Newswires: NATO
Updated daily: Articles from external newswires filtered to include the keywords: NATO, Afghanistan...
EFF Asks Court to Protect Craigslist from Defamation Suit
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of public interest groups and law professors have asked a California appeals court to protect craigslist from a lawsuit that could spur websites to be less helpful in responding to complaints about user behavior. In Scott P. v. craigslist, Inc., the plaintiff complained about a series of craigslist ads he said were written by impersonators. While craigslist removed the ads within minutes of his phone calls, the plaintiff sued, contending that craigslist broke a promise to "take care of it" when the impersonators posted additional ads. In cases like these, federal law -- specifically Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -- shields Internet forums like craigslist from liability. Section 230 was designed to encourage parties to pursue action against those who created the questionable content instead of the platform that hosted it. But the California Superior Court has ruled that this case can continue because of the plaintiff's allegations that craigslist said it would help. Craigslist filed a writ petition with the Court of Appeal for the State of California Wednesday, arguing that the trial court should have dismissed the case because of Section 230's protections for forum hosts. In an amicus letter filed today in support of craigslist, EFF argues that the lower court reasoning could create a hole in Section 230, discouraging forum owners from helping users. "Section 230 was a deliberate effort by Congress to encourage service providers to find innovative ways to self-regulate," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. "Yet craigslist is facing the prospect of extended litigation because it tried to do just that. Allowing this litigation to continue could result in websites being less helpful to users with complaints." Additionally troublesome is the specter of further lawsuits, which could convince other Internet innovators not to host user content at all. "Congress created Section 230 to allow for online interactivity without a flood of lawsuits. But this case could undermine the immunity that the law created," said Opsahl. "If litigation can survive merely because a plaintiff asserts that the site made a vague promise, sites may decide that allowing comments or user generated content is not worth the legal exposure. Then we'll lose the vibrant online environment that Section 230 helped create in the first place." Joining EFF in the letter to court were the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Citizen Media Law Project, and law professors Eric Goldman, David S. Levine, David G. Post, and Jason Schultz. Separately, a group of Internet companies, including Yahoo!, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Linkedin filed another amicus brief in support of craigslist. For the full amicus letter: http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/craigslist_v_sup/EFFletter9210.pdf For more on this case: http://www.eff.org/cases/craigslist-v-superior-court-california Contact: Kurt Opsahl Senior Staff Attorney Electronic Frontier Foundation kurt@eff.org more >>
NATO air strike kills 10 civilians: Afghan president
AFP: Ten Afghan civilians were killed Thursday in a NATO air strike on three vehicles carrying election campaign workers in northern Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai said in a statement. Karzai strongly condemned the incident in his statement, confirming earlier reports of an air strike that killed election workers in Takhar province. more >>
U.S. Nuclear Stockpile Secrecy: A View from 1949
The question of whether or not to disclose the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal “goes to the very heart of our democratic system of government,” said Senator Brien McMahon (D-CT) in a newly rediscovered 1949 speech (pdf) on secrecy in nuclear weapons policy. “Do we possess five bombs, or fifty bombs, or [...] more >>
Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
By Bruce Levine - September 2010 ...[Is] it just a coincidence that disabling mental illness and psychiatric drug use have been rapidly increasing at the same time?...[The] most scientifically identifiable factor for the increase of severe psychiatric problems is the increase in psychiatric drug use...[L]ong-term psychiatric drug use has caused children and adults with minor emotional problems to have severe and chronic disorders that result in mental illness disabilities. read more more >>
US deaths in Afghanistan hit record in 2010
AFP: he toll of US soldiers killed in the Afghan war this year is the highest since the conflict began, an AFP count found, as NATO said Wednesday it had killed two insurgents for every soldier lost last month. A total of 323 US soldiers have been killed in the Afghan war 2010, compared with 317 for all of 2009, according to AFP figures based on the independent icasualties.org website. more >>
Where Did The Money Go?
Yahoo News: OK. The roads are impressive. Specifically, the fact that they exist. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, more than two decades of civil conflict had left the country bereft of basic infrastructure. Roads, bridges and tunnels had been bombed and mined. What didn't blow up got ground down by tanks. Maintenance? Don't be funny. It took them too long to get started, but U.S. occupation forces deserve credit for slapping down asphalt. more >>
Karzai in panic as graft probe closes in
Global Post: Editor's note: Afghanistan's central bank moved to shore up confidence in the country's biggest financial institution Wednesday, taking over the Kabul Bank after its top executives resigned amid allegations of mismanagement and corruption. Kabul Bank belongs in part to the brother of President Hamid Karzai, Mahmoud Karzai, while the vice-president's brother also owns a stake. more >>
Wikileaks’ CIA release -- say what?
Wikileaks offered its first release since the controversial distribution of documents related to the United States effort in Afghanistan. The current leak was posted to their web site on August 25. It is titled CIA Red Cell Memorandum on United States “exporting terrorism,” 2 Feb 2010. The leak describes Red Cell as a CIA unit created by the director to develop “out-of-the-box” analysis offering “alternative viewpoints” on key intelligence issues. This document doesn’t disappoint in being out-of-the-box. more >>
Afghanistan: NATO's ten-year war in South Asia
In slightly over a month, on October 7, the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan will enter its tenth year. The conflict represents the longest continuous combat operations in the history of the United States and Afghanistan alike. With the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for the only time in its existence activating its Article 5 mutual military assistance clause in September 2001 and thus entering the Afghan fray, European nations that had not been at war since the Second World War are now engaged in an endless combat mission. There are 150,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, 120,000 of them under the command of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Military personnel from over a quarter of the 192 members of the United Nations. They include soldiers from almost every European country, several Asia-Pacific states, and nations in the Americas and the Middle East. more >>
Some Afghan Men Form Sexual Relationships With Young Boys
Care2: On the eve of Obama's speech on the Iraq transition, the last thing anyone needs is another reason to have misgivings about the situation in Afghanistan - but that's certainly what a piece from this weekend's San Francisco Chronicle provides. Among the Pashtun, Afghanistan's major ethnic group, sexual relationships between grown men and boys as young as nine are common, according to Joel Brinkley, a journalism professor at Stanford. more >>
Pakistan: Multi-party conference demands debt cancellation
By Farooq Tariq August 29, 2010 -- A multi-party conference in Lahore has decided to campaign for cancellation of Pakistan's crippling foreign debt and to organise mass rallies in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad. The first rally will be on September 2 in Islamabad. The Labour Relief Campaign in association with Oxfam Pakistan called the conference on August 29, in Lahore, to discuss the issue of debt repayment in the post-flood scenario. It was chaired by Aman Kariaper and Ammar Ali Jan. Senator Hasil Bezinjo vowed to take the issue to Pakistan's Senate and present a resolution to demand that government refuse to pay the foreign debt. read more more >>
Invasion by Birth Canal? The fourteenth amendment and its opponents’ motivations
Russell Pearce, the Arizona Senator who pushed the “Support Our Law Enforcement” immigration bill (known in Arizona as SB 1070), complains about th... more >>
America's Holy Crusade against the Muslim World.
"The fact that the 9/11 attacks were not instigated by Muslims has rarely been acknowledged by the Muslim community. Al Qaeda's ongoing relationship to the CIA, its role as a US sponsored "intelligence asset" going back to to the Soviet-Afghan war is not mentioned. (Michel Chossudovsky, America's "War on Terrorism" Global Research, Montreal, 2005) Since the early 1980s, Washington has covertly supported the most conservative and fundamentalist factions of Islam, largely with a view to weakening secular, nationalist and progressive movements in the Middle East and Central Asia. Known and documented, the fundamentalist Wahhabi and Salafi missions from Saudi Arabia, dispatched not only to Afghanistan but also to the Balkans and to the Muslim republics of the former Soviet republics were covertly supported by US intelligence. (Ibid) What is often referred to as "Political Islam" is in large part a creation of the US intelligence apparatus (with the support of Britain's MI6 and Israel's Mossad)." more >>
Karzai “fired” anti-corruption lawyer after top official stung
The Guardian: One of Afghanistan's most senior government prosecutors said yesterday that he was forced into retirement after aggressively promoting corruption investigations against top officials, including one of Hamid Karzai's most trusted aides. Fazel Ahmed Faqiryar, a lawyer well-regarded by foreign rule-of-law experts, lost his position as deputy attorney general at a time of growing US impatience with President Karzai... more >>
Letter from Iranian Political Prisoners to Brazilian President Lula da Silva
Honorable President Da Silva: We the signatories and endorsers of this letter know that you have traversed a difficult road to democracy -- from the grassroots level of union struggles to the level of the nationwide Brazilian workers' federations and the arena of global politics -- with the support of the votes of the democratic and freedom-loving people of Brazil. As a group of union and syndicate activists, political activists, and activists promoting various creeds, we have been incarcerated in the prisons of the Islamic Republic solely for having performed our union and professional duties and for our votes and opinions. more >>
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from J4J campaign, 18 November 2008: We would imagine that, in the midst of the inquest into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, publications aimed at and widely read by serving police officers would show greater sensitivity in the way they talk about fatal shootings by the police. But evidently not. The magazine "Police Review", in its 14 November edition, decided that the introduction of new rules preventing firearms officers from conferring after a shooting was best illustrated by this appalling cartoon. more
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