According to a recent investigation by the Swedish news show Uppdrag Granskning, Sweden’s telecommunications giant Teliasonera is the latest Western company revealed to be colluding with authoritarian regimes by selling them high-tech surveillance gear to spy on its citizens. Teliasonera has allegedly enabled the governments of Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Kazakhstan to spy on journalists, union leaders, and members of the political opposition. One Teliasonera whistle-blower told the reporters, “The Arab Spring prompted the regimes to tighten their surveillance. ... There’s no limit to how much wiretapping is done, none at all.”

The investigative report, titled “Black Boxes,” in reference to the black boxes Teliasonera allowed police and security services to install in their operation centers--which granted them the unrestricted capability to monitor all communications—including Internet traffic, phone calls, location data from cell phones, and text messages—in real-time. This has caused concern among Swedish citizens and Teliasonera shareholders, who had previously been assuaged by assurances from the telecommunications company that they follow the law in the countries in which they are operating. After a meeting with Peter Norman, Sweden’s Minister of Financial Markets, the chairman of Teliasonera’s board of directors issued a statement, announcing that they had launched “an action programme for handling issues related to protection of privacy and freedom of expression in non-democratic countries, in a better and more transparent way.”

Have you been deluged with media inquiries? Absolutely. In the beginning we were just sort of tickled with it. It's just such a cool story that you can't not share it. The fear is that you beat something to death but at this point I'm just still delighted with the mysticism of it. We picked up John Waters hitchhiking! What on earth? I'm just sort of rolling it over in my brain like I lost a tooth up there or something.

Now what do you say to conspiracy theorists who think that John Waters is a huge fan of Here We Go Magic, and this was just orchestrated as a publicity stunt to promote the band? [Laughs] Wow. That would...I'd be completely awed. I would push that story, I wouldn't mind at all! But the truth is we actually picked him up hitchhiking. It was a complete and utter coincident.

All too many of us are ever-eager to upgrade to the latest and greatest whatever. Whether they be computers, washing machines, or clothes, if something goes wrong or next next arrives, we're on to the next purchase.

Part of it, too, is that we don't actually know how to repair our stuff. And our world is set up so it's dramatically easier to cut and run than sit and fix. And so our landfills overflow with slightly damaged goods ... a less-than-convenient truth that threatens our economic and environmental health.

This may be changing. In The Netherlands, mom and former journalist Martine Postma stumbled onto an idea that tacks the word "repair" onto the familiar green mantra, "reduce, re-use, recycle." The result is community-based Repair Cafes where folks come together to fix their broken items. What started as a few neighbors in Amsterdam helping each other out has, two years later, become a much bigger deal, with 30 groups springing up around the country.

If someone told you they killed a rabid mountain lion with a frying pan, would you believe it?

Chino Valley resident Brandon Arnold has such a story, and he has witnesses to prove it.

Arnold, 24, his girlfriend Tessa Gerdes and seven of their Chino Valley friends, including three children, were camping May 4 at a remote spot on the Tonto National Forest, near the Verde River off Bloody Basin Road, when the story of a lifetime unfolded.

They were getting ready to make breakfast at about 6:45 a.m. when a large animal jumped out of the bushes onto the back of Arnold's dog Apollo, a 90-pound lab-pit bull mix.

"It was hard to tell what it was when it jumped out of there covered with grass and smelling like a skunk," Arnold's friend Donald Jones said. "I thought it was somebody's dog, so I was just pissed off somebody brought a mean dog to camp."

Jones grabbed the neck of both the animals to try to pull them apart.

That's when they all figured out the other animal wasn't a dog.

Jones let go real fast.

"I started screaming at the top of my lungs, 'Holy (bleep), it's a mountain lion!'" Arnold recalled.

The lion ran into the mesquite bushes and Apollo ran after it while the men frantically looked for the nearest weapon. Jones grabbed a camping table and Arnold grabbed a 14-inch cast-iron skillet heating up on the propane stove. Arnold got to the lion and dog fight first and did what he had to do to save Apollo.

"The first time I had a clear shot I just swung the pan and hit him right on the head," Arnold said. "It was like a cartoon - he just kind of stopped and I hit him again. He got stiff and fell over."

THE competition watchdog will launch an investigation into clothing importers who are reaching agreements with overseas suppliers to stop selling their products to Australians on websites or instructing them to lift their web prices.

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims has acknowledged that anti-competitive practices revealed by The Age last week could breach competition legislation.

He said an investigation would be launched, and companies found breaking the law would be prosecuted. ''We are extremely committed to having a close look at this,'' he said.

Kodak has confirmed it used weapons-grade uranium and housed a fully functioning nuclear reactor in an underground lab near Greece, New York for 30 years, according to news reports.

And according to the Democrat and Chronicle, almost nobody in the community knew about it — until now.

The small nuclear reactor was housed in a 14- by 24-foot concrete room beneath the basement-level of Building 82 in Kodak Park.

Described as resembling “Robby the Robot from a 1950s science fiction movie" by the Democrat and Chronicle, it contained 3.5 pounds of highly-enriched uranium.

A spokesman for the film and camera company and former scientist for the firm told CNN that such an amount was less than one-tenth of the amount necessary to make a crude nuclear device.

A nearly complete skeleton of a towering Tyrannosaurus bataaris set to go on auction on Sunday (May 20). The skeleton measures some 8-feet (2.4-meters) tall and 24-feet (7.3-meters) long.

This is the first full Tyrannosaurus specimen to go on auction since "Sue," aTyrannosaurus rex, sold for $8.3 million in 1997, said David Herskowitz, director of Natural History at Heritage Auctions, the auction house conducting the sale.  

The Tyrannosaurus bataar was uncovered in the Gobi Desert roughly eight years ago and has an estimated value of $950,000. Also called Tarbosaurus bataar, this species is an Asian relative to the North American T. rex.

 

The Metropolitan Police has rolled out a mobile device data extraction system to allow officers to extract data "within minutes" from suspects' phones while they are in custody.

The capability would be particularly useful if the police force were to face a similar situation to the riots last August, which were reportedly coordinated mainly via BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). At the time, there appeared to be confusion around whether or not police could access the data from rioters’ phones, although BlackBerry owner RIM promised to co-operate fully with the police.

The new system being used by the Met is Radio Tactics' ACESO data extraction system across 16 boroughs in the capital.

A paralysed man has regained limited use of his hand after pioneering surgery to bypass damage to his spinal cord.

His injury meant his brain could not "talk" to his hand, meaning all control was lost.

Surgeons at the Washington University School of Medicine re-wired his nerves to build a new route between hand and brain.

He can now feed himself and can just about write.

Google has revamped its search engine in an attempt to offer instant answers to search questions.

A new function, the Knowledge Graph, will make the site's algorithms act "more human", the site said in a blog post.

The feature will at first be available to US-based users, but will be rolled out globally in due course.

Twitter has told the BBC it now wants to work closer with government and policymakers in the UK.

The site has revealed that there are over 10 million active tweeters across the nation.

The site's UK general manager Tony Wang said it is a priority to "protect and defend" the voice of those users.

There's another mining boom you may have missed. It too involves paying young people six-figure salaries in their first jobs, and exploring deeper for resources that may have been previously overlooked. But it's not about driving trucks or digging holes. It's about building algorithms and crunching facts and numbers. It's mining for data.

Big data is the new business black. It's a catch-all phrase for the billions of transactions and other bits of information about their customers, suppliers and operations logged by businesses and governments the world over every day. Yesterday's storage problem has become today's strategic asset. Turns out there's gold in them thar files.

''This is the biggest industry that people are only now starting to talk about,'' says Anthony Goldbloom, a 28-year-old former Reserve Bank of Australia statistician who has moved his start-up data analytics business, Kaggle, to Silicon Valley where NASA is among its clients. ''The whole place is big data mad. Industries like banking, insurance, and increasingly pharmaceuticals are competing on the back of predictive models that get built [by mining data].''

Enterprises are using data analysis not just to improve their everyday business processes, but also to build predictive models of consumer behaviour. Retailers, telcos, airlines, hotels, healthcare and credit card companies are among those with information-rich customer data. In Australia ''only really leading companies have realised this as an opportunity'', Goldbloom says. To his knowledge, Telstra, Myer, the University of Melbourne and the New South Wales Roads and Traffic Authority are among those known to have applied large-scale data analysis to their operations.

Gyani Maiya Sen, a 75-year-old woman from western Nepal, can perhaps be forgiven for feeling that the weight of the world rests on her shoulders.

She is the only person still alive in Nepal who fluently speaks the Kusunda language. The unknown origins and mysterious sentence structures of Kusunda have long baffled linguists.

As such, she has become a star attraction for campaigners eager to preserve her dying tongue.

Madhav Prasad Pokharel, a professor of linguistics at Nepal's Tribhuwan University, has spent a decade researching the vanishing Kusunda tribe.

Professor Pokharel describes Kusunda as a "language isolate", not related to any common language of the world.

"There are about 20 language families in the world," he said, "among them are the Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan and Austro-Asiatic group of languages.

"Kusunda stands out because it is not phonologically, morphologically, syntactically and lexically related to any other languages of the world.

Bass guitarist Donald "Duck" Dunn, who played with Booker T and the MGs, has died in Tokyo aged 70.

The MGs were the house band for Stax Records, and Dunn can be heard on songs such as Otis Redding's Respect and Sam and Dave's Hold On, I'm Comin'.

He was in Japan for a series of concerts, and had played two shows on Saturday night.

His friend and fellow musician Steve Cropper, who was on the same tour, said Dunn had died in his sleep.

"Today I lost my best friend," Cropper wrote on his Facebook page. "The World has lost the best guy and bass player to ever live".

Miho Harasawa, a spokeswoman for Tokyo Blue Note, the last venue Dunn played, confirmed he died alone early Sunday. She had no further details.

A medicine clinic that claims it can cure cancer misled and deceived consumers, the Victorian Court of Appeal has found.

On its website, Operation Smile describes itself as a complementary medicine centre specialising in the treatment of cancer through photo dynamic therapy, oxygen therapies and high-dose intravenous Vitamin C at its Hope Clinic.

Consumer Affairs Victoria took the company to the Supreme Court, alleging its statements falsely represented its treatments as effective in treating cancer and that it claimed to have scientific support.

Apple co-founder Steve 'Woz' Wozniak has sided with Australian consumers on the contentious topic of price discrimination, saying we shouldn't have to pay more for technology goods that cost much less in the United States.

His comments, made on ABC radio this morning ahead of a sponsored speaking tour of Australia, come as the federal government readies for an inquiry that will ask tech giants like Apple to explain why Australians pay more for goods such as music, TV and game downloads from iTunes than overseas customers.

Other companies like Microsoft and Adobe will also be asked to explain.

In deciphering the tablet seen above, John MacGinnis of the University of Cambridge found that many of the names on the list are not from any currently known ancient language. "One or two are actually Assyrian and a few more may belong to other known languages of the period, such as Luwian or Hurrian," he says, "but the great majority belong to a previously unidentified language."

The site, in Guatemala, includes the first known instance of Mayan art
painted on the walls of a dwelling.

 

A report in Science says it dates from the early 9th Century, pre-dating
other Mayan calendars by centuries.

 

Such calendars rose to prominence recently amid claims they predicted the end
of the world in 2012.

Rolex USA is starting to crackdown on counterfeiters blatantly imitating and selling its products for huge profits on the internet. It has won nearly $160,000 in court after taking the owner of two websites selling fake Rolex watches to court in New York.

Gabriel Alvarez had been running deviousdesires.net and deviousdesires.com that sold fake Rolex watches for about $100 as well as other counterfeit goods masquerading as products from brands including Breitling, Armani, Bulgari and Chanel. The site openly advertised that the goods it sold were fakes.

The Sheriff's sale of a repossessed house in Melbourne's west for $1000 — that was worth an estimated $630,000 — has today been overturned by the Victorian Supreme Court.

The five-bedroom, two-storey brick house in Wirraway Avenue, Braybrook, built in 2006 by owner Zhiping Zhou, was repossessed by the Sheriff in late 2009 after Zhou failed to re-pay a $100,000 debt.

He also had an outstanding mortgage of just under $460,000 and was in arrears by almost $8000 to Maribyrnong Council for his municipal rates.
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A warrant of seizure and sale was obtained in November 2009 and the Sheriff auctioned off the property on December 16 the following year — without a reserve price.

Justice Peter Vickery today labelled such a sale in his judgment as a "remarkable event".

Police in South Africa have confiscated nearly $7 million in assets from three suspected rhino poachers, two of whom are veterinarians.

The assets were seized from Dawie Groenewald, owner of a safari business, and veterinary surgeons Karel Toet and Manie Du Plessis. The men were in 2010 charged with 1,872 counts of racketeering in what police described as one of South Africa's biggest wildlife crime cases.

South Africa, which is home to most of the world's 21,000 rhinos, is facing a massive poaching crisis.

The country has seen a dramatic rise in poaching since 2008, with 448 of the endangered animals killed last year. The brutal killing of rhinos is fueled by the soaring demand for their horns in China and particularly Vietnam.

Light bulbs that are said to last for more than two decades while consuming very little energy may go on sale later this year.

US firm General Electric, Dutch company Philips and UK-based Sylvania all showcased their products at the Light Fair industry conference in Las Vegas.

Using light-emitting diodes (LEDs) instead of filaments, the bulbs are meant to produce as much light as a 100-watt incandescent alternative.

However, LEDs are not usually cheap.

If you talk to US-based companies about hosting providers, they’re likely to rabbit on and on about the unholy dominant duo of the US market: Amazon and Rackspace. Amazon. Rackspace. Rackspace. Amazon. It gets to be a bit repetitive at times. If you’re not with one, you’re with the other. Or both. And now both are (reportedly) expanding into Australia. Like Amazon, Rackspace recently opened an Australian office and starting hiring local staff. Like Amazon, Rackspace has already notched up some Australian customers. And also like its eternal rival, Rackspace’s appeal to Australian customers has been somewhat limited by the fact that it doesn’t have any Australian infrastructure. But as iTNews reports today (we recommend you click here for the full article), all that may be about to change, as Rackspace follows Amazon in yet another way: Australian infrastructure

File-sharing was firmly on the agenda when the head of the US Department of Homeland Security touched down in the Australian capital last week. The four new agreements – promptly signed before Secretary Janet Napolitano flew back out of Canberra – were less about sharing season two of Game of Thrones and more about sharing the private, government held information of Australian citizens with US authorities.

Then there’s Andrew Nikolic.  The endorsed Liberal candidate for the northern seat of Bass has wasted no time getting into election mode, despite the fact he’s likely to be waiting another 18 months before voters have their say.  With the Liberals having no policies to speak of, Nikolic has a free rein: writing letters to newspapers, issuing media releases, kissing babies in public.  In short, he’s acting like the next Federal election was scheduled for June 2012 rather than November 2013.

Nikolic has embraced social media.  His Facebook site (authorised by former Liberal candidate Sam McQuestin) boasts 680 followers, although he’s quick to despatch anybody brave enough to offer a viewpoint contrary to his.  (There’s actually a Facebook page dedicated specifically for Facebook users blocked by Andrew Nikolic.)

He’s also aligned himself with some of the more unpleasant social media outlets.  Not only is he the pin-up boy for more extreme elements of the logging industry, but he’s an unashamed supporter of `Code Red’, a one-man vendetta against Greens, homosexuals, the Labor Party and anybody who questions Forestry Tasmania.

Nikolic isn’t a politician.  Yet.  Generally, the New Examiner respects the rights of individuals.  Politicians, however, are fair game, particularly when their antics, statements and actions aren’t effectively reported in mainstream media.  So when Nikolic chose to abuse a handful of elderly protestors in the Launceston mall (TT here) because they didn’t agree with his far-right brand of politics, we added him to the list of targets.

Although he’s retired from the army, Nikolic’s biggest sales pitch to the voters is his military background.  He’s even gone so far as to promote `Andrew’s Army’ on Facebook - a collection of individuals preparing to fight the good fight against the evil Labor/Green Government.