Once Upon a Time In Athens: The Legend of The Riot Dog

Starring Loukanikos The Riot Dog

Italians Mistake Russian Graffiti for Occult Scribbling

As reported by The Moscow Times:

Italian bloggers buzzed about mysterious graffiti that appeared on the walls of an ancient church in Rome, trying to decrypt its "occult" messages — only to discover that it was a regular “I love you” inscription in Russian.

The graffiti, painted in dark orange, appeared late Friday on the outer walls of Santa Scala, a famous pilgrim attraction whose stairs, brought to Rome in the 4th century, are believed to have been trodden by Jesus.

Police suspected that the “incomprehensible” words in a “foreign language” were insults aimed at Pope Benedict XVI, Italian news web site Ansa reported.

Some bloggers speculated that the phrase, which was said to feature combinations of letters and numbers, were codes for Bible passages.

Rome Mayor Giovanni Alemanno criticized the graffiti as "another act of imbeciles seeking media exposure" and expressed solidarity with the pontiff, Ansa reported.

Officials did not reveal the message, which was removed immediately.

But a photograph of the graffiti later surfaced that showed that the phrase was in Russian and read, "I love you, Vera. Vanya."

Investigators said they were looking for the vandal, who was filmed in the act by several witnesses but managed to flee before police arrived, the La Repubblica daily reported.

Israel paves the way for killing by remote control

It is called Spot and Shoot. Operators sit in front of a TV monitor from which they can control the action with a PlayStation-style joystick.

The aim: to kill.

Played by: young women serving in the Israeli army.

Spot and Shoot, as it is called by the Israeli military, may look like a video game but the figures on the screen are real people – Palestinians in Gaza – who can be killed with the press of a button on the joystick.

The female soldiers, located far away in an operations room, are responsible for aiming and firing remote-controlled machine-guns mounted on watch-towers every few hundred metres along an electronic fence that surrounds Gaza.

The system is one of the latest “remote killing” devices developed by Israel's Rafael armaments company, the former weapons research division of the Israeli army and now a separate governmental firm.

According to Giora Katz, Rafael's vice president, remote-controlled military hardware such as Spot and Shoot is the face of the future. He expects that within a decade at least a third of the machines used by the Israeli army to control land, air and sea will be unmanned.

The demand for such devices, the Israeli army admits, has been partly fuelled by a combination of declining recruitment levels and a population less ready to risk death in combat.

Oren Berebbi, head of its technology branch, recently told an American newspaper: “We're trying to get to unmanned vehicles everywhere on the battlefield … We can do more and more missions without putting a soldier at risk.”

Rapid progress with the technology has raised alarm at the United Nations. Philip Alston, its special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, warned last month of the danger that a “PlayStation mentality to killing” could quickly emerge.

According to analysts, however, Israel is unlikely to turn its back on hardware that it has been at the forefront of developing – using the occupied Palestinian territories, and especially Gaza, as testing laboratories.

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China ponders closing 'outdated' re-education labour camps

Since the 1950s, China has used "re-education through labour" to imprison people without trial.

Currently, there are an estimated 400,000 prisoners undergoing re-education through labour in around 310 camps across the country, according to China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong NGO.

The camps were originally used in Chairman Mao's era to lock away so-called Rightists, counter-revolutionaries and landlords.

While five to ten per cent of the detainees today remain political prisoners, the camps are more commonly used to house drug addicts, street hawkers, prostitutes and pickpockets. Inmates can be imprisoned at the camps for a maximum of four years.

The abolition of the labour camps has been called for several times by the United Nations and it appeared as if the Chinese government would close them down in 2007. However, they remain in force today.

Inmates interviewed by China Human Rights Defenders, a Hong Kong NGO, said they had been shackled upside down, electrocuted and forced to work when sick.

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Behind the media contractors' veil

By Mark Prendergast, Stars and Stripes

Ombudsman's Note: Congress established this position to conduct “aggressive and objective oversight” of Stars and Stripes' relationship with the military to foster independent, quality journalism and a “free flow of information” to the paper's readers absent censorship, propaganda or other forms of news management. This admittedly lengthy column is offered in support of that mandate.

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When the U.S. military in Afghanistan canceled a media services contract with the Rendon Group last summer, Stars and Stripes, which had assailed Rendon's analyses of journalists' work as an affront to press freedom and a Pentagon effort to skew public perception of the war, saw it as a white flag and moved on.

Had journalists here and elsewhere instead pressed on, they might have found more to report with regard to the untold millions of dollars spent yearly on information services provided by contractors like Rendon.

For one, the identities of large companies are sometimes masked in public records with the designation “miscellaneous foreign contractors” – even when they are prominent, registered American firms, their contracts are unclassified, the companies and Pentagon officials are open about what they do, and the contractors have not asked to be shielded from public view.

One effect of this practice, which has been made harder to penetrate since I began asking about it early this year, is to hamper journalists, watchdog groups and members of the public in following the money trail of who is being paid by the government to inform and influence mass audiences in an ever-shrinking global media environment.

This comes as the Defense Department is reported to be planning to spend up to $1 billion next year on Psychological Operations while also imposing new rules that more tightly control information about the military and the Pentagon.

PsyOp is a component of what are called Information Operations (IO), which are persuasive actions that by law are supposed to be kept overseas and distinct from more neutral activities like public relations/Public Affairs (PA), which are supposed to factually inform audiences, including the American public.

Rendon is one firm in the information field whose identity the military has at times screened from public scrutiny, though an executive told me he was surprised to learn that.

Another is Wall Street-based SOS International Ltd., whose Web site says it provides intelligence and media support services to government and business around the world. Its two listed spokesmen did not respond to e-mail requests for information.

SOSi provided Gen. Stanley McChrystal with the civilian media adviser, Duncan Boothby, who arranged the fateful Rolling Stone “media engagement” that cost the general command of the Afghan war last month.

SOSi's Web site says the company also provided a key aide to McChrystal's successor, Gen. David Petraeus – a translator, Sadi Othman, who SOSi says rose to become a senior adviser while the general, himself a strong proponent of Information Operations, was leading the war effort in Iraq.

Rendon and SOSi contractors worked concurrently in the main military Public Affairs shop in Afghanistan last year, though only Rendon drew journalists' attention. SOSi is still there.

Both are among nine firms I encountered with media-related contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan shrouded in the designation “miscellaneous foreign contractors” – even though the contracts in question for six of those firms did not seem to fit the criteria for masking vendors' identities as laid out in the governing Federal Acquisition Regulation.

Moreover, since the Pentagon was provided with extensive details of this research into “miscellaneous foreign contractors” in the context of a query last month, key contract data that had been publicly accessible before then is now no longer so.

In nearly six months of pestering Pentagon offices, military PAO's on two continents, officials elsewhere in government and contractors themselves, among others, no one was willing or able to explain the “miscellaneous” listings, which were found on usaspending.gov, the open, online government database for contract information.

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