• Epidemiologist warns Maine is unprepared to deal with disease outbreaks

    Last year, when Kaci Hickox, a nurse who returned to her home state of Maine from West Africa, she was quarantined despite showing no signs of the disease. The way she was treated led the CDC to warn that in the absence of detailed preparations, public hysteria and paranoia often accompany, and complicate response to, an outbreak. Since then, Maine officials have been debating whether or not state agencies are prepared to tackle an outbreak.

     

  • Pressures grow to release docs which would clarify Saudi involvement in 9/11 attacks

    About fourteen years after the 9/11 attacks, there remains a disagreement among former and current U.S. intelligence officials on whether Saudi Arabia or individuals connected to the Saudi Royal family helped finance the attacks or had knowledge of the attacks before  it occurred. Lawmakers and relatives of those killed in the attacks now want twenty-eight pages of investigation by congressional intelligence committees into the 9/11 attacks declassified, on the grounds that those pages may clear up confusion about Saudi involvement. President George W. Bush ordered the twenty-eight pages classified when the rest of the report was released in December 2002.

  • Bangladesh bracing for violent protests, strikes following Islamist leader's execution

    Muhammad Kamaruzzaman, 62, an assistant secretary general of the Bangladeshi Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami party, was hanged Saturday for crimes committed during the 1971 bloody war between Bengali nationalists and the Pakistani army. A special war crimes tribunal found him guilty of heading a Muslim militia group which was responsible for a massacre of at least 120 unarmed farmers during the conflict. The hanging Kamaruzzman is likely to galvanize the Islamists to intensify their campaign of civil and economic disruption and destabilization. The Islamists have also joined non-Islamist opposition parties, chief among them the major opposition party, the BNP, in an effort to topple the government.

  • Al-Shabaab is implementing a "plan as we go" strategy

    In the past two years, al-Qaeda-linked al-Shabaab has lost territory, ports, checkpoints, and key leaders to the African Unionforce in Somalia, which is supported by the United States. They have no armored personnel carriers like Nigerian-based Boko Haram, poppy fields like the Taliban, or oil fields like the Islamic State, still the Somali-based group has been able to launch deadly attacks in and out of Somalia.Counterterrorism experts say that al-Shabaab is implementing a “plan as we go” strategy, which relies on decentralized teams of gunmen who, on their own, determine who and where to attack.

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  • New privacy technologies protect personal data better

    In Estonia, the public and private sector have databases, the merging and analysis of which could help the state and enterprises make better management decisions. Such consolidation of data, however, would be a serious threat to privacy and violate data protection rules. A researcher suggests a more convenient way of analyzing very sensitive data without the fear of data leak. The new approach would be appropriate for preserving privacy in genome-wide association studies, satellite collision prediction analysis, and conducting labor market studies.

  • As law enforcement increases use of license plate readers, privacy advocates fret

    Law enforcement agencies across the country have adopted license plate readers (LPRs) to monitor vehicles driving on roads and to locate wanted suspects or suspended drivers.After canceling plans last year to operate its own LPR database, DHS announced last week, through a bid request, that the agency’s ICE is seeking a private sector firm to provide access to already functioning LPR databases for a subscription fee.Privacy advocates argue that the gains made with LPR systems, do not justify the mass monitoring of Americans who drive.

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  • Implementing new food safety measure hampered by lack of funding

    Roughly forty-eight million Americans have food-borne illness each year, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 128,000 of them are hospitalized, and 3,000 die. The cost of treatment and lost income is $15 billion a year or more, according to data from the Agriculture Department.When Congress passed the 2010 Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) to give the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) new powers to prevent food outbreaks, however, it failed adequately to fund the agency, thereby diminishing its ability to implement new regulations and inspection powers on food producers and foreign suppliers.

  • Do you know where your data is?

    Bitglass, a data protection company, undertook an experiment aiming to gain better understanding of what happens to sensitive data once it has been stolen. In the experiment, stolen data traveled the globe, landing in five different continents and twenty-two countries within two weeks. Overall, the data was viewed more than 1,000 times and downloaded forty-seven times; some activity had connections to crime syndicates in Nigeria and Russia. “This experiment demonstrates the liquidity of breached data, underscoring the importance of discovering data breaches early,” said Nat Kausik, Bitglass CEO.

  • Chlorine attacks continue in Syria with no prospect of Assad being brought to account

    For more than a year, there have been numerous reports of chemical weapons attacks in Syria. This includes reported incidents which occurred in late March, as thousands of Syrians fled the city of Idlib in the face of a government-rebel stand-off. According to witnesses, chemical weapons were used. UN resolutions condemning the use of chemical weapons, however, do not imply immediate action to stop such use. The use of chlorine as a weapon in Syria thus goes on — and there is so far little evidence that the world’s major powers have the wherewithal to bring those responsible to justice. Continued geopolitical wrangling over Syria leaves those documenting the continuation of war crimes there almost completely powerless to stop what is happening. For now, the best we can hope for is that relevant organizations are allowed to continue to gather evidence for future trials —– and that pressure is put on all states to prosecute suspected perpetrators. This is to ensure that those who are committing such atrocities know that they will eventually be held to account.

  • As the drought worsens, California’s conservation measures fall short

    As the drought worsens, California is doing a poor job of conserving water. Water use has declined by only 2.8 percent in February compared with the same time in 2013. Some Southern Californians are actually increasing their water use. “These are sobering statistics — disheartening statistics, considering how hard we have been working on this,” said Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of California’s water control board, which reported the findings. “We are very concern about these numbers. They highlight the need for further action.”

  • House Democrats write court in support of Obama’s immigration executive order

    On Monday, 181 Democratic House members filed a joint amicus brief, telling the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuitthat the executive branch has the authority to make certain policy changes on immigration matters. Specifically, they noted that that the enforcement of immigration laws and the deferral of certain deportations are within the discretion of the executive branch. The lawmakers added that the White House is often better positioned than Congress to determine how to adjust immigration laws.

  • Rwanda: how to deal with a million genocide suspects

    Twenty-one years ago — on 7 April 1994 — the genocide that would kill up to one million people in Rwanda began. Another million individuals would be implicated as perpetrators, leaving Rwandans and many others to ask: how does a country begin to bring so many suspects to justice? In 2002, the Rwandan government created the gacaca — or “grass” in the country’s official language of Kinyarwanda — court system to tackle this enormous problem. Based on a traditional form of community dispute resolution, the gacaca courts functioned for ten years — until 2012. In total, an estimated one million people were tried within the gacaca courts. By Western legal standards, the gacaca courts had serious limitations. That said, the system’s ability to prosecute a massive number of suspected perpetrators in a devastated post-genocide environment is an accomplishment in itself. In fact, other countries could perhaps learn from the goal of integrating punitive responses (like prison sentences) with more restorative ones (like community service).

  • Calif. business leaders: State’s worsening water situation threatens economic havoc

    California’s drought outlook is alarming to the point that Governor Jerry Brown recently announced the first-ever mandatory restrictions on water usage, aimed at reducing the state’s urban water use by 25 percent. For much of its history, California has measured up to its challenges while maintaining a healthy economy. Business leaders in the state say that the time has come for California once again to take bold actions to ensure a sustainable future. “We have a choice between protecting our economy by protecting our environment — or allowing environmental havoc to create economic havoc,” said former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who now co-chairs the Risky Business Project.Driscoll’s CEO Miles Reiter agrees: “The state of California has to deal with groundwater, or we’re going to ruin this state,” he said.

  • DHS seeking license plate readers (LPRs) technology -- again

    A year after privacy concerns led DHS to recall its solicitation for bids by private companies to help the department create a national license-plate database which would allow unlimited access to information obtained from commercial and law enforcement license plate readers (LPRs), the agency has renewed its solicitation on the basis that privacy concerns raised by civil liberties groups and lawmakers could be addressed and managed.

  • Canada delays national counter-terrorism program, so provinces launch own initiatives

    Canada’s national anti-terrorism program, which aims to identify signs of radicalization in young people and then connect them with social services, has been long-delayed, leading some communities to institute programs of their own with outside assistance.