Global spa, wellness industry estimated at $4.3 trillion

Posted on by

NEW YORK - A growing middle class and consumers' evolving attitudes toward health and travel have fueled a global spa and wellness industry worth an estimated US$3.4 trillion S$4.3 trillion) in 2013, according to a report released on Tuesday.

Nutrition and weight loss, preventative and personalized health, complementary and alternative medicine, and beauty and anti-aging treatments were the biggest growing sectors, the report compiled by the non-profit research centre SRI International showed.

"All across the world we have seen, from Asia to Europe to Africa to North America, more and more people are consciously thinking about healthy food, exercising, looking to nature, getting massages and doing yoga," said Ophelia Yeung, a senior consultant for SRI International who led the study.

Spa treatments and products, alternative and complementary treatments and weight-loss programs once considered beyond the means of many people, she added, are becoming more mainstream with a growing middle class.

While medical care treats illness and disease, wellness is focused on prevention through a variety of healthy habits, nutritional eating, exercise and treatments.

To compile the report researchers looked at wellness sectors ranging from mind and body fitness to beauty and anti-aging, spas and workplace wellness.

The global spa industry generated $94 billion last year, according to the Global Spa and Wellness Economy Monitor report, up from $60 billion in 2007.

With more than 32,000 spas, Europe had the highest revenue of $29.8 billion, followed by the Asia-Pacific region with $18.8 billion and North America with $18.3 billion.

Emerging markets in the Middle East and Africa have been growing the fastest in terms of adding spas. In Asia, China and India are leading growth, while in Europe it is Eastern Europe, Russia and the Baltic states.

Thermal/mineral springs generated $50 billion worldwide but the biggest industry sector was wellness tourism, or travel associated with maintaining or enhancing one's personal well-being and health, which accounted for $494 billion.

Read more:
Global spa, wellness industry estimated at $4.3 trillion

NATO gets a new chief_one Vladimir Putin has said he can do business with

Posted on by

New NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg arrives for his first day of work at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2014. A two-time prime minister, Stoltenberg became a recognizable face on the international scene with his dignified response to the twin terror attacks that killed 77 people in Norway in July 2011. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)(The Associated Press)

New NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg arrives for his first day of work at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2014. A two-time prime minister, Stoltenberg became a recognizable face on the international scene with his dignified response to the twin terror attacks that killed 77 people in Norway in July 2011. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)(The Associated Press)

New NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, shakes hands with NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow as he arrives for his first day of work at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2014. A two-time prime minister, Stoltenberg became a recognizable face on the international scene with his dignified response to the twin terror attacks in Norway in July 2011. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)(The Associated Press)

New NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, walks with NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow as he arrives for his first day of work at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2014. A two-time prime minister, Stoltenberg became a recognizable face on the international scene with his dignified response to the twin terror attacks in Norway in July 2011. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)(The Associated Press)

BRUSSELS At a time of daunting geopolitical crises, NATO is undergoing its own version of regime change, with the arrival of a new chief official who has the blessing, at least temporarily, of one of the West's biggest adversaries: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Former two-term Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg started work Wednesday as NATO's secretary-general, the 13th in the trans-Atlantic organization's 65-year existence. And the key question is whether his consensus-building style will be more effective in tamping down the Ukraine conflict and other flashpoints than the hard talk of his predecessor, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

"I expect more moderate language, and that he will try to keep the dialogue open," said Kristian Berg Harpviken, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, an independent Norwegian research institution.

To allies like Germany, the expectation of a dial-back of the rhetoric from Rasmussen a former conservative Danish prime minister was one factor arguing in Stoltenberg's favor.

Last month, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, though squarely blaming the Kremlin for the continued crisis over Ukraine, said: "I found that some things that came out of Brussels, from NATO headquarters, in these last few weeks weren't always helpful."

Stoltenberg was unanimously chosen as Rasmussen's successor by NATO's policy-making North Atlantic Council in March. It was a pick that won swift if tentative approval from Putin, who had dealt with Stoltenberg when the 55-year-old Norwegian headed the left-of-center government of one of Russia's neighboring countries.

Read more:

NATO gets a new chief_one Vladimir Putin has said he can do business with

NATO, US Governed By Self-Interest, Not National Interest

Posted on by

Much geopolitical comment commits the mistake of believing that foreign affairs should be understood in terms of national interests. The crisis in Ukraine, for instance, can be viewed as being over gas pipelines or spheres of influence. In reality, however, the decisive factor in foreign policy is very often the personal self-interest of the decision-makers themselves, and by extension the institutional self-interest of the bodies in which they work.

Take last week's Joint Statement of the NATO-Ukraine commission issued at the summit in Wales. It would be difficult to imagine a more belligerent or aggressive document. It is uncompromising in its hostility to Russia, full of allegations against Moscow, and devoid of any criticism for the way that Kiev has sought, from the very beginning of the conflict in the East, to crush its opponents by force. "Despite Russias denials," it says, "Russian armed forces are engaged in direct military operations in Ukraine; Russia continues to supply weapons to militants in eastern Ukraine; and it maintains thousands of combat-ready troops on its border with Ukraine."

Like all Western policy on Ukraine, therefore, the Statement cuts no slack to the concerns of the Russian population of Eastern Ukraine and gives no quarter to the peace proposals which have emanated from the Kremlin since the beginning of the conflict and which were repeated on 3 September. It does not even mention the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have fled into Russia as a result of the conflict. As the West did during the Bosnian war, it doggedly presents a civil conflict as an international one. The document even condemns "external interference" in Ukraine while at the same time announcing a huge programme of new NATO and bilateral lethal and non-lethal military aid to Kiev: the Statement not is therefore not only disconnected from reality but also self-contradictory.

Such a position is irrational from the point of view of national interest. NATO states have no interest in throwing oil on the flames by attacking Russia: even they admit that Russia can play a key role in calming things down. They have no interest in aggravating the internal tensions within Ukraine by encouraging it to apply for NATO membership: everyone knows this is far more serious than association with the EU. They have no interest in supporting a military solution to the conflict when a political one is at hand (NATO's declared support for Kiev's alleged pursuit of a political solution is nothing but a bad joke): fighting can only drag out the agony. By the same token, the EU has no interest, and certainly no intention, of accepting responsibility for a failed state like Ukraine: swimming in debt themselves, the EU states cannot possibly find the money to bail it out.

So what is the explanation? The NATO-Ukraine joint statement, like the EU's Eastern Neighbourhood policy of which Ukraine is the key part and which caused the crisis in the first place, makes sense only as ideology and in terms of institutional self-justification. According to the ideology, "the West" is a body of post-national states united by common values of diversity and tolerance. At his speech to European Youth in Brussels on 26 March, President Obama presented the conflict in Ukraine in precisely these stark civilisational terms - between, on the one hand, a West attached to the principles of freedom and, on the other, a Russia attached to the use of authoritarianism and brute force. The West needs to bolster this external ideological enemy, Russia, for the purposes of ensuring its own political cohesion.

This ideology not only flatters Westerners' sense of moral superiority; it also serves a specific function for Western political elites, namely to justify the existence and expenditure of NATO and the EU. Both bodies need to continue to expand to foster the illusion that they have universal appeal because they are based on universal values; both bodies need to dissipate their own internal tensions and lack of legitimacy by currying enmity with an external enemy which embodies the values they reject. Without such an enemy, they would have to be dissolved and their officials dismissed. These structures give the officials who work for them, and the politicians who control them, far greater power than they would otherwise have, because their expansion and strengthening means that ever greater areas of policy-making are transferred to the cosy world of international summitry, and away from the difficulties created by public scrutiny in the domestic arena. It is for this reason that the Secretary-General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said that last week's summit in Wales would be "one of the most important summits in the Alliance's history". It was nothing of the kind, of course, but Rasmussen and his Western political bosses need to keep up a sense of urgency to justify their own pay packets.

The virulence of the Statement, and Kiev's announcement that it will abandon non-aligned status and seek NATO membership, also confirms a crucial point which has in fact been clear from the very beginning of the crisis - that the EU Association Agreement, which Viktor Yanukovich refused to sign last November, and which caused the whole crisis in the first place, was in fact always really about NATO. The political chapters of that agreement, signed by Prime Minister Yatseniuk in March only weeks after his seizure of power, requires that there be "convergence in the area of foreign and security policy, including the Common Security and Defence Policy". This Common Security and Defence Policy, in turn, thanks to Article 42 and Protocol 10 of the EUs Lisbon Treaty, is itself integrated into that of NATO: the treaty declares that the Policy "shall be consistent with commitments under the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation". A key geopolitical point which was previously buried inside the arcane paragraphs of an international treaty has at least now been publicly announced.

Originally posted here:

NATO, US Governed By Self-Interest, Not National Interest

NATO Lost in Contradictions

Posted on by

LONDON, September 10 (RIA Novosti) The NATO summit that concluded recently highlighted the sad case of an alliance of countries whose leaders live in a strange world, where what they insist is truth contradicts all facts, leading them to make foolish decisions which they soon regret.

NATO furiously condemned what they claimed were Russias actions in Ukraine. Obama accuses Russia of aggression. David Cameron says Russia has ripped up the rule book. Merkel has said Russia cannot be permitted to use force to change borders. They have created a 4,000-man rapid deployment force to deter Russia. They are imposing additional sanctions on Russia and threaten still more.

In reality, Russia hasnt engaged in the sort of behaviour they condemn it for, but they have behaved that way themselves.

Before considering NATOs strange truth, let us look at the actual facts. Russia has not invaded Ukraine or committed aggression against Ukraine. It did not aid or support the overthrow of Ukraines constitutional and democratic government or interfere in its domestic affairs as the West did before the February coup. Russia did support the exercise of self-determination of the people of Crimea. It did not use force in doing this, but it did act to prevent force from being used to prevent it. The International Court of Justice has said this is legal; it did so at Western insistence following Kosovos unilateral declaration of independence. Russia has never claimed any part of eastern Ukraine for itself. Russia has not sent its army there. All claims that NATO has made about the presence of the Russian army there are unconvincing or even ridiculous, as a group of retired senior US intelligence officials has pointed out. Russia has always contended and still says that it recognises Ukraines sovereignty over eastern Ukraine. There should be no question then of Russia ripping up rule books or changing borders by force.

In reality, where Ukraine was concerned, Russia did everything it could to prevent violence. It called for the constitutional negotiations the West brokered between Yanukovych and his opponents on February 21, 2014 to be observed. Ukraine would not have lost the Crimea and there would have been no war in eastern Ukraine if these had taken place. Russia always spoke out against the use of force in Ukraine and called for Ukrainians to negotiate in order to settle their differences. Its call went unheeded. Russia sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine in a way the International Court of Justice says is legal. It negotiated ceasefire agreements on April 17, 2014 and July 2, 2014, which Steinmeier and Fabius, the German and French foreign ministers, admitted were broken by the Ukrainian government. Finally it was Russias President Putin who proposed the peace plan that seems to have finally produced a ceasefire.

To talk of Russia as the aggressor that attacked Ukraine as NATO does is to stand reality on its head. It is also strange and hypocritical, coming from an alliance that in recent years has attacked Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, which last year threatened to attack Syria and which used force to alter the borders of Yugoslavia.

However, NATO leaders still insist they are the peacemakers and that Russia threatens them. They call for increases in defence spending to counter this imaginary threat, even though they already account for 57% of the worlds defence spending (Russia accounts for just 5%). They talk grandly of setting up a rapid deployment force to deter Russia and then show how little actual belief they have in the threat they say Russia poses by assigning just 4,000 men to it. They solemnly tell us that according to Article 5 of the NATO Charter, an attack on one member is an attack on all of them, even though the very fact that they are obliged to say it publicly shows how little they actually believe it. Words of this kind are cheap since as they know Russia has no plan or desire to attack any of them. Yet at the same time they make empty threats and warnings against Russia, they still want Russias help regarding Irans nuclear program and to counter the far more real threats they face from the Taliban, ISIS and Islamic terrorism in general.

It seems the leaders of NATO have succumbed to cognitive dissonance with regard to Russia, where facts cannot be allowed to shake their strange truth, which would allow them to have Russia both as an enemy and a partner as it suits them. It would be nearly impossible for them to devise a more certain way of causing themselves and their countries injury by antagonising a country that had only wanted to be their friend.

Alexander Mercouris is a London-based lawyer. The views expressed in this article are the authors and may not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.

Read the original:

NATO Lost in Contradictions

Ex-NSA director Alexander calls for new cybersecurity model

Posted on by

Small and medium-size U.S. companies should band together on cybersecurity systems as a way to pool limited resources against increasingly sophisticated attackers, the former director of the U.S. National Security Agency said Tuesday.

U.S. companies should explore ways to share more cyberthreat information with each other and work together to buy cybersecurity defenses as a service, said General Keith Alexander, who retired as director of the NSA and commander of cyber defense agency U.S. Cyber Command in April.

For smaller companies, I think were going to have to go to something like cybersecurity as a service, where they can opt in, Alexander said during a cybersecurity discussion in New York City hosted by PwC. If the small and mid-sized companies are grouped together, where its economically feasible to give them a great capability, then they arent the downstream problem for the large banks. In fact, they become a part of the sensing fabric that helps protect the big banks or big industries.

Many large U.S. businesses would probably continue to provide their own cybersecurity, but a shared cybersecurity service would hold major advantages for smaller businesses, said Alexander, who co-founded cybersecurity consulting firm IronNet Cybersecurity just weeks after retiring.

There are big companies that can afford big cybersecurity teams, have the funding to pay for them, he said. Then, if youre mid-sized, you can afford to have a mid-sized team or lesswell call that the economy team. If youre a small [business], you know what cybersecurity is, and wish you had some. You have ... an IT guy who went to a class at night.

Alexander, during his speech, largely sidestepped the NSAs surveillance of U.S. companies and its work to defeat encryption systems. Those NSA efforts came to light in the past 15 months through leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

He called on the U.S. Congress to pass controversial cyberthreat sharing legislation that would allow government agencies and private companies to more easily exchange information about attacks. Many privacy groups have protested the legislation, saying it would give government agencies, including the NSA, access to even more personal information held by private companies.

The cyberthreat information sharing bills in Congress have stalled this year because of privacy concerns.

We have to have a messaging framework and capability that shares information among sectors at network speed, Alexander said. Its technically feasible and something we should try for.

Alexander also suggested that too many companies rely on their chief information security officers (CISOs) or CTOs to keep up with the rapidly changing IT field and integrate what can be hundreds of IT products from dozens of vendors. One employee or small department cannot keep up with the changes and be expected to integrate all those products without exposing the company to cybersecurity risks, he said.

Read the rest here:

Ex-NSA director Alexander calls for new cybersecurity model

Posted in NSA

New docs show how Reagan-era executive order unbounded NSA

Posted on by

Further Reading A set of newly declassified documents shows definitively and explicitly that the United States intelligence community relies heavily on what is effectively unchecked presidential authority to conduct surveillance operations, as manifested through the Reagan-era Executive Order (EO) 12333.

And at a more basic level, the new documentsillustrate that the government is adept at creating obscure legalistic definitions of plain language words, like "collection of information," which help obfuscate the publics understanding of the scope and scale of such a dragnet.

The documents were first published on Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) after the groupfiled aFreedom of Information Act lawsuit with the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School.

As Arsreported previously, "twelve triple three" is a presidential order that spells out the National Security Agencys authority to conduct signals intelligence, among other things. EO 12333 was amended three times under President George W.Bush. Famously, the NSAexpanded its domestic surveillance operation after the September 11 attacks without a direct order from the president, who later provided cover under EO 12333.

"These documents are a good first step to understanding how EO 12333 is being used," Mark Jaycox, a legislative analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars. "We already know that it's used in a very similar manner to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is being used as part of collection techniques that collect wholly domestic (American) e-mail. We also know [EO 12333 is] used for the NSAs interception of Internet traffic between Google's and Yahoo!'s data centers abroad, the collection of millions of e-mail and instant message address books, the recording of the contents of every phone call made in at least two countries, and the mass cell phone location-tracking program. The NSAand the White Housemust release more material on EO 12333. The President has encouraged a public discussion on the NSA's signals intelligence activities. He must follow through with ensuring an open, and honest, debate on EO 12333 activities."

In a rare instance of clarity and precision, a "legal fact sheet" authored by the NSA and dated June 19, 2013 explains various elements of EO 12333.

FISA only regulates a subset of NSA's signals intelligence activities.

NSA conducts the majority of its SIGINT activities solely pursuant to the authority provided by Executive Order (EO) 12333.

Since 1981, EO 12333 has provided the President's authoritative written instruction for the organization and operation of the United States Intelligence Community (IC).

An internal training document for a course taught with the NSA entitled "Overview of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) Authorities" notes that:

Read the rest here:

New docs show how Reagan-era executive order unbounded NSA

Posted in NSA

Volokh Conspiracy: Third Circuit on the mosaic theory and Smith v. Maryland

Posted on by

Back in August, the Third Circuit handed down an unpublished opinion in United States v. Gomez (August 8, 2014), that appears to have rejected the mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment, at least in the context of telephone metadata. I havent seen any coverage of the decision elsewhere, so I thought I would blog it.

In Gomez, the government obtained a pen register order to monitor the metadata for Gomezs telephone calls for about 5 weeks. Gomez argued that under the Jones concurrences, the prolonged surveillance was sufficient to constitute a Fourth Amendment search. The Third Circuit disagreed in an opinion by Judge Smith joined by Judges Vanaskie and Schwartz:

Gomez first argues that the DEAs prolonged warrantless use of a pen register and trap and trace device violated his privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment. We agree with the District Court that this argument is foreclosed by Smith [v. Maryland]. Gomez provided a third party in this case, Sprint with all the data that the DEA obtained through the use of the pen register and trap and trace device. In so doing, Gomez abandoned his privacy interest in this data because he assumed the risk that the information would be divulged to police. Smith, 442 U.S. at 745, 99 S.Ct. 2577. Although Justice Sotomayor has urged the Court to reconsider Smiths holding that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties, United States v. Jones, U.S. , 132 S.Ct. 945, 957, 181 L.Ed.2d 911 (2012) (Sotomayor, J., concurring), we remain bound by Smith until a majority of the Court endorses this view.

The Third Circuit then adds the following explanatory footnote:

In the proceedings below, Gomez conceded that his position was contrary to Smith, but cited Justice Sotomayors concurrence in Jones for the proposition that Smith is antiquated and must be reconsidered. J.A. 60. Gomez presents a different argument on appeal. Instead of urging us to overrule Smiths third party doctrine, Gomez contends that this doctrine has already been cabined by five Justices of the Supreme Courta number he reaches by combining Justice Sotomayors and Justice Alitos concurrences in Jones. Appellants Br. 27, 31. As Gomez did not raise this argument before the District Court, it is waived. Holk v. Snapple Beverage Corp., 575 F.3d 329, 336 (3d Cir.2009).

In any event, we reject Gomezs contention that the concurrences in Jones cabined Smith. Justice Alitos concurrence did not explicitly seek to limit Smith, and indeed relied heavily on the fact that drivers of automobiles do not expect third parties to possess detailed, long-term data regarding their location. Jones, 132 S.Ct. at 964 (Alito, J., concurring). By contrast, cell phone users do expect service providers to possess detailed, long-term data regarding the numbers they dial because this information is necessarily conveyed in the course of connecting a call. Smith, 442 U.S. at 743, 99 S.Ct. 2577. By disclosing this data, cell phone users, unlike drivers of automobiles, assume[ ] the risk that a third party will convey it to law enforcement. Id. at 744, 99 S.Ct. 2577. Therefore, we are not persuaded that the two concurrences in Jones have limited Smith to short-term call monitoring.

Off the top of my head, I think this is the first federal court of appeals opinion to directly address the important question of whether the mosaic theory modifies Smith v. Maryland. The opinion was not published and is therefore non-precedential. But given that this is likely to be an important issue when the D.C. Circuit reviews Klayman v. Obama on November 4th, I thought the Third Circuits opinion was worth noting.

Orin Kerr is the Fred C. Stevenson Research Professor at The George Washington University Law School, where he has taught since 2001. He teaches and writes in the area of criminal procedure and computer crime law.

View original post here:

Volokh Conspiracy: Third Circuit on the mosaic theory and Smith v. Maryland

Senate Dems Vote Down Text Of First Amendment – The Divine Kingdom – Video

Posted on by


Senate Dems Vote Down Text Of First Amendment - The Divine Kingdom
Come Join Us Each Tuesday Wednesday @ 7pm For An Interactive Discussion of the Endtimes, Including The ObamaCare Law HR 3962 How Parts of The Law "MAY" Fit Into Bible Prophecy of Rev. 13:16-18....

By: Prophet Willie Johnson

Read the original here:

Senate Dems Vote Down Text Of First Amendment - The Divine Kingdom - Video

043 CryptoToken Bitcoin LTBcoin Metacoin SoulTradeGame SecondLife CryptoCurrency Money Innovation – Video

Posted on by


043 CryptoToken Bitcoin LTBcoin Metacoin SoulTradeGame SecondLife CryptoCurrency Money Innovation
http://www.twitter.com/VanosEnigmA + @SoulTradeGame #FollowBack 😉 plus.google.com/+VanosEnigmaisland/about http://www.facebook.com/VanosEnigmA http://www.youtube.com/user/Enigma...

By: VanosEnigmA Enigmaisland

See more here:

043 CryptoToken Bitcoin LTBcoin Metacoin SoulTradeGame SecondLife CryptoCurrency Money Innovation - Video