The country has qualified for the 2015 Cricket World Cup to be played in Australia and New Zealand. Given the fact that this country has been in pretty much a permanent state of major war for the past three decades, that turmoil in the country has seemed to be continual fact of life, and the fact that cricket is relatively new to that country, this is a remarkable achievement. [Read more…]
The Russian government has set in place a monitoring system that will enable their security services to gather up all communications during the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The program is being described as ‘PRISM on steroids’, comparing it to one of the monitoring programs of the NSA.
Athletes and spectators attending the Winter Olympics in Sochi in February will face some of the most invasive and systematic spying and surveillance in the history of the Games, documents shared with the Guardian show.
Russia’s powerful FSB security service plans to ensure that no communication by competitors or spectators goes unmonitored during the event, according to a dossier compiled by a team of Russian investigative journalists looking into preparations for the 2014 Games.
…Tellingly, the FSB has appointed one of its top counterintelligence chiefs, Oleg Syromolotov, to be in charge at Sochi: security will thus be overseen by someone who has spent his career chasing foreign spies rather than terrorists.
…In the end, the goal is overarching, but simple, says Soldatov: “Russian authorities want to make sure that every connection and every move made online in Sochi during the Olympics will be absolutely transparent to the secret services of the country.”
I am surprised that the Russians did not hire Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, as a consultant on this effort.
I am waiting for the US and UK governments to denounce this massive invasion of people’s privacy as an indicator of how that country does not share its democratic values for the rights of the individual.
The Affordable Care Act has two main elements. One is to provide affordable health insurance to working people through the health care exchanges but these can be taken advantage of only by people who are working and roughly in the middle class in terms of income but do not have health insurance through their employers. It is this part that was inaugurated on October 1 and has received a lot of attention. [Read more…]
I have previously railed against the practice of tipping, seeing it as something that encourages servile behavior and is demeaning. It seems to me to be a relic of the feudal system in which the nobility acted patronizingly towards the peasantry by giving them gifts in exchange for acting obsequiously towards them. So I was pleased to see that some restaurants are adopting a no-tipping policy and paying their employees a living wage, by either raising their menu prices and/or adding a service charge automatically. [Read more…]
Scott Rigell, a Republican congressman, seems to have decided to not follow the party line on how to vote on the shut down and is now calling for a vote on a ‘clean’ continuing resolution. He was the only Republican to vote against a continuing resolution that defunded the Affordable Care Act, though his reason for doing so was because it didn’t replace the sequester. [Read more…]
It turns out that in March this year, congressman Frank Wolf, chair of the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee initiated a bill that incredibly was allowed to become a law that prohibited Chinese nationals, even those who are already in the US and working at US universities and other institutions, from even setting foot in a NASA building. The reason given was the risk of espionage. [Read more…]
Old timers will remember the name Vo Nguyen Giap. He was the legendary leader of the North Vietnamese army who is credited with leading the Vietnamese to victory over much more powerful armies, first famously defeating the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and later successfully resisting the US invasion of his country and forcing them out, leading to the reunification of Vietnam in 1975. [Read more…]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is clearly alarmed at the way that Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani has made inroads in the west and the thaw that seems to be occurring between Iran and the US. The goal of Israel has been to have the US go to war with Iran and so you could expect him to use his annual speech to the UN to whip up alarm about the extreme danger posed by Iran’s nuclear program and urge that everything be done to completely dismantle it. But it would be hard to top the comedic effect produced by last year’s speech with the ridiculous cartoon of a bomb that spawned numerous parodies inspired by the similarities to the Road Runner and Bugs Bunny. [Read more…]
That is what the character Dr. House said in one episode of his eponymous TV show. That particular episode about a 15-year old faith healer is hilarious and sharply written. An excellent summary of that show that lasts 17:30 minutes and contains all the good bits can be seen here. [Read more…]
It is no secret that the leadership of the Republican party would like to re-open the government by passing a clean continuing resolution without any other provisions and also to raise the debt-ceiling limit. It is also clear that there are more than enough Republican votes in the House of Representatives to join up with the Democrats to do so. The number of Republicans who refuse to do is lies anywhere from 30 to 80, not small but nowhere near enough to stop this from happening, if the Republican leadership were to bring it to the floor. [Read more…]