To inform people in boycotting Israeli products (made in Israel or made outside of Israel but directly or indirectly support Israel) send out an emails, tweets, share Facebook pages, post boycott information on forums and different blogs, send out text/SMS messages to people in your mobile phone book, call people and tell them.
Most consumers do not realize the extent of the penetration of Israeli goods in Europe, and in particular the UK market.
The purpose of this campaign is to draw awareness to this and to encourage people to join the boycott by starting with boycotting 'made in Israel' products.
Does the boycott work?
According to the Israeli Union of Industrialists, following the attack on Gaza, one in five Israeli exporters are having difficulty selling abroad due to the boycott. Yair Rotloi, chairman of the association's foreign-trade committee revealed:
"Twenty one percent of local exporters report that they are facing problems in selling Israeli goods because of an anti-Israel boycott, mainly from the UK and Scandinavian countries".
The Iraqi Council of Representatives will vote to legalise Forced Child Marriage1.
The specifics of the legislation (part of the Jaafari Personal Status Law) are terrifying:
There will no longer be a minimum age to legally marry(it’s currently 18) but the law provides policies for divorcing a 9-year-old girl;
A girl’s father would legally be able to accept a marriage proposal on her behalf; and
The girl would be legally prohibited from resisting her husband’s advances and leaving the home without his permission.
It’s a recipe for a life in domestic and sexual slavery.
The law was sent to the Council of Representatives yesterday, andthe vote could happen any time now. To prevent Iraq’s girls from becoming vulnerable to forced child marriage it is crucial that we act now.
Currently, Iraq has one of the most progressive policies on women’s rights in the Middle East -- setting the legal marriage age at 18 and prohibiting forced marriage2.
Published time: April 04, 2013 16:34
Edited time: April 05, 2013 12:28
Monsanto on Wednesday reported that its net income rose 22
percent to $1.48 billion, or $2.74 a share, in a one-year period.
The profit increase, which occurred in the three-month period
through February, marked a new record for the lucrative biotech
company. Revenue rose 15 percent to $5.47 billion, much of which
came from the sales of genetically modified corn seeds,
particularly those sold in emerging markets like Brazil, Argentina,
and other Latin American countries.
Russian Facebook users have poured scorn on a promise by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to investigate reports of electoral fraud.
At least 7,000 comments had appeared under his post by 20:00 GMT on Sunday, a day after the biggest anti-government protests since Soviet times.
An early random sample showed the comments were equally divided between hostility, support and neutrality.
Mr Medvedev prides himself on using social media.
He recently suffered an embarrassment on Twitter.
Having already conceded that some violations of electoral law had taken place at the parliamentary elections last Sunday, he went on Facebook to say he had issued instructions for all official reports on the conduct of the polls to be checked.
It was his comments on Saturday's election protests - some 50,000 people turned out in Moscow alone - which drew particular anger.
'Pathetic liar'
"I do not agree with either the slogans or statements heard at the rallies," Mr Medvedev wrote.
Facebook users pointed out that the chief, official slogan of the rallies had been "For Honest Elections".
As many as 50,000 people gathered on an island near the Kremlin to condemn alleged ballot-rigging in parliamentary elections and demand a re-run.
Other, smaller rallies took place in St Petersburg and other cities.
Communists, nationalists and Western-leaning liberals turned out together despite divisions between them.
The protesters allege there was widespread fraud in Sunday's polls though the ruling United Russia party did see its share of the vote fall sharply.
Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
The time has come to throw off the chains”
End Quote
Alexei Navalny
Jailed protest leader, in message posted on his blog
Demonstrations in the immediate aftermath of the election saw more than 1,000 arrests, mostly in Moscow, and several key protest leaders such as the anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny were jailed.
A message from Mr Navalny was released through his blog, saying: "The time has come to throw off the chains. We are not cattle or slaves. We have a voice and we have the strength to defend it."
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has never experienced popular protests like these before, the BBC's Steve Rosenberg reports from Moscow.
During his decade in power, first as president then prime minister, he has grown used to being seen as Russia's most popular and powerful politician.
But as one of the protesters put it to our correspondent, Russia is changing.
eurozone members and others will adopt an accord with penalties for breaking deficit rules. It will be backed by a treaty between governments, not an EU treaty.
Tens of thousands are expected to gather in a square south of the Kremlin, in the latest show of anger over disputed parliamentary polls.
Smaller rallies are taking place in cities across the country.
The protesters allege Sunday's elections - which gave Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's ruling United Russia party a small lead - were fraudulent.
Hundreds of people have been arrested during anti-Putin protests over the past week, mainly in Moscow and St Petersburg.
At least 50,000 police and riot troops have been deployed in Moscow ahead of Saturday's protests.
The opposition says it is hoping for a turnout of 30,000 in the capital in the demonstration dubbed "For Fair Elections", due to begin at 14:00 (10:00 GMT).
Protests have already begun elsewhere, with several hundred marching in Vladivostok, seven timezones to the east of Moscow.
(NaturalNews) They are convenient, relatively easy to use, and help millions of people around the world stay connected with family and friends, at least digitally. But social media portals like Facebook and Twitter are increasingly being exposed as what appear to be bait-and-switch spying networks funded, and potentially even run covertly, by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other government agencies. And this is all apparently being done for the purpose of gathering real-time data on the private lives of individuals willing to freely post such information for the world to see.
It is something that serious investigative journalists and skeptics alike have suspected for years, especially as sites like Facebook have gradually and quietly eliminated users' access to the privacy controls that once kept their information "classified" by default. Today, Facebook is literally an open book of information that is freely available not only to the rest of the internet, but also to numerous government agencies that many years ago invested millions of dollars to make social networking sites like Facebook what they are today.
This week, President Obama is in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly to meet with partners and address a range of issues with the international community, including open government.
At the U.N. General Assembly last year, President Obama called on nations to make, "specific commitments to promote transparency, to fight corruption, to energize civic engagement, and to leverage new technologies so we can strengthen the foundations of freedom in our own countries." Today, the President outlined the progress that has already been made in response to his call to action:
And now we see governments around the world meeting this challenge, including many represented here today. Countries from Mexico to Turkey to Liberia have passed laws guaranteeing citizens the right to information. From Chile to Kenya to the Philippines, civil society groups are giving citizens new tools to report corruption. From Tanzania to Indonesia -- and as I saw firsthand during my visit to India -- rural villages are organizing and making their voices heard, and getting the public services that they need. Governments from Brazil to South Africa are putting more information online, helping people hold public officials accountable for how they spend taxpayer dollars.
Here in the United States, we’ve worked to make government more open and responsive than ever before. We’ve been promoting greater disclosure of government information, empowering citizens with new ways to participate in their democracy. We are releasing more data in usable forms on health and safety and the environment, because information is power, and helping people make informed decisions and entrepreneurs turn data into new products, they create new jobs. We’re also soliciting the best ideas from our people in how to make government work better. And around the world, we’re standing up for freedom to access information, including a free and open Internet.
"A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives." James Madison, Letter to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1822
"...[T]he concentration of power and the subjection of individuals will increase amongst democratic nations... in the same proportion as their ignorance."
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2, 1840
In a democracy, the principle of accountability holds that government officials—whether elected or appointed by those who have been elected—are responsible to the citizenry for their decisions and actions.
Transparency requires that the decisions and actions of those in government are open to public scrutiny and that the public has a right to access such information. Both concepts are central to the very idea of democratic governance. Without accountability and transparency, democracy is impossible. In their absence, elections and the notion of the will of the people have no meaning, and government has the potential to become arbitrary and self-serving.
The People's Right to Know
Elections are the primary means for citizens to hold their country's officials accountable for their actions in office, especially when they have behaved illegally, corruptly, or ineptly while carrying out the work of the government. But for elections—and the people's will—to be meaningful, basic rights must be protected and affirmed, such as with a Bill of Rights, as in the United States. James Madison, the author of the U.S. Bill of Rights, believed that the very basis for government's responsiveness was the assurance that citizens would have sufficient knowledge to direct it. If citizens are to govern their own affairs, either directly or through representative government, they must be informed about how best to determine their affairs and how best to represent and execute them. If citizens are not well informed, they can neither act in their own self-interest, broadly speaking, nor have any serious choice in elections, much less offer themselves as candidates.
TheInformation Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying surveillance and information technology to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to national security, by achieving Total Information Awareness (TIA). This would be achieved by creating enormous computer databases to gather and store the personal information of everyone in the United States, including personal e-mails, social networks, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, and numerous other sources, without any requirement for a search warrant.[1] This information would then be analyzed to look for suspicious activities, connections between individuals, and "threats".[2] Additionally, the program included funding for biometric surveillance technologies that could identify and track individuals using surveillance cameras, and other methods.[2]
Following public criticism that the development and deployment of these technologies could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003. However, several IAO projects continued to be funded, and merely run under different names.[3][4][5][6]
The purpose of the SSNA algorithms program is to extend techniques of social network analysis to assist with distinguishing potential terrorist cells from legitimate groups of people.... In order to be successful SSNA will require information on the social interactions of the majority of people around the globe. Since the Defense Department cannot easily distinguish between peaceful citizens and terrorists, it will be necessary for them to gather data on innocent civilians as well as on potential terrorists.
AT&T developed a programming language called "Hancock", which is able to sift through enormous databases of phone call and Internet traffic records, such as the NSA call database, and extract "communities of interest" -- groups of people who call each other regularly, or groups that regularly visit certain sites on the Internet. AT&T originally built the system to develop "marketing leads",[47] but the FBI has regularly requested such information from phone companies such as AT&T without a warrant,[47] and after using the data stores all information received in its own databases, regardless of whether or not the information was ever useful in an investigation.[48]
Some people believe that the use of social networking sites is a form of "participatory surveillance", where users of these sites are essentially performing surveillance on themselves, putting detailed personal information on public websites where it can be viewed by corporations and governments.[39] About 20% of employers have reported using social networking sites to collect personal data on prospective or current employees.[49]
Facebook, Inc. and Facebook Ireland Ltd., which together operate the Facebook service worldwide, recently posted someproposed updatesto ourData Use Policyand ourStatement of Rights and Responsibilitiesfor your review and feedback. Those updates provided more detailed information about our practices, reflected changes to our products, and modified how we conduct our site governance process.
The period for submitting your comments has ended, but you can still provide feedback on those proposals by taking part in our site governance vote. To learn more about our proposed updates (which include additional clarifications based on your comments) and the vote, please visit ourSite Governance Page. Voting will end on December 10, 2012 at 12 PM (PST) / December 10, 2012 at 8 PM (GMT). We encourage you to review and vote on the proposed versions of our governance documents.
(Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Monday gave his preliminary approval to a second attempt by Facebook Inc to settle a class action lawsuit which charges the social networking company with violating privacy rights.
U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg in California rejected a settlement in August over Facebook's 'Sponsored Stories' advertising feature, questioning why it did not award money to Facebook members for using their personal information.
Concision refers generally to brevity, or the practice of using no more words than necessary to describe an idea. In the context of media criticism, the word concision is also used to describe the practice of limiting debate and discussion of important topics on broadcast news on the basis of broadcast time allotment.
Media critics such as Noam Chomsky contend that this practice, especially on commercial broadcasts with advertising,
encourages broadcasters to exclude people and ideas that they judge
cannot conform to the time limits of a particular program. This leads to
a limited number of "the usual suspects" who will say expected ideas
that will not require extensive explanation such as mainstream political
ones. Furthermore, introducing controversial or unexpected statements
that do not conform to those conventional ideas are discouraged as time
inefficient because the person will be required to explain and support
them in detail. Since this can often take considerable time in itself
and digress from the primary discussion topic of the broadcast, this is
discouraged. Alternatively, the explanation could be subject to
extensive editing for time which could lead to an inadequate
presentation of the subject's thoughts.
This media control idea is illustrated in the film documentaryManufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media where journalist Jeff Greenfield
explains why a person like Chomsky may be excluded from being
interviewed on air because he takes too long to warm up. The film then
follows up with Chomsky himself explaining the concept while the film
gives examples of controversial statements he has made in the past that
would require extensive explanation in an interview.
The 1999 feature film The Insider has a dramatization of the media concept where journalist Mike Wallace goes public on a news show about the censoring of a controversial story on 60 Minutes.
When Wallace sees his interview broadcast, he is furious that his
testimony is limited to a cut part statement that does not adequately
explain his position and the only excuse from the producers he receives
is that it had to be cut for time.
If you're reading this article, chances are good you have a page on Facebook, too. More than 150 million Americans already use the site, and the number grows daily because Facebook makes it so easy to keep up with friends, family, and colleagues, discover great content, connect to causes, share photos, drum up business, and learn about fun events.
To deliver this service, Facebook and other social networks collect enormous amounts of highly sensitive information—and distribute it more quickly and widely than traditional consumer data-gathering firms ever could. That’s great when it helps you find old classmates or see ads for things you actually want to buy. But how much information is really being collected about you? How is it being used? And could it fall into the wrong hands?
A group of blond haired, blue-eyed southern California surfer boys from advocacy group Invisible Children got more than 30 million people to watch a half-hour video on a 20-year-old conflict in Central Africa—in just two days. But, the fallout has been some tough criticism charging that the group is raising awareness about a conflict that has essentially wound down since its height in 2003-4. Detractors piled on that Invisible Children spends only a third of its revenues on advocacy programs and not enough money goes to actually helping people. But in a backlash to the backlash, other African experts and human rights advocates today say the widespread negativity is unfounded.
"The argument now is that Kony and the LRA are no longer this massive threat," Cameron Hudson, former Africa director at the George W. Bush National Security Council, told Yahoo News Thursday, referring to Joseph Kony, the founder of the rebel Lords Resistance Army (LRA). The conflict involves the Ugandan army and the LRA which is thought to be responsible for thousands of children having gone missing.
Hudson, now policy director at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, stressed that he doesn't share the critique that the group is no longer harmful and he praised Invisible Children for creating a campaign that reached 30 million people. "I just saw PDiddy Tweet about this thing," he said.
Hudson believes the criticism is mostly sour grapes. "I think that these guys are getting mercilessly picked apart by a bunch of intellectual elites who spend their days tweeting but never trending," he said. "If their aim is to raise awareness, they have done that in spades."
Invisible Children is a California-based advocacy group whose founders were San Diego college students who went to south Sudan and northern Uganda in 2003 at the height of the conflict. On Monday, Invisible Children released a powerful, slickly produced half-hour video on the clash, seeking a half million viewers. By Thursday morning they were well on their way, with over 30 million viewers. Their viral tag lines: #Kony2012 and #Stop Kony, along with Uganda and Invisible Children, were top 10 trending topics around the country.
"Where you live shouldn't determine whether you live #KONY2012", the group posted to Twitter Thursday.
Michael Poffenberger, executive director of Resolve, an advocacy organization that works with Invisible Children agrees this is nothing but a good thing. "You have to recognize that for more than two decades [Joseph] Kony and the LRA have been perpetrating horrific atrocities in remote parts of Central Africa, and nobody has been paying attention," he told Yahoo News in an interview Thursday.
Poffenberger said he and the founders of Invisible Children became obsessed with the Lords Resistance Army, its founder Joseph Kony and the plight of thousands of African children disappearing in the conflict back in 2003-2004. "They created this initial film that took off," he said. "And they have been connecting with an audience. The majority of their supporters - and they have 100s of thousands of supporters--are millennials." And he believes this new millennial audience could help foment political change.
In May 2010, members of Invisible Children and Resolve were in the Oval Office as President Obama signed legislation--the Lords Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Recovery Act. The bill, originally spearheaded by former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin), ended up with the support or sponsorship of 267 members of Congress--more than any other piece of Africa legislation in history, said Sarah Margon, a former Feingold staff member.
