Nuke Look: 'If Strangled, Iran Will Retaliate'

Source: RT

UN nuclear inspectors have started a three-day mission to examine Iran's atomic activities. Tehran says it's certain the talks - the first in more than three years - will prove its program's purpose is purely peaceful. The IAEA visit comes at a time when tensions between Iran and the West are approaching crisis level. On Monday, EU nations adopted an unprecedented set of sanctions against the Islamic Republic, which include a complete embargo on oil supplies from Iran. That comes into force in July, but Iran is considering an immediate halt of oil sales to Europe in retaliation. RT discusses the latest development around the Iranian crisis with Seyed Mohammad Marandi, who's a professor at the University of Tehran.

Beyond SOPA: The Past, Present and Future of Internet Censorship

Source: Corbett Report and Global Research
James Corbett

TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:

When legislators in the US abandoned their support of SOPA and PIPA in the wake of mass popular protest earlier this month, many of those who had been mobilized by the legislation–which would have granted the US government almost total power to block access to foreign websites accused of so much as linking to copyrighted material–did not have long to enjoy their “victory.” The very next day the New Zealand police swooped in to the million-dollar estate of MegaUpload.com founder Kim Dotcom, arresting him and three others at the US government’s request for alleged racketeering, copyright infringement and money laundering. The Department of Justice is now seeking the MegaUpload CEO’s extradition to the US.

ACTA is Worse than SOPA, Here's What You Need to Know

Source: Natural News

As a warrior for Internet freedom, you helped defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA by supporting Web black outs by sites like Wikipedia and by contacting your lawmaker to voice your displeasure. So loud was your voice that even the president of the United States sided with you in opposing it.

But don't take a deep sigh of relief because, after all, we're talking about a merger of Washington, D.C., and Hollywood here, as well as global interests. After the motion picture industry, its subsidiaries and all "interested parties" have spent nearly $150 million lobbying for some sort of Internet-centric "anti-piracy" bill, you should have known the powers that be would return.

And they have, only this time they are pushing something far more onerous: ACTA, or the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

"Although the proposed treaty's title might suggest that the agreement deals only with counterfeit physical goods (such as medicines) what little information has been made available publicly by negotiating governments about the content of the treaty makes it clear that it will have a far broader scope and in particular will deal with new tools targeting 'Internet distribution and information technology'", says an assessment of ACTA by the watchdogs at the Electronic Freedom Foundation.

"ACTA has several features that raise significant potential concerns for consumers' privacy and civil liberties for innovation and the free flow of information on the Internet [regarding] legitimate commerce and for developing countries' ability to choose policy options that best suit their domestic priorities and level of economic development," says EFF's assessment.

As is usually the case with dubious, rights-stripping legislation, ACTA - which Forbes.com reports was signed by the U.S. in 2011 and has already been sanctioned as well by Japan, Switzerland and many European Union nations - has largely been negotiated in the shadows and, thus, has largely been devoid of scrutiny... until now.

While the Obama administration was shying away from SOPA, it has been aggressively pursuing ACTA (full disclosure: the process was started under the Bush administration). Critics say it is much more far-reaching than SOPA, bypassing "the sovereign laws of participating nations" and "forcing ISP's across the globe to act as internet police," Forbes said.

Flash-grenades and Tear Gas: 300 Arrested at Occupy Oakland

Source: RT

Police in Oakland, California, have used tear-gas and flash-grenades as a 2,000-strong Occupy Oakland march turned violent, with some protesters claiming that rubber bullets were also fired into the crowd. At least 300 people were arrested.

The demonstrators had attempted to take over vacant buildings to use as their headquarters, they also broke into City Hall and tried to occupy a YMCA. Police spokesman Jeff Thomason told media most of the arrests came around 8 pm local time. Police took many protesters into custody as they marched through the city's downtown area, with some entering a YMCA building.

Officials say, at one point protesters began tearing down perimeter fences around the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, as some attacked police officers, throwing rocks, bottles and other objects. Police declared an unlawful assembly and used force, according to the Oakland Tribune newspaper.

While police were taking people into custody near the YMCA, about 100 officers surrounded City Hall, while others swept the inside of the building for protesters who had broken in. Inside the building, protesters burned flags, broke into an electrical box and damaged several art structures, according to Oakland Mayor Jean Quan.

“The City of Oakland welcomes peaceful forms of assembly and freedom of speech, but acts of violence, property destruction and overnight lodging will not be tolerated,” the press release by city officials stated. “The Oakland Police Department is also committed to facilitating peaceful forms of expression while protecting personal safety and property through ethical and constitutional policing.”

At the moment, the Occupy crowd in the city’s central square is being monitored by dozens of police officers.

Oakland has seen one of America’s largest and most vocal Occupy protests, with thousands of people attending since the demos started in October. Some 300 people have been arrested since then. The Occupy Wall Street movement started in September in New York and claims to represent the 99 per cent of Americans, who suffer from corporate greed and economic injustice.

Language Imperialism, Concepts and Civilization: China versus The West

Source: Global Research
Dr. Thorsten Pattberg

If you are an American or European citizen, chances are you've never heard about shengren, minzhu and wenming. If one day you promote them, you might even be accused of culture treason.

That's because these are Chinese concepts. They are often conveniently translated as "philosophers," "democracy" and "civilization." In fact, they are none of those. They are something else. Something the West lacks in turn. But that is irritating for most Westerners, so in the past, foreign concepts were quickly removed from the books and records and, if possible, from the history of the world, which is a world dominated by the West. As the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel once remarked, the East plays no part in the formation of the history of thought.

But let us step back a bit. Remember what school told us about the humanities? They are not the sciences! If the humanities were science, the vocabularies of the world's languages would add up, not overlap. Does that surprise you?

I estimate that there are over 35,000 Chinese words or phrases that cannot properly be translated into the English language. Words like yin and yang, kung fu and fengshui. Add to this another 35,000 Sanskrit terminology, mainly from India and Buddhism. Words like Buddha, bodhisattva and guru.

In a recent lecture at Peking University, the renowned linguist Gu Zhengkun explained that wenming describes a high level of ethics and gentleness of a people, while the English word "civilization" derives from a city people's mastery over materials and technology.

The correct Chinese translation of civilization should be chengshijishu-zhuyi. Wenming is better, but untranslatable. It has been around for some thousand years, too, while Europe's notion of "civilization" is a late 18th-century "invention."

Tourists and imperialists do not come to be taught. They call things the way they call things at home. Then they realize that the names are not correct.