Banco del Sur vs IMF showdown sunday, sunday, sunday

* South American Countries Agree to Found Banco Del Sur
By Jeb Blount

Bloomberg - October 8, 2007

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aTCCDSFNqrzY

Seven South American countries agreed to establish
Banco del Sur, a regional development bank championed
by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in an effort to
expand regional trade and growth with their own
resources.

Chavez, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
and the presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador,
Paraguay and Uruguay will inaugurate the bank on Nov.
3, in Caracas according the "Declaration of Rio de
Janeiro" signed by finance ministry officials of the
seven countries today.

"Banco del Sur is the beginning of a new financial
architecture for the South," said Rodrigo Cabezas,
Venezuela's finance minister, in comments to reporters
in Rio de Janeiro. "Our development won't be put at
the service of other countries." Today's meeting
included officials from Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay,
Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

Torture and mass killings in Burma

Monk reveals how Burmese security forces tortured protesters

Matthew Weaver
Thursday October 11, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

New evidence emerged today of the torture of monks and other protesters in Burma, as the security forces arrested more prominent anti-government activists.

A recently released monk revealed today that he and hundreds of others were interrogated to provide the names of the ringleaders of the protests.

When they failed to answer they were kicked and beaten, he told Reuters news agency.

Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, he said they were packed in so tightly at a makeshift prison at the Technical Institute campus in Rangoon that they could not lie down.

Radiohead Update email

THANK YOU FOR ORDERING IN RAINBOWS. THIS IS AN UPDATE.

YOUR UNIQUE ACTIVATION CODE(S) WILL BE SENT OUT TOMORROW MORNING (UK TIME). THIS WILL TAKE YOU STRAIGHT TO THE DOWNLOAD AREA.

HERE IS SOME INFORMATION ABOUT THE DOWNLOAD:

THE ALBUM WILL COME AS A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s.

MOST COMPUTERS NOW HAVE ZIP SOFTWARE AS PART OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM; IF YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT, YOU NEED TO GET WINZIP OR ZIPIT INSTALLED PRIOR.

Protect America Act and Domestic Surveillance

As I speculated on 08/05/2007, the Protect America Act does in fact allow spying on purely domestic calls without a warrant. So from now on, I will be calling it the Spy on Americans Act. Some details from the draft of "Risking Communications Security: Potential Hazards of the “Protect America Act”," authored by Steven M. Bellovin, Columbia University, Matt Blaze, University of Pennsylvania Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems Susan Landau, Sun Microsystems, Peter G. Neumann, SRI International, Jennifer Rexford, Princeton University:

While most traffic on international links travels to or from a foreign host, a small amount of domestic traffic traverses these links as well. For example, some domestic traffic travels through Canada and then back to the U.S., due to the vagaries of Internet routing11. As such, monitoring the links at the U.S. borders, with the goal of warrantless tapping of international traffic, could lead to unintentional tapping of domestic traffic. Because these links operate at very high speed, it is difficult to analyze the measurement data as they are collected. Furthermore, Internet traffic does not necessarily follow symmetric paths — the traffic from host A to host B does not necessarily traverse the same links as the traffic from B to A —monitoring both ends of a conversation sometimes requires combining data collected from multiple locations, making this type of monitoring
difficult in practice.

And this is with the assumption that NSA is making a good faith effort to not intercept domestic calls. There are other complications as well, I suggest checking out the whole piece linked to above.

Radiohead to Release New Album, "In Rainbows," on the Web

And you can pay whatever you like for it. You just add the download to your basket, go to your basket and then enter whatever price you want. I entered 0.0 just to see what would happen. I then "stood in queue" for a couple of minutes (I assume this is because the site was overloaded when the release date and method of release was first announced). I was then asked to sign in or register. The registration process asks for name, email, address and mobile phone number. I gave a fake everything except email address as that's where the details for download are to be sent. Here is an LA Times article on it. If you want the deluxe box set you have to pay, of course, but it looks like if you just want a download, you can pay 0.00. I received this email:

Order Number WAS4303056
Order Date Sat 6th Oct 2007

Your Name Jimbo Monkeyface
Your Address
Lansing
48912
USA


Description Qty Each Total



Download


1


£ 0.00


£ 0.00

Total Goods Price £ 0.00
Order Total £ 0.00
This transaction will appear on your credit card bill as WASTE PRODUCTS LTD. or a shortened version of this.


Discbox customers.

You goods will be shipped on or before 3rd December 2007 by post.
Information regarding the download (included with the Discbox) as per below.

Download customers.

You will receive a further e-mail on or before the 10th October detailing your username and activation code. The e-mail will also provide the link to the download area.

We value your custom.

Burma's latest

Not sure if you all are following this, but I was floored to see this as a possibility...

BBC
Burma's military leader, Gen Than Shwe, has agreed in principle to meet the detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, state media has reported.

In return she must drop her support for international sanctions and abandon her confrontational attitude, it said.