Politics
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Before leaving for a vacation in South Africa in December of 2001, my editor asked me to prepare an obituary for Osama bin Laden for TIME.com on the assumption that he might well be killed in Afghanistan while I was on the beach in Cape Town. Almost ten years later there was finally a reason to call up the old file: President Barack Obama said late Sunday that the al-Qaeda leader had been killed in a U.S. raid in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad, and that the U.S. was in possession of his body. But where killing or capturing Bin Laden might once have been imagined to be a decisive turning point in a struggle between the U.S. and its challengers in the Muslim world, today, the death of America’s erstwhile nemesis is little more than an historical footnote — a settling of accounts for a spree of ugly crimes and the elimination of a symbol of global jihadist nihilism, perhaps, offering justice and closure for the victims of 9/11 and other atrocities.
Why Bin Laden’s Death No Longer Really Matters - Global Spin - TIME.com
CAIRO, April 30 (UPI) -- The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt says its new political group, the Freedom and Justice Party, is not "theocratic." Leaders said the party will run candidates for as many as half the races in the parliamentary election scheduled for September, the BBC reported. "It is not an Islamist party in the old understanding, it is not theocratic," Mohammed al-Mursi, who was chosen to head Freedom and Justice, told reporters after the founding meeting in Cairo. The two-day meeting of Muslim Brotherhood's Shura Council began Friday with a speech by Mohamed Badie, its supreme guide, the newspaper al-Masry al-Youm reported. The newspaper said reporters were barred from the meeting but sources said Badie promised the party would work with other parties and with Egypt's Coptic Christian communities.
Muslim Brotherhood forms political party - UPI.com
From energy wars to water wars, the 21st century will be determined by a fierce battle for the world's remaining natural resources. The chessboard is global. The stakes are tremendous. Most battles will be invisible. All will be crucial.
The African 'Star Wars' - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
Should the nuclear power plants go underground? - Dinescoteque
I started a discussion on Linkedin: Should the nuclear power plants go underground? http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&gid=46854&discussionID=51715124&sik=&trk=mywl_artile&goback=%2Emwg_*2_1 The nuclear industry has a "reasonable" security level but reality is not always reasonable. Not only the earthquakes, tsunamies, terrorists, revolutionaries .. are threatening us with a radioactive holocaust, it's also the sky above which is full of debris. It didn't happen yet but it can happen anytime: a bigger meteorite to hit a nuclear power plant.
CIA director Leon Panetta will become US defence secretary and be replaced at the spy agency's helm by General David Petraeus, current head of military operations in Afghanistan, ABC News reported on Wednesday. Panetta, a 72-year-old Democratic politician, lawyer and professor will take over from Robert Gates following his planned retirement this year. President Barack Obama will also nominate veteran diplomat Ryan Crocker as the next US ambassador to Afghanistan, according to an NBC News report.
CIA boss to be new US defence secretary - Americas - Al Jazeera English
Obama Wont Produce Birth Certificate Because It Would Reveal TRUE Identity of His Father: Hawaii Senators Extraordinary Claim
A member of the Hawaii State Senate said today he believes Barack Obama is not releasing his long-form birth certificate because he may want to hide the identity or citizenship of his father. In an extraordinary outburst, Republican Sam Slom said the 'real issue' behind the reluctance of the President, who says he was born in Hawaii, to release full details from his birth certificate was unlikely to be because he wanted to hide his place of birth. 'My particular point of view... is that [Obama] probably was born [in Hawaii] and that the real issue is not the birth certificate, but what's on the birth certificate,' Slom said in an interview on New York's WABC 770 AM radio station. 'It could have to do with what his name is on the birth certificate, who is actually listed as his father, the citizenship of the father,' Slom said.
Protesters are also demanding the closure of France's oldest nuclear power station at Fessenheim. In service since 1977, the Fessenheim plant lies in a densely-populated part of France, less than two kilometres from Germany and around 40 kilometres (25 miles) from Switzerland. French television presenter and green activist Nicolas Hulot, who announced earlier this month that he hopes to run as an environmentalist candidate in the 2012 presidential election, is due to attend the Pont de l'Europe protest. "Fukushima is what finally convinced me that nuclear power can no longer be the answer to the planet's energy future," Hulot told journalists ahead of the protest. "I was one of those who had a certain trust in the arguments of pronuclear engineers. Their arguments are today losing their edge in the face of the facts."
Anti-nuclear 'die in' on Franco-German border - Telegraph
Le Figaro - International : Misrata, mauvaise conscience des Occidentaux
Au début des années 1990, après un siège de quatre ans, Sarajevo, la capitale bosniaque, devint le symbole de l'impuissance des pays d'Europe, incapables de mettre fin aux atrocités commises par les forces serbes. En juillet 1995, après un long et meurtrier siège, Srebrenica fut le symbole de la lâcheté de la communauté internationale, qui avait fait de cette ville de Bosnie orientale une zone de sécurité mais ne fit rien pour empêcher que 8000 Musulmans y soient massacrés par les milices du général serbe Ratko Mladic. Assiégée depuis deux mois par les troupes du colonel Kadhafi, la ville de Misrata , à l'ouest de la Libye, deviendra-t-elle celle de l'inefficacité européenne ? La guerre élastique Car si l'intervention militaire a tenu sa promesse initiale, sauver Benghazi, la «capitale» des rebelles, des massacres qu'avait promis d'y perpétrer le dirigeant libyen, Misrata vit depuis un martyre, à peine adouci par l'arrivée de l'aide humanitaire livrée par mer.
The Geek Manifesto
We are geeks, and we are proud to be. We are rational; we understand cause and effect; we understand consequences; we understand loosely-coupled distributed self-organizing systems with multiple redundant communication channels. We are a community, not individuals entirely subject to our employers’ whims.Using a high-security online drop box and a well-insulated website, WikiLeaks has published 76,000 classified U.S. documents about the war in Afghanistan, [1] nearly 400,000 classified U.S. documents about the war in Iraq, [2] and more than 2,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. [3] In doing so, it has collaborated with some of the most powerful newspapers in the world, [4] and it has rankled some of the most powerful people in the world. [5] President Barack Obama said in July 2010, right after the release of the Afghanistan documents, that he was “concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield.” [6] His concern spread quickly through the echelons of power, as WikiLeaks continued in the fall of 2010 to release caches of classified U.S. documents.
Harvard Law and Policy Review » WikiLeaks, the First Amendment, and the Press