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Tuesday September 30, 2008
US Congress rejects crucial $700bn bailout plan
James Daley
AP
Global stock markets suffered another meltdown yesterday, plummeting as much as 8 per cent, as panic about the financial crisis continued to intensify on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the US, the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its biggest ever one-day fall, closing down 6.9 per cent at 10,365.4, after the House of Representatives threw out George Bush's proposals for a $700bn (£388bn) Wall Street bailout.
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Sunday September 28, 2008
EU bans children's food imports from China
Geoff Meade
PA
A Europe-wide ban on all food for children coming from China comes into force today.
The European Commission's ban comes amid growing concern over contaminated milk powder which has already caused infant deaths in China and affected thousands more children.
A Commission spokeswoman said some EU countries - and some sectors of the food industry - had already announced their own bans, but now Brussels was activating an explicit total ban on all products from China aimed at infants and young children and which could pose a threat of contamination.
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Friday September 26, 2008
First sight of the ID cards that will soon be compulsory
Ben Russell
Independent
The Government was accused yesterday of cynically targeting immigrants to boost support for its controversial £4.7bn compulsory identity cards scheme as the Home Office unveiled the documents it plans will eventually be held by every adult in Britain.
A coalition of opposition parties, trade unions and civil liberties campaigners condemned the symbolic release of the pink and blue cards, which will be introduced for foreign nationals living in Britain from next month.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
Google New Spy
Corporate Watch
Users of Google's newly released Internet browser, Chrome, were shocked to find out that, by downloading and using the programme, they had agreed to give up copyright to their own files. The browser's End User Licence Agreement contained a clause giving the company a "perpetual, irrevocable" licence to "reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content" submitted or displayed through its browser, as well as "sharing" the user's information with other organisations.
For many, even those who would normally share their knowledge for free, this would not only include their personal details, but also things like programming code, which could then be reproduced by corporations for commercial purposes.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
Why presents become less exciting as you get older
Steve Connor
Independent
The reason children tear open their Christmas presents in a frenzy of dawn excitement while grandparents leave theirs until after lunch comes down to how the ageing brain handles rewards.
Scientists have discovered that a chemical in the brain governing the delivery and feeling of reward is altered physically as a person grows old, which explains why opening presents becomes less exciting.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
The Crooked Deals That Made This Financial Meltdown Inevitable
Stirling Newberry
Firedoglake
Here's what went wrong
Almost every weekend for the last month, there has been an extra-ordinary announcement from the financial world and the White House. The financial system is rattling apart, and while the poor card player may blame his cards, the expert knows when there has been a crooked deal.
From nationalizing the mortgage market by taking over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, to the bankruptcy of Lehman brothers, to the demand that Congress write a bottomless blank check to Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson to bail out the investment bank he once ran, and others like it. But in this whirlwind there has been almost no explanation of why there is a sudden rush to do something.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
Top scientist blames hunger in Africa on anti-GM, not corporate pillage!
Corporate Watch
The government's ex-chief scientific adviser has accused Anti-GM campaigners of being "anti-science and anti-technology", and of holding attitudes with "devastating consequences" for Africa.
Sir David King told the British Association's Science Festival in Liverpool earlier this month that "the problem is that the western world's move toward organic farming - a lifestyle choice for a community with surplus food - and against agricultural technology in general and GM in particular, has been adopted across the whole of Africa, with the exception of South Africa, with devastating consequences."
Needless to say, King was talking about the continent impoverished by years of Western imperial intervention and resource expropriation, something he seemingly did not feel the urge to point out.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
Royal Mint: 'Thirty million £1 coins are fake'
Martin Hickman
Independent
Royal Mint finds that the number of counterfeit coins has doubled in five years
The number of fake £1 coins has doubled in five years to 30 million – about one in 50 – because of counterfeiting by organised crime gangs.
Random sampling tests by the Royal Mint revealed that approximately 2 per cent of £1 coins are bogus, up from 1 per cent in 2003 and the highest level of forgeries in the denomination's 25-year existence. Only careful examination reveals the true origins of the coins, which are spent freely (and illegally) in shops, pubs and restaurants.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
Proposal to tax plastic forks sticks in the throats of les pique-niqueurs
John Lichfield in Paris
Independent
Not since the unveiling of Edouard Manet's scandalous painting Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe in 1863 has a row over the humble picnic – or pique-nique – so convulsed France.
The French Environment minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, yesterday confirmed dark, but seemingly preposterous, rumours that have circulated in France for several days. The government intends to levy a tax on picnics.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
John le Carré: Britons have been ’stripped’ of civil liberties
Nicole Martin and Christopher Hope
London Telegraph
Britons have been “stripped” of their civil liberties amid an “atmosphere of panic” over the threat from terrorism, according to the novelist John le Carré.
In a rare public intervention, the spy author criticised ministers for voting to extend the time limit that terror suspects can be held without charge to 42 days.
His comments come only weeks ahead of a key vote in the House of Lords that could see peers throw out the Government’s controversial 42-day proposals.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
Congress demands more time to scrutinise $700bn rescue plan
Elana Schor and Andrew Clark
Guardian
The Bush administration's proposed $700bn bailout of cash-strapped Wall Street banks received a rancorous hearing in Congress today as lawmakers demand safeguards, extra details and more time to scrutinise the way the Treasury intends to spend the money.
Under questioning by the senate banking committee on Capitol Hill, treasury secretary Henry Paulson clashed repeatedly with questioners as he admitted that he only had a rough idea of how his department would price and purchase troubled mortgage-backed securities.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
Mobile phone use 'raises children's risk of brain cancer fivefold'
Geoffrey Lean
Independent
Alarming new research from Sweden on the effects of radiation raises fears that today's youngsters face an epidemic of the disease in later life
Children and teenagers are five times more likely to get brain cancer if they use mobile phones, startling new research indicates
The study, experts say, raises fears that today's young people may suffer an "epidemic" of the disease in later life. At least nine out of 10 British 16-year-olds have their own handset, as do more than 40 per cent of primary schoolchildren.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
All webmail could be easy prey to tyro hackers
Gregg Keizer
Computerworld
Yahoo Mail isn't the only webmail service that could be duped into giving up someone else's account password, the tactic that some have argued was used to break into US Governor Sarah Palin's email last week.
Google's Gmail, Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo's Mail all rely on automated password reset mechanisms that can be abused by knowing a username associated with an account and an answer to a single security question, according to quick tests run by Computerworld in the US.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
Cheap thrills: Can you live on a pound a day?
Jamie Merrill
Independent
We may all be tightening our belts, but just how far would we goto save money? Teacher Kath Kelly lived on just £1 a day for a whole year, and lived to tell the tale. Jamie Merrill follows her lead – and learns some life-changing lessons on the way
I'm crouching down tight on my bicycle, trying to avoid the driving rain and the oily spray from the road. I'm hung over, hungry, and trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to battle my way through London's Saturday lunchtime traffic. It's not, I have to say, how I like to spend my weekends.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
Pakistani Troops Fire on Intruding US Choppers
Augustine Anthony
Reuters
Pakistani troops fired on two U.S. helicopters that intruded into Pakistani airspace on Sunday night, forcing them to turn back to Afghanistan, a senior Pakistani security official said on Monday.
It was the second such incident in a week, and reflects frayed relations with the United States over Pakistan's failure to act more forcibly against Islamist fighters in the tribal lands bordering Afghanistan.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
Is Drinking from the Toilet Bowl the Best Way to Deal with Water Shortages?
Elizabeth Royte
AlterNet
More and more cities are implementing "toilet to tap" programs as the answer to our water crisis. But is it the best and safest option?
Before I left New York for California, where I planned to visit a water-recycling plant, I mopped my kitchen floor. Afterward, I emptied the bucket of dirty water into the toilet and watched as the foamy mess swirled away. This was one of life's more mundane moments, to be sure. But with water infrastructure on my mind, I took an extra moment to contemplate my water's journey through city pipes to the wastewater-treatment plant, which separates solids and dumps the disinfected liquids into the ocean.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
Fancy exchanging your car for a pony? Horse power may be making a comeback
Richard Sharp
Independent
It could be a scene from a bygone age: a pony and trap makes its way over Tower Bridge. But this pony and trap, driven by Dan Tipple, is surrounded by cars, their drivers slowing down for a look. Armani the pony transports Dan all over London, including into the centre, where he will drop his daughter off for one of her shopping trips.
"I sometimes pick up my daughter from her school, which goes down very well with her friends," explains Tipple, who stables his horse at Mudchute city farm in east London.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
Tar sands - the new toxic investment
Terry Macalister
The Guardian
Report warns against oil industry's equivalent of the sub-prime mortgage crisis
Shell and BP have been warned by investors that their involvement in unconventional energy production such as Canada's oil sands could turn out to be the industry's equivalent of the sub-prime lending that poisoned the banking sector and triggered the current financial crisis.
The criticism came as a report was released yesterday warning of the potential financial risks of tar sands, and members of the UK Social Investment Forum met in London to consider a Co-op Investments campaign on halting oil industry involvement in the carbon-intensive oil projects.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
Beauty Secrets
Jacqueline Houton
Bitch Magazine
The New Cosmetic Cover-up
From the pages of every mainstream women’s magazine—between the list of 43 things every confident woman knows and the six-week ab-blasting plan—the ads beckon. Conditioners enriched with vitamins vow to make each strand 10 times stronger. Undereye concealers containing white-tea antioxidants claim to combat the cellular damage that deepens those oh-so-unsightly dark circles.
Pricey foundations promise to rejuvenate the face at the molecular level with the new Pro-Xylane compound, carefully extracted from Eastern European beech trees. These days, more and more personal care products are promising to harness the power of nature to beautify us from the inside out. Makeup doesn’t merely make us look good, we’re told—now it’s good for us, too.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
Why does the US think it can win in Afghanistan?
Robert Fisk
Independent
The Taliban are better trained, and – sad to say – increasingly tolerated by the local civilian population
Poor old Algerians. They are being served the same old pap from their cruel government. In 1997, the Pouvoir announced a "final victory" over their vicious Islamist enemies. On at least three occasions, I reported – not, of course, without appropriate cynicism – that the Algerian authorities believed their enemies were finally beaten because the "terrorists" were so desperate that they were beheading every man, woman and child in the villages they captured in the mountains around Algiers and Oran.
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Wednesday September 24, 2008
How Much Have Taxpayers Coughed Up for the Most Secretive White House Ever?
Willam Fisher
IPS News
According to a new study, the Bush administration has spent almost $200 on keeping secrets to every dollar allocated to open them
The administration of President George W. Bush continues to expand government secrecy across a broad array of agencies and actions -- and at greatly increased cost to taxpayers, according to a coalition of groups that promote greater transparency.
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Tuesday September 23, 2008
Climate Change: Chemical Lobby Weakening Ozone Treaty
Stephen Leahy
Inre Press Service
In hard economic times, protecting the environment is often seen as a luxury -- or ignored completely. But had that attitude prevailed 20 years ago when it came to taking action to protect the ozone layer, skin cancer rates would have soared and climate change would be even more dramatic than it is today.
"We forget that things could have been far worse without international action in the form of the Montreal Protocol," said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Tuesday as part of the annual World Ozone Day celebration.
And things are bad enough.
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Tuesday September 23, 2008
The Drug War's Latest Tally: 872,721 Pot Arrests, an All-Time High
Paul Armentano
AlterNet
Cannabis arrests now comprise nearly 47.5 percent of all drug arrests in the United States, 89% of them for mere possession
If denial is the first sign of addiction, then Drug Czar John Walters is hooked to the gills. He's addicted to targeting and arresting marijuana consumers, and he'll do and say anything to keep this irrational and punitive policy in place.
Speaking earlier this month on C-Span, the reigning Czar stretched his usual deceit to outrageous new heights. Responding to a question from the Marijuana Policy Project's Dan Bernath, Walters flatly denied the charge that over 800,000 Americans are arrested annually for violating pot laws.
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Tuesday September 23, 2008
Testosterone levels 'affect sexual attraction'
PA
Women with high levels of testosterone are more attracted to masculine-looking men like James Bond actor Daniel Craig, scientists said today.
Meanwhile men, whose levels of the hormone are increased, are more attracted to feminine faces like Hollywood actress Natalie Portman.
Researchers at Aberdeen University Face Research Laboratory carried out the first study into the role testosterone plays in attraction between the sexes.
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Tuesday September 23, 2008
Has American Society Gone Insane?
Bruce E. Levine
AlterNet
America's mental health problems may be more than a matter of some "unadjusted" individuals. The entire culture might well need adjusting
For many Americans who gain their information solely from television, all critics of psychiatry are Scientologists, exemplified by Tom Cruise spewing at Matt Lauer, "You don't know the history of psychiatry. ... Matt, you're so glib." The mass media has been highly successful in convincing Americans to associate criticism of psychiatry with anti-drug zealots from the Church of Scientology, the lucrative invention of science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.
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Tuesday September 23, 2008
What the Chemical Industry Doesn't Want You to Know about Everyday Products
Elaine Shannon
AlterNet
The chemical industry has spent years trying to suppress information about a certain chemical. Will Congress help the public know the true dangers?
It takes a lot of nerve to go up against the $3 trillion-a-year global chemical industry.
Ask University of Missouri-Columbia scientists Frederick Vom Saal and Wade Welshons. They've been in the industry's crosshairs for more than a decade, since their experiments turned up the first hard evidence that miniscule amounts of bisphenol A (BPA), an artificial sex hormone and integral component of a vast array of plastic products, caused irreversible changes in the prostates of fetal mice.
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Tuesday September 23, 2008
UPDATE: Newspapers Deliver Millions of 'Terror' DVDs to Subscribers -- In 'Swing States'
Greg Mitchell and Joe Strupp
Editor & Publisher
The arrival of tens of millions of DVDs of a controversial film on doorsteps around the nation -- but almost exclusively in election "swing states" -- via newspaper home delivery continues this weekend, with explanatory articles and subscriber feedback appearing on some of the papers' Web sites.
The DVDs of the 60-minute film, made in 2005, and titled "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West," arrived Saturday with, among other papers, the Charlotte Observer and the News & Observer in Raleigh, with delivery with the Miami Herald and other papers set for Sunday.
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Tuesday September 23, 2008
The methane time bomb
Steve Connor
Independent
Arctic scientists discover new global warming threat as melting permafrost releases millions of tons of a gas 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide
The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.
The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.
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Sunday September 21, 2008
The doom merchants: Cheer up, Britain!
David Randall
independent
'The waters are now surging through Galveston"... "millions are without power or clean water"... "the demise of Lehman Brothers has sent shock waves through the world's largest economy"... "40,000 jobs may be lost in Britain alone"... "the death toll in Haiti has now passed 600"...
"He is the 27th teenager to be murdered this year"... "more than 6,200 babies have now fallen ill through the Chinese contaminated baby-milk scandal"... "And some experts here in New York fear a rerun of the 1929 Crash and the worldwide, decade-long depression that followed."
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Wednesday September 17, 2008
Now fear stalks British banks
Sean O'Grady and James Daley
Independent
Speculators hunting for next victim target UK institutions
The storm sweeping the financial world crossed the Atlantic yesterday, with Halifax Bank of Scotland, the UK's largest mortgage provider, hit hard by a cyclone of speculation. Having watched a series of major US institutions previously thought invincible, such as Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and now AIG run into difficulties, traders asked "Who next?" and seized on the slightest hint of real or perceived weakness in the British banks to sell into a plummeting market.
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Monday September 15, 2008
Church 'owes Darwin an apology'
PA
The Church of England "owes" an apology to Charles Darwin for misunderstanding his theory of evolution when it was first published nearly 150 years ago, a senior clergyman said today.
The Rev Dr Malcolm Brown said some people in the Church made a mistake in the way they reacted to the naturalist's theory outlined in the 1859 publication On The Origin Of Species.
"Charles Darwin - 200 years from your birth (1809) the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still," he wrote on the Church of England website.
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Monday September 15, 2008
Irish Judge Balks at Unquantified Drugged Driving Test
Stop The Drug War
An Irish judge last Friday threw out drugged driving charges against a young driver, saying that a positive result for marijuana in his urine sample was not specific enough to allow him to conclude that the driver was indeed impaired. Judge Kevin Kilrane of the Ballyshannon District Court in Donegal also criticized the Road Safety Medical Bureau for failing to test for the level of drug intoxication in its drug tests.
Peter Gillen was pulled over shortly after 4:00am for driving erratically, and Garda Officer Sean Flynn described him as "very shocked, unsteady, and very agitated" upon being stopped. Gillen tested negative on a breath test for alcohol, but Flynn arrested him on suspicion of drugged driving, and a urine sample Gillen provided soon after came up positive for marijuana.
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Monday September 15, 2008
A Matter of Morals, Not Morales: Respect Bolivia's Democracy!
Olivia Burlingame Goumbri
AlterNet
Yet again, the United States appears to be siding with violent right-wing elements to undermine a Latin American democracy
As an American and an expert on US-Venezuela relations, the events unfolding in Bolivia are simply too familiar to escape my notice. The tactics used by opponents of President Chavez during Venezuela's short-lived coup in 2002 are currently being replicated in a "civic coup" in neighboring Bolivia that is designed to undermine the democratic government of Evo Morales.
That nation, though different from Venezuela in so many ways, seems to be travelling down a strikingly similar road, not least in terms of the role of the media in encouraging right-wing, anti-democratic opposition groups and the active support of that process by US officials.
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Monday September 15, 2008
Why I’d Rather Sleep with an Old Guy
Katherine Anne Forsythe
American Sexuality Magazine
A perspective for women of any age
Rippling, hard muscles. Firm six pack. Tight, round butt. He undresses you hurriedly. Your pulse is racing. You open your eyes to see a chiseled twenty-five-year-old face with the look of fiery hunger burning in his eyes. He wants you desperately.
You want him madly. Your kisses are delicious and wet and deep and full. Your passion builds. Your breath comes faster. He pumps faster and faster, harder and harder . . .
Sound good? Before you decide, consider this: The whole scene, start to finish, took twenty minutes, max.
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Monday September 15, 2008
Stephen Hawking to unveil strange new way to tell the time
Roger Highfield
Telegraph
Prof Stephen Hawking is to unveil a remarkable £500,000 clock with no hands that pays tribute to the world's greatest clockmaker.
One clock made by the legendary John Harrison, the pioneer of longitude, took 36 years to build and he was still calibrating it when he died at his home in London on March 24, 1776, his 83rd birthday.
The Corpus Clock has been invented and designed by Dr John Taylor for Corpus Christi College Cambridge for the exterior of the college's new library building.
It will be unveiled next week (19th Sept) by Prof Stephen Hawking, cosmologist and author of the global bestseller, A Brief History of Time.
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Monday September 15, 2008
Deaf people feel their way to speech
Ewen Callaway
NewScientist
Anyone who's done a bad Elvis impression knows that contorting your mouth makes talking feel wrong – never mind how ridiculous you sound. People who have lost their hearing use the same sense to retain their speech, new research suggests.
When five deaf volunteers were asked to talk while a robot nudged their jaws slightly, they quickly learned to compensate for the perturbation.
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Monday September 15, 2008
Hackers attack website of Large Hadron Collider experiment
Daniel Bates
Daily Mail
Hackers have infiltrated the computer systems of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest experiment in the world.
A group calling themselves the Greek Security Team put a fake page on the facility’s website mocking those responsible for its IT systems as ‘a bunch of schoolkids’.
But there was nothing more malicious in their attack and, in a rambling note written in Greek, they said they were not going to disrupt it further.
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Monday September 15, 2008
Big Brother is watching you…. Council to fingerprint staff as they clock in for work
Daily Mail
Hundreds council workers are set to be fingerprinted before they are allowed to work, it has been revealed.
Staff at Westminster Council in London will ‘clock in’ by scanning their fingerprints in what is believed to be the first scheme of its type in Britain.
But today civil liberties and data protection watchdogs warned the scheme had ‘Big Brother’ overtones and should be abandoned.
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Monday September 15, 2008
Council uses anti-terror rules to spy on man with noisy wardrobe
Chris Hastings
Telegraph
Anti-terror powers were used to spy on a member of the public after his neighbour complained about his noisy wardrobe doors and loud footsteps, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.
Fife Council was given permission to plant recording equipment in the neighbour’s flat in response to concern that his or her human rights were being infringed because of the noise. The council admitted in another investigation that such equipment could lead to “collateral intrusion”, in which conversations were recorded, but insisted that all material was destroyed.
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Monday September 15, 2008
Now Hollywood is chasing UK downloaders
Chris Williams
The Register
And getting the wrong guy
Tiscali threatened to disconnect a customer for illegally downloading a TV show last week, after receiving a copyright infringement notice from a Hollywood studio. The only problem was the customer had quit the ISP months before the alleged transgression was made.
Euan MacLay had been a customer of Freedom2Surf (F2S) for two years until it was taken over by Tiscali as part of the Pipex acquisition last year. His past experience of the Italian buyer's customer service was poor, so as soon as his Freedom2Surf line was due to be migrated to Tiscali's budget network he decided to switch.
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Monday September 15, 2008
The Mendacity of Missed Opportunities
M. Shahid Alam
Counter Punch
“There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages…There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arabpopulation.”
David Ben-Gurion[1]
All too often, the failure of Israel and the Arabs to make peace – especially since the creation of Israel – has been described as the folly of missed opportunities. In a discourse that is dominated by the Zionists, the Palestinians are forced to carry much of the burden of this folly.
How often have the Zionists, with delightful malice of the strong, accused the Palestinians – using the words of Abba Eban – that they “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity?”
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Monday September 15, 2008
Fears over privacy as police expand surveillance project
Paul Lewis
The Guardian
Database to hold details of millions of journeys for five years
The police are to expand a car surveillance operation that will allow them to record and store details of millions of daily journeys for up to five years, the Guardian has learned.
A national network of roadside cameras will be able to "read" 50m licence plates a day, enabling officers to reconstruct the journeys of motorists.
Police have been encouraged to "fully and strategically exploit" the database, which is already recording the whereabouts of 10 million drivers a day, during investigations ranging from counter-terrorism to low-level crime.
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Monday September 15, 2008
The killing of Mark Saunders
Independent
This police shooting is a disgrace and an outrage, argues a former high-ranking soldier with 20 years' experience incounter-terrorism at home and abroad. He is writing on condition of anonymity
Four months ago, Mark Saunders, a successful and highly regarded London barrister, came back early from work to his flat in salubrious Markham Square, Chelsea, and started drinking. Having consumed a good deal, evidently, he reached for his shotgun and started firing, mostly from one window, to the alarm and consternation of his neighbours. According to one: "He didn't even bother to open the window – he was shooting through the glass. There are bullet holes in my daughter's bedroom wall. People were screaming: 'What on earth are you doing?'."
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Monday September 15, 2008
US Arms Sales Climbing Rapidly
Eric Lipton
The New York Times
Washington - The Bush administration is pushing through a broad array of foreign weapons deals as it seeks to rearm Iraq and Afghanistan, contain North Korea and Iran, and solidify ties with onetime Russian allies.
From tanks, helicopters and fighter jets to missiles, remotely piloted aircraft and even warships, the Department of Defense has agreed so far this fiscal year to sell or transfer more than $32 billion in weapons and other military equipment to foreign governments, compared with $12 billion in 2005.
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Monday September 15, 2008
Obama Deploys Clintons as Race Tightens
Agence France-Presse
Barack Obama is unleashing both of the Democratic Party's heaviest hitters - Bill and Hillary Clinton - as he battles to fend off a revitalized Republican ticket in the White House election.
For the first time, former president Bill Clinton is set to join his wife Hillary on the campaign trail for Obama, whose poll lead over John McCain has evaporated since the Republican chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.
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Monday September 15, 2008
Largest owls in the world threaten British birds
Michael McCarthy
Independent
Several pairs of eagle owls, the largest owls in the world, are now breeding in the wild in Britain, according to a new study.
But it is unlikely they will ever be considered British birds as they escaped from a large pool of birds kept in captivity.
With its prominent ear tufts, 6ft wingspan and its ability to kill birds as large as herons and animals as big as roe deer, the eagle owl is one of the most remarkable birds in Europe, nesting from Spain in the south to Russia in the north, but has always been absent from Britain.
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Saturday September 13, 2008
Websites shed light on how humans value fresh ideas
Colin Barras
NewScientist
Analysing the rise and fall of websites is the perfect way to shed light on the old debate over whether talent or experience matters most, say mathematicians.
The question crops up everywhere, from job interviews to presidential races, says Vwani Roychowdhury, but it's hard to examine the problem using hard figures.
However, the same way of thinking can be applied to websites, which also succeed or fail based on many millions of human decisions. In fact, the web may be one of the few places it is possible to quantify the balance between the two, say the researchers.
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Saturday September 13, 2008
One in 10 pupils believes in creationism
Steve Connor
Independent
Creationism should be included in science lessons to reduce the confusion among the rising numbers of schoolchildren who have been brought up to reject the principles of evolution, one of the country's leading scientists said yesterday.
Citing evidence that more than one in 10 children in British state schools now believes in creationism, Professor Michael Reiss, the director of education at the Royal Society, called for such beliefs to be discussed and debated in class by science teachers, but not taught as a subject.
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Saturday September 13, 2008
Marijuana Could Be a Gusher of Cash If We Treated It Like a Crop, Not a Crime
Steven Wishnia
AlterNet
Economists estimate tens of billions for governments if we taxed pot like tobacco and stopped wasting money on the drug war.
If marijuana were legal but taxed like alcohol and tobacco, how much money could it bring in to cash-strapped state governments?
One 2006 study called cannabis the top cash crop in the nation, worth more than corn and wheat combined. It was the leading crop in 12 states, outstripping grapes in California and tobacco in North Carolina, and one of the top three in 18 others, coming in just behind apples in Washington and cotton in Georgia. So with states facing massive deficits, could reefer revenues help?
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Saturday September 13, 2008
Development - Africa: Why The Richest Continent Is Also The Poorest
Miriam Mannak
Inter Press Service
The ecological impact of natural resource exploitation on the lives of the poor in Africa and other regions is not being addressed sufficiently in aid effectiveness and development discussions, aid experts say.
"Africa is known as one of the richest parts of the world when it comes to natural resources, yet it is also the poorest region -- despite the natural wealth and the aid flow," said Charles Mutasa, executive director of the African Forum and Network on Debt and Development (AFRODAD) – a Zimbabwe-based NGO working on Africa's debt problem.
Mutasa was participating in a discussion at the Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF3), which took place in the Ghanaian capital of Accra from September 2-4.
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Saturday September 13, 2008
Environment: Huge increase in spending on water urged to avert global catastrophe
Juliette Jowit
The Guardian
Countries across the world will have to dramatically increase investment in dams, pipes and other water infrastructure to avoid widespread flooding, drought and disease even before climate change accelerates these problems, experts have warned.
Investment needs to be at least doubled from the current level of $80bn (£45.5bn) a year, an international congress was told this week, and one leading authority said spending needed to rise to 1.5% of gross domestic product just "to be able to cope with the current climate" - one thousand times the current level.
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Saturday September 13, 2008
US Should Disclose Its Funding of Opposition Groups in Bolivia and Other Latin American Countries
The Center for Economic and Policy Research
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) called on the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other agencies to release information detailing whom it is funding in Bolivia - where violent right-wing opposition groups have wreaked havoc this week in a series of shootings, beatings, ransacking of offices, and sabotage of a natural gas pipeline - as well as in other Latin American countries including Venezuela.
Recent events suggest there may be evidence for Bolivian president Evo Morales' assertions that the U.S. Embassy is supporting groups promoting violence and seeking "autonomy" from Bolivia, and the Center called on USAID and other U.S. agencies to "come clean" in order to demonstrate the U.S. government's good faith.
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Saturday September 13, 2008
The science of magnetism
Cathy Holding
Independent
We all think we know instinctively what we find attractive in other people. Off the top of our heads, we will probably mention attributes such as facial appearance, physical build, mannerisms and behaviours. But how do we define physical appeal and attraction? What, precisely, makes an attractive woman or man?
The idea of applying scientific analytical methods to such questions may seem about as appropriate as analysing Shakespeare's love sonnets through the mathematics of rhythm and the structure of language and vocabulary to better understand their seductive effects.
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Saturday September 13, 2008
Congress Asks: Who Misled the Anthrax Investigation by Pointing at Iraq?
Bill Simpich
T r u t h o u t
On September 16, the House Judiciary Committee will hold oversight hearings to review the FBI's role in investigating the 2001 anthrax attacks, followed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on the 17th. (Glenn Greenwald, August 20 interview with Charles Grassley).
Chairmen Senator Patrick Leahy and Congressman John Conyers have asked FBI Director Robert Mueller to attend. Conyers has specifically asked Mueller to address whether White House officials initially pressed the FBI to show the attacks were linked to Iraq, why Steven Hatfill was a key suspect in the investigation and why Bruce Ivins kept his security clearance for so many years.
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Friday September 12, 2008
Scientology critics fight YouTube takedown notices
John Leyden
The Register
Push Me F*ck You
Net users are fighting back against attempts to remove content critical of the Church of Scientology (CoS) from YouTube.
American Rights Counsel LLC, apparently acting on behalf of the Church of Scientology, sent 4,000 DMCA takedown notices to YouTube late last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reports. The notices allege copyright infringement over clips critical of the Church of Scientology.
YouTube is legally obliged to respond to such notices regardless of their merits, and as a result numerous videos were pulled. These included the BBC documentary Scientology and Me and clips posted by anti-Scientology collective Anonymous. Many accounts were suspended over the weekend as a result of the action.
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Friday September 12, 2008
New 'super worms' may clean up heavy metals
Steve Connor
Independent
A metal-eating earthworm that can survive the toxic environment of heavily contaminated soils is being recruited in the fight to clean up the polluted land of former industrial sites.
Scientists believe earthworms have undergone rapid evolutionary changes at abandoned mines in Britain, which have enabled them to survive and even thrive in an environment rich in toxic heavy metals.
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Friday September 12, 2008
Slaughter, Lies, and Video in Afghanistan
Tom Engelhardt
Tomdispatch.com
An Anatomy of Collateral Damage in the Bush Era
In a little noted passage in her bestselling book, The Dark Side, Jane Mayer offers us a vision, just post-9/11, of the value of one. In October 2001, shaken by a nerve-gas false alarm at the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney, reports Mayer, went underground.
He literally embunkered himself in "a secure, undisclosed location," which she describes as "one of several Cold War-era nuclear-hardened subterranean bunkers built during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, the nearest of which were located hundreds of feet below bedrock…" That bunker would be dubbed, perhaps only half-sardonically, "the Commander in Chief's Suite."
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Friday September 12, 2008
Study says old growth forests bank carbon dioxide
Jeff Barnard
Associated Press
A group of forest scientists from the United States and Europe reports that a growing body of evidence settles an old question over whether old growth forests store more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than they release.
Based on a review of research from more than 500 forest sites around the world, the answer, published Thursday in an online edition of the journal Nature, is that most forests between 15 and 800 years old do, and the total amounts to about 1 billion metric tons a year, or about 10 percent of the net carbon uptake worldwide.
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Friday September 12, 2008
To slow global warming, install white roofs
Margot Roosevelt
Los Angeles Times
Such roofs and reflective pavement in the world's 100 largest cities would have a massive cooling effect, according to data released at California's annual Climate Change Research Conference.
Builders have known for decades that white roofs reflect the sun's rays and lower the cost of air conditioning. But now scientists say they have quantified a new benefit: slowing global warming.
If the 100 biggest cities in the world installed white roofs and changed their pavement to more reflective materials -- say, concrete instead of asphalt-based material -- the global cooling effect would be massive, according to data released Tuesday at California's annual Climate Change Research Conference in Sacramento.
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Friday September 12, 2008
9/11 seven years later: U.S. 'safe,' South Asia in turmoil
Jonathan S. Landay and Saeed Shah
McClatchy Newspapers
Seven years after 9/11, al Qaida and its allies are gaining ground across the region where the plot was hatched, staging their most lethal attacks yet against NATO forces and posing a growing threat to the U.S.-backed governments in Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan.
While there have been no new strikes on the U.S. homeland, the Islamic insurrection inspired by Osama bin Laden has claimed thousands of casualties and displaced tens of thousands of people and shows no sign of slackening in the face of history's most powerful military alliance.
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Friday September 12, 2008
Raise taxes to stub out smoking by 2025, say doctors
Jeremy Laurance
Independent
Britain's oldest and most powerful medical college today calls on the Government to set a target to eliminate smoking by 2025.
The Royal College of Physicians says radical measures are needed to curb smoking: swingeing increases in tobacco tax; tougher penalties for tobacco smugglers; and promoting alternative forms of nicotine. The college says the approach "has the potential to end tobacco smoking in the UK within the next 20 years".
The college has campaigned against smoking since its landmark report in 1962 first demanded tough policies to reduce its prevalence.
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Friday September 12, 2008
On Top of Jail Time, Prisoners Now Face Fees and Surcharges
Emily Jane Goodman
The Nation
Prisoners across the country are facing court fees, arrest fees and booking fees in addition to their sentences -- and states are raking in the cash
Paying a debt to society now means more than doing time. In addition to prison sentences or alternatives to incarceration such as drug programs, fees and surcharges are being imposed on criminal offenders throughout the country. In some states, offender-based revenues start to accumulate upon arrest, without a wait for conviction. These charges are in addition to any fines and restitution they may be required to pay.
Surcharges and fees are mandatory in all New York criminal cases. A felony conviction for drugs, larceny or burglary, for example, costs the defendant a statutory $300 fee plus $25 to a victims' fund. Judges have no discretion to waive them despite the defendant's likely indigence. As New York State Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach says, "The imposition of mandatory surcharges, like mandatory sentencing, erodes judicial independence by tying the judges' hands even when they think that justice requires a different result."
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Friday September 12, 2008
Pollution linked to obesity, new study finds
Chris Irvine
Telegraph
Pollution could determine whether a child is fat or not before they have even been born, a new study has found.
Exposure to a range of common chemicals before birth increases the chance of a baby to growing up overweight or obese, the research indicates.
The study by scientists at Barcelona's Municipal Institute of Medical Research is the first to link obesity with chemical contamination in the womb, where humans are most vulnerable.
A quarter of all British adults and a fifth of children suffer from obesity, with at least 300 million obese worldwide.
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Friday September 12, 2008
Pentagon debates development of offensive cyberspace capabilities
Julian E. Barnes
Los Angeles Times
The current emphasis is on intelligence gathering and defending U.S. electronic security, but some officials think the military should know how to attack other nations' computer systems.
Igniting a provocative new debate, senior military officials are pushing the Pentagon to go on the offensive in cyberspace by developing the ability to attack other nations' computer systems, rather than concentrating on defending America's electronic security.
Under the most sweeping proposals, military experts would acquire the know-how to commandeer the unmanned aerial drones of adversaries, disable enemy warplanes in mid-flight and cut off electricity at precise moments to strategic locations, such as military installations, while sparing humanitarian facilities, such as hospitals.
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Friday September 12, 2008
Why drinkers do it all again – they only recall the good bits
Steve Connor
Independent
Some people drink to forget, but scientists have found that anyone who binge drinks is more likely to forget only the worst experiences of being drunk – which is why alcohol is such an addictive drug.
Alcohol has been found to affect memory in a selective manner. Drinking makes it easier to remember the good things about a party but harder to recall the bad things that happen after having too much.
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Friday September 12, 2008
World's first carbon capture pilot fires up clean-coal advocates
Alok Jha
Guardian
German project will burn coal in an atmosphere of pure oxygen – producing CO2 waste which can be buried – creating enough electricity to power 1,000 homes
The world's first complete demonstration of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will begin next week at a coal-fired power station in Germany.
Built alongside the 1,600MW Schwarze Pumpe power plant in north Germany, the demonstration experiment will capture up to 100,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, compress it and bury it 3,000m below the surface of the depleted Altmark gas field, about 200km from the site.
The €70m (£57m) project has an output of around 12MW of electricity and 30MW of thermal power, enough for more about 1,000 homes.
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Friday September 12, 2008
Who Make Better Bosses -- Women or Men?
Heather Gehlert,
AlterNet
New research shows women outperform men in five of eight leadership categories
The Pew Research Center's latest survey on gender and leadership reveals that the public thinks women have more desirable leadership traits than men. The survey asked its respondents -- 2,250 adults -- to rate women and men on eight characteristics considered important in leadership. Women smashed men in five of the categories -- honesty, intelligence, compassion, outgoing personality, creativity -- and tied men in two: hard work and ambition. The only category in which men showed an edge was decisiveness.
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Friday September 12, 2008
US-Iraq Agreement Leaked
Maya Schenwar
T r u t h o u t
A leaked version of last month's draft of the proposed US-Iraq status of forces agreement (SOFA) suggests that the Iraqi parliament may not be consulted before it is signed, despite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's promises to do so. The pact would govern the future US presence in Iraq.
The draft indicates no intent to set a deadline for withdrawal of "noncombat" troops from Iraq. It also grants immunity from Iraqi law to US military personnel, no matter where they are located.
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Friday September 12, 2008
High Court May Immunize Big Pharma
Terry J. Allen
In These Times
The FDA’s new “preemption” doctrine jeopardizes consumers’ right to sue for drug-caused injuries
Struck by a blinding migraine, Vermont musician Diana Levine went to a clinic where she was injected with the anti-nausea drug Phenergan, produced by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. Within weeks, the hand that had fingered her guitar was black with gangrene. Doctors amputated below the wrist and, when that failed to stop the necrosis, removed her forearm.
Wyeth’s label had warned that hitting an artery could cause irreversible damage, but it did not specifically direct physicians to avoid delivering the drug with intravenous (IV) push injection — rather than free-flowing IV drip or intramuscular shot.
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Friday September 12, 2008
Venezuela: Hugo Chávez expels US ambassador amid claims of coup plot
Rory Carroll
Guardian
Expulsions and aggressive language raise stakes in long-running diplomatic battle between US and Venezuela
President Hugo Chávez last night ordered the US ambassador to leave Venezuela within 72 hours and accused Washington of fomenting a coup attempt against his socialist revolution.
Chávez also ordered Venezuela's ambassador to Washington to return home and threatened to cut oil supplies, plunging relations between the countries to a new low. "Go to hell a hundred times, fucking Yankees," he told a televised rally thronged with supporters clad in red.
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Friday September 12, 2008
The great honey drought
Cahal Milmo
Independent
Winter viruses and the wettest August for years have combined to leave Britain's beehives dry
In 26 years of beekeeping, Ged Marshall has never seen anything as bad as the 2008 honey harvest. A miserable summer that has confined his bees to their hives following a winter bedevilled by deadly viruses means that production this year will be barely a third of its usual level of around five tonnes of honey.
Unfortunately for the nation's honey lovers and apiarists, Mr Marshall's experience is far from unique. According to the British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA), up to a third of Britain's 240,000 hives failed to survive last winter and spring due to disease and poor weather. The result is a drop of more than 50 per cent in honey production across the country.
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Friday September 12, 2008
Europe backs downs on biofuels from crops
New Scientist
A key panel of European Union lawmakers voted on Thursday to lower a target for using biofuels from crops in petrol and diesel as part of the EU's plan to fight climate change.
The move could curb the growth of a market coveted by biofuels exporters such as Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as European farming nations.
The executive European Commission has proposed that 10% of all road transport fuel come from renewable sources by 2020, without specifying how much of that should be biofuels, renewable electricity or hydrogen.
Environmentalists attacked the policy, charging that biofuels produced from grains and oil seeds contribute to rising food prices and deforestation.
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Friday September 12, 2008
A Temporary Respite from Permanent Decline
Paul Craig Roberts
Counter Punch
Americans were alarmed last June as the price of oil raced toward $150 per barrel. Today, as the price falls toward $100, Americans feel relieved. They have forgotten that prior to the Bush regime’s wars, the price of oil was $30 per barrel.
Similarly with the dollar. Despair ruled as the dollar fell to 1.6 to 1 euro. Now with the dollar’s rise to 1.4 to 1 euro, relief bathes the markets. The fact that the dollar will never return to parity with the euro is out of sight and out of mind.
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Friday September 12, 2008
Green Cement May Set CO2 Fate in Concrete
Carrie Sturrock
The San Francisco Chronicle
Call him cement man
Back when Stanford Professor Brent Constantz was 27, he created a high-tech cement that revolutionized bone fracture repair in hospitals worldwide. People who might have died from the complications of breaking their hips lived. Fractured wrists became good as new.
Now, 22 years later, he wants to repair the world.
Constantz says he has invented a green cement that could eliminate the huge amounts of carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere by manufacturers of the everyday cement used in concrete for buildings, roadways and bridges.
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Friday September 12, 2008
Lunatic Drug Warriors Still Ignore Powerful Pot Science
Rob Kampia
AlterNet
Twenty years ago a DEA chief judge concluded that doctors should be allowed to prescribe pot -- and the government is still ignoring his ruling.
Twenty years ago, on Sept. 6, 1988, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's chief administrative law judge issued a landmark ruling, but don't expect any celebrations or commemorations in Washington, D.C. Our government has ignored this historic decision since the day it was issued, inflicting needless misery on millions.
Indeed, most Americans don't know it ever happened.
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Friday September 12, 2008
Classical to Rap: Music lovers have much more in common than you would think
Chris Green
Independent
People who listen to indie bands are miserable shaggy-haired layabouts, while fans of rap music are bold, brash and brimming with self-confidence.
Rather than mere narrow- minded stereotyping, these are the results of an extensive psychological survey of more than 36,000 music lovers, which confirms, once and for all, that our musical tastes really do reflect our personality. But the study's most remarkable discovery is that refined lovers of classical music share a high number of personality traits with those who prefer rocking out to heavy metal.
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Friday September 12, 2008
The US Has 761 Military Bases Across the Planet, and We Simply Never Talk About It
Tom Engelhardt
Tomdispatch.com
America garrison the globe in ways that really are unprecedented, and yet, if you live in the United States, you basically wouldn't know it.
Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely.
Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don't stay, often American equipment does -- carefully stored for further use at tiny "cooperative security locations," known informally as "lily pads" (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis).
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Friday September 12, 2008
Can engineering the earth save it from catastrophe?
Steve Connor
Independent
Fears that the world is not doing enough to cut carbon dioxide emissions are forcing scientists to "think the unthinkable" by taking seriously the idea that humans may have to alter the global climate artificially with mega-engineering projects.
The Royal Society will launch a study later this year aimed at reviewing the possibility of saving the planet by "geoengineering" the climate on the grandest scales imaginable.
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Friday September 12, 2008
Israel: Where the Slave Trade Heads
Mel Frykberg
Inter Press Service
Israel continues to be a favourite destination for the trafficking of women for the sex industry, also known as the white slave trade, and for a form of modern day slavery where migrant labourers from developing countries are exploited.
The U.S. State Department placed Israel in Tier 2 position in its 2007 Trafficking in Persons report. And an Israeli court ruled against the country's work visa policy, which forces foreign workers into indentured labour with a single employer.
"Israel was only upgraded to Tier 2 last year," Romm Lewkowicz, a spokesman from Israel's Hotline for Migrant Workers, an advocacy group which defends the rights of foreign workers, told IPS.
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Thursday September 11, 2008
Cleared: Jury decides that threat of global warming justifies breaking the law
Michael McCarthy
Independent
The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.
Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a "lawful excuse" to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of "lawful excuse" under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.
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