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Saturday August 30, 2008
Manufactured Famine
George Monbiot
Monbiot.com
A new wave of food colonialism is taking food from the mouths of the poor.
In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines that sucked the guts out of India in the 1870s. The hunger began when a drought, caused by El Nino, killed the crops on the Deccan plateau. As starvation bit, the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. While Lytton lived in imperial splendour and commissioned, among other extravangances, "the most colossal and expensive meal in world history between 12 and 29 million people died. Only Stalin manufactured a comparable hunger.
Now a new Lord Lytton is seeking to engineer another brutal food grab. As Tony Blair's favoured courtier, Peter Mandelson often created the impression that he would do anything to please his master.
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Saturday August 30, 2008
Robert Fisk's World: Why do we keep letting the politicians get away with lies?
Robert Fisk
Independent
How on earth do they get away with it? Let's start with war between Hizbollah and Israel – past and future war, that is.
Back in 2006, Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers from their side of the Lebanese frontier and dragged them, mortally wounded, into Lebanon. The Israelis immediately launched a massive air bombardment against all of Lebanon, publicly declaring Beirut's democratically-elected and US-backed – but extremely weak – government must be held to account for what Hizbollah does.
Taking the lives of more than 1,000 Lebanese, almost all civilians, Israel unleashed its air power against the entire infrastructure of the rebuilt Lebanon, smashing highways, viaducts, electric grids, factories, lighthouses, totally erasing dozens of villages and half-destroying hundreds more before bathing the south of the country in three million cluster bomblets.
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Saturday August 30, 2008
NASA's 'electronic nose' could sniff out cancer
NewScientist
From rocket science to brain surgery: a device designed to sniff out leaks on the space shuttle may soon guide surgeons as they operate on cancer patients.
The ENose was originally developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to detect low-level leaks of ammonia in shuttles. It is based on polymer films whose electrical conductivity varies as they encounter different substances. Now its creators believe the ENose could act as a highly sensitive detector of the characteristic compounds produced by cancer cells.
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Saturday August 30, 2008
How the Republicans Win
Robert Parry
Consortium News
Barack Obama made it across the tightrope of the Democratic National Convention, gaining solid endorsements from Bill and Hillary Clinton and giving a rousing speech before some 80,000 supporters at Invesco Field in Denver. But now comes the time when the Republicans win elections.
Over the past four decades, Republicans have dominated the outcomes of presidential races by mixing negative campaigning in public with illicit dirty tricks behind the scenes, as I've recounted in my last two books, Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep.
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Saturday August 30, 2008
Mob rule: The phenomenon of flash mobbing
Madeleine North
Independent
It started five years ago, in the rug department of Macy's, New York, and shows no signs of letting up. In fact, flash mobbing is bigger than ever. The Chambers Dictionary describes the phenomenon thus: "A group of people who arrange to assemble briefly in a public place to perform some activity, often of a humorous or surreal nature."
These "activities", word of which is spread via forwarded e-mails, social networking sites, text messages and water-cooler conversations, have taken the form of silent discos, kiss mobs, musical statues without the music, Circle Line parties, shouting in the manner of stock exchange traders, "wobbly bridge" congas – and the most recent incarnation, rick mobbing, rick rolling or, to give it its full Latin name, The Rick Astley Flash Mob, in which hundreds of people descend on a rush-hour station concourse and sing, a cappella, the lyrics to "Never Gonna Give You Up". And then leave.
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Saturday August 30, 2008
Excessive IP protection causes economic gridlock, says expert
Out-Law
Intellectual property laws which were designed to protect inventors are actually stifling innovation, according to a leading US law academic.
Michael Heller is an academic at Columbia University in New York and told technology law podcast OUT-LAW Radio that intellectual property laws are being used to stop new products and services being made.
"I discovered a paradox in the free market and it is this: usually private ownership creates wealth, but too much ownership has the opposite effect, it creates gridlock," he said. "When too many owners control a single resource – it can be a patent, a copyright, land – when too many people control a single resource, co-operation breaks down and wealth disappears, everybody ends up losing."
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Saturday August 30, 2008
Aussie has answer to save Earth from asteroid attack
Scott Snowden
The Register
An PhD student with the University of Queensland's School of Engineering has won top prize in an international competition for her plan to wrap a giant asteroid with reflective sheeting to prevent a collision with the Earth.
The asteroid, Apophis, is estimated to be perhaps 270 metres across and it will pass close to Earth in 2029, well inside the orbit of the Moon and closing in to the same sort of distance as geosynchronous satellites.
Despite being considerably smaller than the 15km wide asteroid that struck the Earth in what is now the Yucatán Peninsula, in south east Mexico - and more than likely caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, if it collided with Earth it would strike with the force of more than 110,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs.
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Saturday August 30, 2008
Kevin Mitnick Tells All in Upcoming Book -- Promises No Whining
Kim Zetter
Wired
Now that the statute of limitations has lifted on many of his crimes -- as well as a seven-year court ban prohibiting him from writing about them (the ban ended midnight on January 28, 2007) -- former hacker Kevin Mitnick is telling his story in a book to be published next year.
Mitnick, the Mumia Abu-Jamal of the hacker world who inspired a "Free Kevin" movement, was imprisoned for four and a half years, beginning in February 1995, before he was finally sentenced to 46 months in 1999, with some credit for time already served. Part of that time he was held in solitary confinement and without bail because the government feared he had the ability to detonate a nuclear weapon simply by whistling a tone through a phone. He was released in 2000.
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Saturday August 30, 2008
Chomsky: Britain has failed US detainees
Robert Verkaik
Independent
Britain has failed in its duty to stop the US from committing "shameful acts" in the treatment of suspects detained during the war on terror, one of America's most respected intellectuals warns today.
In an interview with The Independent, Professor Noam Chomsky calls on the Government to use its special relationship with Washington America to secure the closure of Guantanamo Bay.
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Friday August 29, 2008
Shoppers lose their taste for organic food
Juliette Jowit
The Guardian
Organic food sales have fallen more than at any time in the last decade as shoppers try to cut costs and experts warn that consumers are more confused than ever about whether it is worth paying the higher prices.
Figures collected for the Guardian by the market research company TNS show spending on organic food and drinks fell from a peak of nearly £100m a month earlier this year to £81m in the most recent four-week period recorded. The fall has been steepest in eggs, but is also reported in the most popular sectors, including dairy, fruit and vegetables and chicken.
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Friday August 29, 2008
IT staff admit they would steal sensitive data
Computerworld
The majority of IT staff have admitted they would steal sensitive company information, including customer details and CEO's passwords, if they were laid off, according to a new survey from Cyber-Ark.
A staggering 88 percent of IT administrators admitted they would take corporate secrets, if they were suddenly made redundant. The target information included CEO passwords, customer database, research and development plans, financial reports, M&A plans and the company's list of privileged passwords.
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Friday August 29, 2008
Gotcha! How to swat a fly, and know that it will die
Steve Connor
Independent
The enduring mystery of why it is so difficult to swat a fly has been solved by scientists who believe they can now offer technical advice on how to hit a fly before it has chance to escape.
A series of experiments with high-speed digital cameras and a swarm of obliging laboratory flies has discovered that the insects use a sophisticated defence system to anticipate a swatter's movements in a fraction of a second.
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Friday August 29, 2008
US warning to court in alleged torture case
Duncan Campbell
The Guardian
The US state department yesterday warned that disclosure of secret information in the case of a British resident said to have been tortured before he was sent to Guantánamo Bay would cause "serious and lasting damage" to security relations between the countries.
Stephen Mathias, a legal adviser to the department, also claimed that the "national security of the UK" would be affected by disclosure of the details of the detention and interrogation of Binyam Mohamed, 30, who is accused of conspiring with al-Qaida.
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Friday August 29, 2008
Malware hits outer space
Gregg Keizer
Computerworld
Now you're not even safe from malware in space. NASA has confirmed that the International Space Station, has been hit by a worm, identified as W32.Gammima.AG.
Early reports suggest that at least one of the laptops used on the station, which is administered jointly by the US and Russia. However, NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries declined to identify the malware, saying only that anti-virus software detected a worm on 25 July.
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Friday August 29, 2008
He's anonymous, so Banksy's gift is inadmissible
Ben Russell
Independent
When Banksy offered one of his highly sought-after canvases to Labour to auction for Ken Livingstone's ill-fated re-election campaign, the party's high command was jubilant.
They were left with a conundrum, however, when they realised that the secret identity of the famously elusive graffiti artist would cost their hard-pressed coffers tens of thousands of pounds
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Friday August 29, 2008
Indigenous Groups Win Major Battle in Congress
Milagros Salazar
Inter Press Service
The Peruvian Congress voted Friday to repeal two decrees that opened up communally owned native lands to private investment and that triggered a wave of protests this month by indigenous people in Amazon jungle provinces.
The vote was a rare instance of cooperation between opposition lawmakers and legislators from parties that up to now have been allied with the government, who voted to overturn the decrees on the argument that they undermined the rights of native communities.
Sixty-six lawmakers voted to revoke the decrees and 29 members of the governing APRA party voted against the decision.
The decrees were adopted by the executive branch in an unconstitutional manner and without respecting indigenous groups’ right to be consulted prior to any project on their land, as established by International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169, which has been ratified by Peru.
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Thursday August 28, 2008
Strip-Search Nation
Dave Lindorff
CounterPunch
We’ve come a long way towards imperial government in the US—towards a view of the relationship between the federal government, and especially the administration, and the citizenry that has more of a ruler-subjects than a democratic feel to it.
Now I know it is easy to gloss over the way things were, and since I spent a few days in federal prison for protesting the Indochina War at the Pentagon in 1967, after being beaten by federal marshals for doing nothing more than exercising my constitional right to protest on public ground, I am well aware that 40 years ago we were also often treated like serfs.
But that said, there was something different back then—a sense that you could deal with powerful officials as an equal.
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Thursday August 28, 2008
Email Spamming 101: The A-Z Guide To Becoming Human Garbage
Ross Wolinsky
Cracked.com
So you’re considering a lucrative, rewarding career in the exciting world of email spamming! Good for you! Being an email spammer can be a lot of fun, but it can also be a challenge. What nonexistent celebrity sex tapes should you offer fake links to, and how do you use those fake links to install malware on peoples’ computers? What types of products and services should you offer to people, and if they’re interested, what’s the easiest way to steal those peoples’ personal financial information?
You probably have a lot of questions, but as luck would have it, I just so happen to have some answers for you. With a little patience and some good ol’ fashioned elbow grease, you’ll be scamming senior citizens and mental defectives before you know it… and pulling down a seven-figure salary to boot! Let’s get started!
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Thursday August 28, 2008
The US missile defence system is the magic pudding that will never run out
George Monbiot
The Guardian
The US missile defence system is the magic pudding that will never run out Poland is just the latest fall guy for an American foreign policy dictated by military industrial lobbyists in Washington
It's a novel way to take your own life. Just as Russia demonstrates what happens to former minions that annoy it, Poland agrees to host a US missile defence base. The Russians, as Poland expected, respond to this proposal by offering to turn the country into a parking lot. This proves that the missile defence system is necessary after all: it will stop the missiles Russia will now aim at Poland, the Czech Republic and the UK in response to, er, their involvement in the missile defence system.
The American government insists that the interceptors, which will be stationed on the Baltic coast, have nothing to do with Russia: their purpose is to defend Europe and the US against the intercontinental ballistic missiles Iran and North Korea don't possess. This is why they are being placed in Poland, which, as every geography student in Texas knows, shares a border with both rogue states.
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Thursday August 28, 2008
Man's 'pants' password is changed
BBC News
A man who chose "Lloyds is pants" as his telephone banking password said he found it had been changed by a member of staff to "no it's not".
Steve Jetley, from Shrewsbury, said he chose the password after falling out with Lloyds TSB over insurance that came free with an account.
He said he was then banned from changing it back or to another password of "Barclays is better".
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Thursday August 28, 2008
Brit firm to demo serious flying robo-saucer in 2009
Lewis Page
The Register
A small British company developing a unique form of hovering aircraft says it will soon demonstrate a new and much more serious version of its technology.
GFS Projects of Peterborough was registered in 2002, following early efforts by former hovercraft engineer Geoff Hatton to develop a working "flying saucer" aircraft based on the Coanda effect. (GFS stands for Geoff's Flying Saucers.) The Reg spoke to GFS marketing chief Mark Broughton this morning, who gave us a run-through on the "Fenstar 50" autonomous unmanned saucer which the company hopes to have flying in the first half of next year.
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Thursday August 28, 2008
Why you should go with your gut feeling
Ewen Callaway
NewScientist
Next time you’re at a blackjack table trying to decide whether to hold or hit, just trust your gut. New research shows that our brains pick up on subliminal signals – a dealer’s tell, for instance – when making risky decisions.
“When you think that you are referring to your intuition, actually you just learn an association between subliminal signals in your context and the outcome of your actions,” says Mathias Pessiglione, a neuroscientist at the Centre for Neuroimaging Research in Paris, France, who led the study.
Doctors and gamblers may be used to trusting their instincts in make-or-break situations, but scientists have had a tough time proving that the brain can learn subconsciously.
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Thursday August 28, 2008
Prison reformers condemn new 'Titan' jails as a 'gigantic mistake'
Ben Russell
Independent
Proposals to build three huge new jails would "squander" public money and leave Britain the prisons capital of Europe, a coalition of 34 penal reform groups and unions warn today.
In a stinging letter to Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, union leaders and campaigners warn that the jails – each with a proposed capacity of 2,500 prisoners – would damage efforts to take criminals away from a life of crime and exacerbate mental health problems in jails.
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Thursday August 28, 2008
Scrapping fuel subsidies can help climate-UN study
Alister Doyle
Reuters
Abolishing subsidies on fossil fuels could cut world greenhouse gas emissions by up to 6 percent and also nudge up world economic growth, a U.N. report showed on Tuesday.
Subsidies on oil, gas or coal are meant to help the poor by lowering the price of energy but the report, issued on the sidelines of a 160-nation U.N. climate meeting in Ghana, said they often backfired by mainly benefiting wealthier people.
The study estimated that energy subsidies, almost all for fossil fuels, totalled about $300 billion a year or 0.7 percent of world gross domestic product (GDP).
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Thursday August 28, 2008
The Wild Weapons of DARPA
Nick Turse
TomDispatch.com
When, in October 1957, the USSR launched the first man-made earth satellite, the basketball-sized Sputnik, it caught the United States off guard and sent the government into fits. Not only had the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb years before the Americans predicted they would, but now they were leading the "space race."
In response, the Defense Department approved funding for a new U.S. satellite project, headed by former Nazi SS officer Wernher von Braun, and created, in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to make certain that the United States forever after maintained "a lead in applying state-of-the-art technology for military capabilities and to prevent technological surprise from her adversaries."
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Thursday August 28, 2008
Google looks at user search feedback
Juan Carlos Perez
IDG News Service
Google is considering allowing users of its search engine to tinker with query results by re-ranking them and commenting on them.
The company has already run public tests on its search-results pages that contain up and down arrows next to listed links, as well as buttons that allow users to append comments to results.
"At this point, I can't say what we expect from this feature; we're just curious to see how it will be used," wrote Ben Gomes, a Google Distinguished Engineer, in the company's official blog on Tuesday.
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Thursday August 28, 2008
Bush Is Pouring Gas on Afghanistan's Bonfire
Chris Hedges
Truthdig
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind forward with their terrible human toll, even as the press and many Americans play who gets thrown off the island with Barack Obama. Coalition forces carried out an airstrike that killed up to 95 Afghan civilians in western Afghanistan on Friday, 50 of them children, President Hamid Karzai said. And the mounting bombing raids and widespread detentions of Afghans are rapidly turning Afghanistan into the mirror image of Iraq.
But these very real events, which will have devastating consequences over the next few months and years, are largely ignored by us. We prefer to waste our time on the trivia and gossip that swallow up air time and do nothing to advance our understanding of either the campaign or the wars fought in our name.
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Thursday August 28, 2008
Digging Up the Dirt on Arctic Carbon
Peter N. Spotts
The Christian Science Monitor
You never know what you'll find until you dig a little deeper. Scientists taking the measure of how much carbon the Arctic locks up beneath its tundra have done just that. Based on what they've found, they estimate that the Arctic could harbor an average of 60 percent more carbon than previous estimates have indicated.
Researchers are interested in the Arctic's carbon budget because projections of global warming suggest that the region's average temperature could warm by as much as 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, depending on the trajectory that emissions from human activities take.
The concern: As the Arctic continues to warm and the permafrost thaws, significant amounts of carbon will find their way into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide or methane. These added greenhouse gases would serve to reinforce global warming.
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Thursday August 28, 2008
What a McCain Victory Would Mean
Robert Parry
Consortium News
In judging the shape of a future John McCain presidency, there are already plenty of dots that are easy to connect. They reveal an image of a war-like Empire so full of hubris that it could take the world into a cascade of crises, while extinguishing what is left of the noble American Republic.
McCain has made clear he would continue and even escalate George W. Bush's open-ended global war on Islamic radicals. McCain buys into the neoconservative vision of expending U.S. treasure and troops to kill as many Muslim militants as possible.
McCain's tough talk - for instance, his joking about "bomb, bomb Iran" and his vow to pursue Osama bin Laden "to the gates of hell" - is indistinguishable from Bush's "bring 'em on," "smoke 'em out," "dead or alive" rhetoric.
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Thursday August 28, 2008
Ministers to tell energy firms: 'Use your profits to help poor'
Andrew Grice
Independent
Energy companies could escape a windfall tax on their huge profits if they do more to help people struggling to pay their fuel bills.
Ministers will tell gas and electricity bosses that they want them to take further action to combat fuel poverty. Although they deny threatening a windfall tax, ministers say the firms' response to their call will be taken into account when they consider growing demands by Labour MPs for a one-off raid to fund measures to help poor families meet their bills.
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Wednesday August 27, 2008
Safe in our cages
AC Grayling
Guardian
Proposals to monitor all our communications are an intolerable assault on liberty in the name of security
In the Queen's speech this autumn Gordon Brown's government will announce a scheme to institute a database of every telephone call, email, and act of online usage by every resident of the UK. It will propose that this information will be gathered, stored, and "made accessible" to the security and law enforcement agencies, local councils, and "other public bodies".
This fact should be in equal parts incredible and nauseating. It is certainly enraging and despicable. Not even George Orwell in his most febrile moments could have envisaged a world in which every citizen could be so thoroughly monitored every moment of the day, spied upon, eavesdropped, watched, tracked, followed by CCTV cameras, recorded and scrutinised.
Our words and web searches, our messages and intimacies, are to be stored and made available to the police, the spooks, the local council – the local council! – and "other public bodies".
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Wednesday August 27, 2008
Believe Me, It’s Torture
Christopher Hitchens
Vanity Fair
What more can be added to the debate over U.S. interrogation methods, and whether waterboarding is torture? Try firsthand experience. The author undergoes the controversial drowning technique, at the hands of men who once trained American soldiers to resist—not inflict—it.
Here is the most chilling way I can find of stating the matter. Until recently, “waterboarding” was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the Special Forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as sere (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape).
In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict.
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Wednesday August 27, 2008
U.S. Advises Allies Not To Border Russia
The Onion
Following Russia's controversial military excursions into neighboring Georgia, the Bush administration made its most direct commitment to the U.S.'s Eastern European allies to date by "strongly advising" those countries not to border Russia under any circumstance. "The United States stands by its allies, but will not be able to defend our friends in the region if they continue to share geographical lines with Russia,"
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Wednesday August 27, 2008
Europe of the future: Germany shrinks, France grows, but UK population booms
Ian Traynor
The Guardian
Britain will overtake Germany and France to become the biggest country in the EU in 50 years' time, according to population projections unveiled yesterday. A survey of demographic trends finds Britain's positive birth rate contrasting strongly with most other large countries in Europe.
The impact of population shrinkage, coupled with the ageing of key European societies, spells big problems for pensions, health and welfare systems across much of the union, says the report, published by Eurostat, the statistical service of the European commission.
But Britain, it says, is likely to suffer less because of its strong population growth and the younger average age of British society.
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Wednesday August 27, 2008
Apple misled iPhone users over internet capability
Martin Hickman
Independent
The iPhone, the latest must-have gadget from Apple, fails to give users complete access to the internet, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) rules today.
It said the combined phone, music player and computer is flawed because of the absence of two common website programmes, Flash and Java. As a result, the authority said Apple's claim that the iPhone gave access to "all parts of the internet" misled customers about its power as a web browser.
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
The 10 Most Shameless Product Placements in Movie History
Jeff Steinbrunner
Cracked.com
We understand why movies have product placement. How are studios supposed to make money? You know, other than from ticket sales and DVDs. And merchandising.
The point is, if they have to show a Pepsi label now and then so Will Smith can keep the heat on in his home, we're fine with that. But don't rewrite the damned movie to work the product into the plot. Movies that disastrously stepped over that line include:
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
North Korea to Suspend Nuclear Disablement
Reuters
North Korea said on Tuesday it will stop disabling its nuclear facilities and consider restoring the Yongbyon reactor that can make material for atomic bombs, accusing the United States of violating a disarmament deal.
"We have decided to immediately suspend disabling our nuclear facilities," the North's KCNA news agency quoted a foreign ministry official as saying.
"This measure has been effective on August 14 and related parties have been notified of it," the official said.
Analysts said that given North Korea's deep reluctance to give up its nuclear weapons program - the one powerful negotiating card it has with the outside world - its latest move was no big surprise.
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
Moderators say reader comments on news stories are higher risk than forums
Out-Law
Media sites which ask readers to comment on news stories are at greater risk of bearing responsibility for those comments than for comments in online forums or discussion groups, leading web moderators have warned.
Though there are few verdicts to help lawyers and site moderators come up with hard and fast rules, it is generally believed that a web publisher who does not pre-screen user comments is not liable for libellous or otherwise unlawful comments because they had no editorial involvement in them.
Sites which pre-screen all comments are generally deemed to share responsibility with the poster because they have chosen to publish any comments that appear.
But one moderating veteran has said that when unscreened comments appear under news stories the publishers of the site could be liable for them.
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
Surveillance made easy
Laura Margottini
NewScientist
"This data allows investigators to identify suspects, examine their contacts, establish relationships between conspirators and place them in a specific location at a certain time."
So said the UK Home Office last week as it announced plans to give law-enforcement agencies, local councils and other public bodies access to the details of people's text messages, emails and internet activity. The move followed its announcement in May that it was considering creating a massive central database to store all this data, as a tool to help the security services tackle crime and terrorism.
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
How RFID Tags Could Be Used to Track Unsuspecting People
Katherine Albrecht
Scientific American
Radio-frequency identi fication (RFID) tags are embedded in a growing number of personal items and identity documents.
Because the tags were designed to be powerful tracking devices and they typically incorporate little security, people wearing or carrying them are vulnerable to surreptitious surveillance and profiling.
Worldwide, legislators have done little to address those risks to citizens.
If you live in a state bordering Canada or Mexico, you may soon be given an opportunity to carry a very high tech item: a remotely readable driver’s license. Designed to identify U.S. citizens as they approach the nation’s borders, the cards are being promoted by the Department of Homeland Security as a way to save time and simplify border crossings. But if you care about your safety and privacy as much as convenience, you might want to think twice before signing up.
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
Nuclear waste containers likely to fail, warns 'devastating' report
Geoffrey Lean
Independent
Environment Agency reveals thousands of holders do not meet basic specifications for storage and disposal
Thousands of containers of lethal nuclear waste are likely to fail before being safely sealed away underground, a devastating official report concludes.
The unpublicised report is by the Environment Agency, which has to approve any proposals for getting rid of the waste that remains deadly for tens of thousands of years.
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
Putin Can’t Afford to Back Down
Mike Whitney
Information Clearing House
If the Bush administration proceeds with its plan to deploy its Missile Defense System in Poland, Russian Prime Minister Putin will be forced to remove it militarily. He has no other option. The proposed system integrates the the entire US nuclear arsenal into one operational-unit a mere 115 miles from the Russian border. It’s no different than Khrushchev’s plan to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba in the 1960s.
Early last year, at a press conference that was censored in the United States, Putin explained his concerns about Bush’s plan:
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
US Out of Iraq by ... "2011"
Patrick Cockburn
Counter Punch
The United States is moving towards ending its military control of Iraq by agreeing to withdraw combat troops from Iraqi cities and towns by June next year and from the rest of Iraq by 2011, according Iraqi and American negotiators.
The withdrawal of US troops to bases outside the cities, towns and villages would make the Iraqi government, whose security forces number half a million men, the predominant military power in Iraq for the first time since the US-led invasion of 2003.
“By June 2009, if security progress continues, there would be no need for US troops in city centers,” the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, tells me.
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
Israeli Outposts Seal Death of Palestinian State
Jonathan Cook
Counter Punch
Yehudit Genud hardly feels she is on the frontier of Israel’s settlement project, although the huddle of mobile homes on a wind-swept West Bank hilltop she calls home is controversial even by Israeli standards.
Despite the size and isolation of Migron, a settlement of about 45 religious families on a ridge next to the Palestinian city of Ramallah, Mrs Genud’s job as a social worker in West Jerusalem is a 25-minute drive away on a well-paved road.
Mrs Genud, 28, pregnant with her first child, points out that Migron has parks, children’s playgrounds, a kindergarten, a daycare centre and a synagogue, all paid for by the government -- even if the buildings are enclosed by a razor-wire fence, and her husband, Roni, has to put in overtime as the settlement’s security guard.
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
Encourage migrants to stay to boost economy - report
Allegra Stratton
The Guardian
A thinktank close to the government has criticised current immigration policy, issuing a warning that the entrepreneurial spirit and inventive flair of migrant communities will be lost to the UK unless ministers change their thinking.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has found that employers and local economies benefit from the skills brought by migrants, but the full positive effects are not being realised since most migrants only stay in the UK for short periods.
The IPPR says that of more than one million migrants who came to the UK from the eight countries that joined the EU in May 2004, around half have now returned home. The thinktank says councils and the government need to try to reverse this.
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
Why Neanderthal man may not have been as stupid as he looks
Steve Connor
Independent
Neanderthals were not as stupid as they have been portrayed, according to a study showing their stone tools were just as good as those made by the early ancestors of modern humans, Homo sapiens.
Scientists who spent years learning how to make replicas of the stone instruments used by Neanderthals and Homo sapiens have found the Neanderthal tools were just as efficient as anything made by Stone Age man.
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
Bank details sold on eBay
Sadie Gray
Independent
The personal details of more than a million high- street bank customers have been found on the hard drive of a computer sold on eBay for £35.
The information on customers of NatWest, the Royal Bank of Scotland and American Express included mobile phone numbers, bank account numbers, mothers' maiden names and signatures.
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
And on that farm the cows face north - says Google
Ewen Callaway
NewScientist
They could be the world’s smelliest magnets. Grazing cows tend to face the North and South Poles, claims a new study of 308 herds made using Google Earth satellite photos.
The ungulate’s orientation suggests that they, like migratory birds, sea turtles and monarch butterflies, tune into Earth’s magnetic fields, says Hynek Burda, a biologist at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
The Smash of Civilizations
Chalmers Johnson
TomDispatch.com
On April 11, 12, 13, and 14, 2003, the United States Army and United States Marine Corps disgraced themselves and the country they represent in Baghdad, Iraq's capital city. Having invaded Iraq and accepted the status of a military occupying power, they sat in their tanks and Humvees, watching as unarmed civilians looted the Iraqi National Museum and burned down the Iraqi National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans of the Ministry of Religious Endowments. Their behavior was in violation of their orders, international law, and the civilized values of the United States. Far from apologizing for these atrocities or attempting to make amends, the United States government has in the past five years added insult to injury.
Donald Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense and the official responsible for the actions of the troops, repeatedly attempted to trivialize what had occurred with inane public statements like "democracy is messy" and "stuff happens."
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
Anti-War Protesters Have Every Right to Yell "F**k FOX News!"
ZP Heller
Brave New Films
The DNC protests are officially under way
The DNC is barely under way in Denver, but protesters are already making themselves heard. Their message: "Fuck corporate media!" and "Fuck FOX News!"
That's the response FOX's Griff Jenkins receives when he throws himself into a swarm of marching anti-war protesters. Jenkins plays incredulous well in this clip, asking over and over again why the protesters don't believe in freedom of speech—the irony of ironies, considering these protesters are exercising their first amendment rights with every step they take.
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Tuesday August 26, 2008
US Cold-War Waste Irks Greenland
Colin Woodard
The Christian Science Monitor
Pentagon refuses to clean up toxic military bases, saying it would set a bad precedent.
The former Sondrestrom US Air Force Base is now a busy community of 500, a midsized town by Greenland standards.
Runways built for heavy bombers and transports now accommodate wide- bodied jetliners, which disgorge passengers connecting to Greenland's many small airstrips. Tourists head out on musk ox safaris or join cruise ships at the base's old supply dock, while locals enjoy Greenland's only indoor swimming pool, originally built for US troops.
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Sunday August 24, 2008
No snapping: Photographers get collars felt
John Ozimek
The Register
Watch where you point that thing this weekend
Fancy getting your camera out this Bank Holiday weekend?
Best be careful who you point it at.
For instance, don’t go taking snaps of unmarked police cars. This was the mistake made by amateur photographer David Gates, who photographed a Police BMW parked illegally at a bus stop in Portsmouth, Hants. Before you could say “Cheese!”, the Police were on him and asking questions under the Terror Act 2000.
Then there’s the sorry tale of Andrew Carter, who spotted a police van ignoring no-entry signs to reverse up a one-way street to reach a chip shop, and felt it was his public duty as a citizen to record both the van and the officer involved, PC Farooq.
For his pains, Mr Carter was abused, had his camera knocked to the ground, arrested, bundled into the van and finally held in police cells for five hours.
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Sunday August 24, 2008
How to Burn the Speculators
James K. Galbraith
Mother Jones
Why is the price of oil so high? Because the Bush administration did to the commodities market what it did to housing.
Whenever economies sour, politicians blame speculators. But on occasion, they are right to do so. Speculators did wreak havoc in 1630s Holland, 1720s France, and in the American stock market in 1929. That crash led to the Great Depression and 60 years of tight controls on speculation. Now, thanks to our 30-year infatuation with free markets, the controls are off, and the mad gamblers are at it again. Yesterday's burst bubble was housing; today's expanding ones are energy and food. True, we have major long-term energy problems that cannot be laid at the feet of speculators. To avoid catastrophic global warming, we will be obliged to reengineer the country, from housing to transport to forests, and also to develop and export the technologies required for the rest of the world to do likewise.
Eight years of George W. Bush's policies have made this much harder, and during that time the world may have passed "peak oil"—that moment when half the recoverable reserves of conventional oil have been drained and burned—so that from now on short supplies will be endemic. Meanwhile, demand grows, notably from China and India, which account for nearly 40 percent of the world's population.
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Sunday August 24, 2008
China holding 6 Americans in Tibet protest at Olympics
Andrew Jacobs
International Herald Tribune
Six Americans who were taken into custody on Tuesday as they tried to protest against China's rule in Tibet have been given 10-day detentions, the Chinese police said Friday.
But other members of their organization, the New York-based Students for a Free Tibet said that they had no information about four other protesters who were detained early Thursday during a protest near the National Stadium. The four are two Americans, a German and a British citizen.
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Saturday August 23, 2008
Wasted Food Is Also Wasted Water
Thalif Deen
Inter Press Service
The world's growing food crisis -- which triggered riots and demonstrations in over 30 developing nations early this year -- is being aggravated primarily by wastage and overconsumption.
"Obesity is a much bigger problem than undernourishment," said Professor Jan Lundqvist of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI).
He pointed out that there are 850 million people worldwide who suffer from hunger and starvation daily compared with over 1.2 billion people who are overweight and obese, which can lead to a vast range of health problems like diabetes and heart disease.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Stockholm International Water Conference, Lundqvist told reporters Thursday that "improving water productivity and reducing the quantity of food wasted can enable us to provide a better diet for the poor and enough food for growing populations."
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Saturday August 23, 2008
Booze Kills, Pot Doesn't
Bruce Mirken
AlterNet
The alcohol poisoning death rate in the United States is shockingly high, consistently between 300 and 400 a year. It's zero for pot.
On Aug. 19, the Associated Press reported on a group of college presidents proposing reconsideration of the legal drinking age. I'll refrain from wading into the emotional debate about what the legal age for alcohol should be, but a graph that accompanied the story in some outlets, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, raises larger questions about our national policies toward drugs and alcohol.
Two things are striking:
1. The number of alcohol poisoning deaths in the United States is shockingly high, consistently between 300 and 400 each year. The number of annual deaths from marijuana poisoning remains -- as always -- zero.
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Saturday August 23, 2008
The View from 2016
John Feffer
Toms Dispatch.com
It was probably all those afternoons at my local library when I was a kid, reading Isaac Asimov's sci-fi version of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the Foundation Trilogy, and those nights under the covers with a flashlight -- long after I was supposed to be asleep -- frightening myself to death with H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds and the like…
Still, even at my age, I continue to enjoy a glimpse into the future. Of course, so do the Pentagon and the U.S. Intelligence Community. In fact, in recent years, they have practically taken out a copyright on the future. These days, they're always producing scenarios for (and plans and weapons for) 2020 and beyond. As Frida Berrigan noted at this site recently, most federal agencies "project budgets just around the corner of the next decade.
Only the Pentagon projects power and possibility decades into the future, colonizing the imagination with scads of different scenarios under which, each year, it will continue to control hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Complex 2030, Vision 2020, UAV Roadmap 2030, the Army's Future Combat Systems -- the names, which seem unending, tell the tale."
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Saturday August 23, 2008
Dead Zone Diet: Why Fertilizers Are Taking Fish off the Menu
Kerry Trueman
Huffington Post
Fertilizer runoff from industrial agriculture and fossil-fuel use are causing catastrophic "dead zones" in our oceans.
Steak or salmon? Millions of menu-mulling diners ask themselves this question every day. Enjoy your dithering while you can, folks, because the day is coming when you may not have the luxury of choosing the lobster over the London broil. For those with a more populist palate, I've got some bad news, too; a future with no more fried clam strips or canned tuna for you.
Why? Because fertilizer runoff from industrial agriculture and fossil-fuel use are causing catastrophic "dead zones" in our oceans, "killing large swaths of sea life and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage," according to Scientific American.
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Saturday August 23, 2008
Presidential Politics: Ralph Nader Says Free the Dopers, Jail the Corporate Crooks
Stop the Drug War
At a press conference last Friday, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader called for emptying prisons of nonviolent drug offenders and filling them with corporate criminals. Nader's call came as he unveiled a 12-point program aimed at reining in the power of corporations.
"Nonviolent drug offenses are being over prosecuted and corporate crime is being under prosecuted. The Justice Department must begin to reverse course, crank up the crackdown on corporate crime, and end the cruel and inhumane war on nonviolent drug possession," the perennial candidate said.
"The criminal justice system is broken -- so badly that one hardly knows where to begin describing the breakdown," Nader said. "Let's start with the war on drugs, since commentators across the political spectrum recognize its lunacy. We pour almost endless resources -- roughly $50 billion every year -- into catching, trying, and incarcerating people who primarily harm themselves.
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Saturday August 23, 2008
Tour of Tskhinvali undercuts Russian claim of genocide
Tom Lasseter
McClatchy Newspapers
As Russian troops pounded through Georgia last week, the Kremlin and its allies repeatedly pointed to one justification above all others: The Georgian military had destroyed the city of Tskhinvali.
Russian politicians and their partners in Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region South Ossetia, said that when Georgian forces tried to seize control of the city and the surrounding area, the physical damage was comparable to Stalingrad and the killings similar to the Holocaust.
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Saturday August 23, 2008
Food, Fuel and Water Crises Converging
Thalif Deen
Inter Press Services
A spectre is haunting the cities and villages of most developing nations, warns a senior official of a World Bank-affiliated organisation.
"It's the spectre of a food, fuel and water crisis," says Lars Thunell, executive vice president of the Washington-based International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank group.
"I believe we are at a tipping point," he said, because the scarcity of water poses a threat to the food supply just when the agricultural sector is stepping up production in response to riots over food prices, growing hunger, and rising malnutrition.
Speaking at the conclusion of the weeklong Stockholm International Water Conference Friday, Thunell said the growing demand for water is outpacing supply.
The world's current population of over 6.0 billion is expected to rise to about 9.0 billion by 2050, with more than 60 percent living in mega cities.
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Saturday August 23, 2008
Superfood rice bran contains arsenic
Catherine Brahic
NewScientist
Rice bran – a so-called "superfood" – might contain dangerous amounts of a natural poison.
A new study suggests that rice bran, the shavings left over after brown rice is polished to produce white rice grains, contains "inappropriate" levels of arsenic. Andrew Meharg at the University of Aberdeen, UK, and colleagues found that the levels of arsenic in rice bran products available on the internet and used in food-aid programmes funded by the US government would be illegal in China – the only country in the world to have standards for how much arsenic is permissible in food.
Meharg's team are calling on the European Union and the US to follow China's example and update food standards for arsenic.
Arsenic is a natural carcinogen, present in drinking water around the world including in Australia, the US and many developing countries.
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Saturday August 23, 2008
Face transplants show promising results
John von Radowitz
PA
A face transplant performed on a man who suffered horrific injuries in a bear attack has shown promising results, say doctors.
The case was one of two reported today which suggest that face transplants can be a successful long term treatment for disfigurement.
The 30-year old Chinese bear victim was attacked in October 2004.
A large section of the man's face was ripped off, leaving him horribly disfigured.
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Saturday August 23, 2008
Consultants who lost data are working on ID cards
Ben Russell
Independent
The Home Office contractor which lost a computer memory stick containing the details of 84,000 prisoners is at the heart of developing the Government's controversial compulsory identity cards system.
PA Consulting – which on Tuesday told ministers it had misplaced the unencrypted names, dates of birth and expected release dates of the inmates, as well as the addresses of 33,000 prolific criminals – has won £240m of government contracts since 2004, including one as the Home Office's "development partner" to "work on the design, feasibility testing, business case and procurement elements of the identity cards programme".
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Saturday August 23, 2008
Afghanistan: 76 civilians die in airstrike, ministry claims
Sharafuddin Sharafyar
The Guardian
US-led coalition forces killed 76 Afghan civilians in western Afghanistan yesterday, most of them children, the country's Interior Ministry said.
The coalition denied killing civilians. Civilian deaths in military operations have become an emotive issue among Afghans, many of whom feel international forces take too little care when launching air strikes, undermining support for their presence.
"Seventy-six civilians, most of them women and children, were martyred today in a coalition forces operation in Herat province," the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
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Saturday August 23, 2008
A New Rush to Spy
New York Times
There is apparently no limit to the Bush administration’s desire to invade Americans’ privacy in the name of national security. According to members of Congress, Attorney General Michael Mukasey is preparing to give the F.B.I. broad new authority to investigate Americans — without any clear basis for suspicion that they are committing a crime.
Opening the door to sweeping investigations of this kind would be an invitation to the government to spy on people based on their race, religion or political activities. Before Mr. Mukasey goes any further, Congress should insist that the guidelines be fully vetted, and it should make certain that they do not pose a further threat to Americans’ civil liberties.
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Saturday August 23, 2008
British security services colluded in unlawful detention of terror suspect, court rules
James Sturcke
Guardian
British security services colluded in the unlawful detention and facilitated the interrogation of a UK resident detained in Pakistan six years ago, the high court ruled today.
Two judges found that the foreign secretary had a duty to hand over to Binyam Mohamed's legal team secret information that could support his case that he was tortured in Pakistan and Morocco before being sent to Guantánamo Bay.
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Saturday August 23, 2008
Why My Family Quit Using Plastic
James Glave
The Tyee
Health concerns about the long-term effects of plastic have led the author's family to keep their food away from plastic containers.
I said goodbye to a few old friends this morning.
I dropped Sabrina and Duncan at day camp and continued on down the road to my community's recycling depot. There, I walked up to the big green "mixed plastics" bin and tossed in my FridgeSmart stackables, Ziploc Twist n' Locs and, perhaps most painful of all, my beloved half-cup-size Rubbermaid Servin' Savers -- indispensable snack-stashers that fit perfectly inside my kids' lunch boxes.
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Friday August 22, 2008
Paul Marks
New Scientist
After buttoning up a lab coat, snapping on surgical gloves and spraying them with alcohol, I am deemed sanitary enough to view a robot's control system up close. Without such precautions, any fungal spores on my skin could infect it. "We've had that happen. They just stop working and die off," says Mark Hammond, the system's creator.
This is no ordinary robot control system - a plain old microchip connected to a circuit board. Instead, the controller nestles inside a small pot containing a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics. Inside that pot, some 300,000 rat neurons have made - and continue to make - connections with each other.
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Friday August 22, 2008
Vitamin C injections 'stop spread of cancer' in rodents
Steve Connor
Independent
Injections of vitamin C can stop the spread of cancer and slow the growth of tumours by 50 per cent in tests on laboratory mice, scientists said yesterday.
The effect was seen on a variety of cancers, such as those of the brain, ovary and pancreas, although the researchers emphasised that further research was necessary before it can be tested on humans.
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Friday August 22, 2008
Are You Ready for Nuclear War?
Paul Craig Roberts
Counterpunch
Pervez Musharraf, the puppet installed by the US to rule Pakistan in the interest of US hegemony, resigned August 18 to avoid impeachment. Karl Rove and the Diebold electronic voting machines were unable to control the result of the last election in Pakistan, the result of which gave Pakistanis a bigger voice in their government than America’s.
It was obvious to anyone with any sense -- which excludes the entire Bush Regime and almost all of the “foreign policy community -- that the illegal and gratuitous US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israel’s 2006 bombing of Lebanon civilians with US blessing, would result in the overthrow of America’s Pakistani puppet.
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Friday August 22, 2008
A man's aggression is written all over his face, say scientists
Steve Connor
Independent
A man's aggressive tendencies are written in his facial features, according to a study that has found a link between bad temper and the shape of a man's face.
The distance between a man's cheekbones compared to the height of his face is a good indicator of how likely he is to explode with rage when provoked and this may be an evolutionary feature going back thousands of years, scientists said.
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Friday August 22, 2008
Elephants master basic mathematics
Ewen Callaway
NewScientist
Add elephants to the growing menagerie of animals that can count.
An Asian elephant named Ashya beat this reporter at a devilishly simple addition problem. When a trainer dropped three apples into one bucket and one apple into a second, then four more apples in the first and five more in the second, the pachyderm recognised that three plus four is greater than one plus five, and snacked on the seven apples. (In my defence, I watched the video in a noisy and crowded auditorium.)
"I even get confused when I'm dropping the bait," says Naoko Irie, a researcher at the University of Tokyo, Japan, who uncovered the elephant's inner genius. She presented her findings last week at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology's annual meeting in Ithaca, New York.
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Friday August 22, 2008
Look out for the 125mph electric car (because you won't hear it)
Michael Savage
Independent
It looks as stylish as a Lotus, can outpace a Porsche 911 and is coveted by Hollywood A-listers such as Brad Pitt and George Clooney. But unlike the average super car, the Tesla Roadster is electric.
The £92,000 car, made in Britain and test-driven here for the first time this week, is being heralded as a breakthrough for the humble electric car, which has been lumbered with a reputation for being distinctly slow and unsexy in the past.
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Saturday August 09, 2008
New gene technique 'stops HIV in its tracks'
Steve Connor
Independent
HIV can be stopped dead in its tracks using a revolutionary technique for "silencing" genes, a study has shown. The discovery raises the possibility of a treatment for HIV that does not involve potentially toxic anti-viral drugs.
Scientists have found that RNA interference – where genes are artificially silenced using a natural molecular switch in the cell – can inhibit the replication of HIV in human blood cells.
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Thursday August 07, 2008
Date-rape chemicals' may be banned
David Barrett
PA
Ministers are planning to ban two chemicals which can be used as date rape drugs, it was announced today.
The substances are legally available but when absorbed by the body they rapidly convert to the drug GHB, which was banned five years ago after being implicated in sexual assaults.
Scientific advisors have warned that the drugs may be contributing to the "significant problem" of drug-aided rape.
The Home Office said it now intends to control the two chemicals, known as Gamma-butyrolactone (GBL) and 1,4 butanediol (1,4-BD) as Class C drugs after a consultation period.
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Thursday August 07, 2008
Chaos aims to crack China's wall
Danny Bradbury
The Guardian
Access to the wider internet is a problem for journalists at the Beijing Olympics - and for the Chinese people. But there is an initiative to bypass the barriers
It was John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who said that the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. For years, the Chinese authorities have done their best to prove him wrong. Now, with the Beijing Olympics upon us, a group of hackers has launched an attempt to stamp out censorship there - and they want your help to do it.
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Thursday August 07, 2008
Cutting-edge camera may become first 'bionic eye'
Steve Connor
Independent
A digital camera closely modelled on the human eye has been invented in what scientists are calling a revolutionary step towards the creation of computerised bionic sensors that can be attached to the body.
The camera's unique technology is its curved light-sensitive surface that was inspired by the human eye's hemispherical retina that collects light at the back of the eyeball and transmits electrical signals to the brain.
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Thursday August 07, 2008
Protesters Unfurl Pro-Tibet Banner Near Olympics Venue
Edward Cody
The Washington Post
Two American and two British protesters slipped through a smothering Olympic security net Wednesday, climbed a pair of lamp posts and unfurled banners demanding freedom for Tibet near the new stadium where the Beijing Games are to open Friday night.
The showy protest, which took place shortly before the final leg of the Olympic torch relay set out from Tiananmen Square to the cheers of bused-in crowds, constituted a substantial embarrassment for Chinese security forces, who have vowed to prevent political demonstrations by foreigners as well as Chinese during the games.
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Thursday August 07, 2008
Sierra Leone And The 'Humanitarian' Intervention
Jessica Pasteiner
Corporate Watch
“Today conflicts rarely stay within national boundaries. Today a tremor in one financial market is repeated in the markets of the world. Today confidence is global; either its presence or its absence”. (Tony Blair, Labour Party Conference 2001)
The prospects for world peace have always been somewhat grim, but the advent of corporate globalization has provided those intent on using violence to secure their interests with an extra source of justification. Through the markets, ‘their’ interests become ‘our’ interests – a threat to the economic growth of a country thousands of miles away has suddenly become our problem (presuming, that is, that we have strategic interests there). In short, wherever a ‘threat’ to unbridled capitalism is perceived, taking action against it can now be justified using the rhetoric of market stability.
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Wednesday August 06, 2008
Unmanned spy planes to police Britain
Kim Sengupta
Independent
The Government is drawing up plans to use unmanned "drone" aircraft currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan to counter terrorism and aid police operations in Britain.
The MoD is carrying out research and development to enable the spy planes, which are equipped with highly sophisticated monitoring equipment that allows them to secretly track and photograph suspects without their knowledge, to be deployed within three years.
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Friday August 01, 2008
Warning to Beijing Olympics over pills that mimic exercise
Jeremy Laurance and Amol Rajan
Independent
A new threat to the Beijing Olympics has emerged in the shape of two new undetectable drugs that could boost the performance of endurance athletes by a medal-winning margin.
Scientists warned that the pills, which mimic the physiological effects of exercise, are already available and can be easily synthesised, but there is no existing test to reveal their presence. UK Sport, the government-funded agency, said yesterday's revelation was a "cause for concern" and that the World Anti-Doping Agency had been informed.
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