The 50 most perfectly timed photos ever!

 See more: http://twistedsifter.com/2013/03/most-perfectly-timed-photos-ever/

and - http://twistedsifter.com/2012/12/top-100-pictures-of-the-day-2012/

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Zero-hours contract workers - the new reserve army of labour?

there is an early 19th-century feel to zero-hour contracts. It is as though Britain has gone back to the future, returned to an age where the employer had the whip hand and where the rights that workers enjoyed under the feudal system had been removed.

It is a pity Karl Marx was not around last week to comment on the news that 90% of the workers at Sports Direct are on zero-hours contracts. The author of the Communist Manifesto would also have had plenty to say about the news that the official estimates of those working in this form of casualised labour had shot up by 25%. It would have amused him to hear that even Buckingham Palace – the very symbol of the ruling class – had got in on the act.

It is safe to say Marx would have cavilled with those who see zero-hour contracts as an expression of Britain's economic strength, a demonstration of flexible labour markets in action. He would have thought "reserve army of labour" a better description of conditions in which workers were expected to be permanently on call for an employer.

The Office for National Statistics said last week that 250,000 people were now on zero-hour contracts – a 25% increase on its previous estimates but still small in relation to the 30 million people employed in the UK. The estimate is, however, disputed by some labour market experts who point out that more than 300,000 care workers are on such contracts. What is certain is that the total is on a steep upward curve; it may be as high as one million and growing.

Bodies representing employers say zero-hour contracts should be welcomed since without them unemployment would be even higher. Better, they say, that people should be working 20 hours one week and no hours at all the next rather than be on the dole.

Seen in this light, Vince Cable – who is conducting a review of the contracts – should be thinking of further deregulation of the labour market rather than contemplating measures that might reduce this "flexibility". He could, for instance, repeal the 1874 Factory Act that banned children under 10 from working in a manufacturing plant. He could rethink the 1847 10-hour Act that said children should not work for more than 10 hours a day. He could be really bold and say that Parliament erred in 1841 when it voted in favour of the Mines Act that prevented a child under 10 from working underground in a pit. Because, let's face it, all this legislation represented regulation of the labour market that made it less "flexible".

It's only fair to say that some employees are content to be on zero-hour contracts. Some students, for example, want to combine work with study and are willing to turn up when summoned. That's also true of older workers topping up their pensions with a bit of irregular, part-time work... read more:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/economics-blog/2013/aug/04/zero-hours-contract-workers-reserve-army-labour

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Suzanne Moore - Twitter boycott is my small symbolic gesture against online misogyny

Right now it is possible to threaten to kill and rape women without fear of the consequences. Twitter must wake up

A conversation has begun that is a long way from over. Women – the majority of social media users – should not be subject to rape and death threats. And yes thanks, I know the difference between disagreement and a description of dismemberment. We want the company hosting these threats to be less lackadaisical and able to respond faster. We provide the content and can it take it elsewhere. There are other platforms out there and Twitter has felt past its peak for a while anyway.

The perception that this is merely the concern of some self-important newspaper columnists who will collectively flounce depriving everyone else of their wit and wisdom is one I understand. Simply though, this idea wouldn't have any legs if all kinds of people were not disgusted when online misogyny is made visible.

Plus, as protests go it's about as easy as it gets. You have to NOT do something instead of doing it! If you don't want to be silent then tweet Simone De Beauvoir all day and shout back at the abusers (troll is not the right word). All is fine.

There have been previous discussions about misogyny online but this has hit a nerve. We watched a week of Twitter dithering and the police making the right noises but unable to achieve much. What has been eye-opening is the outpouring of hostility to the very notion of a boycott. The ongoing discussions about the technical difficulties abound and the essential complicated ones about free speech will continue. But what remains is the simple and essential fact: right now it possible to threaten rape and kill women online without any consequences. Behaviour can and does change. When Lord McAlpine successfully sued prominent tweeters for libel, Twitter woke up a bit.

The past week has opened a can of worms. Some of the worms get off on each other. This strange goon squad of sub-Clarksons, bedroom anarchists, useful idiots and hardcore woman haters gives most of us the creeps and they will be slithering about on Sunday.

In cyberspace, as in the real world, they will not prevail. Join us or don't. The boycott has already worked. Because Twitter, the company, is nervy and watching its back. Hello? That's how it feels when strangers abuse you en masse. Personal apologies to high-profile women feel nothing but patronising. A 24-hour boycott has made us talk much more openly about what could happen, what is happening. That's all. Funny chaps us women? Because once we start talking, we won't stop.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/04/twitter-boycott-gesture-online-misogyny

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How to Be a Rogue Superpower A Manual for the 21st Century // Prometheus Among the Cannibals - A Letter to Edward Snowden

At most moments in American history, the revelation that a secret court, which never turns down government requests, is making law “almost” at the level of the Supreme Court would surely have caused an outcry in Congress and elsewhere.  However, there was none..

Today, if you are a twenty-first-century “dissident” and need asylum/protection from the only superpower left, there is essentially none to be had.

It’s hard even to know how to take it in.  I mean, what’s really happening?  An employee of a private contractor working for the National Security Agency makes off with unknown numbers of files about America’s developing global security state on a thumb drive and four laptop computers, and jumps the nearest plane to Hong Kong.  His goal: to expose a vast surveillance structure built in the shadows in the post-9/11 years and significantly aimed at Americans.  He leaks some of the documents to a columnist at the British Guardian and to the Washington Post.  The response is unprecedented: an “international manhunt” (or more politely but less accurately, “a diplomatic full court press”) conducted not by Interpol or the United Nations but by the planet’s sole superpower, the very government whose practices the leaker was so intent on exposing.

And that’s just for starters.  Let’s add another factor.  The leaker, a young man with great techno-savvy, lets the world know that he’s picked and chosen among the NSA files in his possession.  He’s releasing only those he thinks the American public needs in order to start a full-scale debate about the unprecedented secret world of surveillance that their taxpayer dollars have created.  In other words, this is no “document dump.”  He wants to spark change without doing harm.

But here’s the kicker: he couldn’t be more aware of previous whistleblower cases, the punitive reaction of his government to them, and the fate that might be his.  As a result, we now know, he has encrypted the full set of files in his possession and left them in one or more safe places for unknown individuals -- that is, we don’t know who they are -- to access, should he be taken by the U.S.

In other words, from the time Edward Snowden’s first leaked documents came out, it was obvious that he was in control of how much of the NSA’s secret world would be seen.  It would be hard then not to conclude that capturing him, imprisoning him, trying him, and throwing away the key is likely to increase, not decrease, the flow of those documents.  Knowing that, the Obama administration and the representatives of our secret world went after him anyway -- after one man on a global scale and in a way that may not have a precedent.  No thought of future embarrassment stopped them, nor, it seems, did they hesitate because of possible resentments engendered by their heavy-handed pressure on numerous foreign governments.

The result has been a global spectacle, as well as a worldwide debate about the spying practices of the U.S. (and its allies).  In these weeks, Washington has proven determined, vengeful, implacable.  It has strong-armed, threatened, and elbowed powers large and small.  It has essentially pledged that the leaker, former Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden, will never be safe on this planet in his lifetime. And yet, to mention the obvious, the greatest power on Earth has, as yet, failed to get its man and is losing the public opinion battle globally.

An Asylum-less World

Highlighted in all this has been a curious fact of our twenty-first-century world.  In the Cold War years, asylum was always potentially available.  If you opposed one of the two superpowers or its allies, the other was usually ready to open its arms to you, as the U.S. famously did for what were once called “Soviet dissidents” in great numbers.  The Soviets did the same for Americans, Brits, and others, often secret communists, sometimes actual spies, who opposed the leading capitalist power and its global order.

Today, if you are a twenty-first-century “dissident” and need asylum/protection from the only superpower left, there is essentially none to be had.  Even after three Latin American countries, enraged at Washington's actions, extended offers of protection to Snowden, these should be treated as a new category of limited asylum.  After all, the greatest power on the planet has, since 9/11, shown itself perfectly willing to do almost anything in pursuit of its definition of “security” or the security of its security system.  Torture, abuse, the setting up of secret prisons or “black sites,” the kidnapping of terrorist suspects (including perfectly innocent people) off the streets of global cities and in the backlands of the planet, as well as their “rendition” to the torture chambers of complicit allied regimes, and the secret surveillance of anyone anywhere would only start a far longer list.

Nothing about the “international manhunt” for Snowden indicates that the Obama administration would be unwilling to send in the CIA or special operations types to “render” him from Venezuela, Bolivia, or Nicaragua, no matter the cost to hemispheric relations.  Snowden himself brought up this possibility in his first interview with Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald.  “I could,” he said bluntly, “be rendered by the CIA.” This assumes that he can even make it to a land of exile from somewhere in the bowels of the international terminal of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport without being intercepted by Washington... read more: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175725/

Prometheus Among the Cannibals  A Letter to Edward Snowden  By Rebecca Solnit No matter what’s written about him here in the mainstream, the spectacle of a single remarkably articulate and self-confident individual outwitting the last superpower has been, in its own way, uplifting.  Although the first global polls haven’t come in, I think it’s safe to assume that from Bolivia to Hong Kong, Germany to Japan, Washington is taking a remarkable licking in the global opinion wars.  Even at home, we know that, among the young in particular, opinion seems to be shifting on both Snowden’s acts and the surveillance state whose architecture he revealed...

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Truth vs Hype: The house of Yadavs

After playing cat and mouse with Mulayam Singh Yadav for six years, the UPA looks all set to close the CBI's investigation into whether he and his family amassed crores of assets way beyond their earnings. But this would be turning its back on its own preliminary findings. 

In its preliminary enquiry in October 2007, in response to a petition by Congress activist Vishwanath Chaturvedi, the CBI listed in detail the rapid rise in the fortunes of Mulayam Singh Yadav and his family. From just three bighas of land in 1993, the CBI found that by 2005, the family owned a string of real estate assets in Etawah, Saifai and Lucknow which, by the family's own tax submissions shows Rs. 2.6 crores of disproportionate assets. 

The CBI also listed the many assets and deals not declared, which they say hints at even bigger fraudulence and asked for permission to register cases of criminal misconduct against Mulayam and Akhilesh, and begin the probe. That permission never came. Instead, the case took a crucial step backwards in mid-2008, when the UPA, short on numbers, sought Mulayam's support for the trust vote on the Nuclear deal.

Eight days before the Nuclear deal vote, Mulayam's daughter-in-law, Dimple Yadav, made the first of three presentations on her investments, not to the CBI but to the Prime Minister's Office. The matter was referred to the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT). This was a baffling move, given that the DoPT is the administrative ministry of the CBI, and has no authority to hear those under the CBI's scanner. 

What followed next only strengthened the suspicion of a backroom deal. But the CBI thought it fit to seek the advice of the then Solicitor General of India, Goolam E Vahanvati, who submitted a six-page opinion in which he cited previous court judgments to argue that the burden of proof is on the investigators to show that Dimple's assets were not benami. Until then her assets, cannot be clubbed with Mulayam. Despite this controversial opinion, a month later the CBI, in a virtual admission of the political instructions, told the court that 'in view of the legal advice and directions of the Union of India', they want to withdraw the case against the Yadavs. The court reserved judgement for three years, finally ruling in December last year that Dimple should be excluded from the investigation since she is a private citizen, despite her proximity to Akhilesh Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav.

Now as the UPA seeks Mulayam Singh Yadav's support for the Food Bill, the CBI has a handy excuse in the Supreme Court order. CBI sources told us that Dimple's exclusion is the main reason why they are about to finally close the chapter on Mulayam's investigation. This would be a blatant ignoring of the evidence in their own preliminary report that Dimple's wealth, is only a fraction of the wealth of the Yadav family. ..

http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/truth-vs-hype-the-house-of-yadavs-400928

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Mumbai teenager leaves red-light zone for US degree

A young Indian woman who grew up in Mumbai's red-light district facing poverty and sexual abuse has overcome the odds to win a scholarship to study in New York. Shweta Katti, 18, left for America on Thursday to study at the liberal arts Bard College, where she hopes to read psychology. Afterwards she wants to return to India and help other young women in her community. "It's my childhood dream. I didn't think it would finally happen," she told AFP before leaving Mumbai, where she grew up in a brothel.

Katti's determination won her a place this year in Newsweek's list of 25 "Young Women To Watch" aged under-25, alongside Pakistani schoolgirl and activist Malala Yousufzai who was shot in the head by the Taliban. It is a long way from Katti's early childhood experiences of abuse and harassment in Mumbai's notorious Kamathipura neighbourhood. "You would see everyday someone beating up a woman, the police coming unexpectedly at anytime, and women selling their bodies - they were not happy," Katti said.

"Men would ask to sleep with me, it was so embarrassing, but I had to face it. My father abused me, many people abused me, but my mum was with me always saying: 'You are the best, you can do anything'." The teenager, who describes herself as "a tough-skinned girl", said she faced discrimination "from all sides" at school because of her poor background and low caste status.

She credits her mother, a factory worker, as her "inspiration" and says the local charity Kranti - meaning "revolution" in Hindi - also played a vital role in helping her achieve her dreams. The group's aim is to empower girls from Mumbai's red-light areas "to become agents of social change", and a small group of them live at Kranti's north Mumbai apartment, where Katti moved two years ago. Here she was able to work on her English language skills and experience therapy, which sparked her interest in psychology. "I really think it can change somebody. I started thinking openly and respecting my background and myself," she said.
http://www.ndtv.com/article/cities/mumbai-teenager-beats-odds-leaves-red-light-zone-for-us-degree-401022?pfrom=home-topstories

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/teen-who-grew-up-in-mumbais-redlight-area-awaits-passage-of-hope-to-us/1100132/

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James Bamford on domestic surveillance in the USA - They Know Much More Than You Think

Within days of Snowden’s documents appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post, revealing several of the National Security Agency’s extensive domestic surveillance programs, bookstores reported a sudden spike in the sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984. 


for nearly a century, telecom companies have been allowed to violate the privacy of millions of Americans with impunity.

In mid-May, Edward Snowden, an American in his late twenties, walked through the onyx entrance of the Mira Hotel on Nathan Road in Hong Kong and checked in. He was pulling a small black travel bag and had a number of laptop cases draped over his shoulders. Inside those cases were four computers packed with some of his country’s most closely held secrets.

Within days of Snowden’s documents appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post, revealing several of the National Security Agency’s extensive domestic surveillance programs, bookstores reported a sudden spike in the sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984. On Amazon.com, the book made the “Movers & Shakers” list and skyrocketed 6,021 percent in a single day. Written sixty-five years ago, it described a fictitious totalitarian society where a shadowy leader known as “Big Brother” controls his population through invasive surveillance. “The telescreens,” Orwell wrote, “have hidden microphones and cameras. These devices, alongside informers, permit the Thought Police to spy upon everyone….”

Today, as the Snowden documents make clear, it is the NSA that keeps track of phone calls, monitors communications, and analyzes people’s thoughts through data mining of Google searches and other online activity. “Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,” Orwell wrote about his protagonist, Winston Smith.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Of course the US is not a totalitarian society, and no equivalent of Big Brother runs it, as the widespread reporting of Snowden’s information shows. We know little about what uses the NSA makes of most information available to it—it claims to have exposed a number of terrorist plots—and it has yet to be shown what effects its activities may have on the lives of most American citizens. Congressional committees and a special federal court are charged with overseeing its work, although they are committed to secrecy, and the court can hear appeals only from the government.

Still, the US intelligence agencies also seem to have adopted Orwell’s idea of doublethink—“to be conscious of complete truthfulness,” he wrote, “while telling carefully constructed lies.” For example, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, was asked at a Senate hearing in March whether “the NSA collect[s] any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper’s answer: “No, sir…. Not wittingly.”

Three months later, following the revelations of the phone-log program in which the NSA collects telephone data—the numbers of both callers and the length of the calls—on hundreds of millions of Americans, Clapper switched to doublethink. He said that his previous answer was not a lie; he just chose to respond in the “least untruthful manner.” With such an Orwellian concept of the truth now being used, it is useful to take a look at what the government has been telling the public about its surveillance activities over the years, and compare it with what we know now as a result of the top secret documents and other information released by, among others, the former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden... read more:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/nsa-they-know-much-more-you-think/

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