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Catherine Philp, reporting for The Times:
… 200,000 Tamil civilians [are] being held against their will behind the razor-wire coils that surround Manik Farm, the largest displacement camp in Sri Lanka — one of the largest in the world.
At Manik Farm, the boys — and some girls — of fighting age were separated for screening and have not been seen since.
Fareed Zakaria writing for Newsweek:
… over the last five years, senior Iranian officials at every level have repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to build nuclear weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has quoted the regime’s founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who asserted that such weapons were “un-Islamic.” The country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral. In a subsequent sermon, he declared that “developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam.” Last year Khamenei reiterated all these points after meeting with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. Now, of course, they could all be lying. But it seems odd for a regime that derives its legitimacy from its fidelity to Islam to declare constantly that these weapons are un-Islamic if it intends to develop them. It would be far shrewder to stop reminding people of Khomeini’s statements and stop issuing new fatwas against nukes.
The Daily Telegraph’s interview with John Wick, UK MPs’ expenses benefit fraud whistleblower:
There were three versions [of the MPs’ expenses database] … there was an unredacted version and two redacted versions.
We’ve reached a stage in society where they want to know everything about us. I think we’re entitled to know about them.
I like the way the Telegraph has gone about publishing this material. If they’d published it all at once the story may have faded away and there wouldn’t be as bigger shit storm as there is.
Update: Title updated for accuracy and context.
Quarter of voters set to reject main parties at EU elections, a Guardian/ICM survey finds.
That’s still a lot of suckers out there. I still can’t fathom why they didn’t reject them after they took their country to war on a pack of lies.
John Gruber, with probably the most reliable low-down on the next iPhone, due to arrive in July.
And, in the mean time, workers appeal to Apple directly to end iPhone supplier’s labour abuse.
Costas Douzinas on freedom and equality:
Let me start with a socialist axiom … : freedom cannot flourish without equality and equality does not exist without freedom.
While logically and philosophically inseparable, equality and liberty have followed different and even opposed trajectories. For liberalism, freedom in its negative and positive forms is primary. Negative freedom is captured in Hobbes’s statement that liberty is the absence of “external impediments”. The positive “freedom to”, on the other hand, was classically defined by Isaiah Berlin: “I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind … to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s acts of will.”
Or as I once put on a t-shirt:
Anarchism, the name given to a struggle for a society characterised by the ability of each actor to have a say in outcomes proportionate to the degree they are affected by them.
Landon Thomas Jr. in the New York Times:
Norway is … a major oil exporter [and] Even though prices have sharply declined, the government is not particularly worried. That is because Norway avoided the usual trap that plagues many energy-rich countries.
Instead of spending its riches lavishly, it passed legislation ensuring that oil revenue went straight into its sovereign wealth fund, state money that is used to make investments around the world. Now its sovereign wealth fund is close to being the largest in the world …
Norway’s relative frugality stands in stark contrast to Britain, which spent most of its North Sea oil revenue — and more — during the boom years. Government spending rose to 47 percent of G.D.P., from 42 percent in 2003. By comparison, public spending in Norway fell to 40 percent from 48 percent of G.D.P.
“The U.S. and the U.K. have no sense of guilt,” said Anders Aslund, an expert on Scandinavia at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
Eirik Wekre, an economist … describes Norwegians’ feelings about debt this way: “We cannot spend this money now; it would be stealing from future generations.”
John Timmer’s take on Wolfram Alpha:
… the biggest issue is that, in the process of creating the data store behind Alpha, all the context behind a number — who produced it, what were their methods, how was the raw data obtained, is the number actually relevant for a given analysis, etc. — is stripped …
Fascinating article on Donald Rumsfeld in GQ magazine that will make you cringe.
Wolfram Alpha is a new search engine you’re likely to hear a lot more about and it went live with a test run today. It’s not a search engine in the same way as Google, which indexes and searches websites, but an answer search engine, which indexes and computes facts.
Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer. Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing.
Theodore Gray of Wolfram Research describes the secret behind Wolfram Alpha:
The secret weapon that has allowed us, and no one else, to assemble such a vast library of algorithms, in such a diverse range of fields, is Mathematica.
Mathematica is familiar to scientists and engineers as the most powerful, most general tool for scientific computation, a role it has played since Version 1 was released in 1988.