Canada and the Five Eyes Intelligence Community‎

Monday, ‎December ‎17, ‎2012, ‏‎12:00:00 AM                                                879

 

Canada must work to restore the trust and confidence of its Five Eyes partners, but there are far bigger issues looming that will ensure Canada will continue to be a valuable and credible intelligence source for the Five Eyes network...

http://www.cdfai.org/PDF/Canada%20and%20the%20Five%20Eyes%20Intelligence%20Community.pdf

Younger Africa: What does it mean ,,,, ? ....

Younger Africa

Across Africa, a continent where the average age is about 19, protests have flared against leaders who may have outstayed their welcome. See a country-by-country breakdown of population age 15 or under and tap the icons for more info on recent political shifts.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443864204577623903997777644.html#project%3Dafricaage0612%26articleTabs%3Dinteractive

Egypt: Islamist Mohammed Morsi was elected in June as the country's first freely elected civilian leader after six decades of military-backed dictatorship.

Election

 Algeria: President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's allies scored a victory in parliamentary elections in May. Islamist groups and other opposition parties alleged irregularities. Mr. Bouteflika is 75 years old and has been in office for 13 years.

Election

Angola: Prodemocracy activists are rallying ahead of presidential elections set for Aug. 31. The incumbent, José Eduardo Dos Santos, is one of Africa's longest serving rulers. He has been in office for 33 years.

Election

Burkina Faso: Leader Blaise Compaoré, who is 61 years old, has been in office for 25 years.

Info

Cameroon: 41% of the population is 15 years old or under. They are presided over by Paul Biya, who is 79 years old and has been in office for 30 years.

Info

Cote d'Ivoire: Alassane Ouattara was sworn in after the arrest of former President Laurent Gbagbo in April 2011. In June 2012, the government said it thwarted a plotted coup by army officers loyal to Mr. Gbagbo.

Coup

Eritrea: 43% of the population is 15 years old or under. They are presided over by Girma Wolde-Giorgis, who is 88 years old and has been in office for 11 years.

Ghana: 38% of the population is 15 years old or under. After three years in office, President John Evans Atta Mills fell sick and died suddenly in late July 2012, age 68. The vice president, John Mahama, 53, is finishing Mr. Mills’s term, which had been due to end within months.

  

Guinea: Transitional authorities were sworn on May 23, six weeks after the military seized power in a coup. No president has ever completed a full term in office since the country's independence from Portugal in 1974.

 Kenya: Prime Minister Raila Odinga is a leading candidate in Kenya's upcoming presidential elections, in May 2013.

  

Lesotho: After closely fought general elections in May 2012, a coalition government was established under Prime Minister Thomas Thabane, 73 years old, who joined several smaller parties to end the 14-year career of Pakalitha Mosisili.

Mali: Dioncounda Traoré, 70, is interim president charged with helping move the government back to democracy after a March coup.

Morocco: King Mohammed VI quelled the youth-driven Arab Spring protests by conceding to limited political reforms to his absolute monarchy. A vote resulted in the country’s first coalition government.

Niger: Mahamadou Issoufou was elected in 2011. He is a long time opponent of Mamadou Tandja, who was toppled in a military coup in 2010.

  

Senegal: Abdoulaye Wade was 85 when he was voted out of office in March after 12 years as Senegal's president. Macky Sall, his successor, is 50.

Somalia: An interim government has ruled since 2004, after years of civil war that followed the ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, in 1991. In August 2012, the country was in the process of electing parliamentarians to choose a president.

Uganda: Young people have led protests against long-serving leader Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.

  

Zimbabwe: 44% of the population is 15 years old or under. They are presided over by Robert Mugabe, who is 88 years old and has been in office for 25 years.

 Tunisia: After overthrowing ex-President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, Tunisians elected a ruling coalition of three parties that divided up the jobs of president, prime minister and parliament speaker. The moderate Islamist party, Ennahda, has the prime minister's position. Lately there has been talk of strains in the alliance.

Libya: In the first post-Gadhafi election, July 7, 2012, an alliance of secular parties led by U.S.-educated economist Mahmoud Jibril, 60, won handily over Islamist rivals.

Sudan: President Omar al-Bashirhas ruled the country since 1993, after leading a revolt that overthrew an elected government in 1989.

South Sudan: Became an independent state in 2011.

South Africa: President Jacob Zuma seeks to hold onto to his ruling party post at a conference later this year, as worker unrest simmers.

Christmas is a time of great joy and an occasion for deep reflection

Hopefully my last post of 2012 . . .

A Time for Christians to Engage with the World

This is the article Pope Benedict XVI had published in the Financial Times of London a few days ago.

The invitation to a reigning Pontiff and the publication itself are quite exceptional. 

 The text was also made available by the Holy See Press Office for wider distribution.

 The Holy Father's message of financiers, buisness-people, et al:

"Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God," was the response of Jesus when asked about paying taxes. His questioners, of course, were laying a trap for him. They wanted to force him to take sides in the highly-charged political debate about Roman rule in the land of Israel. Yet there was more at stake here: if Jesus really was the long-awaited Messiah, then surely he would oppose the Roman overlords. So the question was calculated to expose him either as a threat to the regime, or a fraud.

Jesus’ answer deftly moves the argument to a higher plane, gently cautioning against both the politicization of religion and the deification of temporal power, along with the relentless pursuit of wealth. His audience needed to be reminded that the Messiah was not Caesar, and Caesar was not God. The kingdom that Jesus came to establish was of an altogether higher order. As he told Pontius Pilate, "My kingship is not of this world."

The Christmas stories in the New Testament are intended to convey a similar message. Jesus was born during a "census of the whole world" taken by Caesar Augustus, the Emperor renowned for bringing the Pax Romana to all the lands under Roman rule. Yet this infant, born in an obscure and far-flung corner of the Empire, was to offer the world a far greater peace, truly universal in scope and transcending all limitations of space and time.

Jesus is presented to us as King David’s heir, but the liberation he brought to his people was not about holding hostile armies at bay; it was about conquering sin and death forever.

The birth of Christ challenges us to reassess our priorities, our values, our very way of life. While Christmas is undoubtedly a time of great joy, it is also an occasion for deep reflection, even an examination of conscience. At the end of a year that has meant economic hardship for many, what can we learn from the humility, the poverty, the simplicity of the crib scene?

Christmas can be the time in which we learn to read the Gospel, to get to know Jesus not only as the Child in the manger, but as the one in whom we recognize God made Man.

It is in the Gospel that Christians find inspiration for their daily lives and their involvement in worldly affairs – be it in the Houses of Parliament or the Stock Exchange. Christians shouldn’t shun the world; they should engage with it. But their involvement in politics and economics should transcend every form of ideology.

  

Christians fight poverty out of a recognition of the supreme dignity of every human being, created in God’s image and destined for eternal life. Christians work for more equitable sharing of the earth’s resources out of a belief that, as stewards of God’s creation, we have a duty to care for the weakest and most vulnerable. Christians oppose greed and exploitation out of a conviction that generosity and selfless love, as taught and lived by Jesus of Nazareth, are the way that leads to fullness of life. Christian belief in the transcendent destiny of every human being gives urgency to the task of promoting peace and justice for all.

Because these goals are shared by so many, much fruitful cooperation is possible between Christians and others. Yet Christians render to Caesar only what belongs to Caesar, not what belongs to God. Christians have at times throughout history been unable to comply with demands made by Caesar. From the Emperor cult of ancient Rome to the totalitarian regimes of the last century, Caesar has tried to take the place of God. When Christians refuse to bow down before the false gods proposed today, it is not because of an antiquated world-view. Rather, it is because they are free from the constraints of ideology and inspired by such a noble vision of human destiny that they cannot collude with anything that undermines it. *

In Italy, many crib scenes feature the ruins of ancient Roman buildings in the background. This shows that the birth of the child Jesus marks the end of the old order, the pagan world, in which Caesar’s claims went virtually unchallenged. Now there is a new king, who relies not on the force of arms, but on the power of love. He brings hope to all those who, like himself, live on the margins of society. He brings hope to all who are vulnerable to the changing fortunes of a precarious world. From the manger, Christ calls us to live as citizens of his heavenly kingdom, a kingdom that all people of good will can help to build here on earth.

Friday, December 21, 2012

The writer is the Bishop of Rome and author of ‘Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives’

*my underline

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/099d055e-4937-11e2-9225-00144feab49a.html#axzz2FrPsNTnG

Intelligence Agencies Move Towards Single Super-Cloud

December 17, 2012

By Henry Kenyon
AOL Government

The intelligence community is developing a single cloud computing network to allow all its analysts to access and rapidly sift through massive volumes of data. When fully complete, this effort will create a pan-agency cloud, with organizations sharing many of the same computing resources and information. More importantly, the hope is the system will break down existing boundaries between agencies and change their insular cultures.

ICAM Still Faces Bumpy Road For Government Smart Card RolloutAs in the rest of the federal government, lower costs and higher efficiency are the primary reasons for the intelligence world's shift to cloud computing, said Charles Allen, formerly Under Secretary of Homeland Security for intelligence and analysis, currently a principal with the Chertoff Group, in an interview with AOL Defense, an affiliate of AOL Government.

Now in its eighth month, the goal of the effort is to connect the CIA's existing cloud to a new cloud run by the National Security Agency. This NSA-run network consists of five other intelligence agencies and the FBI. Both of these clouds can interoperate, but the CIA has its own unique needs because it must work with human intelligence, which necessitates keeping its cloud slightly separate, he said.

...

Continue reading at AOL Government

 

 

CONFIDENTIAL National Security Study Memorandum. NSSM 200. Implications of Worldwide Population Growth.

Read:
http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PCAAB500.pdf

Who was targeted? Those countries are: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Columbia.

Together, they accounted for 47 percent of the world's population increase (in the 70s)

DO NOT BE DISTRACTED BY other website on the subject,

READ for yourself and draw your own conclusion...

Merry ChrisTmas..

 

World Conference on International Telecommunications of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)

The U.S. and dominant global Internet companies fear regulation because it will adversely affect their control over the communication realm

A lot of global attention right now is focussed on the World Conference on International Telecommunications of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) which will get under way in Dubai next week. This meeting is taking up a review of International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs).

 

When the ITRs were last reviewed in 1988, the Internet was not commonplace and, therefore, did not find mention. In 2012, it is difficult to think of global communication without the Internet. The key question today is whether the remit of the ITU should extend to the Internet or not, and if indeed it should, to what parts and aspects of the Internet, and in what manner.       

Full story ...on link

   http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/hyping-one-threat-to-hide-another/article4140922.ece

 

The Most Anti-Catholic President in the History of the Union

 

http://orbiscatholicussecundus.blogspot.ca/2012/11/the-most-anti-catholic-president-in.html