By Rady Ananda

On Jan. 26, the European Union and 22 member states signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced. They have now joined the US and seven other nations that signed the treaty last October.

This signing ceremony merely formalized the EU’s adoption of ACTA last month, during a completely unrelated meeting on agriculture and fisheries, reports TechDirt.

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By Rady Ananda

Susan Lindauer’s piece of the 9/11 puzzle adds more evidence to support the charge of criminal negligence at the command level and exposes the utter depravity of the Patriot Act. Even more, as the primary Intelligence Asset for Iraq, she proves that top officials of the Bush regime were fully aware that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction prior to the invasion, and had, in fact, negotiated a peace treaty in order to end UN sanctions.

To tell this truth cost her her job, her freedom and almost her sanity.

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By Rady Ananda

For two days this month, Wordpress.com, which hosts a tenth of the world's websites drawing nearly 300 million unique visitors a month, suffered the largest distributed denial-of-service attack in its six-year history. Six separate attacks on March 3 and 4, mostly originating from China, targeted a single Chinese-language site hosted by WP.

On March 3^rd, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg told TechCrunch (also hosted by WP), “There’s an ongoing DDoS attack that was large enough to impact all three of our datacenters in Chicago, San Antonio, and Dallas."

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By Robert Singer

Click here to read why “this article is not currently available” at OpEdNews.

October 8, 2008

2008 Debate: "It's the economy, stupid"

Barack Obama and John McCain clashed over the causes and cures for the worst economic crisis in 80 years in the debate last night.

Republican McCain called for a sweeping $300 billion program to stop mortgage foreclosures so they could continue the American Dream and get back to shopping. Yes, national politicians are still suggesting that if we just shop some more for stuff made in China, our economy will get back on track. What part of import/export economics do our elected officials not understand?

The current economic crisis, according to Barack Obama, is the result of the last eight years of the Bush administration. Not true, it is the final verdict of United States economic policies of the last six decades. Americans enjoyed the highest standard of living in the Western world based on our ability to import cheap, raw materials (thanks to the CIA) and ship refrigerators, cars, airplanes and military hardware to the rest of the world. When the rest of the world caught on, and the refrigerators, cars, airplanes and even our socks started to be produced elsewhere, we still had one more product to ship offshore, and, beginning in 1980 the Reagan administration embarked upon the greatest export of all: OUR DEBT. What we are witnessing in the economic crisis today is the final death march of the dollar. After the government printed an extra trillion dollars over the weekend, the huge drop in markets worldwide shows the extent to which people no longer believe the safest place to be is in U.S. dollars. Our economy also hinges on understanding our dependence on foreign oil. Both Obama and McCain were sure that if we just get out and start drilling we can get the economy out of trouble and back on track for everyone to experience the American Dream. Although drilling offshore or onshore is on the bridge to nowhere, there is a solution to our economic problems related to energy.

Does the following analysis sound familiar?

A weakening U.S. dollar is putting upward pressure on oil prices. The shock produced chaos in the West. In the United States, the retail price of a gallon of gasoline rose 50%, consumption dropped by 6.1% from September to February. Underscoring the interdependence of the world societies and economies, oil-importing nations in the noncommunist industrial world saw sudden inflation and economic recession. The energy crisis led to greater interest in renewable energy and spurred research in solar power and wind power as well as increased interest in mass transit.

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By Rady Ananda

UPDATE: Over 1,200 mirror sites now host Wikileaks.

On Dec. 2nd, extremist Senators John Ensign (R-NV), Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Scott Brown (R-MA) introduced a bill entitled the Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination Act (SHIELD), effectively criminalizing whistleblowers.

The next day, the Library of Congress confirmed that it blocked Wikileaks from its database, bluntly denying access by the Congressional Research Service. Not only is the public being prevented from viewing whatever Wikileaks has to say, but so are government researchers who advise Congress.

Writing for the Federation of American Scientists, Steven Aftergood said, "if CRS is 'Congress’s brain,' then the new access restrictions could mean a partial lobotomy."

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By Rady Ananda

For the past three days, the WikiLeaks website (http://wikileaks.org/) has been under a massive "distributed denial of service" attack, "exceeding 10 gigabits a second," according to the world's most widely used whistleblower website. Amazon shut down WikiLeaks servers, it reported today on Twitter. But that's the least of its problems. Yesterday, a senior advisor to the Canadian Prime Minister issued a televised fatwa on Julian Assange. Today, Interpol posted its call for arrest of the website's founder and Ecuador withdrew its offer of asylum.

University of Calgary political science professor and key advisor to Canada's PM Stephen Harper, Tom Flanagan, called on President Obama to "put out a contract and maybe use a drone" during a talk show interview on the CBC News Network Tuesday evening:
..........

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By Rady Ananda

After controversy erupted when the University of Minnesota yanked the opening of Larkin McPhee's new film, Troubled Waters: A Mississippi River Story, U of M officials gave the go-ahead for the October 3rd screening. The film explores agrochemical runoff and growing dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

Molly Priesmeyer of the Twin Cities Daily Planet exposed a conflict of interest between U of Minn. and Big Ag:

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Michael Collins
Now what could this mean? TV crew stopped from taking samples from polluted Florida beach. Pat Gonzales, US Fish and Wildlife (to WEAR ABC 3 reporter taking a sample from polluted beach): "You can not come out here and do your own investigation if you're looking for oil product." WEAR ABC 3

Is the government protecting the sovereign state of BP? Is a pattern emerging?

It seems so. In addition to chasing off WEAR-ABC off the beach, federal officials discouraged scientists from taking samples in the Gulf, other federal officials confiscated samples gathered by scientists at LSU, and state officials refused to test fish for pollution claiming they'd seen no oil in the area in question. Who benefits?

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