EU's foreign policy chief: what does Serbia's president look like? - video

The EU's foreign policy chief, Lady Ashton, is caught on camera panicking moments before she is to greet Serbia's newly inaugurated president, Tomislav Nikolic, because she doesn't know what he looks like. Ashton's envoy to the Balkans Robert Cooper, also in the clip, cannot help her out. The panicking diplomats are rescued by another official who brought a photograph

The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia

Matt Taibi writes for Rolling Stone:

Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won't hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you're probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer. Even then, all you probably heard was that a threesome of bit players on Wall Street got convicted of obscure antitrust violations in one of the most inscrutable, jargon-packed legal snoozefests since the government's massive case against Microsoft in the Nineties – not exactly the thrilling courtroom drama offered by the famed trials of old-school mobsters like Al Capone or Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo.

But this just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.

The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from "virtually every state, district and territory in the United States," according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being ­cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime. ...

Drone strikes threaten 50 years of international law, says UN rapporteur

A more apt title would've been: "International law trampled for 50 years - UN rapporteur finally wakes up".

From the Guardian:

The US policy of using aerial drones to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the second world war, a United Nations investigator has said.

Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama's attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards.

In his strongest critique so far of drone strikes, Heyns suggested some may even constitute "war crimes".

Julian Assange asks Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, why she is afraid of the Americans

Having experienced the effects of being a whistleblower myself, I understand that the Australian Government is powerless even in domestic issues to protect its citizens. The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy sacked.

THE FOI IS DUE OUT SOON BY WIKILEAKS WRITER PHILIP DORLING.

you can email me at tim_byrnes@hotmail.com

AN AUSTRALIAN government worker was sacked four days into his job after his employer said he failed to disclose he had been given information suspected of being leaked from the United States Department of Homeland Security

Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/national/public-service/career-tainted-by-us-...

Son Where You Going

ΠΟΥ ΠΑΣ ΠΑΙΔΙ ΜΟΥ (SON WHERE YOU GOING)
"A ‘first -person cinema’ documentary in the Greek language. My work will focus on filmic aspects of personal history. I will come back recurrently through this documentary as a self referential artist trying to find his voice through time and culture on two continents, inducing moments of situationality in order to fit into a world where we are always making reference to a simulation of life. My aim is to enter the field of the social antagonist movement of contemporary Athens, Greece, through a self reflective gaze into my determining work, i.e. a centralized power figure within the U.K. axis of T.A.Z. (temporary autonomous zone). Moving through the paradigm of life construct, emotion purging and release, catharsis, Oedipal drive and breakdown, acts of purification, and adaptability. Beat by beat of a life which is an ethnographic inquiry, the material supporting the argument. Who am I as I engage in and observe myself in intense relational conversation produced and performed in cultural spaces? The ‘semiotic fiction-making’ in the attempt to re story myself into a single man's urge towards synthesis."