January22013

Al Jazeera Acquires Current TV

Al Jazeera on Wednesday completed a deal to take over Current TV, the low-rated cable channel that was founded by Al Gore and his business partners seven years ago.

Current will provide the pan-Arab news giant with something it has sought for years: a pathway into American living rooms. Current is available in about 60 million of the 100 million homes in the United States with cable or satellite service.

Bring on the #creepingsharia tags.

So excited for them!

(Source: nyt.com)

news literally news about news 

March202012

Al Jazeera Journalist Explains Resignation over Syria and Bahrain Coverage

Ali Hashem: Al Jazeera has become a “media war machine” and is “committing journalistic suicide”

Al Jazeera Bahrain Syria news propaganda 

December152011

Iceland recognises Palestinian state || Al Jazeera English

Iceland has become the first west European country to formally recognise a Palestinian state, three months after the Palestinians began to seek full membership of the United Nations with peace talks with Israel frozen indefinitely.

“Iceland didn’t only talk the talk, we walked the walk,” Icelandic Foreign Minister Ossur Skarphedinsson said on Thursday at a news conference in Reykjavik.

“We stood by our word, we have supported the Palestinian cause and today will not be the end of that, we will continue to do so,” he added.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki said: “[This] will surely have positive influence on other states to follow the same steps.”

The two also announced the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Nordic island nation and the Palestinians.
“There will be an ambassador from Iceland that will present his credentials to the Palestinians, a non-resident, and … we are contemplating the possibility of appointing an honorary consul, an Icelander, here for the time being,” Malki said.

Thursday’s ceremony at the Reykjavik Culture House follows two years of preparations and a vote in the Icelandic parliament, or Allthingi, on November 29 in favour of recognising the Palestinian state on the borders that existed before the 1967 Middle East war.

The move comes two days after the Palestinian flag was raised for the first time above the UNESCO headquarters in Paris to mark Palestine’s admission to the education, science and culture body.

Admission to UNESCO has however had no impact on the Palestinians’ bid for full UN membership. They would need nine votes out of 15 in the Security Council, but the US has made clear that it would veto the bid if needed.

Palestine Iceland news 

4PM

Indefinite detention bill passes in Senate - RT

Exactly 220 years to the date after the Bill of Rights was ratified, the US Senate today voted 86 to 13 in favor of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, allowing the indefinite detention and torture of Americans.

After a back-and-forth in recent days between both the Senate and House yielded intense criticism from Americans attempting to hold onto their Constitutional rights, NDAA FY2012 is now on its way to the White House, where yesterday the Obama administration revealed that the president would not veto the legislation, cancelling out a warning he offered less than a month earlier.

breaking news news NDAA Senate US Senate US politics politics 

December42011

Iran shoots down US drone – state TV || RT

Iran’s military says it has shot down a US reconnaissance drone aircraft in eastern Iran, Reuters news agency reports, citing state television.

­“Iran’s military has shot down an intruding RQ-170 American drone in eastern Iran,” an unnamed source has reportedly told Iran’s Arabic-language television network. 

Iran news breaking news United States 

November292011

Breaking: UK embassy stormed in Tehran, British flag burned, Iranian raised || RT

news Iran United Kingdom 

October312011

Palestine secures seat in UNESCO despite US threats

Palestine has received membership in the UN’s education, science and culture body after 107 of the 173 attending member states voted for it, with 14 against. The US objected to the move and threatened to curb its donations to the organization.

Half of the delegates present – 81 – had to vote in favor for the decision to be approved. Fifty-two members abstained from the vote.

Palestine breaking news news United Nations 

October62011

gonzodave:

Jon Stewart does 9 minutes on #occupywallstreet (Oct 5, 2011)

occupywallst ows occupywallstreet politics Jon Stewart news dissent 

7PM
cheguevaraslovechild: Lobbying - the Cancer Thats Killing American Politics Money is the drug of choice in Washington and professional lobbyists are the pushers supplying it in exchange for influence for their corporate masters.Like so many things in America, the practice of political lobbying is not always what it claims to be. In theory it is an expression of the publics right to petition their government and make their voice heard for change. In practice it is a cancer that has destroyed the credibility of American politics. It is the corrupt buying and selling of power. It is the way the system is perverted to work in favor of the rich and the big corporations but against the interests of the public the politicians are supposed to serve.There are literally thousands of ‘lobbyists’ swarming Washington, far more than there are politicians, and billions of dollars sloshing around in ‘campaign contributions’ and bribes and kickbacks. Lobbyists have all the money in the world to promote the interests of their masters and, in a system that is ultimately all about money, politicians are always ready to accommodate them.Mostly, the thousands of highly-paid lobbyists pushing money and favors at your elected politicians represent a narrow range of greed and vested interest such as big corporations, the health, and defense industries as well as richly funded pressure groups. They also, alarmingly, represent foreign governments and interests that may be hostile to America. Lobbyists don’t care because they’re mercenaries.This is not a new problem. Its just been getting worse. Many politicians, including Obama, have made pious noises about sweeping the corrupting influence of the lobbyists from Washington but no-one ever actually does anything because, in Americas corrupt and broken political system, the lure of big money is too powerful. The politicians and lobbyists need each other in a self-perpetuating circle of co-dependency. The scandal of lobbyists in Washington is so deeply engrained in Americas political system that many simply cannot see how shockingly sleazy and damaging it is. They don’t understand that it makes America look like some corrupt third-world power to other western countries. But it does.With neither of Americas so-called political parties committed to excising the cancer of lobbying from the body politic its hard to see how change can come. The present system colludes in, and supports, the corruption so clearly its never willingly going to reform itself. When money talks, principles walk.Ellie

cheguevaraslovechild:

Lobbying - the Cancer Thats Killing American Politics

Money is the drug of choice in Washington and professional lobbyists are the pushers supplying it in exchange for influence for their corporate masters.

Like so many things in America, the practice of political lobbying is not always what it claims to be. In theory it is an expression of the publics right to petition their government and make their voice heard for change.

In practice it is a cancer that has destroyed the credibility of American politics. It is the corrupt buying and selling of power. It is the way the system is perverted to work in favor of the rich and the big corporations but against the interests of the public the politicians are supposed to serve.

There are literally thousands of ‘lobbyists’ swarming Washington, far more than there are politicians, and billions of dollars sloshing around in ‘campaign contributions’ and bribes and kickbacks. Lobbyists have all the money in the world to promote the interests of their masters and, in a system that is ultimately all about money, politicians are always ready to accommodate them.

Mostly, the thousands of highly-paid lobbyists pushing money and favors at your elected politicians represent a narrow range of greed and vested interest such as big corporations, the health, and defense industries as well as richly funded pressure groups. They also, alarmingly, represent foreign governments and interests that may be hostile to America. Lobbyists don’t care because they’re mercenaries.

This is not a new problem. Its just been getting worse. Many politicians, including Obama, have made pious noises about sweeping the corrupting influence of the lobbyists from Washington but no-one ever actually does anything because, in Americas corrupt and broken political system, the lure of big money is too powerful. The politicians and lobbyists need each other in a self-perpetuating circle of co-dependency.

The scandal of lobbyists in Washington is so deeply engrained in Americas political system that many simply cannot see how shockingly sleazy and damaging it is. They don’t understand that it makes America look like some corrupt third-world power to other western countries. But it does.

With neither of Americas so-called political parties committed to excising the cancer of lobbying from the body politic its hard to see how change can come. The present system colludes in, and supports, the corruption so clearly its never willingly going to reform itself. When money talks, principles walk.

Ellie

(via gonzodave)

blog politics 99problems news osw occupywallstreet occupywallst 

October52011
“If you go to one demonstration and then go home, that’s something, but the people in power can live with that. What they can’t live with is sustained pressure that keeps building, organisations that keep doing things, people that keep learning lessons from the last time and doing it better the next time.” Noam Chomsky (via thought-emancipation)

(Source: dishabillic, via gonzodave)

noam chomsky occupy wall street politics reform occupywallst news 

October42011
“The “Mobile Informational Call Act” is an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934 and will allow political organizations, committees, and action groups to contact you on your mobile phone. The new bill, if passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by the President, would allow political organizations to use automated dialers and robocall-systems to dial your cell phone and hand you off to a live person or play automated messages asking you to contribute to political campaigns or take surveys.” Congress Is About to Make It Legal to Robocall Your Cell Phone; Here’s How to Speak Up Against It (via greaterthanlapsed)

(via gonzodave)

politics technology occupywallstreet news cell phone privacy 

September292011
“

Lost in the “Is it an iPad Killer?” hype is the audacious introduction of the Silk browser. Under the guise of increasing speed (on WiFi; there is no 3G Fire where download speed would be a larger issue), Amazon is performing astonishing jujitsu on Google.

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

And all of this on Google’s dime. They use a back-revved version of Android, not Honeycomb; they don’t use Google’s web browser; they can intermediate user click through on Google search results so Google doesn’t see the actual user behavior. Google’s whole play of promoting Android in order to aggregate user behavior patterns to sell to advertisers is completely subverted by Amazon’s intermediation.

Fire isn’t a noun, it’s a verb, and it’s what Amazon has done in the targeted direction of Google. This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation network.

”

Apple employee CHRIS ESPINOSA, remarking on Amazon’s Kindle Fire via his personal blog.

Something to think about.

Also, I can’t believe I understood everything I read just now.

(h/t The New York Times)

(Source: inothernews)

data mining amazon tech news kindle fire google 

September282011
“

Major health insurance companies have been charging sharply higher premiums this year, outstripping any growth in workers’ wages and creating more uncertainty for the Obama administration and employers who are struggling to drive down an unrelenting rise in medical costs.

A study released on Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a research group, showed that the average annual premium for family coverage through an employer reached $15,073 in 2011 — 9 percent higher than in the previous year. And even higher premiums could be on the way, particularly in New York, where some companies are asking for double-digit increases for about 1.3 million New Yorkers in individual or small-group plans, setting up a battle with state regulators.

The higher premiums are particularly unwelcome at a time when the economy is sputtering and unemployment is hovering at about 9 percent. Many businesses cite the cost of coverage as a factor in their decision not to hire, and health insurance has become increasingly unaffordable for more Americans. The cost of family coverage has about doubled since 2001, compared with a 34 percent gain in wages.

Aetna and United Health/Oxford said their requested rate increases in New York largely reflected actual hospital, physician and pharmacy costs. “Our rate requests are simply keeping pace,” said Maria Gordon Shydlo, a spokeswoman.

How much the new federal health care legislation pushed by President Obama is affecting rates remains a point of debate, with some consumer advocates and others suggesting that insurers have raised prices in anticipation of new rules that would, in 2012, require them to justify any increase of more than 10 percent. Kaiser pointed out that the increase this year could be an anomaly, after several years of 3 percent to 5 percent increases during the recession.

”

The New York Times, “Health Insurers Push Premiums Sharply Higher.”

Insurance company scumbaggery at work, folks.  This is why we need reform.

(via inothernews)

health insurance hcr healthcare reform news 

September252011
futurejournalismproject: “This will happen to all the Internet snitches.” The bodies of a man and a woman hang from a bridge in Neuvo Laredo, a city along the US-Mexico border. The two were allegedly killed by drug cartel members for reporting information about drug violence to Mexican Web sites that aggregate such data. The quote above is from a sign found near the two. Via a September 15 New York Times post in the Lede Blog: The murders were all the more disturbing because, absent regular news reports on the drug violence, many in Mexico turn to Twitter and other social media for information. Hashtags — which tie Twitter posts together — have become an important sorting mechanism, turning connected reports by individual Twitter accounts into an ad hoc news service. And from today’s New York Times: The killings highlighted the growing power of the so-called cyber guardians, whose Twitter accounts sometimes carry avatars depicting Pancho Villa and other heroes of the Mexican Revolution. The drug cartels, which have often successfully enforced information blackouts at the local level by intimidating the police and reporters, are clearly threatened by the decentralized distribution of the Web. And it may be harder for them to control. Today’s Times story begins with Mexican Twitter users alerting one another to stay away from a particular street in Veracruz. Masked gunmen were in the process of dumping 35 bodies under a bridge. Image Source: Borderland Beat.

futurejournalismproject:

“This will happen to all the Internet snitches.”

The bodies of a man and a woman hang from a bridge in Neuvo Laredo, a city along the US-Mexico border. The two were allegedly killed by drug cartel members for reporting information about drug violence to Mexican Web sites that aggregate such data.

The quote above is from a sign found near the two.

Via a September 15 New York Times post in the Lede Blog:

The murders were all the more disturbing because, absent regular news reports on the drug violence, many in Mexico turn to Twitter and other social media for information. Hashtags — which tie Twitter posts together — have become an important sorting mechanism, turning connected reports by individual Twitter accounts into an ad hoc news service.

And from today’s New York Times:

The killings highlighted the growing power of the so-called cyber guardians, whose Twitter accounts sometimes carry avatars depicting Pancho Villa and other heroes of the Mexican Revolution. The drug cartels, which have often successfully enforced information blackouts at the local level by intimidating the police and reporters, are clearly threatened by the decentralized distribution of the Web. And it may be harder for them to control.

Today’s Times story begins with Mexican Twitter users alerting one another to stay away from a particular street in Veracruz. Masked gunmen were in the process of dumping 35 bodies under a bridge.

Image Source: Borderland Beat.

(Source: futurejournalismproject, via brooklynmutt)

mexico drug violence twitter social media citizen reporting alert systems news 

September242011

umalik:

Scientists Reconstruct Brains’ Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment

Scientists for the first time have been able to reconstruct brain’s vision in a consistent digital video and this is going to have huge implications. Just looking at these video clips I see a beautiful art form but imagine if you could record all of your dreams at night so you can watch them in the morning?

Presently my understanding is that these are only tapping into the visions your brain is producing not your memory but what if that is next on the list? 

For more details on how this is actually done, click here.

(via pak-socioeconomy)

science social news 

← Older entries Page 1 of 3