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Caught on camera: top lobbyists boasting how they influence the PM - UK Politics - UK

Caught on camera: top lobbyists boasting how they influence the PM - UK Politics - UK
* Claiming they have used their access to Downing Street to get David Cameron to speak to the Chinese premier on behalf of one of their business clients within 24 hours of asking him to do so; * Boasting about Bell Pottinger's access to the Foreign Secretary William Hague, to Mr Cameron's chief of staff Ed Llewellyn and to Mr Cameron's old friend and closest No 10 adviser Steve Hilton; * Suggesting that the company could manipulate Google results to "drown" out negative coverage of human rights violations and child labour; * Revealing that Bell Pottinger has a team which "sorts" negative Wikipedia coverage of clients; * Saying it was possible to use MPs known to be critical of investigative programmes to attack their reporting for minor errors. In Uzbekistan, child labour is used in cotton fields to fulfil state quotas and the country also has a terrible human rights record: the think tank Freedom House put it on its 2011 list of the "Worst of the Worst" repressive regimes.

Aurora theater shooting: Bizarre court filing blames massacre on police chief, Illuminati - Denver - News - The Latest Word - Page 2 Earlier, we introduced you to the James Holmes is Innocent Facebook group, whose members say they're uninterested in wild conspiracy theories -- like, for example, the assertions in the strangest Aurora theater shooting document to date. The motion, made public yesterday and on view below, deals with claims allegedly (but not actually) made by a victim pointing the finger of blame at Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates and the Illuminati. The filing, submitted on August 27, redacts the name of the person who supposedly submitted it -- but the text suggests that the moniker appears in the official charging document, which lists 116 counts of attempted murder. Moreover, the victim whose identity was appropriated is female, as indicated in an order by Judge William Sylvester that responds to the motion; it's on view below as well. A footnote reads, "The District Attorney's Office has informed the Court that the victim indicated in this Motion informed an investigator that she did not file it."

Photos du mur Assange complaint over nightclub footage dismissed The Australian, who campaigns against secrecy and censorship, is currently holed up inside Ecuador's embassy in London where he is trying to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault. Independent regulator Ofcom said in a ruling on Monday that his "complaints of unjust or unfair treatment and of unwarranted infringement of privacy in the programme as broadcast should not be upheld". Assange complained to the watchdog about a November 2011 documentary on Britain's independent Channel 4 network called "WikiLeaks: Secrets and Lies", which traced the website's history. The 41-year-old former computer hacker said that around one minute's worth of footage of him dancing at a nightclub in Iceland, shown with commentary on the legal case played over it, was used without his consent. Assange said the footage was filmed on condition that it would be "for personal use" and that his privacy was "unwarrantably" unfringed.

10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture. Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own — the land of free. Yet, the laws and practices of the land should shake that confidence. While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company. Assassination of U.S. citizens War crimes

Majority Of File-Sharers Are Heavily Monitored Get Breaking News First Receive News, Politics, and Entertainment Headlines Each Morning. Sign Up LONDON (CBSDC)- A recent study found that those who participate in illegal file-sharing are not flying under the radar, but rather are closely monitored within hours of engaging in suspect activity. The study, conducted at Birmingham University in the United Kingdom, used software created by computer scientists that emulated the file-sharing program BitTorrent and logged all interactions and connections made to it, the Korea IT Times reported. Over the course of the three-year study, researchers reportedly saw monitoring firms tracking activity within three hours of a given download. According to the tech website, those conducting the study were “surprised” at the diligent way in which such activity was monitored, and noted in their findings that there was no difference between frequent users and occasional downloaders. “You don’t have to be a mass downloader.

Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong! David Ungar is "an out-of-the-box thinker who enjoys the challenge of building computer software systems that work like magic and fit a user's mind like a glove.". this is a summary from SPLASH 2011 in November 2011 In the end of the first decade of the new century, chips such as Tilera’s can give us a glimpse of a future in which manycore microprocessors will become commonplace: every (non-hand-held) computer’s CPU chip will contain 1,000 fairly homogeneous cores. Such a system will not be programmed like the cloud, or even a cluster because communication will be much faster relative to computation. Nor will it be programmed like today’s multicore processors because the illusion of instant memory coherency will have been dispelled by both the physical limitations imposed by the 1,000-way fan-in to the memory system, and the comparatively long physical lengths of the inter- vs. intra-core connections. If we cannot skirt Amdahl’s Law, the last 900 cores will do us no good whatsoever.

Bob Graham: Re-Open the 9/11 Investigation Now The passage of time since September 11, 2001, has not diminished the distrust many of us feel surrounding the official story of how 9/11 happened and, more specifically, who financed and supported it. After eleven years, the time has come for the families of the victims, the survivors and all Americans to get the whole story behind 9/11. Yet the story of who may have facilitated the 19 hijackers and the infrastructure that supported the attacks -- a crucial element of the narrative -- has not been told. Did the hijackers execute the plot alone, or did they have the support of forces other than the known leaders of al-Qaeda -- a network even -- that provided funds, assistance, and cover? It is not merely a question of the need to complete the historical record. If a support network was available to the terrorists before 9/11, why should we think it has now disbanded or been rolled up? This is also about justice. Here are some of the pieces of the puzzle. Bob Graham is a former U.S.

Blogs We wanted to continue our dialog about data storage by talking about the next generation file system being introduced in Windows 8. Today, NTFS is the most widely used, advanced, and feature rich file system in broad use. But when you’re reimagining Windows, as we are for Windows 8, we don’t rest on past successes, and so with Windows 8 we are also introducing a newly engineered file system. In this blog post I’d like to talk about a new file system for Windows. The key goals of ReFS are: Maintain a high degree of compatibility with a subset of NTFS features that are widely adopted while deprecating others that provide limited value at the cost of system complexity and footprint.Verify and auto-correct data. The key features of ReFS are as follows (note that some of these features are provided in conjunction with Storage Spaces). Key design attributes and features Our design attributes are closely related to our goals. Code reuse and compatibility Reliable and scalable on-disk structures

The Missing 20th Century: How Copyright Protection Makes Books Vanish - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology Because of the strange distortions of copyright protection, there are twice as many newly published books available on Amazon from 1850 as there are from 1950. Paul Heald The above chart shows a distribution of 2500 newly printed fiction books selected at random from Amazon's warehouses. What's so crazy is that there are just as many from the last decade as from the decade between 1910 and 1920. This is super exciting, interesting preliminary data, I think. Heald says that the numbers would be even more dramatic if you controlled for the number of books published in those years, because there are likely far more books published in 1950 than in 1850. You can watch Heald's whole talk, "Do Bad Things Happen When Works Fall Into the Public Domain?"

Putting SOPA on a shelf January 15, 2012 8:00 AMPutting SOPA on a shelf By Steve Benen Misguided efforts to combat online privacy have been threatening to stifle innovation, suppress free speech, and even, in some cases, undermine national security. As of yesterday, though, there’s a lot less to worry about. At issue are two related bills: the Senate’s Protect IP Act and the even more offensive Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, both of which are generated intense opposition from tech giants and First Amendment advocates. The first sign that the bills’ prospects were dwindling came Friday, when SOPA sponsors agreed to drop a key provision that would have required service providers to block access to international sites accused of piracy. The legislation ran into an even more significant problem yesterday when the White House announced its opposition to the bills. Until now, the Obama administration had not taken a position on the issue.

Italian Supreme Court head calls for international 9/11 inquiry Fernando Imposimato, the President of the Italian Supreme Court, has raised the call for a criminal investigation of 9/11, comparing the terror attacks to the declassified "false flag" incidents carried out by the CIA in Italy under Operation Gladio. "The 9/11 attacks were a global state terror operation permitted by the administration of the USA, which had foreknowledge of the operation yet remained intentionally unresponsive in order to make war against Afghanistan and Iraq," Imposimato declared in a letter published on Sunday by the Journal of 9/11 Studies. As a former state prosecutor, Imposimato has extensive experience investigating high-profile crimes, including the kidnapping and assassination of Italian Prime Minster Aldo Moro and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. Read more...

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