Sort Out
It is within these parameters that the furore over Wikileaks and its exposures should be seen. The latest document dump is larger than the Iraq files and potentially more embarrassing, with its State Department assessments of governments and statesmen – from Hamid Karzai to Silvio Berlusconi to Nicolas Sarkozy.
John Kampfner: Wikileaks shows up our media for their docility at the feet of authority - Commentators, Opinion
Former Justice John Paul Stevens Criticizes Death Penalty
In 2008, two years before he announced his retirement, Justice Stevens reversed course and in a concurrence said that he now believed the death penalty to be unconstitutional. But the reason for that change of heart, after more than three decades on the court and some 1,100 executions, has in many ways remained a mystery, and now Justice Stevens has provided an explanation. In a detailed, candid and critical essay to be published this week in The New York Review of Books , he wrote that personnel changes on the court, coupled with “regrettable judicial activism,” had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria. The essay is remarkable in itself.
Big Polluters Freed from Environmental Oversight by Stimulus - The Center for Public Integrity
In the name of job creation and clean energy, the Obama administration has doled out billions of dollars in stimulus money to some of the nation’s biggest polluters and granted them sweeping exemptions from the most basic form of environmental oversight, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found.
Ecuador offers WikiLeak's founder Assange residency, no questions asked
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With the release of the first round of WikiLeaks State Department documents this week, Iran hawks in the United States have embraced a new line : Look at the number of Arab leaders who privately urged the U.S. to attack Iran, they say — it isn’t just Israel!
Iran: Timeline to crisis - Iran
US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free
Is it justified? Should a newspaper disclose virtually all a nation's secret diplomatic communication, illegally downloaded by one of its citizens? The reporting in the Guardian of the first of a selection of 250,000 US state department cables marks a recasting of modern diplomacy. Clearly, there is no longer such a thing as a safe electronic archive, whatever computing's snake-oil salesmen claim. No organisation can treat digitised communication as confidential. An electronic secret is a contradiction in terms.
The AP has concluded that there is nothing “particularly explosive” so far in the archive of State Department cables that has begun to be released by WikiLeaks.
The 10 most important WikiLeaks revelations - War Room
Obama’s War on Whistleblowers
As a young lawyer, Obama represented a whistleblower ; as a presidential candidate, he pledged to “strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government.” But as president, Obama has unleashed the most aggressive assault on whistleblowers Washington has ever seen—surpassing even George W. Bush. The latest example comes in a remarkable prosecution of Steven Kim, a well-known scholar of North Korea’s nuclear program. Like most area experts at the top of the game, Kim does consulting for the State Department. He works for Lawrence Livermore Labs and was on secondment to the State Department at the time of the events in question.
Seven Secrets that China Would Like to Keep
Writing at the New York Review of Books blog page, Princeton professor Perry Link enumerates the seven deadly secrets that China’s octogenarians want to keep from the public at all cost. It makes an excellent list of potential dissertation topics for students of Chinese history and politics: The famine during the Great Leap Forward in 1959-62. Somewhere between 20 and 50 million people died because of bad policy, not “bad weather.” What exactly happened?Free Shipping is one of the common tricks to convert visitors into customers. What I found though is that most of retailers neither have an analytical framework to identify products to be sold with free shipping and nor have tools to evaluate results of the promotion. Here are some of my best practices that you are welcome to try out. Magic of Free Shipping There are numerous researches on why Free Shipping feels like an irresistable deal. The best books I read on this topic are Predictably Irrational written by Dan Ariely, an extraordinary guy who I took a number of seminars with at MIT, and Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin. Dan dedicated a chapter of his book to the "Magic of Free Shipping" looking at Amazon`s success with Free Shipping program and lack of thereof in France where Amazon tried "1 euro" shipping.
Save Millions: E-Commerce Best Practices: Magic of Free Shipping
WikiLeaks cables: CIA drew up UN spying wishlist for diplomats | World news
WikiLeaks cables show the Central Intelligence drew up information wishlist. Photograph: Getty Images The US state department's wishlist of information about the United Nations secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, and other senior members of his organisation was drawn up by the CIA , the Guardian has learned. The disclosure comes as new information emerged about Washington's intelligence gathering on foreign diplomats, including surveillance of the telephone and internet use of Iranian and Chinese diplomats. One of the most embarrassing revelations to emerge from US diplomatic cables obtained by the whistleblowers' website WikiLeaks has been that US diplomats were asked to gather intelligence on Ban, other senior UN staff , security council members and other foreign diplomats – a possible violation of international law.David Cameron with Barack Obama at a press conference at the White House earlier this year.