laviedupremier

vendredi 3 décembre 2010

The Guardian Today

**12.43pm:** Lebanon's al-Akhbar newspaper has an Arab world exclusive by getting its hands on a sizeable selection of Wikileaked state department cables from across the region, writes Ian Black, our Middle East editor.
How it got the material — much of it not yet released by anyone else — is a closely-guarded secret.
Al-Masry al-Youm, a respected Egyptian daily, also intended to run the cables - triggering nervousness in Cairo - but apparently came under pressure not to do so.
Interestingly, there is very little new in the Beirut documents about the 2005 murder of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, as expectations mount that a UN tribunal will shortly indict members of Hizbullah for the assassination.
Other key events are conspicuously absent.
Elias al-Murr, the defence minister, has come under attack for comments he reportedly made to US diplomats, and was forced to issue a statement that a Wikileaks cable was "incomplete and inaccurate."
It quoted him as telling the US ambassador that Hizbullah was "terrified of Israel."
Al-Akhbar accused him and other pro-western Lebanese politicians of acting like "informers." The paper also said the leaked documents proved the extent of the "politicization" of the UN's investigation into the Hariri assassination.
The Guardian's revelations about US spy flights over Lebanon are also big news in Beirut, not least because of the assumption that any intelligence about Hizbullah would automatically be passed to Isra
el.

**12.31pm:** There's been some more interesting reaction on the Army Rumour Service, the site popular with squaddies, to the criticism of the British campaign in Afghanistan.
annoy_mous writes:

The comments about the British were justified. We didn't send enough troops out there because the British government, and British taxpayer, wouldn't pay for them. There weren't enough troops in Sangin to dominate the ground, so regular patrols weren't possible. The army hierarchy wouldn't / didn't acknowledge this and for several years carried on with the same tactics despite there obvious flaws.
Karzai and the Americans were right, US marines were needed to provide the extra manpower. I've read nothing to suggest that the lads themselves were anything other than professional. And hopefully now we are consolidating a position in central Helmand, we will be more effective.
Blokeonabike writes:

The military "top brass" have, on several occasions and occasionally very publicly, noted that we do not have enough manpower/helicopters/light armoured vehicles etc. However, they, like the soldiers below them, are obliged to follow legal orders. The fact that they are given those orders by politicians with no military understanding does not make them any less legally binding. Given insufficient funding/equipment and political back-up, the British Forces at all levels have done the best they could be expected to do with the hand they have been dealt.
**12.04pm:** The Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, the man described as Robin to Vladimir Putin's Batman in one cable, has spoken out against US diplomats.
Speaking at a briefing with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in the southern Russian resort of Krasnaya Polyana, he said the cables showed the "cynicism" of US diplomacy.
According to RIA Novosti he said:

We are not paranoid and we do not link Russian-American relations with any leaks, although the leaks are revealing. They show a full measure of cynicism of those evaluations and judgments that often prevail in the foreign policy of various states, in this case I am referring to the United States.
**11.57am:** This is useful: a full summary of today's WikiLeaks disclosures by my colleague Haroon Siddique. Down the right hand side of the article are links to previous day's disclosures.
**11.40am:** Der Spiegel has more on the German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle's chief of staff who admitted to passing secrets information to the Americans.
A worker at the party's headquarters who was chief of staff to the FDP chairman, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, came forward and admitted to being the source, an FDP party spokesperson said.
Frankfturter Allgemeine names him as Helmut Metzner and says he has been relieved of his duties rather sacked. Does that mean he's been suspended?
Der Spiegel adds:

Helmut M. became chief of staff to the chairman of the party in Berlin after Westerwelle became Germany's foreign minister in a coalition government with Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats in 2009. During the coalition talks, Helmut M. had participated as a notetaker, FDP officials stated.
In a cable sent back to Washington that has been published online by WikiLeaks and cited by Spiegel, US Ambassador Philip Murphy described the worker as a "young, up-and-coming party loyalist." The cable states that during his meetings at the US Embassy in Berlin, he brought along internal papers from the coalition talks, including participant lists from working groups, schedules and handwritten notes. According to Spiegel information, they include, for example, information about an internal dispute over disarmament that took shape during the coalition negotiations.
**11.31am:** Another technical update on the WikiLeaks site, from Josh Halliday.
The Wikileaks.ch domain name, which only surfaced on Friday morning, is being served by the Swiss Pirate Party. And the routing to it is still being done by everydns.
**11.22am:** The WikiLeaks affair has claimed its first victim, according to the EU Observer. It reports that Germany's vice-chancellor Guido Westerwelle today sacked his chief of staff for spying for the Americans.
Westerwelle's chief of staff, Helmut Metzner, admitted that he gave regular information to the US embassy in Berlin, and has been "relieved from his duties," a spokesman for the Liberal Free Democrats (FDP) said in a statement.
**11.12am:** Julian Assange will be live on the Guardian's site from 1pm today to answer readers' questions. That's if he can get access to the internet. A big if at the moment.
**10.57am:** The Guardian's latest WikiLeaks story exposes more duplicity from the Foreign Office, this time over the plight of thousands of islanders expelled from Deigo Garcia to make way for a US military base.
Rob Evans and Richard Norton-Taylor report:

More than 2,000 islanders – described privately by the Foreign Office as "Man Fridays" – were evicted from the British colony of Diego Garcia in the 1960s and 1970s. The Foreign Office, backed by the US, has fought a long legal battle to prevent them returning home.
The islanders' quest to go back will be decided by a ruling, expected shortly, from the European court of human rights.
New leaked documents show the Foreign Office has privately admitted its latest plan to declare the islands the world's largest marine protection zone will end any chance of them being repatriated.
The admission is at odds with public claims by Foreign Office ministers that the proposed park would have no effect on the islanders' right of return.
Here's relevant cable.

**10.46am:** Pentagon papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has called for a boycott of Amazon, over its withdrawal of support for WikiLeaks.
In an open letter to Amazon, he writes:

I'm disgusted by Amazon's cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating today its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China's control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.
For the last several years, I've been spending over $100 a month on new and used books from Amazon. That's over. I ask Amazon to terminate immediately my membership in Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card and account, to delete my contact and credit information from their files and to send me no more notices.
I understand that many other regular customers feel as I do and are responding the same way. Good: the broader and more immediate the boycott, the better.
Amazon denies that it was put under pressure by the US government.

**10.26am:** There was a fascinating exchange yesterday between journalists and the US State department spokesman PJ Crowley. The State department has published a full transcript. Here's a key extract, in which Crowley reveals that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wrote to the US ambassador in London last weekend offering to talk:
QUESTION: P.J., on that subject of WikiLeaks, Amazon, as we know, did have them on their server for a time and then stopped doing that. And there's a human rights group that says that Amazon was directed by the U.S. Government to stop that relationship. Do you know anything –
MR. CROWLEY: All I can say is I'm not aware of any contacts between the Department of State and Amazon.
QUESTION: Or the U.S. Government or just State?
MR. CROWLEY: I'm not in a position on this particular issue to talk about the entire government. I'm just not aware of any contacts directly.
QUESTION: From your perspective, what is WikiLeaks? How do you define them, if it is not a media organization, then?
MR. CROWLEY: Well, as the Secretary said earlier this week, it is – one might infer it has many characteristics of some internet sites. Not every internet site you would call a media organization or a news organization. We're focused on WikiLeaks's behavior, and I have had personally conversations with media outlets that are reporting on this, and we have had the opportunity to express our specific concerns about intelligence sources and methods and other interests that could put real lives at risk.
Mr. Assange, in a letter to our Ambassador in the United Kingdom over the weekend, after documents had been released to news organizations, made what we thought was a halfhearted gesture to have some sort of conversation, but that was after he released the documents and after he knew that they were going to emerge publicly. So I think there's been a very different approach. And Mr. Assange obviously has a particular political objective behind his activities, and I think that, among other things, disqualifies him as being considered a journalist.
**10.14am:**Here's the latest on what's happening with the WikiLeaks website, from Josh Halliday on our Media and Technology desk.
The site this morning said it had "move[d] to Switzerland", announcing a new domain name with the Swiss suffix, .ch. However, the new address still only points to a DNS address, suggesting WikiLeaks has been unable to quickly find a new hosting provider.
A new Germany-based WikiLeaks domain also appeared this morning, with its data apparently hosted in California. People have also taken to setting up alternative domain names that point to the WikiLeaks address. Robin Fenwick, a UK-based web services director, this morning launched Wikileeks.org.uk – a "joke domain" that points to the WikiLeaks DNS address.
**9.29am:** The New York Times WikiLeaks coverage today focuses on corruption in Afghanistan.
From hundreds of diplomatic cables, Afghanistan emerges as a looking-glass land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm and the honest man is a distinct outlier.
Describing the likely lineup of Afghanistan's new cabinet last January, the American Embassy noted that the agriculture minister, Asif Rahimi, "appears to be the only minister that was confirmed about whom no allegations of bribery exist."
But the paper's veteran foreign affairs commentator Roger Cohen has serious qualms.

The cables are intriguing, offering plenty of voyeuristic titillation but no gasp of discovery. They provide texture but break little new ground. Yet their publication has done significant damage to the courageous work of America's diplomats and may endanger lives. That's a tradeoff that I find troubling and unpersuasive.
**9.15am:** Pravada goes into Cold War mode. In an opinion piece David Hoffman, its legal editor launches a scathing attack on the United States, contrasting the US double standards over WikiLeaks and the outing of the CIA operative Valerie Plame.
The article doesn't mention the corruption allegations against Russia.

It is the American people who should be outraged that its government has transformed a nation with a reputation for freedom, justice, tolerance and respect for human rights into a backwater that revels in its criminality, cover-ups, injustices and hypocrisies.
**9.03am:** The WikiLeaks cables can still be seen at this proxy address, tweets Andrew Spooner.
A tweet from WikiLeaks suggests the new address is being hosted in Switzerland. Or is it just speaking metaphorically?

WikiLeaks moves to Switzerland http://wikileaks.ch/less than a minute ago via webWikiLeaks
wikileaks

**8.44am:** Colonel Stuart Tootal, former commander of 3 Para, the first battle group to be sent into Helmand, has been doing the rounds of broadcast interviews today to defend the British Army's record in Afghanistan.
On BBC Breakfast he said the US held British forces "in the highest regard" and said the army had ensured "strong security" in Afghanistan for US troops. He added:

Some of the individual criticisms I think are very unfair. We have now got the resources in place. I don't think (the army) made a mess of things but we got some of our approach wrong in not having enough resources.
A lot of this comment is historic and some of it is unfair.
And speaking on the BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he described the cables as "disappointing".

But it's important to remember these are the individual views of some people."
It's been challenging - the resources, the initial approach was wrong. Now we've got 30,000 Nato troops, British and American, who are all doing a fantastic job and we mustn't lose sight of this.
And quite frankly, the leaks don't help anyone, particularly not the poor bloody infantryman on the ground slogging his guts out, whether he's a Brit or an American, to try and improve the lot of the Afghan people.
**8.07am:** The rest of British press wasn't interested in the corruption allegations about Russia exposed in the cables. But that was before Russia won the right to host the World Cup.
The Independent neatly links to the two stories on its front page. The front of the sun says: "Fifa Bungs Russia the World Cup.". Inside the headline is "And the 2018 World Cup is awarded to... mafia state". The story quickly gets into the details of the WikiLeak revelations.

Hours before it landed the greatest show on earth yesterday, secret US documents published by rogue website WikiLeaks had spelled out shocking corruption allegations.
The largest country in the world was depicted as run by organised criminals and headed by a government that pockets almost £200billion a year in bribes.
In one document, a Spanish prosecutor who spent ten years examining corruption levels concluded: "The government of Russia's strategy is to use organised crime groups to do whatever it cannot acceptably do as a government."
**7.56am:** Connecting to WikiLeaks is presently not possible until it gets a new DNS service, writes our technology editor Charles Arthur.
WikiLeaks lawyers Mark Stephens wants answers on whether anyone leaned on EveryDNS.net to pull the domain name. He just tweeted this:

Pressure appears to have been applied to close the Wikileaks domain name. Anyone else know anything?less than a minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®**Mark Stephens**
MarksLarks

**7.42am:**The WikiLeaks website is down again, after its domain name system, EveryDNS.net, pulled the plug on it.
But the Guardian is up and running and packed with more revelations from the leaked cables. Today the main focus is Afghanistan.
The dispatches expose a devastating contempt for the British failure to impose security and connect with ordinary Afghans, our lead story says.
The Ministry of Defence has been swift to rebut the cables. A spokesman said:

UK forces did an excellent job in Sangin, an area which has always been and continues to be uniquely challenging, delivering progress by increasing security and taking the fight to the insurgency.
That work is now being continued by the US Marines as part of a hugely increased Isaf presence across the whole of Helmand Province.
Both Afghan leaders, including the Governor of Sangin, and the US Marines have publicly recognised and paid tribute to the sacrifice and achievements of the UK forces in that area.
Criticism of UK troops in the cables has prompted a furious reaction on the Army Rumour Service, the online chatroom popular with British troops. "It's utterly ridiculous how little they appreciate the effort our troops have made," wrote Bloodloss, while Oddjob, who says he has a son currently serving in Afghanistan, tells the Afgans where to go.
Here's a round up of the other stories from the leaked cables today:
• CIA drew up UN spying wishlist for diplomats
• Afghan vice-president 'landed in Dubai with $52m in cash'
• Afghan MPs and religious scholars 'on Iran payroll'
• Germany accuses US over 'missing' Afghan funds
• Cables portray Hamid Karzai as corrupt and erratic
• Americans believed Gordon Brown was an 'abysmal' prime minister
• Gordon Brown's potential successors, as viewed by Washington
• Gordon Brown's global moves dismissed by US
• UK overruled on Lebanon spy flights from Cyprus
• U2 spy flights targetting Hizbullah fuels tensions
• Berlusconi 'profited from secret deals' with Putin
• Silvio Berlusconi's health hit by party lifestyle
• Cables vindicate Litvinenko murder claim, says widow
• Chávez and Uribe 'almost came to blows' at summit
• US has lost faith in Mexico's ability to win drugs war
You can follow all of yesterday's disclosures and reaction on Thursday's live blog. And for the full coverage go to our US embassy cables page or follow our US embassy cable Twitter feed @GdnCables.

**12.43pm:** Lebanon's al-Akhbar newspaper has an Arab world exclusive by getting its hands on a sizeable selection of Wikileaked state department cables from across the region, writes Ian Black, our Middle East editor.
How it got the material — much of it not yet released by anyone else — is a closely-guarded secret.
Al-Masry al-Youm, a respected Egyptian daily, also intended to run the cables - triggering nervousness in Cairo - but apparently came under pressure not to do so.
Interestingly, there is very little new in the Beirut documents about the 2005 murder of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, as expectations mount that a UN tribunal will shortly indict members of Hizbullah for the assassination.
Other key events are conspicuously absent.
Elias al-Murr, the defence minister, has come under attack for comments he reportedly made to US diplomats, and was forced to issue a statement that a Wikileaks cable was "incomplete and inaccurate."
It quoted him as telling the US ambassador that Hizbullah was "terrified of Israel."
Al-Akhbar accused him and other pro-western Lebanese politicians of acting like "informers." The paper also said the leaked documents proved the extent of the "politicization" of the UN's investigation into the Hariri assassination.
The Guardian's revelations about US spy flights over Lebanon are also big news in Beirut, not least because of the assumption that any intelligence about Hizbullah would automatically be passed to Isra
el.

**12.31pm:** There's been some more interesting reaction on the Army Rumour Service, the site popular with squaddies, to the criticism of the British campaign in Afghanistan.
annoy_mous writes:

The comments about the British were justified. We didn't send enough troops out there because the British government, and British taxpayer, wouldn't pay for them. There weren't enough troops in Sangin to dominate the ground, so regular patrols weren't possible. The army hierarchy wouldn't / didn't acknowledge this and for several years carried on with the same tactics despite there obvious flaws.
Karzai and the Americans were right, US marines were needed to provide the extra manpower. I've read nothing to suggest that the lads themselves were anything other than professional. And hopefully now we are consolidating a position in central Helmand, we will be more effective.
Blokeonabike writes:

The military "top brass" have, on several occasions and occasionally very publicly, noted that we do not have enough manpower/helicopters/light armoured vehicles etc. However, they, like the soldiers below them, are obliged to follow legal orders. The fact that they are given those orders by politicians with no military understanding does not make them any less legally binding. Given insufficient funding/equipment and political back-up, the British Forces at all levels have done the best they could be expected to do with the hand they have been dealt.
**12.04pm:** The Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, the man described as Robin to Vladimir Putin's Batman in one cable, has spoken out against US diplomats.
Speaking at a briefing with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in the southern Russian resort of Krasnaya Polyana, he said the cables showed the "cynicism" of US diplomacy.
According to RIA Novosti he said:

We are not paranoid and we do not link Russian-American relations with any leaks, although the leaks are revealing. They show a full measure of cynicism of those evaluations and judgments that often prevail in the foreign policy of various states, in this case I am referring to the United States.
**11.57am:** This is useful: a full summary of today's WikiLeaks disclosures by my colleague Haroon Siddique. Down the right hand side of the article are links to previous day's disclosures.
**11.40am:** Der Spiegel has more on the German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle's chief of staff who admitted to passing secrets information to the Americans.
A worker at the party's headquarters who was chief of staff to the FDP chairman, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, came forward and admitted to being the source, an FDP party spokesperson said.
Frankfturter Allgemeine names him as Helmut Metzner and says he has been relieved of his duties rather sacked. Does that mean he's been suspended?
Der Spiegel adds:

Helmut M. became chief of staff to the chairman of the party in Berlin after Westerwelle became Germany's foreign minister in a coalition government with Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats in 2009. During the coalition talks, Helmut M. had participated as a notetaker, FDP officials stated.
In a cable sent back to Washington that has been published online by WikiLeaks and cited by Spiegel, US Ambassador Philip Murphy described the worker as a "young, up-and-coming party loyalist." The cable states that during his meetings at the US Embassy in Berlin, he brought along internal papers from the coalition talks, including participant lists from working groups, schedules and handwritten notes. According to Spiegel information, they include, for example, information about an internal dispute over disarmament that took shape during the coalition negotiations.
**11.31am:** Another technical update on the WikiLeaks site, from Josh Halliday.
The Wikileaks.ch domain name, which only surfaced on Friday morning, is being served by the Swiss Pirate Party. And the routing to it is still being done by everydns.
**11.22am:** The WikiLeaks affair has claimed its first victim, according to the EU Observer. It reports that Germany's vice-chancellor Guido Westerwelle today sacked his chief of staff for spying for the Americans.
Westerwelle's chief of staff, Helmut Metzner, admitted that he gave regular information to the US embassy in Berlin, and has been "relieved from his duties," a spokesman for the Liberal Free Democrats (FDP) said in a statement.
**11.12am:** Julian Assange will be live on the Guardian's site from 1pm today to answer readers' questions. That's if he can get access to the internet. A big if at the moment.
**10.57am:** The Guardian's latest WikiLeaks story exposes more duplicity from the Foreign Office, this time over the plight of thousands of islanders expelled from Deigo Garcia to make way for a US military base.
Rob Evans and Richard Norton-Taylor report:

More than 2,000 islanders – described privately by the Foreign Office as "Man Fridays" – were evicted from the British colony of Diego Garcia in the 1960s and 1970s. The Foreign Office, backed by the US, has fought a long legal battle to prevent them returning home.
The islanders' quest to go back will be decided by a ruling, expected shortly, from the European court of human rights.
New leaked documents show the Foreign Office has privately admitted its latest plan to declare the islands the world's largest marine protection zone will end any chance of them being repatriated.
The admission is at odds with public claims by Foreign Office ministers that the proposed park would have no effect on the islanders' right of return.
Here's relevant cable.

**10.46am:** Pentagon papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has called for a boycott of Amazon, over its withdrawal of support for WikiLeaks.
In an open letter to Amazon, he writes:

I'm disgusted by Amazon's cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating today its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China's control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.
For the last several years, I've been spending over $100 a month on new and used books from Amazon. That's over. I ask Amazon to terminate immediately my membership in Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card and account, to delete my contact and credit information from their files and to send me no more notices.
I understand that many other regular customers feel as I do and are responding the same way. Good: the broader and more immediate the boycott, the better.
Amazon denies that it was put under pressure by the US government.

**10.26am:** There was a fascinating exchange yesterday between journalists and the US State department spokesman PJ Crowley. The State department has published a full transcript. Here's a key extract, in which Crowley reveals that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wrote to the US ambassador in London last weekend offering to talk:
QUESTION: P.J., on that subject of WikiLeaks, Amazon, as we know, did have them on their server for a time and then stopped doing that. And there's a human rights group that says that Amazon was directed by the U.S. Government to stop that relationship. Do you know anything –
MR. CROWLEY: All I can say is I'm not aware of any contacts between the Department of State and Amazon.
QUESTION: Or the U.S. Government or just State?
MR. CROWLEY: I'm not in a position on this particular issue to talk about the entire government. I'm just not aware of any contacts directly.
QUESTION: From your perspective, what is WikiLeaks? How do you define them, if it is not a media organization, then?
MR. CROWLEY: Well, as the Secretary said earlier this week, it is – one might infer it has many characteristics of some internet sites. Not every internet site you would call a media organization or a news organization. We're focused on WikiLeaks's behavior, and I have had personally conversations with media outlets that are reporting on this, and we have had the opportunity to express our specific concerns about intelligence sources and methods and other interests that could put real lives at risk.
Mr. Assange, in a letter to our Ambassador in the United Kingdom over the weekend, after documents had been released to news organizations, made what we thought was a halfhearted gesture to have some sort of conversation, but that was after he released the documents and after he knew that they were going to emerge publicly. So I think there's been a very different approach. And Mr. Assange obviously has a particular political objective behind his activities, and I think that, among other things, disqualifies him as being considered a journalist.
**10.14am:**Here's the latest on what's happening with the WikiLeaks website, from Josh Halliday on our Media and Technology desk.
The site this morning said it had "move[d] to Switzerland", announcing a new domain name with the Swiss suffix, .ch. However, the new address still only points to a DNS address, suggesting WikiLeaks has been unable to quickly find a new hosting provider.
A new Germany-based WikiLeaks domain also appeared this morning, with its data apparently hosted in California. People have also taken to setting up alternative domain names that point to the WikiLeaks address. Robin Fenwick, a UK-based web services director, this morning launched Wikileeks.org.uk – a "joke domain" that points to the WikiLeaks DNS address.
**9.29am:** The New York Times WikiLeaks coverage today focuses on corruption in Afghanistan.
From hundreds of diplomatic cables, Afghanistan emerges as a looking-glass land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm and the honest man is a distinct outlier.
Describing the likely lineup of Afghanistan's new cabinet last January, the American Embassy noted that the agriculture minister, Asif Rahimi, "appears to be the only minister that was confirmed about whom no allegations of bribery exist."
But the paper's veteran foreign affairs commentator Roger Cohen has serious qualms.

The cables are intriguing, offering plenty of voyeuristic titillation but no gasp of discovery. They provide texture but break little new ground. Yet their publication has done significant damage to the courageous work of America's diplomats and may endanger lives. That's a tradeoff that I find troubling and unpersuasive.
**9.15am:** Pravada goes into Cold War mode. In an opinion piece David Hoffman, its legal editor launches a scathing attack on the United States, contrasting the US double standards over WikiLeaks and the outing of the CIA operative Valerie Plame.
The article doesn't mention the corruption allegations against Russia.

It is the American people who should be outraged that its government has transformed a nation with a reputation for freedom, justice, tolerance and respect for human rights into a backwater that revels in its criminality, cover-ups, injustices and hypocrisies.
**9.03am:** The WikiLeaks cables can still be seen at this proxy address, tweets Andrew Spooner.
A tweet from WikiLeaks suggests the new address is being hosted in Switzerland. Or is it just speaking metaphorically?

WikiLeaks moves to Switzerland http://wikileaks.ch/less than a minute ago via webWikiLeaks
wikileaks

**8.44am:** Colonel Stuart Tootal, former commander of 3 Para, the first battle group to be sent into Helmand, has been doing the rounds of broadcast interviews today to defend the British Army's record in Afghanistan.
On BBC Breakfast he said the US held British forces "in the highest regard" and said the army had ensured "strong security" in Afghanistan for US troops. He added:

Some of the individual criticisms I think are very unfair. We have now got the resources in place. I don't think (the army) made a mess of things but we got some of our approach wrong in not having enough resources.
A lot of this comment is historic and some of it is unfair.
And speaking on the BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he described the cables as "disappointing".

But it's important to remember these are the individual views of some people."
It's been challenging - the resources, the initial approach was wrong. Now we've got 30,000 Nato troops, British and American, who are all doing a fantastic job and we mustn't lose sight of this.
And quite frankly, the leaks don't help anyone, particularly not the poor bloody infantryman on the ground slogging his guts out, whether he's a Brit or an American, to try and improve the lot of the Afghan people.
**8.07am:** The rest of British press wasn't interested in the corruption allegations about Russia exposed in the cables. But that was before Russia won the right to host the World Cup.
The Independent neatly links to the two stories on its front page. The front of the sun says: "Fifa Bungs Russia the World Cup.". Inside the headline is "And the 2018 World Cup is awarded to... mafia state". The story quickly gets into the details of the WikiLeak revelations.

Hours before it landed the greatest show on earth yesterday, secret US documents published by rogue website WikiLeaks had spelled out shocking corruption allegations.
The largest country in the world was depicted as run by organised criminals and headed by a government that pockets almost £200billion a year in bribes.
In one document, a Spanish prosecutor who spent ten years examining corruption levels concluded: "The government of Russia's strategy is to use organised crime groups to do whatever it cannot acceptably do as a government."
**7.56am:** Connecting to WikiLeaks is presently not possible until it gets a new DNS service, writes our technology editor Charles Arthur.
WikiLeaks lawyers Mark Stephens wants answers on whether anyone leaned on EveryDNS.net to pull the domain name. He just tweeted this:

Pressure appears to have been applied to close the Wikileaks domain name. Anyone else know anything?less than a minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®**Mark Stephens**
MarksLarks

**7.42am:**The WikiLeaks website is down again, after its domain name system, EveryDNS.net, pulled the plug on it.
But the Guardian is up and running and packed with more revelations from the leaked cables. Today the main focus is Afghanistan.
The dispatches expose a devastating contempt for the British failure to impose security and connect with ordinary Afghans, our lead story says.
The Ministry of Defence has been swift to rebut the cables. A spokesman said:

UK forces did an excellent job in Sangin, an area which has always been and continues to be uniquely challenging, delivering progress by increasing security and taking the fight to the insurgency.
That work is now being continued by the US Marines as part of a hugely increased Isaf presence across the whole of Helmand Province.
Both Afghan leaders, including the Governor of Sangin, and the US Marines have publicly recognised and paid tribute to the sacrifice and achievements of the UK forces in that area.
Criticism of UK troops in the cables has prompted a furious reaction on the Army Rumour Service, the online chatroom popular with British troops. "It's utterly ridiculous how little they appreciate the effort our troops have made," wrote Bloodloss, while Oddjob, who says he has a son currently serving in Afghanistan, tells the Afgans where to go.
Here's a round up of the other stories from the leaked cables today:
• CIA drew up UN spying wishlist for diplomats
• Afghan vice-president 'landed in Dubai with $52m in cash'
• Afghan MPs and religious scholars 'on Iran payroll'
• Germany accuses US over 'missing' Afghan funds
• Cables portray Hamid Karzai as corrupt and erratic
• Americans believed Gordon Brown was an 'abysmal' prime minister
• Gordon Brown's potential successors, as viewed by Washington
• Gordon Brown's global moves dismissed by US
• UK overruled on Lebanon spy flights from Cyprus
• U2 spy flights targetting Hizbullah fuels tensions
• Berlusconi 'profited from secret deals' with Putin
• Silvio Berlusconi's health hit by party lifestyle
• Cables vindicate Litvinenko murder claim, says widow
• Chávez and Uribe 'almost came to blows' at summit
• US has lost faith in Mexico's ability to win drugs war
You can follow all of yesterday's disclosures and reaction on Thursday's live blog. And for the full coverage go to our US embassy cables page or follow our US embassy cable Twitter feed @GdnCables.

Je suis déçue de voir que l'Amérique n'est pas une vraie démocratie, n'est pas un pays libre.

Article trouvé dans le Guardian aujourd'hui:

The US was today accused of opening up a dramatic new front againstWikiLeaks, effectively "killing" its web address just days after Amazon pulled the site from its servers following political pressure.

The whistleblowers' website went offline for the third time in a week this morning, in the biggest threat to its online presence yet.

Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security, earlier this week called for any organisation helping sustain WikiLeaks to "immediately terminate" its relationship with them.

On Friday morning, WikiLeaks and the cache of secret diplomatic documents that have proved to be a scourge for governments around the world were only accessible through a string of digits known as a DNS address. The site later re-emerged with a Swiss domain, WikiLeaks.ch.

Julian Assange this morning said the development is an example of the "privatisation of state censorship" in the US and is a "serious problem."

"These attacks will not stop our mission, but should be setting off alarm bells about the rule of law in the United States," he warned.

The California-based internet hosting provider that dropped WikiLeaks at 3am GMT on Friday (10PM EST Thursday), Everydns, says it did so to prevent its other 500,000 customers of being affected by the intense cyber attacks targeted at WikiLeaks.

The site this morning said it had "move[d] to Switzerland", announcing a new domain name – wikileaks.ch, with the Swiss suffix. However, the new address still only points to an IP address, suggesting WikiLeaks has been unable to quickly find a new hosting provider.

The Wikileaks.ch domain name, which only surfaced on Friday morning, is being served by the Swiss Pirate Party. And the routing to it is still being done by everydns.

Late yesterday evening Tableau Software, a company which published data visualisations, pulled one of its images picturing the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables at the request of Senator Lieberman. Writing on the company's blog, Elissa Fink said: "Our decision to remove the data from our servers came in response to a public request by Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, when he called for organisations hosting WikiLeaks to terminate their relationship with the website."

Mark Stephens, the London-based lawyer acting on behalf of Assange,wrote on Twitter after the shutdown: "Pressure appears to have been applied to close the WikiLeaks domain name."

Andre Rickardsson, an expert on computer security at Sweden's Bitsec Consulting, told Reuters: "I don't believe for a second that this has been done by everydns themselves. I think they've been under pressure," he said, apparently referring to US authorities.

A new Germany-based WikiLeaks domain – wikileaks.dd19.de – also appeared on Friday morning, with its data apparently hosted in California. People have also taken to setting up alternative domain names that point to the WikiLeaks address. Robin Fenwick, a UK-based web services director, this morning launched Wikileeks.org.uk – a "joke domain" that points to the WikiLeaks DNS address.

In a statement on its website, the free everydns.net service said that the "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attacks by unknown hackers – who are trying to knock WikiLeaks off the net – meant that the leaks site was interfering with the service being provided to other users. That in turn meant that WikiLeaks had broken everydns.net's terms of service, and it cut the site off at 3am GMT on Friday (10PM EST Thursday).

DNS services translate a website name, such as guardian.co.uk, into machine-readable "IP quads" – in that case 77.91.249.30, so thathttp://77.91.249.30 will show the Guardian site. If the DNS fails, the site is only reachable via IP address – but WikiLeaks has not yet provided one via Twitter or other means.

Everydns.net said that the attacks – which have been going on all week, and led the site to temporarily host its services on Amazon's more resilient EC2 "cloud computing" service – "threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites".

WikiLeaks was given 24 hours' notice of the termination, and everydns said: "Any downtime of the wikileaks.org website has resulted from its failure to use another hosted DNS service provider."

The move comes after several days of WikiLeaks coming under a determined DDOS attack, apparently from hackers friendly to the point of view of the US government, which has disparaged the site's leaking of thousands of US diplomatic cables.

US companies have also come under intense political pressure to remove any connection to, or support for, WikiLeaks. Amazon ended its hosting of the cables on its EC2 cloud computer service earlier this week, but last night insisted in a blogpost that its decision was not due to pressure from Senator Joe Lieberman, who has called for the removal of the data – and who has influenced at least one other US company to withdraw support for WikiLeaks data.

In a blogpost late on Thursday, Amazon said reports that government inquiries prompted it to remove the data were "inaccurate".

Amazon said:

"[Amazon Web Services] does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that "you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity". It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy."

It noted that:

"When companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn't rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won't injure others, it's a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere."

But as commentators have pointed out, that stance is contradicted by the fact that Amazon has previously hosted the "war logs" from WikiLeaks which contained data about the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Connecting to WikiLeaks is presently not possible until it gets a new DNS service. WikiLeaks itself said on Twitter that the ending of DNS services was allegedly due to "claimed mass attacks" and called for further donations to "keep us strong".

vendredi 26 novembre 2010

I would like to know what sort of camera this one is :

Orson Wells à la caméra sur le tournage du film "Une histoire immortelle" Date : 01/09/1966 Crédits : Galmiche, Georges / INA

jeudi 25 novembre 2010

Dans le Guardian paru aujourd'hui, un article à propos du free speech :
"British novelist Hari Kunzru has attacked Turkey's record on free speech at the Istanbul literary event the European Writers' Parliament, describing VS Naipaul's absence from the event "regrettable", and calling for the repeal of the notorious article 301 of the Turkish penal code.
Kunzru stepped into the breach to deliver the opening speech this morning in place of Naipaul, who withdrew from the EWP earlier this week "by mutual agreement" with the organisers following a row over his criticisms of Islam.
Kunzru referred to the Nobel laureate's absence and said: "I feel we would be stronger and more credible if we were to deal with divergent views within this meeting rather than a priori excluding someone because of fear that offence might be given."
The writer also attacked Turkey's record on free speech, citing the cases brought against novelist Orhan Pamuk and editor Hrant Dink under article 301 of the country's penal code, which makes it illegal to insult Turkey, Turkish ethnicity or Turkish government institutions.
Kunzru told the assembled authors: "Pamuk faced trial for giving the following statement to a Swiss magazine: 'Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares mention that. So I do.'" He added: "Dink, one of Turkey's most prominent Armenian voices was convicted under article 301 then murdered by a young nationalist, who was subsequently photographed in a police station surrounded by smiling officers, against the backdrop of the national flag. There are many other examples in Turkey of the weapons of offence and insult being used to silence dissent. Turkey is obviously not alone in this, but since we are here, it is important that we acknowledge it."
Kunzru said he believed one of the most tangible and immediate results of the European Writers' Parliament would be to call for the repeal of section 301 "and a declaration that no European writer should have to operate under the threat of similar laws".
The novelist acknowledged that his criticisms risked causing offence, but said: "Our kind Turkish hosts have invited us here, as an international group, to air our views, and so it is my belief that we must not shy away from recognising the situation here, where we are speaking." He added: "It would be absurd to assert freedom of speech in the abstract without exercising it in concrete terms."
Kunzru has been outspoken in the past in defence of his beliefs. In 2003 he refused the award of the £5,000 John Llewellyn Rhys prize for his debut novel, The Impressionist, because it was then sponsored by the Daily Mail. Kunzru rejected the prize because of what he called the paper's consistent "hostility towards black and Asian British people", telling the organisers to give the cash to the Refugee Council."( Benedicte Page )

J'apprends dans cet article du Guardian paru le 21 novembre, , que Ivan Moffat a eu une fille illégitime, Ivana Lowell. Elle vient d'écrire un livre :

Sometimes, even truly bad books can be gripping, and Ivana Lowell's Why Not Say What Happened? is one of them. Clunky, repetitive and disorganised – you will search in vain for a single date among its pages – her prose is also fatally hamstrung by the weird incontinent blankness that is so typical of those who have spent too long in rehab. In the therapy room, Lowell, a Guinness heiress, has learned to be unflinching: to face up bravely both to her own failings, and to those of people close to her. Coy she is not. But the more appalling the events she describes, the more inadequate and cliched her prose starts to seem. She quotes the best-selling novelist Josephine Hart – "Damaged people are different" – with a reverence you or I might reserve for Shakespeare; she kills her funniest anecdotes at 100 paces; her metaphors are so bad, they make you cry out in pain. And yet I could not put her book down. Never before has so much bad behaviour by people who should have known better been crammed into so few pages. To fall back on a cliche myself: you really couldn't make it up.

Even by the standards of the Guinness clan – a family beloved of the tabloids for its higher than average tendency to abuse drink and drugs – Lowell's childhood was toxic. Her narrative is dominated by two women: her spoilt grandmother, Maureen Guinness, the late Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, and her mother, Maureen's eldest child, Caroline Blackwood, the gothic novelist and noted muse. Maureen, a Dame Edna Everage lookalike who enjoyed a close if somewhat competitive friendship with the Queen Mother, was a vacuous snob; her idea of fun was to turn up at the houses of society hostesses wearing a comedy penis nose, a fart machine carefully hidden between her legs. She and Caroline, who had a brain, disdained her mother's snobbery, and was keen to join a more bohemian world, did not get on, and the misery that trails Lowell like a noxious cloud can mostly be traced back to their relationship: Maureen's neglect of Caroline was duly succeeded by Caroline's neglect of Ivana. It is not just that Blackwood, a raging alcoholic, was not one for the domestic arts (though she travelled with garlic in her handbag; most cooks, in her opinion, were apt to stint on this particular allium, cloves of which she liked to chew). Far less forgivable than the Steptoe-like mess of her various grand but rotting houses was the fact that she could not be bothered to tell Ivana the truth about her father.
Blackwood had enjoyed an early but disastrous marriage to Lucian Freud (she is the subject of some of his most famous early paintings). With her second husband, the composer Israel Citkowitz, she had three daughters, Natalya (who died of a heroin overdose at 18), Evgenia (now married to the actor Julian Sands), and Ivana; with her third husband, the manic-depressive American poet Robert Lowell, she had a son, Sheridan. Ivana was fond of Lowell, with whom the girls lived until his death in 1977. She felt sure he would have been furious had she told him that the family odd-job man, Mike, was sexually abusing her (only she never told anyone), and when, at the age of six, she suffered third-degree burns over 70% of her body having accidentally collided with a boiling kettle, Lowell devotedly slept on the floor outside her hospital room until it was clear she would survive. But she always felt sure that her father was Citkowitz. Only after her mother died of cancer in 1996 did she discover that Caroline had led two other men to believe that Ivana was their daughter: Robert Silvers, one of the founders of the New York Review of Books, and Ivan Moffat, the Hollywood screenwriter. There followed the humiliation of DNA tests, and Moffat was established as Daddy. Granny, who died in 1998, was gleeful. A non-Jewish granddaughter would have a far better chance of getting married. Ivana was despondent. She preferred Silvers.
Lowell takes the reader through a chaotic childhood and then on into an even trickier adulthood (she is now 43). Among other piteous humiliations, when a boyfriend is alarmed by the effect her burn scars have had on her body, she agrees to undergo a pubic hair transplant. It fails save for "a few lonely sprouts". Later, when she is dating Bob Weinstein, the Miramax movie mogul charmingly asks a hotel employee to set about Ivana's new Galliano gown, which he dislikes, with a pair of scissors. She ends up attending the Oscars in what looks like a "shapeless black pillowcase". When she eventually marries, she chooses – what else? – a junkie, and their wedding at the Rainbow Room in New York is ruined by a workers' picket line outside, a demonstration that Ivana's brother, by now some kind of beret-wearing communist, duly joins once the vows have been exchanged. She and Moffat try to forge a relationship, but she can't help herself: she is mean to him. By the time remorse sets in, however, it is too late: Moffat has had a stroke, and is on his deathbed.
Those who want the full dish on Caroline Blackwood should probably read Nancy Schoenberger's unauthorised biography, though I relished Lowell's description of Marianne Faithfull's visit to her deathbed ("Surabaya Caroline, we all love you Caroline," sang Marianne croakily, before making a swift exit: "I really can't bear long goodbyes, darling."). But there is, as yet, no biography of Maureen, whom Cecil Beaton once described as the "biggest bitch in London" – and for the batty marchioness alone, I would buy Lowell's memoir. Truly, they don't make them like her any more. I'm sorry for the coastal shelf of misery she helped to carve, but I laughed out loud at the letters she wrote to guests who broke her house rules. Among these "guests" was her own granddaughter: "It really is too path [pathetic] that you have grown up to have such bad manners, just like your poor mother. Love from a broken-hearted and sad Maureen." Ivana gamely tries to stick up for her, but the truth is that Granny was a monster in a tiara. Now she has it all down on paper, her granddaughter should get on and enjoy whatever money she inherited from her with alacrity and a clear conscience.( Rachel Cooke)

Caroline Blackwood, Lucian Freud — Ivana Lowell’s mother, Caroline Blackwood, with her first husband Lucian Freud on their honeymoon in Paris, 1949. Photograph: Private Collection

mardi 16 novembre 2010

Je devrais lire le livre de Simionetta Greggio :

Dolce Vita 1959-1979
1959. Le film de Federico Fellini, La Dolce Vita, fait scandale en Italie, dans un pays pudibond tenu par l'Église ; il remporte la Palme d'or à Cannes en 1960. Son succès signe le début d'une ère pleine de promesses et de libertés qui rompt avec les années de pauvreté de l'après-guerre.
1969. Une bombe explose à Milan et fait seize morts. C'est un massacre, le premier d'une longue série, qui voit le pays durablement endeuillé par les actes de terrorisme.
2010. Le prince Malo se confie au prêtre Saverio. À quatre-vingts ans passés, il sait qu'il ne lui reste que peu de temps à vivre. Sa confession porte sur son existence dissolue, celle d'une aristocratie décadente, et les secrets hautement politiques qu'il a tus jusque-là. Il est l'un des derniers témoins des années les plus glamour et les plus sombres de l'Italie.
Pourquoi et comment ce pays que nous avons tant aimé a-t-il basculé dans le rouge et le noir ?
Dolce Vita est le roman de l'Italie entre 1959 et 1979. Affaires de moeurs, scandales financiers, Brigades rouges, enlèvement et meurtre de Moro, mort du réalisateur et poète Pasolini, Cosa Nostra, intrigues au Vatican... Dessinant le portrait fascinant d'un pays voisin infiniment romanesque, il donne les clés de l'Italie d'aujourd'hui, celle d'un Berlusconi tragicomique. Racontée par le dernier Guépard, son histoire a la saveur douce-amère et le charme vénéneux d'une fin de règne qui n'en finit plus, car un pays qui ne fait pas les comptes avec son passé est un pays qui ne cesse de le payer.

vendredi 12 novembre 2010

Je trouve sur le site de www.mythorama.com, l'histoire de Perséphone:

Déesse appelée Perséphone dans la civilisation grecque, Proserpine dans la civilisation romaine, vivant la moitié de l'année sous terre, dans le royaume des morts, et l'autre moitié de l'année sur terre, parmi les vivants.
Hésiode, dans la Théogonie

, indique que Perséphone est née de l'union de Zeus et de Déméter. Elle fut enlevée à la déesse Déméter par Hadès, ce dernier ayant eu l'autorisation de Zeus d'effectuer ce rapt. (Th 912-914

). Dès lors, Perséphone habite sous la terre avec le dieu souterrain (Th 767-768

), dans un domaine - l'Hadès - gardé par le terrible Cerbère (Th 774

).
Loin d'habiter perpétuellement sous terre, les Hymnes Orphiques

précisent que Perséphone ne vit qu'une partie de son temps dans l'Hadès ; elle retourne sur terre, en compagnie de sa mère, tous les ans. Cet événement est au centre des mystères célébrés à Éleusis (Parfum des Saisons

).
Les enfants de Perséphone, selon la théogonie orphique, sont nombreux. Il s'agit des Erinnyes, d'Eribrémétos (Parfum de Perséphonè

), des Euménides, conçues avec Zeus (Parfum de Euménides

), de la Nymphe Mèlinoè, conçue tout à la fois avec Zeus et Hadès (Parfum de Mèlinoè

), et, semble-t-il, d'Adonis (Parfum d'Adônis

).
Perséphone entretien des rapports étroits avec Dionysos : Dionysos fête avec les Nymphes sa naissance autour de son domaine (Parfum d'Amphiétès

; Parfum de Sémélè

; Parfum des Nèréides

) ; il est son protégé (Parfum de Liknitès

) et son conseiller (Parfum de Dionysos

).
Après Dionysos, Hermès, le guide des âmes, est une autre figure divine qui côtoie Perséphone. De par sa fonction, il parcourt son royaume (Parfum de Hermès souterrain

).
Homère, dans l'Iliade

, dresse le portrait d'une Perséphone, mère des Erinnyes, au centre des malédictions des hommes :
- Phœnix, sur l'ordre de sa mère délaissée, séduit la concubine de son père. Ce dernier, furieux, demanda aux Erinnyes que Phœnix n'ait jamais la joie de porter sur ses genoux un fils. Zeus et Perséphone exécutèrent son vœu (Il. IX

).
- Méléagre connut aussi la colère des Erinnyes, sa mère ayant supplié Hadès et Perséphone de le punir de la mort de son frère (Il. IX

).

L'Odyssée

dresse le portrait de Perséphone en tant que reine. A ce titre, elle fait partie des dieux privilégiés auxquels Zeus prête l'égide (Od, XI

). Elle règne sur les âmes des morts. Une âme est le pâle écho qui reste d'une personne lorsqu'elle décède ; à ce titre les âmes sont volontiers appelées « ombres ». Seul l'ombre de Tirésias, le divinateur aveugle, possède l'intelligence et la pensée, un don que lui fit Perséphone (Od. X

).
Dans son œuvre, Horace fait quatre fois référence à Proserpine qu'il présente comme le fléau des hommes. Aussi, trouve-t-on la déesse dans une épode consacrée à la sorcière Canidie (Épodes XVII

), dans une complexe ode évoquant le naufrage et la mort sans sépulture (Odes I,28

), dans une satire grinçante où Tirésias se moque d'Ulysse (Satires II,05

), et enfin, à l'occasion d'une ode consacrée à un arbre qui faillit tuer le poète (Odes II,13

).
Une interprétation classique du mythe est de voir dans Perséphone enfermée au royaume des morts, les grains de blés ensevelis sous la terre en automne et en hiver. Le retour de Perséphone auprès de sa mère correspondrait au retour du printemps, puis de l'été, c'est-à-dire à la germination et à l'épanouissement des plantes.
On peut aussi considérer qu'invoquée avec Déméter durant les rites initiatiques aux mystères d’Eleusis, Perséphone représente le refoulement, la descente dans le subconscient pour y découvrir l’intime connaissance de soi. Ensuite, par sa mère Déméter, qui a donné le pain aux hommes, un sens sera donné à la vie humaine à travers la spiritualisation du désir et la recherche de la transcendance.