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বুধবার, ৩১ জুলাই, ২০১৩
Security News Headlines - Yahoo! News
Israel, the Palestine-Iran fork
The hope for progress in the core middle-east dispute arises at the very time when a new Iranian president tests Israel's unyielding stance on nuclear security.
The Israeli-Palestinian talks convened in Washington on 30 July 2013 are taking place after a long hiatus marked by events on the ground that make a resolution of the conflict even more difficult than it has always been. The preliminary scene-setting witnessed veteran Palestinian negotiator Sa'eb Erakat and Israeli justice minister Tzipi Livni beginning to explore the possibilities of any advance on the present vastly unequal stalemate. The United States clearly has an interest in moving forward, with secretary of state John Kerry's personal commitment and President Barack Obama's relative freedom of manouevre providing the fuel. But as the president's new representative Martin Indyk prerpares to chair a round of more serious discussions in the coming weeks, expectations must be modest.?
There are, after all, major differences on all four major issues: borders, settlements, the status of Jerusalem, and the rights of Palestinian refugees. These overshadow the limited space for compromise. A fundamental problem is that both sides have basic internal issues to address. Many of Livni's cabinet colleagues see no point at all in negotiating, and Erakat does not speak for Hamas.
In regional terms, there are other dynamics at work. Israel's unease when it gazes across its borders contrasts with its extraordinarily high level of domestic security and apparent safety. The Sinai border barrier separating it from Egypt is now complete, and the Mediterranean coast is very well protected. It may appear that Israelis have created a virtual prison for themselves within the region, a western outpost in an uncertain land; but? the Arab world's upheavals reinforce their belief in the importance both of stringent frontier security and retention of their powerful nuclear arsenal. The latter is always there as the final guarantor - but it can only play this role as long as Israel alone within the region possesses a nuclear capability.
Israel, historically, prefers to deal with autocrats as neighbours - they know where they stand and don't have to worry too much about public opinion. Egypt's deposed president, Mohammed Morsi, was a worry because he spoke for a very large minority of Egyptians. Now, though, he has gone, leaving the Egyptian military to adopt a hard line towards Gaza and even bring back the secret police.
Israel's concerns over Syria and Iran remain. In the case of Syria, Israel fears that if Bashar al-Assad's regime falls, radical Islamists will wield influence in a successor state; but that if it remains in power it will continue to supply Hizbollah, its Lebanese ally which has aided it so much in recent months.
In the short term, not much can be done about the Islamists in Syria except to encourage the Americans privately to be cautious about any dalliance with the rebels. Where Hizbollah is concerned, though, Israel does have options in southern Lebanon that fall well short of another out-and-out war.
The Israeli outlook
In a scarcely reported operation on 5 July 2013, Israeli forces attacked a Syrian base near the port city of Latakia - reportedly a storage facility for Russian-built P-800 Yakhout anti-ship missiles (see Jeremy Binnie, ?Syria silent on alleged Israeli strike?, Jane's Defence Weekly, 24 July 2013). The raid was probably carried out by Israeli strike-aircraft flying low over Lebanese territory before firing stand-off missiles, though it may have involved submarine-launched land-attack cruise-missiles. The P-800 has a range of 300 km and could be used by the Syrians to attack Israeli ships in retaliation for intervention in Syria, but Israel also sees the potential for these missiles to be supplied to Hizbollah. Israel bitterly recalls an incident during the war of July-August 2006 when Hizbollah fired a Chinese anti-ship missile from the Lebanese coast whichbadly damaged a powerful Israeli missile-boat.
This latest Israeli operation shows the willingness of the Netanyahu government to escalate. But however chaotic and violent - and right on Israel's border - is the situation in Syria, the government's much greater concern is with Iran and its nuclear programme. In this respect the Israelis are in a very odd position. In the coming weeks, Hassan Rowhani will be installed as president as successor to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after he won an outright victory over five opponents (four of them hardliners). Rowhani is also an experienced nuclear negotiator, and his victory both somewhat limits the power of the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei and lends energy to his immediate aim of easing Iran's dire economic situation.
There are strong indications that Iran did have a nuclear-weapon programme in the early 2000s, run by the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), but that this was halted - partly through Rowhani's action after he became Iran's chief negotiator in October 2003 (see Francois Nicoullaud, ?Rouhani and the Iranian bomb?, New York Times, 26 July 2013).
The Iranian risk
In this overall light, three factors are coalescing:
* The Iranian economy is in a mess, and though internal mismanagement may be more the cause than sanctions, the latter are significant and any easing would help
* Hassan Rowhani is a seasoned diplomat whose knowledge of the nuclear issue is more detailed than any previous Iranian president
* Barack Obama would welcome some degree of compromise, and it's early enough in his second term for him both to need some historically significant progress and be able to face down domestic opposition. He does not have another election to win and the mid-sessional elections to Congress are more than a year away.
This combination makes the chance of progress better than for several years. It is also clear that the Iranians, whatever they are prepared to negotiate over, will insist on maintaining a civil nuclear programme - even if fully safeguarded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
This leaves the Netanyahu government in a real dilemma. For it is simply not prepared to allow Iran to continue to accumulate the technical know-how that could suddenly enable a ?break-out? to building a small nuclear arsenal. It is also deeply critical of Obama for being, in its view, soft on Tehran.
The current Israeli ?red line? is Iran accumulating more than 250 kg of medium-enriched uranium (20% U-235). Iran so far has gathered over 300 kg, but about 130 kg the total has been converted into research-reactor fuel elements. So Tehran remains some way short of Israel's red line.
That may change. But Rowhani is smart enough to work around this, leaving the Israelis in a state of permanent suspicion. A number of reports cites Netanyahu as saying: ?I can tell you, I won't wait until it's too late. We will have to address this question of how to stop Iran, perhaps before the United States?. For the Israeli prime minister, Rowhani's strategy ?is to be a wolf in sheep's clothing, to smile and build a bomb? (see Jeremy Binnie, ?Netanyahu repeats threats against Iran?, Jane's Defence Weekly, 17 July 2013).
This rhetoric may have the instrumental aim of persuading the White House and backing pro-Israel interest-groups in the US. But a very real fixation underlies it: that Israel must be the only power in the region that has nuclear weapons - and even the capability to develop them. That is why at the very time the possibility of progress in Israel-Palestine talks has arisen, so too has that of a serious crisis over Iran. Most analysts currently downplay or dismiss the risk of an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. This might be an occasion when most analysts are wrong.
Source: http://www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/israel-palestine-iran-fork
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With 1.5M Users In Total, Wave Begins Mobile Payments Beta Via iOS App For Its Free Accounting Software
Toronto-based Wave, the free cloud accounting platform that has since expanded into payroll and other business-focused applications, today announced the beginning of its mobile payments beta program. Interested users can sign up via their website today, and Wave will start sending out invites next month. The mobile expansion follows the introduction of direct payments on Wave's web-based accounting tool, and both are powered by partner Stripe.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/dOk03QTanqo/
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মঙ্গলবার, ৩০ জুলাই, ২০১৩
Classified ad site Backpage gets backlash over sex ads
sex-crimes 
59 minutes ago
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Backpage.com has become the Craigslist of prostitution ads in recent years since that free site stopped running the ads in 2010.
Search for "Backpage.com" on the FBI's main website and up pops eight whole pages of press releases and public announcements naming the classified advertising site as a tool for sex criminals, particularly those selling children, sex and prostitution. And in fact, Backpage was named as one of the sources law enforcement used to help gather evidence needed to coordinate a 70-city raid last weekend that resulted in the rescue of 105 teenagers and the arrest of 159 pimps.
"The fact that they were able to rescue that many children and arrest that many pimps is fantastic," Liz McDougall, counsel for Backpage told NBC News Monday. "We are glad to be a partner with and support law enforcement to make these arrests, and make them in time to rescue these children."
A partner with law enforcement? While Backpage may be the current Craigslist for prostitution ads in the United States, McDougall says the site gladly cooperates with police when they want information about those who place the ads, including the IP, or Internet protocol, address from where the ads originated.
But a new effort by the National Association of Attorneys General wants to change federal law so that Internet service providers and websites like Backpage could be prosecuted by state and local governments for promoting prostitution and child sex trafficking, simply by running such ads.
It's a double-edged sword, some might say: Shutting down online ad venues for criminals and sexual traffickers seems like a good "nowhere to run" idea, but law enforcement looks to such sites to find information about the criminals they're chasing. And some argue that if you shut down one such "offending" site, another pops up anyway. Besides, there's a bigger issue at the heart of this: The same laws that protect the unsavory ads online also protect most Internet providers from liabilities of all kinds.
Backpage is specifically named in a letter from the attorneys' general group, sent last week to members of Congress, seeking an amendment to the Communications Decency Act of 1996:
Every day, children in the United States are sold for sex. In instance after instance, State and local authorities discover that the vehicles for advertising the victims of the child sex trade to the world are online classified ad services, such as Backpage.com. The involvement of these advertising companies is not incidental ? these companies have constructed their business models around income gained from participants in the sex trade.
Federal enforcement by itself has "proven insufficient to stem the growth of Internet-facilitated child trafficking," says the group, with the letter signed by 49 state and territorial attorneys general. "Those on the front lines of the battle against the sexual exploitation of children ? state and local law enforcement ? must be granted the authority to investigate and prosecute those who facilitate these horrible crimes."
It's an effort applauded by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which works with law enforcement on sex trafficking cases.
"Classified-ad websites have made child sex trafficking an easy and profitable business enterprise for pimps," said John Ryan, the center's CEO, in a recent statement. "NCMEC urges all policymakers to explore every avenue available to bring to justice those who profit from the sexual exploitation of children."
Perhaps you're wondering why so many name Backpage and not Craigslist. In 2010, Craigslist, under pressure from more than a dozen individual states' attorney generals, voluntarily banned ads for adult services from the site. When that happened, much of the business moved to Backpage.com. (Village Voice Media, which owns the Village Voice, among other publications, also owned Backpage.com until last fall, when it became a separate company.)
Whether or not Backpage follows suit and ditches adult services, experts argue that the law itself should not be changed in order to make this happen.
Mark Rasch, former head of the Department of Justice's Computer Crimes Unit, and now an independent consultant, told NBC News he is against the proposed change, which would restrict free speech, now a key protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. He also says it's the "wrong way" to go after those in the child sex trade.
"Sex traffickers use the Internet to sell their wares, use the telephone lines to communicate with customers, use the banking and credit card system to obtain payment for sex services, use highways and local roads to transport minors for sex, use cars and other vehicles for the same purpose," he wrote in a recent blog post. "They use the same infrastructure established to sell toothpaste to sell illicit sex with minors. They need to be arrested and prosecuted for these crimes."
But third parties that might be accused of making those crimes possible ? whether it's ISPs or gas stations ? shouldn't be held criminally liable "for their own participation," he argues. An amendment to the law like this one means that "EBay could be held liable if someone purchased a knife online and then used that knife to kill someone, if a state passed a law making the advertisement of knives that are used for such purposes a crime."
Matthew Zimmerman, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties organization, told NBC News that with the "proliferation of user-generated speech online over the past decade," the proposed amendment would be "extraordinarily harmful."
The EFF successfully defended both Backpage and the non-profit Internet Archive in a suit against the state of Washington, which in 2012 passed a law that essentially made it a crime to "knowingly" publish or display any ad for a commercial sex act, including the depiction of a minor. The EFF said that the new state law considered both sites publishers, contrary to the provisions of the Communications Decency Act. A federal court agreed, and blocked the law.
Zimmerman says it's not only "lawful speech" that would be hurt by letting states prosecute service providers and websites. "This could also lead to the loss of critical tools that law enforcement could use to investigate these and other crimes," he told NBC News.
McDougall of Backpage agrees. The arrests over the weekend are "something that wouldn't be possible if you didn't have a domestic, cooperative website involved," she said. "That's why it's important to not drive this content to offshore websites, which won't cooperate and don't have to cooperate with U.S. law enforcement. It would make law enforcement's job exponentially more difficult."
Still, there are many who'd argue that giving child traffickers one less avenue would be a win for the good guys. It's not known yet what, if any, action Congress will take on changing the Communications Decency Act. The issue is sure to be debated in the months to come.
Check out Technology and TODAY Tech on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Suzanne Choney.
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Outer Space Olympics: Russia to Launch Torch, Award Meteor Medals
Russia is injecting outer space into the 2014 Olympics ? both literally and figuratively.
The host nation for the next Winter Games will launch an Olympic torch on a spacewalk and embed meteorite fragments into a special set of gold medals.
Scheduled for Feb. 7 through 23, 2014, in Sochi, Russia, the 22nd Winter Olympics will be preceded by a traditional torch relay to begin on Oct. 7. A total of 14,000 people will carry the torch from Moscow to Sochi, including Valentina Tereshkova, who 50 years ago became the first woman in space.
On Nov. 7, a month into the torch relay with the flame still being run across Russia, an unlit Olympic torch will lift off with three new crew members for the International Space Station.
Flying on Soyuz TMA-11M with Roscosmos cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, NASA astronaut Richard Mastracchio and JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata, the Olympic torch will be handed off to Expedition 38 commander Oleg Kotov and flight engineer Sergey Ryazansky to be taken outside the orbiting laboratory during a spacewalk on Nov. 9. [Summer Olympics Cities Seen from Space (Photos)]
"The story of the Olympic torch is part of our mission," Kotov told reporters during a press briefing held earlier this month. "We are going to take... the Olympic torch out with us on our first EVA [extravehicular activity] and we'll take a few pictures and video and downlink them to the ground. And maybe we will have some activity [inside] the station with the Olympic torch."
Olympic torches previously flew twice on board the space shuttle, even entering the International Space Station, but have never ventured outside until now.
"Nobody has done this before," Dmitry Chernyshenko, the president of the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee, said in a statement. "The spacewalk by two Russian cosmonauts with the [Olympic torch] will be a historic moment in the history of the Olympic Torch Relay."
"Conducting a spacewalk with the torch is unprecedented in the history of the Olympic movement and the world of astronautics," added Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin. "Its in-orbit delivery and the spacewalk by cosmonauts will be a bright new page in space history."
The aluminum and red colored torch ? red being the color of Russian sports ? will return to Earth two days later on Nov. 11, landing aboard the Soyuz TMA-09M capsule with cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, NASA's Karen Nyberg and Luca Parmitano with the European Space Agency (ESA).
Three months (and four days) later, on the ninth day of the Olympics, it will be something that fell from space, rather than landed, that will take the Winter Games' center stage.
The athletes who earn gold on Feb. 15, 2014 will receive a special medal featuring a chip of the meteor that exploded over Russia a year earlier. The meteor strike, the largest recorded fall in more than a century, resulted in buildings being damaged and more than 1,000 people being injured.
"We will hand out our medals to all the athletes who will win gold on that day, because both the meteorite strike and the Olympic Games are global events," said Alexei Betekhtin, culture minister for the Chelyabinsk region, in a statement.
Pieces of the recovered space rocks will be inserted into the medals for presentation.
Seven of the meteorite-embedded awards will be given to the gold medal athletes competing in speedskating (men's 1,500 meter), short-track speedskating (women's 1,000 m and men's 1,500), cross-country skiing (women's relay), ski jumping (men's K-125), Alpine skiing (women's super giant slalom) and skeleton (men's).
Click through to collectSPACE.com to see Russia?s Soyuz TMA-11M mission patch that pays tribute to the 2014 Sochi Olympic Winter Games and the Olympic torch flying aboard the mission to the International Space Station.
Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2013 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.
Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Source: http://news.yahoo.com/outer-space-olympics-russia-launch-torch-award-meteor-133733095.html
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Heavy cell phone use linked to oxidative stress
[unable to retrieve full-text content]A new study finds a strong link between heavy cell phone users and higher oxidative stress to all aspects of a human cell, including DNA. Uniquely based on examinations of the saliva of cell phone users, the research provides evidence of a connection between cell phone use and cancer risk.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_health/~3/UVTAx77ex88/130729133531.htm
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সোমবার, ২৯ জুলাই, ২০১৩
Israel agrees to free 104 Palestinian prisoners
JERUSALEM (AP) ? Israel's Cabinet approved the release of 104 long-held Palestinian prisoners Sunday, clearing a hurdle toward a possible resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks after five years of paralysis.
The prisoner release is part of a push by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to bring the two sides back to the table. Sunday's 13-7 vote, with two abstentions, marks his first visible achievement after six months of shuttle diplomacy.
As a next step, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are set to hold preliminary talks in Washington on Tuesday, to be followed by up to nine months of negotiations on a peace deal.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, welcomed the Cabinet vote as "a step toward peace."
The fate of Palestinian prisoners is emotionally charged for both sides. Palestinians tend to view prisoners as heroes who made sacrifices in the struggle for independence. Most Israelis view them as cold-blooded terrorists.
The Cabinet approved the release in principle of the 104 prisoners, said a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with briefing regulations. Under the deal brokered by Kerry, the prisoners would be freed in four stages over several months. Each step would be linked to progress in negotiations.
According to a list provided by the Palestinians, the prisoners have served between 19 and 30 years for involvement in deadly attacks on Israelis. Their release would go a long way toward giving Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas a popular mandate to resume negotiations with Israel, despite widespread skepticism on both sides after 20 years of intermittent talks that produced no results.
On the Israeli side, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced stiff opposition from within his governing coalition, including his own Likud Party. Two Likud ministers and those from the pro-settler Jewish Home Party voted against a prisoner release.
Outside the government complex, hundreds of Israelis who lost loved ones in Palestinian attacks demonstrated against the release.
Netanyahu told the Cabinet releasing prisoners involved in deadly attacks was difficult for him.
"This is not an easy moment for me, and is not easy for the ministers in the government and is especially difficult for the bereaved families," Netanyahu said. "But there are moments where I need to make tough decisions for the good of the country and this is one of those moments."
"I believe that resuming the political process at this time is important for Israel," he said, noting that any peace deal would have to be approved in a national referendum.
Along with the prisoner release, ministers also authorized the resumption of talks with the Palestinians and agreed that a team led by the prime minister would oversee negotiations.
They approved the draft of an amended bill that would require a referendum on any partition deal with the Palestinians.
A resumption of peace talks is not yet assured, though.
Abbas has said he won't go back to talks unless Netanyahu accepts the pre-1967 war lines as a starting line for border talks. That refers to all of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. The Palestinians want to establish their state those territories, captured by Israel in 1967, though they have said they are ready for minor adjustments.
Abbas told reporters Friday that the invitation to talks to be issued by Kerry will state that the basis for negotiations is the 1967 line. It's not clear whether Netanyahu has dropped his long-standing objection to the idea.
In his comments Sunday, Erekat referred to the touchy issue.
"I hope that we can use this opportunity that the U.S. has provided for us to resume negotiations, in order to achieve peace with a state of Palestine that can live in peace and security next to the state of Israeli on the 1967 lines," he said.
Before the Cabinet vote, hundreds of relatives of those killed by the prisoners protested the release outside parliament. Families held pictures of slain loved ones and chanted, "Terrorists must not be freed."
One of Netanyahu's major coalition partners, Naftali Bennett of the Jewish Home Party, took part in the rally. "Whoever demands the killers of women and children to be freed are not worthy to be called a partner," he said, referring to Abbas. "We have nothing to negotiate with he who praises the killers of women and children," Bennett said.
Bennett has threatened to pull his party out of the government if the prime minister agrees to other Palestinian demands, such as recognizing the 1967 line as a base for talks.
Other Israeli leaders said freeing the prisoners is a necessary move in order to promote peace talks.
"This is a painful decision ... but it's a step that will strengthen Israel strategically," opposition leader Shelly Yachimovich of the centrist Labor party said. She called on Netanyahu to listen to an Israeli majority in favor of a peace deal and "not to be led by extremists in his government."
Israel has a history of releasing Palestinian prisoners, including those involved in attacks. In 2011, it exchanged some 1,000 Palestinians for a single Israeli soldier held by Gaza militants.
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