The evening before Bush signed off the plans, Black and a handful of other senior CIA officers went to the British embassy in Washington, where they told senior British intelligence officers what was about to happen. At the end of Black‘s three-hour presentation, his opposite number at MI6, Mark Allen, commented drily that it all sounded „rather blood-curdling“. Allen also expressed concern that once the Americans had „hammered the mercury in Afghanistan“, al-Qaida would simply scatter across south Asia and the Middle East, destabilising entire regions.

The US government insists that Americans don’t have the right to challenge a law that lets the National Security Agency eavesdrop on the intimate communications of anyone in the country, but all of that could now change as early as next week.

The Rev Jesse Jackson is arrested on Wednesday in Freeport, Illinois, after attending a protest at Sensata Technologies, a firm owned by Bain Capital. Workers at Sensata were protesting against the outsourcing of their jobs to China. Bain Capital was co-founded by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney

Riot police clash with market vendors in Peru over plans to relocate their businesses, leaving one dead and scores injured.

Survivors of the bloody last months of Sri Lanka‘s civil war tell a story of injustice and horror that we cannot continue to ignore

Back in May, Techdirt pointed to a presentation from Mike Palmedo listing a wide range of research that demonstrates the lack of a connection between policies introducing stricter IP laws or enforcement and economic growth or innovation. Apparently, the African Union Scientific, Technical and Research Commission didn‘t get around to reading that post, since it has produced a draft statute for the creation of a new Pan-Africa Intellectual Property Organization that seems based entirely on assuming this link exists.

Eine Gruppe führender Technologie-Unternehmen, darunter die Chip-Giganten AMD und Intel sowie mehrere Rüstungsfirmen, haben sich zu einer Allianz für die „Cyber-Sicherheits-Forschung“ zusammen geschlossen. Die „Cyber Security Research Alliance“ (CSRA) soll helfen, „große Herausforderungen in Cyber-Sicherheit und Technologien der nächsten Generation“ zu meistern.

„In the 1960‘s an anti-war movement emerged that altered the course of history. This movement didn‘t take place on college campuses, but in barracks and on aircraft carriers. It flourished in army stockades, navy brigs and in the dingy towns that surround military bases. It penetrated elite military colleges like West Point. And it spread throughout the battlefields of Vietnam. It was a movement no one expected, least of all those in it. Hundreds went to prison and thousands into exile. And by 1971 it had, in the words of one colonel, infested the entire armed services. Yet today few people know about the GI movement against the war in Vietnam.