 |
|
|
WikiLeaks supporters vow to step up cyber attacks
More Americans on charity path
|
|
|
China gives its peace prize but ‘winner’ skips ceremony
54% Indians paid bribe last year
|
|
WikiLeaks supporters vow to step up cyber attacks
London, December 9 On Thursday, supporters of WikiLeaks were plotting attacks on online payment service PayPal and other perceived enemies of the publisher, which has angered US authorities by starting to release details of 250,000 confidential diplomatic cables. “The campaign is not over from what I’ve seen, it’s still going strong. More people are joining,” a spokesman calling himself “Coldblood” told BBC Radio 4. The speaker, who had an English accent, said he was aged 22 and was a software engineer. “Anonymous has targeted mainly companies which have decided for whatever reason not to deal with WikiLeaks. Some of the main targets involve Amazon, MasterCard, Visa and PayPal.” The websites of credit-card giants Mastercard and Visa have already been brought down through distributed denial-of-service attacks that temporarily disable computer servers by bombarding them with requests. In an online letter the group said its activists were neither vigilantes nor terrorists. It added: “The goal is simple: Win the right to keep the Internet free of any control from any entity, corporation, or government.” Sweden has issued an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founderJulian Assange over sex crimes and he is in jail in London, awaiting an extradition hearing. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, has been hailed as an advocate of free speech by supporters, but now finds himself fighting serious sexual allegations made by two women in Sweden. Assange will have another court appearance next Tuesday and his supporters assert he is being victimised for his work. In the Internet Relay chat channel where activists coordinated the attacks, conversations were short and to the point. Participants asked what the target should be and reported progress. Some bemoaned the fact that paypal.com remained up despite efforts to bring down its transactions server. “The only thing most of these CEOs understand is the bottom line. You have to hit them in the bank account, or not at all,” said one participant called Cancer. The cyber activity was not all one way. Accounts used by the pro-WikiLeaks online campaign Operation Payback had disappeared on Thursday from Facebook and Twitter, which kept WikiLeaks alive last week when US Web services providers Amazon and EveryDNS cut them off. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. WikiLeaks is continuing to drip-feed cables into the public domain despite the legal woes of its founder. Those released on Thursday showed U.S. diplomats reporting that the illicit diamond trade in Zimbabwe had led to the murder of thousands, enriched those close to President Robert Mugabe and been financed in part by the central bank.
— Reuters
|
|
More Americans on charity path
New York, December 9 “Seventeen more of America’s wealthiest families have committed to returning the majority of their wealth to charitable causes by taking the Giving Pledge,” the charitable organisation said in a statement. The announcement of a second group of pledgers follows the news in August of 40 families having joined The Giving Pledge, a long-term charitable project launched by billionaire investor Warren Buffett and Microsoft founder Bill and his wife Melinda Gates. The project, which was launched in June, now includes 57 families from across the United States. In addition to Zuckerberg, the new group of billionaires taking the pledge includes AOL co-founder Steve Case, financier Carl Icahn among others. “I am delighted to welcome these 17 families into the Giving Pledge community,” said Warren Buffett, pledge co- founder and chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. The Giving Pledge is an effort to help address society’s most pressing problems by inviting the wealthiest American families and individuals to commit to giving more than half of their wealth to philanthropy or charitable causes.
— PTI
|
|
China gives its peace prize but ‘winner’ skips ceremony
Beijing, December 9 Instead, it was left to a scared-looking girl, whom organisers did not properly identify, to collect a stack of bills for the $15,000 cash prize meant for former Taiwan vice-president Lien Chan. Lien had won the prize for his efforts to improve relations between China and Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing claims as its own, beating out five other nominees, including past Nobel Peace Prize winners Mahmoud Abbas and Nelson Mandela. “We believe that Mr Lien Chan, with his knowledge, dignity, and political wisdom, would not refuse peace, and he would not refuse this prize,” Confucius Prize organiser Tan Changliu gamely told a packed news conference in Beijing. Lien, now honorary chairman of Taiwan’s ruling Nationalist or KMT party, has not commented publicly on the prize. Lai Shin-yuan, chairwoman of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, told Taiwan lawmakers that the island’s government found the prize “amusing”. “As far as we know it is an unofficial prize. We don’t plan to make any comment on it,” she said. “But we do find it amusing.” Lien travelled to China in 2005 in his then capacity as chairman of the KMT in the first such trip since the Communists won control of the mainland in 1949 after forcing the KMT to flee into exile in Taiwan. The prize, offered before more than 100 journalists in a cramped windowless conference room in a Beijing office block, was first suggested in an opinion piece in the popular Chinese tabloid the Global Times three weeks ago. Its timing is no coincidence, coming the day before the Nobel is formally awarded to Liu in Oslo, an event that has prompted a slew of invective from the Chinese government for honouring a man it calls a subversive and a criminal. — Reuters
|
|
54% Indians paid bribe last year
Berlin, December 9 “Corruption has increased over the last three years, say six out of 10 people around the world, and one in four people report paying bribes in the last year,” the Berlin-based non- governmental agency, Transparency International (TI), said. Releasing the findings of the 2010 Global Corruption Barometer, a worldwide public opinion survey on corruption, TI said it showed that in the past 12 months one in four people paid bribe to one of nine institutions and services, from health to education to tax authorities. The police is named the most frequent recipient of bribes, according to those surveyed, with 29 per cent of those who had contact with the police reporting that they paid bribe. The biggest number of reported bribery payments in 2010 is in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Cameroon, India, Iraq, Liberia, Nigeria, Palestine, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Uganda where more than 50 per cent of people surveyed paid bribe in the past 12 months. In India, 54 per cent of users of services said they paid bribe to receive attention from service providers. Almost half of all respondents say they paid bribes to avoid problems with the authorities and a quarter say it was to speed up processes. Most worrying is the fact that bribes to the police have almost doubled since 2006, and more people report paying bribes to the judiciary and for registry and permit services than they did so five years ago, TI said. — PTI
|
2 KZF extremists held in Germany 
|
| HOME PAGE | |
Punjab | Haryana | Jammu & Kashmir |
Himachal Pradesh | Regional Briefs |
Nation | Opinions | | Business | Sports | World | Letters | Chandigarh | Ludhiana | Delhi | | Calendar | Weather | Archive | Subscribe | Suggestion | E-mail | |
