Family of Aaron Swartz: Government officials partly to blame for his death
By Isolde Raftery, Staff Writer, NBC News
In the 24 hours since Aaron Swartz, a prodigy programmer turned Internet folk hero, hanged himself in his New York apartment, his family and a close friend and mentor have not only expressed devastation – they have been angry.
“Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy,” his family wrote in a statement. “It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”
Swartz, who helped to create RSS at age 14, was indicted in 2011 on charges alleging he improperly downloaded more than four million articles from JSTOR, an online system for archiving academic journals. Swartz argued for transparency — JSTOR costs more than $50,000 for an annual university subscription — but court records show that the federal government believed he had, among other felonies, committed wire fraud and computer fraud and unlawfully obtained information from a protected computer.
Israel evicts tent protesters at West Bank E1 settlement
13 January 2013 Last updated at 05:22 GMT
The BBC
Israeli police have evicted Palestinian and international activists from an area of the West Bank where Israel is planning fresh settlement building.
They had put up around 20 tents in the area called E1, between Jerusalem and the Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim.
Israel’s Supreme Court had ruled on Friday that the encampment could remain for six days.
Palestinians fear building in E1 would threaten the viability of a future Palestinian state.
Abir Kopty, spokeswoman for the Popular Struggle Co-ordination Committee, a Palestinian activist group, tweeted that six people had been injured during the eviction and had been taken to hospital.
Athens tax scandal becomes political thriller
GREECE
How could suspected Greek tax evaders data simply disappear? This question may soon come before a parliamentary probe. At the center of the scandal is the country’s former finance minister.
In the scandal involving the cover-up of alleged tax evader’s bank accounts, Greece’s former finance minister George Papaconstantinou may be forced to front an inquiry board. The reason: the former head of Greece’s public finances is accused of removing relatives names from a list of Swiss bank account holders.
Named after Christine Lagarde, France’s former finance minister and current head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the ‘Lagarde-list’ names nearly 2,000 Greeks holding bank accounts in Switzerland. An employee at HSBC in Geneva leaked the file and in 2010 Lagarde handed the dossier to her counterpart, Papaconstantinou, assuming the information would be of interest to Greek tax authorities.
Toxic air blocks out the sun in Beijing
John Garnaut January 13, 2013 – 5:19PM
A blanket of toxic air that has blocked out the sun across most of north China is dominating social media and looming as a serious health and political challenge.
Visibility was reduced to a few hundred metres for much of the weekend in the Chinese capital and many of the city’s 20 million residents went online to vent their frustration about “apocalyptic” and “post-apocalyptic” conditions.
The Beijing News covered the story with the headline “Blown the Charts”, showing that several air monitoring stations were recording levels higher than their indexes could cope with.
Pollution was the top-ranking story on the country’s most popular news portals.
Analysts said censorship of air pollution problems has eased since President Xi Jinping raised “a more beautiful environment” as a priority in his November 15 acceptance speech and then ordered official news outlets to report more genuine news.
Somalia: A failed state is back from the dead
Less than two years ago, its capital was a war zone. No longer
JAMES FERGUSSON SUNDAY 13 JANUARY 2013
Eighteen months ago, central Mogadishu was like an African Stalingrad. The heat may have been equatorial but everything else seemed strangely familiar: a dirty cat-and-mouse war, often fought hand to hand among the spectacularly bombed-out ruins of a once-thriving city centre.
On one side were the forces of the Western-backed government, supported by thousands of Ugandan and Burundian troops of AMISOM, the African Union Mission in Somalia. On the other was al Shabaab, a virulent militant Islamist organisation aligned with al Qaida. The two sides had been fighting for control of the capital for three years.
Bowie’s Berlin: ‘A time of Sturm und Drang in the shadow of the Wall’
After the surprise release of the singer’s first single in more than a decade, Kate Connolly walks in his footsteps around the city landmarks that inspired three great albums of the 1970s – as well as his latest elegy to the German capital
Kate Connolly
The Observer, Sunday 13 January 2013Thilo Schmied is lost in thought, mulling over the days when David Bowie fell in love with Berlin, and Berlin fell in love with him. “Whenever he went into a record store, the word would spread and people would gather outside, and when he came out with his purchases, they’d dash inside and ask the sales people what he had bought.”
Schmied, a sound engineer, now offers tours of the Hansa studio, the place where Bowie spent so much of the fertile period which saw the recording of his Berlin trilogy of albums, Low, “Heroes” and Lodger. The studio’s mahogany-panelled former ballroom – where “Heroes” was recorded – remains the destination for many fans seeking to get to the heart of Bowie’s mid-1970s Berlin experience.
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