My good friend John of Americablog has been in Paris for the last few weeks and sent me a message today. The message contained excerpts from this article in the Guardian which tells about religious extremists in Iraq who troll gay websites and chat rooms seeking to identify gay Iraqi’s, track them down, and then torture or murder them. They do this in the name of religion, citing the usual claims related to god and religious rules as justification for butchering men and women in ways that words cannot describe.
In his message John asked me if, among my many friends in the hacker community across the world, I might know some who could help expose these murderers who use computer skills to find their prey. Although I do know many skilled individuals, I didn’t have a good answer for him. Is it possible that in a world where such a barberic group of killers exist, there might also be a group dedicated to human rights and the belief that none of us should ever be hunted for who we are, who could combat their activities? Part of me thinks it is too TV, too Hollywood, that in the real world of post-Saddam Iraq, it is not possible to stop such horror.
Yet outside of the idea of stopping a group seeking to identify gay Iraqi’s, couldn’t those of us concerned with this issue help in other ways? The most basic – making sure there is information, readily available and being passed around any place where gay Iraqi’s could find it, on how to keep their identities safe. On how to be vigilant for someone who is pretending to be something they are not. Although it might seem like common sense to some of us, it still seems to me one step we can take towards stopping fundamentalist monsters from committing atrocities.
A new 
The bottle might look unique and the image might be of a ecological alternative style bottled water company, but is that the whole story? Investigative journalist Anna Lenzer examined Fiji Water in her recent piece for Mother Jones, looking into the details of who owns the company, their environmental record, as well as their relationship with the nation of Fiji and its military government. She joins me to explain her experience and what she learned.
It was this week 4 years ago that hundreds of thousands of human beings in the American city of New Orleans were left stranded as the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina rose all around them. It was this week, 4 years ago, that the truth about the lack of plan and the blatant incompetence of a government became clear. And having been born in a country, as well as a world, that has such a narrow and limited understanding of history, it is this week, 4 years later, that I reflect on a great crime committed against hundreds of thousands of people, many who died, and still more who have never really recovered from what took place in New Orleans.
“Do you fear an arms race over the arctic?” the host of The Current Podcast asked an Inuit representative during a recent episode. The gentlemen spoke at length about the problems of the Inuit population in the high arctic and his concerns about the Canadian federal government doing military exercises in the arctic as opposed to giving much needed attention to public services and infrastructure.