position:investigator

An Ocean of Lies on Venezuela : Abby Martin & UN Rapporteur Expose Coup
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/an-ocean-of-lies-on-venezuela-abby-martin-and-un-rapporteur-expose-c

On the eve of another US war for oil, Abby Martin debunks the most repeated myths about Venezuela and uncovers how US sanctions are crimes against humanity with UN Investigator and Human Rights...

Palestinian teen shot, killed by Israeli forces in al-Bireh
Dec. 14, 2018 5:39 P.M. (Updated: Dec. 14, 2018 5:55 P.M.)
▻http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=782092

http://www.maannews.com/Photos/494608C.jpg

RAMALLAH (Ma’an) — A 16-year-old Palestinian was shot and killed by Israeli forces during clashes that erupted in the al-Jalazun refugee camp north of al-Bireh in the central occupied West Bank, on Friday evening.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed that a Palestinian from the al-Jalazun refugee camp arrived to the Palestine Medical Center in a critical condition.

Sources added that the teen was injured with live bullets in the abdomen.

The ministry identified the killed teen as Mahmoud Youssef Nakhleh.

Israeli forces opened fire at the teen from a very close range; from less than 10 meters away.

Israeli soldiers attempted to detain Nakhleh afterwards, however, Palestinian Red Crescent paramedics were able to take him and transfer him to the Palestine Medical Center after having to quarrel Israeli soldiers for more than 30 minutes.

Nakhleh was later pronounced dead at the hospital.

#Palestine_assassinée

Billions of Euro ‘Disappeared’ From Frozen Accounts of Muammar Gaddafi. They Were Used to Finance War in Libya.
▻https://www.globalresearch.ca/billions-of-euro-disappeared-from-frozen-accounts-of-muammar-gaddafi-they-were-used-to-finance-war-in-libya/5658667?platform=hootsuite

https://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/1-281-400x225.jpg

The UN is investigating the alleged embezzlement of up to €5 billion that disappeared from accounts owned by Muammar Gaddafi, the former Libyan leader, according to Belgian MP Georges Gilkinet.

“UN documents confirm that Belgium failed to comply with a UN resolution on freezing Libyan assets,” he told the Belgian news network RTBF.

He said that so far, he had received fragmented information from Belgian authorities and that is vital “to clarify the situation, which may lead to a big scandal, because hundreds of millions of euros were sent to unknown individuals in Libya who were not known.”

RTBF also cited an anonymous source claiming that since 2013 the missing assets from the accounts have allegedly been used to “finance a civil war which led to a major migration crisis.”

In Belgium, the probe which is headed by investigator Michel Claise comes amid reports that a portion of Gaddafi’s assets could be sent to the Libyan Investment Authority, a sovereign fund.

Furthermore, a special UN report also suggested that the money was received by the Libyan Investment Authority. As reported by Sputnik, its complex structure makes it almost impossible to find out what these funds were allocated for.

Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy? | The New Yorker
►https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5b9189222baa30258f02e769/16:9/w_1200,h_630,c_limit/180917_r32804.jpg

Since 2011, Zuckerberg has lived in a century-old white clapboard Craftsman in the Crescent Park neighborhood, an enclave of giant oaks and historic homes not far from Stanford University. The house, which cost seven million dollars, affords him a sense of sanctuary. It’s set back from the road, shielded by hedges, a wall, and mature trees. Guests enter through an arched wooden gate and follow a long gravel path to a front lawn with a saltwater pool in the center. The year after Zuckerberg bought the house, he and his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, held their wedding in the back yard, which encompasses gardens, a pond, and a shaded pavilion. Since then, they have had two children, and acquired a seven-hundred-acre estate in Hawaii, a ski retreat in Montana, and a four-story town house on Liberty Hill, in San Francisco. But the family’s full-time residence is here, a ten-minute drive from Facebook’s headquarters.

Occasionally, Zuckerberg records a Facebook video from the back yard or the dinner table, as is expected of a man who built his fortune exhorting employees to keep “pushing the world in the direction of making it a more open and transparent place.” But his appetite for personal openness is limited. Although Zuckerberg is the most famous entrepreneur of his generation, he remains elusive to everyone but a small circle of family and friends, and his efforts to protect his privacy inevitably attract attention. The local press has chronicled his feud with a developer who announced plans to build a mansion that would look into Zuckerberg’s master bedroom. After a legal fight, the developer gave up, and Zuckerberg spent forty-four million dollars to buy the houses surrounding his. Over the years, he has come to believe that he will always be the subject of criticism. “We’re not—pick your noncontroversial business—selling dog food, although I think that people who do that probably say there is controversy in that, too, but this is an inherently cultural thing,” he told me, of his business. “It’s at the intersection of technology and psychology, and it’s very personal.”

At the same time, former Facebook executives, echoing a growing body of research, began to voice misgivings about the company’s role in exacerbating isolation, outrage, and addictive behaviors. One of the largest studies, published last year in the American Journal of Epidemiology, followed the Facebook use of more than five thousand people over three years and found that higher use correlated with self-reported declines in physical health, mental health, and life satisfaction. At an event in November, 2017, Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, called himself a “conscientious objector” to social media, saying, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” A few days later, Chamath Palihapitiya, the former vice-president of user growth, told an audience at Stanford, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works—no civil discourse, no coöperation, misinformation, mistruth.” Palihapitiya, a prominent Silicon Valley figure who worked at Facebook from 2007 to 2011, said, “I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds.” Of his children, he added, “They’re not allowed to use this shit.” (Facebook replied to the remarks in a statement, noting that Palihapitiya had left six years earlier, and adding, “Facebook was a very different company back then.”)

In March, Facebook was confronted with an even larger scandal: the Times and the British newspaper the Observer reported that a researcher had gained access to the personal information of Facebook users and sold it to Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy hired by Trump and other Republicans which advertised using “psychographic” techniques to manipulate voter behavior. In all, the personal data of eighty-seven million people had been harvested. Moreover, Facebook had known of the problem since December of 2015 but had said nothing to users or regulators. The company acknowledged the breach only after the press discovered it.

We spoke at his home, at his office, and by phone. I also interviewed four dozen people inside and outside the company about its culture, his performance, and his decision-making. I found Zuckerberg straining, not always coherently, to grasp problems for which he was plainly unprepared. These are not technical puzzles to be cracked in the middle of the night but some of the subtlest aspects of human affairs, including the meaning of truth, the limits of free speech, and the origins of violence.

Zuckerberg is now at the center of a full-fledged debate about the moral character of Silicon Valley and the conscience of its leaders. Leslie Berlin, a historian of technology at Stanford, told me, “For a long time, Silicon Valley enjoyed an unencumbered embrace in America. And now everyone says, Is this a trick? And the question Mark Zuckerberg is dealing with is: Should my company be the arbiter of truth and decency for two billion people? Nobody in the history of technology has dealt with that.”

In 2002, Zuckerberg went to Harvard, where he embraced the hacker mystique, which celebrates brilliance in pursuit of disruption. “The ‘fuck you’ to those in power was very strong,” the longtime friend said. In 2004, as a sophomore, he embarked on the project whose origin story is now well known: the founding of Thefacebook.com with four fellow-students (“the” was dropped the following year); the legal battles over ownership, including a suit filed by twin brothers, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, accusing Zuckerberg of stealing their idea; the disclosure of embarrassing messages in which Zuckerberg mocked users for giving him so much data (“they ‘trust me.’ dumb fucks,” he wrote); his regrets about those remarks, and his efforts, in the years afterward, to convince the world that he has left that mind-set behind.

New hires learned that a crucial measure of the company’s performance was how many people had logged in to Facebook on six of the previous seven days, a measurement known as L6/7. “You could say it’s how many people love this service so much they use it six out of seven days,” Parakilas, who left the company in 2012, said. “But, if your job is to get that number up, at some point you run out of good, purely positive ways. You start thinking about ‘Well, what are the dark patterns that I can use to get people to log back in?’ ”

Facebook engineers became a new breed of behaviorists, tweaking levers of vanity and passion and susceptibility. The real-world effects were striking. In 2012, when Chan was in medical school, she and Zuckerberg discussed a critical shortage of organs for transplant, inspiring Zuckerberg to add a small, powerful nudge on Facebook: if people indicated that they were organ donors, it triggered a notification to friends, and, in turn, a cascade of social pressure. Researchers later found that, on the first day the feature appeared, it increased official organ-donor enrollment more than twentyfold nationwide.

Sean Parker later described the company’s expertise as “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” The goal: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” Facebook engineers discovered that people find it nearly impossible not to log in after receiving an e-mail saying that someone has uploaded a picture of them. Facebook also discovered its power to affect people’s political behavior. Researchers found that, during the 2010 midterm elections, Facebook was able to prod users to vote simply by feeding them pictures of friends who had already voted, and by giving them the option to click on an “I Voted” button. The technique boosted turnout by three hundred and forty thousand people—more than four times the number of votes separating Trump and Clinton in key states in the 2016 race. It became a running joke among employees that Facebook could tilt an election just by choosing where to deploy its “I Voted” button.

These powers of social engineering could be put to dubious purposes. In 2012, Facebook data scientists used nearly seven hundred thousand people as guinea pigs, feeding them happy or sad posts to test whether emotion is contagious on social media. (They concluded that it is.) When the findings were published, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they caused an uproar among users, many of whom were horrified that their emotions may have been surreptitiously manipulated. In an apology, one of the scientists wrote, “In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.”

Facebook was, in the words of Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, becoming a pioneer in “ persuasive technology. ”

Facebook had adopted a buccaneering motto, “Move fast and break things,” which celebrated the idea that it was better to be flawed and first than careful and perfect. Andrew Bosworth, a former Harvard teaching assistant who is now one of Zuckerberg’s longest-serving lieutenants and a member of his inner circle, explained, “A failure can be a form of success. It’s not the form you want, but it can be a useful thing to how you learn.” In Zuckerberg’s view, skeptics were often just fogies and scolds. “There’s always someone who wants to slow you down,” he said in a commencement address at Harvard last year. “In our society, we often don’t do big things because we’re so afraid of making mistakes that we ignore all the things wrong today if we do nothing. The reality is, anything we do will have issues in the future. But that can’t keep us from starting.”

In contrast to a traditional foundation, an L.L.C. can lobby and give money to politicians, without as strict a legal requirement to disclose activities. In other words, rather than trying to win over politicians and citizens in places like Newark, Zuckerberg and Chan could help elect politicians who agree with them, and rally the public directly by running ads and supporting advocacy groups. (A spokesperson for C.Z.I. said that it has given no money to candidates; it has supported ballot initiatives through a 501(c)(4) social-welfare organization.) “The whole point of the L.L.C. structure is to allow a coördinated attack,” Rob Reich, a co-director of Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, told me. The structure has gained popularity in Silicon Valley but has been criticized for allowing wealthy individuals to orchestrate large-scale social agendas behind closed doors. Reich said, “There should be much greater transparency, so that it’s not dark. That’s not a criticism of Mark Zuckerberg. It’s a criticism of the law.”

La question des langues est fondamentale quand il s’agit de réseaux sociaux

Beginning in 2013, a series of experts on Myanmar met with Facebook officials to warn them that it was fuelling attacks on the Rohingya. David Madden, an entrepreneur based in Myanmar, delivered a presentation to officials at the Menlo Park headquarters, pointing out that the company was playing a role akin to that of the radio broadcasts that spread hatred during the Rwandan genocide. In 2016, C4ADS, a Washington-based nonprofit, published a detailed analysis of Facebook usage in Myanmar, and described a “campaign of hate speech that actively dehumanizes Muslims.” Facebook officials said that they were hiring more Burmese-language reviewers to take down dangerous content, but the company repeatedly declined to say how many had actually been hired. By last March, the situation had become dire: almost a million Rohingya had fled the country, and more than a hundred thousand were confined to internal camps. The United Nations investigator in charge of examining the crisis, which the U.N. has deemed a genocide, said, “I’m afraid that Facebook has now turned into a beast, and not what it was originally intended.” Afterward, when pressed, Zuckerberg repeated the claim that Facebook was “hiring dozens” of additional Burmese-language content reviewers.

More than three months later, I asked Jes Kaliebe Petersen, the C.E.O. of Phandeeyar, a tech hub in Myanmar, if there had been any progress. “We haven’t seen any tangible change from Facebook,” he told me. “We don’t know how much content is being reported. We don’t know how many people at Facebook speak Burmese. The situation is getting worse and worse here.”

I saw Zuckerberg the following morning, and asked him what was taking so long. He replied, “I think, fundamentally, we’ve been slow at the same thing in a number of areas, because it’s actually the same problem. But, yeah, I think the situation in Myanmar is terrible.” It was a frustrating and evasive reply. I asked him to specify the problem. He said, “Across the board, the solution to this is we need to move from what is fundamentally a reactive model to a model where we are using technical systems to flag things to a much larger number of people who speak all the native languages around the world and who can just capture much more of the content.”

Lecture des journaux ou des aggrégateurs ?

once asked Zuckerberg what he reads to get the news. “I probably mostly read aggregators,” he said. “I definitely follow Techmeme”—a roundup of headlines about his industry—“and the media and political equivalents of that, just for awareness.” He went on, “There’s really no newspaper that I pick up and read front to back. Well, that might be true of most people these days—most people don’t read the physical paper—but there aren’t many news Web sites where I go to browse.”

A couple of days later, he called me and asked to revisit the subject. “I felt like my answers were kind of vague, because I didn’t necessarily feel like it was appropriate for me to get into which specific organizations or reporters I read and follow,” he said. “I guess what I tried to convey, although I’m not sure if this came across clearly, is that the job of uncovering new facts and doing it in a trusted way is just an absolutely critical function for society.”

Zuckerberg and Sandberg have attributed their mistakes to excessive optimism, a blindness to the darker applications of their service. But that explanation ignores their fixation on growth, and their unwillingness to heed warnings. Zuckerberg resisted calls to reorganize the company around a new understanding of privacy, or to reconsider the depth of data it collects for advertisers.

Antitrust

In barely two years, the mood in Washington had shifted. Internet companies and entrepreneurs, formerly valorized as the vanguard of American ingenuity and the astronauts of our time, were being compared to Standard Oil and other monopolists of the Gilded Age. This spring, the Wall Street Journal published an article that began, “Imagine a not-too-distant future in which trustbusters force Facebook to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp.” It was accompanied by a sepia-toned illustration in which portraits of Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and other tech C.E.O.s had been grafted onto overstuffed torsos meant to evoke the robber barons. In 1915, Louis Brandeis, the reformer and future Supreme Court Justice, testified before a congressional committee about the dangers of corporations large enough that they could achieve a level of near-sovereignty “so powerful that the ordinary social and industrial forces existing are insufficient to cope with it.” He called this the “curse of bigness.” Tim Wu, a Columbia law-school professor and the author of a forthcoming book inspired by Brandeis’s phrase, told me, “Today, no sector exemplifies more clearly the threat of bigness to democracy than Big Tech.” He added, “When a concentrated private power has such control over what we see and hear, it has a power that rivals or exceeds that of elected government.”

When I asked Zuckerberg whether policymakers might try to break up Facebook, he replied, adamantly, that such a move would be a mistake. The field is “extremely competitive,” he told me. “I think sometimes people get into this mode of ‘Well, there’s not, like, an exact replacement for Facebook.’ Well, actually, that makes it more competitive, because what we really are is a system of different things: we compete with Twitter as a broadcast medium; we compete with Snapchat as a broadcast medium; we do messaging, and iMessage is default-installed on every iPhone.” He acknowledged the deeper concern. “There’s this other question, which is just, laws aside, how do we feel about these tech companies being big?” he said. But he argued that efforts to “curtail” the growth of Facebook or other Silicon Valley heavyweights would cede the field to China. “I think that anything that we’re doing to constrain them will, first, have an impact on how successful we can be in other places,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry in the near term about Chinese companies or anyone else winning in the U.S., for the most part. But there are all these places where there are day-to-day more competitive situations—in Southeast Asia, across Europe, Latin America, lots of different places.”

The rough consensus in Washington is that regulators are unlikely to try to break up Facebook. The F.T.C. will almost certainly fine the company for violations, and may consider blocking it from buying big potential competitors, but, as a former F.T.C. commissioner told me, “in the United States you’re allowed to have a monopoly position, as long as you achieve it and maintain it without doing illegal things.”

Facebook is encountering tougher treatment in Europe, where antitrust laws are stronger and the history of fascism makes people especially wary of intrusions on privacy. One of the most formidable critics of Silicon Valley is the European Union’s top antitrust regulator, Margrethe Vestager.

In Vestager’s view, a healthy market should produce competitors to Facebook that position themselves as ethical alternatives, collecting less data and seeking a smaller share of user attention. “We need social media that will allow us to have a nonaddictive, advertising-free space,” she said. “You’re more than welcome to be successful and to dramatically outgrow your competitors if customers like your product. But, if you grow to be dominant, you have a special responsibility not to misuse your dominant position to make it very difficult for others to compete against you and to attract potential customers. Of course, we keep an eye on it. If we get worried, we will start looking.”

Modération

As hard as it is to curb election propaganda, Zuckerberg’s most intractable problem may lie elsewhere—in the struggle over which opinions can appear on Facebook, which cannot, and who gets to decide. As an engineer, Zuckerberg never wanted to wade into the realm of content. Initially, Facebook tried blocking certain kinds of material, such as posts featuring nudity, but it was forced to create long lists of exceptions, including images of breast-feeding, “acts of protest,” and works of art. Once Facebook became a venue for political debate, the problem exploded. In April, in a call with investment analysts, Zuckerberg said glumly that it was proving “easier to build an A.I. system to detect a nipple than what is hate speech.”

The cult of growth leads to the curse of bigness: every day, a billion things were being posted to Facebook. At any given moment, a Facebook “content moderator” was deciding whether a post in, say, Sri Lanka met the standard of hate speech or whether a dispute over Korean politics had crossed the line into bullying. Zuckerberg sought to avoid banning users, preferring to be a “platform for all ideas.” But he needed to prevent Facebook from becoming a swamp of hoaxes and abuse. His solution was to ban “hate speech” and impose lesser punishments for “misinformation,” a broad category that ranged from crude deceptions to simple mistakes. Facebook tried to develop rules about how the punishments would be applied, but each idiosyncratic scenario prompted more rules, and over time they became byzantine. According to Facebook training slides published by the Guardian last year, moderators were told that it was permissible to say “You are such a Jew” but not permissible to say “Irish are the best, but really French sucks,” because the latter was defining another people as “inferiors.” Users could not write “Migrants are scum,” because it is dehumanizing, but they could write “Keep the horny migrant teen-agers away from our daughters.” The distinctions were explained to trainees in arcane formulas such as “Not Protected + Quasi protected = not protected.”

It will hardly be the last quandary of this sort. Facebook’s free-speech dilemmas have no simple answers—you don’t have to be a fan of Alex Jones to be unnerved by the company’s extraordinary power to silence a voice when it chooses, or, for that matter, to amplify others, to pull the levers of what we see, hear, and experience. Zuckerberg is hoping to erect a scalable system, an orderly decision tree that accounts for every eventuality and exception, but the boundaries of speech are a bedevilling problem that defies mechanistic fixes. The Supreme Court, defining obscenity, landed on “I know it when I see it.” For now, Facebook is making do with a Rube Goldberg machine of policies and improvisations, and opportunists are relishing it. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, seized on the ban of Jones as a fascist assault on conservatives. In a moment that was rich even by Cruz’s standards, he quoted Martin Niemöller’s famous lines about the Holocaust, saying, “As the poem goes, you know, ‘First they came for Alex Jones.’ ”

#Facebook #Histoire_numérique

Shin Bet holds German citizen at Israeli border: Your blood isn’t German, it’s Palestinian- Haaretz.Com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page///.premium-shin-bet-grills-german-with-palestinian-blood-at-border-crossing-1

After 10 minutes the Shin Bet interrogator – who didn’t identify herself, didn’t give her name and looked about 30 years old – got up and started questioning him. “She started by asking where I am from. I said I am from Germany. She asked me where I am really from. I said, I was born in Berlin, Germany, have a German passport and no other and am thus a German citizen.”

And then came her questions about his blood, Palestinian or German. He replied: “I don’t know about that, but if my blood is anything, it’s probably also Polish.” His mother is a Polish woman who was born in Germany.

The Shin Bet investigator continued with her unexpected questions: “‘Do you know, that you are a refugee?’ He replied that he isn’t a refugee. “But yes, you’re a refugee,” she insisted. “Don’t you know that the UN considers you, like any other descendant of Arabs from this area as Palestinian refugees? No other people in the world keep their refugee status, after becoming citizens of another country, but the Palestinians, yes.’”

Sarrouh’s family is Christian. Unlike Muslim Palestinians, Christian Palestinians who found themselves in Lebanon in 1948 because of the war, or who were expelled, became Lebanese citizens, so they didn’t receive refugee status. The Sarrouh family is from the Maronite village of Kafr Bir’im, as is his wife’s family. In November 1948, after the occupation of the village, its residents, including the Sarrouh family, were expelled to the other side of the border.

#Israel “#villa_dans_la_jungle” #sang

In a democracy, Palestinian lawmaker Khalida Jarrar would be free - Haaretz.com | Gideon Levy | Jun 21, 2018 1:13 AM

▻https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-in-a-democracy-palestinian-lawmaker-khalida-jarrar-would-be-free-1

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.6197334.1529531608!/image/2828411179.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/2828411179.jpg

The continued detention of Palestinian parliament member Khalida Jarrar can no longer be presented as a worrisome exception on Israel’s democratic landscape. Nor can the incredible public apathy and almost total absence of media coverage of her plight be dismissed any longer as a general lack of interest in what Israel does to the Palestinians. The usual repression and denial cannot explain it either.

Jarrar’s detention doesn’t only define what is happening in Israel’s dark backyard, it is part of its glittering display window. Jarrar defines democracy and the rule of law in Israel. Her imprisonment is an inseparable part of the Israeli regime and it is the face of Israeli democracy, no less than its free elections (for some of its subjects) or the pride parades that wind through its streets.

Jarrar is the Israeli regime no less than the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty. Jarrar is Israeli democracy without makeup and adornments. The lack of interest in her fate is also characteristic of the regime. A legislator in prison through no fault of her own is a political prisoner in every way, and political prisoners defined by the regime. There can be no political prisoners in a democracy, nor detention without trial in a state of law. Thus Jarrar’s imprisonment is not only a black stain on the Israeli regime; it’s an inseparable part of it.

A Palestinian legislator has been imprisoned for nothing for months and years, and no one in Israel cares about her fate; only a very few protest. None of her Israeli counterparts in the Knesset say anything, not even those from the hypocritical Zionist left; no jurist groups or even the enlightened High Court of Justice are working to get her freed.

There’s no point in reporting on the trivialities that the Shin Bet security service attributes to her, or to explain that she is innocent until proven guilty. There is no point in writing again and again about parliamentary immunity, lest this be considered delusional – how can a Palestinian have immunity? – nor is there any point in wasting words to describe her courage, though she is perhaps the bravest woman living today under Israeli control.

All these things fall on deaf ears. There are no charges and no guilt, just a freedom fighter in jail. The Shin Bet is the investigator, the prosecutor and the judge, three positions in one in the land of unlimited possibilities, in which a state can define itself as a democracy, even the only one in the Middle East, and most Israelis are convinced that this is the case, while the world accepts it.

Jarrar could end up spending the rest of her life in prison; there is no legal impediment to this since all the pathetic arguments used to justify her continued detention could be deemed valid indefinitely. If she’s dangerous today, she’s dangerous forever. Political prisoners, detention without trial and unlimited imprisonment define tyranny.

Of course, Jarrar is not an exceptional case; she isn’t even the only Palestinian MP in an Israeli prison. So the pretentious talk about Israeli democracy must be halted, given her imprisonment. Israel with Jarrar in prison is at most a half-democracy.

Therefore, the resistance should no longer be directed solely against the occupation. The resistance is to the regime in place in Israel. Her imprisonment is the regime and she opposes the regime under whose boots she lives. Many of the Palestinian resistance organizations, which are always defined as “terror organizations,” solely because of their means, rather than their goals, are opponents of the regime under which they were forced to live. Their goals are similar to those of others who resisted tyranny, from the Soviet Union to South Africa to Argentina. Just like the handful of Israelis who want to support Jarrar. They are not expressing only human solidarity or opposition to the occupation; they are opponents of the regime.

All those who support her continued detention, anyone who is silent while she remains in jail, and all those who make her detention possible are saying: Forget democracy. That’s not what we are. Get used to it.

#Khalida_Jarrar

#MH370 four years on: until the plane is found, theories run wild | World news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/23/mh370-four-years-on-the-main-theories-on-what-happened-to-the-plane

In the vacuum of information, theories – some more likely than others – have sprung up. These are the four main contenders:

Mass hypoxia event
The official theory, adopted by both the Malaysian government and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, is that the passengers and crew of MH370 were incapacitated by an unknown “unresponsive crew/ hypoxia event”. Hypoxia is a deficiency of oxygen.
[…]
Fire or accident
In the immediate aftermath of the disappearance, former pilot Christopher Goodfellow speculated that an electrical fire broke out on board. He said this explained the first turn towards Malaysia as Shah was searching for an emergency landing strip. He believes the fire then incapacitated Shah and the cabin crew, leaving the plane to fly south on autopilot.

Patrick Smith, another pilot, has cast doubt on the fire theory, saying it was unlikely MH370 could have continued for six hours on autopilot after a major fire. Officials believe Shah was unconcious, but have not offered any theories as to why or when this occurred.
[…]
The rogue pilot
Byron Bailey, a former RAAF trainer and captain with Emirates, believes the plane was under the control of its captain as part of a deliberate descent into the Indian Ocean.

This would radically alter the current search operation – and potentially explain why the plane has not been found. Current and previous searches assumed the plane dived steeply and suddenly, with nobody at the helm, near the location of the seventh handshake.

But if Shah was conscious, he could have manoeuvred the plane in a long, slow glide, travelling almost 200km further south. This also would have kept the plane more intact, with less debris.
[…]
A northern landing
Yet another theory says the plane is not near Australia at all, but rather to the north of Malaysia.

This theory stems from the way satellite data is calculated. After MH370 turned back towards Malaysia, its last known military radar point showed it travelling slightly north-west towards India.

Bonus…

Photo evidence
Other armchair investigators have claimed to have discovered photo evidence of debris that places MH370 in various other locations, but all have been discredited.

On Monday, Peter McMahon, an Australian investigator, told the Daily Star he had discovered the plane on Google Maps near Mauritius and submitted photo evidence to the ATSB.

But the ATSB pointed out his images were more than 10 years old and predated the plane’s disappearance.

“The images sent to ATSB by Mr McMahon were captured on 6 November 2009, more than four years before the flight disappeared,” a spokesperson for the ATSB said.

Intéressante enquête du New Yorker sur l’incarcération d’un jeune érythréen en Italie, accusé à tort de trafic d’êtres humains.

►http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/how-not-to-solve-the-refugee-crisis

#Erythrée #réfugiés #bateaux_gonflables #asile #migrations #Méditerranée #smuggling #smugglers #passeurs #Libye

Archive 2003: Conspiracy of Silence - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/books/conspiracy-of-silence.html

The theory of ’’Why America Slept,’’ saved for the provocative final chapter of this smart and evocatively written book: the Saudis were in on it.

The basis for this charge, Posner writes, is the C.I.A.’s interrogation of one of America’s biggest catches in the campaign against Al Qaeda — a senior aide to Osama bin Laden named Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in March 2002 in western Pakistan by American and Pakistani forces. Relying on two unnamed government sources to provide new information about the intelligence gleaned from the interrogation, Posner writes that C.I.A. interrogators manipulated the injured Zubaydah’s pain medication to wear down his defenses. They tricked him into believing he was in Saudi custody — and were then shocked to hear what a relieved Zubaydah finally had to tell them. He instructed them to call a senior member of the ruling Saudi family, Posner writes, and gave them a phone number from memory. ’’He will tell you what to do,’’ Zubaydah said. He went on to tell his interrogators that bin Laden had struck a deal in the late 1990’s to gain the blessing and support of top Saudi leaders in exchange for assurances that his holy war would spare the Saudi kingdom. This testimony, an American investigator says, was ’’the Rosetta stone of 9/11.’’ Still more intriguing, three of the Saudi leaders whom the prisoner named as allies (including Prince Ahmed bin Salman, probably best known to Americans as the owner of the Kentucky Derby winner War Emblem) wound up dead within a week of one another in three separate incidents; a Pakistani military official also named by Zubaydah was killed seven months later in a plane crash.

The allegations will no doubt provide grist for those eager to link the Saudis to the Sept. 11 attacks. But as with all conspiracy theories — as Posner himself has shown in his past work — there is reason for skepticism. Qaeda prisoners like Zubaydah have become notorious for providing misinformation to their captors, American officials have not rushed to broadcast the information prisoners have given them and the Saudis have vigorously denied any links to bin Laden, despite the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers hailed from the kingdom. (Last month, in fact, Saudi officials asserted that bin Laden intentionally recruited Saudis for the Sept. 11 mission in order to strain relations between the United States and the kingdom.) Still, Posner’s reputation for sober, exhaustive journalism and his access to classified intelligence signal that his theory should not be dismissed out of hand.

Yemenite babies who disappeared in 1950s Israel were sold to U.S. Jews, new film claims - Israel News - Haaretz.com
▻http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.787519

http://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.787522.1493987774!/image/1224653793.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/1224653793.jpg

U.S. Jews believed children were orphans, that money would help new Jewish state, researcher says in ’Lost Children,’ which claims WIZO played role in sending infants to U.S.
Judy Maltz May 05, 2017 10:50 PM

In 1994, a few dozen armed Yemenite Jews barricaded themselves in a home in the central Israel city of Yehud. They would not leave, they warned, until an official investigation was launched into allegations that Yemenite children had been systematically abducted and handed over to Ashkenazi families – sometimes in exchange for money – in the early years of the state. Their leader was a radical rabbi named Uzi Meshulam, who threatened bloodshed. The standoff lasted seven weeks, and Meshulam ended up serving nearly six years in prison.

But by drawing public attention to their cause, he and his followers were able to force the government’s hand. A year after the standoff, a commission of inquiry was established to determine the fate of hundreds of Yemenite babies and toddlers who had gone missing in the 1950s, not long after they and their families arrived in the recently established state. Did they die of illness, as two previous investigations had found, or had they been abducted and handed over to childless couples in Israel and the United States in exchange for money, as Meshulam and his followers insisted?

A new documentary recently aired on Israel’s Channel 2 TV suggests Meshulam may not have been as crazy as many in Israel believed. Relying on fresh testimonies, rare footage of the commission hearings and recently declassified documents, “Lost Children” presents considerable evidence to support his claims.

“I was also one of those people who thought these were wacko claims and that Uzi Meshulam and his followers were all wackos,” says Prof. Meira Weiss, an Israeli anthropologist interviewed in the hour-long documentary.

Years later, intrigued by new evidence that had emerged to support the abduction theory, Weiss proceeded on her own quest to discover the truth. On a trip to New Jersey, where she had heard that several of the missing Yemenite children ended up, she says her suspicions were confirmed.

“What I was told is that these families had heard through the Jewish community that they could adopt orphans in Israel in exchange for money that would be used to help the new Jewish state get on its feet and purchase weapons,” she says in the film. “So they came and took these children they believed were orphans. As they saw it, they were doing a mitzvah and were very proud of that. When they heard later on that there might be parents who were still alive and that the money they gave didn’t all go to buy weapons, they were genuinely shocked.”

Weiss says her investigation led her to believe that the stories she had heard about children being handed over for adoption without their parents’ consent were not isolated cases. “It was a phenomenon,” she says.

Last December, the Israel State Archives released more than 200,000 previously classified documents pertaining to this decades-long affair that has come to symbolize the grievances of Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern or North African origin) against the establishment. They include testimonies of parents who searched in vain for their missing children and their graves for decades; of hospital nurses who witnessed children being given away without permission; and of children sent off for adoption who later tried to reconnect with their biological parents. However, the documents provided no outright proof of an organized and institutionalized abduction campaign.

The newly declassified papers also include minutes from the hearings of the commission of inquiry established in 1995. Like the two previous commissions that investigated the affair (the most recent being by Justice Moshe Shalgi in 1988), this one also found that most of the Yemenite children who disappeared had died of illness. While the fate of several dozen children is still unknown, the most recent commission of inquiry determined that none of the children had been kidnapped.

The new documentary challenges these findings. A key testimony is provided by Ami Hovav, who worked as an investigator on two of the three commissions of inquiry. In an interview with Rina Matzliach, the Channel 2 correspondent who made the film, Hovav addresses the role of machers, or middlemen, in the disappearance of several children. As part of his duties on the commissions, Hovav had been asked to investigate reports, published as early as 1967, that Yemenite children had been abducted and sold to wealthy Jews abroad for $5,000 a head.

Interviewed in the film, Hovav relays that many of the Yemenite babies and toddlers were put in child-care centers run by the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO), one of the largest Jewish women’s organizations in the world.

“There was a rule at the time that if the parents didn’t show up within three months to reclaim their children, the kids would be sent off for adoption,” he states. “So there were these machers who would come and get $5,000 for each child that was adopted.”

But it would be wrong, he says, to describe such transactions as sales: “This was a commission they took, just like real estate agents. This was their job.”

The film provides never-before-seen footage, shot by Meshulam’s followers, of the 1995 commission of inquiry hearings. At one point, Sonia Milstein, the head nurse at the Kibbutz Ein Shemer absorption center, recounts how Yemenite children were systematically separated from their parents and put in childcare centers. When asked to explain why no records of their whereabouts were ever kept, she responds: “That was the reality then. It was what it was.”

In more rare footage, a former doctor at a WIZO center in Safed tells her interrogators at the commission hearings she has no recollection of what happened to the Yemenite children housed at her facility. Commenting in the documentary, Drora Nachmani – the lawyer who interrogated the doctor and other witnesses – notes that this sudden loss of memory among WIZO staff members was not uncommon.

“Some of the WIZO witnesses didn’t want to come to the hearings, and we would have to chase after them,” she tells Matzliach. “Often, they would insist we come to them rather than they come to us, as if they were afraid of something. And sometimes they said one thing to one investigator and something else to another.”

According to Nachmani, the WIZO day-care centers “were often the last stop or the second-last stop in the whole chronology of events” surrounding the disappearance of the Yemenite children.

“They were a central junction in this whole story,” she states.

The documents recently declassified by the Israel State Archives were meant to stay under wraps for another 15 years. But in response to public pressure, the government decided to release them sooner.

Mizrahi activists had been urging the government to open the state archives for several years, arguing that the various commissions of inquiry whitewashed the affair. A driving force behind the campaign has been an organization called Amram.

Interviewed in the film, founding member Shlomi Hatuka notes that out of more than 5,800 Yemenite babies and toddlers known to have been alive during the first years of the state, 700 disappeared. “That is one out of eight children,” he tells Matzliach. “And if you take into account those parents who didn’t report their missing children, it’s probably closer to one out of seven, or one out of six.”

The irony, he notes, is that families were told their children were being moved from absorption centers to child-care centers for reasons of health and sanitation, but many became ill there, ending up in hospitals from which they never returned.

To illustrate the atmosphere of mayhem in those early days of the state, Hovav recounts a story he heard from Milstein, the head nurse, about what would happen when sick babies were taken to the hospital. “An ambulance driver would pick them up and the babies would be put in cardboard boxes that had been used to transport fruit, bananas or apples,” he relays. “And there would be five or six of these boxes in the back.”

Each carton, according to his account, had a little note attached to it bearing the child’s name, address and destination. “When it would get very hot,” he recounts, “the ambulance driver would open the window and a huge blast of wind would come in. What would happen then is that all those little notes would start flying in the air. They would stop the ambulance on the side of the road, but they had no idea after that which note belonged where.”

Asked to comment on the allegations raised against WIZO in the film, a spokeswoman issued the following statement: “The process by which children were admitted or left our facilities was handled exclusively by the certified state authorities, while WIZO’s role was restricted to caring for their health and welfare. The allegation that the organization played a central role in transferring the children to adoptive families is erroneous and is merely someone’s personal interpretation of events. The same is true about allegations raised by some of the interviewees in Rina Matzliach’s film.”

WIZO’s spokeswoman said her organization knew of no pressure put to bear on former staffers to refrain from cooperating with the commission of inquiry. “The reverse is true. WIZO handed over all the information it had, and the commission of inquiry not only found nothing wrong with the way it behaved, but recently the government even decided to publish this information on the internet.

“As a social organization,” she added, “WIZO supports all efforts to shed light on this affair, which has caused such great pain to many in Israeli society.”

When the rapist is also the judge
Haaretz.com | Amira Hass Apr 09, 2017 9:58 PM
▻http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.782624

http://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.666068.1491764675!/image/268725878.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/268725878.jpg

The entire Israeli military legal system that operates in the West Bank is corrupt

Agents nicknamed Niso, Herzl and Arye signed an almost identical document, on different dates. Its heading reads: State of Israel, General Security Service [Shin Bet], unclassified. Under that it says: to the Israel Police’s crime investigations unit in Judea and Samaria. The subject: denial of a detainee’s request to meet a lawyer. The name of the detainee comes next. In this case it’s Kifah Quzmar, with his identity number included. (The word “nicknamed” the quotation marks around the names appear in the original document.)

The one nicknamed Niso was in charge of the investigation. He heads the Ramallah team of investigators, and was the one who signed the first three orders prohibiting the 28 year-old Quzmar from meeting his lawyer. The first one was signed on March 8, a day after Quzmar was arrested at the Allenby border crossing, and was valid until March 13, at 11:59 p.m. The second and third orders were signed on March 13 and 16, respectively. The one nicknamed Herzl, who heads another investigations unit, signed an identical order on March 21 while Arye, who heads yet another unit, signed such an order on March 23, valid until 11:59 p.m. on March 26.

This is what the order says: “By my authority … having examined the circumstances I hereby order that the detainee not be allowed to meet a lawyer for a further period … since I believe this is necessary for the following reasons …” In the first two documents signed by Niso the reason given is “for the area’s security” and that’s all. The third document bearing his signature and the other two documents give the same reason, as well as one stating “for the benefit of the investigation.”

In other words, from March 16 the investigators admit the investigation ran into serious trouble. It did not yield what was expected. Advancing the investigation required the continued violation of basic principles of jurisprudence and detainee rights. A bit more pressure, somewhat less moderate, a few more painful positions and sleep deprivation, threats and insults and who knows, maybe a shred of evidence would pop up.

On March 16 the detainee was brought before the president of the military court, Lt. Col. Menachem Lieberman. His lawyer, Anan Odeh, waited outside while the investigator told the judge that “Quzmar was suspected of activity that would endanger the security of the area.” How original. Quzmar, who is studying business administration at Bir Zeit University, said (according to the minutes of this hearing) that “the investigators are trying to find something to pin on me and destroy my future. They have no proof and I constitute no danger.”

Quzmar was led out of the courtroom trailer and his attorney went in. He asked questions and the investigator said he couldn’t answer them. He was asked if Quzmar was cooperating with the investigation and replied that he wasn’t. When asked if there were any criminal charges against Quzmar he referred to a “secret report.” Was police testimony taken from the detainee? “No.” How many times has he been questioned since his arrest? “Nine times.” For how many hours? “Yesterday (March 15) he was questioned for four hours, with breaks.” Is he subjected to pressure? The investigator replied that “the report would refer to that issue if that was the case.”

Lt. Col. Lieberman did a copy and paste from innumerable previous rulings and wrote that “there are grave suspicions against the detainee, which require detention and interrogation. … I’ve taken into account the fact that the suspect is not allowed to see his attorney, but due to the severity of the transgressions and the need to reach the truth there is justification in extending his remand for the entire requested period, in order to give investigators a continuous detention period.” Lieberman extended detention until March 27.

On March 24 attorney Odeh submitted an urgent petition to the High Court of Justice, asking that his client be allowed to meet with a lawyer. Without waiting for a ruling the investigators removed their objection to such a meeting.

Up to then Quzmar had been questioned by the Shin Bet in the Russian Compound in Jerusalem and at Hashikma Prison in Ashkelon. He was also put in a cell with collaborators disguised as prisoners, which was meant to induce him to talk. He was later transferred to the Ofer Prison in the West Bank. He went on a hunger strike for a few days as a protest against being denied a lawyer’s visit. On April 3, a final hearing regarding the last extension of his detention was scheduled, to decide whether he would be charged or sent home.

On that sunny morning, Quzmar’s brother and cousin walked along the fenced path linking the Bitunya commercial checkpoint to the military courtroom. The 800 meters separating the two were lined with spring’s greenery and chirping birds. They crossed rotating iron gates that open and shut at the press of a button. They sat in the waiting yard, smoking many cigarettes and waiting. Who didn’t arrive? Kifah. Their guess was that he’d been sent to administrative detention.

Indeed, the administrative order for a six-month detention is signed by Col. Yossi Sariel, Central Command’s intelligence officer. The Shin Bet failed to extract some hint of an offense, so the simple solution is unlimited administrative detention, based on no evidence, no charges, defense or trial. What else is new?

The entire Israeli military legal system that operates in the West Bank is corrupt. The serial rapist arrests the victim simply due to her principled or active resistance to the rape. He charges her, tries her and then sentences her. That is it in a nutshell. Denying the right to meet an attorney and administrative detention are but two of the more common practices in the foreordained process of punishing Palestinians for being Palestinians who object to our foreign rule.

Uber said it protects you from spying. Security sources say otherwise | Reveal
▻https://www.revealnews.org/article/uber-said-it-protects-you-from-spying-security-sources-say-otherwise

For anyone who’s snagged a ride with Uber, Ward Spangenberg has a warning: Your personal information is not safe.
Internal Uber employees helped ex-boyfriends stalk their ex-girlfriends and searched for the trip information of celebrities such as Beyoncé, the company’s former forensic investigator said.
“Uber’s lack of security regarding its customer data was resulting in Uber employees being able to track high profile politicians, celebrities, and even personal acquaintances of Uber employees, including ex-boyfriends/girlfriends, and ex-spouses,” Spangenberg wrote in a court declaration, signed in October under penalty of perjury.

Question centrale du traçage généralisé: qui a accès aux données? sous quel contrôle?
#vie_privée #uber

Burglary suspect kept stolen brain beneath porch and used it to get high, police say - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/07/16/robbery-suspect-kept-stolen-brain-beneath-porch-and-used-it-to-get-h

Police said the brain was discovered by Long’s aunt while she was cleaning the trailer-home, according to NBC affiliate WGAL. The station reported that she contacted her nephew in prison to ask about the brain and he told her that it belonged to him. At some point, she contacted police and told them about the brain, according to the Associated Press.

“The defendant related that he knew it was illegal to have the brain and that he and (another man) would spray the embalming fluid on ‘weed’ to get high,” Trooper John Boardman, an investigator involved in the case, wrote in court documents cited by the AP.

Ingenious : Hope Jahren - Issue 34 : Adaptation
▻http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/ingenious-hope-jahren

http://static.nautil.us/8537_5c843bd82838f70b8321b95e2f1a84ef.jpg

What do you see when you look into a lab? Fluorescent lights and whirring machinery? Gee-whiz equipment and tempting red buttons? Hope Jahren, the geochemist and geobiologist, sees those things, certainly, but also something else: Home. “It just feels to me like the most wonderful, softest, warmest, safest place in the world,” she says in her Nautilus interview. Jahren is an accomplished scientist and a tenured professor at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in Honolulu. She has received three Fulbright Awards in geobiology, and is the only woman to have been awarded both of the Young Investigator Medals given in the earth sciences. In 2005, Popular Science christened her one of the “Brilliant 10” young scientists. With her upcoming book, Lab Girl, she shows us that she is also one of today’s (...)

Video shows another unarmed youth killed by Chicago police - World Socialist Web Site

▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/01/16/poli-j16.html

Video shows another unarmed youth killed by Chicago police
By George Gallanis
16 January 2016

On Thursday, a Chicago judge released video of the deadly 2013 shooting of 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman by Chicago police. The video was concealed by the Chicago Police Department for three years, and an investigator was fired for opposing police claims that the killing was justified.

#états-unis #Police #violence #meurtre

High-Speed Slaughter Hell at Hormel, Makers of SPAM
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/highspeed-slaughter-hell-at-hormel-makers-of-spam

A Compassion Over Killing investigator worked inside Quality Pork Processors, a USDA-inspected slaughterhouse in Minnesota that exclusively supplies to Hormel, the makers of SPAM. This shocking...

Greek Investigator’s Report Finds Evidence of Plot Against Former PM’s Life, ’Silver Drachma’ Plan | GreekReporter.com
▻http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/06/27/greek-investigators-report-finds-evidence-of-plot-against-form

http://greece.greekreporter.com/files/aithousa-dikastiriou-dikastirio.jpg

Evidence pointing to international espionage, a plot to murder former Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and a 2012 plan for Greece’s exit from the euro code-named the “Silver Drachma” are just some of the sensational findings unveiled in a report by Greek Anti-Corruption Investigator Dimitris Foukas, released on Friday and sent to the Justices’ Council for consideration.

The report outlines the findings of three converging judicial investigations spanning several years, initiated after the notorious phone-tapping scandal in 2005 and revelations that the mobile phones of then Prime Minister Karamanlis and dozens of other prominent Greeks were under surveillance.

This investigation later merged with that of the “Pythias Plan’” – for the neutralization and even murder of Karamanlis – and allegations that Greek National Intelligence Service officers and former Minister Michalis Karchimakis had leaked classified state secrets and documents.

Top investigator says Interpol’s inaction thwarts cases against Yanukovych allies
▻http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/top-investigator-says-interpols-inaction-thwarts-cases-against-yanukovych-

http://www.kyivpost.com/media/images/2015/04/17/p19j265gh2ukf1mm2ss08stmps4/original_big.jpg

Ukrainian authorities cannot try many of former President Viktor Yanukovych’s allies due to Interpol’s refusal to put them on a wanted list and technicalities in Ukraine’s law on trials in absentia, Serhiy Horbatiuk, the prosecutor in charge of the investigations, told the Kyiv Post.

C’est la faute d’Interpol…

Prosecutors insist a major impediment is Interpol’s refusal to put suspects in the EuroMaidan murder cases on an international wanted list because the international law enforcement agency believes the investigations to be politically motivated – a claim dismissed by EuroMaidan supporters. Interpol declined to comment.

On rappelera juste qu’Interpol se contente simplement de demander à l’Ukraine de fournir des preuves… et ne voit rien venir.

Patrick Modiano, cartographie et vaporisation / Mapping and Vaporization | (e)space & fiction

►http://spacefiction.wordpress.com/2014/12/27/patrick-modiano-cartographie-et-vaporisation-mapping-and-vap

Patrick Modiano recent Nobel Prize in Literature, can be called a geographical novelist by the way he intertwines time and space in his novels through picky and unfinished investigations in a misty and troubled atmosphere.Modiano’s books are full of places, addresses and very preciseroutes, mainly in Paris. The reader often follows an investigator compiling archives and old directories, searching back in time for spatial connexions and temporal coincidences.At first sight, Modiano seems a novelist for obsessional cartographers, a natural subject for (e)space&fiction.

http://s2.lemde.fr/image/2014/10/02/534x0/4499466_6_7591_le-feuilleton-d-eric-chevillard-a-propos-de_f19848c1c1c57f752d2dacd6c418af1a.jpg

But why do we have the feeling that something important would be lost in the mapping of Modiano’s novels ? His space-time narrative is too obvious to be something else than a decoy. We have to lo look a little further. But is a map the good way to show what could be hidden beyond?

#cartographie_narrative

Uber Security Staffer Went Undercover At Taxi Conference
▻http://www.buzzfeed.com/johanabhuiyan/uber-security-staffer-went-undercover-at-taxi-conference

A former Air Force investigator who now works in “Global Security” for the transit company Uber omitted his employer’s name — and scrubbed it from his LinkedIn profile — when he attended the conference of Uber’s archenemy, the taxi lobby, last month.

The security staffer, Roger Kaiser, left his Uber affiliation off the form at the Taxicab, Limousine, and Paratransit Association’s (TLPA) annual conference in San Antonio last month, TLPA spokesperson John Boit confirmed to BuzzFeed News — and the apparent undercover operation prompted a furious response from the group.

“This is just more evidence of Uber buying into its own myth that they supposedly need to conduct clandestine research against anyone — organizations or journalists — who are against them,” Mike Fogarty, the president of the TLPA, told BuzzFeed News. “They aren’t in a political campaign. They are simply a business that is not following the rules. All I can say is that I hope this gentleman from Uber, and whoever else they had in the room, learned a thing or two about how a responsible transportation company operates.”

UN rights investigator accuses Israel of ’ethnic cleansing’ -
Haaretz
By Reuters | Mar. 21, 2014
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.581248

Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, told a news conference that Israeli policies bore “unacceptable characteristics of colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing”.

“Every increment of enlarging the settlements or every incident of house demolition is a way of worsening the situation confronting the Palestinian people and reducing what prospects they might have as the outcome of supposed peace negotiations.”

Asked about his accusation of ethnic cleansing, Falk said that more than 11,000 Palestinians had lost their right to live in Jerusalem since 1996 due to Israel imposing residency laws favoring Jews and revoking Palestinian residence permits.

“The 11,000 is just the tip of the iceberg because many more are faced with possible challenges to their residency rights.”

This compounded the “ordeal of this extended, prolonged occupation”, according to Falk, an international law expert and professor emeritus at Princeton University in the United States.

Une enquête super-indépendante blanchit Gerhard Lehmann.
▻http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2014/Jan-30/245783-ex-hariri-probe-official-cleared-of-bribery.ashx#axzz2rvlDMTh1

A German Interior Ministry report has cleared a top U.N. investigator in the Hariri assassination from bribery allegations made by Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, a source familiar with the case told The Daily Star.

[…]

Investigators conceded that the video shown by Nasrallah depicts an individual who could possibly be Lehmann, but they concluded that the footage does not show a transfer of money, and certainly not of thousands of dollars, the source said.

The investigation decided that Nasrallah’s allegations were not legally sufficient to create credible suspicion against Lehmann, and were considered “secondhand knowledge at best” but were more likely “unconfirmed rumors,” the source said.

The source said the report questioned why Nasrallah did not know the exact amount of the money allegedly given to Lehmann, why none of the details of partners who allegedly bought testimony from him have been made public, and why the date and location of the meeting where Lehmann allegedly received the money were not disclosed.

Pour la bonne bouche, tout de même, voici la fameuse vidéo d’un individu qui n’est pas forcément Lehmann empocher une liasse peut-être pas de billets avec un air gourmand à une date et dans un lieu tellement indéterminés que ce n’est peut-être pas pendant qu’il travaillait pour Detlev Mehlis :
►http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeYjEiN99yc

Évidemment, si on avait disposé d’une vidéo similaire permettant de relier vaguement des responsables du Hezbollah aux attentats commis au Liban, il n’aurait pas fallu 2 ans à un « rapport du ministère de l’intérieur allemand » pour décréter qu’il s’agit d’une preuve irréfutable.

#TSL

Black Power Challenges a White Christmas in the Netherlands

▻http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/12/black-power-challenges-a-white-christmas-in-the-netherlands

Yesterday marked the closure of the annual celebration of Sinterklaas, the Dutch equivalent of Santa Claus. Traditionally, the children’s festivity is an occasion for family fun and pleasure that unites a nation, but this year it has become a highly charged political battleground that is exposing a society increasingly more conservative and hostile towards people of color, while unleashing an unprecedented anti-racism movement that is empowering minorities and posing fundamental challenges to the Dutch establishment.

The story goes that on the evening of December 5, Saint Nicholas, a white elderly man wearing a red robe and riding a white horse rewards children with presents and sweets if they have behaved well during the past year. Unlike Santa Claus, however, his minions are not elves, but Zwarte Pieten, or Black Petes — black clown-like figures that appear in colonial dress with afro wigs, as well as big red lips and golden earrings. Yearly, white Dutch people paint their faces black and dress up to enact Zwarte Piet for the spectacle and entertainment of the country’s white majority.

Unsurprisingly, in a country with a bloody and controversial — but often neglected — history of colonialism and slavery, the figure that epitomizes this legacy in its most blatant expression has been the subject of criticism for years. Active attempts to ban Black Pete date back as early as 2003 when African, Surinamese and Antillean communities joined forces to demand that the House of Representatives to take action against this racist characterization of black people. At the time, Celestine Robles from the Dutch Global African Congress denounced the festivity for actively shaping negative perceptions of black Dutch people through the celebration of a “superior race” as embodied by Saint Nicholas in opposition to an “inferior race” as performed by the “silly slave/assistant Black Pete.” (...)

Nevertheless, a large majority of the country still sees Black Pete as a central and vital component of Dutch tradition and collective identity. This became most apparent when 20 opponents of the figure, among them Quinsy Gario and Patricia Schor, recently demanded the municipality of Amsterdam officially ban Black Pete from the annual, state-funded procession in the city. Unlike previous efforts, this step made media headlines and provoked debate on both national television and social media. The accusation of racism was initially received with disdain and mockery, which then turned into an occasion to unleash racist attacks and general fury after an independent U.N. investigator issued a letter urging the Dutch government to take positive action to change its tradition, further confirming that Black Pete is indeed “a living trace of past slavery and oppression, tracing back to the country’s past involvement in the trade of African slaves in the previous centuries.”

#Pays-Bas #racisme #Sinterklaas

UN Investigator: US Drone Strikes Violate Pakistan Sovereignty

▻http://www.globalpolicy.org/international-justice/general-articles-on-international-justice/52352-un-investigator-us-drone-strikes-violate-pakistan-sovereignty.ht

The UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-terrorism and Human Rights, Ben Emmerson, has released a statement declaring US drone strikes in Pakistan a violation of Pakistani sovereignty, and a contravention of international law. Emmerson has also claimed that the drone strikes are radicalizing certain segments of the population and may, therefore, be causing the very problem these counter-terrorist operations purport to eliminate. The statement is not expected to directly affect US policies regarding drone strikes.

#drone

USFDA’s Jeff Novitzky — Investigator of Seven-time Tour de France Lance Armstrong — Hereby Ask to To Comment on Prima Facie Showing Keker & Van Nest’s Chris Young and USDOJ’s Tony West Part of Financial Scheme Rendering West Compromised.

Please see article @:
►http://lesliebrodie.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/usfdas-jeff-novitzky-investigator-of-seven-time-tour-de-fran

AND ALSO @:

►http://tinyurl.com/USDOJTONYWEST