Archive for November 12th, 2011
Occupy Italy: Police raid homes after riots
Italian police conducted raids, including house searches, Monday against suspected leftist extremists following a weekend that saw some of the worst violence to hit Rome in years.
Interior Ministry Undersecretary Alfredo Mantovano told local media that police targeted far-left suspects in an ongoing operation in cities across the country, the Associated Press reports.
Read more at GlobalPost: Occupy Wall Street goes global
Police reportedly raided homes and youth centers in Florence, Palermo and Ancona.
The riots began Saturday when Italians took to the streets to join the global campaign against corporate greed and economic inequality inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York. Protests took place in cities across the world Saturday.
The protests turned violent Saturday when several hundred protesters started setting cars on fire, breaking store windows, smashing bank ATMs and store windows and torching police vehicles in Rome. Italian police responded by firing teargas and using water cannons to break up demonstrators.
Judge Orders Divorcing Couple To Swap Facebook And Dating Site Passwords – Forbes
Most divorces require spouses to part with some of their property, but in Connecticut, a soon-to-be ex-husband and wife are being asked to give up more than just investments, cars, TVs, kids, and pets. They have to hand over their social networking passwords. At the end of September, Judge Kenneth Shluger ordered that the attorneys for Stephen and Courtney Gallion exchange “their client’s Facebook and dating website passwords.”
Everyone knows that evidence from social networking sites comes in handy for lawsuits and divorces. Attorneys usually get that material by visiting someone’s page or asking that they turn over evidence from their page, not by signing into their accounts. But judges are sometimes forcing litigants to hand over the passwords to their Facebook accounts. Should they be? What was the reason behind the court-authorized hacking in the Gallion case?
via Judge Orders Divorcing Couple To Swap Facebook And Dating Site Passwords – Forbes.
Commercial Space: Spirit of Apollo or Spirit of Solyndra? – Yahoo! News
When Andrew Chaikin talks about the spirit of Apollo, people listen. Chaikin, after all, wrote the definitive history of the Apollo program. He has invoked Apollo to weigh in the ongoing debate between commercial space and NASA.
What was Chaikin’s premise?
In an oped published in Space News, Chaikin found that the “spirit of Apollo” was not necessarily in NASA’s current space exploration program, but rather in the commercial space sector. He finds that the heavy lift Space Launch System is too evocative of the past, whereas innovation, the future, and the hope of space exploration lays in the commercial space firms such as SpaceX.
If this is so, why is Congress so skeptical of commercial space?
It is not, despite what Chaikin suggests, that Congress opposes commercial space. Congress is deeply skeptical about how the current administration is approaching the matter. In a recent hearing before the House Science Committee, Congress seemed to find not so much the spirit of Apollo, but rather the spirit of Solyndra, a commercial space sector too heavily dependent on government subsidies and without any firm private markets. Something cannot be called, strictly speaking, “commercial” if it is financed primarily by the government and services primarily government markets. Furthermore, the commercial crew program is not designed to send people back to the moon, but rather to build a space taxi service to the International Space Station. It is more evocative, therefore, of the “spirit of the space shuttle” than that of Apollo.
via Commercial Space: Spirit of Apollo or Spirit of Solyndra? – Yahoo! News.
Dave Simpson tracks down everyone who has ever been a member of Mark E Smith’s band | Music | The Guardian
It’s a Tuesday morning in December, and I’m ringing people called Brown in Rotherham. “Hello,” I begin again. “I’m trying to trace Jonnie Brown who used to play in the Fall. He came from Rotherham and I wondered if you might be a relative.” “The Who?” asks the latest Mr Brown. “No. The Fall – the band from Salford. He played bass for three weeks in 1978.” “Is this some kind of joke?”
This has been my life for weeks. I’ve become an internet stalker and a telephone pest, all because of an obsessive drive to track down everyone who has ever played in the Fall. That’s 40-odd people, including drummers abandoned at motorway services, guitarists left in foreign hotels and various wives and girlfriends of the band’s provocateur-ringmaster, Mark E Smith.
Unemployment – We’ve Now Got Depression-Level Unemployment) – Washington’s Blog
The commonly-accepted unemployment figures for the Great Depression are overstated.
Specifically, government workers were counted as unemployed by Stanley Lebergott (the BLS economist who put together the most widely used numbers) … even though gainfully employed and receiving a pay check.
If we’re trying to compare current unemployment figures with the Great Depression, the calculations of economists such as Michael Darby are more accurate.
