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Wikileaks says Australia warned of ‘dirty tricks’
STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Australian intelligence services had warned WikiLeaks of “dirty tricks” before Swedish authorities issued a short-lived arrest warrant for founder Julian Assange over a rape claim, he said Monday.
“We were warned on the 11th (of August) by Australian intelligence that we should expect this sort of thing,” Assange said in a telephone interview with broadcaster Al-Jazeera from a secret location in Sweden.
‘Zombie ants’ controlled by parasitic fungus for 48m years
We now present it as the first example of behavioural manipulation and probably the only one which can be found. In most cases, this kind of control is spectacular but ephemeral and doesn’t leave any permanent trace,” Hughes said.
“The question now is, what are the triggers that push a parasite not just to kill its host, but to take over its brain and muscles and then kill it.”
He added: “Of all the parasitic organisms, only a few have evolved this trick of manipulating their host’s behaviour.
related: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8
Fringe’s funniest joke prize awarded to Tim Vine
Outrage at UN decision to exonerate Shell for oil pollution in Niger delta
[Quote]:
A three-year investigation by the United Nations will almost entirely exonerate Royal Dutch Shell for 40 years of oil pollution in the Niger delta, causing outrage among communities who have long campaigned to force the multinational to clean up its spills and pay compensation.
Before you click through – take a guess who funded the investigation.
The Sofa Wars – Plenty to Watch Online, but Viewers Prefer to Pay for Cable
[Quote]:
These are confusing times in the living room. The proliferation of Internet video has led to much talk of “cord-cutting” — a term that has come to mean canceling traditional pay TV and replacing it with programming from a grab bag of online sources.
But so far Americans are not doing this in any meaningful numbers. “Nor is there any evidence of it emerging in the near future,” said Bruce Leichtman, the president of Leichtman Research Group, which studies consumer media habits.
This is all the more remarkable, industry analysts say, because it seems to defy the way the Internet has disrupted and challenged virtually every other major form of media — from music to newspapers to books.
In part that is because the television business took action to avoid the same fate. Heavyweight distributors and producers have protected their business models by ensuring that some must-see shows and live sporting events cannot legally be seen online.
Apparently it’s still easier to dump TV altogether than to replace it with an online version..
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Assange claims ‘smear campaign’
[Quote]:
Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, has said the now-dropped charge of rape levelled against him in Sweden was "a smear campaign".
Assange told Al Jazeera on Sunday that while he had been forewarned by Australian intelligence on August 11 to expect a campaign against him, it was unclear who was behind it.
"It is clearly a smear campaign … the only question is who was involved.
"We can have some suspicions about who would benefit, but without direct evidence I would not be willing to make a direct allegation."
Assange said that the accusations were completely untrue and expected all charges to be dropped on Monday, adding that his lawyers were in the process of arranging a meeting with the prosecutors.
He also said that this was just one of many attempts to discredit him.
"This is the first sexual related we’ve had, but we have seen 14 fabricated
documents, for example, that have appeared in various places about this organisation which have been shown to be clear fakes," he said.
"So there are significant forces pushing to perceive things in a particular way".
Cartoons
Discovery of ancient cave paintings in Petra stuns art scholars
[Quote]:
Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra through the expertise of British conservation specialists. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti.
Experts from the Courtauld Institute in London have now removed the black grime, uncovering paintings whose "exceptional" artistic quality and sheer beauty are said to be superior even to some of the better Roman paintings at Herculaneum that were inspired by Hellenistic art.
Looks suspicious, but if Shell were mostly innocent and offered to fund an investigation to prove it, they couldn’t succeed in your book.
Here’s the bike of Mike Cowing, the guy who led the UNEP investigation:
http://www.unep.org/documents.multilingual/default.asp?documentid=585&articleid=6151&l=en
Doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who’s in it for a buck, eh?
(I’m not claiming this proves anything, of course, but in my mind his bio goes a fair way to balance the fact that the study was paid for by Shell. Unless there’s some really deep corruption going on (not impossible in the UN, but not the trend, I’d guess), Cowing wouldn’t be bothering to lead a sham investigation.)
Looks suspicious, but if Shell were mostly innocent and offered to fund an investigation to prove it, they couldn’t succeed in your book.
Correct. For things like this, they should have avoided everything that makes it even look improper. And come on, Shell isn’t stupid, they should know that a favorable outcome of sponsored research would be questioned – why are they still doing this?
“And come on, Shell isn’t stupid, they should know that a favorable outcome of sponsored research would be questioned – why are they still doing this?”
Paid for by Shell, not sponsored by Shell – I pay for the blood test if I cause an accident, but I don’t sponsor it.
Why do this? I don’t know. One possible reason is because they were told: And you gonna pay the expenses of this investigation, we won’t waste “public” money on it.
I don’t say that’s what happened, but “paid for by” can be involuntary too.