US commandos parachuted into North Korea: report

28 May

US paratroopers are dropped by a US airforce C17 (not pictured) during a training exercise over Maniago (AFP/File, Giuseppe Cacace)

WASHINGTON — US and South Korean special forces have been parachuting into North Korea to gather intelligence about underground military installations, a US officer has said in comments carried in US media.

Army Brigadier General Neil Tolley, commander of US special forces in South Korea, told a conference held in Florida last week that Pyongyang had built thousands of tunnels since the Korean war, The Diplomat reported.

“The entire tunnel infrastructure is hidden from our satellites,” Tolley said, according to The Diplomat, a current affairs magazine. “So we send (South Korean) soldiers and US soldiers to the North to do special reconnaissance.”

“After 50 years, we still don’t know much about the capability and full extent” of the underground facilities,” he said, in comments reported by the National Defense Industrial Association’s magazine on its website.

Tolley said the commandos were sent in with minimal equipment to facilitate their movements and minimize the risk of detection by North Korean forces.

At least four of the tunnels built by Pyongyang go under the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Korea, Tolley said.

“We don’t know how many we don’t know about,” he admitted.

Among the facilities identified are 20 air fields that are partially underground, and thousands of artillery positions.

In February, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported that had built at least two new tunnels at a nuclear testing site, likely in preparation for a new test.

Source

Four witnesses in Trayvon Martin case change their stories

28 May

George Zimmerman, at a bond hearing in Sanford, Fla., faces a second-degree murder charge in the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. (Gary W. Green, Orlando Sentinel / Pool Photo / April 20, 2012)

Three key witnesses in the second-degree murder case against George Zimmerman change their accounts in ways that could damage the defendant. The fourth abandons her initial story altogether.

By Rene Stutzman and Jeff Weiner

ORLANDO, Fla. — Evidence released last week in the second-degree murder case against George Zimmerman shows four key witnesses made major changes in what they say they saw and heard on the rainy February night when he fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

Three changed their stories in ways that could damage Zimmerman. One man who initially told police Martin was atop Zimmerman punching him “MMA-style” — a reference to Mixed Marital Arts — later said he was no longer sure about the punches. The teenager may have simply been keeping Zimmerman pinned to the ground, he said.

A fourth witness abandoned her initial story — that she saw one person chasing another. Now she says she saw a single figure running.

They were re-interviewed in mid-March, after Sanford, Fla., police handed off the case to State Atty. Norm Wolfinger. The case changed hands again when Florida Gov. Rick Scott appointed a special prosecutor.

Zimmerman, 28, was arrested April 11 on a charge of second-degree murder. He has pleaded not guilty, claiming self-defense, and is out on bond awaiting trial.

Martin was staying with his father’s fiancee, who lives in the Retreat at Twin Lakes, a gated community. Zimmerman called police to report him as a suspicious person. Then he followed Martin, who was returning from a convenience store with a bag of Skittles and an iced tea. An altercation ensued and Martin was shot in the chest.

The witnesses changed their stories in these key ways:

• Witness 2: A young woman who lives in the gated community was interviewed twice by Sanford police and once by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

She told authorities that she had taken out her contact lenses just before the incident. In her first recorded interview with Sanford police four days after the shooting, she told lead Investigator Chris Serino, “I saw two guys running. Couldn’t tell you who was in front, who was behind.”

She stepped away from her window, and when she looked again, she “saw a fistfight. Just fists. I don’t know who was hitting who.”

A week later, she added a detail when talking again to Serino: During the chase, the two figures had been 10 feet apart.

That all changed when she was re-interviewed March 20 by a state agent. That time, she recalled catching a glimpse of just one running figure, she told investigator John Batchelor, and she heard the person more than saw him.

“I couldn’t tell you if it was a man, a woman, a kid, black or white. I couldn’t tell you because it was dark and because I didn’t have my contacts on or glasses…. I just know I saw a person out there.”

• Witness 12: A young mother who is also a neighbor in the town-home community never gave a recorded interview to Sanford police, according to prosecution records released last week. She first sat down for an audio-recorded interview with a state agent March 20, more than three weeks after the shooting.

During that session, she said she saw two people on the ground immediately after the shooting and was not sure who was on top.

“I don’t know which one…. All I saw when they were on the ground was dark colors,” she said.

Six days later, however, she said she was sure: It was Zimmerman on top, she told trial prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda during a 2 1/2-minute recorded session.

“I know after seeing the TV of what’s happening, comparing their sizes; I think Zimmerman was definitely on top because of his size,” she said.

• Witness 6: This witness lived a few feet from where Martin and Zimmerman fought. On the night of the shooting, he told Serino he saw a black man on top of a lighter-skinned man “just throwing down blows on the guy, MMA-style.”

He also said the one calling for help was “the one being beat up,” a reference to Zimmerman.

But three weeks later, when he was interviewed by a state agent, the man said he was no longer sure which one called for help.

“I truly can’t tell who, after thinking about it, was yelling for help just because it was so dark out on that sidewalk,” he said.

He also said he was no longer sure Martin was throwing punches. The teenager may have merely pinned Zimmerman to the ground, he said.

He did not equivocate about who was on top, however.

“The black guy was on top,” he said.

• Witness 13: He is important because he talked with Zimmerman and watched the way he behaved immediately after the shooting, before police arrived.

After this neighbor heard gunfire, he went outside and spotted Zimmerman standing there with “blood on the back of his head,” he told Sanford police the night of the shooting.

Zimmerman told him that Martin “was beating up on me, so I had to shoot him,” the witness told Serino. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, then asked the witness to call his wife, Shellie, and tell her what had happened.

In two subsequent interviews about a month later — one with a state investigator and one with De la Rionda — the witness described Zimmerman’s demeanor in greater detail, adding that he spoke as if the shooting were no big deal.

Zimmerman’s tone, the witness said, was “not like, ‘I can’t believe I just shot someone!’ — it was more like, ‘Just tell my wife I shot somebody’ … like it was nothing.”

Source

“We didn’t know it was impossible, so we did it!” The Quebec Student Strike celebrates its 100th day

27 May

by Malav Kanuga

Origins of an unlimited general strike (“grève générale illimitée”)

Students in Quebec are marking their 100th day of an unlimited general strike on Tuesday, May 22nd, the culmination of the most stunning mass protest movements of recent months and North America’s largest student movement in years. In fact, the mobilizations in Quebec might just be Canada’s Arab Spring.

Students have been organizing against tuition hikes for nearly one and a half years, when the Quebec government first proposed to raise tuition fees by 75% over five years (amended to 82% over seven years by the government at the end of April). Before the general strike began in February, protests, demos, trainings, letter writing campaigns and attempts to negotiate in good faith with the government were consistently met with obstinate silence from the Charest administration. For the students there has been a growing sense of urgency and a shared recognition that increased tuition means a heavier student debt burden, hundreds of more hours a year spent working instead of studying, less access for working class and lower class students, and a shift in university culture toward the market, the commodification of education, the financialization of student life, and the privatization of the university.

Even if fees increase, Quebec students would be paying less than other provinces in Canada, a gap the provincial government has been aiming to close. But so far every time the administration has proposed to do so, students have gone on strike. Deep in the Quebec struggle is a culture of solidarity and security, a social fabric, a sense of community that endures and mobilizes a powerful defense of their commonwealth. Call it what you will, it is precisely this that Margaret Thatcher declared war upon on May 1st 1981 when she said that the project of neoliberalism is to change the heart and soul of a ‘collectivist’ spirit, and its means is economics. Indeed, the Finance Minister of the Quebec Liberal government recently called its austerity policies “a cultural revolution” and they are not shy about their plan to reorganize Quebecois life through fiscal discipline. The Modèle québécois of social collectivism (in its traditional social democratic sensibility, but also, and more importantly, its directly democratic ethic that has emerged in the course of the last 14 weeks of strike) is the target of these policies, specifically through education and health. This is what explains the Charest government’s attempts to break the strike and destroy the student unions.

Student unionism is particularly strong in Quebec, and for a reason: they are inherently political, engaging, and participatory, using principles of direct democracy in weekly general assemblies. A dispersal of power, where students have a direct role in shaping the culture of university life through the policies and activities of the unions has been the backbone of the growing movement against tuition hikes, and the secret to why it has been able to mobilize such a broad and popular base. Yet, while a rejection of political parties and emphasis on direct democracy and militancy infuse the movement, there are in reality a range of unions—from the combative wing of the movement, such as the Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (ASSÉ) that demands free education, to more corporatist and mainstream student unions that integrate with bourgeois political parties.

But this struggle represents more than students. It represents an attack on the middle class and lower income families, their sense of social cohesion, and the social entitlement and equality of access to public services amid rising cost of living. The strikes register across these domains of everyday life, in the university, in the family home, the workplace, and the hospital, where increasingly the same growing resentment of the imposition of austerity measures in Quebec emerge, as the tuition increases coincide with the first ever “health tax,” alongside a 20% increase in hydro rates, the raising of the federal retirement age to 67, as well as mass layoffs.

A chronology of the last weeks of the movement

On November 10th, over 200,000 students went on a one-day strike, and 30,000 took to the streets. 20,000 of which marched directly to Charest’s Montreal office to demonstrate against rising fees. Hundreds, including the Quebec Women’s Federation, shut down the Montreal Stock Exchange in mid-February, a site dear to the 1%, and where the Charest government, who had so far been ignoring the budding movement, would certainly devote its rapt attention.

By February 23rd, forty thousand post-secondary students across the province joined the unlimited general strike. Thousands of students occupied the Jacques Cartier Bridge. If the tactical approaches of the movement had been ignored by university administrations and the provincial government in its first weeks, by March 22nd, student unions such as CLASSE (The Coalition large de l’Association pour une Solidarite Syndaicale Etudiante), whose 80,000 members have been leading the strike, couldn’t be missed. Since then, they have shifted focus toward targeting governmental offices, ministries, and crown corporations, placing strategic emphasis on economic disruption, an approach to direct action that has had precedence in many earlier urban protest movements in the last decade or so.

On March 22nd, as over 300,000 students had been on strike, a massive march in the streets inaugurated the Maple Spring (“Printemps Érable,” a play on words in French), with university after university, and college after college, going on strike. Two months later, on Tuesday, May 22nd, the Quebec students’ unlimited strike will celebrate its 100th day, already one of the largest student mobilizations in recent history. During 100 days of strike, contempt, and resistance, students have mobilized against steep tuition increases, austerity and debt, and the criminalization of the right to education.

On Friday, a friend Lilian Radovac, who has been active in the student mobilizations in Montreal, described a cultural shift expanding in the cracks of everyday austerity:

“For years, May ’68 was a dry, dusty thing other people theorized about in poor translations, but these last months, something like it has been happening in the crevices of our vie quotidienne. How strange that it is just there, between bus rides and doctor’s appointments and trips to the grocery store, a thing that is so extraordinary and so bizarrely normal at the same time. The metro has been shut down by smoke bombs? Oh well, I feel like a walk anyway.

Did it feel like this when OWS started? It must have.”

Each week, in local general assemblies of student associations, students have voted to sustain the ‘renewable general strike’. With over 180 different unions representing some 170,000 students, university departments and the government can no longer hope the movement will dwindle on its own, and are increasingly forced to repress the movement actively. Indeed, days after the Education Minister Line Beauchamp resigned on May 14th over failed negotiations with student leaders, the Quebec Government enacted a special emergency law.

Bill 78 specifically targets the massive student assemblies and mobilizations in order to break the growing strike and destroy the power of the student union. One member of the Quebec political opposition used the term “Loi Fuck” to refer to the blunt and draconian tool that outlaws public assembly, imposes harsh fines for strike activity (even tacit support), and effectively makes organizing an arrestable offense. The bill also gives more power to the police in enforcing student protest. Indeed, during the last many weeks of escalating street demos, police have repeatedly preempted demonstrations with CS gas, sound grenades, ‘blast disperser’ grenades, and rubber bullets. Nevertheless, it is not clear how this law will be used in the coming days and weeks, or whether it will be successful in intimidating students.

An emergency law announced on the previous Wednesday “suspended” the semester for many CEGEP (academic and vocational college) and university students, with provisions for classes to be postponed until August. Provisions of Bill 78 that followed include:

- Fines of between $1,000 and $5,000 for anyone who prevents someone from entering an educational institution.
– Steep penalties of $7,000 and $35,000 for anyone deemed a ‘student leader’ and between $25,000 and $125,000 for unions or student associations. Fines double after the first offense.
– Plans for public demonstrations involving more than 50 people (originally 8) must be submitted to the police eight hours in advance, and must detail itinerary, duration and time at which they are being held.
– Offering encouragement, tacitly supporting, or promoting protest at a school, either is subject to punishment.

In Montreal, specifically, a new municipal anti-mask law accompanies Bill 78, and another has been proposed at the federal level. With Charest’s attempts to legislate the end of the student movement, the struggle has deepened and is now at a turning point. Yet, on its 100th day of an unlimited general strike, the movement does not show any signs of slowing down or veering from its median tactic of general assemblies, its preferred direct action orientation, and its culture of horizontal democracy.

The return of the red square and our right to assembly

Students in Quebec have popularized the symbol of the “red square” to signify being financially “squarely in the red” amid tuition hikes, cuts in social entitlements, and the specter of spiraling student and consumer debt. As their movement has powerfully reminded us, we are all ‘in the red’ as long as the 1% imposes upon us austerity, debt, and repression.

The politics of austerity and the increased policing of everyday life reveal themselves in these instances to be inseparably linked. We can see the direct link between tuition hikes and the criminalization of assembly in Quebec, just as we can see Bloomberg’s management through “free speech zones” of political protest, the silencing of media, and the increased police aggression in suppressing the Occupy Wall Street movement. Thus, solidarity with Quebec students is also important work in defense of our right to demonstrate here and everywhere. When times of crisis provoke ramped up police power and allow desperate politicians to pass “emergency laws” that target unquiet sectors of the population, we are certain that the class balance of present society is threatened. But it is a cautious joy we should preach, along with the sober insight that without powerful international solidarity and coordination, as James Baldwin once wrote to Angela Davis, “if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”

The police backlash—through intimidation, repression, and wanton brutality—we have faced in NYC for trying to assemble is enormous. On May 2nd, students at Brooklyn College were met with police hostility as they demonstrated against policies that restrict access to education for lower-income students. Wherever the site of struggle, the very idea of opening up space for collective imagination is policed. But we are not battling on the plane of the imaginary. An attack in Quebec on the right to assemble, if unchallenged through coordinated international solidarity, will have real and chilling effects on our movements here.

Solidarity in NYC

Speaking about the Quebec students’ strike in New York, there is often enthusiasm and support, if not bewilderment upon learning of the size and power of their movement, something that the media blackout in the U.S. has successfully eclipsed. But there is also a bit of shoulder shrugging. “Are they really on strike for $250 dollars?” one unmoved passerby queried as we were wrapping up an assembly in the park on Sunday. Indeed more popular education needs to be done here on the plight of students in the climate of this crisis. But the student struggle, here in NYC as in Quebec, is not only a struggle for the student: it is about access to education for all regardless of economic circumstance, a challenge to the very economic and political planning that has been transforming our cities into spaces for the elite over the last three decades.

This past weekend, several groups from Occupy Wall Street and other organizations held an assembly to address these “emergency laws” and discuss solidarity with Quebec on Tuesday. Immediately a robust day was in the works: At 2PM on Tuesday, the time marches are slated to begin in Montreal, demonstrators in NYC will gather at the Quebec Government Offices at 1 Rockefeller Plaza. The Free University, which organized a day of free education in Madison Square Park on May Day, is hosting a pop-up occupation open to all students, educators, and community members. At 5PM, there will be a gathering on the north side of the fountain in Washington Square Park, where people will paint banners, make ‘book bloc’ shields, and cut red squares for the evening march. At 6PM, there will be a teach in/speak out assembly about the Quebec student strike, the emergency laws, and the criminalization of dissent, followed by a number of self-organized lectures, workshops, skill-shares, and discussions.

In coordination with Quebec students who have been holding nightly assemblies, there will also be an assembly and march originating from Washington Square Park at 8PM to celebrate the successes of the student movement and to march against repressive anti-protest laws worldwide.

On this day, in solidarity with our sisters and brothers in Quebec, we will paint the town red.

Source

RIP Adam Yauch (MCA); Thoughts on the Beastie Boys and Tibet

27 May

First things first, RIP to a Adam Yauch, a hip-hop innovator whose contribution to the art form is widely recognised. The Beastie Boys form an important chapter in hip-hop history. Even as white, middle-class kids whose main effect was to make hip-hop more accessible to other white, middle-class kids, they were generally respectful of the art form and of the communities that created it. Chuck D commented on Twitter:

“Adam & the boys put us on our first tour 25 years & 79 tours ago. They ARE essential to our beginning, middle and today. A very real cat R.I.P MCA”

While Yauch deserves respect as an artist and innovator, the aspect of his life that has earned him the most praise in the liberal press is his activism in favour of Tibetan independence. This is interesting. While the press censors musicians who call for Free Palestine, it lauds artists who call for Free Tibet. And while western governments actively support the Israeli government against the Palestinian movement for national self-determination, they actively support the Tibetan independence movement against the government of the People’s Republic of China. Why the discrepancy? In short: because Israel is a ‘friend’ and China is an ‘enemy’. The west has consistently used the issue of Tibet in order to paint China as an evil, ruthless coloniser, thereby making it morally abhorrent, even to those that support other aspects of Chinese politics (you know… little things like the most significant poverty alleviation programme of all time).

Every western liberal knows that Tibet must be free. And yet 99.9% of them haven’t got the slightest clue as to the history of Tibet, or the relationship between Tibet and the rest of China. Wearing that ‘Free Tibet’ t-shirt is simply the easiest, most acceptable and least confrontational way of saying “I am a good person”, absolving the wearer of all responsibility for developing their knowledge and understanding.

In fact, the issue of Tibet is not an open-and-shut case of Chinese colonialism. And perhaps more importantly, there are better ways for people in the ‘first world’ to be active in pursuit of a fairer, more peaceful world. The Beastie Boys were/are privileged white Jewish kids from affluent families in New York. They have made a fortune, and built a musical legacy, on the basis of a culture created by people of African descent in the poorest districts of New York. Instead of taking up a cause celebre which poses zero challenge to the US ruling circles, surely it would be more appropriate to use their privilege and wealth in support of the oppressed communities that hip-hop grew out of?

Incidentally, New York wasn’t always called New York – it was given that name by English colonisers in 1664. Native Americans have lived in that area for an estimated 12,000 years. Wealthy European settlers could consider supporting indigenous rights and power as an outlet for their activism. But that would be a bit difficult. It would mean standing up to their government; it would mean getting labeled in the press as subversives rather than lauded as heroes; it would mean taking on corporate interests; it would mean not sharing the same views as George W Bush. It doesn’t take any courage for a wealthy North American or European to stand up to ‘Chinese tyranny’. The Chinese are an easy target. The west is generally anti-China to begin with, and there’s a prevailing sense of indignation that they are no longer our colonial subjects (things were soooo much better in China back when we fought wars for our right to get the Chinese masses hooked on opium). In the US this sentiment is mixed up with the intellectual legacy of McCarthyism, which means that anything called ‘communist’ is automatically considered demonic. The prevailing hatred only grows as China is developing into an economically and politically strong country, the number one challenge to the total dominance of US imperialism.

One international cause which doesn’t typically attract the support of many wealthy western celebrities (especially Jewish people from New York) is that of Palestinian national self-determination. Why not demand an end to Israeli oppression of Palestinians? There are few such clear-cut cases of ongoing colonial occupation, organised and paid for by the west. Opposition to Israeli occupation is a lot more valid than joining in with the fashionable Hollywood-liberal cries of ‘Free Tibet’. However, I can’t find any record of the Beastie Boys voicing their support for Palestine. Indeed, they played concerts in Israel in 1995.

So in celebrating the legacy of the Beastie Boys (Paul’s Boutique is playing in my headphones as I write this), I suggest we emulate their creativity rather than their activism. Be an activist, for sure, but pick the right side!

Source

Ludicrous Bill In New York State Senate Endeavors To End All Anonymous Posting On The Internet

26 May

If the bill passes, get ready to hand over your full name and home address

You know SOPA and you know CISPA, so you might think you have a good handle on crazy Internet legislation. You might think you’ve seen the crazy stuff, but unless you’ve seen Thomas F. O’Mara’s bill S06779, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Currently sitting in the New York State Senate, 6779 proposes that any and all anonymous posts online should be subject to takedown by a webmaster if the anonymous poster refuses to attach their legal name to the post and verify their legal name, IP address, and home address. Luckily, this bill is probably too insane to pass, and definitely too laughably ludicrous to even enforce.

Here’s the horrifying text from the bill:

A web site administrator upon request shall remove any comments posted on his or her web site by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP adress, legal name, and home address are accurate. All web site administrators shall have a contact number or e-mail address posted for such removal requests, clearly visible in any sections where comments are posted.

There are almost too many things to rip apart in this bill.

First, and most obviously, the amount of information required to “validate” an anonymous posts is utterly ridiculous. The bill endeavors to turn literally every account on the Internet capable of posting into the equivalent of a verified Twitter account. Granted, it’s only on a “request” basis, but if you have been keeping an eye on how DMCA takedown requests have been used, you know full well that request-based, no-questions-asked takedown policies are ripe for abuse. Oh, and they want your home address. Your home address.

Which leads us to the second part of the question; who do you need to verify your legal name, IP address and home address to? The webmaster? Some new regulatory agency? No one in particular? It’s one thing to have a bill that requires Internet users to start handing out their home addresses — one of the few pieces of information in this day and age that remains somewhat sacred — but to not specify to who, or guarantee any security is another.

There’s also the problem of the IP address, which has been shown to be a totally horrible indication of anything; everyone keeps trying to use them to narrow down specific people. That being the case, it makes a disgusting sort of sense that the same flawed logic be included here as well. It does seem, however, that maybe the bill’s authors know how weak this really is, which might be the reason for the inclusion of a home address to sort of balance things out.

And while having to share this kind of information by law is kind of disconcerting in any context, it’s especially troubling in the context of anonymous contents, considering the kind of comments you could probably connect to potential violence are often made anonymously. It’s one (terrible) thing to force people to walk around giving out their home address, it’s an even worse one to do it right as they’re getting into a heated cyber-argument.

All that said, you shouldn’t ignore the last little part of that excerpt which states that the administrator’s contact information must be “clearly visible in any sections where comments are posted.” Not only is the web administrator now effectively on-call 24/7, but you have to find a way to plaster his information practically everywhere. What a nightmare.

The upside is that this law, if it were passed by some chance, would be practically impossible to enforce. Most likely, it’s some kind of symbolic push possibly related to cyber-bullying. The result this law would most likely have would be the wholesale elimination of pretty much every comment section everywhere, because who in their right mind would devote the effort and manpower to curating it so closely. Instead, we might see a migration back toward non-persistent anonymous interactions like 4chan, or even chat, like IRC. Of course, we’ll probably never see that happen, because such an insane, loosely-worded and wide reaching bill could never actually pass into law. Right?

Source

North Carolina pastor’s anti-gay sermon spurs protest

26 May

By Steve Lyttle, McClatchy Newspapers

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A North Carolina pastor’s sermon in which he called for gays and lesbians to be placed in a form of concentration camp has spurred a protest planned at the church this Sunday.

A group calling itself Catawba Valley Citizens Against Hate says it plans a peaceful protest Sunday outside Providence Road Baptist Church in Catawba County, an independent Baptist church where the Rev. Charles Worley delivered his controversial homily on May 13.

Worley’s sermon on Mother’s Day has received more than 165,000 views on YouTube.

It also has caused plenty of confusion for the much-larger Providence Baptist Church in Charlotte, where the church’s senior pastor has issued a statement, distancing his church from the Catawba County pastor.

Leaders at the Charlotte church said they thoroughly disagree with Worley’s comments and say they have received a number of angry emails, phone calls and other messages from people who mistook them for the Catawba church.

The Catawba preacher’s remarks came five days after more than 60 percent of North Carolina voters approved a referendum that defined marriage as a civil union between a man and a woman — in effect, outlawing gay marriages.

The church originally placed the video on its website, but it was removed late over the weekend. Providence Road Baptist’s website was not operating Tuesday, possibly due to the large number of people trying to access the site. But the video is still posted on YouTube.

It appears as if the May 13 sermon by Worley was aimed as criticism of President Barack Obama’s announcement days earlier that he supports the right of gay couples to be married. Worley told his congregation that he couldn’t vote for a “baby killer and a homosexual lover.”

After using biblical passages that he said supported his argument, Worley then outlined a plan to put gays and lesbians in confinement.

The 71-year-old minister suggested building a large fence, 100 or 150 miles long, he said. He said lesbians would be put in one area, “and the queers and the homosexuals in another, and have that fence electrified, so they can’t get out.”

“Feed ’em, and you know what?” Worley continued. “In a few years, they’ll die. Do you know why? They can’t reproduce.”

Some members of the congregation can be heard saying “Amen” in response to the pastor’s remarks.

As might be expected, the pastor’s comments have set off an outburst of comments on Internet bulletin boards. Worley himself could not be contacted.

The group planning the protest Sunday is asking for people opposed to Worley’s comments to gather outside the church in Maiden, N.C., for a peaceful demonstration.

“We will not scream, shout or taunt Pastor Worley or his church’s members,” according to a message issued by the group. “We will not vandalize, threaten or injure property or persons.”

Meanwhile, in Charlotte, Dr. Al Cadenhead, senior pastor of Providence Baptist Church, said, “In recent hours, we have been incorrectly identified as the church in another town where hatred and violence have been advocated from the pulpit.

“First of all, we are genuinely Baptist in that we recognize the right of every church to reach out or not to reach out, as that church deems itself to be led.

“Jesus preached a Gospel of love. So do we. Jesus preached that we love our neighbor, whether that neighbor is like us or not.”

Source

Hacktivist claim: We took down city website because of police violence

25 May

A video was posted on YouTube claiming credit for a cyberattack on the City of Chicago website. The video was later taken from public view.

BY NATASHA KORECKI

When the NATO Summit in Chicago was still on the horizon, a group of self-proclaimed “hacktivists” was gearing up.

A member of AntiS3curityOPS, which has taken credit for taking the City of Chicago’s website offline on Sunday, said in an interview on Tuesday it had been prepared for weeks to launch a cyber attack during the NATO meetings — but did so only after protesters reported violent tactics by the Chicago Police Department.

“Like the police we plan for any outcome, we were ready to stand down had they not committed violence,” a member of the group said in an interview via electronic message. The group associates itself with an activist hacking group known as Anonymous, but says it focuses on “police accountability and corruption at all levels of government.

“We had this planned for weeks and we also had a lot of help from other Anon’s as well,” the member said.

The group said it saw violence from police at 8 p.m. Saturday and launched a cyber attack by 9 p.m. that night.

“We are peaceful Hacktivists. We do only harm to those causing harm and hurting innocent people and the corrupt. We act when it’s justified. … No credit card info or phone numbers were at any risk. The public is in no way in danger because of us,” said the unidentified individual who responded to questions sent electronically to AntiS3curityOPS by the Sun-Times.

Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy has said his officers showed tremendous restraint with protesters and used force only as a last recourse.

City officials have not said whether they believe AntiS3curityOPS was responsible for the site going offline.

“At this time, we have no reason to believe any data was stolen from the City’s website or systems,” a city spokesperson said. “The City of Chicago continues to work with appropriate federal authorities to investigate the temporary interruption of access to the City’s website.”

The site appeared to be down several hours Sunday morning.

Because of the NATO component, the U.S. Secret Service immediately became involved in the probe as well as the Chicago Police Department and the FBI’s top Cyber squad, according to law enforcement sources. For its part, law enforcement sources said they were expecting some level of cyber attack over the NATO Summit.

The representative of AntiS3curityOPS would not say if there was a “data breach” but did refer to the incident as a “DDOS,” which stands for Distributed Denial of Service.

Such an attack can temporarily disable a website by flooding it with communications beyond its capacity, said Michael DuBose, a managing director with Kroll who has expertise in cyber investigations.

“These types of attacks are disruptive and often quite costly to the victim organization, but they do not penetrate the website’s database or any other part of the company’s network where personally identifiable information of proprietary information may be stored,” he said.

The group claimed it took offline the Chicago Police Department’s Web site several times over the weekend as well but “we did not access anything” on it.

As for the pending investigation, the member said, “If we we’re [SIC] afraid of trouble, we would not be doing what we do.”

A general Tweet sent out on Tuesday indicated the group has shifted its priority.

“Our campaign against the Manchester, New Hampshire Police Dept. we postponed due to our attacks on NATO and Chicago Police this past 4 days. However, this week we will be reengaging. We didnt forget about you Manchester ♥.”

Source

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