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steve2470's JournalJapan Stands by Apology to Its Wartime Sex Slaves
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/world/asia/japan-prime-minister-says-he-will-not-revise-1993-apology-to-wartime-prostitutes.html?_r=0TOKYO — Moving to defuse a heated diplomatic dispute over World War II-era history, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Friday that his government would not revise a landmark 1993 apology to women forced to work in Japanese military brothels.
It was the first time since taking office more than a year ago that Mr. Abe has explicitly stated that his right-wing administration would uphold the official apology, known as the Kono Statement. That statement, issued by Yohei Kono, then the chief cabinet secretary, admitted that Japan’s military played at least an indirect role in forcing the so-called comfort women to provide sex to Japanese soldiers.
“I am deeply pained to think of the comfort women who experienced immeasurable pain and suffering, a feeling I share equally with my predecessors,” Mr. Abe told Parliament. Referring to the Kono Statement, the prime minister said, “The Abe cabinet has no intention to review it.”
Mr. Abe also stated that his administration would uphold a broader apology that the Japanese government issued in 1995 to all victims of Japan’s early 20th-century militarism. Previously, he had spoken in more general terms of the suffering that Japan had caused, and of continuing the position of previous governments on historical issues.
The Ukrainian parliament has voted to dissolve the Crimean parliament
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/15/ukraine-crisis-fatal-clashes-as-tensions-rise-before-crimea-vote-live1.18pm GMT Summary
Two people were killed in Kharkiv in what the Ukrainian government said was a Russian-staged provocation
Large peace demonstration takes place in Moscow in a different part of the city from a smaller Russian nationalist or pro Soviet Union march.
US cancels military exercises in Russia but confirms exercises in Ukraine in July.
The Ukrainian parliament has voted to dissolve the Crimean parliament.
Absurd Creature of the Week: The Murderous 10-Foot-Tall Bird With a Beak Like a Pickax
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/03/absurd-creature-week-terror-bird/
You’d be forgiven for looking at a pigeon and straining to believe that its ancestors were dinosaurs. This is a creature, after all, that descended from some of the finest killing machines evolution has ever produced to now drink gutter water and assault old people for bread crumbs. But millions of years before birds were bumming for handouts in parks, they had risen right to the top of the food chain. In fact, they filled the vacated niches of their menacing theropod forebears like Velociraptor.
These are the terror birds: scrappy, powerful critters that drove their enormous hooked beaks through small mammals as easily as that guy who put a pickax through my crazy uncle’s skull in a bar fight that one time (he survived, and no, I’m not even kidding). The 18 known species, the tallest growing to a staggering 10 feet tall, didn’t bother with flying, instead opting to chase down all those creatures that had only just thrown their good-riddance-to-the-massive-carnivorous-dinosaurs party. The poor things woke up with a hangover, and the hangover was the terror bird.
It was 60 million years ago in South America, which had not yet joined with its northern counterpart, where the terror birds rose to power in isolation as apex predators. Even given their success, their fossils are fragmentary and extremely rare, according to paleontologist Luis Chiappe, who in 2007 described the titanic, strangely boxy noggin of the biggest terror bird ever: Kelenken, named after the fearsome bird spirit of Patagonia’s native Tehuelche people.
“It’s the largest known skull for terror birds,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it’s the largest known bird skull, period. It’s about two-and-a-half feet long, an enormous, colossal beast with a very big hook at the end of the beak like an eagle.”
U.S. to Give Up Role in Internet Domain Names
Source: New York Times
WASHINGTON — The United States will stop overseeing the system of numbers and domain names that govern Internet traffic in 2015 and will turn over related administrative functions to a global group, yet to be determined, government officials said on Friday.
The United States has managed that function since the dawn of the Internet, assigning the names and numbers that make up Internet addresses. It will now ask the global Internet governing body, known as Icann, to put together a new plan for those functions, known as the domain name system.
The United States has been planning the transition since 1997, government officials said, but it has taken on greater urgency in the last year because of revelations that United States intelligence agencies, particularly the National Security Agency, have been intercepting Internet traffic and using it to spy on countries and individuals.
As use of the Internet has expanded around the globe, other countries and multinational corporations have pushed for the United States’ role to be curtailed and turned over to what officials call a multi-stakeholder group, including businesses, governments, consumers and others.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/technology/us-to-give-up-role-in-internet-domain-names.html
Fed Transferred $79.6 Billion in Earnings to the Treasury Last Year
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/business/economy/fed-transferred-79-6-billion-in-earnings-to-the-treasury-last-year.html?_r=0WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve paid $79.6 billion to the Treasury Department in 2013 as the Fed’s enormous investment campaign to stimulate economic growth continued to generate windfall profits for taxpayers.
Since 2008, the Fed has expanded its holdings of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities from less than $1 trillion to more than $4 trillion in an effort to suppress interest rates and encourage risk-taking.
Its earnings from those holdings have increased apace. The Fed, required by law to put most of its profit in the government’s coffers, has contributed almost $323 billion in the last four years. The Fed invests exclusively in federal government bonds, so its profits come from lending to the Treasury. In returning the money, it is effectively reducing the government’s borrowing costs.
Some Republican politicians argue that the Fed, by reducing the short-term cost of borrowing, is enabling the growth of the federal debt. Fed officials respond that Congress itself is responsible for making those decisions — and that abandoning the policy would be counterproductive, in all likelihood.
U.S. regulator sues 16 banks for rigging key interest rate
Source: Reuters
(Reuters) - The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation sued 16 of the world's largest banks on Friday, accusing them of colluding to suppress interest rates.
The lawsuit, filed in the federal district court in New York, was the latest to accuse financial institutions of conspiring to manipulate Libor, or the London Interbank Offered Rate.
The FDIC said the defendants' conduct caused substantial losses to 38 banks that the U.S. regulator had taken into receivership since 2008, including Washington Mutual Bank and IndyMac Bank.
"The closed banks' losses flowed directly from, among other things, the harm to competition caused by the fraud and collusion alleged in the complaint," the FDIC said in the lawsuit.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/14/us-fdic-libor-idUSBREA2D1KR20140314?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=71&google_editors_picks=true
CIA feared that documents shared with Senate could lead to exposure of crucial intel sources
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-feared-that-documents-shared-with-senate-could-lead-to-exposure-of-crucial-intel-sources/2014/03/13/ddd23cd4-aae0-11e3-adbc-888c8010c799_story.htmlAfter the CIA provided a massive cache of documents in 2009 to Senate staffers investigating the agency’s detention and interrogation program, the agency realized it might have a problem.
Within those documents, agency employees feared, were details that could lead to the exposure of CIA sources, former U.S intelligence officials said. Among them were top assets who had been recruited while being held at a secret CIA facility on Guantanamo Bay called “Penny Lane,” according to one of the officials.
So great was the concern that the sources’ identity would be disclosed that the CIA withdrew some of the documents from a special facility that had been set up for members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The episode was an early indication of just how sensitive relations were between the CIA and the Senate staffers tasked with investigating one of the agency’s most controversial programs since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The problems only intensified in January after the CIA notified the panel that it had again searched Senate computers in the belief that staffers had obtained documents beyond the scope of their investigation and that it had launched a security review to determine what had happened.
All major browsers fall during second day of Pwn2Own hacking contest
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2108560/all-major-browsers-fall-during-second-day-at-pwn2own-hacking-contest.html?google_editors_picks=trueSecurity researchers demonstrated zero-day exploits against Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Adobe Flash Player during the second day of the Pwn2Own hacking competition Thursday, racking up total prizes of $450,000.
A team from French vulnerability research firm Vupen hacked Google Chrome by exploiting a use-after-free vulnerability that affects both the WebKit and Blink rendering engines. The researchers then successfully bypassed Chrome’s sandbox protection to execute arbitrary code on the underlying system.
On Wednesday, the first day of the contest that takes place every year at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, researchers from the same team hacked Internet Explorer 11, Firefox, Flash Player and Adobe Reader.
Another anonymous researcher presented a Chrome remote code execution exploit Thursday, but the contest judges declared it only a partial win because some details of the hack were similar to those of an exploit presented earlier at Pwnium, Google’s own hacking contest that runs aside Pwn2Own.
For Job-Hunting Teenagers, the Market Is Brutal
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-14/how-to-fix-the-shockingly-high-teen-unemployment-rate?google_editors_picks=trueIf you think the U.S. job market is snapping back, you’re probably not a teenager hunting for work. A report released today (PDF) uses new statistics and analysis to call attention to an employment decline that’s so big it would be considered a national emergency if it affected people older than age 19.
The study’s lead author, Andrew Sum, the head of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, brings a reformer’s zeal to the topic. In 2000, he points out, 45 percent of teens (aged 16 to 19) were employed. By 2011, the last year covered by the study, that ratio had plummeted to 26 percent.
“If the employment rate went down 20 percentage points for adults, what would you call it?” he asked me. “For teenagers, it’s worse than the Great Depression. The question is, why don’t we care?”
It’s not as if things are getting better, either. Last month the employment-to-population ratio for teens was stuck at 25.8 percent—significantly lower than in the recession years of 2008 and 2009.
New Donetsk governor says Russians behind east Ukraine clashes
Source: Reuters
(Reuters) - The new governor of the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk on Friday said Russians were behind violent clashes between rival demonstrators in which one man was killed, and accused Moscow of distorting the truth in its account of what happened.
Dmitriy Chernyavskiy, 22, was stabbed to death in Donetsk, the heartland of Ukraine's Russian-speaking coalfields, after pro-Russian protesters clashed with others favoring European integration and denouncing Russia's incursion into Crimea.
Four of 29 people injured received hospital treatment.
"Sadly, we note that there were, according to police, a lot of people concentrated there who were not from Ukraine," Serhiy Taruta told journalists in an oblique reference to Russia.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/14/us-ukraine-crisis-donetsk-idUSBREA2D13L20140314
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