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Maximilian Schell, who won a best actor Oscar for his role in the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, has died in his native Austria after what doctors describe as a sudden illness. He was 83.

He was also nominated for best actor for the 1975 The Man in the Glass Booth and for best supporting actor in Julia in 1977, The Associated Press says.

But the Vienna-born actor's most famous role was as Hans Rolfe, a defense attorney representing accused Nazi war criminals at the post-World War II Nuremberg trials. In it, Rolfe delivers a courtroom monologue condemning those who acquiesced or promoted Hitler's rise to power. You can see a clip here.

Kerry Skyring, reporting for NPR from Vienna, reports:

"Handsome and charismatic, the son of a Swiss playwright and an Austrian stage actress, he was raised in Switzerland after Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany."

"Schell ... went on to become a film producer and director. His recent appearances include the films The Freshman and Telling Lies in America.

"He died in the Austrian city of Innsbruck."

When oil supplies ran short and gasoline prices spiked four decades ago, angry drivers demanded relief. Congress responded in 1975 by banning most exports of U.S. crude oil.

Today, domestic oil production is booming, prompting U.S. energy companies to call for a resumption of exporting. Many economists agree.

But would that bring back the bad old days of shortages? Would you end up paying more at the pump?

Supporters of exports say Americans should not allow 40-year-old images of an energy crisis to distort how we see the world today. They argue that in the 1970s, a particular vision of oil markets got embedded into our national psyche, and now it's time to update our worldview to more clearly see what's happening.

To appreciate their argument, let your mind wander back. Pretend it's the fall of 1973:

War is raging in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and other members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, are looking for ways to hit back at supporters of Israel. They launch an embargo that blocks oil deliveries to the United States.

News reports label the embargo a "political weapon," intended to push America into an energy crisis. Soon, oil prices are quadrupling and lines of cars are snaking around gas stations with empty pumps.

The Great Plains Oil Rush

On The Plains, The Rush For Oil Has Changed Everything

When oil supplies ran short and gasoline prices spiked four decades ago, angry drivers demanded relief. Congress responded in 1975 by banning most exports of U.S. crude oil.

Today, domestic oil production is booming, prompting U.S. energy companies to call for a resumption of exporting. Many economists agree.

But would that bring back the bad old days of shortages? Would you end up paying more at the pump?

Supporters of exports say Americans should not allow 40-year-old images of an energy crisis to distort how we see the world today. They argue that in the 1970s, a particular vision of oil markets got embedded into our national psyche, and now it's time to update our worldview to more clearly see what's happening.

To appreciate their argument, let your mind wander back. Pretend it's the fall of 1973:

War is raging in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and other members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, are looking for ways to hit back at supporters of Israel. They launch an embargo that blocks oil deliveries to the United States.

News reports label the embargo a "political weapon," intended to push America into an energy crisis. Soon, oil prices are quadrupling and lines of cars are snaking around gas stations with empty pumps.

The Great Plains Oil Rush

On The Plains, The Rush For Oil Has Changed Everything

пятница

A classified document that's among the many secrets revealed by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden "shows that Canada's electronic spy agency used information from the free Internet service at a major Canadian airport to track the wireless devices of thousands of ordinary airline passengers for days after they left the terminal," CBC News reports.

The Canadian broadcaster has posted a "redacted PDF" about what Communications Security Establishment Canada, that nation's equivalent of the NSA, did during a two-week-long test.

The CBC says the document indicates that "the spy service was provided with information captured from unsuspecting travelers' wireless devices by [an unidentified] airport's free Wi-Fi system" over a two-week period in May 2012.

"The document shows the federal intelligence agency was then able to track the travelers for a week or more as they — and their wireless devices — showed up in other Wi-Fi 'hot spots' in cities across Canada and even at U.S. airports," the CBC adds.

The Canadian spy agency tells the CBC that it is "mandated to collect foreign signals intelligence to protect Canada and Canadians. And in order to fulfill that key foreign intelligence role for the country, CSEC is legally authorized to collect and analyze metadata. ... No Canadian communications were (or are) targeted, collected or used."

That explanation is similar to those provided by U.S. officials about the NSA's electronic surveillance programs — basically, that the NSA collects huge amounts of information (metadata) about phone calls and other electronic communications, but does not probe their contents or target those of U.S. citizens.

Canadian cybersecurity expert Ronald Deibert tells CBC News, however, that "I can't see any circumstance in which this would not be unlawful, under current Canadian law."

President Obama has said that "critics are right to point out that without proper safeguards," the NSA's surveillance programs "could be used to yield more information about our private lives." But while he has said the NSA should no longer hold on to the massive amounts of data it has been collecting, he has also said that the information still needs to be gathered and stored by a third party in case it later needs to be analyzed.

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