Italy’s first black minister, Cecile Kyenge, was greeted by nooses hanging from lampposts in the city of Pescara. Posters proclaiming “Immigration, the noose of the people!” were alongside the nooses and the group putting up the posters was a far-right group known as Forza Nuova. We can put that group in the same hateful category as the Golden Dawn in Greece. Earlier, an Italian senator compared Ms Kyenge to an “orangutan.” In virtually every country of the world there is an unsettling explicit merging of the issues of race and immigration–a highly volatile mix in an economic slowdown.
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has given an interview on Face the Nation in which he claimed that Iran was “weeks away” from developing a nuclear bomb capability. Although the new Iranian President, Rouhani, has made some conciliatory statements to the P5+1 (the five Permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany), the Prime Minister believes those statements to be dilatory and not significant enough to warrant more time for negotiations. There is no indication that the US has changed its position, but the pressure from Israel toward military action against Iran seems to be increasing. But an Israeli attack on Iran would only stiffen the power of the government of Iran, and likely lead to a far more rigid and dangerous pattern.
The revelation that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting information on communications of virtually anyone who uses a telephone and the internet was astonishing, not because of the fact of the spying, but because the scale of the spying was incomprehensible. Apparently, the amount of information being collected is even larger than we had initially thought. A British program, Tempora, collects 21 million gigabytes per day and stores the data for a month. This information is also shared with the NSA. The idea of privacy has become a naive relic.
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