Category Archives: Fail!

Who leaked Panama Papers and why? – Times of India

However, the source warned that his or her “life is in danger”, was only willing to communicate via encrypted channels and refused to meet in person. “How much data are we talking about,” Obermayer asked, according to an account in Wired. “More than you have ever seen,” the source responded. The eventual stash added up to 2.6 terabytes, a 100 times bigger than Wikileaks’ Cablegate, and enough to fill 600 DVDs. Obermayer says he communicated with his source over a series of encrypted channels that they frequently changed, each time deleting all history from their prior exchange. In their Suddeutsche Zeitung report, Obermayer and his co-authors write that the source wanted neither financial compensation nor anything else in return, apart from a few security measures. To this day, Obermayer says he does not know the name of the person or the identity of the person who leaked the documents, but feels he knows the person. “For certain periods I talked to (this person) more than to my wife,” he told Wired.

Source: Who leaked Panama Papers and why? – Times of India

More Evidence that Monarch Butterflies Should be Listed as Endangered | Civil Eats

Now, new research by a group of scientists from around the nation reveals that monarchs may be even more vulnerable to extinction than previously understood. And this in turn means that listing the monarch as endangered under the Endangered Species Act is even more urgent than we thought. These revelations come despite the fact that there was an initial increase in this year’s overwintering monarchs in Mexico. While some news sources reported that the monarchs were “making a comeback” or “on the rebound,” such increases have commonly occurred in previous years. And while the latest news stories linked the reported increases to more milkweed planting, most of these often substantial population fluctuations are more likely caused by factors such as favorable or unfavorable weather. And, as if on cue, a major winter storm has recently reduced the overwintering population. So the optimism about this year’s population increase seems to have been premature. And, in much the same way that a particularly cold winter in one part of the world does not have anything to do with fact that the surface of the planet is getting warmer due to climate change, this year’s increase in monarchs provides no evidence that the long-term trend toward their decline has been reversed. And if the welcome, but limited, planting of milkweed along roadsides, and in parks and gardens has helped, any effect is likely to have been very small. We know that monarch butterfly populations fluctuate greatly, but this new research may also help us better understanding their historic fluctuations by enabling the scientists to place actual numbers on them. By using analytic methods not previously used, these scientists estimate that if current trends are not reversed, there is between an 11 and 57 percent risk of extinction of the Midwest migrating population (the main population by far) within the next 20 years.

Source: More Evidence that Monarch Butterflies Should be Listed as Endangered | Civil Eats

The April 5: The Day that shook the South and its legacy – Groundviews {Textbook Ethno-Racism}

On the 5th April 1971 midnight the revolution began in earnest and it was confined to the areas where the Sinhalese lived. The simultaneous attacks on   police stations went in line with the plan that had been drawn up years before as part of the revolutionary strategy. Between 187-89 the JVP’s armed wing murdered left wing leaders and also trade unionists and activists. Built on a foundation of Sinhalese chauvinism it remains hostile to dissenting political opinions and even the existence of human beings within Sri Lanka of other cultures and religions. This exclusionary nationalism is deeply embedded in the JVP’s DNA, marking their political practice even today. It leaves them with the dubious and contradictory position of upholding majoritarian ethnic nationalism while at the same time adhering to a  ‘proletarian internationalism’. Their answer to the great question of post-Independence Sri Lankan politics, the rights of ethnic minorities is simply to wait for the socialist revolution.  Their political vision is untouched by the need to widen their electoral coalition, persuade voters or make any compromises with the real problems and challenges facing Sri Lankan people. Dissecting the JVP’s ideological and political articulation explains why.

Source: The April 5: The Day that shook the South and its legacy – Groundviews

 just call me deportee… no longer human or humane

Legal Nihilism Whereas Berlin and the EU are approaching open conflict with the United Nations, citizens’ initiatives also in Greece are raising strong criticism. A Greek-German appeal, for example, calls for the blockade, imposed on the refugees stranded in Greece, to be lifted. They should be promptly brought to Germany with special trains.[8] The “Train of Commemoration” initiative, in turn, has issued a statement saying that by violating “international humanitarian law” the German government, along with “the principal parliamentary and non-parliamentary supporting parties and circles” are also violating “the German constitution,” “whose historical foundation was the renunciation of the legal nihilism of its predecessor German state and its anti-humanitarian crimes of persecution. Hundreds of thousands, at the time, became refugees, wandering around the continent, in search of protection from Germany.”[9] (Read the entire text here.) Sheer Desperation Over the past few days, the protests by the refugees themselves have continued to intensify. Since the beginning of last week, there have been practically daily outbursts of collective anger. Last Thursday, in Camp Moria on Lesbos, about 50 Afghans chanted “Azandi” (which means freedom in Farsi).[10] On the Greek island of Chios, hundreds of refugees tore down a razor wire fence Friday and fled their detention “hotspot,” and marched together to the harbor. Even on the Greek mainland, protests are escalating. About 1,000 people, including many migrants and refugees, marched to the EU office in Athens Thursday, to protest against Brussels’ deportation deal with Ankara. In the north of the country, roads to Macedonia were blocked. “We expect violence,” warned on the weekend, a government spokesperson in Athens regarding the growing resistance to these illegal deportation measures. The refugees had narrowly escaped the war and are adamant in light of Berlin and the EU’s denial of protection, he admitted. “Desperate people” however “tend to resort to violence.”[11] German Deportation Personnel German personnel are also participating in the mass deportation. Thirty officers of the Federal Police were expected to arrive in Lesbos on the weekend and by Monday eight employees of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). They are tasked to assist the Expeditious Asylum Procedures in the detention “hotspots,” so that Berlin and Brussels can lend a veneer of rule of law. The BAMF is planning to dispatch 100 officials to Greece to ensure the smoothest possible implementation of the deportation deal with Turkey. For the German government this deal is of strategic importance in view of permanently sealing off the EU against refugees. It is explicitly promoting this deal as a “European solution.”[12]

Source: www.german-foreign-policy.com

Security for Turkey′s Erdogan scuffles with journalists in Washington | News | DW.COM | 31.03.2016

The National Press Club condemned the incident. “Turkey’s leader and his security team are guests in the United States,” Thomas Burr, the group’s president, said in statement. “They have no right to lay their hands on reporters or protesters or anyone else for that matter, when the people they were apparently roughing up seemed to be merely doing their jobs or exercising the rights they have in this country.” Turkey is under mounting international criticism over press freedom and free speech. Journalists are regularly physically harassed, arrested, censured and taken to court for reporting. The media landscape is dominated by pro-government mouthpieces as the government takes control of some of the few remaining opposition media outlets.

Source: Security for Turkey′s Erdogan scuffles with journalists in Washington | News | DW.COM | 31.03.2016

ISIS Turns Saudis Against the Kingdom, and Families Against Their Own – The New York Times

BURAIDA, Saudi Arabia — The men were not hardened militants. One was a pharmacist, another a heating and cooling technician. One was a high school student. They were six cousins, all living in Saudi Arabia, all with the same secret. They had vowed allegiance to the Islamic State — and they planned to kill another cousin, a sergeant in the kingdom’s counterterrorism force. And that’s what they did. In February, the group abducted Sgt. Bader al-Rashidi, dragged him to the side of a road south of this central Saudi city, and shot and killed him. With video rolling, they condemned the royal family, saying it had forsaken Islam. Then they fled into the desert. The video spread rapidly across the kingdom, shocking a nation struggling to contain a terrorist movement seen as especially dangerous not just because it promotes violence, but also because it has adopted elements of Saudi Arabia’s intolerant version of Islam — a Sunni creed known as Wahhabism — and used them to delegitimize the monarchy. “Wahhabism is fundamental to the Islamic State’s ideology,” said Cole Bunzel, a scholar of Wahhabi history at Princeton University and the author of a recent paper on Saudi Arabia and the Islamic State. “It informs the character of their religion and is the most on-display feature, in my opinion, of their entire ideology.” Among 20 terrorist episodes in Saudi Arabia since late 2014, the killing of Sergeant Rashidi was the third in which citizens had secretly joined the Islamic State and killed relatives in the security services. In each case, they justified their acts by saying Saudi Arabia practiced a corrupted version of the faith, a charge aimed at a kingdom that holds itself up as the only true Islamic state.

Source: ISIS Turns Saudis Against the Kingdom, and Families Against Their Own – The New York Times

Ebola no longer poses global risk, says WHO | News | DW.COM | 29.03.2016

{The very non-health related desire to say everything is OK now, is the same reaction that caused WHO and its member nations to urge calm and under-react to Ebola – which gave Ebola all the time it needed to outstrip several nation’s ability to fight it. Immediate “economic” concerns that drive this behavior may well be the leading cause of the pandemic that kills millions!}

Chan stressed that the three worst affected countries – Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone – remain vulnerable to Ebola flare-ups, including an ongoing cluster of cases in Guinea, which has left five people dead.But the UN’s health agency said all original chains of virus transmission have now ended.Chan said the “risk of international spread is now low, and…countries currently have the capacity to respond rapidly to new virus emergences.”Her statement brings to an end a nearly 20-month emergency that started in Guinea in late 2013, saw 28,638 cases emerge and 11,300 deaths.

Source: Ebola no longer poses global risk, says WHO | News | DW.COM | 29.03.2016