Calling taxation voluntary in the United States is like calling a prison sentence voluntary: you can voluntarily go to prison, or you can be hunted down like a dog and physically forced to go to prison. … Read More
‘Capital of torture’: Bahraini Shiite majority demands democratic rule
The frustrated mob held up signs that read: “Manama, capital of torture,” and waved the national flag.“Torture is a practice rooted in the security agencies,” in Bahrain, the main Shiite opposition bloc Al-Wefaq said in a statement. It added that these practice were “embedded in the security doctrine – corrupt and hostile to the citizens.” The organization also highlighted the rift between Sunni-ruled monarchy and Shiites saying “a political majority demanding a democratic transition and a hard core dictatorship that refuses any change and respond to the popular will.” The demonstration comes just days after the start of the international campaign under the title “Bahrain capital of torture.” On Wednesday, Bahrain Forum for Human Rights in Beirut announced the details of the international campaign against torture in prisons on the island.It also accused the authorities of arresting 120 people during the period between 16 – April 22. Human rights delegates condemned the use of force on citizens and the media blackout on the repression. Also on Wednesday, the parliament in Bahrain was presented with a bill that would impose further restrictions on demonstrations. The new law would require organizers to submit a warranty check of more than $50,000 before holding a rally. It would also allow any resident to block a petition.In late April, Bahrain has unilaterally cancelled a United Nations mission to Manama to assess the country’s progress in eliminating torture.In 2011, a government-commissioned report found evidence of torture and human rights violations committed by the government forces committed during an uprising that year.Bahrain – home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet – is ruled by a Sunni monarchy, while over 75 percent of the population is Shia. In February 2011, thousands of protesters swarmed the streets of Bahrain’s capital Manama, demanding democratic reforms and the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa. The island’s monarchy asked for Saudi Arabian troops to contain the violence, which according human rights groups’ estimates has resulted in at least 80 deaths. … Read More
The ACLU Is Like the NRA Because It Is
Decrying “the ability of well-funded extremist groups to thwart the will of the overwhelming majority,” Time’s Joe Klein cites defenders of Social Security–who, of course, are trying to thwart the will of an overwhelming minority. … Read More
Fourth party in: UKIP surges in England’s by-election on anti-EU ticket
UKIP has so far won 140 council seats in 35 councils nationwide, meaning that the party had polled roughly 25 per cent of the vote. Among their victories was taking Lincolnshire County Council in east England from the Conservative party, leading to the founders of the Conservative Home blog, Lord Ashcroft and Stephan Shakespeare, to state: “The Lincolnshire result, in particular, is disappointing. Even in 2005 the Conservatives had a substantial majority – the result last time in 2009 increased that majority still further.” The party also won its first seats in Dorset and Somerset, and took five seats in Norfolk and won Tunbridge Wells East from the Conservatives: 1,386 to 1,005. The Conservatives held the council’s remaining five seats.“The message to the Coalition is you are losing the argument. If I was a Tory MP in a marginal constituency I would be worried. If I was a Labour MP in a marginal I would be worried too, ” said UKIP Deputy Leader Paul Nuttall speaking at the count.“We are not just taking votes from Conservatives. This is the fourth by-election on the trot in the North where UKIP has finished second ,” he stated.The success has received quite unanimous estimates in British media.”This is a big deal for the British politics, which for many years has been dominated by the three main parties – Conservatives, Labor, Liberal Democrats. And as of today, there’s a new party on the scene. And it’s certainly shaking things up here in London ,” the editor of a UK political news website Politics.co.uk, Alex Stevenson, told RT.With the political landscape shifting significantly overnight, PM David Cameron, who in 2006 dubbed UKIP “fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists mostly “, called Friday for more respect to the party and its voters.”It’s no good insulting a political party that people have chosen to vote for ,” the prime minister told the BBC when he was asked whether he still stood by his previous comment.Cameron further said UKIP now represents a threat to all parties:”I think there are major lessons for the major political parties. For the Conservatives – look I understand why some people who supported us before didn’t support us again. They want us to do even more to work for hard-working people, to sort out the issues they care about, more to help with the cost of living, more to turn the economy around, more to get immigration down, to sort out the welfare system .”‘Sea-change for British politics’ – Farage celebrates UKIP gains“We’ve been abused by everybody, the entire establishment, and now they are shocked and stunned that we’re getting over 25 per cent of the vote everywhere we stand across the country. This is a real sea-change for the British politics,” Nigel Farage, UKIP leader, told the BBC. He was celebrating UKIP’s success over a pint of beer at his favorite haunt at Westminster, saying that the support from the public in the current election was more than he “dreamt possible”.”We’ve thrown the kitchen sink at the campaign and spent every penny we had,” Farage is cited by the Guardian as saying. “And I’ve thrown myself into it.”The 49-year-old believes that the council election has become UKIP’s “first substantial step towards a party that can credibly win seats at Westminster”.”I know that everyone would like to say that it’s just a little short-term, stamp your feet protest – it isn’t. There’s something really fundamental that has happened here,” he stressed. “People have had enough of three main parties, who increasingly resemble each other. The differences between them are very narrow and they don’t even speak the same language that ordinary folk out there, who are struggling with housing and jobs, speak.”Farage described UKIP’s current position as a “very strong” one, but acknowledged that “when it comes to a general election we do have a problem, which is the first-past-the-post election system”.UKIP’s leader confirmed that he’ll run in the next general election in 2015, despite failing to snatch Speaker John Bercow’s seat of Buckingham two years ago.UKIP-ing EnglandConstituency residents and voters shed some light on why the party is enjoying so much newfound success.“Politicians now can never give a straight answer to a question…they trip themselves up. Nigel Farage, ask him a question, you get a straight answer. He’s a straight-talking man; a spade is a spade ,” one South Shields voter told RT.The Liberal Democrats, in a coalition with the ruling Conservative party, finished with fewer than 400 votes, a mere seventh, just ahead of the Monster Raving Loony Party leader, ‘Howling Laud Hope.’Among the elected UKIP councilors is one distant relative of Guy Fawkes, famed for attempting to blow up the houses of Parliament in the 17th century. The Hampshire candidate, where UKIP gained 10 new seats, and the infamous gunpowder plotter share a relative in the latter’s 15th-century great-great-grandfather, leading Farage to comment that the blood of rebellion still run his veins. Fawkes took a 37.2 per cent share of the vote.The still-incoming results, favorable towards UKIP, are widely regarded as symptomatic of an increasingly euro-skeptic and disillusioned UK.“There comes a time in your life when you realize your country is going to the dogs, and I felt that I had to do something… It’s got the fastest growing membership – I think it’s put 10,000 new members in the last couple of months ,” UK columnist, broadcaster and new UKIP member John Gaunt told RT.“What people want is a party that’s going to put the UK first. So they want things like – they want to get out of the EU, which clearly costs Britain 52 million pounds per day. They want to have control over their own borders. UKIP want to halt immigration and drastically reduce immigration over the next five years… It’s kind of a commonsense manifesto ,” he said.UKIP argues that all three main parties share similar values, hoping to absorb traditionally Conservative voters into their fold through their harder-line stance on immigration policy – something the three main parties have all begun to imitate in recent months.Grant Shapps, the Conservative chairman, issued a statement in the fallout from the local election results on Friday morning.“People have sent a message, we get it, we hear what people are saying, people are concerned that we get on with the big issues facing hard-working people in this country, like fixing the economy, sorting out the welfare system, helping hard-working people to get on,” it said. UKIP City of London spokesman, Steven Woolfe, told RT that what his party has created is “a seismic shift” in the UK politics and is now “knocking on the door of parliament”. He stressed that the British political elite is ignoring the real state of things by explaining UKIP’s success only by being a protest vote.“They ignored us in the past and said that no one wanted to listen to us because we were a one-issue party. And then they said that we were just a one-person party,” Woolfe said. “Now that we’ve shown that there are millions of people voting for us they’re saying that we’re the party of protest.” According to the spokesman, the reason UKIP been so bolstered in the vote is that it listens to the needs of the British population. “Today with over a 184 councilors, with over 400 second places we’ve put down a marker that UKIP is here – a particular party that’s listening to the people of this country, hearing that they have problems and saying we’ve got the policies for them,” he explained. Woolfe added that the Independence Party has every intention of capitalizing on their bounce “once we’ve got this success we’re going to work hard across through the country and knocking on the door to get MPs and show them we can do more in parliament too”.The final results of the local council elections, which encompass over 2,000 council seats in England and Wales, are to be announced later on Friday. … Read More
Secret US court approved every single domestic spying request in 2012
The agency, which oversees requests for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign intelligence agents on US soil, released the report to Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), showing that by approving the 1,856 inquiries “for foreign intelligence purposes,” it had granted every single government request in 2012. The FISC’s approval rating actually jumped by five per cent from 2011 – when it also approved every application.The FISC was instituted as part of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, expanded under the George W. Bush administration, and then reauthorized by Congress for another five years in December of 2012. The act, commonly referred to act the “warrantless wiretapping” law, authorizes the government to monitor US citizens’ phone calls and emails without first proving probable cause as long as they’re believed to be corresponding with an individual overseas. “The 1,856 applications include applications made solely for electronic surveillance, applications made solely for physical search, and combined applications requesting authority for electronic surveillance and physical search,” the report read. “Of these, 1,789 applications included requests for authority to conduct electronic surveillance.” David Kris, a former top anti-terrorism attorney at the Justice Department, wrote in the 2012 edition of National Security Investigations and Prosecutions that the FISA Amendments Act also gives the government domestic spying power while stripping away accountability.“For example, an authorization targeting Al-Qaeda – which is a non-US person located abroad – could allow the government to wiretap any telephone that it believes will yield information from or about Al-Qaeda, either because the telephone is registered to a person whom the government believes is affiliated with Al-Qaeda, or because the government believes that the person communicates with others who are affiliated with Al-Qaeda, regardless of the location of the telephone,” Kris wrote, as quoted by Wired. In February of this year the American Civil Liberties Union tried to sue the government in a bid to nullify the law. However, the Supreme Court ruled that, because the court proceedings are kept secret and the American Civil Liberties Union has no way to know if it’s been targeted by the FISA Act, they had no legal standing to sue. When the powers under the law were extended last year, the Senate refused to include any amendments that would have prohibited the CIA from reviewing information taken from government surveillance, one of which was proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon). “The amendment I fought to include would have helped bring the Constitutional principles of security and liberty back into balance and I intend to work with my colleagues to see that the liberties of individual Americans are maintained,” Wyden said after the vote. … Read More
Russian billionaire switches to Apple from Facebook
Analysts cast their doubts on Apple when its stock plunged below $400 and it posted its first profit decline in a decade, which was followed by an 18 percent second quarter earning dip. The stock closed Monday on the NYSE near $420, a far cry from the $705 peak price that coincided with the release in September of the iPhone 5.Apple’s sales surpassed Wall Street’s estimates by almost a 2 million units, but the profit drop stole the financial headlines. Apple sold 37.4 million iPhones and 19.5 million iPads, bringing in $43.6 billion, up 11% from $39.2 billion year-on-year.Apple will still need to fend off competition from Samsung, as they edge their influence in the smart phone and tablet market. With record low stock prices and little market confidence, Usmanov is capitalizing on investors’ spout of doubt. “When the company lost $100 billion of its market value, it was a good time to buy its shares, as the capitalization should rebound,” Usmanov told Bloomberg in an interview in Moscow.Apple’s gross margins are likely to continue shrinking in the short-term, but Usmanov sees the long-term market potential of the iPhone.“But for the next three years I believe Apple is a very promising investment, especially given large dividend payments and buybacks.”“I believe in the future of this company even after Steve Jobs,” Usmanov added.Usmanov, a metal tycoon who exited the metal business and entered telecoms at just the precise moment, has made the lion’s share of his wealth from the Mail.ru group. He has 10% ownership in Facebook, Mail.ru has 40 percent in Vkontakte, Russia’s copycat version of the social network, which has 100 million users and counting. Usmanov is also after a majority share in Vkontakte.Usmanov acquired Facebook shares through his Mail.ru group in 2009, when the social-media network was valued at $6.5 billion, according to Bloomberg estimates. Usmanov’s company sold a $1.7 billion share during Facebook’s initial public offering in May 2012, pocketing $1.4 billion in the deal. … Read More
Russians prepare 1.5mn questions for Putin’s annual Q&A call-in
The questions were submitted through the Internet and at specially organized stations. The queries will be asked live at six studios in different locations throughout Russia, which are not disclosed until the call-in show starts.Putin’s 11th Q&A session will be different from previous ones as the questions will be arranged by type, not by where the questioner is from, presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the press shortly ahead of the session.“Somewhere we will have the representatives of science and intelligentsia, in some places we will have science representatives and students, veterans of WWII and those who search for soldiers’ remains, peasants and families with a lot of adopted children, as this topic is very urgent,” Peskov explained.Some of the questions will also touch upon Russia’s political problems, such as appropriate types of protest, whether the majority party is ready for a dialogue with the opposition, recent corruption scandals in the Defense Ministry, and the ongoing trial of whistleblower Aleksey Navalny.The Russian TV channels that are organizing the event also said that the main studio in Moscow will host representatives of political parties and public movements, as well as several figures from major news events of 2012. … Read More
