The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom

February 21, 2012 Leave a Comment

by Robert McDowell
WSJ
February 20, 2012

On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year’s end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish “international control over the Internet” through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.

If successful, these new regulatory proposals would upend the Internet’s flourishing regime, which has been in place since 1988. That year, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Australia to agree to a treaty that set the stage for dramatic liberalization of international telecommunications. This insulated the Internet from economic and technical regulation and quickly became the greatest deregulatory success story of all time.

Since the Net’s inception, engineers, academics, user groups and others have convened in bottom-up nongovernmental organizations to keep it operating and thriving through what is known as a “multi-stakeholder” governance model. This consensus-driven private-sector approach has been the key to the Net’s phenomenal success.

In 1995, shortly after it was privatized, only 16 million people used the Internet world-wide. By 2011, more than two billion were online—and that number is growing by as much as half a million every day. This explosive growth is the direct result of governments generally keeping their hands off the Internet sphere.

Net access, especially through mobile devices, is improving the human condition more quickly—and more fundamentally—than any other technology in history. Nowhere is this more true than in the developing world, where unfettered Internet technologies are expanding economies and raising living standards.

Farmers who live far from markets are now able to find buyers for their crops through their Internet-connected mobile devices without assuming the risks and expenses of traveling with their goods. Worried parents are able to go online to locate medicine for their sick children. And proponents of political freedom are better able to share information and organize support to break down the walls of tyranny.

The Internet has also been a net job creator. A recent McKinsey study found that for every job disrupted by Internet connectivity, 2.6 new jobs are created. It is no coincidence that these wonderful developments blossomed as the Internet migrated further away from government control.

Today, however, Russia, China and their allies within the 193 member states of the ITU want to renegotiate the 1988 treaty to expand its reach into previously unregulated areas. Reading even a partial list of proposals that could be codified into international law next December at a conference in Dubai is chilling:

• Subject cyber security and data privacy to international control;

• Allow foreign phone companies to charge fees for “international” Internet traffic, perhaps even on a “per-click” basis for certain Web destinations, with the goal of generating revenue for state-owned phone companies and government treasuries;

• Impose unprecedented economic regulations such as mandates for rates, terms and conditions for currently unregulated traffic-swapping agreements known as “peering.”

• Establish for the first time ITU dominion over important functions of multi-stakeholder Internet governance entities such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit entity that coordinates the .com and .org Web addresses of the world;

• Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work;

• Regulate international mobile roaming rates and practices.

Many countries in the developing world, including India and Brazil, are particularly intrigued by these ideas. Even though Internet-based technologies are improving billions of lives everywhere, some governments feel excluded and want more control.

And let’s face it, strong-arm regimes are threatened by popular outcries for political freedom that are empowered by unfettered Internet connectivity. They have formed impressive coalitions, and their efforts have progressed significantly.

Merely saying “no” to any changes to the current structure of Internet governance is likely to be a losing proposition. A more successful strategy would be for proponents of Internet freedom and prosperity within every nation to encourage a dialogue among all interested parties, including governments and the ITU, to broaden the multi-stakeholder umbrella with the goal of reaching consensus to address reasonable concerns. As part of this conversation, we should underscore the tremendous benefits that the Internet has yielded for the developing world through the multi-stakeholder model.

Upending this model with a new regulatory treaty is likely to partition the Internet as some countries would inevitably choose to opt out. A balkanized Internet would be devastating to global free trade and national sovereignty. It would impair Internet growth most severely in the developing world but also globally as technologists are forced to seek bureaucratic permission to innovate and invest. This would also undermine the proliferation of new cross-border technologies, such as cloud computing.

A top-down, centralized, international regulatory overlay is antithetical to the architecture of the Net, which is a global network of networks without borders. No government, let alone an intergovernmental body, can make engineering and economic decisions in lightning-fast Internet time. Productivity, rising living standards and the spread of freedom everywhere, but especially in the developing world, would grind to a halt as engineering and business decisions become politically paralyzed within a global regulatory body.

Any attempts to expand intergovernmental powers over the Internet—no matter how incremental or seemingly innocuous—should be turned back. Modernization and reform can be constructive, but not if the end result is a new global bureaucracy that departs from the multi-stakeholder model. Enlightened nations should draw a line in the sand against new regulations while welcoming reform that could include a nonregulatory role for the ITU.

Pro-regulation forces are, thus far, much more energized and organized than those who favor the multi-stakeholder approach. Regulation proponents only need to secure a simple majority of the 193 member states to codify their radical and counterproductive agenda. Unlike the U.N. Security Council, no country can wield a veto in ITU proceedings. With this in mind, some estimate that approximately 90 countries could be supporting intergovernmental Net regulation—a mere seven short of a majority.

While precious time ticks away, the U.S. has not named a leader for the treaty negotiation. We must awake from our slumber and engage before it is too late. Not only do these developments have the potential to affect the daily lives of all Americans, they also threaten freedom and prosperity across the globe.

Mr. McDowell is a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission.

Filed under Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, Special Reports, World Tagged with , , , ,

The World Bank’s 28 year-old Depopulation Plan

February 14, 2012 1 Comment

by Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
February 14, 2012

Plans to drastically reduce the world’s population aren’t new. Many organizations and members of the oligarchy have manifested their intention to promote and carry out plans to dramatically reduce — between 80% and 90% — the number of humans that inhabit the Earth. Last week, we presented proof of now the United Nations and well-known philanthropists divest and invest billions of dollars to support campaigns that threaten the lives of millions of people every year. According to the cited sources and documentation in our article UN Pushes for a Global Tax to Finance its Global Socialist System, the UN alone, and in many cases its alliances with rich corporatists or partner organizations spend their budgets implementing programs in third world nations to avoid human reproduction and the development of those nations. In many cases, the application of eugenics or population control programs are a condition to receiving financial aid.

But the UN is not the only corporate-controlled organization that pushes for population reduction. Together with the UN are the World Health Organization, the IMF, and the World Bank, among others. In the case of the World Bank, the record reveals that some of the most recent initiatives date to 1984, when a report was written and presented to the controllers of the Bank. Among other things, it suggests the immediate start of population reduction policies in order to maintain economic growth; mainly for the developed nations. The document titled “World Development Report 1984″, also includes analysis and commentary about issues such as the Recovery or Relapse in the World Economy, Population Change and Development, Population Data Supplement and World Development Indicators. Notice how three of the 4 most important topics have to do directly with population.

The 300-page report from 1984 was the seventh of its kind, meaning that the World Bank’s elite’s thoughts on how to reduce or manage the world’s population was at least that old. We know today that the actual plan to reduce the population to around 500 million people is much older than that, and that this plan has been channeled through several other organizations whose work is to create policies that support the move to get rid off billions of people. Along with these organizations, the elites have partnered with their own corporations to implement policies in fields such as education, resource management, war (civil and otherwise), peace, financial aid, development, commerce, trade and so on, to enforce those policies. In essence, the corporate oligarchy has always controlled all sides.

The report is very clear from the beginning as to how important depopulation is in their plans to control the masses. “What governments and their people do today to influence our demographic future, will set the terms for the development strategy well into the next century. Failure to act now to slow growth is likely to mean a lower quality of life for millions of people.” Note that the World Banks’ strategy is one for the long term. Depopulation policies are being applied and will continue to be applied progressively, not at once. That is exactly what the elites have been doing for decades. They have been using slow-kill weapons such as chemical products in the food supply and other products we consume on a daily basis, but whose effects are only seen years later (fluoride, GMO’s, pesticides, herbicides, BPA, vaccines and others).

The report continues trying to reinforce a fallacy: That poverty and hunger are a consequence of overpopulation. As we have reported in numerous occasions, poverty and hunger have little to do with overpopulation, but have everything to do with monopolistic practices, price speculation, war and political corruption. “The experience of the past decade shows that education, health, and other development measures that raise parents’ hopes for their children, along with widespread access to family planning services, create a powerful combination in reducing fertility.” This last two words describe the main goal of the World Bank. But let’s review the complete quote and re-format it to reflect what the Bank really means. Indoctrination through the current educational system, eugenics through the use of highly toxic medicines along with the promotion of abortion results in reduced fertility.

The humanity hating statements start on page 50 of the report. “Lower GDP growth makes it more difficult for countries to finance programs in education and family planning, for example –that reduce population growth.” This statement is very important, because education or indoctrination through the public education system in developed and not developed countries together with the so-called family planning practices are two of the most effective tools to carry out eugenics today. In many countries, children are taught to hate humanity and that the most important thing is the well-being of animals, insects and mother nature or GAIA. Some NGO’s have even published articles or produced PSA’s that promote the salvation of insects and animals above humans and that humans and animals are equal. Legislation being worked out in Congresses around the world intend to officially consider humans as equals to animals and to have the United Nations as official spokesperson of the voiceless animals. All of this, of course, to save the planet. But in reality the sought outcome is to equal humans to animals in order to rip our humanity from us. If people are like animals, then people are not people, but animals. With this, the elites can legally argue that it is time to end with all the inherent rights we have as people, because we are not longer people. No more right to life, no right to freedom and the pursuit of happiness, etc.

Neither does poverty or hunger have anything to do with overpopulation, nor there is an overpopulation problem, as the World Bank says in its report. The report goes on to ask whether governments should promote and apply campaigns to reduce fertility and therefore reduce their population. The answer, the text reads, requires an understanding of high fertility and population growth. ” It is the poor with little education and poor health and family planning services who have many children, yet it is also the poor who lose out as rapid population growth hampers development.” This statement is very revealing, as many of the policies for sterilization and population control implemented for the past 50 years are pointed to the poor in both wealthy and developing countries.

The World Bank’s then goes to say that one of the main reasons why poor people choose to have many children is because they want to secure help when they become old; someone to take care of them. The report also cites other reasons such as income, infant mortality, family encouragement of high fertility and limited information about contraceptives, which the report says “are safe”. Of course, this last claim is not true. But that is a discussion for another article.

What the report fails to say is that the real cause of high fertility in poor countries is the welfare-state. Although in many countries some of the reasons cited by the 1984 report may be applicable, the reason why most people have several children in poor and rich countries is because there are socialist programs in place that promote free care and services for those who cannot pay for it. The reason why those people cannot pay for care and health services is because they don’t have jobs to earn a living and depend on their governments to provide care for themselves and their children.

If there is a strong reason why poor people decide to have more than 2 children, which is near the optimum average of 2.1 per family, is because there is an incentive to keep having more. But this is just an unintended consequence of public policies. The real issue is that governments use welfare to keep people dependent, as supposed to help them be self-sufficient and independent. So the Bank not only lies about the real cause of high fertility, but it also supports government intervention to maintain the welfare-state.

Further down on the report, it says that collectivism should be the model to follow, because government control of population fertility has ”longer time horizons than its individual constituents, and the government can weigh better the interests of the future generations against of those of current citizens.” This couldn’t be further from the truth, as most countries where governments intervene heavily in all aspects of life are places where — due to people’s dependence of government — its citizens don’t get to enjoy their lives freely. The report blames the family as a unit, for the government’s lack of action. Governments must, says the report, invest more on the poor.” With this, the World Bank reinforces public perception that it does support socialist policies and the welfare-state as models to govern a dumbed-down, poor and dependent population. “Health and education costs of children are heavily subsidized by the public sector as are roads, communications and other public services that boost jobs and income.” This could not be further from the truth. No socialist program could ever spur economic growth and higher incomes better and more effectively than entrepreneurship in the private sector. What government-sponsored programs do, besides keeping people dependent, is to limit the people’s opportunities as it doesn’t offer incentives to detach themselves from the ever existent government nipple. Also, it is important to remember where government funds come from. In most countries, money is taken from the middle class to give it to the poor in exchange for nothing. The middle class effectively subsidizes poverty. Unfortunately, most of the income stolen from the middle class does not even make it to the poor. It stays inside the government corruptocrazy to finance the its out-of-control spending.

Although the report does not recognize it explicitly, it is visible in many of the claims made in it, that history shows how population growth and decline has always been (except under situations like war or major natural disasters) “automatically” controlled by human progress and how it never needed government intervention. It is not a coincidence that war is one of tools of choice the globalists use to keep the poor countries from developing. That is what is stated on the White House Memorandum 200 prepared by Mr. henry Kissinger.

How does the World Bank implement population control

On page 160, the report states clearly how governments and private institutions can coerce their populations into becoming infertile. “ensuring that people have only the children they want, might not be enough to bring private and socially desired fertility into balance. Economic and social policies are indispensable. Eliminating subsidies to large families, offering financial incentives for smaller families, imposing disincentives for larger families…” The report praises the quota system imposed to the chinese by its government and the fact that China “gives permission” to its citizens to have or not to have children.  ”The system quotas and the accompanying pressure to have an abortion when a woman becomes pregnant without permission, are an additional policy step over and above the system of incentives and disincentives.” In other words, governments should implement any and all measures available to prevent people from having children and cause them to become infertile, including poverty and starvation, bribery, violently killing babies right out of the mothers’ wombs and imposing penalties on people who do not attend to government population control policies.

In addition to imposing sterilization policies and methods as well as bribing people so they don’t have children, the World Bank’s report also suggests that offering low interest rate loans to communities and schools can be a good incentive to keep population growth down and to reduce fertility. “Incentives that offer schools, low interest loans, or a tubewell to communities where contraceptive use is high, also directly link lower fertility to increased welfare.

But all of these suggestions seem mild when it comes to enforcing sterilization policies. The 1984 report also adds that “Male and female sterilization and IUDs can be made more readily available through mobile facilities (such as sterilization vans in Thailand) or periodic “camps” (such as vasectomy and tubectomy-camps in India and IUD “safaris” in Indonesia).”

“Population policy has a long lead time; other development policies must adapt in the meantime. Inaction today forecloses options tomorrow, in overall development strategy and in future population policy. Worst of all, inaction today could mean that more drastic steps, less compatible with individual choice and freedom, will seem necessary tomorrow to slow population growth.”

The authors also promote the creation of concentration camps where people can be taken to be sterilized.

As we have informed before, the World Bank’s policies and suggestions to reduce population are in complete accordance with those of other organizations, philanthropists, NGO’s and well-known personalities who donate their monies to reduce the human population. Those include the UN, the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, World Health Organization and IMF. So the next time your country receives aid from a foreign foundation, an NGO, the World Bank or the IMF, remember: this aid comes at the cost of human lives.

Filed under Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, Special Reports, World Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

What’s Killing Central Americans by the Thousands?

February 12, 2012 Leave a Comment

All that doctors can do at this point is speculate about the cause of thousands of unexplained deaths from a mystery disease.

Associated Press
February 11, 2012

Jesus Ignacio Flores started working when he was 16, laboring long hours on construction sites and in the fields of his country’s biggest sugar plantation.

Three years ago his kidneys started to fail and flooded his body with toxins. He became too weak to work, wracked by cramps, headaches and vomiting.

On Jan. 19 he died on the porch of his house. He was 51. His withered body was dressed by his weeping wife, embraced a final time, then carried in the bed of a pickup truck to a grave on the edge of Chichigalpa, a town in Nicaragua’s sugar-growing heartland, where studies have found more than one in four men showing symptoms of chronic kidney disease.

A mysterious epidemic is devastating the Pacific coast of Central America, killing more than 24,000 people in El Salvador and Nicaragua since 2000 and striking thousands of others with chronic kidney disease at rates unseen virtually anywhere else. Scientists say they have received reports of the phenomenon as far north as southern Mexico and as far south as Panama.

Last year it reached the point where El Salvador’s health minister, Dr. Maria Isabel Rodriguez, appealed for international help, saying the epidemic was undermining health systems.

Wilfredo Ordonez, who has harvested corn, sesame and rice for more than 30 years in the Bajo Lempa region of El Salvador, was hit by the chronic disease when he was 38. Ten years later, he depends on dialysis treatments he administers to himself four times a day.

“This is a disease that comes with no warning, and when they find it, it’s too late,” Ordonez said as he lay on a hammock on his porch.

Many of the victims were manual laborers or worked in sugar cane fields that cover much of the coastal lowlands. Patients, local doctors and activists say they believe the culprit lurks among the agricultural chemicals workers have used for years with virtually none of the protections required in more developed countries. But a growing body of evidence supports a more complicated and counterintuitive hypothesis.

The roots of the epidemic, scientists say, appear to lie in the grueling nature of the work performed by its victims, including construction workers, miners and others who labor hour after hour without enough water in blazing temperatures, pushing their bodies through repeated bouts of extreme dehydration and heat stress for years on end. Many start as young as 10. The punishing routine appears to be a key part of some previously unknown trigger of chronic kidney disease, which is normally caused by diabetes and high-blood pressure, maladies absent in most of the patients in Central America.

“The thing that evidence most strongly points to is this idea of manual labor and not enough hydration,” said Daniel Brooks, a professor of epidemiology at Boston University’s School of Public Health, who has worked on a series of studies of the kidney disease epidemic.

Because hard work and intense heat alone are hardly a phenomenon unique to Central America, some researchers will not rule out manmade factors. But no strong evidence has turned up.

“I think that everything points away from pesticides,” said Dr. Catharina Wesseling, an occupational and environmental epidemiologist who also is regional director of the Program on Work, Health and Environment in Central America. “It is too multinational; it is too spread out.

“I would place my bet on repeated dehydration, acute attacks everyday. That is my bet, my guess, but nothing is proved.”

Dr. Richard J. Johnson, a kidney specialist at the University of Colorado, Denver, is working with other researchers investigating the cause of the disease. They too suspect chronic dehydration.

“This is a new concept, but there’s some evidence supporting it,” Johnson said. “There are other ways to damage the kidney. Heavy metals, chemicals, toxins have all been considered, but to date there have been no leading candidates to explain what’s going on in Nicaragua …

“As these possibilities get exhausted, recurrent dehydration is moving up on the list.”

In Nicaragua, the number of annual deaths from chronic kidney disease more than doubled in a decade, from 466 in 2000 to 1,047 in 2010, according to the Pan American Health Organization, a regional arm of the World Health Organization. In El Salvador, the agency reported a similar jump, from 1,282 in 2000 to 2,181 in 2010.

Farther down the coast, in the cane-growing lowlands of northern Costa Rica, there also have been sharp increases in kidney disease, Wesseling said, and the Pan American body’s statistics show deaths are on the rise in Panama, although at less dramatic rates.

While some of the rising numbers may be due to better record-keeping, scientists have no doubt they are facing something deadly and previously unknown to medicine.

In nations with more developed health systems, the disease that impairs the kidney’s ability to cleanse the blood is diagnosed relatively early and treated with dialysis in medical clinics. In Central America, many of the victims treat themselves at home with a cheaper but less efficient form of dialysis, or go without any dialysis at all.

At a hospital in the Nicaraguan town of Chinandega, Segundo Zapata Palacios sat motionless in his room, bent over with his head on the bed.

“He no longer wants to talk,” said his wife, Enma Vanegas.

His levels of creatinine, a chemical marker of kidney failure, were 25 times the normal amount.

His family told him he was being hospitalized to receive dialysis. In reality, the hope was to ease his pain before his inevitable death, said Carmen Rios, a leader of Nicaragua’s Association of Chronic Kidney Disease Patients, a support and advocacy group.

“There’s already nothing to do,” she said. “He was hospitalized on Jan. 23 just waiting to die.”

Zapata Palacios passed away on Jan. 26. He was 49.

Working with scientists from Costa Rica, El Salvador and Nicaragua, Wesseling tested groups on the coast and compared them with groups who had similar work habits and exposure to pesticide but lived and worked more than 500 meters (1,500 feet) above sea level.

Some 30 percent of coastal dwellers had elevated levels of creatinine, strongly suggesting environment rather than agrochemicals was to blame, Brooks, the epidemiologist, said. The study is expected to be published in a peer-reviewed journal in coming weeks.

Brooks and Johnson, the kidney specialist, said they have seen echoes of the Central American phenomenon in reports from hot farming areas in Sri Lanka, Egypt and the Indian east coast.

“We don’t really know how widespread this is,” Brooks said. “This may be an under-recognized epidemic.”

Jason Glaser, co-founder of a group working to help victims of the epidemic in Nicaragua, said he and colleagues also have begun receiving reports of mysterious kidney disease among sugar cane workers in Australia.

Despite the growing consensus among international experts, Elsy Brizuela, a doctor who works with an El Salvadoran project to treat workers and research the epidemic, discounts the dehydration theory and insists “the common factor is exposure to herbicides and poisons.”

Nicaragua’s highest rates of chronic kidney disease show up around the Ingenio San Antonio, a plant owned by the Pellas Group conglomerate, whose sugar mill processes nearly half the nation’s sugar. Flores and Zapata Palacios both worked at the plantation.

According to one of Brooks’ studies, about eight years ago the factory started providing electrolyte solution and protein cookies to workers who previously brought their own water to work. But the study also found that some workers were cutting sugar cane for as long as 9 1/2 hours a day with virtually no break and little shade in average temperatures of 30 C (87 F).

In 2006, the plantation, owned by one of the country’s richest families, received $36.5 million in loans from the International Finance Corp., the private-sector arm of the World Bank Group, to buy more land, expand its processing plant and produce more sugar for consumers and ethanol production.

In a statement, the IFC said it had examined the social and environmental impacts of its loans as part of a due diligence process and did not identify kidney disease as something related to the sugar plantation’s operations.

Nonetheless, the statement said, “we are concerned about this disease that affects not only Nicaragua but other countries in the region, and will follow closely any new findings.”

Ariel Granera, a spokesman for the Pellas’ business conglomerate, said that starting as early as 1993 the company had begun taking a wide variety of precautions to avoid heat stress in its workers, from starting their shifts very early in the morning to providing them with many gallons of drinking water per day.

Associated Press reporters saw workers bringing water bottles from their homes, which they refilled during the day from large cylinders of water in the buses that bring them to the fields.

Glaser, the co-founder of the activist group in Nicaragua, La Isla Foundation, said that nonetheless many worker protections in the region are badly enforced by the companies and government regulators, particularly measures to stop workers with failing kidneys from working in the cane fields owned by the Pellas Group and other companies.

Many workers disqualified by tests showing high levels of creatinine go back to work in the fields for subcontractors with less stringent standards, he said. Some use false IDs, or give their IDs to their healthy sons, who then pass the tests and go work in the cane fields, damaging their kidneys.

“This is the only job in town,” Glaser said. “It’s all they’re trained to do. It’s all they know.”

The Ingenio San Antonio mill processes cane from more than 24,000 hectares (60,000 acres) of fields, about half directly owned by the mill and most of the rest by independent farmers.

The trade group for Nicaragua’s sugar companies said the Boston University study had confirmed that “the agricultural sugar industry in Nicaragua has no responsibility whatsoever for chronic renal insufficiency in Nicaragua” because the research found that “in the current body of scientific knowledge there is no way to establish a direct link between sugar cane cultivation and renal insufficiency.”

Brooks, the epidemiologist at Boston University, told the AP that the study simply said there was no definitive scientific proof of the cause, but that all possible connections remained open to future research.

In comparison with Nicaragua, where thousands of kidney disease sufferers work for large sugar estates, in El Salvador many of them are independent small farmers. They blame agricultural chemicals and few appear to have significantly changed their work habits in response to the latest research, which has not received significant publicity in El Salvador.

In Nicaragua, the dangers are better known, but still, workers need jobs. Zapata Palacios left eight children. Three of them work in the cane fields.

Two already show signs of disease.

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Corruptocrazy in Brazil asks Twitter to Censor Users

February 9, 2012 Leave a Comment

The out-of-control tyranny in Brazil wants to prevent drivers from warning other drivers about unconstitutional police check points and road blocks. Meanwhile, government corruption on all strata goes on unpunished.

by Stan Lehman
Associated Press
February 9, 2012

A request for an injunction to stop Twitter users from alerting drivers to police roadblocks, radar traps and drunk-driving checkpoints could make Brazil the first country to take Twitter up on its plan to censor content at governments’ requests.

Twitter unveiled plans last month that would allow country-specific censorship of tweets that might break local laws.

“As far as we know this is the first time that a country has attempted to take Twitter up on their country-by-country take down,” Eva Galperin of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a telephone interview Thursday.

Galperin, who described the foundation as “a digital liberties organization,” predicted governments will be taking similar opportunities to censor Twitter traffic.

“Twitter has given these countries the tool and now Brazil has chosen to use it,” she said.

Carlos Eduardo Rodrigues Alves, a spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office, said the injunction request was filed Monday. He said a judge was expected to announce in the next few days whether he will issue the order against Twitter users.

The attorney general’s office said in a statement that tweeted alerts about police operations jeopardize efforts to reduce traffic accidents and curb auto thefts and the transportation of drugs and weapons.

According to the statement, traffic accidents throughout Brazil kill 55,000 people each year and cost the country 24.6 billion reals, or about $14.3 billion.

If the judge rules in favor of the injunction, anyone who violates it could be hit with a daily fine of 500,000 reals ($291,000), the statement said.

San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. said in an email that it had “nothing to share on this issue.”

Under Twitter’s new policy, a tweet breaking a law in one country can be taken down there at a government’s request. But it adds that censored tweets will still be seen elsewhere.

Twitter has said it will post a censorship notice whenever a tweet is removed and will post the removal requests it receives.

It said it has no plans to remove tweets unless it receives a request from government officials, companies or another outside party that believes the message is illegal.

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Brazil will become first Transgenic crop producer

February 7, 2012 Leave a Comment

France 24
February 7, 2012

Brazil is on course to overtake the United States as the world’s top producer of biotech crops in the coming years, a leading promoter of farm biotechnology said Tuesday.

The United States currently holds the lead with 69 million hectares (170 million acres) under biocrop cultivation in 2011, ahead of Brazil with 30.3 million, Argentina with 23.7 million and India with 10.6 million, the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) said.

But USAAA, a government-funded international body promoting the use of farm biotechnology, particularly in developing countries, said that for the third year in a row, Brazil was last year the engine of global biocrop growth, with 4.9 million hectares added, a rise of 20 percent from 2010.

Speaking in a teleconference from the Philippines, ISAAA president Clive James said that while the United States was currently well ahead, “Brazil is closing the gap very quickly” and bringing in new biotech crops like sugar cane.

Brazil has eight million hectares of sugar cane, the largest in the world, and is expected to increase it by 50 percent in the next five years for both ethanol and sugar production, he noted.

“I believe that in the long term, Brazil, will become the number one country in the world in terms of total soybean acreage,” James said.

“It will take some time, but I think the political will (in Brazil) is there and the target is to increase productivity through biotechnology for the domestic market and also for large export markets, particularly China,” he added.

ISAAA meanwhile highlighted a 94-fold increase in biotech crop cultivation around the world from 1.7 million hectares in 1996 to 160 million hectares last year.

Of 29 countries planting transgenic crops last year, 19 were emerging or developing nations and 10 were in the industrialized world, the group said.

A record 16.7 million farmers, up eight percent from 2010, grew biotech crops, including 15 million who were resource-poor farmers in developing countries.

The five top biotech crop producers in the emerging world were India and China in Asia, Brazil and Argentina in Latin America and South Africa on the African continent. Together they represent 40 percent of the global population.

Six European Union countries planted a record 114,490 hectares of genetically modified maize, up 26 percent from 2010 while in China, seven million farmers grew a record 3.9 million hectares of genetically modified cotton.

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