President Dilma Rousseff on Tuesday sought to defuse a massive protest movement sweeping Brazil, acknowledging the need for better public services and more responsive governance as demonstrations continued in some cities around the country.
Speaking the morning after more than 200,000 Brazilians marched in over a half-dozen cities, Rousseff said her government remains committed to social change and is listening attentively to the many grievances expressed at the demonstrations.
“Brazil woke up stronger today,” Rousseff said in a televised speech in Brasilia. “The size of yesterday’s demonstrations shows the energy of our democracy, the strength of the voice of the streets and the civility of our population.”
Monday’s demonstrations were the latest in a flurry of protests over the past two weeks that have fed on widespread frustration with poor public services, police violence and government corruption.
The protests, organized mostly by university students through snowballing social media campaigns, marked the first time that Brazilians have taken to the streets on such a large scale since economic volatility and a corruption scandal led to the toppling of a president in the early 1990s.
The demonstrations started as small protests in a few cities against an increase in bus and subway fares but quickly ballooned into a national movement after police fired rubber bullets at protesters in Sao Paulo last week in clashes that injured more than 100 people.
Google is asking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow it to do something no other company can: publish tallies of the court’s secret requests for data on its users.
In a filing to the government on Tuesday, Google asserted that it has a right under the First Amendment to publish more details about national security-related requests, including from the FISA court. The company wants to disclose the total number of requests and the number of accounts targeted.
Tech companies have been racing to reassure users in the wake of revelations about the PRISM surveillance program. In recent days, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple have released batches of information about government data requests they receive, but with strings attached by the feds requiring that the firms lump together national security requests with other ones from law enforcement at the federal, state and local level.
Google, which has published biannual transparency reports since 2010, pushed back against those conditions. The company currently breaks out different categories of law enforcement requests — including, this year, National Security Letters, which are one category of national security requests.
“However, greater transparency is needed, so today we have petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow us to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately,” a Google representative said Tuesday. “Lumping national security requests together with criminal requests — as some companies have been permitted to do — would be a backward step for our users.”
Google’s petition represents a more confrontational approach to pressing the government to allow more disclosure of data requests. Tech companies have been negotiating with the feds behind closed doors on the matter in recent weeks.
(出典： politico.com)
民主党の海江田万里代表は、経済評論家時代に書いた雑誌記事などをきっかけに出資して被害を被ったとして、出資者３０人に６億円の損害賠償を求められている。海江田氏は１８日、国会内で記者団に「２０年以上前のことで、議員になってからは何の関係もない」と述べた。
・「13.3％の高利回りは驚異的だ」「元金確実で，しかも年13.3％と考えれば，他の金融商品はまっ青！」（書籍・「今どうすれば一番損をしないか」）
・「和牛の死亡率は0.4％と低く，また万一そのような事態があっても代わりの牛が提供されるので，契約どおりの利益は保証されます」（雑誌・「BIGMAN」昭和63年3月）
・「知る人ぞ知るといった高利回りの利殖商品」「むろん元本は保証付き」
（書籍・「海江田万里の金のなる本」）
・「この利益は申し込み時に確定していて，リスクはゼロ」
（雑誌･「女性セブン」平成4年7月2日）
・「利益は申し込みをした時点で確定していますから，リスクもありません。」
（雑誌･月刊ドリブ「DoLive」平成4年9月）
Hundreds of demonstrators surrounded Brazil’s Congress and set fire to a car in the streets of Rio de Janeiro as a wave of nationwide protests rocking Latin America’s largest economy turned violent for a second straight time.
An estimated 100,000 people marched peacefully through downtown Rio before a smaller group of activists overturned a car, set it ablaze and began vandalizing the state assembly. In Brasilia, a few thousand students were prevented from entering Congress and instead climbed atop its roof as riot police looked on. In Sao Paulo, where dozens were wounded when police clashed with activists on June 13, demonstrations were more peaceful.
The demonstrations, initially to protest an increase in bus fares, have grown larger and spread across the country in the past two weeks as discontent about inflation and the economy mount, fueling dissatisfaction with President Dilma Rousseff. The president was jeered at a packed soccer stadium over the weekend while inaugurating the Confederations Cup.
In Brasilia, activists shouted “Leave Dilma” and “Dilma, what happened to the guerrilla?,” in reference to the president’s past as a member of the Marxist underground that battled Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship.
(出典： funshoku.blogspot.jp)
Vladimir Putin pulled off one of his most audacious pieces of stagecraft, attending a ballet with his rarely seen wife and then announcing their marriage is over. But how will it play to his audience of 143 million Russians?
The end of the marriage of the Russian president and Lyudmila Putina less than two months shy of their 30th anniversary came on state television after a Thursday evening that started out like a model of domestic contentment — a devoted husband taking his wife to the ballet.
But after the performance of “Esmeralda” at the Great Kremlin Palace, the two came into a luxurious room to speak to a reporter.
“Excellent. Great music, excellent production,” Putin said and Lyudmila echoed his praise.
After about a minute, the reporter asked about rumors that the two didn’t live together. Putin smiled slightly, like a boy caught misbehaving, and turned his head toward Lyudmila. “This is so,” he said.
It wasn’t immediately clear if that meant just separate domiciles. After a few more comments, the reporter gently prodded: “I am afraid to say this word `divorce’.”
“Yes, this is a civilized divorced,” Lyudmila said.
The peculiar format for the announcement appeared aimed at underlining that this wasn’t just a powerful man dumping his faithful helpmate. That’s a potentially important strategic move for Putin, who has based his public image on rectitude and support of traditional values.
Tabloid reports in 2008 claimed that Putin already had divorced Lyudmila and planned to marry a gymnast less than half his age.
The Interfax news agency cited presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying the divorce has not been formalized and that the televised comments were only an announcement of the decision to divorce.
Divorce is common in Russia, and nearly 700,000 pairs dissolved their marriages in 2009, according to UNICEF. Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who studies Russia’s political elite, said the divorce probably won’t hurt Putin in the public eye — as long as he doesn’t take a trophy wife.
(出典： foxnews.com)
どっちがホントだ？……どっちも 信用するな
A storm system that wrought havoc on the Oklahoma City metropolitan area, generating a handful of tornadoes that killed five people and sent tens of thousands scrambling for shelter, moved late Friday over Missouri.
The National Weather Service warned a “confirmed and extremely dangerous tornado” was near the city of Harvester, about 25 miles northwest of St. Louis.
There were no immediate reports of catastrophic damage or major injuries in the St. Louis area, said Jeff Rainford, the chief of staff for Mayor Francis Slay. Lambert-St. Louis International Airport was closed because of the severe weather, and minor damage was reported to a terminal, he said.
As authorities in Missouri urged people to take shelter, officials in Oklahoma were working to determine how many people had been killed and injured in the storm that battered the state’s largest city.
A mother and a child were among five people killed as a result of severe weather, and another 14 were injured, authorities said.
At the height of the storm, the National Weather Service issued a tornado emergency for a number of areas in and around Oklahoma’s capital city, with tornadoes reported outside Moore, near the suburb of Bethany, north of Union City and outside Tinker Air Force Base.
Parts of Interstates 35 and 40, which cut through Oklahoma City and Moore, were “a parking lot,” the weather service said, warning that those caught in the heavy rush hour traffic “are in danger.”
“We’ve got a nightmare situation going on right now,” Betsy Randolph, a state Highway Patrol spokeswoman, told CNN.
“They are essentially sitting ducks on the interstate.”
Overturned big rigs and cars littered portions of the roadway, and thousands more were believed to be stuck in the traffic.
“My biggest concern right now is the traffic that is out on the highway right now,” Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin said.
She said she has called out the National Guard, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and the state Office of Emergency Management to “try to get the traffic moving” and get people to shelter.
The weather service issued the tornado emergency for Oklahoma City as well as its suburbs of Moore, Yukon and Bethany.
(出典： CNN)
An international trio flying in a Russian capsule docked with the International Space Station on Wednesday with a busy schedule full of space walks and an encounter with a pioneering US cargo craft.
The six-month mission of Russian commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and his two flight engineers — Karen Nyberg of NASA and Italian Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency — began once their craft sidled up to the orbiting lab six hours after blasting off from the Moscow-owned Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan.
The Soyuz took a shortcut that slashed the travel time from the usual 48 hours thanks to a special orbit that catapaults the astronauts directly to their destination.
(出典： smh.com.au)
ネット検索大手・ヤフーはオークションサイト「ヤフオク！」を利用している会員のうち、およそ９万４０００人分のＩＤとメールアドレスのリストを最大で１７９人の利用者に誤ってメールで送信したと発表しました。
ヤフーは先日、およそ１４００人分の会員ついて同様の流出があったと発表していましたが、今回はそれを大幅に上回る規模です。
ヤフーは現在、メールを受け取った会員に削除するよう呼びかけています。
ワタミフードサービスの社員が入社2か月後に自殺。長時間労働を強いられたことが原因の自殺と判断され、労災に認定された。
従業員の自殺問題について渡邉氏はTwitterで発言したが、内容が不誠実であるなど、ネット上で批判され、以降はブラック企業としてやり玉にあげられることも多い。
「公認したら笑えるな＞ブラック企業が政権与党からお墨付きだものw」
「反省がまるで無い 」
「マジかよ、日本終わったな。総理、奴だけはやめとけ！」
「民主＞維新ときてこんどは自民か。日和見め。」
「えええええ！？こいつだけはやめとけよ！！」
「最悪だ。」
「あれ、自民党ってブラック企業を公表するって言っていなかったっけ？これっていわゆるブラックジョーク？？」
(出典： daily-eye-news.net)
The dollar was on track for its biggest daily drop in more than five weeks against the yen on Thursday after a sharp slide in Japanese stocks and weak Chinese factory activity data prompted a rush for the safe-haven Japanese currency.
The yen also rallied versus the euro and other currencies, further buoyed by a jump in 10-year Japanese government bonds yields, to 1.000 percent, the highest in a year.
China’s factory activity shrank for the first time in seven months in May, a survey showed, deepening fears that China’s economic recovery has stalled and a sharper cooldown may be imminent.
Concerns that U.S. monetary stimulus could be scaled back, sparked by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s testimony on Wednesday, also weighed on markets and drove Japan’s Nikkei share index .N225 down 7.3 percent on Thursday, its biggest one-day drop since a slide two years ago in the wake of the tsunami.
“The yen’s outperformance Thursday served as a reminder that despite its bearish long-term outlook, it stands to rally when investors turn skittish and need a safer place to hide,” said Joe Manimbo, senior market analyst at Western Union Business Solutions in Washington.
Analysts said the dollar could drop further against the yen if stocks continued to decline. But they expected the trend of yen weakness and dollar strength to remain given aggressive easing in Japan and the prospect of tighter U.S. policy.
“I still think the scope of easing that the government is doing in Japan is going to have an effect and eventually is going to drive dollar/yen higher,” said Fabian Eliasson, vice president of currency sales at Mizuho Corporate Bank in New York.
The Nikkei 225 index fell 7.3 percent in one day, a stomach-churning drop made all the worse for the lack of an obvious cause. It could be anything from worries about the value of the yen to hints from the Federal Reserve that the U.S. could leave the monetary-easing party before Japan has opened its first beer.
Leave aside the reasons for the fall. A sudden decline of more than 7 percent brings to mind a great discussion of investing from MIT professor (and hedge fund manager) Andrew W. Lo. In a paper written some years ago, Lo asked readers to imagine a hypothetical hedge fund called Capital Decimation Partners.
CDP posts superb returns month after month, handily beating the S&P 500 Index and reaping returns of more than 2,700% over a hypothetical eight-year period. CDP can do that using a single strategy, saving on the overhead of analysts and office space. All that Lo’s fund needs to do is short certain stock options once a month.
