Brazilian President to Cancel Visit to the USA If She Doesn’t Receive a Public Apology for NSA Cyberspying

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According to local media reports, Brazilian President Dilma Vana Rousseff is ready to cancel her visit to the USA scheduled for October if she doesn’t receive a public apology from Washington in connection with cyberspying by American intelligence services on her. Reports also say that Brazil is ready to cancel planned trade deals with the USA, including an agreement to purchase F-18 Super Hornet jets from US-based Boeing Corporation, worth some 4 billion USD (133 billion Roubles. 4.2 billion CAD. 4.4 billion AUD. 3 billion Euros. 2.6 billion UK Pounds). This week, Rede Globo TV said that the NSA, the American electronic intelligence bureau, tracked phone calls and e-mail messages between President Rousseff and her Mexican counterpart Enrique Peña Nieto. Documents handed to journalists by ex-CIA analyst Edward Snowden backed up these revelations. On Tuesday, Folha de S. Paulo reported that President Rousseff is thinking of cancelling her scheduled 23 October official visit to Washington. President Rousseff was greatly angered at the news that the NSA spied on her telephone calls and correspondence.

5 September 2013

Voice of Russia World Service

http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2013_09_05/Brazilian-President-to-cancel-US-visit-if-doesn-t-receive-public-apologies-for-cyber-spying-3906/

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A Law That Gives Birth to Crimes

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A man with a gun killed seven people and wounded at least three others at a university campus in Oakland CA. When police detained the killer, he babbled senseless statements continually. Later, they found out that the man was One Goh, 43-years-old, once a student at the same university. The Oakland tragedy happened only one month after a similar one in Ohio. There, a schoolboy shot dead three classmates in a school cafeteria. Similar incidents of shootings in schools or universities have nearly become a routine in the USA. Each year, they take up to 30 lives. In 1999, two schoolboys in Littleton CO shot dead 17 of their schoolmates. Then, they shot themselves in the school’s library. We know that these two boys belonged to a group of teenagers who called themselves “The Trench Coat Mafia”, who professed ideas close to Nazism. In 2007, a student in Virginia killed 30 people at a technical institute.

One might say that we should blame the administrators of these schools and universities for what happened. If they had watched their students closer, they would’ve probably noticed something strange in their behaviour and would have prevented the tragedies by calling the police or a brigade of psychiatrists. That might be true, but only to a certain extent. Probably, it’d be more logical to say that the main people bearing the blame here are US lawmakers, who haven’t yet abolished laws that allow practically everyone to possess weapons. You can hardly argue, after all, that even the most aggressive or inadequate person is less dangerous if they don’t have a gun than if they do. In fact, at present, practically everyone, even former criminals or mentally insane people, may buy a gun in the USA.

However, the reason why the law that makes this situation possible still exists is simple. Weapons producers, who seem to care more about their profits than about people’s lives, back the law. True, there are heated debates concerning this law in the USA, but as one can see, they still haven’t brought any results. The defenders of the law in question say that it is thanks to such laws that the USA gained independence from the UK more than 200 years ago and managed to preserve this independence through all these years. Well, historians may argue whether this is true. However, what’s true without doubt is that Colonial times or those of the Civil War are now long-bygone history.

Unfortunately, the law that allows nearly everyone to have a gun is not the only dubious law that still exists in the USA. There are some other laws that, in fact, allow people to lynch anyone under the pretext that the lyncher is helping the police. For example, recently, a certain George Zimmerman, a member of a volunteer neighbourhood watch group that helped the police to patrol streets in the city of Sanford FL, killed a 17-year old boy because he took him for a robber. This group consisted of volunteers, but existed quite legally and officially. The killer was white and the victim was black, but it’s still uncertain whether there were racial motives behind this killing. However, this incident was one step away from stirring a racial conflict all over the USA. Quite logically, many people say that the authorities should fight crime, not self-proclaimed “gropers after truth” like George Zimmermann. However, weapon producers hardly listen to any logic except the “logic” of their purses. Several years ago, weapon producers, with the help of the Republican Party, managed to urge lawmakers to abolish a ban on selling about 20 kinds of weapons to individuals introduced by the Clinton administration.

Even the fact that the free selling of weapons may aggravate US relations with Mexico doesn’t stop the defenders of this obviously outdated law. At present, without exaggeration, something that one may call a war of mafia clans grips Mexico. Mexican President Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa believes that the free trade of weapons in the US makes it easier for weapon smugglers to provide Mexican gangsters with weapons. Sr Calderon has several times addressed the USA with a request to abolish the free trade of weapons, but with no success. One can make only one conclusion in this situation… if Americans don’t want new tragedies, they have to abolish laws that give birth to crimes.

3 April 2012

Vladimir Gladkov

Voice of Russia World Service

http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_04_03/70564073/

Editor’s Note:

American independence was NOT won by a bunch of yahoos waving muskets. It was won because the American Radicals maintained a field army long enough to weary Britain, which had to fight an expensive unpopular war at the end of a long supply line. Then, again, the fact that most of Europe lined up against Britain also brought things to a head. The fact that yahoos owned their own hunting pieces was of no moment in the larger scheme of things. The sooner we regulate firearms more closely will be the day when we’ll be able to cut the murder rate. Unfortunately, the American South is full of macho creeps who think their virility’s threatened if they can’t own an AK or a machine gun (no lie). Therefore, lax gun laws will continue in this barbarous quarter, which will mean that murderers will continue to be able to procure firearms.

Sad, but true…

BMD