Wikileaks' underground bunker in Sweden

Wikileaks' internet servers are operating in an underground nuclear-proof bunker in Sweden. The front page photo (below) of the Gold Coast Bulletin issue of December 10, and twelve more in the inside pages remind us of the futuristic sets of science-fiction movies.

In contrast, it's jail for Julian Assange, and he's not been allowed to bring his computer to his detention cell.  His arrest has not stopped the leaks though, the latest having to do with Pope Benedict XVI and the Vatican regarding Turkey, Anglicans and child sex abuse.

Wikileaks was on the move after the shut-out by Amazon.com, but then around 500 mirror sites sprang up from around the cyberworld capable of releasing the 250,000 US embassy cables anytime.

When Assange was denied bail, Operation Payback, an activist group, attacked the MasterCard and Visa websites, among others.

What would happen if Assange is extradited to Sweden to face the rape charges against him? An arrest warrant went out not because of Weakileaks but of sexual crime he allegedly committed when he visited that country earlier this year.

What would happen if Sweden delivers Assange--the "Ned Kelly of the digital age" to the Sydney Morning Herald--to American custody for a possible espionage case?

Imagine John Lennon on his 30th death anniversary

We were a provincial lad, thin and with a thick, hard-to-comb, curly bush of hair, transplanted from the old hometown for the first time ever to the freshman dormitory of the Philippines' premier state university when the Beatles long-playing album A Hard Day's Night (June 1964) had just been released.  Thus, hardly a day or night passed without someone warbling--without apologies to John Lennon-- I Should Have Known Better along the dorm's long corridors or in the shower room for quite a long period of time.

To us, the Beatles was John Lennon and/or Paul McCartney. The songs we loved simply got stuck in our memory.  We didn't get bothered if You've Got to Hide Your Love Away, Ticket to Ride and Norwegian Wood were Lennon's, and Yesterday, Michelle and Hey Jude were  McCartney's, although they were marked up as Lennon/McCartney collaborations.  

Hey Jude remains a favorite. In some ways it was the theme song of our fraternity's final rites in October 1968, a few months after it was released, because almost everyone would break into singing it whole or in parts every so often during the informal sessions with our candidate brothers.   It doesn't matter that McCartney wrote it to comfort Julian Lennon  after his father left him and his mother Cynthia for Yoko Ono earlier that year.  

John Lennon and Yoko Ono we remember so well for their pacifist stance, and their nude photo in the cover of their album Two Virgins in 1968. 

While we somehow lost much of our Lennon/McCartney consciousness during the people's long marches in the late 1960s, we still responded to their Give Peace a Chance (1969) and Lennon's Imagine (1971) with a different kind of dynamics. These songs came at the height of the American war in Vietnam, and the Philippines was confronting a gathering malevolent political storm.  There came different songs to voice our protests when we went through the dark night of the Philippine soul in the 1970s to 1986, pulling out from our memory's cache of  Lennon/McCartney musical gems something to imagine bright days ahead.

We also deeply grieved when Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon four times in the back thirty years ago today, on 08 December 1980, at the entrance of The Dakota on 71st Street, New York City. A few hours earlier, Chapman asked Lennon for his autograph on a copy of the Double Fantasy album cover.

"Just imagine it never happened," Darryl Sterdan, music critic of the Winnipeg Sun Media, wrote, and  that last year, "Lennon and Ono celebrate[d] their 40th anniversary by making a new CD. They pose[d] nude on the cover a la Two Virgins. Walmart refuse[d] to stock it until Lennon agree[d] to add tiny fig leaves."

This year, Sterdan added further, it would be "the Beatles embrac[ing] the digital age. Once again rejecting massive offers for a reunion tour, Lennon quietly turns 70, teaming up with Sean and Yoko to reform Plastic Ono Band and Elephant's Memory for a one-off concert. On eBay, an autographed but badly damaged copy of Double Fantasy found on the street in 1980 sits unsold."

For more of Sterdan's Just Imagine scenarios,  go to http://www.torontosun.com/entertainment/music/2010/12/02/16407886.html

His memory lives on with this official video of him singing Imagine --

For a personal homage to his memory, one can walk across the street from The Dakota to the Strawberry Fields and the Imagine memorials for John Lennon in Central Park.  It can not be missed if one follows the trail on the west side.  The day we went last year, the memorials were not crowded. 

New lands for the FIFA World Cup; vuvuzelas in Russia, 2018 and Qatar, 2022

It also happened that England was snowbound on the day it lost its bid to host the World Cup in 2018.  The idiom "under the weather" is indeed apt. 

Despite their strong presence in Zurich, Prime Minister David Cameron, Prince William and former football captain David Beckham did not fire up enthusiasm among the 22 members of the FIFA governing body, which gave England only two votes. 

On the other hand, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin canceled initial plans to be there before the secret voting.  Despite his absence, Russia won the bid, reason for him to fly to Zurich to receive the award.  "If you don't take risks, you don't drink champagne," he's reported to have quoted this Russian saying.

Football fans may expect Russia to build stadiums in 13 host cities from Kaliningrad in the west to Yekaterinburg in the east at a cost estimated at around $10 billion. 

Beckham could only cry for England's bitter disappointment. The other losers were Holland-Belgium and Spain-Portugal. 

US President Obama, on the other hand, accused FIFA for making a "wrong decision" when the hosting of World Cup 2022 went to Qatar.  The US, Australia, South Korea and Japan bid for the site.

"We go to new lands" was how FIFA president Sepp Blatter explained the choices. 

Qatar is an interesting issue. It has never qualified for the World Cup finals. It's in the Middle East, and there's the risk from desert heat. FIFA must have strongly believed that Qatar can deliver its "commitment to  

to spend $42.9 billion on infrastructure upgrades and $4 billion to build nine stadiums and renovate three others [and all of them] will have a state-of-the art cooling system that will keep temperatures at about 27 degrees Celsius (81 F)."

Recommended reading on the operational risk assessment and selection of Russia and Qatar as hosts:  "FIFA overlooks risks in picking Russia and Qatar" (04 December 2010) by Stephen Wilson, AP Sports Writer, accessible from My Star online  at http://football.thestar.com.my/story.asp?file=/2010/12/4/football_latest/20101204072455&sec=football_latest

We found this front page cartoon, which came out before the FIFA selection event, very amusing.  It derives its humor from the Wikileaks, insinuating that Julian Assange could possibly do some mining in the rich field of intrigues, accusations and suspicions in international sports organizations, and in this instance, the FIFA.  Who knows if there were also "unclassified", "classified" and "secret" cables that were exchanged in the selection of Olympic, World Cup and other international sports events?

Waiting for WikiLeaks from Manila

"The United States targets Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.  Washington says the publication of more than 250,000 documents is dangerous, and calls the perpetrators criminals."

The 251,287 confidential United States embassy cables started leaking out on Sunday, November 28. 

Just a kid?

On Tuesday, November 30, we caught Secretary of State Hillary Clinton live on TV expressing America's deep regrets about the Wikileaked documents at the same time reassuring American allies. "I want to make it clear," she stressed, "that our foreign policy is not set through these messages, but here in Washington. 

Curiosity led us to Secret US Embassy Cables at http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/ the next day but we could not get to the documents anymore.  We were still able to read the explanatory notes on the cables though, and look at the the map and bar graph showing the various American embassy sources. "The full set consists of 251,287 documents," it said, "comprising 261,276,536 words (seven times the size of "The Iraq War Logs", the world's previously largest classified information release) ...the cables cover from 28th December 1966 to 28th February 2010 and originate from 274 embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions."
  
We also noted that 15, 652 of these memos are "secret",101,748 "confidential" and 133,887 "unclassified"; Iraq was the "most discussed country" with 15,365 cables, 6,677 came from there; "Ankara, Turkey had the most cables coming from it--7,918"; and 8,017 cables came from the office of the Secretary of State.

One more thing whetted our appetite to look for the leaks--The Philippine Star headlined on the same day that the Wikileaks include "1,796 US memos from [the US embassy in] Manila."  It learned from the Guardian of UK that 982 of these cables are "unclassified", 749 "classified" and 65 "secret", and "all but two of [these] were sent between January 2005 and February 2010, [with] the two ... dated Nov. 21, 2001 and July 19, 1994."  It appears that most of the information flow happened during the reign of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.


Until today, President Noynoy Aquino has yet to receive a call from Clinton although nothing yet of the Philippine cables have hit the remaining open online Wikileaks sources--The New York Times, Guardian of the UK, Der Spiegel of Germany, Le Monde of France and El Pais of Spain--after Amazon.com shut down its host services. It has been reported that Wikileaks has moved its site to Switzerland. 


We've seen the summary reports on the cables that have been released so far at the New York Times and Buenos Aires Herald.  The one we read with utmost delight at Spiegel Online is the confidential dispatch of 31 August 2006 with an intriguing title: "The US Ambassador Learns that Cognac Is Like Wine."  about "high society wedding in the Caucasus -- complete with massive quantities of alcohol, lumps of gold and revolver-wielding drunkards."  It's very well-written like an essay in one's favorite magazine coming in four parts, and these are just excerpts.


The latest releases (05 December) in Spiegel Online include the following:

•  At Sea in the Desert/ US Diplomats Bewildered and Bamboozled in Baghdad
• 'Redder than Red'/ An American Portrait of China's Next Leader
• US Dispatches from Beijing/ 'True Democracy' Within China's Politburo?

Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, is thought of as constantly moving. However, it has been reported by a British newspaper,The Independent, that the whistle blower arrived in Britain in October, the police know of his whereabouts but they have yet to serve the international warrant for his arrest.  The Interpol has issued a 'red notice' for his arrest because he is wanted in Sweden on suspicion of sexual crimes allegedly committed there earlier this year.

The fall-out has caused US President Barack Obama to create a special committee called the Interagency Policy Committee for WikiLeaks that will try to block any other leaks in the future through intelligence agency coordination within the country.

We have yet to see the US file federal charges against Wikileaks. Is cablegate a sound argument for honest journalism?

Rio War Ending: Brazil Flag Waves Over the Slums

Reconquering territory!

Military occupation.

Like any Bruce Willis do-good urban warfare movie, criminal elements either die during the eardrum-splitting exchange of gunfire, or get captured after a hot pursuit by foot or police cars through a maze of hide-outs while a helicopter hovers above for tactical support, or, to everyone's frustration, escape. 

Urban war trophies:  arms and drugs.

The paradox is that it was this urban war that appears to have given the two-year pacification program in the favelas a big push.  President Luiz Inacio da Silva was saying he couldn't understand why the criminals should be in control over the favelas; he himself dispatched 800 troopers to support the police and military forces in their assault of the Complexo do Alemao and Vila Cruzeiro. There were casualties, yes, but the operation succeeded.  The denouement had the soldiers waving the Brazil flag over the re-conquered territory.  Wanted criminals were captured, arms arsenals and drug warehouses captured. The war pains would probably be felt by the slum residents for a long time. 

A hero of the Rio war returns home to his pregnant wife.

President-elect Dilma Rousseff takes over government on December 31st.  Probably, Silva wants Dilma not to be bothered by the favela issues while she takes care of more pressing government agenda, and as Brazil prepares for the great samba welcome to the World Cup 2014 and the Summer Olympics in 2018!

A view of the two faces of Rio, the bright city and the dark slums.