Jusqu’à présent, la géo-localisation de votre mobile a servi à savoir où vous êtes. Bientôt, elle servira aussi à savoir qui vous êtes. Une équipe de spécialistes d’intelligence artificielle dirigée par le professeur Tony Jebara, de l’université Columbia de New York, a mis au point un système permettant de profiler un possesseur de téléphone portable sans rien lui demander, en se basant exclusivement sur ses déplacements quotidiens. Après une période d’observation continue des mouvements d’un téléphone, le moteur d’intelligence artificielle saura si son propriétaire est un homme ou une femme, jeune ou âgé, riche ou pauvre, dépensier ou avare, diplômé ou non, nomade ou sédentaire, employé stable ou précaire…

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By night Berlin has become a battlefield. Each morning reveals new casualties: burned out cars. There have been over 500 in the past three years. These nocturnal arson attacks are part of a protracted campaign of resistance to the city’s increasing gentrification, retaliatory strikes against the loss of areas of the city that have long fostered alternative culture and anticapitalist activity. As more and more residents are priced out of their own neighborhoods, such acts of sabotage have become the last-ditch efforts of the dispossessed.

These are certainly desperate measures, but we live in desperate times. We might ask whether cars are legitimate targets. Is there not something uncomfortable in the ethics of destroying the property of individuals, especially in such an environmentally careless manner? Would such violence be more productively focused on state or corporate targets? Perhaps, but this campaign has abandoned the unwinnable battle for public approval. An anonymous website, Brennende-autos.de, mockingly offers epitaphs for the sacrificed vehicles: “05.03.2010 – Fließstraße – Mercedes.” And there remains a powerful symbolic value to the burning car. We can sense that something is being said beyond the immediate context, beyond the localized struggle. So, what do these fires really illuminate?

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Während die rechtskonservative Tea Party in den USA gegen Obama hetzt, wächst in diesen Tagen eine weitere Graswurzelbewegung heran: die Coffee Party. Die Mitglieder organisieren sich über Facebook und sammeln rasant Unterstützer. Was sie wollen, wissen sie selbst noch nicht.

“Wenn uns einer fragt, wofür wir stehen, müssen wir eine Antwort haben”, ruft ein Mann im “Vote-Obama”-Shirt. “Wir brauchen konkrete Ziele!” Die anderen klatschen Beifall. Sie haben sich über das soziale Netz Facebook kennengelernt, in der Bar Le Monde Deli in Manhattan sehen sie sich zum ersten Mal.

Sie sind Mitglieder einer neuen Bewegung in den USA, die sich Coffee Party nennt. Es ist eine Gegenbewegung zur sogenannten Tea Party, einer rechtskonservativen Gruppierung, die sich vor rund einem Jahr aus zunächst losen Protesten gegen Barack Obamas Politik entwickelte. Mittlerweile ist die Tea Party zu einer großen Protestbewegung geworden, die lautstark und radikal gegen die Obama-Regierung hetzt.
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Après avoir lancé le débat controversé sur l’identité nationale, Eric Besson s’est fait plus discret. Le ministre de l’immigration, de l’intégration et de l’identité serait-il en disgrâce, obligé de se brider ? Il nie et repart à l’offensive : “C’est le tabou et non le débat qui entretient les mauvais instincts”, assure-t-il en annonçant la tenue d’un colloque le 8 avril.

On ne vous entend plus. Vous êtes en quarantaine depuis le débat manqué sur l’identité nationale ?

Pas du tout, j’ai participé à plusieurs réunions publiques, j’étais mercredi 3 mars en Isère, je serai mardi 9 en Alsace et en Lorraine aux côtés de Xavier Bertrand. Etant plus présent dans les réunions locales depuis quinze jours, je me suis moins exprimé au niveau national.
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Topeka, ville d’un peu plus de 100 000 habitants dans le Kansas, aux Etats-Unis, s’appellera “Google” pendant le mois de mars, a expliqué son maire, lundi 1er mars. Le site Internet de la ville accueille désormais les visiteurs par un bandeau : “Ville de Google”, écrit dans la police de caractères et les couleurs du logotype de la firme californienne.

“Cette proclamation est plus un clin d’œil qu’autre chose”, précise le maire, William Bunten, dans le quotidien local The Topeka Capital Journal. Mais par cette initiative, les autorités locales cherchent en réalité à attirer le géant américain, et son projet d’installer des réseaux à très haut débit.
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Nearly half of the Arizona Legislature wants to force President Barack Obama to show his birth certificate to state officials if he runs for re-election.

A state House committee on Tuesday approved the measure sponsored by 40 of the state’s 90 legislators. It would require presidential candidates who want to appear on the ballot in Arizona to submit documents proving they meet the requirements to be president.
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Senator Evan Bayh’s comments this week about a dysfunctional Congress reflected a complaint being directed at Washington with increasing frequency, and there is broad agreement among critics about Exhibit A: The unwillingness of the two parties to compromise to control a national debt that is rising to dangerous heights.

After decades of warnings that budgetary profligacy, escalating health care costs and an aging population would lead to a day of fiscal reckoning, economists and the nation’s foreign creditors say that moment is approaching faster than expected, hastened by a deep recession that cost trillions of dollars in lost tax revenues and higher spending for safety-net programs.
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Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) primary challenger, former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), has clearly made the political calculation that the longtime senator and 2008 presidential candidate is vulnerable on his conservative flank.

But how vulnerable is that flank? McCain supporters are sending around a clip of Hayworth’s appearance on CNN last night, in which the onetime congressman refuses to flat-out disavow the birther conspiracy movement and even suggests that, in the age of identify theft, questions about President Obama’s citizenship are legitimate.
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Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs, watching government lift struggling families with job training and education. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.

But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated — even manufactured — by both parties to grab power.
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The decision by Iranian judicial authorities to start executing political dissidents shows the courts are closer to the regime than ever and neither has any intention of compromising with protesters.

Two political prisoners have been executed and the courts have imposed nine further death sentences; the country is waiting to find out whether there will be more.
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