Eideard

“The direct number to the CEO of AT&T is in the top righthand drawer of your desk”

A U.S. appeals panel on Thursday upheld the constitutionality of a federal law that grants immunity to telecommunications companies that assist the U.S. government in conducting surveillance of American citizens. However, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also revived a separate lawsuit against the government over its surveillance activities.

Several lawsuits filed in the wake of revelations about warrantless wiretapping alleged that telecom companies provided authorities with direct access to nearly all communications passing through their domestic facilities. Besides the government itself, defendants included AT&T, Sprint Nextel and Verizon.

In 2008, Congress granted telecoms immunity for cooperating with the government’s intelligence-gathering activities. A district judge in San Francisco upheld the law as constitutional, and dismissed the claims against the companies.

In a ruling on Thursday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit agreed…

Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a leading plaintiff in both cases, said they had not yet decided whether to appeal the telecom ruling…

Cohn said it has been nearly six years since warrantless wiretapping was revealed. “I think the American people deserve a little faster justice than that,” she said.

Some of us – foolish as it has turned out to be – expected that the Obama Administration would come down on the side of Liberty for All and the rest of that good stuff and reverse the crap spying and censorship brought upon this land by the Bush/Cheney cabal.

Wrong.

The first of a line of 17,300 cherry trees are at the high-water mark of the tsunami that devastated the north-east of Japan on March 11.

A citizens’ group from Tohoku came up with the idea of planting the trees every 10 metres along the 173 km of the coastline that was most seriously affected by the tsunami, which in places reached a height of more than 40 metres.

Cherry trees have long been seen as a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of life and are commonly used in Japanese art, anime and film, but the volunteers who began planting the trees in the devastated town of Rikuzentakata on Sunday hope they will serve a different purpose.

In previous centuries, survivors of a major tsunami placed stone markers at the high-water mark. Those markers have since been forgotten or covered with undergrowth, leaving the people of the Tohoku region with no indicator of how far inland they needed to move when the magnitude-9 earthquake struck off the coast on March 11.

By planting distinctive cherry trees, the volunteers hope that more lives can be saved next time disaster strikes in this part of Japan. “It is our responsibility to preserve the memory of the great tsunami for future generations,” Takumi Hashizume, the leader of the Cherry Line 311 Action Committee, told the Kyodo news agency. “I don’t want people in the future to suffer the same pain.

Smart. Memorable. Easy to point out to future generations.

Most of the 1,800 people the feds believe obtained their citizenship fraudulently are Canadians of convenience who don’t even live here, according to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. “Most of these people, we believe, have never really lived in Canada and are still overseas,” he said Wednesday…

“We frankly have got them dead to rights with the proof that we have, and I don’t think a lot of these people want to go through a long, protracted public court battle where it’s clear they fraudulently obtained our citizenship. We expect most of them will just accept our decision and we’ll be able to do this in a fairly quick and low-cost way.”

The federal government revealed Tuesday it will revoke the citizenship of 1,800 people alleged to have obtained their Canadian citizenship fraudulently.

For the most part, it appears those people fudged or hired crooked immigration consultants to fudge for them their residency requirements…

Kenney warned the 1,800 are likely just the first tranche of people to have their citizenship revoked as the feds crack down on the crooked consultants.

He called it, “widespread residency fraud, where these consultants will sell packages for thousands of dollars, create a fake house or address or apartment, create fake utility bills and submit those to my ministry as proof of residency.”

In 2006, the federal government shelled out nearly $100 million evacuating 15,000 Canadian citizens from Lebanon during the Lebanon-Israel conflict.

It turns out many of them had rarely, if ever, set foot in Canada, prompting some to blast them as “Canadians of convenience…”

Since Confederation, Canada has only ever revoked 67 citizenships, 63 of them since 1977.

Sounds like this is overdue. If so, I have to ask how long did it take for someone to notice a practice this phony was going on? Like – who’s watching the store?

Yes, that is a helluva question for an American to ask, eh?

Israeli “democracy” in action
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

In a move likely to fuel tensions with its minority Arab population, Israel moved a step closer to passing a law that would require new citizens of the country to declare their loyalty to a “Jewish state.”

In a statement released Wednesday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his support for adding language to Israel’s citizenship and entry law that would declare a new citizen’s allegiance to “a Jewish and democratic state.”

“The State of Israel is the national state of the Jewish people. This principle guides government policy, both foreign and domestic, and is a foundation of Israeli law,” Netanyahu declared in the statement…

Sounds familiar doesn’t it? Ask your friendly neighborhood teabagger how they feel about enforcing a mandatory Christian United States? They’d probably offer the usual Judeo-Christian folderol. It gets to sound more inclusive.

Arab Knesset member Ahmed Tibi from the Ra’am-Ta’al party criticized the move, saying that ” the values of Jewish and Democratic cannot be in the same definition because democracy is the equality of all the citizens. But an ethnic definition as Jewish is the preference of the Jew over that of the Arab and therefore it fixates an inferior status to 20 percent of the population…”

In an updated statement, Netanyahu said “Israel is a democratic state that gives full civil equality to all its citizens. We uphold this in our foreign and domestic policy, and in the peace negotiations.”

Which is another lie.

None of the populations under the thumb of Israeli occupation are allowed to vote in anything other than a strictly local election. They have no voice in the larger political entity ruling their lives.

UPDATE: The Israeli cabinet adopted the bill.

Survivors of Israeli mines and cluster bombs in Lebanon enjoy a football match
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

An international treaty banning cluster munitions will come into force later this year after the number of countries to register their ratification reached 30 on Tuesday, the United Nations said.

Dropped from aircraft or fired from the ground, cluster bombs open in mid-air and scatter bomblets over a wide area. Campaigners against their use say they have killed and maimed tens of thousands of civilians…

The treaty is binding only on countries that have signed and ratified it. So far, 104 countries have signed the pact, according to advocacy group Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC).

Countries that have signed the convention include major European states France, Germany and Spain. Britain and Italy have signed but not ratified.

Those that have done neither include the United States, Russia, China and Israel…

Anyone surprised? All confident they are above international law.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the 30 ratifications a “major advance on the global disarmament agenda” and said the treaty’s entry into force “demonstrates the world’s collective revulsion at the impact of these terrible weapons.”

“Cluster munitions are unreliable and inaccurate,” Ban said in a statement. “They maim and kill scores of civilians, including many children. They impair post-conflict recovery by making roads and land inaccessible to farmers and aid workers…”

In recent times, the United Nations estimated that Israel used up to 4 million submunitions in Lebanon during a 2006 war against Hezbollah guerrillas, who also fired more than 100 cluster munitions rockets into northern Israel.

Both Russia and Georgia used them during their August 2008 conflict.

Laos is the country most heavily contaminated by cluster munitions as a result of U.S. bombing during the Indochina war more than 30 years ago, according to the CMC.

Anyone surprised?

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist and a customer-service guru, was riding on a public train in San Francisco, California, recently when something common but annoying occurred: The railcar filled with people and became uncomfortably hot…

This was 2009, the age of mobile technology, so Newmark pulled out his iPhone, snapped a photo of the train car and, using an app called “SeeClickFix,” zapped an on-the-go complaint, complete with GPS coordinates, straight to City Hall.

“A week or so later I got an e-mail back saying, ‘Hey, we know about the problem and we’re going to be taking some measures to address it,’ ” he said.

Welcome to a movement the tech crowd is calling “Gov 2.0” — where mobile technology and GPS apps are helping give citizens like Newmark more of a say in how their local tax money is spent. It’s public service for the digital age.

A host of larger U.S. cities from San Francisco to New York quietly have been releasing treasure troves of public data to Web and mobile application developers.

That may sound dull. But tech geeks transform banal local government spreadsheets about train schedules, complaint systems, potholes, street lamp repairs and city garbage into useful applications for mobile phones and the Web.

The aim is to let citizens report problems to their governments more easily and accurately; and to put public information, which otherwise may be buried in file cabinets and Excel files, at the fingertips of taxpayers.

I see a bit of this coming my way. Our county government has an application in for stimulus/broadband money – and has a useful and navigable website designed to aid residents.

True – I don’t have to worry long about potholes since an exec in our highway department lives just down the road and doesn’t want to tweak his Corvette. But, immediate access to several departments would aid ordinary citizens to support better service for us all. IMHO.

Most of Europe’s Muslims want to live in mixed communities, not segregated neighbourhoods, a new report says.

The work by the Open Society Institute (OSI), an independent think-tank, looked at the social integration of Muslims in 11 West European cities…

The report says religious discrimination remains a critical barrier to their participation in European society, and the situation has worsened in recent years…

Nazia Hussein, who supervised the work, says many Muslims are still seen as outsiders.

“The majority of Muslims that we’ve spoken to across 11 cities feel very strongly attached to their neighbourhood and city, they feel quite strongly attached to their country,” she told the BBC. “But at the same time they don’t believe that their fellow countrymen or the wider society sees them as either German or French or English…”

New laws forbidding the wearing of visibly religious symbols or clothing in schools have had a detrimental impact, it says…

City authorities were “fighting residential segregation”, it acknowledged, but educational segregation remains a problem.

The authors conclude that social segregation does matter, but it is of most concern to Muslims themselves.

One of the most interesting points – indicating who is really trying to build a new society – was the success of cities trying to foster an inclusive city identity.

RTFA for more of the points covered.

The Rhode Island state Senate has passed legislation allowing “domestic partners” the right to claim each others bodies and arrange funerals.
The bill would apply to both homosexual and heterosexual couples, defining domestic partners as those in an “intimate, committed and exclusive relationship,” The Providence Journal reported Wednesday.

Gay marriage is now legal in four of the six New England states with New Hampshire and Rhode Island the holdouts. A number of other bills have been introduced in Rhode Island to either ban gay marriage or extend partnership or marriage rights to homosexuals, but the all except the funeral bill remain stalled in committee.

During legislative hearings on the bill earlier this year, Mark Goldberg described spending weeks trying to arrange the release of his longtime partner’s body for cremation. He said state officials refused because he and Ron Hanby were neither related nor legally married until a state Department of Human Services employee went to bat for him.

“I felt as if I was treated not as a second-class citizen, but as a non-citizen,” Goldberg said.

How can some of these bureaucrats justify their pitiful existence? The biggest and best favor they could give the state is – NOT coming to work.

Leaders of the Bund of Brothers
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The Israeli Knesset has approved a preliminary reading of a bill that would outlaw calls for the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

The measure, approved 47-37, was sponsored by Habayit Hayehudi party MK Zevulun Orlev and calls for the year-long imprisonment of anyone making public comments that would “cause an act of hatred, scorn or disloyalty to the state,” The Jerusalem Post reported.

The bill came hard on the heels of another measure proposed this week by Yisrael Beiteinu MK Alex Miller that seeks to outlaw commemorating Israel’s Independence Day as a day of mourning, as many Palestinians and some Israeli Arabs do now…

MK Afo Agbaria told the Post, “The State of Israel has declared jihad on the Arab population. Israel is gradually becoming an apartheid state. I won’t be surprised if in the future the Netanyahu-Lieberman government imposes additional restrictions on Arab citizens, including forbidding the use of the Arabic language.”

No surprise. How sad it is to say this.

This is a long editorial piece by Cinaedh – one of our regular visitors.

I’m not reprinting the whole work here. What I’d like folks to do is drop by his own blog and read it through and comment over there. He’s thoughtful and filled with a special perspective on truth and justice that adds insight to his writing. Insight that many of us haven’t had a chance to develop.

Take a look.