Hamas Foreign Minister: We Accept Two-State Solution With '67 Borders
By Eyder Peralta
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Hamas, which has been known for its rocket attacks and suicide bombings, just signed a reconciliation with its secular rival Fatah. In 2007, Hamas expelled Fatah from Gaza and the Palestinians ended up with a divided government. According to analysts, the reconciliation between the two groups means Hamas is trying to moderate its views to appeal to the West.
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"I think Hamas shows a lot of flexibility. We became more pragmatic, more realistic. Hamas is ready to go more and more for political solutions. Hamas could be a good player in making peace in this region, but don't use sticks against him, and punishment against Hamas," Hamad said, referring to the sanctions imposed after Hamas won a decisive majority in the Palestinian Parliament in 2006.
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Hani Masri, a Palestinian commentator who sometimes mediates between Hamas and its secular rival, Fatah, said Hamas realized that to lead the Palestinians, it needs "acceptance by the international community, particularly the West."
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For it's part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear that Israel wants nothing to do with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas.
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Chart of the Day: Unemployment Falls Off the Radar
By Kevin Drum
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National Journal's Clifford Marks goes looking for evidence that the chattering classes are chattering a lot more about the deficit these days, and he finds it: mentions of the deficit are way up in the country's five biggest newspapers. The explanation is pretty simple: "The broadening gap demonstrates just how effective conservatives have been at changing the narrative of economic policy from one dominated by talk of fiscal stimulus to one now in lockstep with notions of fiscal austerity."
This is neither surprising nor, in a sense, unwarranted. Republicans won a landslide election last November and several deficit commissions finally presented their plans to the public in December. What is unwarranted, however, is the yellow line in the chart, the one that shows mentions of unemployment: it's down to about 50, which means about two mentions per week in each newspaper.
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Haunted by the nightmare of Katrina
By Seema Jilani
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The announcement that John Ashcroft will become the new ethics adviser to the private security company formerly known as Blackwater – now Xe – reflects the fact that our nation's moral compass has not been pointing due north in recent years. This April, a federal appeals court reopened the case against four Blackwater guards accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007, when the company was under the control of the controversial figure Erik Prince. Prince has since set up a secret mercenary force for the UAE, whose primary objectives are to defend against terrorist attacks and to mercilessly squash internal revolts.
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All this comes on the heels of the news that for the first time since 1973, the Army Corps of Engineers opened a portion of the Morganza Spillway this weekend to relieve pressure on the levees from a swollen Mississippi River. In 2009, a federal judge found the same Army Corps of Engineers guilty of negligence that led to catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Katrina. As the water began engulfing Cajun country again this weekend, memories of Hurricane Katrina resurfaced in the minds of Louisiana residents: water lapping onto roofs, bloated human cadavers floating among the carcasses of dead animals, snakes and alligators biting in toxic flood waters, widespread rapes and looting in the infested, filthy Superdome.
For many who lived through it, Katrina was not a natural disaster. It was a calamity fuelled by an incompetent government guilty of negligence, corruption, violence and racism, one in which the poorest people of the country suffered inexcusably and a city was rendered unrecognisable. It was devastation of epic proportions.
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These were our fellow Americans, who watched their children drown, and their possessions swept away, citizens who were living like animals, waiting in anticipation for their government to rescue them from their rooftops, to feed them and shelter them, or at least comfort them. And what did they get? Mercenaries who were employed by private security companies. These mercenaries were sent to the submerged city under the auspices of restoring order, but actually participated in one of the most disgraceful chapters in American history.
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USA Today: Climate science deniers are now like birthers
By Joseph Romm
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In a must-read editorial, USA Today compared climate science deniers to "the 'birthers' who continue to challenge President Obama's American citizenship -- a vocal minority that refuses to accept overwhelming evidence."
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In making the comparison, the newspaper cited both the National Academy's "Climate Choices" study and their own devastating dismantling of statistician Edward Wegman's work, which has been a cornerstone corner card of the climate science denial cult . . .
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Coincidentally, USA TODAY's Dan Vergano reported Monday, a statistics journal retracted a federally funded study that had become a touchstone among climate-change deniers. The retraction followed complaints of plagiarism and use of unreliable sources, such as Wikipedia.
Taken together, these developments ought to leave the deniers in the same position as the "birthers," who continue to challenge President Obama's American citizenship -- a vocal minority that refuses to accept overwhelming evidence.
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Why you can't really anonymize your data
By Pete Warden
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One of the joys of the last few years has been the flood of real-world datasets being released by all sorts of organizations. These usually involve some record of individuals' activities, so to assuage privacy fears, the distributors will claim that any personally-identifying information (PII) has been stripped. The idea is that this makes it impossible to match any record with the person it's recording.
Something that my friend Arvind Narayanan has taught me, both with theoretical papers and repeated practical demonstrations, is that this anonymization process is an illusion. Precisely because there are now so many different public datasets to cross-reference, any set of records with a non-trivial amount of information on someone's actions has a good chance of matching identifiable public records. Arvind first demonstrated this when he and his fellow researcher took the "anonymous" dataset released as part of the first Netflix prize, and demonstrated how he could correlate the movie rentals listed with public IMDB reviews. That let them identify some named individuals, and then gave access to their complete rental histories. More recently, he and his collaborators used the same approach to win a Kaggle contest by matching the topography of the anonymized and a publicly crawled version of the social connections on Flickr. They were able to take two partial social graphs, and like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, figure out fragments that matched and represented the same users in both.
All the known examples of this type of identification are from the research world — no commercial or malicious uses have yet come to light — but they prove that anonymization is not an absolute protection. In fact, it creates a false sense of security. Any dataset that has enough information on people to be interesting to researchers also has enough information to be de-anonymized. This is important because I want to see our tools applied to problems that really matter in areas like health and crime. This means releasing detailed datasets on those areas to researchers, and those are bound to contain data more sensitive than movie rentals or photo logs. If just one of those sets is de-anonymized and causes a user backlash, we'll lose access to all of them.
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Pakistani PM hails China as his country's 'best friend'
By (BBC)
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Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has arrived in China on a four-day visit to commemorate 60 years of diplomatic ties between the countries.
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Pakistan feels dwarfed and threatened by India and China is a useful counterbalance. But it's important to get this in perspective. Both China and Pakistan still have more significant links with America than with each other.
China's relationship with the US is by far its most significant diplomatic relationship, dwarfing any ties with Islamabad. Pakistan receives billions of dollars in US aid and, despite the tensions, both Islamabad and Washington are enmeshed in a joint fight against extremists.
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Any divisions between Pakistan and the United States could be an opportunity for China - Pakistan is desperate for foreign investment, especially in infrastructure, one of China's specialities, our correspondent adds.
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Ex-Rwanda army chief sentenced for genocide
By (Al Jazeera)
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The UN court for Rwanda has handed the general who was army chief during the country's 1994 genocide a 30-year jail term for his role in the mass killing, including calling for the murder of ethnic Tutsis.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) found that Augustine Bizimungu had complete control over the men he commanded, who were involved in the massacres that started on the night of April 6.
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Bizimungu and Ndindiliyimana are among the most senior figures to be tried by the tribunal, based in the Tanzanian city of Arusha, for the genocide in which 800,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, were killed.
The genocide targeted mostly minority Tutsis and was orchestrated by machete-wielding Hutus calling themselves the Interahamwe, meaning "those who work together".
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