of the bill that passed the House, and it was dumped from the final bill released Tuesday after a conference committee from both chambers worked out a unified measure.

It declared that “An authorization to use military force, a declaration of war, or any similar authority shall not authorize the detention without charge or trial of a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States apprehended in the United States, unless an Act of Congress expressly authorizes such detention.”

The provision sparked a heated debate in the Senate, but ultimately passed by a wide majority with both supporters and opponents of U.S. terrorist detention practices voting for it, citing differing interpretations. Feinstein offered the amendment to clarify a part of the 2012 NDAA that for the first time codified the ability of the military and White House to detain terrorism suspects.


The Economic Return of Iceland Has Proved That the Joke Was on Ireland

December 20th, 2012

Via: Irish Independent:

WAY back in the autumn of 2008, the joke in financial circles was that the only difference between Ireland and Iceland was a letter and six months. Now, with the Icelandic banks preparing to issue foreign currency bonds once again, it turns out that the joke was on us.

Remember when the Icelandics did the unthinkable and, unlike Ireland, told bank creditors to take a hike? They also imposed capital controls and allowed the value of their currency to fall – the Icelandic krona has lost almost half of its value against the euro over the past five years.

The “experts” queued up to assure us that these latter-day Vikings would be severely punished for their impertinence. While no one forecast that a hole would open up in the North Atlantic and swallow Iceland whole, some of the predictions came pretty darned close.

Meanwhile, we in Ireland did what we were told and repaid over €70bn of bank bonds at par. By doing so, even at the cost of bankrupting the State, the “experts” assured us that we would retain the confidence of the markets. Now, four years later, it is clear that, not for the first time, the “experts” have got it wrong. Catastrophically and utterly wrong.

Since putting the taxpayer on the hook for the banks’ debts, the domestic economy has shrunk by almost a quarter in nominal or cash terms. And any real recovery is still a long way off. The documents along with this month’s Budget reveal that the Department of Finance is expecting Irish GNP, basically the domestic economy, to grow by 1.4 per cent in 2012 and 0.9 per cent next year. Other forecasters are taking a far more pessimistic view.

Way out in the North Atlantic, things have turned out rather differently. Economic growth is expected to be 3.1 per cent this year and 2.2 per cent in 2013. But surely after stitching up its bank creditors – the Icelandic banking default cost $85bn, a massive amount for a country with a population of 320,000 people – the country remains persona non grata with the international financial markets. Having been so badly bitten once, the markets must be twice or even thrice shy of Iceland.

Not so. The Icelandic treasury successfully flogged $1bn of 10-year bonds to investors in May. These bonds were initially priced to yield a spread of 407 basis points (4.07 per cent) over comparable US treasuries, a margin which has since narrowed to 296 basis points.

In the financial markets, as elsewhere in life, eaten bread is soon forgotten. Would-be investors in Icelandic bonds focus most of their attention, not on what happened in the past, but on what is likely to happen in the future.


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