Tuesday, November 5, 2013
manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News clips of the day

From Wired.com
Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?
By Steven Levy
Had Narrative Science — a company that trains computers to write news stories—created this piece, it probably would not mention that the company’s Chicago headquarters lie only a long baseball toss from the Tribune newspaper building. Nor would it dwell on the fact that this potentially job-killing technology was incubated in part at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Those ironies are obvious to a human. But not to a computer. At least not yet.
For now consider this: Every 30 seconds or so, the algorithmic bull pen of Narrative Science, a 30-person company occupying a large room on the fringes of the Chicago Loop, extrudes a story whose very byline is a question of philosophical inquiry. The computer-written product could be a pennant-waving second-half update of a Big Ten basketball contest, a sober preview of a corporate earnings statement, or a blithe summary of the presidential horse race drawn from Twitter posts. The articles run on the websites of respected publishers like Forbes, as well as other Internet media powers (many of which are keeping their identities private). Niche news services hire Narrative Science to write updates for their subscribers, be they sports fans, small-cap investors, or fast-food franchise owners.
And the articles don’t read like robots wrote them:
Friona fell 10-8 to Boys Ranch in five innings on Monday at Friona despite racking up seven hits and eight runs. Friona was led by a flawless day at the dish by Hunter Sundre, who went 2-2 against Boys Ranch pitching. Sundre singled in the third inning and tripled in the fourth inning … Friona piled up the steals, swiping eight bags in all …
OK, it’s not Roger Angell. But the grandparents of a Little Leaguer would find this game summary—available on the web even before the two teams finished shaking hands—as welcome as anything on the sports pages. Narrative Science’s algorithms built the article using pitch-by-pitch game data that parents entered into an iPhone app called GameChanger. Last year the software produced nearly 400,000 accounts of Little League games. This year that number is expected to top 1.5 million.
Narrative Science’s CTO and cofounder, Kristian Hammond, works in a small office just a few feet away from the buzz of coders and engineers. To Hammond, these stories are only the first step toward what will eventually become a news universe dominated by computer-generated stories. How dominant? Last year at a small conference of journalists and technologists, I asked Hammond to predict what percentage of news would be written by computers in 15 years. At first he tried to duck the question, but with some prodding he sighed and gave in: “More than 90 percent.”
That’s when I decided to write this article, hoping to finish it before being scooped by a MacBook Air.
Hammond assures me I have nothing to worry about. This robonews tsunami, he insists, will not wash away the remaining human reporters who still collect paychecks. Instead the universe of newswriting will expand dramatically, as computers mine vast troves of data to produce ultracheap, totally readable accounts of events, trends, and developments that no journalist is currently covering.
That’s not to say that computer-generated stories will remain in the margins, limited to producing more and more Little League write-ups and formulaic earnings previews. Hammond was recently asked for his reaction to a prediction that a computer would win a Pulitzer Prize within 20 years. He disagreed. It would happen, he said, in five.
Hammond was raised in Utah, where his archaeologist dad taught at a state university. He grew up thinking he’d become a lawyer. But in the late 1980s, as an undergraduate at Yale, he fell under the sway of Roger Schank, a renowned artificial intelligence researcher and chair of the computer science department. After earning a doctorate in computer science, Hammond was hired by the University of Chicago to lead a new AI lab. While there, in the mid-1990s, he created a system that tracked users’ reading and writing and then recommended relevant documents. Hammond built a small company around that technology, which he later sold. By that time, he had moved to Northwestern University, becoming codirector of its Intelligent Information Laboratory. In 2009, Hammond and his colleague Larry Birnbaum taught a class at Medill that included both programmers and prospective journalists. They encouraged their students to create a system that could transform data into prose stories. One of the students in the class was a stringer for the Tribune who covered high school sports; he and two other journalism students were paired with a computer science student. Their prototype software, Stats Monkey, collected box scores and play-by-play data to spit out credible accounts of college baseball games.
At the end of the semester, the class participated in a demo day, where students presented their projects to a roomful of executives from the likes of ESPN, Hearst, and the Tribune. The Stats Monkey presentation was particularly impressive. “They put a box score and play-by-play into the program, and in something close to 12 seconds it drew examples from 40 years of Major League history, wrote a game account, located the best picture, and wrote a caption,” recalls the Medill dean, John Lavine.
Stuart Frankel, a former DoubleClick executive who left the online advertising network after Google purchased it in 2008, was among the guests that day. “When these guys did the presentation, the air in the room changed,” he said. “But it was still just a piece of software that wrote stories about baseball games—very limited.” Frankel followed up with Hammond and Birnbaum. Could this system create any kind of story, using any kind of data? Could it create stories good enough that people would pay to read them? The answers were positive enough to convince him that “there was a really big, exciting potential business here,” he says. The trio founded Narrative Science with Frankel as CEO in 2010.
The startup’s first customer was a TV network for the Big Ten college sports conference. The company’s algorithm would write stories on thousands of Big Ten sporting events in near-real time; its accounts of football games updated after every quarter. Narrative Science also got assigned the women’s softball beat, where it became the country’s most prolific chronicler of that sport.
But not long after the contract began, a slight problem emerged: The stories tended to focus on the victors. When a Big Ten team got whipped by an out-of-conference rival, the resulting write-ups could be downright humiliating. Conference officials asked Narrative Science to find a way for the stories to praise the performances of the Big Ten players even when they lost. A human journalist might have blanched at the request, but Narrative Science’s engineers saw no problem in tweaking the software’s parameters—hacking it to make it write more like a hack. Likewise, when the company began covering Little League games, it quickly understood that parents didn’t want to read about their kids’ errors. So the algorithmic accounts of those matchups ignore dropped fly balls and focus on the heroics.
Narrative Science’s writing engine requires several steps. First, it must amass high-quality data. That’s why finance and sports are such natural subjects:
Then the algorithms must fit that data into some broader understanding of the subject matter. (For instance, they must know that the team with the highest number of “runs” is declared the winner of a baseball game.) So Narrative Science’s engineers program a set of rules that govern each subject, be it corporate earnings or a sporting event
Then comes the structure. Most news stories, particularly about subjects like sports or finance, hew to a pretty predictable formula, and so it’s a relatively simple matter for the meta-writers to create a framework for the articles. To construct sentences, the algorithms use vocabulary compiled by the meta-writers.
The Narrative Science team also lets clients customize the tone of the stories. “You can get anything, from something that sounds like a breathless financial reporter screaming from a trading floor to a dry sell-side researcher pedantically walking you through it,”
Once Narrative Science had mastered the art of telling sports and finance stories, the company realized that it could produce much more than journalism. Indeed, anyone who needed to translate and explain large sets of data could benefit from its services. Requests poured in from people who were buried in spreadsheets and charts. It turned out that those people would pay to convert all that confusing information into a couple of readable paragraphs that hit the key points.
“Narrative Science needs to exist. The journalism might be only the sizzle—the steak might be management reports.”
For now, though, journalism remains at the company’s core. And like any cub reporter, Narrative Science has dreams of glory—to identify and break big stories. To do that, it will have to invest in sophisticated machine-learning and data-mining technologies. It will also have to get deeper into the business of understanding natural language, which would allow it to access information and events that can’t be expressed in a spreadsheet. It already does a little of that. “In the financial world, we’re reading headlines,” Hammond says.
But even if Narrative Science never does learn to produce Pulitzer-level scoops with the icy linguistic precision of Joan Didion, it will still capitalize on the fact that more and more of our lives and our world is being converted into data
Hammond believes that as Narrative Science grows, its stories will go higher up the journalism food chain—from commodity news to explanatory journalism and, ultimately, detailed long-form articles. Maybe at some point, humans and algorithms will collaborate, with each partner playing to its strength. Computers, with their flawless memories and ability to access data, might act as legmen to human writers. Or vice versa, human reporters might interview subjects and pick up stray details—and then send them to a computer that writes it all up. As the computers get more accomplished and have access to more and more data, their limitations as storytellers will fall away. It might take a while, but eventually even a story like this one could be produced without, well, me. “Humans are unbelievably rich and complex, but they are machines,” Hammond says. “In 20 years, there will be no area in which Narrative Science doesn’t write stories.”


The above, though it's long, is a collection of clips from a much longer story, catching all the main points. It can be found on the Internet under the search heading “news,” by Wired.com. It astonished me, because I didn't know computers had been developed to do things like this. I'm impressed, but it doesn't make me feel good at all. I want some things to continue to be the work of humans. I think novels will always be the creative effort of people. They are too complex and long for a computer to be programmed to do them, and they don't deal primarily with data so much as emotion, events and conversation. I'm not in love with technology in the way that some people are, anyway. In my opinion we have invented enough things already.





A GoPro camera has captured a pride of lions embracing South Africa's "lion whisperer" Kevin Richardson.-- from ninemsn.com.au/world/ October 4, 2013
The inspiring footage shows one lioness, responding to Mr Richardson's calls, appear from behind the scrub and run excitedly into his arms.
They are soon joined by another lion, this one with a full mane, much to the joy of the self-trained animal behaviourist.
"Hello my boy, hello my boy," he says, blowing raspberries at the known predator as if it were merely a child.
The larger lion pounces on Mr Richardson, wrapping its giant paws around in him in warm embrace.
The three of them fall to the ground where the lions continue to nuzzle and hug Mr Richardson, and squirm as he scratches their bellies.
The inspiring footage shows one lioness, responding to Mr Richardson's calls, appear from behind the scrub and run excitedly into his arms.
They are soon joined by another lion, this one with a full mane, much to the joy of the self-trained animal behaviourist.
"Hello my boy, hello my boy," he says, blowing raspberries at the known predator as if it were merely a child.
The larger lion pounces on Mr Richardson, wrapping its giant paws around in him in warm embrace.
The three of them fall to the ground where the lions continue to nuzzle and hug Mr Richardson, and squirm as he scratches their bellies.
May 22, 2013: The incredible moment 'Christian the Lion' recognises and embraces two previous owners after years apart.
However, these are not the first lions to bond with a human.
They follow in the footsteps of the widely publicised Christian the lion, who was filmed hugging his rescuers after six years apart.
Author: Chloe Ross, Approving editor: Nick Pearson

9RAW: Lion bonds with conservationists – NBC Today Show
Published on Nov 4, 2013
November 05, 2013: A lion rescued from the wild has developed a unique bond with the two men who saved it as a cub, greeting them with a big hug whenever it sees them.
9RAW: Lion bonds with conservationists


The Today Show this morning showed video of a lioness hugging a man, standing on her hind legs and wrapping her arms around his neck, rubbing her face against his. I went on the net to find the story. I could only find one dated October 3 of this year, and it is a different lion, but in checking it out I found two different lions hugging people. There were other hits as well, but they seemed to be the same lions. These aren't lions in a zoo, either, though in both cases, the humans had helped or raised them when they were younger. They are clearly intelligent animals with good memories, and not incapable of loving. I have heard some people say that animals don't really love their owners, but I have had too many dogs and cats to believe that. If you are loving toward your animals and you feed them and take care of their needs, they will usually love you in return, showing their affection spontaneously.





Nine million Syrians need humanitarian aid due to war: UN – NBC

By Louis Charbonneau, Reuters
UNITED NATIONS - The United Nations estimates that around 9.3 million people in Syria or about 40 percent of the population need humanitarian assistance due to the country's two-and-a-half-year civil war, the U.N. humanitarian office said Monday.
"The humanitarian situation in Syria continues to deteriorate rapidly and inexorably," U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos told the U.N. Security Council behind closed doors, according to her spokeswoman Amanda Pitt

"The number of people we estimate to be in need of humanitarian assistance in Syria has now risen to some 9.3 million," Pitt said, summarizing Amos' remarks to the 15-nation council. "Of them, 6.5 million people are displaced from their homes, within the country."
"Amos continues to press the council for their help and influence over those parties who can ensure the protection of civilians and civilian facilities; the safe passage of medical personnel and supplies; the safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance; and can facilitate progress in expanding critical, life-saving relief operations," Pitt said.

Amos' plea to the council follows the Syrian government's promise on Monday to ensure delivery of vaccinations and humanitarian aid across the country, after an outbreak of polio in the Northeast and warnings of malnutrition in areas under military siege.
Twenty-two children in Deir al-Zor province bordering Iraq were left paralyzed last month. The polio virus has been confirmed so far in 10 of them, and experts say it could spread quickly across the region.
Last month Amos demanded stronger action by the Security Council to get desperately needed aid into Syria, where millions of people in need have not received any help for almost a year.
Violence and excessive red tape have slowed aid delivery to a trickle in Syria. More than 100,000 people have been killed in the civil war and millions have fled the country. After months of talks, the 15-member Security Council approved a non-binding statement on Oct. 2 urging increased humanitarian access.
What are the concerns about violence and disease spreading beyond Syria's borders? NBC's Ayman Mohyeldin talks with Richard Lui.
Amos has complained that that statement has had little impact on the ground. Western diplomats say they would like the council to adopt a legally binding resolution but worry Russia would veto it.
Senior U.N. diplomats say that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov previously dismissed the possibility of a legally binding resolution on aid access in Syria.
Russia, a close ally of Syrian President Bashar Assad, and China have vetoed three Security Council resolutions since October 2011 that would have condemned the government and threatened it with sanctions. 


Vladimir Putin's high brow arguments in his NYT Op Ed piece against the US threat to intervene in Syria would seem to cast him in the light of a peacemaker, but he has no pity for the civilians in Syria. He should at least allow the UN to give aid where it is needed, but is apparently only concerned with his party winning the civil war. Russia is in some ways our ally now, but they are still interfering in the governments of many smaller countries around the world, undoubtedly to gain a toehold there.

The US, of course, also does this in many cases. Both countries are propagating unrest or war to gain power. The results are that people are driven from their homes and starving. The last time the American people had to deal with war at home was the Civil War, so we have forgotten what it is to have society totally disrupted, and it's easier to let it happen abroad, too often due to our own actions.

During my lifetime, there has been almost constant war somewhere in the world with our country involved in it. I would like to see peace. Let the civil war factions in other countries fight it out and see who wins, or act through the UN Security Council, in the case of genocide. Send in the Red Cross when refugees need food and medical attention. Help in peaceful ways. I would be prouder of my country if we would do that.




India blasts off in race to Mars with low-cost space mission
Sruthi Gottipati Reuters

NEW DELHI — India launched its first rocket to Mars on Tuesday, aiming to reach the Red Planet at a much lower cost than successful missions by other nations.
The Mars Orbiter Mission, also known as Mangalyaan, mission positions the emerging Asian giant as a budget player in the latest global space race.
India's red-and-white-striped PSLV rocket blasted off from the southeastern coast, streaking across the sky in a blazing trail. The orbiter is scheduled to reach Mars by next September.
Probes to Mars have a high failure rate, and a success would be a boost for Indian national pride, especially after a similar mission mounted by Russia and China failed to leave Earth's orbit in 2011.
Only the United States, Europe and Russia have sent probes that have orbited or landed on the planet.
"The ISRO team will fulfill the expectations that the nation has in them," K. Radhakrishnan, head of the state-run Indian Space Research Organization, said after the spacecraft was successfully placed into orbit around Earth. "The journey has only begun. The challenging phase is coming."
India's space program began 50 years ago and developed rapidly after Western powers imposed sanctions in response to a nuclear weapons test in 1974, spurring its scientists to build advanced rocket technology. Five years ago, its Chandrayaan satellite found evidence of water on the moon.
India's relative prowess in space contrasts with mixed results in the aerospace industry. State-run Hindustan Aeronautics has been developing a light combat aircraft since the early 1980s with no success so far.
"The point is we don't have the sound technological base for a car, forget about a fighter jet," said Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.
Looking for methane
The mission plans to study the Martian surface and mineral composition as well as search the atmosphere for methane, the chemical strongly tied to life on Earth. Recent measurements by NASA's rover, Curiosity, showed only trace amounts of it on Mars.
India's space program has drawn criticism in a country that is dogged by poverty and power shortages, and is now experiencing its sharpest economic slowdown in a decade.
India has long argued that technology developed in its space program has practical applications to everyday life.
"For a country like India, it's not a luxury, it's a necessity," said Susmita Mohanty, co-founder and chief executive of Earth2Orbit, India's first private space start-up. She argued that satellites have applications from television broadcasting to weather forecasting for disaster management.
The mission is considerably cheaper than some of India's more lavish spending schemes, including a $340 million plan to build the world's largest statue in the state of Gujarat.
Budget travel
Analysts say India could capture more of the $304 billion global space market with its low-cost technology. The probe's 4.5 billion rupee ($73 million) price tag is a fraction of the cost of NASA's MAVEN mission, which is due to launch this month.
ISRO designed the craft to go around Earth six or seven times to build up the momentum needed to slingshot it to Mars, a measure that will help it save fuel, said Mayank N. Vahia, a scientist in the department of astronomy and astrophysics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
It costs India about 1,000 rupees ($16.20) to put a gram of payload into space, less than a tenth of NASA's cost, he said.
India's space program still has challenges, including the need to import components and the lack of a deep-space monitoring system, which means it will rely on the United States to watch the satellite once it nears Mars.
Commercial implications
There's much at stake in the global space business, where revenues for the satellite industry in 2012 were $189.5 billion, according to the U.S. Satellite Industry Association.
"Given ISRO's broad portfolio of space capabilities, India could, if it does things right, get at least a quarter of (the space industry) market if not more in the coming decade or two," said Earth2Orbit's Mohanty.
India's relations with its giant neighbor China are marked as much by competition as cooperation, and analysts say New Delhi has stepped up its space program because of concerns about China's civilian and military space technology.
"The reality is that there is competition in Asia. There's the angle of the potential space race," said Rajagopalan.
Although India's program is largely for peaceful purposes, it has increasingly realized the need to grow its deterrence capability after China's 2007 anti-satellite missile test. "That was a wake-up call for India," said Rajagopalan. "Until then we were taking it easy."
China's space program is far ahead of India's, with bigger rockets, more launches and equally cost-effective missions.
Officials dismissed the suggestion that India raced to prepare Tuesday's launch to trump China's failed attempt at Mars.
"We're not in a race with anybody," said ISRO spokesman Deviprasad Karnik, noting that the voyage can happen only every 26 months, when the spacecraft can travel the shortest distance between Earth and Mars.
"The mission to Mars has to be organized whenever there is an opportunity available," Karnik said.


I'm glad to see India developing with the other advanced nations. I've known several people of Indian descent, and they were very intelligent and socially open people. India is one of the countries I would like to visit, because of their rich cultural history and colorful people. Also, I like the fact that they aren't constantly at war with some other country – their people just live their lives in relative peace.




'OCTOPUS!': Eight legs, one brain and plenty of smarts
Nidhi Subbaraman NBC

Octopuses are so smart they get bored. Aquarium staff have learned to be wary of a bored octopus because they've been known to break the monotony by eating their own arms. That tends to scare the kids. 
Octopuses are so smart, one figured out how to open a child-proof, press-and-twist pill jar, and it took her less than an hour. 
Octopuses are so smart, they don't just look at you, they stare you down, especially if you're their keeper. Sometimes the gaze is curious, sometimes there's a glint of malice — it all depends: what did you just feed them? One bossy specimen chided her minder whenever the food wasn't up to snuff.
Though completely squishy, octopuses have earned "honorary vertebrate" status in the European Union, where they are legally protected against "pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm."
Katherine Harmon Courage's first book "OCTOPUS!" is crammed with funny, weird, memorable stories about human interactions with cephalopods that start out strange and only get stranger. Humans have been catching and eating octopuses for hundreds of years, she writes, but their biology and their bizarrely smart brains continue to inspire and befuddle researchers who study them. 
Octopus brains are a mystery: They run on a decentralized nervous system, two-thirds of which is distributed in the eight arms and legs, away from the central brain. So octopuses offer researchers an opportunity to study a unique kind of complex intelligence — one that's very different from the kind we understand and see in larger vertebrates and primates. 
Meanwhile, engineers are fascinated by the brains and body of the octopuses as well. Courage describes how some groups hope to replicate the cephalopods' decentralized, local-level intelligence to build networked robotic systems. Still others are studying its instant-camouflage skin and flexible body plan to build resilient, pliable soft rescue robots that can squeeze into hard-to-reach places. We chatted with Courage about "OCTOPUS!", which is due for release on Thursday. An edited version of the conversation follows: 
"OCTOPUS!" plunges into the bizarre world of the stunningly smart, solitary, ocean dwellers.
Q. Was there a moment when you knew you had to write a book about octopuses? 
A: There was a study that came out three years ago, when I was a reporter at Scientific American. Researchers had observed octopuses collecting coconut shell halves to use, they said, as tools. The octopuses would collect the coconut shell halves, carry them around awkwardly, and when they were scared or wanted to hide, they would snap the halves together and crawl inside.
The researchers said this was an amazing example of foresight, planning, and all these things we generally ascribe to ourselves, to primates, maybe some other mammals, certainly not invertebrates. To see that in octopuses was incredible. And! They had a video they published with their study and it was incredible to watch them. Ever since that moment I’ve been totally fascinated and completely captivated.
Q: It seems like the more you learn about octopuses, they only get weirder. 
A: I still feel that way after writing the book — after researching them, traveling to see them, talking to researchers. I keep a blog at Scientific American called Octopus Chronicles, where I post about once a week new research that’s coming out, or new facts we learn about them. It’s incredible — it just never stops. They’re amazing. After writing this book they still surprise me every single day.
Q: Why is it so surprising to us that these creatures have this higher intelligence?
A: They look like aliens! If you saw one in a sci-fi movie, you’d be like, "Wow that’s a crazy-looking alien." But they live right here on our planet.
One of the researchers likened it to interacting with a dog: They look at you. They look at your eyes, they study you — not many animals look at you. Then you realize this animal has such a different genetic makeup from us … What’s going on in their heads?
Our last common ancestor was a sightless worm about 500 million years ago. How did we both arrive at this moment of intelligence? I don’t know if we’ll ever answer that.
Q: How have octopuses changed your understanding of what it means to be intelligent?
A: It made me realize how myopic our own view of intelligence is. I mean, octopus — two-thirds of their nervous system is in their arms, not in their central brain. What does that mean for their experience of the world, and how they’re figuring things out? Is it taking place independently in the arms, or among the arms? We’re still not really sure.
Q: What special abilities can we expect from our future octobot overlords?
A: If we can create a totally soft-bodied robot, it has almost infinite range of motion like the real octopus. It could squeeze through small holes, like the real octopus. Although it’s a little frightening to think of a self-aware squishy robot octopus. 
Q: What do we know about where octopuses came from?
A: That’s a really good question ... they’re really scarce in the fossil record because they don’t have any bones. [Researchers] find traces of them sometimes in these octopus-shaped stains on the rocks, incredibly rare and very hard to spot.
They all descended from something called a nautilus, which is also a cephalopod but something with a shell. At some point the octopus and squid branched off and became soft-bodied creatures.
It’s an interesting question because it intersects with intelligence. Did they have to become intelligent perhaps to defend themselves against the emerging fish and things with shells in the ocean?
Q: What is the first lesson that the octopus is going to teach us?
A: As amazing and deep and ongoing as the intelligence question is, that one might be more for the long term. In the near term there are so many researchers working on the skin and their camouflage abilities. If we could mimic that ability I think that would be a very exciting technological advance. That might come sooner, before we understand what octopus intelligence is. 
Nidhi Subbaraman writes about science and


I saw a documentary on the intelligence of octopuses (octopi?), so this article wasn't a surprise to me. They really do look too primitive to be intelligent, but scientists are becoming aware that there is some level and type of intelligence in many animals. Birds used to be considered not very bright, but now crows show the ability to solve some problems to get food, and an African gray parrot named Alex, dead now, could identify the shape, color, material, name and number of objects which his handler would ask him about, and of course, being a parrot, he could tell her the answer with words. A number of ape media stars have been taught to use sign language and show that they know the meaning of the words by doing certain tasks. That is, of course, Koko the gorilla and her “consort” Michael, and Kanzi the chimp. Koko told her handler that she had a bad toothache about two years ago (she described the pain as a 9 on a scale of ten) and was taken to the dentist, who pulled the tooth. That was done on her own initiative. The intelligence of animals doesn't scare me like it does some people, who want to feel free to mistreat them and don't want to consider them to be worth respect. It pleases me and makes me see that humans aren't alone in the world of meaningful interactions.



­

Brazil Admits It Has Spied On U.S. Diplomats
by Eyder Peralta
­ When a Brazilian newspaper published a report that the U.S. had spied on Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff, the country complained bitterly. Rouseff even postponed a state visit with President Obama.
On Monday, the Brazilian paper Folha de S. Paulo published a report that revealed a government operation "modest in scope and technique" that spied on American, Russian, Iranian and Iraqi diplomats in Brazil.
The paper reports that Brazilian Intelligence Agency operatives followed the diplomats on foot and by car. They took pictures and monitored a commercial property leased by the U.S. Embassy in the Brazilian capital.
The Wall Street Journal reports the government issued a statement shortly after the publication of the report. The Journal adds:
"The Brazilian government's Office of Institutional Security, which oversees the intelligence agency for Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, acknowledged the report's main points. 'The operations involved counterintelligence efforts by the intelligence agency in 2003 and 2004," the statement said. "The operations were undertaken in strict accordance with Brazilian legislation and in strict defense of national interests,' it said.
"It also said the leaking of classified government documents constituted 'a serious crime, which will be investigated and prosecuted under the terms of the law.'"
While the revelation puts Brazil in an awkward position, The New York Times reports that the kind of spying detailed in this report is basic and "in sharp contrast to the sweeping international eavesdropping operations carried out by the National Security Agency."
The spying is so basic that this is how Fernando Sampaio, Russia's honorary consul in the city of Porto Alegre, reacted to the news in an interview with the Times: "Governments spy, what a surprise. I've long suspected that my phone line was tapped, and it probably still is."
In other spying news: Today, Germany summoned the British ambassador over a report that the British embassy in Berlin may be being used as a "top-secret listening post."


There used to be a very funny section in Mad Magazine called “Spy versus spy.” That's what this and several other recent stories remind me of. International interactions are so guarded about revealing unadulterated truth that governments probably have to spy on each other to find out what is really happening. There is constant posturing for status ranking. No one wants to show their weaknesses. Much of human relations is based on maintaining a high status within society. Still, the thought that our personal moments are being observed is hard to accept, no matter what the reason. The way the NSA has siphoned up such a large and miscellaneous amount of information, including in this our own country, seems like an abuse of power. It's also probably a large part of what we are spending US dollars to achieve. Is it worth it?



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For The Sake Of Happiness, Venezuela's Maduro Moves Up Christmas
by Eyder Peralta
­Perhaps Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is taking a hint from big U.S. retailers: For the sake of happiness, Maduro said, he declared an early beginning to the Christmas season.
"Today, on this first day of November, we decided to declare the arrival of Christmas, because we want happiness for all people," Maduro said.
Maduro made the decree on Friday, which means we're a bit late to this story, but it was too good to pass up.
Fox News Latino reports:
"During a visit to the so-called Socialist Christmas Fair 2013, organized by the government in a central area of Caracas, Maduro exchanged a few words with actors posing as the Three Kings, sang traditional Venezuelan Christmas songs and witnessed the sale of typical holiday food and items.
"The surprising announcement came a week after the creation of the new cabinet post of Deputy Minister of Supreme Happiness, which was greeted with jeers. Now critics say that with his generous Christmas measure, President Maduro is trying to ease off growing discontent over the country's economic crisis, food shortages and the spike of crime in Caracas."
In video posted by BBC Mundo, a jolly Maduro says that an early Christmas is the best vaccine for whoever wants to start "rioting and violence."
If you were cynical, you might think happiness may not be Maduro's only objective with this calendar switcheroo.
El Universal reports the new schedule means that the government will finish paying Christmas bonuses by Dec. 1. The Christian Science Monitor reports municipal elections will be held Dec. 8.
This decree also comes just a few days after Maduro made another stunning announcement: Maduro said that the late Hugo Chávez appeared in a subway tunnel.
The AFP explains:
"President Nicolas Maduro said Wednesday workers in the tunnel saw the image come and go, and he showed a photo of the alleged visage in a rally in Caracas.
"'Look at the figure, a face. This picture was taken by the workers,' he said, smiling. 'Chavez is everywhere.'
"Maduro, handpicked by the ailing Chavez to run for president upon his death, said during the election campaign in April that he had seen the populist leader incarnated as 'a little bird.'"


Nicolás Maduro
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nicolás Maduro Moros (Spanish pronunciation: [nikoˈlaz maˈðuɾo ˈmoɾos]; born 23 November 1962) is a Venezuelan politician who is the current President of Venezuela. He was previously the Vice President of Venezuela and the Minister of Foreign Affairs under President Hugo Chávez.
A former bus driver, Maduro rose to become a trade union leader, before being elected to the National Assembly in 2000. He was appointed to a number of positions within the Venezuelan Government under Chávez, ultimately being made Foreign Minister in 2006. He was described during this time as the "most capable administrator and politician of Chávez's inner circle".[2]
After Chávez's death was announced on 5 March 2013, Maduro assumed the powers and responsibilities of the President. A special election was held on 14 April of the same year to elect a new President, which he won by a tight margin as the candidate of the United Socialist Party; he was formally inaugurated on 19 April
On 5 July 2013, Maduro offered humanitarian asylum to ex-US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.[30]
In October 2013 Nicolás Maduro requested an enabling law to fight corruption.[31][32] Maduro also said the law was necessary to fight an 'economic war'.[33]
On 24 October 2013 the president announced the creation of a new agency, the Vice Ministry of Supreme Happiness, to coordinate all the social programmes.[34]
According to Professor Ramón Piñango, a sociologist from the Venezuelan University of IESA, "Maduro has a very strong ideological orientation, close to the communist ideology. Contrary to Diosdado, he is not very pragmatic."[5] However, the World Socialist Web Site has argued that Maduro intends to roll back Chávez's reforms, noting that, "In the conduct of his campaign, Maduro has continued his appeal to right-wing and nationalist sentiments, with repeated invocations of patriotism and the fatherland".[35]


According to Wikipedia, his Vice Ministry of Supreme Happiness is to coordinate all of the social programs, so it isn't such a flight from reality as it sounds. Maybe it's just the way the Spanish happens to translate into English.

About seeing Hugo Chavez in the subway tunnel, that still sounds bizarre, though there are probably plenty of people in Venezuela who believe in ghosts, possibly including Maduro. Abraham Lincoln's wife held seances in the White House after her son's death to try to reach his spirit. Anybody who believes literally in the Christian religion may believe that spirits don't necessarily go straight to their destination of either heaven or hell, so they hang around haunting humans.

As for his early Christmas, it sounds like a way to offer a palliative measure to the country's economic problems. I think he is probably sane –- that there are just some cultural differences between us and the Venezuelans which make him sound strange.