| The US military has been giving tens of millions of American taxpayer dollars to warlords in Afghanistan, through logistics firms in the war-torn country.
Investigators say as much as $4 million per week end up in the hands of the Taliban via local security companies in return for not attacking convoys carrying supplies to American troops based across Afghanistan.
The money allegedly ensures a safe passage for the Pentagon transport contractors in dangerous Afghan regions.
If the mafia-style protection payments are not made, the trucks responsible for transporting food, water, fuel and ammunition will allegedly come under attack.
The report carried out by the House Subcommittee for National Security further adds that armed groups are not the only beneficiaries of the hefty sum.
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Google has released a statement announcing YouTube has been granted a "summary judgment" in Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit, effectively protecting YouTube under the Digital Copyright Millennium Act. Viacom plans an appeal. More details to come, here's a statement from Google: "This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate and share experiences with each other. We're excited about this decision and look forward to renewing our focus on supporting the incredible variety of ideas and expression that billions of people post and watch on YouTube every day around the world." Viacom's statement: We believe that this ruling by the lower court is fundamentally flawed and contrary to the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the intent of Congress, and the views of the Supreme Court as expressed in its most recent decisions. We intend to seek to have these issues before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as soon as possible. After years of delay, this decision gives us the opportunity to have the Appellate Court address these critical issues on an accelerated basis. We look forward to the next stage of the process. http://rewired.hollywoodreporter.com/2010/06/23/viacom-lawsuit-youtube-googl/
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by David Pescovitz 
From 1953 to 1963, poet Allen Ginsberg (below) snapped thousands of candid photos of his friends, documenting the personal, intimate, and spirited lives of the writers and artists who created the major works of Beat culture. His images of Jack Kerouac (above), William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peter Orlovsky, and others are now on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The exhibition, titled "Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg," runs until September 16. The hardcover exhibition catalog is $32 from Amazon. From Smithsonian:  Ginsberg started taking photographs as a young man, in the 1940s, and kept doing so through 1963, when his camera was left behind on a trip to India. The result was a kind of Beat family photo album: informal, affectionate, full of personality—and personalities. We see, among others, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady and Orlovsky. Ginsberg liked to say he was "fooling around" with the camera (whether behind or before it). These were pictures, he felt, "meant more for a public in heaven than one here on earth—and that's why they're charming... Ginsberg resumed taking pictures, more seriously, in the early 1980s. He was inspired by the example of an old friend, the photographer Robert Frank, and a new one, the photographer Berenice Abbott... Ginsberg began using better cameras and having his photographs printed professionally. "I had been taking pictures all along," he told an interviewer in 1991, "but I hadn't thought of myself as a photographer." The most noticeable difference was a simple yet distinctive way he found to marry image and text.
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Friday marked the 60th day since the Deepwater Horizon rig began hemorrhaging oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and the topic took up much of our fact-checking efforts this week. Here's a summary of our latest fact-checks on statements made about the oil spill. You can read all of our fact-checks on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill on our oil spill page. • In a speech to the country, President Barack Obama said regulation of oil companies has been troubled for years. "Oil companies showered regulators (at the Minerals Management Service) with gifts and favors, and were essentially allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and write their own regulations," Obama said. We looked into the history at the Minerals Management Service and rated his statement Mostly True. • Also in that speech, Obama said, "Already, I've issued a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling." We rated this Half True, because the moratorium is only on new drilling. Deepwater production of oil continues on rigs that have finished creating their wells. • Despite the spill, some political leaders and others think the U.S. needs to continue drilling to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. Eric Johnson, a candidate for governor in Georgia, supports that view. "Predictably, liberal activists call the Gulf disaster a warning of things to come if we expand drilling, but this incident is an unfortunate exception to the rule," he wrote on his blog. "The last major oil spill from a drilling accident in America happened over 40 years ago in 1969." We looked into previous oil spills, and found that there have been several major spills since 1969. We rated his statement False. • One of the criticisms of the clean-up effort is that the United States has rejected help from other countries. George Lemieux, a U.S. Senator from Florida, said that the U.S. has "refused" international help. We found that the government has accepted some offers of help and is still evaluating other offers. It has rejected a few offers that did not meet U.S. specifications. So we rated his statement Barely True. • How much oil companies pay for oil leases was another hot topic of the week. Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts said that oil companies aren't paying what they should to drill in the Gulf of Mexico. "Right now every single one of the (oil) companies here today and dozens of others are drilling for free in the Gulf of Mexico on leases that will cost American taxpayers more than $50 billion in lost royalties," Markey said. We found that Markey has a point about some foregone royalties, but the U.S. government receives millions from the oil companies nonetheless. We rated his statement Half True. • Finally, members of Congress looked at the plans all the major oil companies have to clean up a spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan said he thought the plans lacked specificity. But he reserved particular criticism for Exxon Mobil's plan, which includes many pages of instructions for how company officials should handle the media. "While Exxon Mobil has 40 pages on its media response strategy, its plan for resource protection is only five pages long and its plan for oil removal is just nine pages long," Stupak said. We looked at the report and found a few things to qualify his statement. Still, we rated it Mostly True. http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2010/jun/18/fact-checking-oil-spill/
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In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here are the nine key steps to understanding the most powerful tool of our age – and where it's taking us A funny thing happened to us on the way to the future. The internet went from being something exotic to being boring utility, like mains electricity or running water – and we never really noticed. So we wound up being totally dependent on a system about which we are terminally incurious. You think I exaggerate about the dependence? Well, just ask Estonia, one of the most internet-dependent countries on the planet, which in 2007 was more or less shut down for two weeks by a sustained attack on its network infrastructure. Or imagine what it would be like if, one day, you suddenly found yourself unable to book flights, transfer funds from your bank account, check bus timetables, send email, search Google, call your family using Skype, buy music from Apple or books from Amazon, buy or sell stuff on eBay, watch clips on YouTube or BBC programmes on the iPlayer – or do the 1,001 other things that have become as natural as breathing. The internet has quietly infiltrated our lives, and yet we seem to be remarkably unreflective about it. That's not because we're short of information about the network; on the contrary, we're awash with the stuff. It's just that we don't know what it all means. We're in the state once described by that great scholar of cyberspace, Manuel Castells, as "informed bewilderment". Mainstream media don't exactly help here, because much – if not most – media coverage of the net is negative. It may be essential for our kids' education, they concede, but it's riddled with online predators, seeking children to "groom" for abuse. Google is supposedly "making us stupid" and shattering our concentration into the bargain. It's also allegedly leading to an epidemic of plagiarism. File sharing is destroying music, online news is killing newspapers, and Amazon is killing bookshops. The network is making a mockery of legal injunctions and the web is full of lies, distortions and half-truths. Social networking fuels the growth of vindictive "flash mobs" which ambush innocent columnists such as Jan Moir. And so on. All of which might lead a detached observer to ask: if the internet is such a disaster, how come 27% of the world's population (or about 1.8 billion people) use it happily every day, while billions more are desperate to get access to it? So how might we go about getting a more balanced view of the net ? What would you really need to know to understand the internet phenomenon? Having thought about it for a while, my conclusion is that all you need is a smallish number of big ideas, which, taken together, sharply reduce the bewilderment of which Castells writes so eloquently. But how many ideas? In 1956, the psychologist George Miller published a famous paper in the journal Psychological Review. Its title was "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information" and in it Miller set out to summarise some earlier experiments which attempted to measure the limits of people's short-term memory. In each case he reported that the effective "channel capacity" lay between five and nine choices. Miller did not draw any firm conclusions from this, however, and contented himself by merely conjecturing that "the recurring sevens might represent something deep and profound or be just coincidence". And that, he probably thought, was that. But Miller had underestimated the appetite of popular culture for anything with the word "magical' in the title. Instead of being known as a mere aggregator of research results, Miller found himself identified as a kind of sage — a discoverer of a profound truth about human nature. "My problem," he wrote, "is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals… Either there really is something unusual about the number or else I am suffering from delusions of persecution." But in fact, the basic idea that emerges from Miller's 1956 paper seems to have stood the test of time. The idea is that our short-term memory can only hold between five and nine "chunks" of information at any given moment (here a chunk is defined as a "meaningful unit"). So, when trying to decide how many big ideas about the internet would be meaningful for most readers, it seemed sensible to settle for a magical total of nine. So here they are. 1 TAKE THE LONG VIEW
The strange thing about living through a revolution is that it's very difficult to see what's going on. Imagine what it must have been like being a resident of St Petersburg in 1917, in the months before Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. It's clear that momentous events are afoot; there are all kinds of conflicting rumours and theories, but nobody knows how things will pan out. Only with the benefit of hindsight will we get a clear idea of what was going on. But the clarity that hindsight bestows is also misleading, because it understates how confusing things appeared to people at the time. So it is with us now. We're living through a radical transformation of our communications environment. Since we don't have the benefit of hindsight, we don't really know where it's taking us. And one thing we've learned from the history of communications technology is that people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies — and to underestimate their long-term implications. We see this all around us at the moment, as would-be savants, commentators, writers, consultants and visionaries tout their personal interpretations of what the internet means for business, publishing, retailing, education, politics and the future of civilisation as we know it. Often, these interpretations are compressed into vivid slogans, memes or aphorisms: information "wants to be free"; the "long tail" is the future of retailing; "Facebook just seized control of the internet", and so on. These kinds of slogans are really just short-term extrapolations from yesterday's or today's experience. They tell us little about where the revolution we're currently living through is heading. The question is: can we do any better — without falling into the trap of feigning omniscience? Here's a radical idea: why not see if there's anything to be learned from history? Because mankind has lived through an earlier transformation in its communications environment, brought about by the invention of printing by movable type. This technology changed the world — indeed, it shaped the cultural environment in which most of us grew up. And the great thing about it, from the point of view of this essay, is that we can view it with the benefit of hindsight. We know what happened. A thought experiment So let's conduct what the Germans call a Gedankenexperiment — a thought experiment. Imagine that the net represents a similar kind of transformation in our communications environment to that wrought by printing. What would we learn from such an experiment? The first printed bibles emerged in 1455 from the press created by Johannes Gutenberg in the German city of Mainz. Now, imagine that the year is 1472 — ie 17 years after 1455. Imagine, further, that you're the medieval equivalent of a Mori pollster, standing on the bridge in Mainz with a clipboard in your hand and asking pedestrians a few questions. Here's question four: On a scale of one to five, where one indicates "Not at all likely" and five indicates "Very likely", how likely do you think it is that Herr Gutenberg's invention will: (a) Undermine the authority of the Catholic church? (b) Power the Reformation? (c) Enable the rise of modern science? (d) Create entirely new social classes and professions? (e) Change our conceptions of "childhood" as a protected early period in a person's life? On a scale of one to five! You have only to ask the questions to realise the fatuity of the idea. Printing did indeed have all of these effects, but there was no way that anyone in 1472, in Mainz (or anywhere else for that matter) could have known how profound its impact would be. I'm writing this in 2010, which is 17 years since the web went mainstream. If I'm right about the net effecting a transformation in our communications environment comparable to that wrought by Gutenberg, then it's patently absurd for me (or anyone else) to pretend to know what its long-term impact will be. The honest answer is that we simply don't know. The trouble is, though, that everybody affected by the net is demanding an answer right now. Print journalists and their employers want to know what's going to happen to their industry. Likewise the music business, publishers, television networks, radio stations, government departments, travel agents, universities, telcos, airlines, libraries and lots of others. The sad truth is that they will all have to learn to be patient. And, for some of them, by the time we know the answers to their questions, it will be too late. 2 THE WEB ISN'T THE NET
The most common — and still surprisingly widespread — misconception is that the internet and the web are the same thing. They're not. A good way to understand this is via a railway analogy. Think of the internet as the tracks and signalling, the infrastructure on which everything runs. In a railway network, different kinds of traffic run on the infrastructure — high-speed express trains, slow stopping trains, commuter trains, freight trains and (sometimes) specialist maintenance and repair trains. On the internet, web pages are only one of the many kinds of traffic that run on its virtual tracks. Other types of traffic include music files being exchanged via peer-to-peer networking, or from the iTunes store; movie files travelling via BitTorrent; software updates; email; instant messages; phone conversations via Skype and other VoIP (internet telephony) services; streaming video and audio; and other stuff too arcane to mention. And (here's the important bit) there will undoubtedly be other kinds of traffic, stuff we can't possibly have dreamed of yet, running on the internet in 10 years' time. So the thing to remember is this: the web is huge and very important, but it's just one of the many things that run on the internet. The net is much bigger and far more important than anything that travels on it. Understand this simple distinction and you're halfway to wisdom. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/20/internet-everything-need-to-know
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When you're writing laws, changing the smallest details can have huge effects. But I've never seen anything as big as what happened this week, when the White House gutted an entire section of financial regulation by removing the letter s. Right now, shareholders of big companies vote to decide who will be on the board of directors by filling out a mail-in ballot called a proxy card. But currently the corporation's CEO gets to decide who's on the card! The result is a board hand-picked by the CEO — and they return the favor by providing CEOs with exorbitant salaries. The current financial regulation bill — in a provision passed by both the House and Senate — would change that by allowing shareholders with 5% of the stock to come together and propose additional names for the ballot. But the White House is trying to gut this proposal at the last minute, and they've done it in an incredibly sneaky way — they removed the letter s from the end of the word shareholders. Now instead of shareholders whose stock adds up to 3% coming together, you have to be a single shareholder with 5% of the stock all by yourself. And for most big companies, there just isn't anyone like that. Take GE, for example — its biggest shareholder only owns about 3.4% of the company. So by removing a single letter, they managed to make this provision completely useless. The White House is being barraged by major CEOs begging them to keep fighting for this provision — after all, no CEO wants to see their lavish salaries cut! As Barney Frank put it, "I think there are some people in the White House who think, 'Well, we're fighting the financial institutions, but why fight with some of the others, you know, the other corporations?'" Apparently they're so scared of a fight, they're willing to gut a provision passed by both the House and Senate. If you're interested in fighting for real corporate reform, please sign our petition to the White House: "Stop lobbying against shareholder power in corporate decision-making — and against protections that would finally rein in CEO pay. That's not change we can believe in."\ http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/proxyreform
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 As part of Republican obstruction-at-any-cost election year strategy, Senate Republicans last week once again blocked an extension of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits for long-term jobless workers. The UI extension is part of the jobs bill that could help put the unemployed back to work. Some Republicans even said it's time for "tough love" to motivate the long-term jobless. Granted, they are far removed from the day-to-day economic reality of America's workers. So here's a reminder: Today, in the United States, there are five unemployed workers for every job opening, an unemployment rate near 10 percent, at least 15 million people out of work and 6.8 million people out of work for 27 weeks or more. Getting a job is not like going down to the corner for a quart of milk.
Heck, when you still get your taxpayer-funded, congressional paycheck every week ($3,346.15) for not doing very much work, it can certainly alter your view of the economy—even to the point where some Republican politicos actually claim the not quite $300 a week average unemployment check is a "disincentive" for the unemployed to get out of the door and look for work. Maybe senators think that when the men and women who have been out of work since at least before Thanksgiving (and millions for more than one year) get that bountiful UI check, they sit around the kitchen table and make big plans to spend that dough. Hey, hon got my check. This sure beats working. What do you say we go to Palm Springs this weekend? We can fly the kids to your mom's and board the dogs at that new spa kennel. No, senator, the response to a couple hundred bucks a week goes more like this: Maybe we should think about gassing up the car so we can go down to the food bank and set something aside for your blood pressure medicine. Oh, and there's that foreclosure notice we need to deal with. Each time Senate Democratic leaders have brought up a UI extension this year, Republicans have delayed and blocked the bill. With the extended UI program set to expire at the end of May, the House passed its jobs bill with a UI extension just before Memorial Day but the Senate left town for vacation and didn't act on the bill. As a result, some 1 million workers who have been out of work for more than a year—remember, one job opening for every five unemployed workers—have no UI. Along with the incredibly insensitive and out-of-touch "tough love theory," some lawmakers are hiding behind deficit hysteria, even though three-quarters of voters say extending unemployment insurance is more important than reducing the deficit. http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/06/21/republicans-to-unemployed-get-a-job/
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Rightist Dutch leader wants to end Mideast conflict by finding Palestinians 'alternate homeland' by Roee Nahmias  | | Geert Wilders, who leads the right-wing Party for Freedom (PVV) in Holland, said last week he believes Jordan should be renamed Palestine. The Jordanian government responded by saying Wilders' speech was reminiscent of the Israeli right wing. "Jordan is Palestine," said Wilders, who heads the third-largest party in Holland. "Changing its name to Palestine will end the conflict in the Middle East and provide the Palestinians with an alternate homeland." Wilders added that Israel deserved a special status in the Dutch government because it was fighting for Jerusalem in its name. "If Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next. Thus, Jerusalem is the main front protecting the West. It is not a conflict over territory but rather an ideological battle, between the mentality of the liberated West and the ideology of Islamic barbarism," he said. "There has been an independent Palestinian state since 1946, and it is the kingdom of Jordan." Wilders also called on the Dutch government to refer to Jordan as Palestine and move its embassy to Jerusalem.
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Prepare to be floored by a speech against Corporate power for the ages. (T)his American Government of ours should never be on its knees before corporate power, no matter how strong. It should never be in the thrall of corporate wealth, no matter how vast. crooksandliars.com Speaking on the Senate Floor, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) gave the speech of a lifetime on Thursday. Ironically, this was just after Republican House Representative Joe Barton (BP-TX) virtually knelt down in order to kiss the ring of the Feudal Lord/CEO of BP, a multinational fiefdom of Big Oil. Video, transcript and more below the fold. And get popcorn, this is going to be good. Trust me. Put it to scale; consider $23 billion of pure profit, just in one quarter, by Big Oil. And compare: the Obama and McCain campaigns together spent about $1 billion in the last election. Do the math: for 5% of one quarter's profits, Big Oil could outspend both American presidential campaigns. That may be some politicians' idea of a happy day, because that is who they work to please, but it is wrong and needs to be stopped. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) Channeling the Trust Busters of old, in an eloquent, detailed and truly staggering speech on the Senate floor, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse attacked BP, Wall St, the Bush/Cheney age of crony capitalism, and the very essence of corporate power. While going after BP, the Banksters, the 5-4 Supreme Court Citizens United ruling, the "regulatory capture" of vital arms of government oversight, Sen. Whitehouse ties together the economic bankster caused collapse, the exploding oil rig in the gulf, the Corporate greed and influence that caused them and the bought and owned political hacks who helped allow this to happen. Sen. Whitehouse demands that the US Attorney General be given the power to overhaul any Government agency that becomes "captured" by the Special interests they are supposed to be regulating, and in invoking our founding fathers, Whitehouse made the case that corporate greed is the problem, NOT "too much government", as Conservative shills like to shriek. In 9 minutes you will fall in love with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse as he sums up the heart of most of the major problems with the American Government AND the American economy in a way that surely made the spirit of Ted Kennedy smile. This is what a fighter looks like. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/6/19/877501/-Sen.-Whitehouse-EXPLODES
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By MIKE STOBBE For the first time, abuse of painkillers and other medication is sending as many people to the emergency room as the use of illegal drugs. In 2008, ERS saw an estimated 1 million visits from people abusing prescription or over-the-counter medicines — mostly painkillers and sedatives. That was about the same number of visits from those overdosing on heroin, cocaine and other illegal drugs, according to a government report released Thursday. Only five years earlier, illegal drug visits outnumbered those from legal medications by a 2-to-1 margin. In other words, the number of ER visits from medication abuse doubled, said Peter Delany of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. "It's a pretty startling jump," Delany said. He led a team that worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the report. Painkillers and sedatives clearly drove the trend. ER visits for the painkillers oxycodone and hydrocodone more than doubled from 2004 to 2008. And cases from one kind of tranquilizer nearly doubled. The estimates are based on emergency room data from more than 200 U.S. hospitals. Many of the cases may be overdoses, but some may come from mixing drugs or combining them with alcohol, Delany said. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100617/ap_on_he_me/us_med_prescription_abuse
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by Michael Belk
The Israeli Air Force recently unloaded military equipment at a Saudi Arabia base, a semi-official Iranian news agency claimed Wednesday, while a large American force has massed in Azerbaijan, which is on the northwest border of Iran.
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