contributions

The Bottom Line on Paper vs. Electrons in Elections:
There is no such thing as a completely secure all-electronic ballot nor paper ballot so far. One can be hacked or the data simply lost, the other can be discarded or lost by either human dishonesty or human error.
However, of the two, the one it takes a human to mess up is more likely to survive intact because other humans are actively working to prevent intentional or unintentional discarding of votes, and humans who cheat can go to (…)

Reserves Fall 45% Short Of Goal, While Gap Is 30% In Regular Force Sign-Ups
By CHRISTOPHER COOPER and GREG JAFFE
For the second straight year, U.S. Army recruiters fell short of their goal for signing up enlistees in the first month of a new recruiting cycle.
For the first 30-day period in its new recruiting year, the Army was 30% shy of its goal of signing up 7,274 recruits. The Army had a particularly hard time recruiting for the Army Reserve, on which the Pentagon has relied heavily (…)

GOP chairman says Democrat’s claim ‘inaccurate’
WASHINGTON — Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry accused President Bush on Sunday of planning a surprise second-term attempt to privatize Social Security, and forecast a "disaster for America’s middle class." Republican party chairman Ed Gillespie called the charge "just flat inaccurate."
The clash erupted as Kerry and his running mate both appealed to Florida voters to cast their ballots as early as today under the state’s early voting program. (…)

U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government, risking criticism from lawmakers in the ruling Labour Party, said it will redeploy 850 troops now in southern Iraq to a region controlled by U.S. forces.
The Black Watch regiment will relieve American troops needed for an attack on rebels in Fallujah. The move will help stabilize Iraq ahead of elections due in January, Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said. Britain has 8,500 troops in Iraq.
This deployment is a vital part of the process of (…)

By Ehsan Ahrari
After the US dismantlement of the regime of Saddam Hussein, Iran has emerged as a major target of the acrimonious rhetoric of the Bush administration and Israel’s threats related to that country’s nuclear aspirations. Given the fact that Iran’s active nuclear program has been the focus of US concern since the early 1990s, it is likely to acquire a crisis situation in the near future.
Two other realities are also keeping this issue on the front burner from the American (…)

The parliamentary committee appointed to investigate the Beslan tragedy may keep the results of its investigation a secret, simply because they are too scary.
Over 330 people - half of them children - died in the three-day hostage drama in a school in southern Russia after up to 30 militants stormed the building on the first day of class.
“The truth about the real organizers of the terror attack may be so scary that revealing it would lead to new, bloody conflicts,” Newsru.com quoted (…)

President Fidel Castro, Cuba’s leader for more than 45 years, broke his left knee and right arm in a fall, but urged the Caribbean country’s 11 million people to stay calm, the government said.
Castro, 78, tripped and fell as he walked down some steps from a stage on Wednesday night after giving an hour-long speech at a graduation ceremony. The incident was shown live on Cuban television.
"The medical exam confirmed what the commander in chief himself anticipated, that after his (…)

Increasingly concerned about Iran’s nuclear program, Israel is weighing its options and has not ruled out a military strike to prevent the Islamic republic from gaining the capability to build atomic weapons, officials and analysts say.
Israel would much prefer a diplomatic agreement to shut down Iran’s uranium-enrichment program, they said, but if it concluded that Tehran was approaching a "point of no return" it would not be deterred by the difficulty of a military operation, the (…)

Will political and commercial dogma crush the liberating energies of the world’s social justice movements? The European Social Forum in London leaves Paul Kingsnorth with mixed feelings.
By Paul Kingsnorth
It was when they silenced the free-tea man that I knew something was wrong.
A friendly young man had brought a kettle, cups and a few packets of tea bags into Alexandra Palace, site of the third European Social Forum (ESF), and had set himself up in one corner of its great hall, (…)

By Ryan Singel
New U.S. passports will soon be read remotely at borders around the world, thanks to embedded chips that will broadcast on command an individual’s name, address and digital photo to a computerized reader.
The State Department hopes the addition of the chips, which employ radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology, will make passports more secure and harder to forge, according to spokeswoman Kelly Shannon.
"The reason we are doing this is that it simply makes (…)