Synchronised explosions in mostly Shia Muslim areas kill at least 74 and injure 250, undermining planned US troop withdrawal A series of co-ordinated explosions have killed at least 74 people and wounded 250 more across Iraq, shattering calm during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and showing that extremists remain a threat more than eight years after the fall of Baghdad. The bombs were detonated in largely Shia Muslim areas of the country. Casualties were mostly Shia-led security forces. A Sunni extremist group, the al-Qaida-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq, was blamed. A jihadist site praised the attacks and said they targeted “Shi’ites, Christians and the apostate awakening councils”, in reference to the US-backed Sunni groups who turned on al-Qaida in 2007. In total, 13 bombs exploded. Many were apparently detonated by suicide bombers. If so, this would further undermine Iraqi and US military claims that al-Qaida and its Iraqi jihadist groups are a spent force after almost a decade of war. The deadliest blast was in the south-eastern city of Kut, where 37 people were killed by a roadside bomb and then a car bomb, which detonated as bystanders gathered following the first explosion. In the Shia shrine cities of Kerbala and Najaf up to 11 security officers and members of the public were killed by car bombs. Bombs rocked Baquba, Tikrit and Kirkuk and there were at least six explosions in Baghdad, although only three people were killed in the capital. The ease with which car bombs were moved around Iraq is a further blow to the standing of Iraq’s security forces, who insist they have contained sectarian violence and have Sunni and Shia extremist groups under control. An attack on a similar scale took place during Ramadan last year and Iraq’s dwindling Christian community was subsequently targeted in churches and in their homes. This spring more than 50 people were killed in an attack on the Tikrit governor’s office. Targeted assassinations have been common in Baghdad, Baquba and Kirkuk. Despite monthly death tolls now sharply below those during the sectarian war of 2006-07, spasms of large-scale violence still occur quite frequently in Iraq, a fact that convinced some local politicians to ask departing US forces to remain after the mandated end of their mission in December this year. The US military is prepared to consider an unspecified number of troops staying on in Iraq as trainers but with roles that would likely have a broader mandate. US advisers are wary of the fragile security gains in Iraq unwinding when they leave. This would be a bitter setback after the more than 4,000 lives lost and estimated $500bn spent fighting a war that aimed to reshape Iraq as a pluralist democracy. Whether US troops stay or go is unlikely to be decided until at least November, with many MPs appearing to fear the future without the safety blanket of well-armed and better-trained soldiers on call for any crisis. However, Shia extremist groups, including the Sadrist party, which has 39 seats in Iraq’s 325-seat parliament, have vowed to violently oppose any troop extension. Militias killed at least 12 US soldiers in June in a series of rocket and roadside bomb attacks widely interpreted as an attempt to create the impression that troops were being forced to flee. Iraq Middle East Global terrorism Martin Chulov guardian.co.uk
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Intelligence agency asked to crack encrypted messages – especially on BlackBerry Messenger – to help police The security service MI5 and the electronic interception centre GCHQ have been asked by the government to join the hunt for people who organised last week’s riots, the Guardian has learned. The agencies, the bulk of whose work normally involves catching terrorists inspired by al-Qaida, are helping the effort to catch people who used social messaging, especially BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), to mobilise looters. A key difficulty for law enforcers last week was cracking the high level of encryption on the BBM system. BBM is a pin-protected instant message system that is only accessible to BlackBerry users. MI5 and GCHQ will also help the effort to try to get ahead of any further organisation of disturbances. The move represents a change as officially MI5 is tasked with ensuring the national security of the United Kingdom from terrorist threats, weapons of mass destruction, and espionage, with the police taking the lead on maintaining public order. However, they have a statutory right to target criminals or those suspected of being involved in crime, officials have said. Police struggled to access the BBM network last week, though some who were sent messages planning violence were so outraged they passed them on to law enforcement agencies. GCHQ’s computers and listening devices can pick up audio messages and BBM communications. MI5 and the police can identify the owners with the help of mobile companies and internet service providers. The agencies can intercept electronic and phone messages, identify where they have been sent from and their destination. That allows other investigations to take place and other efforts to develop intelligence. One source said: “The hope is this will boost the intelligence available. It always useful to get some boffins in.” In his speech on Monday David Cameron made no mention of his threatened clampdown on social media. Last week in the House of Commons emergency debate, he said: “There was an awful lot of hoaxes and false trails made on Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger and the rest of it. We need a major piece of work to make sure that the police have all the technological capabilities they need to hunt down and beat the criminals.” One of MI5′s functions under the 1989 Security Service Act is to support “the activities of police forces … and other law enforcement agencies in the prevention and detection of serious crime”. MI5 intercepts communications though officially can only do so with warrants signed by ministers. It seeks technical help from GCHQ. GCHQ’s functions, according to the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, include “to monitor or interfere with electromagnetic, acoustic and other emissions and any equipment producing such emissions and to obtain and provide information derived from or related to such emissions or equipment … ” It can do so “in support of the prevention or detection of serious crime”. On its website, MI5 stresses such a distinction: “For the most part the activities of domestic extremists pose a threat to public order, but not to national security. They are generally investigated by the police, not the Security Service.” For law enforcement, the difficulty with BBM is that it boasts semi-private – and instant – access to a network of like-minded users. BlackBerry handsets are the smartphone of choice for the 37% of British teenagers, according to Ofcom. BBM allows users to send the same message to a network of contacts connected by “BBM pins”. For many teenagers, BBM has replaced text messaging because it is free and instant. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, many BBM messages are untraceable by the authorities. And unlike Facebook, friends are connected either by individual pin numbers or a registered email address. In short, BlackBerry Messenger is more secure than almost all other social networks. So-called “broadcasts” can be sent to hundreds of disparate users within minutes, away from the attention of law enforcement agencies. In the 12 years since it released the first BlackBerry, Research in Motion (RIM) has built a formidable reputation for the impenetrable security of its smartphones. RIM has always struggled to explain to the authorities that, unlike most other companies, it technically cannot access or read the majority of the messages sent by users over its network. One of the biggest problems for law enforcement in the digital age is the inability to get real-time access to messages sent by potential criminals. In England, RIM has said it will actively cooperate with law enforcement as they investigate those behind the unrest. Although it cannot hand to police the contents of rioters’ messages, it can disclose information that could assist any investigation. A clause in the Data Protection Act allows RIM to disclose the names, contacts and times of prominent BlackBerry Messenger users in a certain area and at a certain time. UK riots BlackBerry MI5 Mobile phones Social media Digital media Police Vikram Dodd Richard Norton-Taylor Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Intelligence agency asked to crack encrypted messages – especially on BlackBerry Messenger – to help police The security service MI5 and the electronic interception centre GCHQ have been asked by the government to join the hunt for people who organised last week’s riots, the Guardian has learned. The agencies, the bulk of whose work normally involves catching terrorists inspired by al-Qaida, are helping the effort to catch people who used social messaging, especially BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), to mobilise looters. A key difficulty for law enforcers last week was cracking the high level of encryption on the BBM system. BBM is a pin-protected instant message system that is only accessible to BlackBerry users. MI5 and GCHQ will also help the effort to try to get ahead of any further organisation of disturbances. The move represents a change as officially MI5 is tasked with ensuring the national security of the United Kingdom from terrorist threats, weapons of mass destruction, and espionage, with the police taking the lead on maintaining public order. However, they have a statutory right to target criminals or those suspected of being involved in crime, officials have said. Police struggled to access the BBM network last week, though some who were sent messages planning violence were so outraged they passed them on to law enforcement agencies. GCHQ’s computers and listening devices can pick up audio messages and BBM communications. MI5 and the police can identify the owners with the help of mobile companies and internet service providers. The agencies can intercept electronic and phone messages, identify where they have been sent from and their destination. That allows other investigations to take place and other efforts to develop intelligence. One source said: “The hope is this will boost the intelligence available. It always useful to get some boffins in.” In his speech on Monday David Cameron made no mention of his threatened clampdown on social media. Last week in the House of Commons emergency debate, he said: “There was an awful lot of hoaxes and false trails made on Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger and the rest of it. We need a major piece of work to make sure that the police have all the technological capabilities they need to hunt down and beat the criminals.” One of MI5′s functions under the 1989 Security Service Act is to support “the activities of police forces … and other law enforcement agencies in the prevention and detection of serious crime”. MI5 intercepts communications though officially can only do so with warrants signed by ministers. It seeks technical help from GCHQ. GCHQ’s functions, according to the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, include “to monitor or interfere with electromagnetic, acoustic and other emissions and any equipment producing such emissions and to obtain and provide information derived from or related to such emissions or equipment … ” It can do so “in support of the prevention or detection of serious crime”. On its website, MI5 stresses such a distinction: “For the most part the activities of domestic extremists pose a threat to public order, but not to national security. They are generally investigated by the police, not the Security Service.” For law enforcement, the difficulty with BBM is that it boasts semi-private – and instant – access to a network of like-minded users. BlackBerry handsets are the smartphone of choice for the 37% of British teenagers, according to Ofcom. BBM allows users to send the same message to a network of contacts connected by “BBM pins”. For many teenagers, BBM has replaced text messaging because it is free and instant. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, many BBM messages are untraceable by the authorities. And unlike Facebook, friends are connected either by individual pin numbers or a registered email address. In short, BlackBerry Messenger is more secure than almost all other social networks. So-called “broadcasts” can be sent to hundreds of disparate users within minutes, away from the attention of law enforcement agencies. In the 12 years since it released the first BlackBerry, Research in Motion (RIM) has built a formidable reputation for the impenetrable security of its smartphones. RIM has always struggled to explain to the authorities that, unlike most other companies, it technically cannot access or read the majority of the messages sent by users over its network. One of the biggest problems for law enforcement in the digital age is the inability to get real-time access to messages sent by potential criminals. In England, RIM has said it will actively cooperate with law enforcement as they investigate those behind the unrest. Although it cannot hand to police the contents of rioters’ messages, it can disclose information that could assist any investigation. A clause in the Data Protection Act allows RIM to disclose the names, contacts and times of prominent BlackBerry Messenger users in a certain area and at a certain time. UK riots BlackBerry MI5 Mobile phones Social media Digital media Police Vikram Dodd Richard Norton-Taylor Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk
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Marcos Ambrose won the rain-delayed Sprint Cup race at Watkins Glen International Monday for his first victory in NASCAR’s top series. Ambrose beat Brad Keselowski and Kyle Busch on a green-white-checkered finish. (Aug. 15)
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Marcos Ambrose won the rain-delayed Sprint Cup race at Watkins Glen International Monday for his first victory in NASCAR’s top series. Ambrose beat Brad Keselowski and Kyle Busch on a green-white-checkered finish. (Aug. 15)
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Actress Vera Farmiga wasn’t sure how she’d perform behind instead of in front of the camera, but says directing ‘Higher Ground’ whet her appetite for more. (Aug. 15)
Continue reading …Actress Vera Farmiga wasn’t sure how she’d perform behind instead of in front of the camera, but says directing ‘Higher Ground’ whet her appetite for more. (Aug. 15)
Continue reading …Warren Buffett has been very outspoken about the fact that his secretary pays more proportionally in taxes than he does. You hear very little of this because it doesn’t fit all tidy into the beltway/Republican narrative of cutting taxes and cutting spending. Buffett took to the NY Times to write an op-ed using statistics to back up his major theme. The rich invest money no matter what the tax rate is and do not stop creating jobs because everybody isn’t praising them for being so wealthy. Warren Buffett in the NY Times : OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched. While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors. These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places. Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent. If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot. To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends. I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation. Our tax rates are lower now than they have been for decades yet the super rich corporations are sitting on their pots of gold and not creating jobs. Careful Warren, CNBC and Fox will tell you that if we’re mean to these job producers they will stomp their feet, storm off and take all their jobs with them and leave the country. Nonsense. What shared sacrifice means to the Villagers and the GOP is that the middle class and the poor should be willing to have their social safety nets cut while federal government spending gets slashed in an effort to appease the deficit hawks coming out of the Republican party even though their leadership and policies caused the global financial depression. Historical data or even information garnered from the last ten years has no place in the discussion. Suck it up, America. Buffett is calling out the Congress to get busy and do their jobs instead of pandering to an ideology that has no room for compromise and raising revenues or taxes is tantamount to Socialism. Wanna bet how many times you hear about this op-ed on TV? But if David Brooks or some nut from the op-ed pages of the WSJ pens a piece that defends the fragile and misunderstood Masters of the Universe, it’ll be repeated 24/7.
Continue reading …Warren Buffett has been very outspoken about the fact that his secretary pays more proportionally in taxes than he does. You hear very little of this because it doesn’t fit all tidy into the beltway/Republican narrative of cutting taxes and cutting spending. Buffett took to the NY Times to write an op-ed using statistics to back up his major theme. The rich invest money no matter what the tax rate is and do not stop creating jobs because everybody isn’t praising them for being so wealthy. Warren Buffett in the NY Times : OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched. While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors. These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places. Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent. If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot. To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends. I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation. Our tax rates are lower now than they have been for decades yet the super rich corporations are sitting on their pots of gold and not creating jobs. Careful Warren, CNBC and Fox will tell you that if we’re mean to these job producers they will stomp their feet, storm off and take all their jobs with them and leave the country. Nonsense. What shared sacrifice means to the Villagers and the GOP is that the middle class and the poor should be willing to have their social safety nets cut while federal government spending gets slashed in an effort to appease the deficit hawks coming out of the Republican party even though their leadership and policies caused the global financial depression. Historical data or even information garnered from the last ten years has no place in the discussion. Suck it up, America. Buffett is calling out the Congress to get busy and do their jobs instead of pandering to an ideology that has no room for compromise and raising revenues or taxes is tantamount to Socialism. Wanna bet how many times you hear about this op-ed on TV? But if David Brooks or some nut from the op-ed pages of the WSJ pens a piece that defends the fragile and misunderstood Masters of the Universe, it’ll be repeated 24/7.
Continue reading …Dennis Rodman Delivers NBA Hall Of Fame Speech Through Tears And Emotion (VIDEO)
August 15, 2011 No Comment
When NBA superstar Dennis Rodman penned an autobiography, he entitled it “Bad As I Wanna Be.” And, it seemed apt. After all, Rodman was a tenacious rebounder and a vicious competitor on the court while also being an outlandish and controversial iconoclast away from it. Those inimitable attributes, along with the five NBA championships and seven rebounding titles he won during his career, earned him a place in basketball’s Hall of Fame. However, a visibly emotional Rodman, who still clearly has his flare for memorable wardrobe choices, spoke candidly during his induction speech about the toll that his public lifestyle and on-court persona took on his family and friends. It was a side of the NBA star that most had never seen before. WATCH video above.
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