is china preparing to go to war over south china sea oil?

China vows to back claim to disputed islands with its military

China’s military on Thursday vowed to defend the country’s territory amid a stand-off with the Philippines in the disputed South China Sea, the official Xinhua news agency said.

China is locked in a maritime dispute with the Philippines over the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, which is considered a potential Asian flashpoint due to the overlapping claims of several nations.

“China’s armed forces bear the responsibility for the task of defending the nation’s territorial sovereignty and safeguarding maritime rights and interests,” defence ministry spokesman Geng Yansheng was quoted as saying.

China claims all of the South China Sea as a historic part of its territory, even waters close to the coasts of the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries.

from AFP, via google news

south china sea/spratley islands

The South China Sea is rich in natural resources such as oil and natural gas. These resources have garnered attention throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Until recently, East Asia’s economic growth rates had been among the highest in the world, and despite the current economic crisis, economic growth prospects in the long-term remain among the best in the world. This economic growth will be accompanied by an increasing demand for energy. Over the next 20 years, oil consumption among developing Asian countries is expected to rise by 4% annually on average, with about half of this increase coming from China. If this growth rate is maintained, oil demand for these nations will reach 25 million barrels per day – more than double current consumption levels — by 2020.

Almost of all of this additional Asian oil demand, as well as Japan’s oil needs, will need to be imported from the Middle East and Africa, and to pass through the strategic Strait of Malacca into the South China Sea. Countries in the Asia-Pacific region depend on seaborne trade to fuel their economic growth, and this has led to the sea’s transformation into one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Over half of the world’s merchant fleet (by tonnage) sails through the South China Sea every year. The economic potential and geopolitical importance of the South China Sea region has resulted in jockeying between the surrounding nations to claim this sea and its resources for themselves.

Military skirmishes have occurred numerous times in the past three decades. The most serious occurred in 1976, when China invaded and captured the Paracel Islands from Vietnam, and in 1988, when Chinese and Vietnamese navies clashed at Johnson Reef in the Spratly Islands, sinking several Vietnamese boats and killing over 70 sailors.

from global security

china and russia conduct joint naval operations 

What’s undeniable are the short-term and provocative political implications. The exercises also take place with heightened anxiety over a North Korea rocket test — which dunked into the Yellow Sea earlier this month — and a possible impending nuclear test. Joint U.S. and South Korean exercises, and the U.S. sending the George Washington into that same Yellow Sea, raised hackles in Beijing. Now these joint operations might be tit-for-tat.

“This exercise is a political message,” e-mails Abe Denmark, with the National Bureau of Asian Research. “China in recent years has expressed disapproval of [U.S.-South Korean] joint exercises in the Yellow Sea, especially those that involve an aircraft carrier. Chinese officials object to the proximity of American air and naval power to their economic and political centers, and want to make the case (especially to Seoul) that these exercises are uncomfortable when they’re just off your shores.”

Of course, these are shores that the U.S. Navy wants to spend more time around. The President and the Pentagon have declared that American forces are pivoting to the Pacific, in part to counter a rising China. That job could get a lot tougher, if Beijing and Moscow start to collaborate more often.

For the moment, though, that doesn’t seem to be happening. “In political terms, I don’t see this exercise as a harbinger of things to come in the Western Pacific,” says Holmes. “It’s a lot easier to list things keeping Beijing and Moscow apart than it is to list things tending to unite them in some sort of seagoing entente or alliance.”

from wired

US imposed media ban on live-fire exercises with Philippines

The United States, according to a Philippine military source, made “several changes in the program of activities” apparently to avoid irritating China amid the standoff in the Scarborough Shoal that started on April 10.

“They made many changes to the plans and disallowed media coverage for Crow Valley and El Nido,” said the source, who asked not to be identified for lack of authority to speak on the matter.

The Crow Valley maneuvers, held on April 26, involved live-fire air and ground maneuvers and should have been open to media coverage as in past exercises, while the oil-rig takeover drill, which took place on April 20, was the first time such a scenario was introduced, a scenario which anticipated a counterattack on an oil facility taken over by hostile forces in the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea).

“When the Scarborough standoff happened, they (US Forces) suddenly became very cautious about how media was going to play up those stories.

“Ingat na ingat sila (They were very careful) and they wanted to forgo some of the activities,” the source said.

Western Command spokesperson Maj. Neil Estrella, contacted by phone Saturday, was asked if the El Nido oil-rig takeover exercise was supposed to be open to media coverage. He said the decision to make it off limits was “reached by both sides.”

“There were several considerations why it was not made open to the media. One was safety,” Estrella said.

The source, however, insisted that it was the American side that decided “unilaterally” that the media could not cover the oil-rig event.

from asiaOne 

America On Board for ‘Financial Train Wreck’, Economist Warns

Whether or not you agree with Peter Schiff, CEO and chief global strategist of Euro Pacific Capital, one thing is beyond dispute: Those whom we have trusted to fix our economy have failed.

Instead of making tough decisions to get America back on track, the “yes men” in Washington have only continued to placate donors and implement short-term fixes that will hedge their re-election efforts.

By now it should be clear that the “recovery” won’t happen. All these short-term fixes will come back to haunt us.

And when they do, as prophetic economist Bob Wiedemer boldly states, “[The] money from heaven will be the path to hell.”

via America On Board for ‘Financial Train Wreck’, Economist Warns.

http://r.unicornmedia.com/content.aspx?uid=AC26FE85-334B-4A21-B72C-154F743F5739&at=7b3c6199-eae4-4027-bdcf-136a2c01c5c6

He doesn’t mince words when he talks about the tragic consequences. “The data is clear, 50% unemployment, a 90% stock market drop, and 100% annual inflation . . . starting in 2012.”

Before you discount this scenario as wild speculation, please keep this in mind: In 2006, Weidemer wrote America’s Bubble Economy, which correctly predicted the collapse of the U.S. housing market, equity markets, private debt, and consumer spending.

His newest book, Aftershock, is a wake-up call for those who are ill-prepared (or unwilling) to acknowledge an ugly truth: The country’s financial “rescue” devised in Washington has been a catastrophic failure.

TSA screener is the perfect job for sexual deviants – no background check required!

A statewide crackdown on sexual deviants in Massachusetts has led to the arrest and criminal charge of U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener Jose E. Salgado, a 59-year-old from Chelsea that had been working at Logan International Airport in Boston. Salgado had apparently been in possession of and was distributing pornographic images of young children, a disgusting crime that is quickly proving to be quite common at the TSA.

According to the Huffington Post, Salgado has been suspended, but not necessarily fired, from his position at the TSA while the investigation moves forward (). Meanwhile, Sgt. Michael Hill, Commander of the Massachusetts Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force, told reporters that the 55 individuals apprehended as part of the child pornography sting are “just a drop in the bucket.”

Besides Salgado, at least two other TSA screeners from Massachusetts have been nabbed in recent months on charges of possessing and distributing child pornography, or for committing acts of sexual assault against children. Ex-TSA screener Andrew Cheever, for instance, was recently sentenced to three and a half years in prison for possession of child pornography, while Sean Shanahan was arrested last year for allegedly sending sexually explicit text messages to a 14-year-old girl.

The Boston Herald says that sex charges against TSA workers have also been filed in Virginia, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Georgia, as well as other states. And NaturalNews is aware of at least three additional cases — one in Pennsylvania, one in Florida, and one in Maryland — where TSA screeners have been arrested on charges of child pornography.

Scott Wilson, a former TSA worker at Washington International Airport in Baltimore, had his home raided late last year after an undercover agent downloaded child pornography images from Wilson’s computer. Wilson was charged with two felony counts of child pornography.

Thomas Gordon Jr., a former TSA screener at Philadelphia International Airport was arrested in early 2011 and charged with uploading explicit images of underage girls to websites using at least half a dozen phony Facebook aliases. According to the allegations, Gordon was actually found posing in his TSA uniform in one of the explicit photos he uploaded.

And Charles Bennett, a former TSA screener at Orlando International Airport in Florida was arrested in 2010 for allegedly molesting a young girl and trying to make her his “sex slave.”

As vile as each of these accounts is, they likely represent just a tiny fraction of the sexual deviancy that still takes place within the ranks of the TSA to this day. Each of these instances, after all, represents only those that have been brought to light — many others, thanks to the TSA’s lax “screening” process for its own employees, more than likely remain in their positions to this day.

And if you think about it, what better job is there for sexual deviants than to become TSA screeners? Virtually no other position in society gives them free reign to openly view the naked silhouettes of air travelers as they are forced to walk through naked body scanners, or to aggressively pat down innocent children whose families refuse to have their young ones blasted with toxic radiation in the naked body scanners.

via TSA continues to hire child porn criminals.

TSA Agents Hired Without Full Background Checks

Some workers screening travelers at one major airport may not have been fully screened themselves.

Facing a backlog of background checks, the Transportation Security Administration gave airport employers the ability to hire any workers needed at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport, according to a memoobtained by WSBTV Atlanta. The “regulatory relief” affects airports across the country, WSBTV Atlanta reports.

from the huffington post

European Pirate Party Publishes eBook Explaining Sharing in the Digital Age

Pirate Party MEP Christian Engstrom and founder Rick Falkvinge have released The Case for Copyright Reform a 107-page eBook outlining the party’s vision for reconciling copyright protection with the reality of widespread digital sharing.

The International Pirate Party, first started in Sweden in 2006, won its first seat in the European parliament in 2009, and more recently won 15 seats in Germany’s Berlin state elections. This new proposal represents the burgeoning group’s clearest, most detailed statement yet on how the party plans to act on its signature issue.

While the proposal argues that the explosive growth of file sharing can’t be stopped without monitoring private communication and “infringing on fundamental human rights,” the authors clarify that they don’t want to simply abolish copyright altogether. Though digital rights management systems would be banned under the under the Pirate Party plan, copyright would continue to prevent people from legally profiting from the works of others. Non-commercial copying and use would be made completely legal, though, returning to what Ekstrom and Falvinge argue is the original meaning of copyright, where people could copy a poem or dub a cassette and send it to a friend without fear of punishment.

To help make the bounds for sharing clearer, the authors suggest setting explicit guidelines for legal audio and visual sampling, akin to the kinds of established legal quotation rights for text. The length of copyright protection would be severely curtailed as well, from an “absurd” period of life plus 70 years to a mere 20 years from the time of publication. These copyrights would need to be renewed five years after publication, too, to allow orphaned works quick entry back into the public domain.

The book goes into great detail on how current copyright laws are stifling technological and creative progress, as well as the freedom of private communication and due process. It also lays out evidence from Norway and Sweden to show that artists can still make money in a world where their works can be copied freely, by shifting to other revenue sources. Perhaps the detailed argument will help change the minds of some of those German intellectuals that have been reportedly turning against the party recently.

via European Pirate Party shares copyright reform alternative to ACTA.

The Case for Copyright Reform

Legalized file sharing, shorter protection times for the commercial copyright monopoly, free sampling and a ban on DRM.
These are the main points of the proposal for copyright reform that the Pirate Party is advocating and which the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament adopted as its group position in September 2011.
This is a constructive alternative to the controversial ACTA agreement and to the criminalization of the entire generation of youths. This booklet explains why such a reform is both necessary and sustainable and will benefit both citizens and artists.
Download the book

Justice Department Allows Google to Steal Your Personal Data

in what is clearly an example of how the legal system has not quite come to grips with internet technology, the u.s. justice department has cleared google of any wrong-doing when – as part of their google streetview project – google broke into people’s unencrypted computers through public-access wifi connections.

google claims that unencrypted computers are “open access,” and they are not violating any laws by stealing personal information from people without their knowledge or consent.

that’s like allowing burgalers to sneak into your house and take anything they want because you did not adequately lock your doors or windows, or thieves to take merchandise from stores because the doors were open. google contends that if no one stopped them, no crime was committed.

from wired:

“The DOJ had access to Google employees, reviewed the key documents, and concluded that it would not pursue a case for violation of the Wiretap Act,” Google wrote in a Thursday filing (.pdf) with the Federal Communications Commission.

The Justice Department declined comment.

If true, the development means that at least three government agencies — the FCC, Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department — found Google committed no wrongdoing in the so-called Street View debacle.

Those outcomes, however, contradict a federal judge who last year ruled the search-and-advertising giant could be held liable for violating federal wiretapping law. The decision by U.S. District Judge James Ware of California green-lighted about a dozen lawsuits seeking damages — a decision that has been stayed pending Google’s appeal.

Google has said it didn’t realize it was sniffing packets of data on unsecured Wi-Fi networks in about a dozen countries between 2008 and 2010 until German privacy authorities began questioning what data Google’s Street View mapping cars were collecting. Google, along with other companies, use databases of Wi-Fi networks and their locations to augment or replace GPS when attempting to figure out the location of a computer or mobile device.

In Google’s letter to the FCC, it said it would pay a $25,000 FCC fine, levied two weeks ago, to settle the agency’s claims that Google stonewalled the commission’s Streetview investigation. Google denied wrongdoing, but agreed to pay “in order to put this investigation behind it.”

Google’s letter to the FCC said the Justice Department notified Google in May that it had closed its investigation.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center on Friday filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Justice Department demanding (.pdf) the May letter the Justice Department sent to Google allegedly clearing it of wrongdoing.

The FCC, meanwhile, found that Google “collected and stored encrypted communications sent over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks,” but the FCC found no evidence that Google accessed that data.

Google has said the affair was a “mistake.” The FCC said the hijacked data included “names, addresses, telephone numbers, URL’s, passwords, e-mail, text messages, medical records, video and audio files, and other information from internet users in the United States.”

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission had opened and closed an inquiry in 2010 without taking any action against Google in connection to the Streetview affair.

According to the Wiretap Act, amended in 1986, it’s not considered wiretapping “to intercept or access an electronic communication made through an electronic communication system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public.” But Judge Ware said that interpretation did not apply to open, unencrypted Wi-Fi networks and instead applied only to “traditional radio services” like police scanners.

via Justice Department Clears Google in Wi-Fi Sniffing Scandal | Threat Level | Wired.com.

as for google – those evil fucks say that they “inadvertantly” spent two years breaking into people’s home computers and also into computers connected to public wifi and archiving people’s personal data. they also had people’s encrypted files for this time, and likely still do. there is no mention in any of these reports about what has become of the data, and anyone who trusts the words of these lying, weasely bastards is naive, to say the least.

The data, which Google claims was stored “inadvertently,” was collected over a two-year period by Google’s fleet of Street View cars along with photos and the location of WiFi access points. It included personal information from unencrypted wireless networks—captured network packets that included email messages, passwords, and website requests with attached cookie data that could be used to establish website usage history of the users of those networks.

In an email to the LA Times, Google spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said that the company “decided to voluntarily make the entire document available except for the names of individuals…While we disagree with some of the statements made in the document, we agree with the FCC’s conclusion that we did not break the law. We hope that we can now put this matter behind us.”

The FCC ceased its investigation after determining that the unencrypted network traffic wasn’t protected by federal wiretap laws, and a key Google witness invoked his Fifth Amendment rights. That witness was a Google engineer—referred to as “Engineer Doe” in the FCC report—that the company claims intentionally added code to the Street View data collection software to capture packets’ payload data. Google has declined to name the engineer.

But the FCC report called into question whether the collection of the data was as inadvertent as Google has claimed. Engineer Doe reportedly told two other Google engineers, including a senior manager, that he was collecting payload data as part of Street View. In October of 2006, he gave the entire Street View team a document detailing the work he had done, including the fact that payload data would be logged as part of the data collection.

Google releases full details of FCC investigation into Street View WiFi snooping