A new government surveillance and intelligence program is being developed by the US National Security Agency in which academics utilize US government-collected online data to predict future events, such as political protests, pandemics, and economic crises—with a focus on Latin America.
The warm waters of the Gulf look quiet from where I am sitting, but such tranquility hardly reflects the conflicts this region continues to generate. The euphoria of the so-called Arab Spring is long gone, but what remains is a region that is rich with resources and burdened with easily manipulated history that is in a state of reckless transition. No one can see what the future will look like, but the possibilities are ample, and possibly tragic.
Source: The Nation
Months after the Rana Plaza factory disaster, victims’ families have received little to no compensation.
A foreign visitor is never left alone to contemplate the ruins of Rana Plaza. On a searing hot August morning, sorrowful people gathered with fistfuls of documents and pictures, jostling for my attention. They were desperate for some acknowledgment of the daughter, son, wife or husband they had lost when the eight-story factory building pancaked on April 24, crushing more than 1,100 people—most of them garment workers filling orders for Western brands. As the crowd swelled around me, faint pleas became full-throated demands, and I soon found myself backed against the barbed wire fence that fronts the disaster site, now a pool of dark water. My only way out was to write down the name and phone number of each and every person, with a vague assurance that something would be done.
Irrespective of intelligence, no machine is capable of morality. So, if you thought drones were bad, you are likely to take an even dimmer view of their successors: ‘lethal autonomous robotic weapons’.
Source: IPS News
(IPS) – Conflicts over water are increasing in the sprawling Pangani River Basin in northeastern Tanzania as farmers and herders jostle for dwindling water resources in the face of climate change.
Over the past decade, Maasai pastoralists from the northern areas of Moshi and Arusha have been streaming towards the basin with tens of thousands of their cattle in search of water and grazing pasture.
Hafsa Mtasiwa, the Pangani district commissioner, told IPS that the Maasais’ traditional land was strained by overuse of water resources and overgrazing. She said in the last three years 2,987 herders with 87,1321 cows and 98,341 goats moved into the basin’s low land, destroying arable land.
Source: Al Jazeera
Newly released documents show the NSA accessed the emails and phones of French civilians and Mexican officials.
The National Security Agency (NSA) recorded 70.3 million French civilian telephone conversations in a span of 30 days, from Dec. 10, 2012 to Jan. 8 this year, French newspaper Le Monde reported Monday.
The agency also intercepted communications of the Mexican government for years, has read text messages and listened to phone calls of its current President Enrique Pena Nieto, and has hacked into the email servers of private companies in Latin America, according to a report published on Sunday by Der Spiegel, a German newspaper.
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