Nobel Prize, Ignoble Politics

China's behaviour over the award of the Noble Peace prize to Liu Xiaobo one of their own citizens, but one who is in prison for protesting for human rights, has been nothing less than shameful

..... but the behaviour of some of their 'friends' around the world has been equally disgraceful.

 

Corruption Not Terrorism Threatens Most People

Sweden is possibly one of the most highly developed societies on Earth and regularly tops leagues for ethical societies ....... so imagine the shock to their self psyche when a story suggested all was not as squeaky clean as they believed ...... shock horror! The Swedish news headlines are dominated by a scandal in Gothenburg, with police investigating allegations that local government officials had accepted bribes from a major construction company.

Stockholm, Sweden

Now by most countries standards this would hardly be headline news, or certainly not for more than one day, but in Sweden, this is a shocking revelation ..... when you consider that outside of the first world economies (and there is a tie in with this fact), most countries are corrupt, with the very poorest societies also the most corrupt, then the Swedish problem is minuscule.

In fact some 56% of people interviewed by Transparency International said their country had become more corrupt in the last few years, which is a sad indictment on the state of the world. What makes this even more depressing is that most bribes are paid to the Police.

In Afghanistan, Nigeria, Iraq and India more than 50% of people said they had paid a bribe in the past year - many of them paying off the police. Bur even so they are not considered the most corrupt institution .... Political Parties were regarded as the most corrupt institutions with 80% of people regarding them as corrupt. Political parties also topped the list in Transparency's 2004 barometer, with 71%.

Religious bodies experienced a sharp rise in people regarding them as corrupt - 28% in 2004 increased to 53% by 2010. And with one in four of those polled saying they had paid a bribe in the past year, its not hard to make the correlation between corruption and poverty around the world.

• In sub-Saharan Africa, 67% of bribes were to avoid trouble with the authorities.
• In the Arab world and Latin America most bribes were paid to speed things up.
• In Asia-Pacific, 35% of people bribed to get a service they were entitled to.
• In North America and the EU, most bribe payers said they could not remember why they had paid (about 5% of those polled said they had paid a bribe).

(90,000 polled over 86 countries for the results)

NB: Sadly this morning the Swedish are discovering once again that being a civilised country only  makes  you apparently a target for the new barbarians with two apparent 'jihadist suicide' bombers attaking them ..... but they are not alone in this regard, and even so, I would argue that more people are affected by Corruption, than by Terrorism. 

Global Warming .... British Ice Age!!

Every year is record warmest year according to Meteorologists, and yet Britain currently has harder and harder winters ......  If Britain has much more "Global Warming" like this 'autumn' .....

 then I will freeze to death!

"Honey Traps" And Other Cold War Strategies

A British MP has had his Russian 'Parliamentary Aide', Katia Zatuliveter, age 25, arrested over claims she is a Russian spy.

Katia Zatuliveter

Of course he says she isn't a spy, but as the KGB (FSB, or whatever they call themselves these days), have used Russian ingenue's, to beguile older western males into loosening their tongues (if nothing else), over sensitive information for decades, so its rather odd that she should gravitate towards an old minor leftie MP just 'for love', and for no other reason.

Malware and Other Ills

This weekend I picked up a virus ..... no not the 'woman flu', or 'heavy cold' that is going around frozen Britain, no I mean one of those horrors that beset the Internet, the Trojan/virus call it what you will.

The one I got was the "Google Redirect" .... this is caused by something called the 'TDL3 Rootkit' which causes the Google redirect virus infection. A person who is using Google as a home page or search engine is redirected to visiting unwanted websites ..... and its a real bugger to get rid of!!

Eventually after much searching (hampered greatly by the fact that I was being redirected) I found a site that didn't just spout nonsense ....  "How to Remove the Google Redirect Virus", which apart from being full of generally good advice, has a specific link to the the utility 'TDSSKiller.exe' which is by Kaspersky, and killed the problem in a few moments ...... so a full cheer from a grateful web user for these companies who offer free cures for very nasty little problems.

Oddly, I still have no idea where I picked this problem up from because I most definitely did not give any administrator permissions to a download ..... ah well, at least its apparently fixed for now.