Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
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Good Morning!
July, 2012 by joanneleon
“Historically, propaganda has always merged with recruitment because people must first be conditioned to become soldiers and fight strangers in distant lands. It's not a natural condition but must be manipulated to get people to join unpopular realities.” -
~Nancy Snow
News
Protesters march in Charlotte ahead of Democratic Convention
Around 800 protesters marched through downtown Charlotte, North Carolina on Sunday ahead of the Democratic National Convention.
Like the “Occupy Wall Street” protests that have occurred around the country, the demonstration in Charlotte attracted a wide variety of causes. Protesters decried the deregulated financial system, corporate corruption, overseas wars and use of targeted drone strikes, union busting, and the crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
The demonstration was organized by the Coalition to March on Wall Street South.
LIVE from Charlotte: Washington State’s view inside Time Warner Cable Arena
To be honest, this arena feels like the keep at the center of a giant urban fortress. I had to pass through several layers of security to get in here, including a magetnometer and several security checkpoints.
There are rings of fences and barricades around this place, with police sentinels guarding all of the entrances. Choppers are always overhead, and joint federal/state/county police motorcades go by often. No one is allowed to get close to the arena unless they have a properly-issued credential.
I feel sorry for the people of this city who want to get close to the action out of curiosity, but can’t due to the extremely heavy security.
Quebec separatists look to sweep elections
Quebec’s separatists look to sweep back into power in elections Tuesday, buoyed by rising frustration with the current leadership and months of student protests over a planned tuition hike.
Voters in the country’s only majority French-speaking province will choose 125 lawmakers — and pre-election polls point to theParti Quebecois coming out on top, though without a full majority, a rarity in Canadian politics.
The PQ has been in the opposition since its 2003 defeat by the Liberals, led by Jean Charest, who has served three terms as premier.
Democratic Party platform weakens commitment to climate change action
The Democratic Party’s 2012 platform no longer pledges to free Americans from the tyranny of big oil, dropping the prior platform’s hard-line support for renewable energy for an “all-of-the-above” strategy favored by President Barack Obama and his Republican rivals.
While the platform does still call for an international deal to curtail the types of pollution that accelerate climate change, it does not say that the agreement should be binding, as it did in 2008. The platform also drops the party’s 2008 support for the “cap and trade” scheme Democrats failed to pass in 2010.
Barclays makes £500m betting on food crisis - Outrage as bank revealed to be major speculator while millions face starvation
Barclays has made as much as half a billion pounds in two years from speculating on food staples such as wheat and soya, prompting allegations that banks are profiting handsomely from the global food crisis.
Barclays is the UK bank with the greatest involvement in food commodity trading and is one of the three biggest global players, along with the US banking giants Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, research from the World Development Movement points out.
Last week the trading giant Glencore was attacked for describing the global food crisis and price rises as a "good" business opportunity.
The extent of Barclays' involvement in food speculation comes to light as new figures from the World Bank show that global food prices hit an all-time high in July, with poor harvests in the US and Russia pushing up the average worldwide cost of staples by an unprecedented 10 per cent in a month.
FBI issued a nondenial denial about this saying there is no evidence that the laptop was hacked and that they don't collect that kind of data. The file was labeled with the name of an organization that is an non-government organization, "an information-sharing gateway between private industry and law enforcement".
Anonymous claims hack caught FBI spying on millions of Apple customers
Hackers with the amorphous protest movement “Anonymous” and “AntiSec” said Monday night they caught the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) red-handed spying on Apple customers, and published over 1 million unique device identification numbers they allegedly pulled out of an FBI database.
In all, the hackers claimed that the FBI files they accessed had more than 12 million Apple UDIDs, the unique identifier associated with every iPhone and iPad that comes off the production line. They also said that most UDIDs in the FBI’s database had names, cell phone numbers and addresses attached to them, which were edited out before publication. ... Apple told a congressional inquiry in 2010 that it cannot track iPhones in real time, but a hacker named Eric Smith noted that third party applications can transmit UDIDs, which could potentially be linked to the owner and used to track that person.
And that’s precisely what hackers with Anonymous think the FBI was doing.
Spain's Robin Hood Mayor and Landless Peasants Battle Bankers
In Southern Spain, Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, mayor of the small town of Marinaleda, is helping organize a growing protest movement against the austerity measures imposed by the Spanish government. Sánchez Gordillo and the landless peasants that follow him are at the forefront of demonstrations seeking a radical change in the country's economic policies in response to the country's worsening crisis.
[See video]
Carney recasts Obama words on Afghanistan
"We are bringing our troops home from Afghanistan. And I've set a timetable. We will have them all out of there by 2014," Obama told a crowd in Boulder Sunday afternoon as he slammed GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney for dodging the issue during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.
However, about two hours after Obama spoke, Carney said in a press briefing aboard Air Force One that the president had not pledged a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan.
"He never said that all the troops would be out," the press secretary declared. "What we’ve said, as we did in Iraq -- and I think this is a good way to look at it —is in Iraq, there were steps of—sort of milestones where troops began to come home, more and more authorities transferred over to Iraqi security forces. The U.S. forces that remained as that process took place moved out of the cities and on to bases. And then the full transfer took place and combat mission ended, after which remaining U.S. forces eventually came home and the last U.S. soldier left, with the exception obviously of those who are at the embassy."
Carney said the president was simply referring to the NATO-endorsed strategy of transferring all of Afghanistan's provinces to Afghan security control by 2014. The press secretary accused reporters of dwelling on semantics, even as he used language that seemed substantially at odds with what Obama said earlier in the day.
Yemen probes civilian deaths in apparent US drone strike
Three women and a child were among 14 people killed in Sunday's strike near the town of Radaa, 130 kilometres (80 miles) southeast of Sanaa, targeting Al-Qaeda's Abdelrauf al-Dahab who escaped unharmed. local officials said.
Initial reports said the male dead were Al-Qaeda militants but other sources said they were fellow tribesmen of Dahab unconnected to the jihadist network.
[ ... ]
Angry relatives of the dead blocked the main road linking Radaa to the town of Dhammar and the capital beyond.
Jahmi said his delegation had received an undertaking to reopen the highway in return for a promise of 20 million rials (nearly 100,000 dollars) in compensation.
Blog Posts of Interest
The Evening Blues - 9-4-12
With What Databases Has NCTC Cross-Referenced with FBI’s 12 Million iDevice User IDs? by emptywheel
Petraeus Tie to Afghan Local Police Program Hits NYTimes One Day After ALP Role in Revenge Killings Noted by Jim White at emptywheel.net
Steely Dan - My Old School
We are ready for some serious change. We are ready to take up the tools of a free and analytic press to peacefully undermine the stranglehold of the kleptocrats on our battered democracy. We are ready to expose and publicize their greed, lies and illegal machinations and hold their enablers in government and the media to account. Are you in?
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
~ Margaret Mead
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