Tag Archives: US
4 February 2014
A hacker organisation in Germany, The Chaos Computer Club, accuses Chancellor Angela Merkel and her government of helping US and British intelligence agencies to spy on German citizens. Furthermore, the organisation has filed a criminal complaint against Merkel with the Federal Prosecutor General, however, it is not guaranteed that an investigation will ensue. The complaint alleges that Merkel’s government violated the personal privacy of German citizens through ‘illegal and prohibited covert intelligence activities, along with aiding and abetting such activities’ by allowing and assisting US and British agencies.
Edward J. Snowden, former contractor for the NSA, told reporter Hubert Seipel in an interview that Germany’s intelligence service and the NSA have an ‘intimate’ relationship. Additionally, Snowden stated that ‘[t]hey not only share information, the reporting of results from intelligence, but they actually share the tools and the infrastructure.’ While Steffen Seibert, Merkel’s spokesman, said that to file such a criminal complaint is the right of every German citizen, he declined to comment further on the situation.
Source: The New York Times | Hacker Group Accuses Merkel Government of Helping to Spy
3 February 2014
An US-backed campaign for the past three months to discreetly destroy Libya’s lethal arsenal and chemical weapons successfully ended last week. Hundreds of bombs and artillery rounds filled with mustard agents, which the US feared could fall into terrorists’ hands, were destroyed. The programme took 45 million US dollar from the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction fund and the Pentagon assigned Parsons Corporation to work with Libya to rebuild and safeguard the disposal site. Additionally, Canada donated 6 million US dollar to the site to restore water, sewage and electricity, and to build living quarters, while Germany agreed to send international inspectors to the site.
Paul F. Walker, an arms control expert with Green Cross International, stated ‘[e]ven though Libya’s chemical stockpile was relatively small, the effort to destroy it was very difficult because of weather, geography and because it’s a dangerous area with warring tribes, increasing the risks of theft and diversion.’ The disposal site is located in the desert where Islamist militants are gaining more influence and where the eastern and western provinces struggle over political power and oil revenue.
The programme used a Swedish custom-built device to destroy the chemical weapons. The device is like a giant, high-tech oven in which the weapons are fed into a gas-tight chamber, where the toxic materials are vaporised at temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The easily transportable technology used to destroy Libya’s chemical weapons has become a model for the programme in Syria to destroy their chemical weapons now underway.
Source: The New York Times | Libya’s Cache of Toxic Arms All Destroyed
28 January 2014
Honduras’ new president Juan Hernandez called the US drug policy a “double standard” and urged US President Barack Obama to recognise the joint effort required to end the region’s drug scourge. “We ask the government of Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress to recognize this shared responsibility … and that we truly work together to solve this problem, which is also their problem,” Hernandez said.
Weak institutions, corruption and gang warfare have made Honduras fertile ground for cartels to expand their operations in Honduras, using the country as a basis for United States-bound cocaine.
According to Hernandez, Central America was suffering as a result of US drug consumption. He said “[i]t strikes us as a double standard that while our people die and bleed, and we’re forced to fight the gangs with our own scarce resources, in North America drugs are just a public health issue … For Honduras and the rest of our Central American brothers it’s a case of life and death.” According to the United Nations, in 2012 Honduras had a murder rate of 85.5 per 100,000 people – the world’s highest.
Source: Swissinfo | New Honduras president takes helm, criticizes U.S. drug policy
27 January 2014
China’s export industry is responsible for dirty emissions that are blowing across the Pacific Ocean and contributing to smog in the United States, a new scientific study says.
Scientists in the United States, China and the United Kingdom used data from 2006 to quantify how much of the air pollution reaching the US West Coast from China is from the production of goods for export to the United States and other countries. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that about one-fifth of the pollution China emits into the atmosphere comes from producing goods for export to the United States and other countries.
The LA Times writes that while the United States has reaped some of the benefits of outsourcing – cheaper cellphones, televisions and appliances and big declines in air pollution – rising emissions in China have paralysed cities there with severe smog. One of the authors of the study is quoted as saying that US demand for cheap imports from China has a way of blowing those environmental problems back at the US: “It’s sort of a boomerang effect”.
Source: The Los Angeles Times | China's industry exporting air pollution to U.S., study says
27 January 2014
The Washington Post has provided a detailed account of the use by the United States of a secret prison near Warsaw that was used in 2003 to interrogate accused September 11 conspirators.
The report describes how the interrogation initially took place in Thailand, and that the Polish location was chosen when a better facility was needed. The CIA paid nearly 300,000 US dollars for improvement of the facility. US interrogators used in the Polish prison ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that were formulated at the CIA and approved by Justice Department lawyers. These included slapping, sleep deprivation and waterboarding. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-declared mastermind of the attacks, was reportedly waterboarded 183 times in the Polish facility.
Source: The Washington Post | The hidden history of the CIA’s prison in Poland