MADRID, November 27. /TASS/. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in his book planned to be out on December 1 reveals that Goggle in fact works for the US State Department, as reported by the Spanish Publico.es web edition.

According to the edition, Assange arrived at the conclusion that Google works for the US government after meeting Google president Eric Schmidt and board member Jared Cohen in 2011. The meeting was also attended by Lisa Shields and Scott Malcomson who turned out to be Washington's diplomatic envoys.

WikiLeaks founder in his book says he was visited by a group of people 3/4 of whom were representatives of the US State Department and the rest being fromGoogle.

According to the edition, the company provides FBI and CIA with unfettered access to users' correspondence. Such access can be obtained without the prosecutor's approval or a court ruling, the edition quotes Assange.

http://en.itar-tass.com/world/763927

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/11/26/today-vancouver-becomes-the-first-north-american-city-to-prescribe-heroin-to-addicts-since-the-drug-war-began

The results of the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that 95.2 percent of the research participants receiving heroin stuck with the program while only 54.1 of those taking methadone did.

Dr. Scott MacDonald, who was involved in the trial, has told reporters that bringing stability to the participants' lives gives them the opportunity to reconnect with their families and perhaps even begin building towards further educational or job opportunities.

"I think all the clinicians at the clinic have seen the great beneficial effect that this treatment can have on people — hard-to-reach populations that may have been using on the streets for 15, 20, 25, even 30 years," he told the CBC. "It is very dangerous and life-destroying to have to ingest in an alley, to use illicit heroin three, four times a day. That destroys lives. This is an alternative."

Vancouver has long been an epicenter of progressive thinking about drug policy and drug addiction. Dr. Martin Schechter, president of the School of Public Health at the University of British Columbia, has argued for years that the most destructive harms of heroin use don't come from the drug itself—they come from the fact that the drug is illegal.

It is notable that the U.S. death rates for coal are so much lower than for China, strictly a result of regulation and the Clean Air Act (Scott et al., 2005). It is also notable that the Clean Air Act is one of the most life-saving pieces of legislation ever adopted by any country in history. Still, about 10,000 die from coal use in the U.S. each year, and another thousand from natural gas......


...estimates have suggested a 10% increase in health care costs in countries where coal makes up a significant fraction of the energy mix, like the U.S. and Europe (NAS 2010; Cohen et al., 2005; Pope et al., 2002). These additional health costs begin to rival the total energy costs on an annual basis for the U.S. given that health care costs top $2.6 trillion, and electricity costs only exceed about $400 billion. Another way to describe this human health energy fee is that it costs about 2,000 lives per year to keep the lights on in Beijing but only about 200 lives to keep them on in New York.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/

A police riot is a riot carried out by the police; a riot that the police are responsible for instigating, escalating or sustaining as a violent confrontation; an event characterised by widespread police brutality; a mass police action that is violently undertaken against members of the public for the purpose of political repression. The term "police riot" was popularized after its use in the Walker Report, which investigated the events surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago to describe the "unrestrained and indiscriminate" violence that the police "inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat."[1] In this sense a police riot refers to rioting carried out by the police (or those acting in a police capacity) rather than a riot carried out by people who may be motivated to a greater or lesser degree by grievances with the police (see the 1981 Toxteth riots or the 1992 Los Angeles Riots for examples of riots over policing rather than police riots).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_riot

Last week Amen, a helpline a support service for male victims of domestic abuse, released its 2013 report, which detailed that 7,758 incidents of domestic abuse had been reported by 2,263 men last year. Since 2011 face- to-face meetings with men who reported abuse rose 64 per cent.

........

How can we expect more men to come forward as victims of violence in the home when exposing any kind of vulnerability is usurping this “norm”? And how can we expect men to report crimes perpetrated against them when we make fun of men as victims?

In Love/Hate a horrifying scene in the final episode in which one of the characters, Fran, was raped in prison with a broken snooker cue, was met with “jokes” on Twitter. If the victim had been a woman such attempts at jokes would have caused uproar. But for many commenting online it was clear men being raped was something to be laughed about, so uncomfortable and derogatory are we about men as victims.

Patriarchy doesn’t just punish women. It also places an unsustainable pressure on men to uphold a system that is rigid and stifling.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/men-still-hidden-as-victims-of-violence-in-the-home-1.2012221

A student sit-in protesting tuition hikes at the University of California continued at UC Berkeley's Wheeler Hall for the third day Saturday, while others planned to make a peaceful presence felt at the football game between Cal and Stanford.

Students planned to wear green ribbons at the annual Big Game at California Memorial Stadium, a symbol of the financial burden of the fee hikes. On Thursday, UC regents voted 14-7 to permit fees hikes of as much as 28% over the next five years, depending on state funding; Gov. Jerry Brown and Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), both regents, voted against the measure.

“The aim is not to disrupt the game or the proceedings around it, but to spread awareness of the regents’ vote and its effect on students,” the group occupying Wheeler Hall, known as the Open UC,” said on its blog. Students have been posting updates on Twitter using hashtags #OccupyWheeler and #fightthehike.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-protesting-tuition-hikes-cal-students-to-wear-green-ribbons-at-big-game-20141122-story.html

A new analysis of the data available to the public about drone strikes, conducted by the human-rights group Reprieve, indicates that even when operators target specific individuals – the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls “targeted killing” – they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November.

Reprieve, sifting through reports compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, examined cases in which specific people were targeted by drones multiple times. Their data, shared with the Guardian, raises questions about the accuracy of US intelligence guiding strikes that US officials describe using words like “clinical” and “precise.”

The analysis is a partial estimate of the damage wrought by Obama’s favored weapon of war, a tool he and his administration describe as far more precise than more familiar instruments of land or air power.

“Drone strikes have been sold to the American public on the claim that they’re ‘precise’. But they are only as precise as the intelligence that feeds them. There is nothing precise about intelligence that results in the deaths of 28 unknown people, including women and children, for every ‘bad guy’ the US goes after,” said Reprieve’s Jennifer Gibson, who spearheaded the group’s study.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147

Governments should sack plans to auction off old television frequencies to the highest bidder and instead use the bandwidth for free super-frequency WiFi if they want to boost the economy, scientists have said.

Old television frequencies are becoming available for other uses around the world, thanks to a switch from analogue to digital transmission. However, while governments are for the most part auctioning these off to whoever is prepared to pay the most – usually mobile phone networks – they should instead be using the frequencies to create free-to-use, wide-range WiFi, scientists from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany have said.
...............

WiFi transmitted over old TV frequencies could be transmitted at lower frequencies than traditional WiFi, resulting in a far wider area covered. This super WiFi’s coverage area could even be as big as several kilometres in radius, a massive improvement on existing networks.

This would mean that pricey mobile services such as 4G were no longer required, which the scientists believe would lead to more mobile internet use, and a wealth of economic benefits.

http://www.factor-tech.com/connected-world/9769-scientists-urge-governments-to-turn-old-tv-frequencies-into-free-super-wifi/

All Americans, including the rich, would be better off if top tax rates went back to Eisenhower-era levels when the top federal income tax rate was 91 percent, according to a new working paper by Fabian Kindermann from the University of Bonn and Dirk Krueger from the University of Pennsylvania.

The top tax rate that makes all citizens, including the highest 1 percent of earners, the best off is “somewhere between 85 and 90 percent,” Krueger told The Huffington Post. Currently, the top rate of 39.6 percent is paid on income above $406,750 for individuals and $457,600 for couples.

Fewer than 1 percent of Americans, or about 1.3 million people, reach that top bracket.

Here is the conclusion from the report, charted:

When Facebook opened its first corporate data enter in Prineville, though, the company became a target for Greenpeace because the social networking company bought its energy from PacifiCorp, which relies on coal for a lot of its electricity. Soon after, Facebook pledged to seek renewable power for its data centers.

Apple and Google, which also operate large Oregon data centers, had already made similar promises. Amazon, though, had been less specific about its energy sources and that earned it an "F" grade from Greenpeace earlier this year, even though Amazon's facilities in Morrow County draw their energy from BPA dams.

Amazon Web Services, which rents space in its facilities to other companies that need cloud-computing capacity, wrote on its website that it "has a long-term commitment to achieve 100% renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure footprint."

The company did not immediately respond to an inquiry seeking additional detail.

http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2014/11/amazon_pledges_its_data_center.html