Ohio State's marching band earns its "Best Damn Band In The Land" nickname. From Michael Jackson themed shows to dinosaurs swallowing people whole OSU's band has not disappointed this season.
And Saturday at the Indiana-Ohio State game they brought out another amazing performance, a salute to the Battle of Gettysburg from 1863. Here's a GIF from @corkgaines, and you can watch the whole video below:
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Branson knows an investment when he sees one
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On 22 November 2013, Ms Janice Dunn Lee, Deputy Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), gave a keynote address on “Sixty Years of Atoms for Peace: Women in Nuclear Science” at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, United States.
Should rewind 2012 changes, or face the financial consequences
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Allows attackers to gain access to data and install programs
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Wait, what?
Slate.fr reports a Croatian community association in France is suing Bob Dylan and the French version of Rolling Stone magazine for racism.
Dylan, of course, was at the vanguard of the artistic wing of the Civil Rights movement, so it may seem impossible that anyone could accuse him of such a thing.
But the Croatian group appears not to have appreciated comments made in Rolling Stone's cover interview of Dylan from this September. In response to a question about whether he sees parallels between Civil War-era America and today, Dylan responded:
Mmm, I don't know how to put it. It's like . . . the United States burned and destroyed itself for the sake of slavery. The USA wouldn't give it up. It had to be grinded out. The whole system had to be ripped out with force. A lot of killing. What, like, 500,000 people? A lot of destruction to end slavery. And that's what it really was all about.
This country is just too f***** up about color. It's a distraction. People at each other's throats just because they are of a different color. It's the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back – or any neighborhood back. Or any anything back. Blacks know that some whites didn't want to give up slavery – that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can't pretend they don't know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.
What Dylan is referring to in the final part of that last sentence is the longstanding feud between majority Roman Catholic Croats and Christian Orthodox Serbs, instances of which still occasionally pop up to this day. In October, unknown assailants destroyed several bilingual and Cyrillic signs placed on state buildings and Serb minority institutions in the Croatian capital of Zagreb, according to Balkan Insight. "Bilingual signs have been installed on state buildings in areas where Serbs make up more than a third of the population – a requirement under the minorities legislation – but the move sparked protests by war veterans in the city of Vukovar which was devastated by Serb forces during the 1990s conflict," the site reported.
Europe's free speech laws are much stricter than in the U.S., and the suit has been accepted on formal grounds, though remains to be evaluated on its merits, Slate says. Cases such as these can take up to 18 months to decide, and even longer when the counter-party is not a French citizen. Dylan and the magazine would face a fine and formal sanction if found guilty.
Dylan was recently named a Legion of Honour by France, though at least one member of the Legion's committee objected on the grounds that Dylan had once done drugs and showed signs of radical leftism...
SEE ALSO: The 6 Greatest Dylan Songs Ever
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For many, the actual act of holiday shopping is the scourge of an otherwise cheerful season.
A good gift is hard to find for anyone, but if you've got an investor in your life, it can prove especially difficult.
Not to fear, because we've got a bunch of great options for you.
Whether it's a desktop essential, a must-have book, or a premium item, we have you covered this year.
Prices may vary, but these are sure to keep any investor risk-on for 2014.
In the years before Yahoo Finance, people actually got their quotes from ticker tape machines. Any investor will love this Dow Jones stock ticker floor case, perfect for the home office.
Price: Estimated $500 – $800 at auction
Benjamin Graham is considered the father of value investing. At Columbia, he taught a young Warren Buffett everything he knows today. Grab this "definitive book on value investing" on Amazon.
Price: $16
Here's another antique, but this one will set you back a bit more."There are dual pairs of electrodes on either side for connection to a telegraphic signal that relayed stock information from Western Union and for a storage battery. It is fairly heavy and includes a wooden base and glass dome." Feel like Jay Gould or J.P. Morgan with this baby.
Price: Estimated $5,000 – $7,000 at auction
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SSD maker is now part of Toshiba but will continue to operate independently
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"Deep Web: The Untold Story of Bitcoin and the Silk Road" is a documentary effort raising money on Kickstarter right now to create a film about the notorious digital currency and the anonymous online drug marketplace.
The movie aims to tell the story of the Deep Web and the varied content it plays host to. If you're completely unfamiliar, here's the project creators on what the "Deep Web" is:
"The Deep Web refers to all unseen, un-indexed and often intentionally hidden web content. The Deep Web accounts for at least 96% of the World Wide Web. 96%! Think about that! What you see when you surf around the web is a fraction of what's actually going on out there. And a lot of what's going on out there is scary stuff!"
Intrigue and suspense! The movie seeks a total of $75,000 to meet its fundraising goal. A $30 donation gets you a digital download of the finished movie. Check out their pitch video below:
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It's that day of the year — Thanksgiving.
So, as we always do, we're taking a moment to list the technology things that we here in the Tech department of Business Insider are thankful for.
Of course, what we're most thankful for is you. Your interest makes what we do possible.
Thank you.
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Over the past months the revelations of Edward Snowden have dominated the news.
Internet privacy suddenly became a mainstream topic and all the negative news has increased the demand for encrypted and secure communications.
Responding to this, several developers quickly jumped in with new tools to prevent the public from having their conversations spied on or their data breached. Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde announced a new encrypted messaging service for example, and Kim Dotcom’s Mega has similar plans.
Today BitTorrent Inc. announced a new project that will also increase people’s security. The San Francisco-based company just launched BitTorrent Chat, a secure messenger app that allows people to communicate without storing the conversations on any central servers.
The new tool is based on BitTorrent technology and is offered free of charge to help people regain complete control over their own data.
“This year alone, more than 6 million people have been impacted by data breaches. The right to own your own conversations online: it’s not a given. It should be,” the company says.
“So over at Labs, we’re working on something that could solve for conversation security. BitTorrent Chat applies distributed technology to the idea of IM. Our goal is to ensure that your messages stay yours: private, secure, and free.”
While BitTorrent Chat doesn’t store any conversations on a third-party server, it does need a central location to get the conversation going. To speak in BitTorrent terms, people have to connect to a tracker to know where the message should be sent.
TorrentFreak asked for further details on what central servers are involved in bootstrapping the conversations and what encryption the new tool uses, but the company could not immediately provide further details on these issues.
The new messenger app is not the only ‘breach safe’ tool the company is currently working on. Earlier this year BitTorrent launched its Sync application which provides a secure alternative to centralized cloud backup solutions such as Dropbox and Google drive.
Those who want to give BitTorrent’s Chat application a try can head over to BitTorrent Labs to sign up for the private Alpha.
Source: BitTorrent Launches ‘NSA-proof’ Serverless Messenger App
Gender gaps permeate nearly every aspect of our culture, as everything from comic books to the constitution seems to stress the differences between men and women rather than any similarities between the sexes. It’s hard to walk through a bookstore without being bombarded with advice on decoding the other sex’s cryptic behavior; a few classics are Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, The Female Brain, and the ever-so-helpful Guys are Waffles, Girls are Spaghetti. Sitcoms, romantic comedies, and action movies all tend to exploit traditional gender roles too: females worry, nag, and primp while males theorize, womanize, and ride to the rescue.
Unfortunately, the actual science behind gender gaps isn’t nearly as clear cut. It’s a miasma of conflicting results, non-replicable studies, and varying effect sizes. And when you think about the complexities involved, it’s no wonder there’s a lot of confusion. Researchers studying gender differences must deal with genetics, physiology, behavior, culture, age, environment, race, and innumerable other variables. Behavior is also extremely sensitive to context, which muddies the waters further. Evaluating and interpreting the differences between men and women is, simply put, no easy task.
Sex itself is complex. We already know that sex in the animal kingdom is a surprisingly fluid concept, and that sex determination is more complicated than a single chromosome. In this third installment of our continuing series on sex and gender, Ars is bringing you some of the more promising research into what—if anything—separates males from females when it comes to behavior.
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In Nederland ligt meer dan 10.000 kilometer aan gaspijpleidingen onder de grond. Een groot deel van die leidingen transporteert gas over grotere afstanden van A naar B. Het controleren van de integriteit van die leidingen is een bijna onmogelijk karwei. Syntethic aperture radar (SAR) kan daarbij helpen.
One of the most perplexing accusations that are thrown at me and other copyright monopoly critics is that we “hate culture”. This is not just weird in a Westboro-Baptist-Church kind of way (“if you don’t subscribe to our dogma, you must hate our way of life, freedom, liberty, and fluffy kittens too”), but it is also completely at odds with reality.
It is precisely because I love culture, knowledge, and freedom of expression that I relentlessly criticize the copyright monopoly. It is the biggest inhibitor of creativity by a wide margin in today’s society, according to pretty much every single piece of research that wasn’t funded by the copyright industry itself.
Let’s focus on two areas today: availability of culture and compensation to artists.
In the first area, we can observe that there is more culture available than ever today, not because of the copyright monopoly, but despite it. People create like never before, despite the fact that it is often illegal to do so. Fortunately, most people-be-artists have a deep and healthy disrespect for this monopoly construct that would prevent them from making culture: 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s 6,000 times more than realtime upload. That means people-be-artists are creating programming today for 6,000 worldwide TV channels that run 24-by-7, just for one video site. Most of it is illegal by today’s copyright monopolization.
But it gets worse. When you look at the culture available through the old system based on the copyright monopoly, you find that there’s a huge black hole in our culture heritage where it’s not interesting to publish culture that’s a few decades old. It’s only when the copyright monopoly expires that the culture becomes available again through new publications. There is a cultural black hole of the copyright monopoly that takes away upwards of 90% of our culture from the 1900s. This was clearest illustrated by Paul J. Heald who did research on the catalog of Amazon Books, and found that books that are 20 years old mostly aren’t available anymore, not until the copyright monopoly expires – 90% of our culture vanishes because of the copyright monopoly:
Today’s system based on the copyright monopoly creates a black hole of culture that ensures 90% of modern culture dies and never becomes available again during a human lifetime. How can somebody who claims to love culture possibly defend that? This is a system that somebody who despises every form of culture would typically create: a monopoly that first makes it illegal to create, and which then makes sure 90% of culture dies and becomes unavailable in a few years.
The second objection to copyright monopoly reduction or abolition tends to be “how shall the artists get paid”. This objection is bordering on obscene coming from somebody who defends today’s order based on the copyright monopoly, where 99% of artists don’t get signed by a big publisher, and of those who do, less than 0.05% ever see any royalties. (These numbers come from the recording industry, but based on experience, it is safe to assume that book publishing see similar numbers.)
Today’s system based on the copyright monopoly ensures that 99.995% of struggling artists are never paid a cent. How can somebody who claims to love culture possibly defend that system?
What today’s system does, though, is to enrich the parasitic middlemen inherent in the system – the vested interests who fraudulently claim to “speak for artists”, but in reality, are robbing them blind (stories of how these parasitic middlemen publishers have been outright stealing the rest of the money from those last 0.005% of artists are almost an everyday occurrence).
So in summary, the copyright monopoly prohibits would-be-artists from making culture, it prevents art and culture from reaching the public, it isolates artists from their fans, it prevents artists from getting money for their art, and it ensures that 90% of modern culture dies a premature death. This construct can only be defended by people who claim to love culture if they are afflicted by a religious-grade denial of rational thought.
It’s time to take the bull by the horns and challenge the copyright monopolists on this core issue, whether they actually care for culture at all. The copyright monopoly kills culture and artistry, and that’s a known fact backed up by hard data.
About The Author
Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.
Book Falkvinge as speaker?
Source: How Can Somebody Who Loves Culture Possibly Defend The Copyright Monopoly?
Roughly a year ago a new VPN provider entered the market with a rather generous offer.
The company offered free VPN connections for all, no strings attached. As a result thousands of people flocked to the new service and installed the toolbar-supported client in order to be protected from the prying eyes of their ISP and third-party monitoring outfits.
While a free VPN does indeed sound like a good offer, it was surprising to see how easily people were prepared to hook up to the servers of a totally unknown company. The VPN service in question, which shall remain unnamed, was operated by an unknown offshore company that appeared to come out of nowhere.
Did all these new users really trust this “unknown” company with all their traffic? Would they even know if the VPN service began storing all kinds of sensitive information sent through the VPN?
The above example is not limited to free or new VPN providers. Everyone who uses a VPN service puts an incredible amount of trust in the company they sign up with. While the highest encryption standards offer protection against direct monitoring, VPN providers can still see everything you do, if they want to.
So how do you know if you can trust your provider?
The honest answer is that you don’t. Earlier this year we published an overview of several VPN providers who keep no logs at all. These sound like a great and safe option, but then again, you have to trust the answers they provided.
Perhaps it’s a disappointing conclusion, but despite all the state of the art encryptions these VPN companies offer, complete security remains a matter of trust. In reality this means that you have to carefully vet the VPN service you sign up with, asking yourself whether you really trust company X with all your data.
For an industry that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year it is quite a surprise that these concerns haven’t been addressed more systematically. But perhaps this may change in the future.
TorrentFreak talked to several providers about the idea of setting up an independent foundation to do regular audits on a variety of security aspects. Nearly all providers welcomed such an initiative and would happily pay to be screened.
The screenings could range from an inspection of their privacy policies, through to an independent review of the technical backend, to a complete audit of the company structure. These audits are already commonplace for credit card processors and would help to build trust in the VPN industry.
Of course these audits are no guarantee against companies changing their policies afterwards, but it’s a huge improvement over the complete absence of objective information there is now. For now, however, we are not aware of any concrete plans to start up an independent audit foundation.
To the VPN-using readers out there, feel free to let us know how you approach this hot topic. What are the steps you take to determine whether your VPN provider can be trusted? Feel free to let us know in the comments below.
Source: Can You Trust Your VPN Provider…?
Harris Interactive conducted a poll on employee's online video habits at work. While workers are consuming your standard news clips and viral videos, the poll found that 3% of people are watching porn at work.
That statistic begs a few questions. Who is this wild minority? Why are they indulging in behavior like this? Perhaps most interestingly – how do they get away with it?
We didn't field-test these methods, but they're our best guesses as to how they're watching porn at work.
Use a free proxy service like this one to conceal your identity and location as you browse around. It redistributes your porn traffic around the Internet so that it can't be traced back to you.
The alt-tab shortcut in Windows and command-tab shortcut in OS X lets you switch between whatever programs you're using very quickly and seamlessly. Use it to bury your dirty stuff.
The more discreet you can be, the better. Why not keep your business on a smaller screen that's easier to hide?
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A magnitude 7.7 earthquake hit south-central Pakistan on Tuesday this week. Reports of hundreds of casualties highlight the awful scale of the tragedy, made more difficult for rescuers by the remote location of the quake, 270km north of Karachi.
One of the surprises waiting for people who arrived in the quake’s aftermath was a new island. Just offshore near the site of the earthquake, the island appears to be a large pile of mud, built by the distinctive conditions in the area of the fault.
The quake was caused by movement of the Earth on a fault in the crust at rather shallow depth, around 15km below the surface. The movement at the fracture was a rupturing, as the oceanic crust of the Arabian tectonic plate is dragged down, or “subducted,” beneath the Eurasian continental plate at Pakistan. It is part of what geologists term the “Makran subduction zone,” which extends parallel to the Indian Ocean coast south of Pakistan and Iran.
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Right after I wrote up today's news regarding Valve's announcement of a Linux-based SteamOS as central to its living room PC gaming efforts, I tweeted the following instant analysis: "If anyone has the clout to drag the gaming industry towards Linux, it's Valve." After thinking about it for a bit, I think Valve has a better than decent shot of actually pulling the transition off, especially if it wisely utilizes its position as what amounts to the biggest first-party developer in PC gaming.
The history of Windows' current near-hegemony in the PC gaming space is well known. Windows (and MS-DOS before it) had the most users, so developers coded their games primarily (or exclusively) for Windows. This attracted more gaming-focused users to Windows, which gave developers even more reasons to focus on Windows. It's a cycle that led to a widespread lock-in effect for both PC gamers and game developers, and it's been incredibly hard for other operating systems to break over the years.
Valve has already begun working to break PC gamers out of this cycle (and away from the "catastrophe" that co-founder Gabe Newell considers Windows 8) by extending its popular Steam distribution platform to Linux, a move that was announced last year. Steam for Linux launched in February with over 50 games sporting native compatibility, and its library has grown to nearly 200 titles since. This effort has been helped along by Valve's porting of its Source engine (and its attendant classic games) to Linux and by efforts like the Humble Indie Bundle, which has long encouraged its developers to offer their games for Windows, Mac, and Linux at the same time. (Linux gamers, in turn, have been some of the most generous backers of the Humble Bundles pay-what-you-want efforts.)
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Officials from RSA Security are advising customers of the company's BSAFE toolkit and Data Protection Manager to stop using a crucial cryptography component in the products that was recently revealed to contain a backdoor engineered by the National Security Agency.
An advisory sent to select RSA customers on Thursday confirms that both products by default use something known as Dual EC_DRBG when creating cryptographic keys. The specification, which was approved in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and later by the International Organization for Standardization, contains a backdoor that was inserted by the NSA, the New York Times reported last week. RSA's advisory came 24 hours after Ars asked the company if it intended to warn BSAFE customers about the deliberately crippled pseudo random number generator (PRNG), which is so weak that it undermines the security of most or all cryptography systems that use it.
"To ensure a high level of assurance in their application, RSA strongly recommends that customers discontinue use of Dual EC DRBG and move to a different PRNG," the RSA advisory stated. "Technical guidance, including how to change the default PRNG in most libraries, is available in the most current product documentation" on RSA's websites.
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Tegra revenue was $52.6 million, down 71 percent from last year
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Door redacteur Ardy Stemerding
De provincies Gelderland en Overijssel gaan samen met het Havenbedrijf Rotterdam onderzoek doen naar de aanleg van een noordelijke aansluiting op de Betuweroute. Ze vinden dat het kabinet veel te veel focust op lokale aanpassingen van het bestaande spoor.
Staatssecretaris Mansveld (PvdA) van Infrastructuur en Milieu wil de verwachte toename van het aantal goederentreinen opvangen via de bestaande spoorlijnen. Uiterlijk juni 2014 besluit ze welk traject tussen Elst en Oldenzaal daarvoor geschikt wordt gemaakt.
"De aanpassingen van Mansveld zijn duur en verminderen de overlast maar beperkt", zegt Jaap Jelle Feenstra van het Havenbedrijf. "Ook is de capaciteit van het bestaande spoor beperkt. Wij willen maximale capaciteit combineren met minimale overlast."
De provincies steunen het initiatief van het Havenbedrijf om samen naar een nieuwe tracé te zoeken. "Zoals de plannen er nu liggen hebben wij alleen de lasten van het goederenvervoer", zegt gedeputeerde Conny Bieze (VVD) van de provincie Gelderland.
Ook bewoners in de regio verwachten dat het voorstel van Mansveld leidt tot overlast. Ze vrezen trillingen en geluidshinder van de extra treinen. Een nieuwe goederenspoorlijn zien veel bewoners wel zitten, omdat die minder door bewoond gebied zal gaan en bijvoorbeeld langs de snelweg kan komen te liggen.
Voordelen
Gedeputeerde Bieze: "In eerdere onderzoeken werd alleen naar de kosten gekeken van de aanleg van een nieuwe spoorlijn. Het Havenbedrijf wil nu de eigen expertise inzetten om te kijken wat de kansen voor de regio zijn." De provincie hoopt met bijvoorbeeld de aanleg van goederenterminals te kunnen profiteren van het goederenvervoer door de regio.
Een woordvoerder van de provincie Overijssel laat weten dat de nieuwe goederenlijn kan worden aangelegd als uit het onderzoek zal blijken dat die veiliger is dan aanpassing van het bestaande spoor. Ook vindt de provincie dat de overlast door treinen op de lijn kleiner moet zijn dan bij de plannen van Mansveld.
Eerdere plannen
In 1998 sneuvelde een plan om een noordelijke tak aan te leggen van de Betuweroute. In 2012 is de optie van een nieuwe goederenlijn opnieuw bestudeerd. Toen concludeerde het kabinet dat een nieuwe goederenlijn pas nodig is in 2040. Tot die tijd is er op het bestaande spoor voldoende capaciteit.
Uit dat onderzoek bleek ook dat de aanleg van een geheel nieuwe lijn veel kostbaarder is dan aanpassing van het bestaande spoor. De kosten voor het aanpassen van het bestaande spoor zijn geraamd op maximaal 530 miljoen euro. Een nieuwe lijn kost minimaal 1,4 miljard.
Meebetalen
Havenbedrijf en provincie wijzen voor de financiering van de lijn in eerste instantie naar de overheid. Ze sluiten echter niet uit dat zij meebetalen als de aanleg daardoor versneld kan worden en voldoende oplevert.
Eerder werden acht nieuwe trajecten onderzocht. De goedkoopste variant is een lijn langs de A18/N18 vanaf Zevenaar langs de grens naar Oldenzaal.
Reacties via ardy.stemerding@nos.nl
Utah is making a name for itself as the place to unearth dinosaurs. Earlier this year a big-nosed dinosaur was discovered in the state, and just recently a relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex was also unearthed. Today, yet another dinosaur has been discovered: Siats meekerorum. While its name might sound tame, Siats refers to the man-eating monster from the mythology of the Ute Native American people. Siats "was a colossal predator second only to the great T. rex," explains Lindsay Zanno, director of Paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
A giant 'man eater'
Siats weighed more than 4 tons and was over 30 feet long, making it a giant carnivorous dinosaur. It might be second only to the T.rex, but it’s not a...
Biologische winkelketens vinden dat je verder moet kijken dan de prijs alleen als je hun producten wilt vergelijken met biologische producten van reguliere supermarkten.
Zij reageren daarmee op onderzoek van de consumentenbond, die eerder vandaag meldde dat biologische producten in biowinkels gemiddeld een kwart duurder zijn dan in reguliere supermarkten.
"Wij staan voor eerlijke producten uit de regio", zegt directeur Erik Does van EkoPlaza. "Ja, je kunt je appelsap goedkoper uit Polen halen. En dan is het nog steeds biologisch. Maar wij kiezen voor een goede relatie met lokale leveranciers. Ook doen wij niet aan 'powerplay' zoals supermarkten: het sturen van een brief waarin je 2 procent korting eist."
Volgens hem is de continue prijsdruk van reguliere supermarkten slecht voor de duurzaamheid en arbeidsomstandigheden bij leveranciers.
Winkelketen Estafette zegt dat ook moet worden gekeken worden naar de kwaliteit van een product, de herkomst en naar eerlijke handel. Zo heeft een deel van de producten van Estafette het Demeter-keurmerk. De normen daarvoor zijn strenger dan het bio-keurmerk. "Een lastige vergelijking als je bijvoorbeeld de prijs van Demeter boerenkaas vergelijkt met biologische fabriekskaas uit de supermarkt." Estafette zegt ook geen supermarkt te zijn, maar een biologische/biodynamische speciaalzaak.
De Natuurwinkel verwijst door naar brancheorganisatie Bionext voor een reactie: "De prijzen voor levensmiddelen zijn te laag in de supermarkt", zegt directeur Bavo van den Idsert van Bionext. "Sinds de zomer voeren de grote supers een verhevigde concurrentiestrijd. De biologische sector hecht veel waarde aan evenwichtige prijzen, van boer tot en met consument. Prijsdumping zet altijd de kwaliteit onder druk en dat mag met biologisch voedsel niet gebeuren."
Winkelketen Marqt zegt: "Een prijsverschil zal blijven bestaan, en dat willen we om ethische redenen graag zo houden. Wij verkopen nooit onder de kostprijs, want er is altijd iets of iemand die daarvoor de prijs betaalt. Daarmee bedoelen we natuurlijk het dierenwelzijn, het milieu, de gezondheid van de consument, het inkomen van de boer, etcetera."
We already knew that Iran had troops on the ground in Syria last summer and the Islamic Republic is calling the shots, but a new BBC report presents footage recorded by a cameraman attached to the elite Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to detail just how much Iran is invested in the civil war.
"If Assad falls, Iran's foreign policy objectives would be constrained. So it's doing everything it can to keep Assad in power, " Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies told BBC.
The report details how, over the last year, Iran has not only sent money and military equipment to support the regime of Bashar al-Assad, but also soldiers from its IRGC to attack Syrian rebels, conduct reconnaissance, train Syrian militias, direct Hezbollah guerrilla fighters and Iraqi militiamen, and run commands centers inside.
Check it out:
SEE ALSO: Iran Is Increasingly Calling The Shots For Assad In Syria
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Nowhere in the world have we seen prices surge more violently than in India.
"The recently released WPI for October 2013 shows India’s food inflation jumped by 18.2% yoy, the fifth straight month of double-digit inflation," noted Societe Generale's Kunal Kundu.
Food price fluctuations are usually a function of supply, which is often linked to natural forces, and demand, which is often linked to changing tastes.
In India, however, food price inflation is tied to dysfunctional government policy. Kundu explains:
An important contributor to this is high and rising MSPs (Minimum Support Price). The MSP is used as a tool to incentivise farmers to produce food grain and help them during periods of crop failure. However, like all other social sector spending, it has become a tool to appease farmers as their votes influence the final election outcome. While MSPs are supposed to be used as a tool to compensate farmers in particular during periods of stress like dough and/or flood (which means that during normal periods, MSPs ought to be lowered or even suspended), in reality MSPs in India have always moved in one direction, up!
The continuous uptrend in MSPs creates market distortions. There has never been even a single instance when specific hikes in MSPs (say for drought relief, or as bonuses to meet specific procurement targets etc.) were withdrawn the subsequent year. Rather, these act as a floor for prices that year. From financial year 2007 onward, a substantial hike in MSPs was announced for paddy rice and wheat and this was followed by steep across-the-board hikes the year after. From then on, MSPs have been rising very fast. While, between 1998-99 and 2006-07, the MSPs have increased between 3.1% and 4.2% p.a., they rose by between 9.3% and 15.7% p.a. over 2006-07 and 2013-2014. As MSPs form the benchmark for market prices, these tend to remain elevated even if demand-supply dynamics require prices to come down....
Without reform, food inflation will continue to drive up India's CPI, which is increasing faster than the rest of the emerging world.
SEE ALSO: 6 Crazy Things That Happen In India When Onion Prices Explode
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