Friday, July 5, 2013
No Civil War in Syria - Russian Minister
Do you see it's a bigger game...
MOSCOW, July 5 (RIA Novosti) – Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu suggested Friday there is no civil war in Syria, but rather an ongoing battle against “roving” international forces.
“It is more of a fight against forces that, one way or another, are roving between different kinds of conflicts within various states,” Shoigu said at the start of negotiations in Moscow with a Swedish military delegation led by Defense Minister Karin Enstrom.
He did not elaborate.
At least 93,000 people have been killed in Syria since fighting broke out in March 2011 between government forces and rebels, according to the latest UN figures.
RIA Novosti
Part-Time Jobs Surge To All Time High; Full-Time Jobs Plunge By 240,000
As a reminder: jobs have quantity and quality components. The quantity component was good enough to convince the 10 Year the taper is imminent (if not stocks, which continue to trade dislocated from any and all fundamentals). But how about the quality? In a word: not good. In June, the household survey reported that part-time jobs soared by 360,000 to 28,059,000 - an all time record high. Full time jobs? Down 240,000. And looking back at the entire year, so far in 2013, just 130K Full-Time Jobs have been added, offset by a whopping 557K Part-Time jobs. And there is your jobs "quality" leading to today's market euphoria (if only for now).
June full-time vs part-time:
And the divergence historically:
Source: BLS
Zero hedge
June full-time vs part-time:
And the divergence historically:
Source: BLS
Zero hedge
Postal Service uses "spying" programs similar to NSA
Approximately 160 billion envelopes, packages and postcards were photographed by the United States Postal Service last year, reports The New York Times.
It was done as part of the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, according to The Times, in which Postal Service computers take pictures of the exterior of every piece of mail that passes through the system.
It's one of two programs The Times says shows that postal mail is under similar surveillance to phone calls and emails by the National Security Agency.
Letters and packages cannot be opened without a warrant. The tracking program reportedly only collects images of the outsides.
"Looking at just the outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you bank with, who you communicate with -- all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a subpoena," James J. Wedick, a former FBI agent who spent 34 years at the agency, told The Times.
Under the mail covers program, law enforcement officials can ask postal workers to record information from the outsides of letters or parcels before they are delivered to a particular person. The U.S.P.S. then passes this information on to the law enforcement agency that requested it.
Requests for the mail cover surveillance are granted for approximately 30 days, and can be extended for up to 120 days.
The New York Times reports that tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year are screened through the mail covers program.
Even without opening the mail, officials can obtain valuable information this way -- information that many would consider an invasion of privacy. Computer security expert Bruce Schneier tells The Times that the program can track "names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren't reading the contents."
Law enforcement officials claim these programs are essential to national security.
In one recent case, The Smoking Gun reports that by examining 60 pieces of mail from scanned images, the FBI was able to identify the suspect in the ricin letters sent to President Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in May of this year. A woman from Texas, Shannon Guess Richardson, was charged last month.
CBS
Mexico's Popocatepetl volcano grounds US flights
Four U.S. airlines temporarily suspended flights to and from Mexico City on Thursday after a volcano 50 miles from the capital spewed ash, a spokesman for the city's international airport said.
Three to eight flights on American Airlines, U.S. Airways, Delta Air Lines and Alaska Air Group have been postponed so far, Richard Jimenez, a representative for Mexico City's international airport told Reuters.
"The decision not to fly from Mexico City has been made by these airlines, but the airport is in operable conditions," Andres Gomez, another airport representative, said on local television. No Mexican airlines have halted operations, Gomez said.
Mexico's leading airline AeroMexico suspended flights briefly Thursday morning, but resumed operations less than an hour later.
The volcano Popocatepetl in the central state of Puebla has been more active this year, prompting officials to raise warning levels but have so far ordered no evacuations.
Officials have kept the volcano's risk level on hold at "yellow," the second highest on the four-color spectrum, indicating that there is more activity than usual but no threat of eruption, national emergency services coordinator Luis Felipe said on Twitter.
On Thursday, ash fell on communities adjacent to the volcano, nicknamed Don Goyo, and reached southern neighborhoods of Mexico City.
There is no evidence of volcanic ash in the airport's immediate vicinity, it announced through its Twitter account. Volcanic ash can damage jet engines.
Mexico City's airport serves more than 29 million people a year and oversaw 174,511 takeoffs and landings between January and June.
World News
France 'has vast data surveillance'
France's foreign intelligence service intercepts computer and telephone data on a vast scale, like the controversial US Prism programme, according to the French daily Le Monde.
The data is stored on a supercomputer at the headquarters of the DGSE intelligence service, the paper says.
The operation is "outside the law, and beyond any proper supervision", Le Monde says.
Other French intelligence agencies allegedly access the data secretly.
It is not clear however whether the DGSE surveillance goes as far as Prism. So far French officials have not commented on Le Monde's allegations.
The DGSE allegedly analyses the "metadata" - not the contents of e-mails and other communications, but the data revealing who is speaking to whom, when and where.
Connections inside France and between France and other countries are all monitored, Le Monde reports.
The paper alleges the data is being stored on three basement floors of the DGSE building in Paris. The secret service is the French equivalent of Britain's MI6.
The operation is designed, say experts, to uncover terrorist cells. But the scale of it means that "anyone can be spied on, any time", Le Monde says.
There is a continuing international furore over revelations that the US has been systematically seizing vast amounts of phone and web data.
The French government has sharply criticised the US spying, which allegedly included eavesdropping on official EU communications.
The scale of surveillance by America's National Security Agency (NSA) emerged from classified intelligence documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The UK spy agency GCHQ is reported to run a similarly vast data collection operation, co-operating closely with the NSA.
BBC
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