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Israel Says It Won't Apologize to Turkey for Deadly Flotilla Raid

Isabel Kershner
The New York Times
Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:00 UTC
Mavi Marmara
© Wikimedia
The Mavi Marmara was the largest ship raided May 31 and the site of violence between passengers and Israeli soldiers
Israel has decided not to apologize to Turkey for last year's deadly raid on a Turkish protest flotilla bound for Gaza ahead of a United Nations report on the episode scheduled to be published early next week, according to a senior Israeli official.

Turkey has demanded an official apology, compensation to victims' relatives and a lifting of the blockade on Gaza as conditions for normalizing its heavily strained relations with Israel, formerly an important ally.

The Obama administration is keen to see Israel and Turkey repair relations and has been urging Israel to apologize.

A diplomatic source, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject, said the American request for such an apology was reiterated on Tuesday in a phone call between Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Israeli official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Turks kept adding conditions for a reconciliation, raising uncertainty in Mr. Netanyahu's government over whether they were sincere and whether they would consider the case closed even if a deal were reached.
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Magnify

Russia's Arctic "Sea Grab"

Fred Weir
Christian Science Monitor
Sun, 14 Aug 2011 00:00 UTC
Russia is expected within months to claim to the United Nations its right to annex about 380,000 square miles of the Arctic.

Russia arctic grab
© NTV/AFP/File
Russian NTV channel grab from video taken on August 3, 2007 shows a mini-submarine as it places a Russian flag on the seabed of the Arctic Ocean.
In a multinational race to seize the potential riches of the formerly icebound Arctic, being laid bare by global warming, Russia is the early favorite.

Within the next year, the Kremlin is expected to make its claim to the United Nations in a bold move to annex about 380,000 square miles of the internationally owned Arctic to Russian control. At stake is an estimated one-quarter of all the world's untapped hydrocarbon reserves, abundant fisheries, and a freshly opened route that will cut nearly a third off the shipping time from Asia to Europe.

The global Arctic scramble kicked off in 2007 when Russian explorer Artur Chilingarov planted his country's flag beneath the North Pole. "The Arctic is Russian," he said. "Now we must prove the North Pole is an extension of the Russian landmass."

In July, the Russian ship Akademik Fyodorov set off, accompanied by the giant nuclear-powered icebreaker, to complete undersea mapping to show that the Siberian continental shelf connects to underwater Arctic ridges, making Russia eligible to stake a claim. Around the same time, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov announced the creation of an Arctic military force tasked with backing up Moscow's bid.
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Dollar

Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?

Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
Wed, 17 Aug 2011 21:59 UTC
SEC whistleblower shredder paper
© Pete Gardner/Getty

A whistleblower claims that over the past two decades, the agency has destroyed records of thousands of investigations, whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals.

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file - "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations - "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction - has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.
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Stormtrooper

Syrian security forces adopt shoot-on-sight policy

Rob Crilly
The Telegraph
Wed, 17 Aug 2011 20:00 UTC
syrian tank
© EPA
A Syrian tank stationed in the city of Homs

Syrian security forces have adopted a shoot-on-sight policy to prevent refugees fleeing across the border into Turkey, according to families who have braved the journey in the past week.

Yayladagi, near the Turkish border of Syria

They describe a heavy build-up of troops and tanks slowing the flood of refugees to a trickle.

Human rights campaigners say they are investigating dozens of reports that civilians have been shot dead as they try to cross.

Their stories illustrate how President Bashar al-Assad shows no sign of easing his grip on power or heeding international calls for calm.

Wednesday brought a fresh wave of arrests as Syrian troops raided houses in a Sunni district of the besieged port of Latakia, detaining hundreds of people and taking them to a stadium at the end of a four-day tank assault to crush protests.

Activists say more than 1,800 people have died and more than 30,000 arrested since democracy demonstrations erupted across the country five months ago.
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Bad Guys

Naomi Klein: Daylight Robbery, Meet Nighttime Robbery

Naomi Klein
The Nation
Wed, 17 Aug 2011 16:05 UTC
london riots
© Andy Rain/EPA
A man is framed by smashed glass inside a West London salon that was looted by rioters.

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities - window smashing in Athens or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.

But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion - a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.

Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves. But London isn't Baghdad, and British Prime Minister David Cameron is hardly Saddam, so surely there is nothing to learn there.
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Bad Guys

Dag Hammarskjöld: Evidence Suggests UN Chief's Plane Was Shot Down

Julian Borger & Georgina Smith
The Guardian, UK
Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:57 UTC
Plane Shot Down
© TopFoto
The wreckage of Dag Hammarskjöld's plane near Ndola, now Zambia. Eyewitnesses claim they saw a second plane fire at the UN chief's plane.
New evidence has emerged in one of the most enduring mysteries of United Nations and African history, suggesting that the plane carrying the UN secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld, was shot down over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) 50 years ago, and the murder covered up by British colonial authorities.

A British-run commission of inquiry blamed the 1961 crash on pilot error and a later UN investigation largely rubber-stamped its findings. They ignored or downplayed witness testimony of villagers near the crash site which suggested foul play. The Guardian has talked to surviving witnesses who were never questioned by the official investigations and were too scared to come forward.

The residents on the western outskirts of the town of Ndola described Hammarskjöld's DC6 being shot down by a second, smaller aircraft. They say the crash site was sealed off by Northern Rhodesian security forces the next morning, hours before the wreckage was officially declared found, and they were ordered to leave the area.

The key witnesses were located and interviewed over the past three years by Göran Björkdahl, a Swedish aid worker based in Africa who made the investigation of the Hammarskjöld mystery a personal quest since discovering his father had a fragment of the crashed DC6.
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Display

News International mail server password fail exposed

Kelly Fiveash
The Register
Tue, 16 Aug 2011 04:01 UTC
Full login details published along with damning letters

A letter from News International chairman James Murdoch to the Commons Culture Select Committee has let slip details of how to gain full access to the company's MS Exchange email system - albeit the information is from four years ago.

MPs published a raft of letters this lunchtime including one from jailed News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman, who claimed senior figures at the now-defunct Sunday tabloid knew that phone hacking was going on at the publication.

James Murdoch has consistently denied any knowledge of widespread phone-tapping beyond the illegal methods employed by "one rogue reporter" at the newspaper.

Among the evidence submitted to the committee was an email between an individual named Simon Avery and the company's London law firm Harbottle & Lewis co-founder Lawrence Abramson.
      Read More...
Radar

Street View Wi-Fi collection incident could happen again, ICO warns

Dan Worth
V3
Tue, 16 Aug 2011 04:06 UTC
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has said that changes to Google's privacy and data protection policies "do not eliminate" the risk of another Street View Wi-Fi data collection fiasco.

The ICO carried out an audit of Google in July after an undertaking signed by the search company in November, and said that, while the watchdog is broadly satisfied with the changes, it is still concerned that a similar event could occur.

"The audit has provided reasonable assurance over the accuracy and findings of the Privacy Report as provided by Google to the ICO. It has also provided reasonable assurance that Google has implemented the privacy process changes outlined in the Undertaking," the ICO said.

"The audit provided reasonable assurance that these changes reduce, but do not eliminate, the risk of an incident similar to the mistaken collection of payload data by Google Street View vehicles occurring again."
      Read More...
Cookie

Man reveals secret recipe behind undeletable cookies

Dan Goodin
The Register
Tue, 16 Aug 2011 04:12 UTC
New and improved cookie 'respawning' revealed

A privacy researcher has revealed the evil genius behind a for-profit web analytics service capable of following users across more than 500 sites, even when all cookie storage was disabled and sites were viewed using a browser's privacy mode.

The technique, which worked with sites including Hulu, Spotify and GigaOm, is controversial because it allowed analytics startup KISSmetrics to construct detailed browsing histories even when users went through considerable trouble to prevent tracking of the websites they viewed. It had the ability to resurrect cookies that were deleted, and could also compile a user's browsing history across two or more different browsers. It came to light only after academic researchers published a paper late last month.

KISSmetrics CEO responded with a post on its website claiming the research "significantly distorts our technology and business practices." The company also responded by adding a "consumer-level opt-out for those who wish to be entirely removed from all KISSmetrics tracking, going well beyond the options that other analytics companies provide."
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Eye 1

Germany, France propose collective 'government' for the eurozone led by EU president

Sarah DiLorenzo, David McHugh and Tali Arbel
Associated Press
Tue, 16 Aug 2011 03:11 UTC
Image
The leaders of France and Germany called Tuesday for greater economic discipline and unity among European nations but declined to take immediate financial measures seen by many investors as the only way to halt the continent's spiraling debt crisis.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell, the euro slid against the dollar and key European markets edged down in off-hour trading after Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced the results of their emergency talks in Paris.

Sarkozy called for a "new economic government" for Europe that would meet at least twice a year with European Union President Herman Van Rompuy as its head, but he offered few other details or indications that the body would have real power.

Merkel and Sarkozy also called for all euro zone nations to enact constitutional amendments requiring balanced budgets. They said they want the process completed by the summer of 2012, but it would almost certainly run into protracted political difficulties in many countries.
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