Greece strike turning violent in Athens

Young demonstrators hurled rocks and fire bombs at riot police as clashes broke out on Wednesday in Athens during a mass rally against austerity measures, part of a general strike that crippled services and public ransportation around the country. Police fired tear gas and flash grenades at protesters, blanketing parts of the city centre in choking smoke.

The future of the Arab world

  Revolution is in the air and dictators and leaders throughout the Middle East had better be on guard because the people have had enough. They are tired of being repressed. They are tired of the way their country's wealth is siphoned off so that a few at the top are insanely rich and the masses of citizenry suffer in ghettos. They demand freedom of information as it is harder to restrain free speech with the power of the internet and the rise of the social network. The power to keep the people ignorant is diminishing; yet of course don't think that will stop some leaders from trying.

Today when common people are on the streets wanting dictators like Hosni Mubarak to go, these regimes are shaking in their boots. Now Israeli authorities want to prevent democracy in Egypt as democracy, according to them, would mean Brotherhood coming to power. Earlier in Palestine when Hamas came to power through democratic elections, America and Israel refused to recognize elected Hamas Government. So much for democracy Israel and US talk about.(www.twocircles.net)

And whenever there are good prospects for democracy in any Islamic country the US rushes in to support dictatorships from Indonesia to the Arab world and then blames Islam for being anti-democratic. Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship was supported by USA and Israel in their own interest and what is worse Israel’s interest is US interest. Today when Obama realized that Hosni Mubarak has totally lost support he is advising him to go to keep its credibility with the people of Egypt. But it will also see that someone is installed who acts in US-Israel interests.

America's Most Embarrassing Allies 

SAUDI ARABIA - Leader: King Abdullah
The king has ruled Saudi Arabia since 2005. As ruler of a country with no elections, parliament, or political parties, Abdullah and his family exercise unchecked power within the kingdom, and -- thanks to their control of one-fifth of the world's oil reserves and Islam's two holiest sites -- quite a bit of influence beyond their borders as well. Abdullah surprised many by undertaking some minor reforms of the country's clerical establishment in 2009, though this may have had more to do with a desire to consolidate his power than any enlightened pluralistic impulses.

YEMEN - Leader: Ali Abdullah Saleh
Saleh first took power in Northern Yemen in a military coup in 1978 and has ruled the entire country since unification in 1991. Opposition parties are marginalized, parliamentary elections have been indefinitely postponed, and civilians are frequently caught up in military strikes in the country's lawless south.

JORDAN - Leader: King Abdullah II
When the Western-educated Abdullah took the throne in 1999, hopes were high that political reforms would follow. The government lifted 20 years of martial law in 1989, restoring the country's parliament. But open democracy did not follow: The country's election system remains deeply flawed, gerrymandered to support tribal candidates and government loyalists.

ETHIOPIA - Leader: Meles Zenawi
The 2010 election, in which Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's party won a remarkable 99.6 percent of the vote, was the culmination of what Human Rights Watch called "the government's five-year strategy of systematically closing down space for political dissent and independent criticism." This included attacks and arrests of prominent opposition figures, the shutting down of newspapers and assaults on journalists critical of the government, and doling out international food aid as an incentive to get poor Ethiopians to join the ruling party.

UGANDA - Leader: Yoweri Museveni
Record: Museveni talks a big game on democracy, economic development, and anti-corruption efforts, and to be fair he did institute a number of promising reforms early in his presidency, encouraging the development of free press and elections following decades of strongman rule. But the president has lately started to resemble his predecessors, abolishing term limits after nearly three decades in office, launching legal attacks on independent journalists, harassing opposition parties and flying a $50 million private jet while more than a third of his people live on less than $1 a day, having previously criticized other African leaders for indulging in similar perks. NGOs have also documented numerous cases of unlawful detention and torture by the country's Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force.

UZBEKISTAN - Leader: Islam Karimov
Karimov, Uzbekistan's first and only post-independence president, has routinely stifled political dissent in Uzbekistan, banning opposition groups -- particularly Islamic ones -- stifling the press and jailing thousands. His country is routinely cited as one of the world's worst torturers, with punishments including beatings, rape, and even boiling meted out in its overcrowded jails. Uzbekistan faced international condemnation in 2005 after hundreds of unarmed protesters demonstrating in support of a group of arrested local businessmen were shot by security forces in the city of Andijan. Karimov has repeatedly extended his own tenure beyond the constitutionally mandated two-term limit and international observers have dismissed the country's elections as shams.

KAZAKHSTAN - Leader: Nursultan Nazarbayev
Nazarbayev, former leader of the Kazakh Communist Party, has ruled the country without any serious political challenge since independence in 1991. Restrictive election laws make it nearly impossible to opposition parties to run, anti-government newspapers are routinely harassed and shut down, and corruption -- particularly related to the country's energy sector -- is reportedly pervasive throughout the state.

VIETNAM - Leader: Nguyen Tan Dung
The Communist Party of Vietnam is the only party allowed by law and appoints the country's leaders from within its own ranks -- Nguyen Tan Dung was reappointed for a second term in Jan. 26. According to Human Rights Watch, Vietnam has intensified its repression of human rights over the past year, imprisoning human rights defenders, bloggers, and anti-corruption campaigners. Religious groups, both Christian and Buddhist, have faced repeated harassment. Police brutality and deaths under police custody are commonplace.

Read full article on www.foreignpolicy.com

US tells Twitter to hand over WikiLeaks supporter's messages

A member of parliament in Iceland who is also a former WikiLeaks volunteer says the US justice department has ordered Twitter to hand over her private messages.

Birgitta Jonsdottir, an MP for the Movement in Iceland, said last night on Twitter that the "USA government wants to know about all my tweets and more since november 1st 2009. Do they realize I am a member of parliament in Iceland?"

She said she was starting a legal fight to stop the US getting hold of her messages, after being told by Twitter that a subpoena had been issued. She wrote: "department of justice are requesting twitter to provide the info – I got 10 days to stop it via legal process before twitter hands it over."Read more

Putin: Western Model of Democracy Doesn't Exist

 Vladimir Putin: if there is democracy, it must be a full one. Why did they jail Mr. Assange? Is that democracy?”

 About democracy

“Can you tell me what it is – the Western model of democracy? France has one model of democracy, the USA has another one. A French politician told me once: one can not do anything at the elections in the USA without money – whether they are elections to the Senate or Congress, not to mention the presidential election. There is nothing to do there without a sack of money. So what is that democracy about? Is it democracy of those who have a lot of money? The USA is a presidential republic, Great Britain is a monarchy. All of that are elements of democracy, but what kind of democracy? There is no single model of “ Western democracy ”. It doesn’t exist.

Julian Assange supporters plan protests worldwide

Detention of WikiLeaks founder is focus of demonstrations today as speculation grows over legal move by US authorities

Protests will be held around the world today against the detention of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. Demonstrations are planned in the capitals of Spain, the Netherlands, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico and Peru to demand Assange's release, the re-establishment of the WikiLeaks domain name and the restoration of Visa and Mastercard credit services to allow supporters to donate money to the whistleblowing site.
A statement on the Spanish-language website Free WikiLeaks said: "We seek the liberation of Julian Assange in United Kingdom territory." The website called on protesters to gather at 6pm (17.00 GMT) in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Seville and three other Spanish cities.(www.guardian.co.uk)

Support Wikileaks and Freedom of Speech

Global Censorship: Wikileaks under attack

Since Wikileaks released the US embassy cables on 28 November it has come under pressure on several fronts, from DDoS attacks to frozen bank accounts. We list the companies, politicians and organisations making life difficult for Wikileaks and Julian Assange

On Sunday 28 November Wikileaks began releasing the first of its 250,000 leaked US embassy cables. Almost immediately, a hacking attack known as a "DDOS" – distributed denial of service – attack tried to knock it off the net. These are the attacks that have followed in the succeeding days.

Sunday 28 November

• TECH: DDoS attack hits WikiLeaks as first set of US diplomatic cables is published.

Wednesday 1 December

• TECH: Tableau Software, which offers free software for data visualisation, removes the public views of graphics built using information about the diplomatic cables. It is the first company to distance itself from Wikileaks, and admits that the reason was pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman, an independent senator with ties to the Democratic party.
• POLITICS: Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security, calls for Wikileaks to be taken offline. "I call on any other company or organization that is hosting Wikileaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them. Wikileaks' illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world. No responsible company - whether American or foreign - should assist Wikileaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials."
• TECH Amazon removes Wikileaks's content from its EC2 cloud service, but later insists it did so because the content could cause harm to people and did not belong to Wikileaks – and that it was not due to political pressure or the hacker attacks against the site.

Friday 3 December

• TECH: Wikileaks.org ceases to work for web users after everyDNS.com, which had provided a free routing service translating the human-readable address into a machine-readable form, ends support.
Wikileaks shifts to a backup domain registered in Switzerland but actually hosted in Sweden, at Wikileaks.ch, though the cables are hosted in part by OVH, an internet provider in the north of France.
EveryDNS claims that the DDOS attacks against Wikileaks were disrupting its service provided to thousands of other customers. The company says it is "following established policies so as not to put any one EveryDNS.net user's interests ahead of any others. Lastly, regardless of what people say about the actions of EveryDNS.net, we know this much is true - we believe in our New Hampshire state motto, Live Free or Die."
• POLITICS: French industry minister Eric Besson writes to internet companies warning them there will be "consequences" for any companies or organisations helping to keep WikiLeaks online in the country.

Saturday 4 December

• MONEY: PayPal, owned by US auction site eBay, permanently restricts account used by WikiLeaks due to a "violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy". A spokesman said the account was suspended because "[it] cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity."
You can still donate at Commerzbank Kassel in Germany or Landsbanki in Iceland or by post to a post office box at the University of Melbourne or at http://wikileaks.ch/support.html
• TECH: Switch, the Swiss registrar for Wikileaks.ch declines pressure from US and French authorities to remove the site or block access to it.

Sunday 5 December

• TECH: The Pirate Party in Sweden says that it has taken over the hosting of the Cablegate directory of Wikileaks after the server in France at OVH, which had been hosting the contents of the US diplomatic cables released so far, goes offline.

Monday 6 December

• MONEY: Credit card company Mastercard withdraws ability to make donations to Wikileaks. "MasterCard is taking action to ensure that WikiLeaks can no longer accept MasterCard-branded products," the credit card outfit says.
• TECH: Wikileaks' servers in Sweden attacked by distributed denial of service attack.
• MONEY: Postfinance, the Swiss postal system, strips WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of a key fundraising tool, accusing him of lying and immediately shutting down one of his bank accounts. The bank says that Assange had "provided false information regarding his place of residence during the account opening process."
Assange had told Postfinance he lived in Geneva but could offer no proof that he was a Swiss resident, a requirement of opening such an account. Postfinance spokesman Alex Josty told The Associated Press the account was closed Monday afternoon and there would be "no criminal consequences" for misleading authorities. "That's his money, he will get his money back," Josty said. "We just close the account and that's it."

Tuesday 7 December

• MONEY: Credit card company Visa withdraws ability to make donations or payments to Wikileaks. "Visa Europe has taken action to suspend Visa payment acceptance on WikiLeaks' website pending further investigation into the nature of its business and whether it contravenes Visa operating rules," said a spokesman.

Note: an earlier version of this article wrongly referred to easyDNS.com as having provided DNS routing for Wikileaks. This was wrong, and the company was not involved at that time - although easyDNS.com is now providing routing for Wikileaks.ch.

Why WikiLeaks is good for Us

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Wikileaks: Vladimir Putin warns USA to stay out of Russian internal affairs

In a combative interview with CNN, the Russian prime minister dropped diplomatic protocol to lash out at US criticism of him and his country laid bare in a series of US diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks.
Mr Putin dismissed US defence secretary Robert Gates' views on Russia as "deeply misled," said that a US decision not to ratify a key US-Russia nuclear arms reduction pact would be "very dumb," and repeated Kremlin warnings that the world would face a new arms race if Nato did not treat Russia fairly.(read more)



Wikileaks: Russia branded 'mafia state' in cables
 The cables, published by the Guardian newspaper, paint a picture of a corrupt Russia centred around the leadership of Mr Putin. Bribery in the political system totals an estimated $300bn (£192bn) a year, the paper says.
In one cable from January 2010, Spanish prosecutor Jose "Pepe" Grinda Gonzales claimed that in Russia, Belarus and Chechnya "one cannot differentiate between the activities of the Government and OC (organised crime) groups".

Worldwide Diplomacy Meltdown: US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis

US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis

• More than 250,000 dispatches reveal US foreign strategies
• Diplomats ordered to spy on allies as well as enemies
• Saudi king urged Washington to bomb Iran

Read the full coverage of the US embassy cables

Wikileaks began on Sunday November 28th publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into US Government foreign activities.
The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.
The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice.
The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in "client states"; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.
This document release reveals the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.
Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington – the country’s first President – could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today’s document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the US Government has been warning governments -- even the most corrupt -- around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures.
The full set consists of 251,287 documents, comprising 261,276,536 words (seven times the size of "The Iraq War Logs", the world's previously largest classified information release).
The cables cover from 28th December 1966 to 28th February 2010 and originate from 274 embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions.

Afghanistan war logs: Secret files exposes truth of occupation

• Hundreds of civilians killed by coalition troops
• Covert unit hunts leaders for 'kill or capture'
• Steep rise in Taliban bomb attacks on Nato
• Read the Guardian's full war logs investigation

War Logs Cast Light on Dirty Side of Afghanistan Conflict
The war logs cast light for the first time on the activities of the elite American unit Task Force 373, whose task is to hunt down senior Taliban in Afghanistan. Secret reports show just how cheap life is in Afghanistan -- and how often mistakes happen during missions.

Obama and the massive Afghan war leak
On July 27, Obama finally received the $37 billion in additional funding for his new war strategy, which he had been requesting for nearly six months, when the U.S. House of Representatives followed the Senate and approved the new war-funding bill.That injection, in addition to the $130 billion allocated for the Afghan and Iraqi wars this year, should give the U.S. military what it needs to "break the back" of the Taliban*, if not completely defeat them, by the summer of 2011, when the United States plans to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.

* The Taliban was created in Pakistan by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was fighting its own Afghan war.

Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010

WikiLeaks today released over 75,000 secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan.

The Afghan War Diary an extraordinary secret compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports describe the majority of lethal military actions involving the United States military. They include the number of persons internally stated to be killed, wounded, or detained during each action, together with the precise geographical location of each event, and the military units involved and major weapon systems used.

The Afghan War Diary is the most significant archive about the reality of war to have ever been released during the course of a war. The deaths of tens of thousands is normally only a statistic but the archive reveals the locations and the key events behind each most of these deaths. We hope its release will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients necessary to change its course.

Most entries have been written by soldiers and intelligence officers listening to reports radioed in from front line deployments. However the reports also contain related information from Marines intelligence, US Embassies, and reports about corruption and development activity across Afghanistan.
This archive shows the vast range of small tragedies that are almost never reported by the press but which account for the overwhelming majority of deaths and injuries.

• Der Spiegel: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.html
• The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/afghanistan-the-war-logs
• The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has been all over the news for his controversial publication of the documents he has released.As Wikileaks continues to make a name for itself by leaking nearly 93,000 documents about US policy in Afghanistan, the Obama administration says the documents do not reveal very much and, additionally, do not reflect changes in policy since Obama became president.WikiLeaks, blows the whistle but The Whitehouse downplays the release of these documents