The American Bear

› Egypt politicians discuss sabotaging Ethiopian dam on live TV | Al Akhbar English

Egyptian politicians holding talks with President Mohammed Mursi Monday were unwittingly broadcast on live TV brainstorming ideas to sabotage an Ethiopian dam.

Seated around a large table, the politicians thinking this was a closed meeting began to suggest ways to stop Ethiopia from diverting the Blue Nile for a massive dam project.

Ayman Nour, head of the liberal Ghad Party, suggested spreading rumors that Egypt was buying military planes in order to put “pressure” on Ethiopia, he said.

He also suggested Cairo send political, intelligence and military teams to Addis Ababa because “we need to intervene in their domestic affairs.”

Yunis Makhyun, who heads the extreme Islamist Nur Party, said the dam constituted a “strategic danger for Egypt,” requiring Cairo to support Ethiopian rebels “which would put pressure on the Ethiopian government.”

An aide to Mursi later apologized after for failing to inform politicians that they were live on air.

“Due to the importance of the topic it was decided at the last minute to air the meeting live. I forgot to inform the participants about the changes,” presidential aide for political affairs Pakinam El-Sharkawi wrote on Twitter. “I apologize for any embarrassment caused to the political leaders.”

The meeting, a huge embarrassment both for the presidency and the opposition members who attended, caused a storm of ridicule and anger in the media.

“A scandal in front of the world,” read the headline of the independent daily Al-Tahrir.

Popular talk show host Reem Magued, who aired parts of the meeting on her show, said: “It’s true that we asked for transparency from the government but not like this, not to the point of scandal.”

Ethiopia has begun diverting the Blue Nile 500 meters from its natural course to construct a $4.2 billion hydroelectric project known as Grand Renaissance Dam.

The first phase of construction is expected to be complete in three years, with a capacity of 700 megawatts. Once complete the dam will have a capacity of 6,000 megawatts.

Egypt believes its “historic rights” to the Nile are guaranteed by two treaties from 1929 and 1959 which allow it 87 percent of the Nile’s flow and give it veto power over upstream projects.

But a new deal was signed in 2010 by other Nile Basin countries, including Ethiopia, allowing them to work on river projects without Cairo’s prior agreement.

› The Google Glass feature no one is talking about

Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device – every single day, everywhere they go – on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.

And that, my friends, is the experience that Google Glass creates. That is the experience we should be thinking about. The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.

Just think: if a million Google Glasses go out into the world and start storing audio and video of the world around them, the scope of Google search suddenly gets much, much bigger, and that search index will include you. Let me paint a picture. Ten years from now, someone, some company, or some organization, takes an interest in you, wants to know if you’ve ever said anything they consider offensive, or threatening, or just includes a mention of a certain word or phrase they find interesting. A single search query within Google’s cloud – whether initiated by a publicly available search, or a federal subpoena, or anything in between – will instantly bring up documentation of every word you’ve ever spoken within earshot of a Google Glass device.

This is the discussion we should have about Google Glass. The tech community, by all rights, should be leading this discussion. Yet most techies today are still chattering about whether they’ll look cool wearing the device.

(Source: azspot)

› US Apologizes for Fake-Bomb Panic in Norway

The US State Department has officially apologized today for causing a city-wide panic in Oslo, Norway forcing the evacuation of the nation’s royal palace and much of the city’s downtown after the discovery of a fake bomb on an embassy vehicle.

The bomb had been placed on the vehicle as part of a training drill, and then they forgot it was there until security guards discovered it when the vehicle was trying to reenter embassy grounds.

The discovery sparked a full scale security alert, leading to special forces deployments around the embassy and panic in the surrounding area. A car bomb in downtown Oslo was the beginning of last year’s massacre by Anders Breivik, and security was needless to say spooked by the discovery.

The State Department expressed “regret” for the disturbance but defended the calls to panic after the discovery, saying it proves that they “take any potential threat seriously,” even one they invented themselves.

(Source: jayaprada)

› ALEC Exposed, for 24 Hours

When Florida Rep. Rachel Burgin (R- 56) introduced a bill in November calling on the federal government to reduce taxes for corporations (HM 685), she made an embarrassing mistake. Rep. Burgin was introducing a bill she had received from the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council.  A bill written by the Tax Foundation, corporate members of ALEC’s ‘Tax and Fiscal Policy task force” and a group founded and funded by major corporate interests, including the billionaire Koch brothers.

All ALEC model resolutions contain a boilerplate paragraph, describing ALEC’s adherence to free market principles and limited government.  When legislators introduce one of ALEC’s bills, they normally remove this paragraph. Sometimes (but only sometimes) legislators will make some slight alterations to anALEC model bill,perhaps to include something specific to them or to their state. Rep. Burgin didn’t do that.  Instead she introduced a bill that was the same as the model word-for-word, forgetting even to remove the paragraph naming ALEC and describing its principles.

(Source: sarahlee310)

› Apparent string of errors unties WikiLeaks' bundle of secret cables