Millions of food stamp recipients in the United States will see their benefits cut from the beginning of next month as the program is fully paid through October.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will be cut because a temporary measure to increase food stamps expires Oct. 31.
The country’s weak economy and the high rate of unemployment have caused a growing number of people to rely on the SNAP program. Some 48 million Americans are using food stamps each month, half of them children and teenagers.
According to the US Department of Agriculture, the average benefit is currently about $275 per household per month and a family of four with no changes in circumstance will receive $36 less per month.
The change means that the average benefit will go from about $1.50 per person, per meal each month to about $1.40.
“For those of us who spend $1.70 a day on a latte this doesn’t seem like a big change, but it does kind of really highlight the millions of families living on an extremely modest food budget,” Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said.
“Every week is a struggle as it is,” said Heidi Leno, who lives in Concord with her husband, 9-year-old daughter and twin 5-year-olds. “We hate living paycheck to paycheck and you have to decide what gets paid.”
Jennifer Donald, a mother of three in Philadelphia, said she counts on the family’s $460 monthly benefit to put food on the table.
“I was mad and devastated and a little bit confused because we need our benefits,” Donald said. “This is the way we eat right now. Live a day in our life before you can cut our benefits.”
This is while lawmakers are considering slashing billions of dollars to the overall program.
Last month, the House of Representatives voted to cut food stamps funding by $39 billion over the next decade. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that such a level of cuts would cause up to 3.8 million people to lose food stamp benefits in 2014.
The US Senate had previously voted to cut $4 billion from the program.
UK service company Serco has its fingers in numerous government pies, running British services from transport to prisons while staying invisible to the ‘man on the street.’ The global giant now faces investigation for fraud as it seeks new contracts.
Towards the end of September, the company was alleged in a government report to have charged for the service of tagging criminals who were dead, in prison, or were never tagged at all.
Serco and private security giant G4S overcharged the government by tens of millions of pounds for the practice, which, according to Big Four accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, could date back as far as 1999.
The expose prompted Britain’s Serious Fraud Office to confirm that they are assessing information on Serco provided by the Ministry of Justice.
“We are clear that new business can only be awarded where the integrity of the contracts and the conduct of suppliers can be assured,” the Ministry of Justice stated.
This could lead to an official investigation, and has thrown the company’s leadership into the spotlight as the global giant seeks new defense contracts.
On Friday, it emerged that Serco had been one of three main bidders filing proposals with the UK Ministry of Defence for the role of running a £400 million ($646 million) contract. While it can still bid, it cannot be chosen until present issues are resolved. The deal would run for ten years.
Serco, Telereal Trillium, and Capita-led groups submitted initial proposals in June, while the new bids were executed this week. The contract winner is expected to be chosen by the end of the year.
“Are they competent? Do they have the expertise? Can they really effectively manage the service? I think the answer is becoming clear that no they can’t,” Jane Lethbridge from Public Services International Research Unit told RT.
Meanwhile, Serco has apparently been attempting to rejuvenate its public image, particularly in Britain where its headquarters are based. Some 25 percent of its £4.9 billion ($7.9 billion) annual revenue is acquired through work with the UK government. Around 45 percent of its total revenue comes from the British public sector.
“We will embed quickly and effectively any changes needed into the way we do business, and we expect Serco to emerge stronger as a result,” the company stated.
On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that Serco is predicted to be purging its senior UK management as part of the drive to improve its governmental relationship following its tumultuous year. However, the news left critics doubting whether a mere change in personnel could reform an entire company culture.
“You can’t change a culture in three months,” Andre Spicer, professor of organizational behavior at Cass Business School, told the paper. “The only times that might be possible is if there’s a severe external threat or emergency but I don’t think Serco is in that position at the moment.”
Lethbridge appeared to agree. “Their practices and their publicity are two different things,” she said.
Further commentators have urged caution on the part of Serco. “One of the reasons that these public service markets often go wrong is because the pace and scale of reform is causing significant problems. In the rush to develop public service markets, avoidable errors have been made in design and oversight,” Nechal Panchamia, a researcher at the Institute for Government, told RT.
“What we would urge the government is to slow down, learn quickly from mistakes, and correct them out of the system before another mistake grabs the headline,” she said.
The incident marks the latest in a long line of controversies surrounding the company.
In August, the City of London police were called in by UK Justice Secretary Chris Grayling to probe alleged fraud by the company’s staff working on a £285 million ($460 million) prisoner escorting contract.
“It has become very clear there has been a culture within parts of Serco that has been totally unacceptable,” Grayling said upon launching the investigation.
Early in September, Serco was booted off the FTSE 100. Following the September fraud allegations, Serco’s shares dropped 8p (13 cents) – nearly 1.5 percent – to 543p (942 cents) over the course of a day.
The fraud-related claims follow a list of allegations of detainees facing sexual abuse at Serco-run UK immigration center Yarl’s Wood in September. The reports were corroborated later in the month by further detainees, according to the Guardian.
Although companies like Serco, Capita, and G4S are behind public bicycle rental schemes, speed cameras, military and nuclear weapons contracts, ambulances, and the government’s work program for the jobless, it is apparent that the nation’s general public still remain relatively oblivious to the major role they play in modern society. An RT survey conducted on the streets of London indicated that the average ‘man on the street’ recognized very few of the company names mentioned.
MOSCOW – Russia has begun shipping military hardware to Iraq, Ali al-Musawi, advisor of the Iraqi Prime Minister told Russia Today on Thursday.
The official noted that the contract “entails primarily weapon shipments to combat terrorism.” The advisor clarified that Russia will provide “helicopters which were proven to be effective during anti-terrorist operations. Special hardware to combat terrorists will also be supplied.”
Ali al-Musawi noted that “Iraq does not possess offensive weapons, as it does not hatch any plans for expansion. Bagdad only strives for securing its own sovereignty, defense of its wealth and fight against terrorism.”
Iraq will receive 40 helicopters
The $4.2 billion contract was signed in 2012. In early 2013 reports on its annulment surfaced; however, Anatoly Isaykin, Director General of Rosoboronexport, announced at a press conference in February that the contract was not annulled; rather, it hasn’t come into force yet.
The agreement entails providing Iraq with 40 attack helicopters Mi-35 and Mi-28 “Night Hunter”. The first team of Iraq specialists has concluded Mi-35 flight training in the Russian Center for Military Aviation in Torzhok.
Previously Russia wrote off Iraq’s debt in exchange to expected large-scale purchases of Russian military hardware.
Traditional ties
Iraq purchased most of its military hardware in the USSR and Russia. During the Soviet era around $30.5 billion were spent on Russian arms throughout 30 years. Former deals include around 1000 planes and 350 helicopters as well as AA systems, land transport and watercraft.
Resumption of export of Russian hardware to Iraq is explained by the Iraqi armed forces being used to Russian weapons as well as diversification of suppliers – after Saddam Hussein’s regime toppled, Bagdad started purchasing weapons from the United States. Baghdad and Washington have made arms deals with the total price of over $12 billion.
Despite a deal to lift the debt ceiling and end the government shutdown, the United States is far from a respite, as it won’t address the underlying, internal issues that have usurped its power in the world, economics professor Rodney Shakespeare told RT.
RT:The default is averted. That’s good news, isn’t it?
Rodney Shakespeare: Nothing has been averted. Instead, there’s going to be some sort of meeting between the Democrats and the Republicans, who are two sides of the same coin. And there are three subjects, which they’ll refuse to discuss. The first is the out of control military budget, which ought to be cut to one tenth of what it is at the moment to bring it in line with comparable nations. The second thing is that the system works by exporting jobs. They’ve exported the jobs to about 56,000 enterprises over the last 11 years. That’s five million jobs – and each job creates another three. That’s roughly 15 million jobs which aren’t coming back. And the third thing, which they aren’t going to discuss at this ‘wonderful’ meeting between the Democrats and the Republicans – they will not discuss the core of the issue, which is a corrupt banking system, whose center is the Federal Reserve. Instead, what they’ll do is they’ll blame everything on the poor. So, you see, nothing has been put off. Nothing has been solved. Nothing has been addressed. The situation goes on and ultimately it’s going to result in the final collapse of the dollar. But that may be a year or two off at the moment.
RT:It’s only a temporary fix for the US debt ceiling. But what happens when America is on the verge of running out of cash again?
RS: The same thing is going to happen as is happening at this moment, except that another two or three months will have passed, in which they’ve failed to address the underlying issues and their vanity and the essence of the corruption of the system will not have been addressed. So, you’re going to find at some point that they’ll then…the world will wake up to the overall level of the American debt, which is now just at the point when it becomes unrepairable. And when that happens, you’ll get a sudden, irrevocable slide in the dollar. So, they’ll kick the can down the road for a bit.
RT:It may also be difficult for the rest of the world to understand why there had to be so much last-minute drama in Washington, DC before they reached an agreement. A domestic squabble that held the rest of the world to economic ransom – can the global community afford to risk that again?
RS: The world community should continue doing what it’s quietly doing at the moment: starting to organize it in ways which are separate [from] and outside the West. They should do it in their banking agreements. I’m pleased to say that the BRICs are creating on optic fiber cable, so that the banking can be done away from the West. They should do it by creating different national and central banks, which put out interest-free money. They should make agreements among themselves, particularly among the non-allied nations. This should be political agreements and financial agreements. They must accept that the West now…its economic powers have declined; its political powers have declined. And as of America’s moral authority? Forget it! They are putting out a poisonous depleted uranium. They’re attacking. They’re assassinating. They have no moral authority whatsoever. Everybody else should get on with organizing themselves away from the pariah states, which are now the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, with their poodles, which are the UK and France. I say to the rest of the world: Get on with it. Organize yourselves and give up this corrupt, out-of-date system, which no longer is providing adequate leadership.
Here I sit, in West Virginia, staring down at January 1, 2014.
That’s when my health insurance policy expires and I have a decision to make — renew or not renew?
Right now, I’m paying about $7,000 a year in premiums for a monster deductible and yearly out of pocket of about $15,000 for myself and my family.
My health insurance company informed me yesterday that my premium will be doubled to $14,000 on January 1.
I’ve been trying to get onto the Obamacare web site now for ten days to search for an alternative. No luck. I made it through four pages yesterday — then got a message saying I’d have to wait because there was too much traffic. When I clicked the continue button, it wiped out the information I had typed into the first three pages.
But even if I do get onto the exchanges, it’s probably not going to matter.
I read in a newspaper that Highmark is the only health insurance company on the exchange in West Virginia. Yesterday, I called Highmark and spent an hour on the phone with a nice young man — but the results were not good. The skimpiest plan is going to cost me more than I’m paying now for a higher deductible and out of pocket result.
Thank you Obamacare.
My insurance agent told me yesterday I had only one alternative — wait for six years until Medicare kicks in and keep fighting for single payer.
Obviously, the Democrats and anyone who defends them are not going to be of any help in the next round. They are irrevocably tied to President Obama and Obamacare and even those Democrats nominally in favor of single payer refuse to criticize it for the industry written law that it is.
I agree with Dr. Quentin Young of Physicians for a National Health Program when he says that Obamacare should have been defeated because it enshrines and solidifies corporate domination of the health care system.
But what to do next? Well, first thing is to watch a movie called Healthcare — The Movie. It’s a short documentary — 62 minutes — but packs a big punch. The movie was produced by a husband wife team — the wife Canadian — Laurie Simons — and the husband American — Terry Sterrenberg.
The movie toggles back and forth between the USA and Canada — with Americans struggling with bankruptcy, death from lack of health insurance and the dark cloud of health insurance armageddon menacing their lives from cradle to an often early grave.
The Canadians, by contrast, are living in a relative health care nirvana, thanks in large part to Tommy Douglas, a boxer and Premier of Saskatchewan who stood up to the red baiting being dished out at the time by the Canadian medical establishment. Douglas emerged victorious and his efforts resulted in the creation of Canada’s single payer Medicare for all. The movie is narrated by actor Kiefer Sutherland — Tommy Douglas’ grandson.
The film features great historic clips — including a remarkable scene where a CBC television show host asks the question — who is the greatest Canadian? And then, in reality show format, puts it up to a vote.
“After six weeks, ten finalists, and more than a million votes,” the CBC host says, “it ended tonight with one name. And I have the envelope here. The greatest Canadian as decided by you is — Tommy Douglas.”
Imagine that — the country says that Tommy Douglas, the father of single payer in Canada, is greater than its greatest hockey player — Wayne Gretzky.
Tommy Douglas’ courageous act — standing up for the people of Canada against the vicious attacks of the powers that be — has resulted in a system that delivers health care for all Canadians — no complex bills, no deductibles, no deaths from lack of health insurance, no medical bankruptcies — all funded by a progressive tax system.
The movie profiles Canadians with serious medical illness — who come out financially unscathed — no bills, no bankruptcy, no health related financial worries.
And then compares those Canadians to the suffering human beings south of the border.
The movie does a good job of making us Americans feel like crap compared to our cousins up north.
Check out this sequence, for example:
How many people in the United States die each year because they have no health insurance?
45,000
How many people in Canada die each year because they have no health insurance?
Zero.
How many people go bankrupt each year in the United States because of medical expenses?
922,819
How many people go bankrupt each year in Canada because of medical expenses?
Zero.
How many Americans do not have health insurance?
50 million.
How many Canadians do not have health insurance?
Zero.
How many Americans go without medical care because of costs?
115 million.
How many Canadians go without medical care because of costs?
Zero.
One of the stars of this film is a young American from Portland, Oregon named Lindsay Caron.
“I was a free-lance artist for a long time,” Caron says. “I gave that up to go sit in an office and file papers so that I could have health care. And it amazed me that other people in other countries never had to think about that. I kept hearing that Canada’s system was broken, and that Canadians were flocking over the border to get US care. And so I wanted to go to Canada with a camera and ask a couple hundred people. I bought a ticket up to Vancouver, Canada. I rented camera equipment. And I took my bicycle. I thought maybe I would stay in Vancouver for a couple of days and cycle on back to Portland. I ended staying there the whole week. I got up in the morning, set up a camera on the street and just start asking people questions.”
Caron finds out what polls in Canada consistently confirm — that the vast majority of Canadians would never in a thousand years give up their Medicare coverage for the nightmare south of the border.
It all came about because Tommy Douglas had the guts to stand up to the political and medical establishment and do what is right for the Canadian people.
Canada did it.
There is no reason we can’t do it.
It’s simply a matter of reordering our priorities.
Let’s put aside, for a moment, our millions of copies of Grand Theft Auto 5 and start playing a new game — Grand Theft — Health Insurance.
The goal of the game is to become a boxer, like Tommy Douglas — and fight back against the insurance industry and its Frankenstein monster — Obamacare.
Two recent images encapsulate the message behind the dry statistics of last week’s report by the World Bank on the state of the Palestinian economy.
The first is a poster from the campaigning group Visualising Palestine that shows a photoshopped image of Central Park, eerily naked. Amid New York’s skyscrapers, the park has been sheared of its trees by bulldozers. A caption reveals that since the occupation began in 1967, Israel has uprooted 800,000 olive trees belonging to Palestinians, enough to fill 33 Central Parks.
The second, a photograph widely published last month in Israel, is of a French diplomat lying on her back in the dirt, staring up at Israeli soldiers surrounding her, their guns pointing down towards her. Marion Castaing had been mistreated when she and a small group of fellow diplomats tried to deliver emergency aid, including tents, to Palestinian farmers whose homes had just been razed.
The demolitions were part of long-running efforts by Israel to clear Palestinians out of the Jordan Valley, the agricultural heartland of a future Palestinian state. Ms Castaing’s defiance resulted in her being quietly packed off back to Europe, as French officials sought to avoid a confrontation with Israel.
The World Bank report is a way of stating discreetly what Castaing and other diplomats hoped to highlight more directly: that Israel is gradually whittling away the foundations on which the Palestinians can build an independent economic life and a viable state.
This report follows a long line of warnings in recent years from international bodies on the dire economic situation facing Palestinians. But, significantly, the World Bank has homed in on the key battleground for an international community still harbouring the forlorn hope that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will end in Palestinian statehood.
The report’s focus is on the nearly two-thirds of the West Bank, known as Area C, that is exclusively under Israeli control and in which Israel has implanted more than 200 settlements to grab Palestinian land and resources.
The World Bank report should be seen as a companion piece to the surprise decision of the European Union in the summer to exclude entities associated with the settlements from EU funding.
Both in turn reflect mounting frustration in European capitals and elsewhere at Israeli intransigence and seeming US impotence. Europeans, in particular, are exasperated at their continuing role effectively subsidising through aid an Israeli occupation with no end in sight.
With Israel and the Palestinians forced back to the negotiating table since July, and after the US secretary of state, John Kerry, warned that this was the “last chance” for a deal, the international community is desperate to exercise whatever small leverage it has on Israel and the US to secure a Palestinian state.
The World Bank’s concern about Area C is justified. This is the location of almost all the resources a Palestinian state will need to exploit: undeveloped land for future construction; arable land and water springs to grow crops; quarries to mine stone and the Dead Sea to extract minerals; and archaeological sites to attract tourism.
With access to these resources, the Palestinian Authority could generate an extra income of $3.4 billion a year, increasing its GDP by a third, reducing a ballooning deficit, cutting unemployment rates that have reached 23 per cent, easing poverty and food insecurity and helping the fledgling state break free of aid dependency. But none of this can be achieved while Israel maintains its chokehold on Area C in violation of the 1993 Oslo accords.
Israel has entrenched its rule in Area C precisely because of its wealth of natural resources. Israel neither wants the Palestinians to gain the assets with which to build a state nor intends to lose the many material benefits it has accrued for itself and the settler population in Area C.
It is its treatment of Area C that gives the lie to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that he has been pursuing “economic peace” with the Palestinians in lieu of progress on the diplomatic front. Rather, the Palestinian description of Israeli policy as “economic warfare” is much nearer the mark. During the Oslo period, the disparity between Israel’s per capita GDP and that of the Palestinians has doubled, to $30,000. And the World Bank says that the Palestinian economy is rapidly shrinking: the 11 per cent growth that Netanyahu took credit for in 2011 has crashed to 1.9 per cent in the first six months of this year. In the West Bank, GDP has actually contracted, by 0.1 per cent.
Despite its resources, Area C is being starved of Palestinian funds. Investors are averse to dealing with Israeli military authorities who invariably deny them development permits and severely restrict movement. The image of the French diplomat in the dirt is one that symbolises their own likely treatment if they confront Israel in Area C. Palestinian farmers, meanwhile, cannot grow profitable crops with the miserly water rations Israel allots them from their own aquifers.
Aware of the many obstacles to developing Area C, Palestinian officials have simply neglected it, concentrating instead on the densely populated and resource-poor third of the West Bank under their full or partial control.
The hope was that this would change when Kerry announced in the run-up to the renewed talks a plan to encourage private investors to pour in $4 billion to develop the Palestinian economy. But the reality, as the report notes, is that there can be no serious investment in the economic heartland of Area C until Israel’s control ends.
In effect, the World Bank is saying that Kerry’s plan – and the role of the international community’s envoy Tony Blair, the so-called Quatet Representative – is not only misguided, it is positively delusional. The Quartet has been trying to revive the Palestinian economy to usher in the conditions for statehood; the World Bank’s view is that there can be no Palestinian state, let alone economic revival, until Israel is forced out of the territories. The international community has it all back to front.
The idea that a financial lifeline – whether Kerry’s plan or Netanyahu’s economic peace – is going to smooth the path to the conflict’s end is an illusion. Peace, and prosperity, will come only when Palestinians are liberated from Israeli control.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.
Most readers have probably heard of Marc Rich. He was the Jewish criminal who was pardoned by Bill Clinton just prior to the former president’s leaving office in 2001. Rich was the original founder of Glencore, the company whose exploitive activities in the African nation of Zambia are documented in the video above. Some years ago he was indicted for tax fraud, and the film goes into his criminal past in considerable detail. It will probably come as no great surprise that Rich’s pardon was sought by officials of the Israeli government.
Clinton also cited clemency pleas he had received from Israeli government officials, including then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Rich had made substantial donations to Israeli charitable foundations over the years, and many senior Israeli officials, such as Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert, argued on his behalf behind the scenes.[27] (Speculation about another rationale for Rich’s pardon involved his alleged involvement with the Israeli intelligence community.[28][29] Rich reluctantly acknowledged in interviews with his biographer, Daniel Ammann, that he had assisted the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service,[15][6] a claim that Ammann said was confirmed by a former Israeli intelligence officer.[14] According to Ammann, Rich had helped finance the Mossad’s operations and had supplied Israel with strategic amounts of Iranian oil through a secret oil pipeline.[6] The aide to Rich who had persuaded Denise Rich to personally ask President Clinton to review Rich’s pardon request was a former chief of the Mossad, Avner Azulay.[23][30] Another former Mossad chief, Shabtai Shavit, had also urged Clinton to pardon Rich,[2] whom he said had routinely allowed intelligence agents to use his offices around the world.[3])
Also not surprisingly, the pardon was recommended by our current Attorney General, Eric Holder.
Somewhat less familiar, perhaps, is the name of Ivan Glasenberg. It is Glasenberg who heads Glencore today. Wikipedia lists Glasenberg as a “triple citizen,” that is to say, he reportedly holds citizenship in Israel, Australia, and South Africa. So far as I’m aware, the CEO hasn’t been indicted for anything, but as you’ll see from the video, Glencore has engaged in some highly questionable business practices in regards to its copper mining operations in Zambia. Here it has extracted enormous wealth from the ground—Zambia has been blessed with the third largest copper reserves in the world—yet the country ranks among the poorer nations on earth, with a majority of its citizens subsisting on two dollars a day.
Directed by Christoffer Guldbrandsen, the above documentary is entitled “Stealing Africa.” It was released in November of last year and originally aired on the BBC—which probably explains the omission of the Israeli connection or the absence of any mention of Glasenberg or Rich even being Jewish. Glencore today is called Glencore Xystrata as a result of a merger which took place in May of this year, just a few months after the documentary’s release. Also, just as a matter of interest, Marc Rich died in June of this year. Glasenberg, still among the living, is listed by Forbes as having a net worth of $6.7 billion.
A little bit more on the documentary is available from the website Why Poverty:
In Ruschlikon, a sleepy village in Switzerland, the wealthy residents are receiving more tax revenue than they can use since the arrival of Ivan Glasberg, CEO of commodity giant Glencore. Yet in Zambia, where Glencore owns a majority stake in the country’s biggest copper mining operations, tax is an issue that’s contributing to its poverty…
Glasberg netted $9.6 billion when Glencore went public in 2011. The receipt of of his taxes overwhelmed the public coffers of Ruschlikon so much that the mayor decided to lower the town’s tax rate by 7%.
Not so fortunate for the residents of copper-rich Zambia – where Glencore owns a 73% stake in the Mopani Copper Mines (one of the biggest mining operations in the country).
Unfortunately, Zambia’s copper resources have not made the country rich. Virtually all Zambia’s copper mines are owned by corporations. In the last ten years, they’ve extracted copper worth $29 billion but Zambia is still ranked one of the twenty poorest countries in the world.
So why hasn’t copper wealth reduced poverty in Zambia yet made the residents of Ruschlikon better off? Once again it comes down to the issue of tax, or in Zambia’s case, tax avoidance and the use of tax havens.
The film also gives us some insight into why so many governments, particularly in poorer parts of the world, seemingly do nothing to stop rampant corporate abuses. This is true even in Zambia, which ironically at present has what appears to be a fairly decent government—with some committed officials striving to act in the public interest. But the problem is, quite simply put, Glencore is more powerful.
Director Christoffer Guldbrandsen
Producer Henrik Veileborg
Produced by Guldbrandsen Film
Germany’s largest telecom provider, Deutsche Telekom, is looking to introduce a “national routing” service which would keep German internet traffic out of the hands of foreign spies.
The former state-owned communications giant outlined the plans at a secret meeting in the Economy Ministry, business weekly Wirtschaftswoche reported.
Currently, email data is exchanged between users worldwide via international Internet exchange points; physical structures through which Internet service providers (ISPs) exchange Internet traffic between their networks.
The company hopes to hammer out an agreement with other national Internet providers which would guarantee that “while being transported from the sender to the receiver in Germany… no single byte leaves Germany,” Thomas Kremer, a board member of Telekom’s data privacy, legal affairs and compliance, told the magazine.
To put the plan into effect, Deutsche Telekom must secure the support of all its competitors, including Telefonica and Vodafone.
While Vodafone and Telefonica are currently mulling the initiative, another competitor – Internet service provider QSC – has questioned the efficacy of the plan, saying it was not possible to determine with certainty whether data is being routed nationally or internationally.
“In a next step, this initiative could be expanded to the Schengen area,” the spokesman said, referring to the group of 26 European countries – excluding Britain – that have removed border controls for participating countries.
Deutsche Telekom first began leading the charge for to protect its users’ privacy from foreign intelligence agencies in August when they rolled out ‘Email Made in Germany’, an encrypted email service that only uses German servers to process and store all domestic email traffic.
The move followed revelations that the US National Security Agency (NSA) collects 500 million pieces of phone and email metadata from Germany each month — more than in any other EU country.
“Germans are deeply unsettled by the latest reports on the potential interception of communication data,” said Rene Obermann, head of Deutsche Telekom.
“Now, they can bank on the fact that their personal data online is as secure as it possibly can be.”
Experts do not believe the move will stop governments from getting their hands on information, although it might complicate efforts to do so.
“Of course the NSA could still break in if they wanted to, but the mass encryption of emails would make it harder and more expensive for them to do so,” Sandro Gaycken, a professor of cyber security at Berlin’s Free University, said when the idea was first proposed.
There had been some buzz a while back when Digital Music News published an entire iTunes Radio contract, which was targeted at smaller indie labels, showing how Apple got to throw its weight around, presenting terms that were very much in Apple’s favor over the labels if they wanted to participate in iTunes Radio. However, while it took a few months, Apple’s lawyers finally spotted this and they have apparently made a copyright claim to get the contract taken down. I wonder how the small group of indie musicians who always fight for stronger copyrights feel about Apple using copyright to take down rather important information that they should know concerning the sort of deal Apple offers them….
While this may be possibly legal under the law, it demonstrates how the law can be used in ways that really have absolutely nothing to do with copyright’s purpose. Apple didn’t need copyright’s incentives to create this contract. There is no market for the contract itself. The purpose in flexing the copyright claim here is one thing and one thing only: censorship. As law professor Eric Goldman explained:
“It’s not out of legal bounds to do this. It’s just kind of a jerk move. We all know what’s happening here. Apple doesn’t care about protecting the copyright of contracts. It’s using copyright to try and suppress information that it doesn’t want made public.”
That said, I question whether or not this really is a legit takedown. While Apple can claim a copyright on the contract, it seems that DMN has a really strong fair use claim. The purpose was for reporting (a key purpose that supports fair use). The publication was in the public interest. The type of work is a “contract” for which copyright tends to mean very little. Finally, there’s no “market” for the contract itself, and thus the impact on the market or the value of the copyright in the item is nothing. The only factor that weighs against it is the fact that the entire contract was used — but as we’ve pointed out many times in the past, plenty of cases have been deemed fair use where the “entire work” has been used. This seems like a perfectly strong fair use case, though it might not be worth the legal cost to fight Apple over this, given the company’s historical willingness to go absolutely bonkers against publications it doesn’t like.
It’s time to take some of the profit out of the for-profit healthcare system currently victimizing the people of the United States. This is a small step and one which can be implemented on levels which do not necessitate the consent of an entire nation.
If you’re not intelligent enough to already have realized that the present for-profit healthcare system in the United States constitutes a human rights violation, you might as well go back to watching black and white 1950s sitcoms on your smart phone, and stop reading altogether.
“I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgement and never do harm to anyone.”
That’s one translation of the Hippocratic Oath. “First do no harm” is one way of saying it.
Let’s face it, the for-profit healthcare extortion system in the United States is doing a lot of harm to a lot of people.
When a doctor asks a high price for their services, they are saying one thing. They are saying that if you don’t meet their price, they will withhold their services. That’s how a market is supposed to work. Unfortunately, when doctors withhold their services in order to get more money, people have been known to die. It’s pay or die when it comes to the present healthcare extortion system in the United States.
Individual states license doctors to practice their discipline within that state’s borders. States currently allow licensed medical professionals free reign to charge excessive amounts for their services. The argument that the medical profession exists within a free market and doctors are worth whatever they can get remains entirely bogus. In reality, the for-profit medical profession is an extortion racket where, unless a patient meets the system’s financial demands, something very bad might very well happen to them. Has anyone, anyone ever, compared prices when they needed brain surgery? The states through their licensing powers become willing partners in this extortion racket. Doctors in the present system are asking their patients that most delightful of questions, “Your money or your life?”
If a licensed hunter is limited in the number of deer he can bag in one season, certainly a state has the authority to limit the profit margin on licensed professionals within its jurisdiction. If states and local governments can regulate the prices charged by cab drivers, those same licensing authorities most certainly have the capability to cap the incomes of medical professionals whose entire careers depend upon the state issuing them a license to practice.
A modest proposal. Allow doctors to make as much as they want through earnings and investments within the current healthcare system. However, if their income is more in a year than the governor of the state which issues their license, they will be charged a fee of 75% of those overage monies, which will be paid to the licensing authority. On the plus side the licensing authority will take those monies and initiate a program which reimburses doctors 5% of their outstanding student loans if they perform two weeks of non-profit medical community service each year. Of course there will be other trivial details which can be worked out rather easily once this concept is accepted by those of good faith.
It’s time for individual states to stop participating in the healthcare extortion racket. If any doctor says they will leave the state if they can’t make as much money as they can extort from their captive audience, well, here’s your scrub hat, what’s your hurry?
Mérida – The Venezuelan government has pledged to construct 4,400 new housing units in Haiti worth around US$260 million, according to Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe.
Lamothe announced the initiative after a one day visit to Caracas on Monday.
3,900 of the houses will be constructed in Port-au-Prince, while 500 will be built on Ile-a-Vache. An island just off Haiti’s south-west peninsula, Ile-a-Vache is currently being developed for tourism by the Haitian government. The Venezuelan government is partially funding a US$66 million hotel project on the island.
Along with housing and tourism deals, Lamothe’s visit reportedly focused on discussion of Haiti’s Petrocaribe debt obligations. Under Petrocaribe, Caribbean states are able to purchase Venezuelan oil at preferential rates. Following the 2010 earthquake that devastated the country, Haiti was forgiven US$400 million in Petrocaribe debt.
Debt can also be paid back in products instead of currency. According to a Haitian government press release, Lamothe’s delegation met with Venezuelan officials to negotiate exchanging agricultural products for debt payment. The agreements discussed this week will be finalised in a second meeting later this month.
The two governments also reportedly discussed a US$15 million health services deal, which will see the Development Bank of Venezuela fund new health facilities in Haiti. Lamothe also met with officials from the Bank of ALBA, which pledged to invest a further US$10 million in Haitian literacy programs.
Haiti is yet to recover from the 2010 disaster, and is one of the poorest countries in the region. In July, Haitian president Michel Martelly praised Venezuelan aid, stating that the majority of state projects in areas including education, infrastructure and agriculture are supported by Petrocaribe.
“Most of what is done today in Haiti is achieved with Petrocaribe funds,” Martelly stated.
They say history is written by the victors, but the Crusades offer an interesting historical contrast: a two-century collision that produced not one history, but two parallel, irreconcilable realities. The dates and the battles are identical in both accounts, but the moral axis is entirely flipped.
In the traditional Western narrative, the Crusades are framed as a heroic, if tragic, epic. The First Crusade is a pious pilgrimage; the knights are romanticized figures of chivalry in shining armor, bravely holding the line in a hostile, exotic land. The eventual loss of the Holy Land is mourned as the “fall of Outremer,” a tragic retreat of European civilization. In this telling, the East is often reduced to a passive backdrop, its inhabitants viewed through a lens of mystique or backwardness, mere obstacles to a divine mandate.
But cross the Mediterranean, and the exact same timeline reads like a chronicle of foreign invasion and eventual, hard-won restoration against the barbarous northerners. The dates do not change, but the adjectives do. Here is the history as it is remembered in the Levant… continue
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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