politics: December 2007 Archives

Benazir Bhutto, chief Pakistani opposition leader, former Prime Minister and vocal critic of General Musharraf's recent actions, was assassinated today:

Ms. Bhutto, 54, was shot in the neck or head, according to differing accounts, as she stood in the open sunroof of a car and waved to crowds. Seconds later a suicide attacker detonated his bomb, damaging one of the cars in her motorcade, killing more than 20 people and wounding 50, the Interior Ministry said.

News of her death sent angry protesters swarming the emergency ward of the nearby hospital, where doctors declared Ms. Bhutto dead at 6:16 p.m. Supporters later jostled to carry her bare wooden coffin as it began its journey to her hometown, Larkana, in southern Pakistan, for burial. In Karachi and other cities, frenzied crowds vented their rage, blocking the streets, burning tires and throwing stones.

A nuclear power has the head of the army declare martial law, oust their Supreme Court Justices, flout democratic rule, and then the opposition leader is assassinated while leaving a political rally... This is what should be getting attention, not Iran.

Oh, that's right, admitting the situation's bad in Pakistan would entail The White House admitting they made a grave error in trusting and aiding Musharraf. Silly me, thinking The White House would admit to their mistakes.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report will be returning in January, sans writers if the strike isn't over by then, says Comedy Central:

'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart' and 'The Colbert Report' will resume production on January 7 with both shows returning to air that night without their respective writing staffs. The January 7 return follows a scheduled two-week, end-of-year hiatus that was previously built into the shows' production calendars. We continue to hold out hope for a swift resolution to the current stalemate that will enable the shows to be complete again.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert:

We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence.

Well, it certainly won't be the same, but dear goodness at least we won't have to entertain thoughts of kidnapping Jon Stewart in order to get our fill of wry, witty campaign commentary.

ForeignPolicy.com has a list of the top 10 foreign policy stories you may have missed (if you're not a foreign policy nut like some of us.)

Number 1? The beginning of the cyberwars:

The year 2007 will be remembered as the beginning of the cyberwars. In late April, Western experts were caught off guard when a barrage of cyberattacks emanating from Russia crippled the banking, police, and government offices of Estonia. Many called it the world's first full-scale cyberinvasion. Then in June, Pentagon officials accused the Chinese military of hacking into a computer network used by top aides to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Near the end of the year, Britain's MI5 intelligence service sent a confidential letter to the CEOs of major multinationals warning them that the Chinese army was probing the cyberdefenses of their companies.

This emerging threat may explain why in September the U.S. Air Force quietly decided to form a Cyberspace Command. The new Cyberspace Command, due to become fully operational by October 2009, will be charged with helping to guard against such threats.

Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken this long for the US Military to form a command centre to take care of cyber-threats. So far, such defense had lain in the hands of intelligence gathering agencies like the NSA or CIA, that, while they have expertise in security issues, don't have the resources needed for full on network and computer infrastructure maintenance and defence. They're intelligence gathering services, after all, not defence agencies.

The questions that comes up is: will the Air Force seek to recruit some of the best qualified people to work as these cyberwarriors? I ask this because some of the best people are former black-hat hackers (black-hat refers to malicious hackers) that have turned their knowledge of systems penetration tactics into a skill set in the securities consulting business. Somehow, I think the Air Force would find that pill a little hard to swallow with their attitude tests and psychological profiling.

Update: I forgot the link to the ForeignPolicy.com article. It's now been added. Way to forget the basic premise, Ed.

Reuters has released their slideshow of the 2007 "Pictures of the Year." It's always amazing to see how much can happen in one year.

WARNING: The link resizes your window. I really, really hate it when websites resize my window. It's incredibly bad interface design. Leave my window how I want it, damn it. You're not the only tab open in my window, so hands off!

The title sequence for the movie The Kingdom has a surprisingly good recap of the history of Saudi-US relations:

I agree with this YouTube commenter:

Yeah, this is a nice, quick Hollywood recap of some of the history...Can you imagine the impact of production quality like this on educational films? Kids would start loving history class.

Indeed.

Via Kottke.

Times Online has a damning article on the US claiming it can legally kidnap British citizens, curtailing extradition procedures:

A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.

Great breaking news from Venezuela: President Hugo Chavez has accepted a referendum loss that would have provided for unlimited presidential terms and other constitutional changes:

The most controversial amendment would do away with term limits, thereby allowing the 53-year-old former paratrooper, who has already served almost eight years in power, to hold it indefinitely as long as he is re-elected.

If the amendments were approved, Chavez could have run for president in seven-year terms.

At present, the president's term runs six years, and current law would not allow Chavez to run again after his term ends in 2012.

The New York Times has an op-ed article by Stephanie Coontz regarding the sorry state of marriage law today, in respect to gay unions:

As Nancy Polikoff, an American University law professor, argues, the marriage license no longer draws reasonable dividing lines regarding which adult obligations and rights merit state protection. A woman married to a man for just nine months gets Social Security survivor’s benefits when he dies. But a woman living for 19 years with a man to whom she isn’t married is left without government support, even if her presence helped him hold down a full-time job and pay Social Security taxes. A newly married wife or husband can take leave from work to care for a spouse, or sue for a partner’s wrongful death. But unmarried couples typically cannot, no matter how long they have pooled their resources and how faithfully they have kept their commitments.