Thursday April 30, 2009

The missing sunspots: Is this the big chill?

David Whitehouse
Independent

Scientists are baffled by what they’re seeing on the Sun’s surface – nothing at all. And this lack of activity could have a major impact on global warming.

Could the Sun play a greater role in recent climate change than has been believed? Climatologists had dismissed the idea and some solar scientists have been reticent about it because of its connections with those who those who deny climate change.
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Thursday April 30, 2009

NASA may abandon plans for moon base

David Shiga
New Scientist

NASA will probably not build an outpost on the moon as originally planned, the agency's acting administrator, Chris Scolese, told lawmakers on Wednesday. His comments also hinted that the agency is open to putting more emphasis on human missions to destinations like Mars or a near-Earth asteroid.

NASA has been working towards returning astronauts to the moon by 2020 and building a permanent base there.
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Thursday April 30, 2009

New swine flu feared to be weaponized strain

Wayne Madsen
Online Journal

According to two mainstream media journalists, one in Mexico City and the other in Jakarta, who spoke to WMR on background, they are convinced that the current outbreak of a new strain of swine flu in Mexico and some parts of the United States is the result of the introduction of a human-engineered pathogen that could result in a widespread global pandemic, with potentially catastrophic consequences for domestic and international travel and commerce.

The journalists have been told by top officials of the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO) about the grave dangers posed by the new and deadly swine flu strain, known as A-H1N1.
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Thursday April 30, 2009

Bracing for New Prisoner Abuse Photos

William Fisher
Inter Press Service

This Tuesday, Apr. 28, will mark five years since the world got its first look at the sickening photographs from Abu Ghraib on the U.S. television programme "60 Minutes."

And a month after that, on May 28, the Department of Justice, acting under a court order, will release several thousand never-before-seen-in-public photographs of U.S. prisoner abuse from Afghanistan and from elsewhere in Iraq.
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Thursday April 30, 2009

Wind farm may be torn down to make way for nuclear site

Geoffrey Lean and Ian Griggs
Independent

A Cumbrian village has found itself at the centre of the debate over Britain's future energy policy

To passionate advocates of the atom and renewable energy alike, this says it all. One of Britain's pioneering wind farms is threatened with demolition to make way for one of the Government's planned new generation of nuclear power stations.
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Thursday April 30, 2009

Pinter's Message to Obama

Mikey Whitney

About a month before Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski appeared on PBS's Charlie Rose Show and was asked whether he thought Obama would be a good choice for president.

Brzezinski paused for a minute, peered at Rose out of the corner of his eye, and answered, "Just think of the symbolism." As soon as he said that, Brzezinski and Rose broke out into laughter as though they were sharing a private joke.
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Thursday April 30, 2009

Prisoners' Message Found in Auschwitz

Spiegel International

In 1944, seven Auschwitz inmates scribbled their names on a scrap of paper and hid it in a wall to leave a trace of their existence in case they didn't survive the Nazi death camp. That note has now been discovered, and at least one of the prisoners, a Frenchman, is still alive.

Construction workers have found a message written by inmates of the Auschwitz death camp almost 65 years ago, the memorial site's museum said on Tuesday.
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Thursday April 30, 2009

No one can possibly know the risks of taking these drugs

Dr John Ramsey
The Observer

Although we have laws to control access to drugs such as cocaine and cannabis, we tolerate so-called "head shops" on our high streets which sell the paraphernalia (snorters, pipes, rolling paper, scales) used to consume them.

Over the last few years, the stimulant tablets and capsules also sold by these shops and market stalls have changed. Previously, they were fairly benign herbal products containing mostly caffeine or ephedrine from the herbs guarana and ephedra, whose effects were not much more than a strong cup of coffee.
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Thursday April 30, 2009

All-Electric Cars About to Be Resurrected

Michael Taylor
The San Francisco Chronicle

The all-electric car, which had a brief heyday less than a decade ago and then went the way of the dodo, killed off by the car companies, is about to make a comeback.

Charged up with lighter, more sophisticated and efficient batteries, and competitively priced with gasoline-driven and hybrid vehicles, the new offers will be marketed and sold primarily as second cars - for running errands, taking kids to school and the like.
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Thursday April 30, 2009

Why holidays can be bad for your health

Jeremy Laurance
Independent

World Health Organisation issues warning on stress and offers tips for travellers

Travel is said to broaden the mind – but it can also damage it, experts say.

In an unprecedented move, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has issued a warning that the stress of international travel can lead to mental disorder in vulnerable people.
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Thursday April 30, 2009

Swine-flu outbreak could be linked to Smithfield factory farms

Tom Philpott
Grist

The outbreak of a new flu strain—a nasty mash-up of swine, avian, and human viruses—has infected 1,000 people in Mexico and the U.S., killing 68. The World Health Organization warned Saturday that the outbreak could reach global pandemic levels.

Is Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork packer and hog producer, linked to the outbreak? Smithfield operates massive hog-raising operations Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Russian management tool helps recover passwords

Jeremy Kirk
IDG News Service

A Russian security company has released a software tool that will allow users to recover lost passwords or change forgotten ones.

Elcomsoft's latest upgrade to its Distributed Password Recovery (EDPR) product increases the speed at which passwords can potentially be recovered from the hard disk with PGP encryption, said Olga Koksharova, Elcomsoft's marketing and sales director.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Martyrs of the Iraqi marshes

Patrick Cockburn
Independent

They survived Saddam, but now the marsh Arabs are losing a battle against nature

One of the few successes of the Iraqi governments since the fall of Saddam Hussein has been reversing one of his great crimes: the draining of the marshes of southern Iraq and the destruction of the unique water-born civilisation which had survived there for thousands of years.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Double Vision: Parsing Images That Trick Our Brain

Mike Olson
Wired

Look at the picture above and you see Albert Einstein. Now walk across the room. Suddenly, he morphs into Marilyn Monroe. Trippy, right?

Aude Oliva, an associate professor of cognitive science at MIT, uses images like this one to study how our brains make sense of sight.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

The Debt Looters

Greg Moses
Counterpunch

It wasn’t the housing bubble exactly. It was more the way the bubble was blown.

In the official language of the International Monetary Fund report for April 2009, “the crisis was largely caused by weak risk management in large institutions at the core of the global financial system combined with failures in financial regulation and supervision.”
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Newsflash: Populism Is Popular

David Sirota
AlterNet

Populism is becoming the dominant paradigm, and that has the Establishment frightened.

In 2006, journalist Christopher Hayes wrote a little-noticed article for In These Times magazine about a proposal in Oregon to crack down on predatory lending. The initiative had become so popular that conservative legislators supported it fearing that if it were put on the state's ballot, the resulting gusher of grassroots support would not only ratify the measure, but depose the bank-allied Republican Party, too.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Britain's new age of austerity

Sean O'Grady
Independent

Huge tax rises and spending cuts: the true cost of the Budget revealed.

A bleak picture of a future Britain once again shamed by its public services was conjured up yesterday as the true cost of fixing the nation's finances emerged from the fog of Treasury statistics.

Whatever the political furore over the 50p tax rate, most of the burden of plugging the £1.3 trillion hole in the nation's coffers over the next decade will fall on the public services, says the respected and independent Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Final Push to Control Malaria by 2015

Ali Gharib
Inter Press Service

About one million people die every year from malaria, including a child every 30 seconds. Half a billion people are infected annually. Africa alone, according to studies, loses 12 billion dollars in productivity and to treating the disease. And almost all of it is easily preventable.

But resources have been scarce and attention to the killer mosquito-borne disease relatively low, in large part because the disease burden rests almost exclusively in the poorest countries.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Firms Infused With Rescue Cash Find Money to Fund Lobbying

Dan Eggen
The Washington Post

GM, financial companies are among biggest spenders.

Top recipients of federal bailout money spent more than $10 million on political lobbying in the first three months of this year, including aggressive efforts aimed at blocking executive pay limits and tougher financial regulations, according to newly filed disclosure records.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

So much for balancing the books: this is worse than we ever imagined

Sean O'Grady
Independent

The Budget is traditionally thought of as an exercise in showing how the nation's books can be balanced. In this case, it is more a case of demonstrating to the world how difficult, if not impossible, it will prove to pull public finances back into any sort of balance.

The numbers are galling. As recently as the pre-Budget report in November – half way through the tax year – Mr Darling told the nation that borrowing in this fiscal year would be £78bn.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Oldsters: If you think you'll lose your memory, you will

Lewis Page
The Register

Remember: Forget the whole theory

Here's one for all those concerned at the prospect of advancing age gradually stripping away their, erm, wait, tip of my tongue - memory. Bad news: your ability to retain information will indeed disappear as you get older. But, in a cruel twist of fate, if you aren't concerned you'll be fine.

Yes, you read that right. New research by American oldness profs has revealed that senior citizens who believe that age affects memory are self-fulfilling prophets. They score much worse on memory tests than those who don't believe in decline with age.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Poor and Unemployed, Young Afghan Men Turning to Part-Time Work for the Taliban

Fetrat Zerak
Institute for War and Peace Reporting

Says one 22-year-old with a family of eight: "I'm just fighting for the money. If I find another job, I'll leave this one as soon as possible."

Abdullah Jan and Abdul Khaleq are both from the Pushtrod district of Farah province in western Afghanistan. Both are young, unemployed, and seek work as day laborers, for which they get about 200 afghani (4 US dollars) per job.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

A Quarter Million Americans Demand Torture Prosecutions

The American Civil Liberties Union

Broad coalition of advocacy groups present Attorney General Holder with petition.

A broad coalition of advocacy groups today will deliver petitions containing a quarter million signatures to Attorney General Eric Holder demanding that he appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s use of torture on terrorism suspects.

The petitions were gathered by the American Civil Liberties Union, MoveOn.org Political Action, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Firedoglake.com, Democrats.com and other advocacy groups. The petitions will be delivered during Holder’s testimony before a House Appropriations Subcommittee.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Customer takes on bank over chip and pin security

Jeremy Kirk
IDG News Service

A customer is set to take on his bank over so-called phantom withdrawals, marking the first such legal case in the UK.

Alain Job saw £2,100 disappear from his account but maintains he always had his card in his possession and didn't do the withdrawal. He took his complaint to the UK's Financial Ombudsman Service, which mediates disputes between banks and customers, but lost in early 2007.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Torture

John Cory
Truthout

They say that the first casualty of war is truth, but they are wrong. The first casualty of war - is reality. In war, the unreal becomes real and the lie becomes truth.

On Tuesday evening, I watched Anderson Cooper and Bill O'Reilly utter the same euphemism for torture. "Harsh" techniques, they said. And then, to each of their guests they posed the question of whether or not these "harsh interrogation techniques" worked and shouldn't that be an important part of judging their merit? I felt dirty just listening to them.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Pakistan scrambles to repel Taliban advance

Omar Waraich
Independent

Swat Valley peace deal blamed as government forces come under fire from insurgents 60 miles from capital

The Taliban has seized control of an area just 60 miles from the Pakistani capital Islamabad, provoking fears that militants are attempting to spread their insurgency – and with it their extreme brand of Islam – across the country.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

The sun's cooling down - so what does that mean for us?

Laura Spinney
The Guardian

The sun's activity is winding down, triggering fevered debate among scientists about how low it will go, and what it means for Earth's climate.

Nasa recorded no sunspots on 266 days in 2008 - a level of inactivity not seen since 1913 - and 2009 looks set to be even quieter. Solar wind pressure is at a 50-year low and our local star is ever so slightly dimmer than it was 10 years ago.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

EU nations eye prosecution of Bush officials

Press TV

European officials and lawyers seek to criminalize former US officials over torture charges amid the reluctance of President Barack Obama.

A number of European authorities and human rights groups have expressed dissatisfaction with Obama's failure to press charges against ex-CIA authorities who sanctioned or administered the so-called 'enhanced interrogation methods' to terror suspects, saying that they will make an effort to delve into the torture case under a "universal jurisdiction" code.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

FBI Weren’t the Only Ones Objecting to Torture — So Did the Army, Marines & Air Force

Jane Hamsher
Firedoglake

As Digby notes, there were already serious objections to the use of torture in 2002 -- the FBI chief Muller had already refused to let his agents participate in the CIA's "coercive interrogations" in June of 2002 (per Marcy's timeline, the Bybee memo didn't make them legal until August 1).

But it's not like the FBI was the only one who had a problem. On October 1, Major General Michael Dunlavey sent a memo to General James Hill, Commander of US Southern Command, requesting the authority to use "aggressive interrogations techniques" like those use in SERE training.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

U.S. Cities Increasing Use of Armed Mercenaries to Replace Police

Jeremy Scahill
Rebel Reports

Some estimate that private security inside the US actually outnumber police 5-to-1.

The United States is in the midst of the most radical privatization agenda in its history. We see this in schools, health care, prisons, and certainly with the US military/national security/intelligence apparatus.

There are almost 200,000 "private contractors" in Iraq (more than U.S. soldiers) and President Barack Obama is continuing to use mercenaries there and in Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine. At present, 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget is going to private companies.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

EU rubber-stamps law to slash mobile roaming costs

Paul Meller
IDG News Service

The cost of sending text messages on your mobile phone while abroad in the EU is set to fall sharply in July, after a new law was approved on Wednesday.

Similarly, the price of Internet downloads onto your mobile while you are travelling in the EU will drop, and calls made from abroad will be charged per second, rather than per minute.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

UK High Court Demands US Torture Documents

Julie Sell
McClatchy Newspapers

London - The chief justice of the British High Court on Wednesday gave the British government one week to obtain the US release of classified information about the alleged torture of a British resident who'd been detained at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The court indicated that it would issue its own order if the government doesn't respond or justify why continued secrecy is warranted.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Who was St George, and why is celebrating him so contentious?

Andy McSmith
Independent

Why are we asking this now?

Today is St George's Day and, rather unusually, a mainstream politician has identified himself with making this a day for celebrating the glory. Up to now, the only politicians promoting St George's memory have been too far out on the fringes to be taken seriously, but today the London Mayor, Boris Johnson, will be travelling around the capital in a Routemaster bus – one of several initiatives he is taking to mark St George's Day.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Profs: Human race must become Hobbits to save planet

Lewis Page
The Register

British men 3'3" tall would meet UK carbon pledges

Public-health researchers in London have come up with a new plan to save the planet: wealthy westerners should all reduce by several inches in height by starving their children. This would not only save food, but make people much lighter, meaning that cars and buses would use less fuel.

The new insight comes from Professor Ian Roberts and Dr Phil Edwards of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. According to the two men:
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Climate Change to Shrink Agricultural Production by Half

Kristin Palitza
Inter Press Service

Environmental researchers predict Southern Africa will be hit heavily by climate change over the next 70 years. Agricultural production is projected to be halved - a development that will threaten the livelihoods of farmers in a region where 70 percent of the population are smallholder farmers.

"We will be seriously affected by climate change in Southern Africa. Agriculture and biodiversity will experience a particularly negative impact," Dr Constansia Musvoto, researcher at South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), told members of the Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions (SACAU) at the organisation’s policy conference in Durban on Apr. 15 and 16.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Revealed: the tonnes of rubbish put out for recycling that end up in landfill sites

Martin Hickman
Independent

Many councils are rejecting more than 10 per cent of waste put out for recycling by households and dumping it in the ground instead, a report has revealed.

The consumer's organisation Which? found that in 2007-08 councils in England rejected almost 229,400 tonnes of recycling waste because materials had been damaged or put in the wrong bin.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Climate change threatens Ganges, Niger and other mighty rivers

Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian

Some of the mightiest rivers on the planet, including the Ganges, the Niger, and the Yellow river in China, are drying up because of climate change, a study of global waterways warned yesterday.

The study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado found that global warming has had a far more damaging impact on rivers than had been realised and that, overwhelmingly, those rivers in highly populated areas were the most severely affected.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

GM to Shut Most US Plants Up to Nine Weeks

Tom Krisher
The Associated Press

Detroit - General Motors Corp. is planning to temporarily close most of its U.S. factories for up to nine weeks this summer because of slumping sales and growing inventories of unsold vehicles, two people briefed on the plan said Wednesday.

The exact dates of the closures are not known, but both people said they will occur around the normal two-week shutdown in July to change from one model year to the next.
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

New approach needed to tackle cyber gangs

Gregg Keizer
Computerworld (US)

Law authorities should take a radical new approach against cyber criminals said a leading security researcher. Criminal gangs must be harried, hounded and hunted until they're driven out of business, said Joe Stewart, the director of SecureWorks' counter-threat unit.

"We need a new approach to fighting cybercrime," said Stewart. "What we're doing now is not making a significant dent."
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Tuesday April 28, 2009

Police and PM in dock over arrest of terrorist suspects

Jonathan Brown, Robert Verkaik and Kim Sengupta
Independent

Case against Muslim men amounted to one email and handful of telephone conversations

The case against 12 Muslim men involved in what Gordon Brown described as a "major terrorist plot" amounted to one email and a handful of ambiguous telephone conversations, it emerged last night after all the men were released without charge.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

One third of workers open to bribes for data theft

John Leyden
The Register

Who wants to be a millionaire?

A somewhat self-serving survey ahead of an information security trade show in London next week reveals a third of workers can potentially be bribed into handing over company data.

A poll of 600 workers at busy London railway stations found more than a third (37 per cent), admitted that they would hand over their organisation's most sensitive data for inducements ranging up to a million pounds.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

2009 budget calculator

The Guardian

Use our budget calculator to find out what impact this year's changes will have on your personal finances. Fill in your details to find out how much better or worse off you will be...
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Slash population to save the world: green lobbyist

The Age

Australia should consider having a one-child policy to protect the planet, an environmental lobby group says.

Sustainable Population Australia says slashing the world’s population is the only way to avoid “environmental suicide”.

National president Sandra Kanck wants Australia’s population of almost 22 million reduced to seven million to tackle climate change.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Spam overload as PC hits 600,000 a day

Gregg Keizer
Computerworld (US)

Researchers fighting spam have warned that bot-infected PCs can crank out as many as 600,000 spam messages a day.

California-based Marshal8e6 deliberately infected machines in the lab of its research arm, TRACElabs, with the malware responsible for the world's nine biggest spam botnets, then observed the PCs' behaviour, including each bot's top-end spam capacity.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

MPs will get daily rate for 'clocking-in' at Commons

Nigel Morris
Independent

Brown's plan to replace second-home allowance runs into controversy

Gordon Brown's plans to pay the vast majority of MPs up to £26,000 a year to "clock in" at the House of Commons face fierce resistance today from opposition leaders.

In a surprise announcement, he set out moves to scrap the controversial second-home allowance from July as part of an attempt to reduce the overall expenses bill for MPs.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

PG&E Announces Solar Power From Space By 2016

Bridgette Steffen
Inhabitat

Microwave beams sending electricity from space to power our homes may sound like a concept straight out of a science fiction novel, but with a recent announcement from PG&E, we may actually see a solar powered space station in the near future. The system would consist of a series of solar powered satellites 22,000 miles above the Earth’s equator that would generate electricity, convert it into radio waves and then transmit to a base station on Earth.

PG&E has entered into a contract with California-based SolarEn Corp. to supply 200 MW of power by 2016. If they succeed in making space solar power affordable, this new technology could be a huge contender in meeting the world’s energy needs.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Cold War Bunker Becomes Modern Mansion

Jim Merithew
Wired

In 1982, schoolteacher Ed Peden drove out to investigate a decommissioned nuclear missile bunker that was up for sale near his hometown of Topeka, Kansas. He found 34 acres of grass in need of mowing and, deep below ground, an 18,000-square-foot warren of concrete tunnels, most of it flooded with rainwater.
Peden stripped to his shorts and dropped a rope ladder into the flooded base.

Most of the rooms were three-quarters flooded, and the water had stagnated for nearly two decades. Holding his nose to dive under doorways between the flooded rooms, Peden took his first tour of what would soon become his family home.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Abu Ghraib Victims Can Sue Interrogators

William Fisher
Inter Press Service

In a ruling that could have widespread implications for government contractors overseas, a federal court has concluded that four former Abu Ghraib detainees, who were tortured and later released without charge, can sue the U.S. military contractor who was involved in conducting prisoner interrogations for the Pentagon in Iraq.

U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1998, denied a motion to dismiss the detainees’ claims by the contractor, CACI International. The Arlington, Virginia-based company is a major contractor to the Defence Department.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Hamas leader's invitation to address MPs provokes fury

Kim Sengupta and Ben Lynfield
Independent

Foreign Office warns video link to Parliament will boost Islamic extremists

The former Labour minister Clare Short has been embroiled in a row after inviting senior Hamas leader Khaled Meshal to address MPs in Parliament.

Ms Short faced strong criticism from both the British and Israeli governments for her part in organising tonight's question-and-answer session between Mr Meshal and a backbench committee of MPs.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Dozens of Prisoners Held by CIA Still Missing, Fates Unknown

Dafna Linzer
ProPublica

Last week, we pointed out that one of the newly released Bush-era memos inadvertently confirmed that the CIA held an al-Qaeda suspect named Hassan Ghul in a secret prison and subjected him to what Bush administration lawyers called "enhanced interrogation techniques." The CIA has never acknowledged holding Ghul, and his whereabouts today are secret.

But Ghul is not the only such prisoner who remains missing. At least three dozen others who were held in the CIA's secret prisons overseas appear to be missing as well.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

10 Environmental Disasters to Remember on Earth Day

Jeff Biggers
AlterNet

Ten tragic lessons in our history that should never be forgotten. And one climate tragedy in the making that needs our urgent help.

Ten tragic lessons in our nation's environmental history that should never be forgotten. And one climate destabilization tragedy in the making that needs our urgent help.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Fertility expert: 'I can clone a human being'

Steve Connor
Independent

Controversial doctor filmed creating embryos before injecting them into wombs of women wanting cloned babies

A controversial fertility doctor claimed yesterday to have cloned 14 human embryos and transferred 11 of them into the wombs of four women who had been prepared to give birth to cloned babies.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Why Americans Are No Longer the Tallest People in the World

Heidi Stevenson
Gaia Health

Average height provides one of the best indications of a population's overall health. Until the last few years, U.S. citizens were the world's tallest and enjoyed better health than the people of any other nation. Things have changed, though. Now, western Europeans' height exceeds that of Americans, and the difference is growing larger.

If there's any question about the connection between height and health, consider that longevity has also decreased during the same time that height has dropped.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Sex, Drugs and ESL

Jessica Olien
In These Times

New laws policing foreign teachers in Thailand are mostly ignored.

Like many young English teachers abroad, I was enthusiastic about—but woefully under-qualified for— my new profession. I wanted to see some of the world before I transitioned to another “more respectable” job.

So, after graduating from college, I flew to Thailand and took a bus to a fishing village a few hours east of Bangkok, where I spent three weeks binge-drinking and hanging out on the beach with 15-or-so classmates—and emerged with certification to teach English to speakers of foreign languages.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Seven Productive Things To Do When You’re Bored At Work

Ali Hale
Dumb Little Man

Do you work in an office? Are you contractually obliged to be at your desk from 8-4 (or similar)? If so, it’s likely that at least some of the time, you’ll be feeling bored. Some days, there just isn’t quite enough to fill the hours (or you convince yourself into believing that!).

A quick Google search for “bored at work” will give you plenty of ideas for pointless, time-wasting activities that could amuse you for all of two minutes. But why not take boredom as a signal to start on some productive, positive action?
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Thursday April 23, 2009

No Such Thing as Free News

Michael Moran
The Nation

With even the most storied American newspapers slipping into shock, journalists and publishers are finally engaged in a genuine debate about the wisdom of giving away for free the one service they provide better than anyone else--gathering, analyzing and disseminating news.

This month, Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch and New York Times executive editor Bill Keller have said they are considering ways to charge for what their news organizations produce, inviting scorn from Internet thinkers like Clay Shirky and Jay Rosen, who have elevated the ethos of free information to unreasonable heights.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Building a Better Alien-Detection System

Brandon Keim
Wired

By measuring the photon signatures left when light bounces off photosynthesizing cells, astronomers may soon have a new tool for detecting extraterrestrial organisms.

"When you look at objects in the solar system, what's a high-probability way of determining whether or not that planet has life?" said Neill Reid, a Space Telescope Science Institute astrobiologist. "Circular polarization has the potential to be a signature of life."
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Study: pirates biggest music buyers. Labels: yeah, right

Jacqui Cheng
Ars Technica

Those who download "free" music from P2P networks are more likely to spend money on legit downloads than those who are squeaky clean, according to a new report out of Norway. The music labels, however, aren't quite buying that data.

Those who download illegal copies of music over P2P networks are the biggest consumers of legal music options, according to a new study by the BI Norwegian School of Management.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Michelle Obama's Fresh Food Revolution

Mark Hertsgaard
The Nation

When Michelle Obama began planting an organic garden on the South Lawn of the White House recently, there was no doubt she was sending a message, but the message was more subversive and far-reaching than most American media coverage recognized.

On March 20, joined by a class of local fifth graders, the first lady lifted the first shovels of dirt onto a 1,100-square-foot plot that will feature fifty-five kinds of vegetables, including spinach, peppers, arugula, kale, collards and tomatoes (but no beets--the president reportedly does not like beets).
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Apple’s New Weapon

Benjamin Sutherland
Newsweek

To help soldiers make sense of data from drones, satellites and ground sensors, the U.S. military now issues the iPod Touch.

Tying the hands of a person who is speaking, the Arab proverb goes, is akin to "tying his tongue." Western soldiers in Iraq know how important gestures can be when communicating with locals. To close, open and close a fist means "light," but just opening a fist means "bomb." One soldier recently home from Iraq once tried to order an Iraqi man to lie down.

To get his point across, the soldier had to demonstrate by stretching out in the dirt. Translation software could help, but what's the best way to make it available in the field?
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Who says one person can't change the world?

AmazingSusan
Ode Magazine

Less than a week ago, 47-year-old Susan Boyle was unemployed, and pretty much unknown beyond her hometown (in her own words: "a collection of villages"), outside of Edinburgh, Scotland.

As of midnight last night (Dubai time), the video of Boyle’s audition performance for Britain’s Got Talent 2009 has generated worldwide media coverage based on almost six million views, close to 40,000 five-star ratings, and 36,000 comments on YouTube.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Yamaha Unveils Golf Cart Powered by Poo

Jorge Chapa
Inhabitat

We’ve shown you vehicles powered by veggie oil, the sun’s rays, and the blowing wind, however we never expected to see a vehicle powered by breaking wind. Yamaha is changing all of that with a bovine-speckled Golf Cart that harnesses the power of poo as a means of propulsion.

The vehicle, which was recently tested at a golf course in Japan, is not powered by cow dung directly - it is in fact powered by methane.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Security Alert: Beware of SMS Messages That Can Take Control of Your Phone

John Messina
PhysOrg.com

Trust Digital has proven that an attacker with the right knowledge and toolkits can remotely hijack a phone by sending an SMS message to it. The attack would be most effective if it took place in the middle of the night while you are asleep.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Nazi 'super cows' shipped to Devon farm

Steven Morris
The Guardian

Successors to extinct wild ox arrive in UK for conservation programme

Their meat will not be reaching the Sunday lunch table any time soon and nobody would dare get close enough to try to milk them. But a herd of "super cows" descended from animals bred in Nazi Germany is making an impressive sight on a farm in the south-west of England.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Huge folly or amazing work of art? Giant 60ft head costing taxpayers £2m nears completion

Julian Gavaghan
Daily Mail

Workers today put the finishing touches to a 60ft-tall sculpture of a head that has been criticised for costing taxpayers £2million.

The elongated woman’s face, entitled 'Dream' was erected on the site of a former slag heap alongside the M62 motorway in Merseyside.

It was created by Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa following orders by St Helens Borough Council to rival Gateshead's Angel of the North.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Empire Foreclosed?

Mark Engler
Foreign Policy In Focus

Not long ago, excitement over American imperialism reached levels not seen in a century. "People are coming out of the closet on the word 'empire,'" the right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer told The New York Times in early 2002. Neoconservatives were on the rise in Washington, and their leading propagandists were not shy in making the case for aggressive expansionism.

Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot, for instance, took issue with Pat Buchanan's belief that the United States should be a "republic, not an empire." "This analysis is exactly backward," Boot wrote. "[T]he Sept. 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation."
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Vietnam Ponder Karaoke Bar Dance Ban in Bid to Slow Ecstasy Use

Stop The Drug War

The Vietnamese government is floating the idea of banning dancing at karaoke bars in a bid to limit the use of Ecstasy. The move is the latest effort to clamp down on drug use at the popular singing spots.
The Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism posted the proposed ban and sought public comment on the measure.

The government banned alcohol at such establishments in 2006, a year after it stopped granting new licenses for bars, karaoke clubs, and dance halls.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Somali Pirates Form Unholy Alliance with Islamists

Spiegel International

Warships have done little to deter Somalia's pirates. But following the latest spate of hijackings, the West plans to take a more robust approach to protecting shipping. Intelligence agencies are alarmed at the pirates' increasingly close ties to Islamist groups.

A sack filled with $1 million (€770,000) in $100 bills weighs just under 15 kilos (33 pounds). Occasionally $3 million in ransom money is paid to Somali pirates for a hijacked freighter and its crew. That's nearly 45 kilos.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Tony Blair's Facebook profile hijacked

Tom Jowitt
Techworld

The Facebook profile page set up to promote Tony Blair's faith foundation has been hijacked and plastered with abusive attacks on the former British Prime Minister and his wife.

A report in the Daily Telegraph newspaper said that Tony Blair Faith Foundation on Facebook, which is accessed via a link from the charity's official website, is supposed to promote understanding of the world's religions.
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Thursday April 23, 2009

Attacks Commence

Dahr Jamail
Truthout

Everyone knows the analogy of the beehive. When it is goaded, countless bees emerge, attacking the tormentor. Right now in Iraq, the formerly US-backed al-Sahwa (Sons of Iraq) Sunni militia, ripe with broken promises from both the occupiers of their country and the Iraqi government that they would be given respect and jobs, have gone into attack mode.

It is an easily predictable outcome. An occupying power (the US) sets up a 100,000-strong militia composed of former resistance fighters and even some members of al-Qaeda, pays them each $300 per month to not attack occupation forces, and attacks decrease dramatically.
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Wednesday April 22, 2009

Dragon nightmares

Economist

Here is a quick way to spoil a Brussels dinner party. Simply suggest that world governance is slipping away from the G20, G7, G8 or other bodies in which Europeans may hog up to half the seats. Then propose, with gloomy relish, that the future belongs to the G2: newly fashionable jargon for a putative body formed by China and America.

The fear of irrelevance haunts Euro-types, for all their public boasting about Europe’s future might. The thought that the European Union might not greatly interest China is especially painful.
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Wednesday April 22, 2009

What Are Friends For? A Longer Life

Tara Parker Pope
New York Times

In the quest for better health, many people turn to doctors, self-help books or herbal supplements. But they overlook a powerful weapon that could help them fight illness and depression, speed recovery, slow aging and prolong life: their friends.

Researchers are only now starting to pay attention to the importance of friendship and social networks in overall health. A 10-year Australian study found that older people with a large circle of friends were 22 percent less likely to die during the study period than those with fewer friends.
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Wednesday April 22, 2009

Deflation returns to Britain for first time since 1960

Ashley Seager
The Guardian

Deflation returned to Britain for the first time in nearly five decades last month as prices measured by the retail price index (RPI) were lower than the same time a year ago.

That will add to the chancellor, Alistair Darling's problems as he prepares to deliver his latest budget tomorrow. Figures out tomorrow morning are likely to show another big jump in unemployment to the highest level in over a decade.
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Wednesday April 22, 2009

Tesco profits top £3bn

Holly Williams
Press Association

Supermarket Tesco today said it had rung up sales of £1bn a week and annual profits of more than £3bn for the first time in its history.

The retail giant posted sales of £54.3bn in the 12 months to 28 February, while its underlying pre-tax profits set another milestone - up 8.8 per cent to £3.13bn.
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Wednesday April 22, 2009

Green and mean: The downside of clean energy

Fred Pearce
New Scientist

You can understand the frustration on both sides. Environmentalists worldwide are clamouring for bold action to end the burning of fossil fuels and plug the world into renewables. Politicians throw their weight behind a $14 billion scheme that would replace the equivalent of eight coal-fired power stations with tidal power. What do they get for their pains? Green outrage.

"This massively damaging proposal cannot be justified," said Graham Wynne, chief of the UK's normally staid Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). Friends of the Earth said it was "not the answer".
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Wednesday April 22, 2009

Budget To Include £1 Billion For New Squats

Daily Mash

Tomorrow's Budget is expected to include a £1 billion programme to build thousands of houses that no-one can afford to buy.

Treasury sources say the initiative will not only look good for a couple of days, but could eventually provide a dry, energy-efficient shelter for families to return to after foraging through skips for food.
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Wednesday April 22, 2009

Researchers use brain interface to post to Twitter (w/Video)

PhysOrg.com

In early April, Adam Wilson posted a status update on the social networking Web site Twitter -- just by thinking about it.

Just 23 characters long, his message, "using EEG to send tweet," demonstrates a natural, manageable way in which "locked-in" patients can couple brain-computer interface technologies with modern communication tools.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student, Wilson is among a growing group of researchers worldwide who aim to perfect a communication system for users whose bodies do not work, but whose brains function normally.
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Wednesday April 22, 2009

Criminals offer huge sum for flawed mobile

Jeremy Kirk
IDG News Service

Criminals are willing to pay thousands of euros for a discontinued Nokia mobile phone with a software problem that can be exploited to hack into online bank accounts, according to a fraud investigator in the Netherlands.

About 10 days ago, investigators observed someone transfer €25,000 (£22,200 or $32,413 US) for a Nokia 1100 phone, said Frank Engelsman of Ultrascan Advanced Global Investigations. The candy-bar style phone is one of Nokia's all-time best-selling models, and originally sold for under €100.
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Wednesday April 22, 2009

Britain Could Save $20 Billion a Year by Legalizing Drugs, Study Finds

Stop The Drug War

A regime where currently illicit drugs are regulated and legalized would provide numerous benefits to Britain, not the least of which would be up to $20 billion a year in savings to government, crime victims, and drug users, according to a comprehensive comparison of the costs of drug prohibition and drug legalization.

The figure comes from A Comparison of the Cost-effectiveness of Prohibition and Regulation, a report released Wednesday by the British drug reform group the Transform Drug Policy Foundation.
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Wednesday April 22, 2009

Binyam Mohamed: MI5 officer gave false evidence in Guantánamo detainee case

Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian

Lawyers for the government have admitted that a senior MI5 officer gave false evidence to the high court in the case of former Guantánamo Bay prisoner Binyam Mohamed.

The admission, combined with an apology, is contained in a letter from Treasury solicitor David Mackie to Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones, who tomorrow will hear fresh demands from lawyers representing Mohamed, and the media, for the disclosure of information about who was complicit in his interrogation and torture.
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Wednesday April 22, 2009

Couple lived 'fairytale' lifestyle after stealing £60,000 from faulty cash machine

Andrew Levy
Daily Mail

It was the cash machine that spouted free money.

To investment banker Joanne Jones and her builder husband Darren, battling with debts, it was the answer to their prayers.

Over 88 days they made more than 300 visits to the faulty machine to take more than £60,000.
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Wednesday April 22, 2009

Passion, deadly secrets and betrayal in Putin's Russia

Shaun Walker
Independent

He was a member of Russia's elite security forces. She was a dissident playwright. Did they get too close – to each other, and the truth behind a notorious terrorist attack?

Zherdevka, a dead-end town seven hours' drive from Moscow, is the sort of place where nothing ever happens. Almost all the cars are old, battered Ladas; the few cafés reek of cheap frying oil and are populated with friendly but tragic-faced people ordering large early morning glasses of vodka.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Robots are narrowing the gap with humans

Robert S. Boyd
McClatchy Newspapers

Robots are gaining on us humans.

Thanks to exponential increases in computer power — which is roughly doubling every two years — robots are getting smarter, more capable, more like flesh-and-blood people.

Matching human skills and intelligence, however, is an enormously difficult — perhaps impossible — challenge.

Nevertheless, robots guided by their own computer "brains'' now can pick up and peel bananas, land jumbo jets, steer cars through city traffic, search human DNA for cancer genes, play soccer or the violin, find earthquake victims or explore craters on Mars.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Eating at the wheel could add 40% to the cost of car insurance

Sophie Borland
Daily Mail

Drivers caught eating an apple, map-reading or listening to loud music face rises of up to £200 on their motor premiums.

Many leading insurers are becoming stricter by checking if motorists have been caught acting in such a 'distracted' way when calculating quotes.

Some firms simply refuse to cover motorists guilty of this behaviour, which can also include sipping from a bottle of water, tuning their radio, snacking or arguing with a passenger.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Pope to Pursue Heavenly Power in Europe’s Biggest Solar Plant

Flavia Krause-Jackson and Flavia Rotondi
Bloomberg.com

On pasture land a day’s walk north of Rome, the inventor of radio Guglielmo Marconi set up a broadcasting service in 1931 for the Vatican.

The world’s smallest state now intends to build the biggest solar plant in Europe for 500 million euros ($660 million) on those same 740 acres near the medieval village of Santa Maria di Galeria, project engineer Mauro Villarini said in an interview.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Waste Not, Want Not

Bill McKibben
Mother Jones

Once a year or so, it's my turn to run recycling day for our tiny town. Saturday morning, 9 to 12, a steady stream of people show up to sort out their plastics (No. 1, No. 2, etc.), their corrugated cardboard (flattened, please), their glass (and their returnable glass, which goes to benefit the elementary school), their Styrofoam peanuts, their paper, their cans. It's quite satisfying—everything in its place.

But it's also kind of disturbing, this waste stream. For one, a town of 550 sure generates a lot—a trailer load every couple of weeks. Sometimes you have to put a kid into the bin and tell her to jump up and down so the lid can close.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

House of Lords invites public to air views through YouTube

Matthew Moore
Telegraph

A House of Lords committee has become the first parliamentary body to invite members of the public to submit their views through YouTube.

The House of Lords Information Committee, which is responsible for raising awareness of the work of the upper chamber, has announced it will accept homemade video evidence as well as written submissions.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Printing Police Lies

George Monbiot
The Guardian

The rightwing press has briefly turned against the police, but normal service will soon resume.

If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who has been twatted by the police. As the tabloids turn their fire onto an unfamiliar target - the unprovoked aggression of Her Majesty’s constabulary - the love affair between the cops and the rightwing press has never been more fragile.

The policing of the G20 protests at the beginning of this month was routine. Policemen hiding their identification numbers and beating up peaceful protesters is as much a part of British life as grey skies and red buses.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

13 things that do not make sense

Michael Brooks
New Scientist

1 The placebo effect

Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Children of broken Britain among least happy in Europe

Steve Doughty
Daily Mail

Children in the UK are among the least wealthy and least happy in Europe, research suggests.

An analysis of lifestyle factors that contribute to their well-being puts British youngsters 24th out of 29 nations - below Estonia, Slovenia and Hungary.

Underage sex, smoking, drinking and drug abuse all play a part in lowering the quality of life for British children.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Strip Search Review Tests Limits of School Drug Policy

Joan Biskupic
USA Today

Eighth-grader Savana Redding was scared and confused when an assistant principal searching for drugs ordered her out of math class, searched her backpack and then instructed an administrative aide and school nurse to conduct a strip search.

"I went into the nurse's office and kept following what they asked me to do," Savana, now 19, recalls of the incident six years ago that she says still leaves her shaken and humiliated. "I thought, 'What could I be in trouble for?' "
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Cancer "Culprits" in Tobacco Smoke Revealed

Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters

Scientists have detected two substances in tobacco smoke that directly cause lung cancer, and they said on Sunday the finding may help one day predict which smokers will develop the disease.

They said people with high concentrations in their urine of a nicotine byproduct called NNAL had double the risk of developing lung cancer compared to smokers with lower NNAL concentrations in their urine.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Too Big to Fail: Ecological Ignorance and Economic Collapse

Chip Ward
TomDispatch.com

"Too big to fail." It's been the mantra of our economic meltdown. Although meant to emphasize the overwhelming importance of this bank or that corporation, the phrase also unwittingly expresses a shared delusion that may be at the root of our current crises - both economic and ecological.

In nature, nothing is too big to fail. In fact, big is bound to fail. To understand why that's so means stepping away from a prevailing set of beliefs that holds us in its sway, especially the deep conviction that we operate apart from nature's limits and rules.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

How Big Pharma Distorts Science to Get FDA Approval for Dangerous Drugs

Martha Rosenberg
AlterNet

How does Big Pharma keep getting dangerous drugs approved? Through the best articles and spokesmen money can buy.

In February the Justice Department charged Forest Laboratories with illegally marketing antidepressants Celexa and Lexapro to younger patients and burying a study that showed suicidal side effects in children. But the very next month the FDA approved Lexapro for depression in adolescents 12 to 17.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Pirates: the $80m Gulf connection

Kim Sengupta and Daniel Howden
independent

Crime syndicates laundering vast sums taken in ransom from ships and their crews hijacked in Horn of Africa

Organised piracy syndicates operating in Dubai and other Gulf states are laundering vast sums of money taken in ransom from vessels hijacked off the Horn of Africa.

Investigators hired by the shipping industry have told The Independent that around $80m (£56m) has been paid out in the past year alone – far more than has previously been admitted.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Nations act to restrict Antarctic tourism 0

Agence France-Presse

U.S. proposals for binding restrictions on Antarctic tourism have been adopted by countries with ties to the region, in a bid to protect the continent’s fragile ecosystem, officials said Friday.

Signatories of the Antarctic Treaty, launched in Washington 50 years ago, capped 11 days of talks in Baltimore, Maryland by agreeing to impose mandatory limits on the size of cruise ships landing in Antarctica and how many passengers they can bring ashore.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

What 420 Means: The True Story Behind Stoners' Favorite Number

Ryan Grim
Huffington Post

Warren Haynes, the Allman Brothers Band guitarist, routinely plays with the surviving members of the Grateful Dead, now touring as The Dead. He's just finished a Dead show in Washington, D.C. and gets a pop quiz from the Huffington Post.

Where does 420 come from?

He pauses and thinks, hands on his side. "I don't know the real origin. I know myths and rumors," he says. "I'm really confused about the first time I heard it. It was like a police code for smoking in progress or something. What's the real story?"
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Paxman to donate brain to charity

Chris Green
Independent

Newsnight presenter's bequest to help fight against Parkinson's disease

During his time as host of University Challenge, Jeremy Paxman has acted as mediator in countless intellectual jousts featuring some of the brightest young minds in the country.

Now the presenter has said he intends to donate his brain to charity when he dies, so that it can be used for medical research into what happens when the brain grows old.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Administration to Take Aim at Credit Card Abuses

Caren Bohan
Reuters

President Barack Obama plans to crack down on deceptive credit-card industry practices that have saddled U.S. consumers with huge debts and soaring interest rates, U.S. officials said on Sunday.

Top White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers said Obama would be "very focused in the very near term on a whole set of issues having to do with credit card abuses."
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Tamil Civilians Slaughtered as Army Shells "No-Fire Zone"

Gethin Chamberlain
The Observer

Hundreds of civilians are being killed or seriously injured in artillery and gun attacks as the Sri Lankan army attempts to finish off the last Tamil Tiger rebels trapped in a shrinking pocket of land.

Injured civilians lucky enough to get out have told of carnage in this so-called "no-fire zone" - a 17 sq km strip of coast where the Tigers are penned in with their backs to the sea.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Tons of Released Drugs Taint US Water

Jeff Donn, Martha Mendoza and Justin Pritchard
The Associated Press

U.S. manufacturers, including major drugmakers, have legally released at least 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water - contamination the federal government has consistently overlooked, according to an Associated Press investigation.

Hundreds of active pharmaceutical ingredients are used in a variety of manufacturing, including drugmaking: For example, lithium is used to make ceramics and treat bipolar disorder; nitroglycerin is a heart drug and also used in explosives; copper shows up in everything from pipes to contraceptives.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

The Bush Administration's Stunning Geneva Hypocrisy

Jason Leopold
Truthout

Newly released US government documents, detailing how Bush administration officials punched legalistic holes in the Geneva Conventions' protections of war captives, stand in stark contrast to the outrage some of the same officials expressed in the first week of the Iraq war when Iraqi TV interviewed several captured American soldiers.

"If there is somebody captured," President George W. Bush told reporters on March 23, 2003, "I expect those people to be treated humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals."
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

How to recycle your CFLs

Shelagh McNally
Green Living Online

Only an environmental choice if you dispose right.

Energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) have to be handled differently that incandescent bulbs. Like other fluorescent lamps, CFLs contain mercury, which can be dangerous to human health and the environment. They should be disposed of properly (so no throwing them into your garbage can).

Minimum mercury

Before you panic, the mercury in CFLs is a small amount (between 1 and 25 milligrams, according to Environment Canada or, on average, 5 milligrams) that has been sealed within glass tubing.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

MPs to examine G20 police tactics as new claims emerge

Paul Lewis
The Guardian

The policing of the G20 protests will be scrutinised by two influential parliamentary committees this week as the continuing fallout from the death of Ian Tomlinson threatens to provoke a crisis in public order policing.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission will today also receive a batch of new complaints about the actions of officers in the City of London on 1 April, compiled from the testimony of legal observers who attended with camcorders. The watchdog is now dealing with the largest number of complaints received in relation to a single policing operation in its history.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Gush Hour: England's commuter-belt oil boom

Nick Harding
Independent

In the verdant valleys of the Home Counties, prospectors have struck black gold – and landowners are cashing in. But not everyone is thrilled.

Peveril Bruce doesn't look like JR Ewing. There's no ten gallon hat, no smug grin and no Cuban heels. Bruce wears the dirty overalls of a dairy farmer and a pair of Wellington boots. But there are two striking similarities between him and the Dallas baddie. The first is oil: Bruce has a well on his land. The second is that if anyone ever shot him, there would be no shortage of suspects.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Robot Wars

Eric Stoner
Indypendent

With little public scrutiny, robotics is quickly revolutionizing not only how war is fought, but who fights in war. While the U.S. military first began to experiment with remote-controlled weapons during World War I, the Pentagon had no robots on the ground when it invaded Iraq in 2003, and only a handful of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air.

Today, according to P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the U.S. military has some 7,000 UAVs in operation — more than double the number of manned aircraft in its arsenal — and more than 12,000 robots on the ground in Iraq alone.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

UN torture investigator: Obama has broken International law

Raw Story

The United Nation’s top torture investigator has suggested it is illegal under International law for President Barack Obama to announce that the United States government has no intention of prosecuting low-level CIA officers who carried out torture sanctioned by the Bush Administration.

President Barack Obama’s release on Thursday of four Bush administration memos sanctioning torture has been widely praised. However, word that government will go so far as to offer a fully-paid legal defense for agents who applied torture techniques to terror war prisoners has triggered loud criticism.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Bone drugs may protect against radiation exposure

Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters

Drugs commonly used to strengthen bones to prevent osteoporosis may protect people exposed to radiation against developing leukemia, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.

They said two compounds in a class of drugs called bisphosphonates delayed and in some cases prevented mice exposed to high doses of radiation from developing leukemia, a common long-term side effect of radiation exposure.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Lawsuits on human rights halve despite European act

Robert Verkaik
Independent

Experts say latest figures counter arguments that the law should be scrapped

Cases taken to court using the Human Rights Act have more than halved in the last eight years, countering claims that the legislation has turned Britain into the compensation capital of the world.

Figures show that human rights legal actions peaked at 714 in 2002, shortly after the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, but have now fallen to a low of 327 cases last year.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Pirate Bay convictions are legally insignificant outside Sweden

OUT-LAW

A court in Sweden has found the co-founders of file-sharing site The Pirate Bay guilty of copyright offences. Each of them has been sentenced to one year in prison. But while the ruling has symbolic significance outside Sweden, it has little legal significance.

Peter Sunde, Carl Lundström, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg said they will appeal today's verdict and the sentence, which includes a fine of 30 million kroner, around £2.4 million. Their site did not host infringing files, it just made it easy to access them. They were charged with being accessories to the breach of copyright laws.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Secret police intelligence was given to E.ON before planned demo

Matthew Taylor and Paul Lewis
The Guardian

Government officials handed confidential police intelligence about environmental activists to the energy giant E.ON before a planned peaceful demonstration, according to private emails seen by the Guardian.

Correspondence between civil servants and security officials at the company reveals how intelligence was shared about the peaceful direct action group Climate Camp in the run-up to the demonstration at Kingsnorth, the proposed site of a new coal-fired power station in north Kent.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Do aliens share our genetic code?

Lewis Dartnell
New Scientist

What similarities will alien life forms have to living things here on Earth? We won't know until we find some, but now there is evidence that at least the basic building blocks will be the same.

All terrestrial life forms share the same 20 amino acids. Biochemists have managed to synthesise 10 of them in experiments that simulate lifeless prebiotic environments, using proxies for lightning, ionising radiation from space, or hydrothermal vents to provide the necessary energy. Amino acids are also found inside meteorites formed before Earth was born.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Doughnut balloon-chute spaceships to reach Mars, Neptune

Lewis Page
The Register

Rocket braking is so retro (cough)

NASA-funded R&D engineers are working on plans for future spaceships to enter orbit around Mars using a doughnut shaped, steerable balloon-chute to slow down by flying through the Red Planet's atmosphere.

Global Aerospace is a Californian firm founded by ex-NASA engineers and in this case funded with NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) money.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

A Healthful Diet? Don’t Forget the Fat

Brie Cadman
Divine Caroline

It used to be that the mere mention of the word fat sent health conscious eaters into retreat mode. Fat was to be avoided at all costs, and the lower the amount one consumed, the better.

Yet as health and weight problems rose simultaneously with the proliferation of goods such as fat-free salad dressings, light cookies, and low-fat peanut butter, it’s come to light that fat, the much maligned macromolecule, doesn’t deserve the reputation it’s been dealt.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Predators starve as we plunder oceans

Geoffrey Lean
Independent

Marine giants go hungry as fleets scoop up their prey for our fish suppers.

Starving sea life – from whales to puffins, tuna to seals – is being found all over the world's oceans, as the food on which it depends is being fished out, startling new evidence shows. And much of the depletion, ironically, is caused by raising captive fish – for the table.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Is It Possible the War on Pot Is on Its Last Legs?

Nathan Comp
In These Times

Marijuana advocates believe legalization is on the horizon.

As a medley of border violence, recessionary pressure, international criticism and popular acceptance steadily undermines America's decades-long effort to eliminate drugs and drug use, the U.S. movement to legalize marijuana is gaining unprecedented momentum.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Internet hampered by lack of trust

Robert McMillan
IDG News Service

Cybercriminals are increasingly exploiting the anonymity of the Internet according to Microsoft's senior security executive, Scott Charney. He said that the Internet needed to become more trustworthy.

In a video posted ahead of Charney's keynote at next week's RSA security conference, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Trustworthy Computing described how anonymity was creating problems for legitimate users. "We need to push back on anonymity and lack of traceability," he said.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

President Obama's New Approach to a New World Order?

Wilmer J. Leon III, Ph.D.
Truthout

On September 11, 1990, President George H.W. Bush (Bush 41) addressed a joint session of Congress with a speech entitled "Toward a New World Order." In this speech he articulated the United States' objectives for post-Cold War global governance in cooperation with post-Soviet states:

"Until now, the world we've known has been a world divided - a world of barbed wire and concrete block, conflict and Cold War. Now, we can see a new world coming into view."
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Shells Hit Baghdad's Green Zone After Three Month Lull

Brian Murphy
The Associated Press

Suspected militants shelled Baghdad's protected Green Zone on Saturday in the first such bombardment in more than three months.

The back-to-back strikes reverberated across the Tigris River to a popular promenade, sending families packing up from fish restaurants and abruptly halting a party at a club.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

IPCC chairman calls for public order debate

PA

The head of the police complaints watchdog is calling for a national debate on how officers maintain public order after revealing nearly 90 complaints had been received about the use of force at the G20 protests.

Nick Hardwick, chairman of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), said he had "serious concerns" about front-line supervision of officers at this month's demonstrations.

He also said police needed to remember that they were "servants, not masters" of the people.
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Tuesday April 21, 2009

Twitter worm author gets security job

John Leyden
The Register

Teen causes chaos, employed, hacked

The self-confessed author of the recent Twitter worm has scored a potentially lucrative job doing security analysis and web development work.

Michael "Mikeyy" Mooney, a 17 year-old student from Brooklyn, New York, created a worm that exploited cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in a ham-fisted attempt to promote a site he ran, called StalkDaily. The worm created thousands of automated tweets and spawned a number of copy-cat attacks.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Inexpensive Satellite Bandwidth under Development

Janice Karin
TFOT

A team of researchers funded by the European Union has developed methods for optimizing satellite bandwidth, potentially dropping the combined cost of satellite phone, television, and internet services to as little as 50 Euros a month.

The Integrated Multi-layer Optimization in broadband DVB-S.2 Satellite Networks (IMOSAN) project focuses on getting the most out of existing resources and creating a wireless interface to the satellite network in order to distribute the satellite bandwidth to the largest number of consumers possible.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

The BNP’s breakthrough

Matthew Goodwin and Robert Ford
New Statesman

Observations on Brussels

When the votes are tallied after the elections for the European Parliament in June there is a good chance that British voters will, for the first time, have sent a representative of the British National Party (BNP) to Brussels. Across the political spectrum, many continue to condemn the BNP as a racist and neo-fascist organisation, considering its supporters “knuckle-dragging scum” (Richard Littlejohn) or “ignoramuses and bigots” (Yasmin Alibhai-Brown).

Such simplistic stereotypes provide a comforting image of the BNP as a lunatic fringe that may score a few upsets in council by-elections but will never be a serious force in mainstream politics.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Revealed: Government helpline tells children 'cannabis is safer than alcohol'

Julie Henry
Telegraph

Children calling the Government's drugs helpline are being told that cannabis is safer than alcohol and that ecstasy will not damage their health, an investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has found.

Advisers manning the “Frank” helpline are informing callers they believed to be children as young as 13 that alcohol is a “much more powerful drug than cannabis” and that using the illegal drug recreationally is not harmful because it “doesn’t get you that high”.

Callers are also being told that taking ecstasy will not lead to long-term damage and that if they are in doubt, to “just take half a pill and if you are handling that OK, you can take the other half.”
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Sunday April 19, 2009

17 More Images You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped

Joe Russo
Cracked.com

This is the fourth installment of our series where we prove that sometimes, real life is stranger than Photoshop (see Part One, Part Two and Part Three).

So enjoy our continuing chronicle of jaw-dropping pics that make you shout "FAKE!" the moment you see them, but in fact are not. Even if, in some cases, we really wish they were ...
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Wall Street wounded Ghana. IMF tonic could hurt it more

Polly Toynbee
The Guardian

Small but steady growth has been undermined by a banking crisis far away. Now is a test of whether G20 aid will really help

In the leafy shade of the tree at the heart of Mangoase village, 50 women sat fanning themselves with their pass books, feeding babies, waiting their turn. Each approached the table to add the equivalent of a dollar or two to their savings or to pay back a small loan that had launched life-changing businesses.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Football lottery scam targets UK punters

John Leyden
The Register

Big Cup con

Fans of Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United are being targeted in a new email scam that attempts to trick recipients into sending premium rate text-messages in the hope of winning non-existent Champions League final ticket prizes.

The ruse promises entry in a draw for a chance of a seat at the Stadio Olimpico on 27 May but promises only to empty fans' pockets, net security firm BitDefender warns. The Champions League and similarly-themed Uefa Cup scam are aimed at mobile subscribers and began circulating earlier this week, before Liverpool and Manchester City were knocked out of the competitions.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Harry's illegal 'rave' with Hardcore Sisters

Keri Sutherland, Amanda Perthen and Daniel Boffey
Daily Mail

Prince Harry faces fresh questions over his judgment after he attended an illegal rave party in a rundown office block.

Senior Royal sources have confirmed that the Prince was at the dilapidated venue in East London.

He was there to celebrate the birthday of Davina Harbord, the sister of 27-year-old Astrid Harbord with whom he has been romantically linked in recent weeks.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

HopeOver, HopeLash, HopeBreak: A Lexicon of Disappointment

Naomi Klein
Huffington Post

I was a bit concerned about posting my latest column on Huffington Post, for obvious reasons. But I have decided to do it anyway, in the hopes that HuffPo readers will submit additions and modifications to the Lexicon of Disappointment. Or, alternatively, just yell about how wrong I am.

I await the verdict…

All is not well in Obamafanland. It’s not clear exactly what accounts for the change of mood. Maybe it was the rancid smell emanating from Treasury’s latest bank bailout. Or the news that the president’s chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, earned millions from the very Wall Street banks and hedge funds he is protecting from reregulation now. Or perhaps it began earlier, with Obama’s silence during Israel’s Gaza attack.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

British intelligence prosecution fear over US torture memos

Michael Evans
London Times

Fresh revelations about the CIA’s torture techniques have thrown the spotlight on British Intelligence, which gained valuable insight into terror networks from confessions extracted by American officers. They have raised further fears that British agents could be prosecuted for their indirect role in the abuse of detainees.

Documents declassified this week by the Obama Administration – four US Justice Department memos authorising “harsh interrogation” – show that the CIA based more than 3,000 intelligence reports on the questioning of “high-value” terror suspects from September 11 2001 to April 2003.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Another Ethanol Producer Goes Bust

Robert Bryce
Counterpunch

The recurring lesson emerging from the corn ethanol scam is this: too many mandates and subsidies are probably worse than none at all. Evidence of that can be found by looking at Aventine Renewable Energy Holdings, the Illinois-based ethanol producer. Last week, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, saying it had $799.5 million in assets and nearly $491 million in debts.

Aventine, which has production capacity of 207 million gallons of ethanol per year, operates plants in Illinois and Nebraska. And Aventine’s bankruptcy won’t be the last in the ethanol sector.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Obama administration breaks with the years of 'climate change denial'

Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guradian

The Obama administration took a bold first step towards limiting the gases that cause global warming today after formally declaring that such emissions are a danger to public health.

The official finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that carbon dioxide and five other gases threaten public welfare sets the stage for regulation of emissions from coal-fired power plants, and for forcing US car manufacturers to make cleaner and more fuel efficient vehicles.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

The jousting accident that turned Henry VIII into a tyrant

Michael McCarthy
Independent

Medical study uncovers turning point in king's life.

Henry VIII became the tyrannical monster remembered by history because of a personality change following a serious jousting accident, according to a new historical documentary.

After the accident – just before he became estranged from the second of his six wives, Anne Boleyn – the king, once sporty and generous, became cruel, vicious and paranoid, his subjects began talking about him in a new way, and the turnover of his wives speeded up.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Fermenting Change

Anne Dailey
Last Exit Magazine

Homemade sauerkraut is suddenly in vogue. For some, it’s the gateway to a fundamental shift in the way we think about food.

In the food world, revolutions tend to come in the same few forms: newer, bigger, and faster. There was the advent of McDonald’s drive-thru, the invention of the microwave oven, Earl Butz’s suggestion that farmers “Get Big or Get Out”, the arrival of GMO seed and farm machines the size of houses.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Suicides on the Rise as Japan's Economy Falters

Wieland Wagner
Spiegel Online

The technology-export powerhouse of Japan has been hard-hit by the global economic downturn. It's all too reminiscent of the nation's last crisis, which ended only in 2002 -- only this time, the misery isn't homegrown.

The man was lying fully clothed on the bed in his apartment in Osaka. He looked peaceful, as if asleep. His skin was dark gray. He'd been lying there for about a month, but no one had missed him. The doctors who performed the autopsy were astonished to find that his stomach was almost empty. The man had starved to death.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Space sail could bring used rockets back to Earth

Paul Marks
New Scientist

The risk to spacecraft from a collision with space debris could be reduced by equipping launchers with a gossamer-thin "sail". The idea is to deploy the sail after the rocket has released its payload to amplify the drag of the last vestiges of the atmosphere, and so force the rocket out of orbit.

Rocket stages are a particular risk to spacecraft because they often contain large amounts of unused fuel, which can explode when sunlight heats the tank.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Shunned Belarus handed invitation from EU

Andrei Makhovsky
independent

Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, long shunned in the West, was handed an invitation yesterday to attend an EU summit with former Soviet republics in Prague next month, his foreign minister said.

It was not certain whether Lukashenko, who has faced accusations in the West of crushing fundamental rights, would attend the Eastern Partnership summit in Prague in person – possibly embarrassing EU leaders – or send someone else.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Curb Aids and HIV by decriminalising drugs, say experts

Mary O'Hara
The Observer

The use of illicit drugs must be decriminalised if efforts to halt the spread of Aids are to succeed, one of the world's leading independent authorities on the disease has warned.

In an unprecedented attack on global drugs policy, Michele Kazatchkine, head of the influential Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, has told the Observer that, without a radical overhaul of laws that lead to hundreds of thousands of drug users being imprisoned or denied access to safe treatment, the millions of pounds spent on fighting HIV and Aids will be wasted.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

The Shipping News

Michael Winship
Truthout

If you're looking for signs of the Apocalypse - and who isn't? - here's a good one. There's an uptick in ark building.

You heard me. According to The Wall Street Journal, that Bible of the Financially Bilious, Hong Kong's billionaire Kwok brothers are in the final stages of constructing the world's first full-size replica of Noah's Ark - 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. "Just the answer," the Journal reports, "for the rising waters threatening the global economy."
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Sunday April 19, 2009

In black and white, the 'torture' files

Robert Verkaik
Independent

The release of Justice Department memos authorising the mistreatment of terror suspects has caused a storm. Robert Verkaik examines a manual that gave US interrogators licence to abuse their enemies

Italics indicate taken from CIA document.

1. As we understand it, Zubaydah is one of the highest-ranking members of the al-Qa'ida terrorist organization, with which the United States is currently engaged in an international armed conflict following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11 2001.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Amazon UK ditches Phorm snoopware

Paul Meller
IDG News Service

Amazon.co.uk has opted out of the Webwise deep packet inspection system being used by BT to target online advertising, the on-line store has said.

Webwise, developed by UK company Phorm, tracks people's browsing habits via cookies and relays the information to the Internet service provider.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Obama's Immunity For CIA Agents Still Leaves Prosecutions of Senior Bushies on the Table

Ali Frick
Think Progress

Yesterday, as he released four Bush-era legal memos authorizing the torture of terrorist suspects, President Obama made it clear he would not support any prosecutions of low-level interrogators who actually carried out Bush’s policies.

“[I]t is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Reversal of post-mortem result piles pressure on the Met

Mark Hughes
Independent

The police officer who pushed Ian Tomlinson to the ground before his death at the G20 protests is facing a manslaughter charge after a second post-mortem examination revealed that the newspaper vendor died of an abdominal haemorrhage and not a heart attack.

Mr Tomlinson died after being struck and pushed to the ground by a police officer. A post-mortem examination ruled that he died of a heart attack, but after amateur footage appeared on the internet showing Mr Tomlinson being thrown to the ground by a police officer minutes before his death, a further post-mortem examination was carried out.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Four convicted in Pirate Bay file-sharing trial

Karl Ritter
Associated Press

Four men behind popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay were convicted today of breaking Sweden's copyright law by helping millions of users freely download music, movies and computer games on the internet.

In a landmark ruling, the Stockholm district court sentenced Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Carl Lundstrom to one year each in prison.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Sex Pot

Josey Vogels
My Messy Bedroom

Marijuana has been used as an aphrodisiac for thousands of years. The ancient Indian Ayurvedic medicine systems used cannabis to increase libido, produce long-lasting erections, delay ejaculation, facilitate lubrication and loosen inhibitions.

Some Tantric sex practitioners drink a substance called bhang, a sort of spiced marijuana milkshake to enhance the sexual experience. According to one source, Indian prostitutes eat bhang sherbet to help them feel sexually aroused. In 19th century Serbia, female virgins were given mixtures of lamb’s fat and cannabis on their wedding night to make sex less painful.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

'A Ton More People Were Wiretapped Than We've Been Led to Believe': FBI Whistleblower Thomas Tamm

Liliana Segura
AlterNet

The man who blew the lid off Bush's spying program believes more details on government spying must, and will, come to light.

This week the New York Times revealed that the National Security Agency has continued spying on Americans well into the Obama era, with government officials listening in on phone conversations and monitoring e-mails on a massive scale.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Human Body Parts

Dahr Jamail
Truthout

In Iraq, time leaves bloody marks upon each day of the ongoing US occupation. The policies of the Obama administration, adopted from the Bush administration, continue to wreak their havoc on the Iraqi people.

The US-created al-Sahwa (Sons of Iraq), a Sunni militia comprised mostly of former resistance fighters and even some members of al-Qaeda, that grew to 100,000 in number, now threatens to fade back into the shadows in order to resume anti-occupation resistance operations against the US military and Iraqi government security forces.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

High energy sports drinks boost performance even if you spit them out

Ian Sample
The Gurdian

Cyclists recorded faster times in a trial when they rinsed their mouths out with the carbohydrate drinks but didn't swallow

Sports drinks can boost athletic performance even if they are spat out and not swallowed, scientists have found.

Cyclists who took part in a time trial recorded significantly faster times if they periodically rinsed their mouths with an energy drink throughout the event, researchers said.

The same group of cyclists failed to perform any better when they swilled a placebo drink laced with an artificial sweetener.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Forests could become source of CO2 0

Agence France-Presse

Forests that today soak up a quarter of carbon pollution spewed into the atmosphere could soon become a net source of CO2 if Earth’s surface warms by another two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), cautions a report to be presented Friday at the UN.

Plants both absorb and exhale carbon dioxide, but healthy forests—especially those in the tropics—take up far more of the greenhouse gas than they give off. When they are damaged, get sick or die, that stored carbon is released.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Bribery – the key to better public health

Jeremy Laurance
Independent

Survey reveals the scale of financial incentives offered by health services

Obese patients in Kent are being paid up to £425 to lose weight by the NHS in a trial to test whether financial incentives can be used to change unhealthy behaviour. In Essex, pregnant women who smoke are being offered up to £60 in food vouchers on the NHS if they give up. Payments are made after one week, one month and one year.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

The Need to Tax the Wealthy

Dean Baker
The Economist

The quest to increase taxes on the wealthy is not a gratuitous attack on upper income households; it is driven by the need to raise more revenue to run the government.

While many deficit hawks been irresponsible in raising fears of an impending collapse of the American government, the projected deficits for years following the recovery are in fact larger than is desirable.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Plan for Palestinian State Is "Dead End," Israel Tells US

Dion Nissenbaum
McClatchy Newspapers

Jerusalem - In a direct challenge to President Barack Obama's commitment to rejuvenate moribund Mideast peace talks, Israel on Thursday dismissed American-led efforts to establish a Palestinian state and laid out new conditions for renewed negotiations.

Leaders of Israel's hawkish new government told former Maine Sen. George Mitchell, the special U.S. envoy, that they aren't going to rush into peace talks with their Palestinian neighbors.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Bug puts Macs at risk from Windows hack

Gregg Keizer
Computerworld (US)

It's the Mac users' worst nightmare; a software bug that could lead to their machines being attacked by Windows. According to security researcher, a bug in VMware's Fusion virtualisation software could be used to run malicious code on a Mac by exploiting Windows in a virtual machine.

VMware has released Fusion 2.0.4 to plug the hole.

Kostya Kortchinsky, an exploit researcher at Immunity, said a critical vulnerability in VMware's virtual machine display function could be used to read and write memory on the "host" operating system - the OS running the physical hardware.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Sea Levels Are Rising: It's Time to Decide Which Coastal Cities Are Worth Saving

Scott Thill
AlterNet

Ice cubes the size of American states are melting into the ocean; we face frightening scenarios and tough choices for coastal habitation.

Since April Fool's Day expired, there has been nothing but bad news about Earth's various ice shelves circulating through the news. Antarctica's Wordie and Larsen ice shelves? The first is simply gone, and the second is disappearing fast. How about the Connecticut-sized Wilkins shelf? It has fragmented into polar pieces after the ice tether holding it to the Antarctic peninsula snapped this week, signaling that the Earth is undergoing some profound changes.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Police delete London tourists' photos 'to prevent terrorism'

Matthew Weaver and Vikram Dodd
The Guardian

Austrian tourist who photographed bus and Tube stations says 'nasty incident' has put him off returning to London

Like most visitors to London, Klaus Matzka and his teenage son Loris took several photographs of some of the city's sights, including the famous red double-decker buses. More unusually perhaps, they also took pictures of the Vauxhall bus station, which Matzka regards as "modern sculpture".
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Sunday April 19, 2009

Councils told to stop abusing secret cameras

Independent

Councils are to be stopped from misusing covert surveillance powers to spy on litterbugs and dog owners, under new controls outlined by the Home Secretary today.

The crackdown follows a series of embarrassing cases in which local authorities were found to have targeted members of public with secret cameras and undercover officers.
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Sunday April 19, 2009

NHS in move to stem data breaches

John E. Dunn
Techworld

The UK has made a start at shedding its reputation as a data breach hotspot with the news that 100 hospitals are to start using encrypted USB sticks from Swedish company BlockMaster.

In one of the biggest public sector procurements ever announced for secure USB sticks, BlockMaster's UK distributor Softek will install 100,000 ‘SafeStick' drives in tandem with the SafeConsole management system over the next two years.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Engineers set to convert carbon dioxide into solid rock

David Adam
The Guardian

Icelandic experts hope to dispose of 30,000 tonnes of the greenhouse gas each year

Engineers in Iceland are set to convert carbon dioxide to solid rock as a way to tackle global warming.

The experts want to exploit the country's volcanic origins to dispose of up to 30,000 tonnes of the greenhouse gas each year. They expect the gas to react with layers of volcanic rocks deep beneath the surface to form minerals that will lock the carbon pollution away for millions of years.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

US Asked to Stop "False Information" on Medical Pot

Carol J. Williams and Maura Dolan
The Los Angeles Times

Advocacy group tells the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that the government needs to update the official view of marijuana to reflect its use as a pain reliever.

San Francisco and Los Angeles - Citing "overwhelming" evidence that marijuana eases pain and anxiety for the chronically ill, medicinal pot advocates told a federal appeals panel Tuesday that the federal government should be stopped from spreading "false information" about marijuana.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Obama Targets Mexican Cartels

Spencer S. Hsu
The Washington Post

Sanctions imposed; US firms warned.

President Obama yesterday ratcheted up efforts to curb the flow of drugs and guns across the southern border, imposing financial sanctions against three of the most violent Mexican drug cartels and threatening to prosecute Americans who do business with them.

On the eve of his summit with Mexican President Felipe Calderón today, Obama added the cartels to the list of banned foreign "drug kingpins," a move that empowers the federal government to seize their assets, estimated to be in the billions of dollars.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Microbes that 'breathe iron' are found in Antarctic

Steve Connor
Independent

Unique organisms have developed from more than a million years in isolation

A community of microbes that have lived cut off from the rest of the world for more than 1.5 million years has been discovered beneath a vast glacier in the Antarctic.

The organisms have survived in total darkness on nothing but the minerals and long-decayed organic matter that were also trapped at the base of the glacier. Instead of breathing oxygen, they have learnt to "breathe" iron to produce energy.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Spain Rejects US "Torture" Probe

BBC News

Spain's attorney general has rejected an attempt to bring a criminal case against six former US officials over torture allegations at Guantanamo Bay.

The officials, including former US attorney general Alberto Gonzalez, were accused of giving a legal justification for torture at the US detention centre.

But Candido Conde-Pumpido said the case had "no merit" as they were not present when the alleged abuse took place.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

UN Nuclear Inspectors Quit North Korea

Agence France-Presse

UN nuclear inspectors left North Korea Thursday after the hardline communist state ordered them out and announced plans to restart production of weapons-grade plutonium.

The inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) arrived in Beijing but declined to comment to reporters.

A separate four-member US team which had been monitoring the North's disablement of its Yongbyon nuclear complex was also preparing to leave after being ordered out, the State Department said.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

iWork Trojan may be turning Macs into zombies

Dan Moren
Macworld.com

Mac users are threatened by something that has previously been the preserve of Windows machines. Researchers claim to have discovered the first Mac zombie botnet in existence and have published a paper in Virus Bulletin (subscription required).

The botnet stems from a Trojan horse embedded in a iWork '09 trial version that was making the rounds on file-sharing networks. The risk first came to light in January when security firm Intego warned of the potential threat hidden in the files.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Space, the final frontier … and California's latest source of low-carbon electricity

Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian

It sounds like an idea drawn from the wilder shores of science fiction: a set of solar panels in outer space that would beam enough clean energy back to Earth to power half a million homes and could one day potentially help save the planet.

But a leading American power company is hoping to turn the stuff of speculative fiction into reality by supporting a project that would put solar panels into orbit.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

This rampant executive must be brought under control

Independent

The power grab of the past decade urgently needs to be reversed

This has been a week to provoke uncomfortable contemplation about the sort of country we are we now living in. We have learned that the Home Secretary, aided by civil servants, grossly exaggerated the security threat posed by a leak from her department, prompting the police to arrest an opposition MP. The Government has conceded that the surveillance powers it granted to local councils have been used to spy on innocent members of the public.

And yesterday it emerged that Ian Tomlinson, who was assaulted by a police officer at the G20 protests in London earlier this month died not from a heart attack but abdominal bleeding. The common imprint on each of these stories is that of the unaccountable and rampant executive arm of the British state.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Pornocalypse Now

Douglas Haddow
Adbusters

It’s in a fog of fake fucking that man is sleepwalking toward an abyss.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”—George Orwell

Now that Gitmo is basically kaput and Bush’s war on the future has been replaced with Obama’s strategy for the present, is Orwell’s forewarning still relevant? Or has the real-world manifestation of the Orwellian already reached its peak and entered into decline?

Let me entertain you with a fantastic scenario – If Orwell had been born in 1984 rather than 1903, he would be a member of a subset of young men whose lives have been framed by two critical shifts in the mental landscape: the collapse of the global superpowers (USSR/US) and the rise of the pornography industry.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

U.S.: Early Friction with New Israeli Govt

Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service

If the past week was any indication, the U.S.-Israeli relationship, which could scarcely have been smoother during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush, appears headed for choppy waters.

Since taking office 10 days ago, the new government headed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been slapped down – at least, rhetorically – by the two most senior members of the Barack Obama administration, including the president himself.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

A shopping mall becomes a city

Lisa Selin Davis
Grist

The poor shopping mall. That once impenetrable fortress now seems as susceptible to the ailing economy as the rest of us. Vacancies are at an all-time high. Dead and dying malls continue to plague the landscape.

And, perhaps worst of all, the mall has transformed from an icon of American life—see Fast Times at Ridgemont High—to a scourge, a symbol of the poor judgment of developers and the government policies that supported them. The mall, at this point, is not only unsustainable, it’s downright unfashionable, and not just for urban planning aficionados; regular old mall-loving Americans are abandoning it, too.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

EGYPT: Where World War II Now Targets the Indigenous

Cam McGrath
Inter Press Service

It has been more than 65 years since the guns fell silent, but the World War II desert battlefields where Allied forces defeated Rommel's Afrika Corps are still claiming lives. Each year the casualty count grows, as Bedouins planting crops, herding livestock and collecting scrap metal are killed or maimed by rusting landmines and munitions hidden beneath the baking sands of Egypt's North West Coast.

More than 670 Egyptians have been killed and 7,500 injured by landmines in this underdeveloped region during the last 20 years, according to the Landmines Struggle Centre (LSC), a Cairo-based NGO that collects data on mine victims. "There are dozens of casualties every year, most of which go unreported," said Sami Abada, the centre's director.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Big Pharma's Thalidomide Drug was Actually Developed as Nazi Chemical Weapon (Today It's Used as Chemotherapy)

David Gutierrez
Natural News

The notorious drug thalidomide, which produced birth defects in the children of women who were prescribed it as a treatment for morning sickness, appears to have been developed by Nazi concentration camp doctors as a nerve gas antidote.

"It is now appearing increasingly likely that thalidomide was the last war crime of the Nazis," said Martin Johnson, director of the Thalidomide Trust and author of one of the papers.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

£5,000 incentive to buy electric cars

Independent

The Government wants to give grants to consumers to buy electric cars like the G-Wiz

Consumers could receive incentives of between £2,000 and £5,000 to buy an electric car from 2011, the Government announced today.

Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon said the initiative — part of the Government’s low-carbon transport plan — would mean an electric car was “a real option for motorists”.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Exclusive: Ethiopia/USA/Somali pirates’ cover-up

Thomas C. Mountain
Online Journal

One of the best kept secrets in the international media these days is the link between the USA, Ethiopia and the Somali pirates. First, a little reliable background from someone on the ground in the Horn of Africa.

The Somali pirates operate out of the Ethiopian and USA created enclaves in Somalia calling themselves Somaliland and Puntland. These Ethiopian and USA backed warlord controlled territories have for many years hosted Ethiopian military bases, which have been greatly expanded recently by the addition of thousands of Ethiopian troops who were driven out of southern and central Somali by the Somali resistance to the Ethiopian invasion.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Drug Traffickers Move Underwater

John Otis
GlobalPost.com

"Semi-submersibles" become the transportation of choice for drug smugglers.

Only a few years ago tales of traffickers plying the underseas world aboard cocaine-laden submarines struck anti-drug agents as a Jules Verne fantasy.

Not anymore.

Today, smugglers are moving tons of drugs towards the United States in so-called "semi-submersibles," homemade vessels that travel just below the ocean's surface and cover distances of up to 2,000 miles.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Lehman Brothers Sitting on a Stockpile of Uranium "Yellowcake"

Andrew Clark
The Guardian

The rump of the bankrupt bank Lehman Brothers is sitting on a stockpile of 450,000 lb of uranium "yellowcake" which could be used to power a nuclear reactor or, theoretically, to make a bomb.

Lehman's potentially explosive asset is a hangover from a commodities trading contract undertaken before the Wall Street bank went bust in September. The substance, yellowcake, is a solid form of mined uranium which is yet to be enriched.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

U.S. Mercenaries to UN: Stop Using the Word 'Mercenary' in Your Investigation into Mercenaries

Jeremy Scahill
AlterNet

The U.S. mercenary trade association asks the UN to join its rebranding campaign.

The latest episode of "Total Makeover: Make Me a More Huggable Mercenary" is just too precious to pass up. As observers of the rise of private paramilitary forces, like Blackwater/Xe (Bush's thugs) and Triple Canopy (Obama's hired guns) know, the mercenary industry has its very own trade association, with the warm and fuzzy Orwellian name, the International Peace Operations Association.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Slide Show: 7 Myths about Pregnancy

Coco Ballantyne
Scientific American

A look at the science (or lack thereof) behind prenatal wives' tale
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Nurse struck off over secret BBC filming

Harriet Alexander
Press Association

Nurse Margaret Haywood was struck off the register with immediate effect today after secretly filming for a BBC Panorama programme exposing neglect of elderly patients in a hospital.

Ms Haywood, 58, recorded appalling conditions at the Royal Sussex Hospital in Brighton for a BBC documentary screened in July 2005.

She said: "I was convinced that it was the right thing to do at the time as, in fact, I had reported the issues and nothing had been done.

"I felt I owed it to the people on the ward."
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Somali Piracy and American Foreign Policy

Rebecca Macaux and Philip Primeau
Counterpunch

With the explosion of Somali piracy, America is reaping what it has sown. In many ways, we have nobody to blame but ourselves for the emergence of high-seas crime threatening to disrupt important lanes of trade.

America’s support for a violent strongman during Somalia’s formative post-colonial years hindered the development of stable political institutions and severely complicated its capacity for effective self-rule and sustainable growth.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Transformers: Protecting pedestrians from killer cars

Nic Fleming
New Scientist

Pity the poor pedestrian. While vehicle drivers and their passengers are cocooned in a crash, people hit by a car have no such protection. Now that could change, thanks to a variety of systems that when built into a vehicle will improve a pedestrian's chances.

Every month approximately 3400 people are killed in traffic accidents on the roads in the US, and a similar number die in Europe. Some 30 per cent of the injuries sustained by this group are caused by an impact with a windscreen or its frame.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Protest over G20 police tactics

AFP

Protestors will be gathering outside Scotland Yard on Thursday voicing their dissent over police tactics during the G20 demonstrations in London.

The police already under fire over the death of a man caught up in a G20 demonstration early this month, said they have suspended an officer who was filmed apparently hitting a woman at the protest.

In the amateur video, posted on YouTube, a line of police officers faces an angry crowd. One officer pushes back a shouting female protester, and when she refuses to back off, hits her on the leg with a baton.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Man Detained As Terror Suspect For Photographing Police Car

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com

Chairman of park society wanted to document police misconduct, but was told he had breached Section 44 of the Terrorism Act

Despite police claiming that an ambiguous section of the UK Counter Terrorism Act of 2008 would not outlaw taking photographs or film of police, a man was detained as a terror suspect this week simply for taking a photograph of a police car in order to document police misconduct.

62-year-old Malcolm Sleath, who is chairman of his local park society, saw a police car driving erratically down a North London park footpath, despite the fact that by law police are supposed to investigate on foot in such circumstances.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Carbon Cap and Trade

Heather Williams and Paul Baker
Counterpunch

How Wall Street Will Game the Regs and Trash the Planet

Every year, sometime around July 15th, the good people of Staunton, Illinois gather by the Staunton Senior High School for what has become an annual point of pride for the community, as flocks of bicyclists from around the country gather at the starting line to begin a 30-mile road race.

The course scenery is pleasant but unremarkable, winding through cornfields and gallery forests in the hilly farm country of southern Illinois. What brings hundreds of competitors here every year is the competition’s unusual mechanism for tabulating individual scores.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Rocktastic: How Guitar Hero brought stardom to the masses

Tim Walker
Independent

Guitar Hero is not just a video game phenomenon – it's changing the way we listen to music, and reshaping the record industry.

If you'd been living in the woods for the last 10 years and needed a quick pop cultural primer to bring you up to date, you could do worse than watch the new video by Eminem, for his single "We Made You". There's Sarah Palin, enjoying the attentions of the Village People's Alaskan chapter. There's the rapper dressed as Mr Spock, in anticipation of this summer's blockbuster Star Trek remake. There's Lindsay Lohan and Sam Ronson. There's Amy Winehouse.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Red Meat or Chicken? Why It's Wise to Stay Away from Both

Kathy Freston
AlterNet

Cutting out red meat while still eating chicken doesn't address the fact that the industrial model for raising both is very bad for the environment.

Nicholas Kristof's column on Wednesday discusses the recent work by animal activists on behalf of chickens and pigs, and the degree to which "animal rights are now firmly on the mainstream ethical agenda" in the United States, as they have been for some years in Europe.

I am delighted to see from Mr. Kristof yet another thoughtful essay about a moral issue that is, until recently, not widely discussed, and even more pleased that in discussing the cruelties of modern intensive farms, he is focusing on birds.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Honeybees in Danger

Evaggelos Vallianatos
Truthout

When I was teaching at Humboldt State University in northern California 20 years ago, I invited a beekeeper to talk to my students. He said that each time he took his bees to southern California to pollinate other farmers' crops, he would lose a third of his bees to sprays. In 2009, the loss ranges all the way to 60 percent.

Honeybees have been in terrible straits.

A little history explains this tragedy.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Asteroids won't raise killer waves - but mind the splash

David Shiga
New Scientist

The odds of encountering a tsunami kicked up by an asteroid strike have just plummeted. Best to hope, though, that you're not underneath the almighty splash such an impact could create.

Small impactors hit us far more frequently than larger ones: a 200-metre asteroid hits Earth about every 10,000 years on average, while 10-kilometre objects like the one that probably killed off the dinosaurs strike every 100 million years.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

'We Have to Save, Save, Save'

Spiegel International

The world could run out of oil in 20 years. This grim scenario is not the prediction of environmentalists, but of Michel Mallet, the general manager of French energy giant Total's German operations. In an interview, Mallet calls for radical reduction of gas consumption and a tax on aviation fuel.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Total earned profits of close to €14 billion ($18.5 billion) in 2008, a record in French economic history. Aren't you affected by the recession?

Mallet: Yes, we are. Our revenues are closely tied to the oil price, which has fallen. We are experiencing a slight decline at the moment. But we are in better shape than other industries. You can put off buying a car, but you need to fill up on a regular basis.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Japan's silver surfers, shoppers (& porn stars)

David McNeill
Independent

The oldest population on the planet has a whole district designed just for them – the Tokyo suburb of Sugamo.

It takes roughly 17 minutes to traverse Tokyo's generation gap. In the city's youth mecca of Harajuku, goths, lolitas, rockers and young fashionistas help fill out a shopping landscape crowded with boutiques and brand-name franchises. Nine stops later on the Yamanote loop railway line in Sugamo, the river of human traffic turns greyer and slower as it files past shops selling thermal underwear, hearing aids and orthopaedic socks.
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Saturday April 18, 2009

Organised crime behind worst cyber-attacks

Brad Reed
Network World (US)

A new study from Verizon Business claims that organised crime is responsible for a large increase in the number of breached corporate electronic records, which totalled roughly 285 million last year.

According to the study, which Verizon Business compiled using data from the 90 confirmed corporate network breaches it recorded last year, roughly 93 percent of all records breached came from the financial sector. The company also says that nine out every 10 of these breaches involved "groups identified by law enforcement as engaged in organised crime."
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Saturday April 18, 2009

If the U.S. is Closing Gitmo, Why is the Pentagon Recruiting New Lawyers to Defend its Detentions?

Willam Fisher
Inter Press Service

The Pentagon is offering $39,407 to $130,211 a year for lawyers to respond to habeas corpus petitions filed by detainees in federal courts.

U.S. President Barack Obama has ordered the Navy’s prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by next January, suspended military commission trials, and assigned Attorney General Eric Holder to conduct case-by-case reviews of the 241 prisoners still detained there to determine which ones should be prosecuted, released or sent to other countries.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Aid Rots Outside Gaza

Erin Cunningham
Inter Press Service

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of aid intended for the Gaza Strip is piling up in cities across Egypt's North Sinai region, despite recent calls from the United Nations to ease aid flow restrictions to the embattled territory in the wake of Operation Cast Lead.

Food, medicine, blankets, infant food and other supplies for Gaza's 1.5 million people, coming from governments and non-governmental agencies around the world, are being stored in warehouses, parking lots, stadiums and on airport runways across Egypt's North Sinai governorate.
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Friday April 17, 2009

MP attacks 'SAS-style' tactics used by police against environmental protesters

Independent

A Nottinghamshire MP has criticised police for using "SAS-style" tactics during an operation to arrest more than 100 environmental activists before they had even begun protesting.

Eco-campaigners and civil liberty groups have questioned the circumstances surrounding the mass arrests, thought to be the largest single pre-emptive raid on a group of demonstrators in British history.
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Friday April 17, 2009

CIA Documents Shine Light on Secretive Air America

Jeff Carlton
The Associated Press

Former naval aviator Don Boecker isn't too proud to say he was scared out of his wits on that July 1965 day in Laos when he dangled by one arm from a helicopter while enemy soldiers took aim below.

Boecker had spent the longest night of his life in the thick jungle, evading capture and certain execution while awaiting rescue. The Navy aviator had ejected after a bomb he intended to drop on the Ho Chi Minh trail exploded prematurely.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Internet privacy: Britain in the dock

Nick Clark and Robert Verkaik
Independent

'Big Brother' state comes under fire as European Commission launches inquiry into secret surveillance of web users

Britain's failure to protect its citizens from secret surveillance on the internet is to be investigated by the European Commission.

The move will fuel claims that Britain is sliding towards a Big Brother state and could end with the Government being forced to defend its policy on internet privacy in front of judges in Europe.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Germany Bans Cultivation of GM Corn

Spiegel International

Germany has banned the cultivation of GM corn, claiming that MON 810 is dangerous for the environment. But that argument might not stand up in court and Berlin could face fines totalling millions of euros if American multinational Monsanto decides to challenge the prohibition on its seed.

The sowing season may be just around the corner, but this year German farmers will not be planting gentically modified crops: German Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner announced Tuesday she was banning the cultivation of GM corn in Germany.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Spam is helping to kill the planet says McAfee

Sumner Lemon
IDG News Service

Spam is not only clogging up our mailboxes, it's also a significant contributor to global warming, according to a report from McAfee.

"When you look at it from an individual user perspective you're only talking about 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide per spam message," said Dave Marcus, director of security research and communications at McAfee's Avert Lab. "When you extrapolate the math out to the larger numbers, it definitely is significant."
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Friday April 17, 2009

Utah Finds Surprising Benefits in Four-Day Workweek

Jenny Brundin
NPR News

Last summer, amid surging gas prices, Utah became the first state in the nation to mandate a four-day workweek for state employees.

A recent assessment of the program by state planners found the expected energy cost savings haven't materialized, but there have been unexpected boosts to productivity and worker satisfaction.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Guerrilla girl power: Have America's feminist artists sold out?

Guy Adams
Independent

Have America's most famous feminist artists finally sold out to the establishment?

After a quarter of a century railing against the dusty establishment, the art world's most prominent group of radical feminists has decided to join it. The Guerrilla Girls, a collection of radical, left-leaning pop artists famed for wearing gorilla masks and fishnets to highlight sexism, racism, and other pillars of injustice, announced this week that its historic archive will be kept, for posterity, by the bluest of America's blue-chip cultural institutions.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Researchers look to make 'messy' nanotech production 'clean and green'

Sara Goodman
New York Times

Nanotechnology's image is sleek, modern and clean. But that's not its reality.

Turns out that designing and manufacturing materials so small that 100,000 of them can fit comfortably on the width of a hair strand absorbs tremendous amounts of energy and is anything but neat.

"You can make a very green product with a very messy process," said Mark Greenwood, a Washington lawyer and former director of U.S. EPA's Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Big Powers Moving In on Gaza

Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa Al-Omrani
Inter Press Service

Nine NATO member states agreed last month to utilise naval, intelligence and diplomatic resources to combat the alleged flow of arms into the Gaza Strip. Some Egyptian commentators see the move as a surreptitious means of cementing foreign control over the region.

"These new protocols aren't really about halting arms smuggling," Tarek Fahmi, political science professor at Cairo University and head of the Israel desk at the Cairo-based National Centre for Middle East Studies, told IPS. "Rather, they aim to establish foreign control over the region's strategic border crossings and maritime ports."
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Friday April 17, 2009

Mass arrests have no place in a democratic country

Independent

The police must use their pre-emptive powers with extreme care

There are times, and they seem to be growing more frequent, when the civil liberties we still associate with life in Britain suddenly start to look dangerously fragile. Yesterday was one such occasion. We woke up to the news that 114 people had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass and criminal damage.

This deserves to be spelled out. More than 100 people were arrested in the Sneinton Dale area of Nottingham not for committing an offence, but for allegedly planning to do so. In other words, they were arrested pre-emptively.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Legalizing Pot Makes Lots of Cents for Our Cash-Starved Government

Paul Armentano
AlterNet

Even the most mainstream figures are now taking the idea of legalizing and taxing pot seriously -- budget-crunched governments should listen.

What could you do with an extra $14 billion? Members of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and other like-minded organizations will be asking government officials that very question on April 15 when they present a mock check to the U.S. Treasury.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Pentagon Prioritizes Pursuit of Alternative Fuel Sources

Steve Vogel
The Washington Post

For the Defense Department, the largest consumer of energy in the United States, addiction to fuel has greater costs than the roughly $18 billion the agency spent on it last year.

By some estimates, about half of the U.S. military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are related to attacks with improvised explosive devices on convoys, many of which are carrying fuel. As of March 20, 3,426 service members had been killed by hostile fire in Iraq, 1,823 of them victims of IEDs.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Vatican Justice

Bill Frogameni
Ms Magazine

Pedophile priests can stay in the Church, but priests who ordain women may be excommunicated

What happens if a Catholic priest molests children?

Usually, he’s protected by the Church hierarchy. Maybe he’ll eventually have his parish or diocese taken away, or be switched to another one—often after years of serial abuse. But there’s a good chance he’ll stay in the Church.

So what happens if a Catholic priest publicly supports ordaining women? Well, then he’s excommunicated on the double.
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Friday April 17, 2009

We're Being Lied to About Pirates

Johann Hari
Independent

Some are clearly just kidnappers and gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal dumping and devastating fishing.

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth.

But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menaces of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side.
read full story

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Friday April 17, 2009

Israel’s Racist in Chief

Chris Hedges
Truthdig

It was unthinkable, when I was based as a correspondent in Jerusalem two decades ago, that an Israeli politician who openly advocated ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from Israeli-controlled territory, as well as forcing Arabs in Israel to take loyalty oaths or be forcibly relocated to the West Bank, could sit on the Cabinet.

The racist tirades of Jewish proto-fascists like Meir Kahane stood outside the law, were vigorously condemned by most Israelis and were prosecuted accordingly. Kahane’s repugnant Kach Party, labeled by the United States, Canada and the European Union as a terrorist organization, was outlawed by the Israeli government in 1988 for inciting racism.
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Friday April 17, 2009

The Power of Horror in Rwanda

Kenneth Roth
The Los Angeles Times

Fifteen years ago, efforts at genocide killed about 800,000 Rwandans. Now that tragedy is providing the government with a cover for repression.

During a gruesome three months in 1994, about 800,000 Rwandans were murdered as part of a calculated effort by a group of Hutu extremists to eradicate the country's Tutsi population.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Food Industry Pursues the Strategy of Big Tobacco

e360

Kelly Brownell has long studied the relationship between rising levels of obesity in the U.S. and the way our food is grown, processed, packaged, and sold. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, he discusses the common marketing and lobbying tactics employed by the food and tobacco industries.

Increasingly, the question of what we eat and how it affects our health is a subject that is important not just to those concerned about nutrition but to environmentalists. Kelly D. Brownell, a psychologist who is director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, has been a leading researcher into America’s obesity epidemic and its links to the practices of the food industry.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Why our ancestors couldn't ape chimps

Michael McCarthy
Independent

Study of climbing abilities disproves long-held belief that the earliest humans were able to scale trees as easily as primates

Humanity's immediate predecessors may have had trouble climbing trees, research suggests – so they may not have been as ape-like as many experts believe.

Scientists have arrived at this conclusion after making a close study of the way chimpanzees scale trees – virtually vertically and with ease – and then comparing chimpanzee ankle joints with those of hominins, humans' ancestors.
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Friday April 17, 2009

America’s first solar city, from a former NFL player 6

Jonathan Hiskes
Grist

Florida developer and former NFL lineman Syd Kitson sent out a coy press release Wednesday promising the biggest news in the history of press releases, to be revealed Thursday. And in truth … it’s sort of a big deal.

The housing collapse be damned, Kitson & Partners announces it will build a planned city near Fort Meyers with 19,500 homes, offices, retail shops, and light industry. Its electricity will come from the world’s largest solar voltaic power plant, a $300 million, 75-megawatt plant to be built on-site by Florida Power & Light. That’s nearly twice as large as the current largest plant in Germany, says Time magazine.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Adbusters Wins Legal Victory

Adbusters

Our appeal was unanimously approved. We’re one step closer to winning the right to buy airtime for citizen-produced, social marketing messages.

Adbusters Media Foundation, the publisher of Adbusters magazine, has won an important appeal in its case against the CBC and Global Television Network. Adbusters initiated a landmark legal action against the media companies for refusing to sell airtime to Adbusters for its social marketing television campaigns.

In a unanimous decision released on Friday, April 3, the BC Court of Appeal overturned a previous BC Supreme Court ruling. Adbusters can now take its case against the media conglomerates to the BC Supreme Court.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Trapped and beaten by police in Climate Camp

Chris Abbott
Our Kingdom

Media coverage of the G20 protests has focused almost entirely on the violence outside the Bank of England and, following the release of Guardian footage, the tragic death of Ian Tomlinson. Events at the Bishopsgate Climate Camp, which was cordoned off in an aggressive operation by riot police, went largely unreported by the BBC and other major media outlets. Most of the reporting has come from online sources (see Stuart White and Beth McGrath for example). Here we publish another eye-witness account of the aggressive police action.

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Friday April 17, 2009

Police leaders must regain control of their subordinates

Brian Paddick
Independent

The former Deputy Assistant Commissioner at the Met, on the force's mounting problems

Seeing the video of Ian Tomlinson being assaulted by a police officer during the G20 protests – an apparently innocent man being subjected to what appeared to be an unjustified assault by a police officer – provoked in me an immediate desire for the perpetrator to be suspended, tried and punished.
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Friday April 17, 2009

G-20 Ignored Social "Havens"

Sylvain Lapoix
Marianne2

While the G-20 has bragged about dismantling tax havens, social "havens" - where minimal labor costs facilitate factory transfers - persist across the world: Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Mexico.... Some have even been inserted into the European Union with complete impunity!

Paradisiacal Asian islands, little Central American states and even European Union member states: "social havens" are legion! While the G-20 has established a black list and two gray lists of countries with minimal taxes on capital and suspicious bank opacity, Marianne2 offers a first draft of a list of social havens.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Cyber Spying a Threat, and Everyone Is in on It

The Associated Press

Ghost hackers infiltrating the computers of Tibetan exiles and the U.S. electric grid have pulled the curtain back on 21st-century espionage as nefarious as anything from the Cold War -- and far more difficult to stop.

Nowadays, a hacker with a high-speed Internet connection, knowledge of computer security and some luck can pilfer information thought to be safely ensconced in a digital locker. And the threat is growing, with countries -- including the U.S. -- pointing fingers at each other even as they ramp up their own cyber espionage.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Schizophrenics see through hollow-mask illusion

Sandrine Ceurstemont
New Scientiast

Telling the front from the back of a mask can be more difficult than it seems. Thanks to an effect called the hollow-mask illusion, the brain can have trouble deciding if the image is convex or concave.

But, it seems, not everyone struggles to correctly determine the mask's orientation. New research shows that people with schizophrenia are immune to the effect – a finding that means the illusion could provide a diagnostic test for the condition.
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Friday April 17, 2009

The child who kills is the child who never had a chance

Johann Hari
Independent

Everything we know tells us child killers are invariably victims of extreme abuse

I have met children who became killers several times in my life: in the warzones of the Congo and the Central African Republic, and in the grey Young Offenders' Institutes of Britain. When I read about the events that are alleged to have happened last weekend in South Yorkshire, I kept thinking about their small, paranoid eyes.

Two brothers – aged ten and eleven – have been charged with torturing two other, younger kids. The victims had been hit with bricks, burned with cigarettes, and slashed with knives in a wild field.

We are a long way from knowing what happened in that field that afternoon, or who carried out these acts.
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Friday April 17, 2009

CIA to Close Secret Overseas Prisons, End Security Contracts

Jonathan S. Landay
McClatchy Newspapers

The CIA is decommissioning the secret overseas prisons where top al Qaida suspects were subjected to interrogation methods, including simulated drowning, that Attorney General Eric Holder, allied governments, the Red Cross and numerous other experts consider torture, the agency said Thursday.

In an e-mail to the agency's work force outlining current interrogation and detention policies, CIA Director Leon Panetta also announced that agreements with the private security firms guarding the so-called black sites will be "promptly terminated," and contractors no longer will be used to conduct interrogations.
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Friday April 17, 2009

Getting a Death Grip on Memory

Norman Solomon
Truthout

A headline in The New York Times announced a few days ago: "Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory." This news ran above the fold on the front page.

"Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain," the article began. Readers quickly learned that it's starting to happen: "Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory ..."
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Thursday April 16, 2009

Medics and Interrogations Don’t Mix

William Fisher
Inter Press service

Human rights advocates are expressing alarm about recent disclosures that medical professionals assisted the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in harsh interrogations at secret prisons overseas and at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. It has also been brought to light that judges have ignored the mental health problems of government witnesses in terror-related trials.

A secret leaked 40-page report by the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded that medical professionals working for the C.I.A. were actively involved in the abusive interrogation of terrorist suspects. The report labelled their participation in abusive interrogations that included waterboarding "a gross breach of medical ethics."
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Thursday April 16, 2009

Hypocrisy, Favoritism and Fear-Mongering: Why the U.S. Position on Nukes is Totally Bankrupt

Allison Kilkenny
AlterNet

Obama says we must expand drone operations in Pakistan lest the Taliban get a nuclear weapon. Pakistani author Tariq Ali tells me this is a joke.

President Obama has seized upon North Korea's missile launch to talk about a new approach to nuclear disarmament. Most people agree with the swell commonplaces associated with Obama's vague rhetoric. Sure, we shouldn't blow up the planet. Yes, nuclear weapons are extremely dangerous.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

Hacker intrusion on US power grid sparks security fears

Associated Press

Spies hacked into the US electric grid and left behind computer programmes that would let them disrupt service, exposing potentially catastrophic vulnerabilities in key pieces of national infrastructure, The Associated Press has learned.

The intrusions were discovered after electric companies gave the government permission to audit their systems, a former US government official told the AP. The ex-official was not authorised to discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

Make space for creationists to have their say

Sophie Elmhirst
New Statesman

Evolution has disappeared from many school lessons in the US. If discussion about the origins of life becomes part of science classes here, could Britain follow suit?

Early last month Hampshire County Council found itself at the centre of an unlikely controversy. The council had published a document, entitled “Teaching About Creationism and Evolution in Schools”. Its author, Clive Erricker, county inspector for religious education, recommended that the “debate” around creationism and evolution should be incorporated into a “joint religious education/science unit”, allowing students to “explore the complexity” of the subject.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

Does gravity change with the seasons?

Marcus Chown
New Scientist

Everyone has heard of Newton's apple. He watched it drop to the ground in the autumn of 1666, prompting him to ask a series of questions. "Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground?" Newton wondered. "Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the Earth's centre?"

One question Newton didn't ask is whether apples or oranges fall differently. Or whether an apple would fall differently in the spring. They might seem peculiar concerns, but Alan Kostelecký, a physicist based at Indiana University in Bloomington, thinks they are important. He and his graduate student Jay Tasson have found that such flagrant violations of our best theory of gravity could easily have evaded detection for centuries.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

Wave Power Faces Rough Seas

Colin Sullivan
Scientific American

Cancelled projects and technological challenges postpone harnessing the power of waves and tides

Technology for tapping ocean waves, tides and rivers for electricity is far from commercial viability and lagging well behind wind, solar and other fledgling power sectors, a panel of experts said last week during a forum here on climate change and marine ecosystems.

While the potential for marine energy is great, ocean wave and tidal energy projects are still winding their way through an early research and development phase, these experts said.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

When life as we know it became possible on Earth

Steve Connor
Independent

The mystery of how our planet's atmosphere became rich in oxygen has finally been solved

It was one of the most important changes to have happened to the Earth's atmosphere and it was the reason why today we can breathe life-giving oxygen. And yet the Great Oxidation Event has remained a mystery – until now.

Without oxygen, life on Earth would not exist as we know it. It has provided the supercharged air that has fuelled an explosion in the diversity and size of all living organisms, from the smallest shrimp to the biggest dinosaur.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

Requiem for the War on Terror

Ira Chernus
Tomdispatch

Goodbye GWOT, Hello OCOs

This is the way the Global War on Terror (also known, in Bush-era jargon, as GWOT) ends, not with a bang, not with parades and speeches, but with an obscure memo, a few news reports, vague denials, and a seemingly off-handed comment (or was it a carefully calculated declaration?) from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: "The administration has stopped using the phrase ["war on terror"] and I think that speaks for itself. Obviously."

This is often the way presidents and their administrations operate when it comes to national security and foreign policy -- not with bold, clear statements but through leaks, trial balloons, small gestures, and innuendo.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

The Abuse of the Desire for Money or Capitalism's Addicts

François Flahault
Le Monde

Are politicians thinking about the common good when they talk about "moralizing capitalism?" Undoubtedly, they are primarily thinking that they must calm discontent to maintain their credibility: a democratic state is supposed to fulfill the function of third party between the powerful and the weak.

Yet now, even in the United States, which, through skillful electoral marketing, had long succeeded in making the poor vote for the rich (a success that has created imitators), the crisis has just reminded everyone that a gap exists between those two groups.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

Tajikistan's Former Soviet Nuclear Sites Pose Threat to Nearby Villages

Farangis Najibullah
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

The first Soviet atomic bomb, tested in 1949, was made from Tajik uranium.

Now Tajikistan is dealing with the dangerous legacy of its role in the Soviet nuclear program: 55 million tons of radioactive waste that, in some sites, is leaking into the soil and local water supplies.

Tajik and international specialists say the leaks pose a major risk to residents' health and the environment.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

Breakthrough in fight against malaria

Steve Connor
Independent

Killer bites are caused by older insects – so scientists have developed a pesticide that attacks only them

The fight against malaria has entered a new phase with an insecticide specifically targeted at older mosquitoes, which scientists believe will be more effective than existing pesticides.

Most malaria infections, which kill about one million people a year, result from humans being bitten by older mosquitoes.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

Obama looks at climate engineering

Seth Borenstein
Associated Press

The president's new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth's air.

John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

How to Starve (or Feed) a River

Janet Kaufmann
Counterpunch

This time of year it’s great to work outside, clean up the place and mow. But if you’re lucky enough to have a stream on your property, think again before clearing that tangle of brush and trees. You’re looking at something good.

Brush and debris are dirty words to many people, who think it’s a mess, a problem. They prefer the “estate” look, with tall trees, groomed green grass, water with nothing in it but water. They chop or spray or clear everything else.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

BRAZIL: Walling Off the Slums…or ‘Eco-Barrier’?

Fabiana Frayssinet
Inter Press Service

While the government of the state of Rio de Janeiro insists that a wall being built around a poor neighbourhood is designed to protect what remains of Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest from further encroachment by the slum, human rights groups say it is designed to further separate the rich and poor.

While the residents of the slums, known as favelas, built on the mountains surrounding the city are used to hiking up and down the steep stairs and alleyways of their neighbourhoods several times a day, climbing up to the wall is difficult for an outsider.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

Military 'Researchers' Strapped Pigs in Body Armor and Blew Them Up, All in the Name of Science

Liliana Segura
AlterNet

The 'study' was conducted last year in an undisclosed location, with the supposed goal of linking bomb blasts and brain injuries.

As long as we're discussing the military budget, let's talk about this: Pentagon researchers spent nearly $10 million dollars last year strapping pigs in body armor and blowing them up.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

The art of survival: Essential skills for the post-apocalyptic world

Neil Strauss
Independent

Recession. Food shortages. Natural disasters. Terrorism. What would happen to us if some cataclysmic event caused society to break down?

Kelly Alwood didn't say a word as he handcuffed my hands behind my back, opened the trunk of a rental car, and ordered me to get inside.

With his shaven head, which looked like it could break bottles; his glassy brown eyes, which revealed no emotion whatsoever; and the 3" calibre pistol hanging from a chain around his neck, he didn't seem like the kind of person to cross.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

The empty name of God

A C Grayling
New Statesman

'The basic doctrines of the major religions have their roots in the superstitions and fancies of illiterate peasants living several thousand years ago'

What religious people mean by “god” means nothing to me beyond an incoherent cluster of concepts from which the aforesaid folk choose the subset most convenient to themselves.

But the word brings to mind the man-made phenomenon of religions, whose net effect on humanity now as throughout history has been, by a considerable margin, negative.
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Thursday April 16, 2009

They Sent Me to Distant Lands to Fight Against Muslims ... Then I Became One

Penny Coleman
AlterNet

Along the way, I ate Burger King in Peshawar, developed a debilitating drug habit and caught a 3-year prison sentence.

Mike's attraction to Islam dates to 2001, when his Afghan interpreter gave him a Quran. Mike had a deep respect for the spirit of those he fought and wanted to better understand what it was about their belief system that roused such a fierce dedication to their cause.

Last month, after a year of one-on-one study with Imam Sabur, Mike made his shihada at the Kemble Street Mosque in Utica, N.Y. He is now officially an adherent of Islam.
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Wednesday April 15, 2009

Europe declares war on laptop power adapters

Peter Sayer
IDG News Service

Inefficient power units, such as those that supply laptops or mobile phones are on the way out. The European Union has issued new rules that will prevent these from wasting electrcity, cutting users' power bills in the process.

The new regulations will come into force in April 2010, limiting the energy that the power supplies can waste -- and the regulations will tighten again in April 2011.
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Wednesday April 15, 2009

The dark side of Dubai

Johann Hari
Independent

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging.

The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region.
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Wednesday April 15, 2009

Antibiotics Pose Concern for Minnesota Ethanol Producers

Mark Steil
The Associated Press

Ethanol's main by-product, which is sold as livestock feed, has raised potential food safety concerns.

Several studies have linked the byproduct, known as distillers grain, to elevated rates of E. coli in cattle. And now, distillers grain is facing further scrutiny because the Food and Drug Administration has found that it often contains antibiotics left over from making ethanol.
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Wednesday April 15, 2009

Do US Drones Kill Pakistani Extremists or Recruit Them?

Jonathan S. Landay
McClatchy Newspapers

Even as the Obama administration launches new drone attacks into Pakistan's remote tribal areas, concerns are growing among US intelligence and military officials that the strikes are bolstering the Islamic insurgency by prompting Islamist radicals to disperse into the country's heartland.

Al Qaida, Taliban and other militants who've been relocating to Pakistan's overcrowded and impoverished cities may be harder to find and stop from staging terrorist attacks, the officials said.
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Wednesday April 15, 2009

Who's the Boss?

Uri Avnery
Counterpunch

On the first day of the new Israeli government, the fog cleared: it’s a Lieberman government.

The day started with a celebration at the President’s office. All the members of this bloated government – 30 ministers and 8 deputy ministers – were dressed up in their best finery and posed for a group photo. Binyamin Netanyahu read an uninspired speech, which included the worn-out cliches that are necessary to set the world at ease: the government is committed to peace, it will negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, bla-bla-bla.

Avigdor Lieberman hurried from there to the foreign Office, for the ceremonial change of ministers. He, too, made a speech – but it was not a routine speech at all.
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Wednesday April 15, 2009

Cybercriminals are profiting from spam and 'scareware

Jack Schofield
The Guardian

New report from Microsoft shows spam level at 97%

"Scareware" is a fast-growing threat to computer users, with cybercriminals promoting fake security software to exploit users' desire to keep their computers protected, according to Microsoft's sixth Security Intelligence Report.

And although Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates predicted in 2004 that spam would be "a thing of the past" within two years, the company now reports that around 97% of all the emails sent over the net are unwanted.
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Wednesday April 15, 2009

You Are Being Lied to About Pirates

Johann Hari
Huffington Post

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains.

They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.
read full story

Posted in: by bubblejam at 01:41 AM | Comments (0) | Email This Entry

Tuesday April 14, 2009

Obama Offers Islam a Handshake

Hilmi Toros
Inter Press Service

On his first visit to a Muslim country this week, U.S. President Barack Obama proposed "a new chapter" in U.S. engagement with the Islamic world. He drew much praise, while some remain skeptical.

"The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam," he told the Turkish Parliament in capital Ankara Monday. "Our partnership with the Muslim world is critical in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject."

His words rang sweet to his audience, a change from statements by former president George Bush, who was not quite so emphatic in offering an embrace to Islam. "America's relationship with the Muslim world cannot and will not be based on opposition to Al-Qaeda," Obama declared. "Far from it. We seek broad engagement based upon mutual interest and mutual respect."
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

A £1bn nuclear white elephant

Michael Savage
Independent

Exclusive: Call for public inquiry as Sellafield recycling plant is costing taxpayer millions every year

A controversial nuclear recycling plant, approved by the Government despite warnings over its economic viability and reliance on unproven technology, has racked up costs of more than £1bn and is still not working properly.

Backers of the plant at Sellafield, which promised to turn toxic waste into a useable fuel that could be sold worldwide, had claimed the plant would make a profit of more than £200m in its lifetime, producing 120 tonnes of recycled fuel a year.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

China’s Grand Plans for Eco-Cities Now Lie Abandoned

Christina Larson
e360

Mostly conceived by international architects, China’s eco-cities were intended to be models of green urban design. But the planning was done with little awareness of how local people lived, and the much-touted projects have largely been scrapped.

If all had gone as planned, “the world’s first eco-city,” as press releases billed it back in 2005, would now be well on its way to completion. The visionary project called for a grassy island near the crowded metropolis of Shanghai to be transformed from a marshy backwater into a gleaming community of energy-efficient buildings housing 50,000 people. Waste was to have been recycled as fuel and the waterfronts were to be lined with sleek micro-windmills.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

GM, Segway unveil Puma urban vehicle

Steve Gelsi
MarketWatch

Electric-powered two-seater is sort of an iPod on wheels

General Motors Corp. and Segway on Tuesday unveiled a two-seat, electric-powered urban vehicle called the Puma, which they compare to an iPod on wheels, complete with Internet connectivity and an on-board brain to drive by itself and find its own parking spot.

With its jelly-bean concept shape and sliding doors, the Puma resembles flying vehicles from the futuristic cartoon "The Jetsons." Another version features gull-wing doors shaped in the tradition of the DeLorean sports car of the 1980s.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

The War on Yugoslavia, Ten Years Later

Stephen Zunes
Foreign Policy in Focus

It has been 10 years since the U.S.-led war on Yugoslavia. For many leading Democrats, including some in top positions in the Obama administration, it was a "good" war, in contrast to the Bush administration's "bad" war on Iraq. And though the suffering and instability unleashed by the 1999 NATO military campaign wasn't as horrific as the U.S. invasion of Iraq four years later, the war was nevertheless unnecessary and illegal, and its political consequences are far from settled.

Unless there's a willingness to critically re-examine the war, the threat of another war in the name of liberal internationalism looms large.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

Revealed: the town hall staff who earn more than the PM

Andy McSmith
Independent

1,000 are paid six-figure salaries – and 16 take home more than Brown himself

More than 1,000 senior town hall staff are being paid-six figure salaries, and at least 16 are earning more than the Prime Minister, a fat cats' rich list has revealed. They include a council chief executive who left his job with more than £500,000 in salary and other payments, and walked straight into another £200,000 job in local government.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

US watchdog calls for bank executives to be sacked

James Doran
The Observer

Elizabeth Warren, chief watchdog of America's $700bn (£472bn) bank bailout plan, will this week call for the removal of top executives from Citigroup, AIG and other institutions that have received government funds in a damning report that will question the administration's approach to saving the financial system from collapse.

Warren, a Harvard law professor and chair of the congressional oversight committee monitoring the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp), is also set to call for shareholders in those institutions to be "wiped out". "It is crucial for these things to happen," she said.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

Terminator Planet

Tom Engelhardt
Tomdispatch.com

Launching the Drone Wars

In 1984, Skynet, the supercomputer that rules a future Earth, sent a cyborg assassin, a "terminator," back to our time. His job was to liquidate the woman who would give birth to John Connor, the leader of the underground human resistance of Skynet's time.

You with me so far? That, of course, was the plot of the first Terminator movie and for the multi-millions who saw it, the images of future machine war -- of hunter-killer drones flying above a wasted landscape -- are unforgettable.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

US senators seek new cybersecurity laws

Jaikumar Vijayan
Computerworld (US)

Two US senators last week proposed legislation that would give federal officials new powers to create and enforce data security standards for key parts of the private sector - and even shut down systems in some cases.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 would empower the National Institute of Standards and Technology to set "measurable and auditable" security standards for all networks and systems run by federal agencies, government contractors and businesses that support critical infrastructure services.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

Vermont legalizes gay marriage with veto override

Dave Gram
Associated Press

Vermont on Tuesday became the fourth state to legalize gay marriage — and the first to do so with a legislature's vote.

The House recorded a dramatic 100-49 vote, the minimum needed, to override Gov. Jim Douglas' veto. Its vote followed a much easier override vote in the Senate, which rebuffed the Republican governor with a vote of 23-5.

Vermont was the first state to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples and joins Connecticut, Massachusetts and Iowa in giving gays the right to marry. Their approval of gay marriage came from the courts.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

Report Calls CIA Detainee Treatment "Inhuman"

Joby Warrick and Julie Tate
The Washington Post

Medical officers who oversaw interrogations of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases essentially participated in torture, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a confidential report that labeled the CIA program "inhuman."

Health personnel offered supervision and even assistance as suspected al-Qaeda operatives were beaten, deprived of food, exposed to temperature extremes and subjected to waterboarding, the relief agency said in the 2007 report, a copy of which was posted on a magazine Web site yesterday.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

Poor nations call for 'levy' on air tickets to help adapt to climate change

John Vidal
The Guardian

World's poorest 49 countries tell UN meeting that aviation industry must help them cope with global warming by raising money from a tax on airline tickets and emissions trading scheme.

A levy on all airline tickets and a global trading system for aircraft emissions are the contrasting proposals presented today to tackle the impact of flying on climate.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

Aircraft could be brought down by DIY 'E-bombs'

Paul Marks
New Scientist

Electromagnetic pulse weapons capable of frying the electronics in civil airliners can be built using information and components available on the net, warn counterterrorism analysts.

All it would take to bring a plane down would be a single but highly energetic microwave radio pulse blasted from a device inside a plane, or on the ground and trained at an aircraft coming in to land.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

Revealed: why we need a good night's sleep

Steve Connor
Independent

Scientists warn of the dangers of sleepless nights after discovering how brain clears out day's mental rubbish

To sleep, perchance to dream, said Hamlet. Now scientists have shown that sleep is more about getting rid of the previous day's mental rubbish than it is about dreaming.

A study into slumber has found that the nerve connections built up in the brain during a busy day are pruned back during the night in an attempt to keep the mind from overloading on junk information.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

Spain Investigates What America Should

Marjorie Cohn
The San Francisco Chronicle

A Spanish court has initiated criminal proceedings against six former officials of the Bush administration. John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes and Douglas Feith may face charges in Spain for authorizing torture at Guantánamo Bay.

If arrest warrants are issued, Spain and any of the other 24 countries that are parties to European extradition conventions could arrest these six men when they travel abroad.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

Obama Lawyers Invoke "State Secrets" to Block Warrantless Spying Lawsuit

Liliana Segura
AlterNet

It's not the first time Obama's DOJ has employed the tactic so often used by the Bush administration to block accountability for government crimes.

Oops, they did it again: lawyers for Barack Obama's Department of Justice have invoked the "state secrets" privilege to block a lawsuit seeking to reverse one of the most scandalous policies of the Bush administration.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

Global Crime Wave?

Michael T. Klare
Tomdispatch.com

A Syndrome of Crime, Violence, and Repression on the Way

In all catastrophes, there are always winners among the host of losers and victims. Bad times, like good ones, generate profits for someone. In the case of the present global economic meltdown, with our world at the brink and up to 50 million people potentially losing their jobs by the end of this year, one winner is likely to be criminal activity and crime syndicates.

From Mexico to Africa, Russia to China, the pool of the desperate and the bribable is expanding exponentially, pointing to a sharp upturn in global crime. As illicit profits rise, so will violence in the turf wars among competing crime syndicates and in the desperate efforts by panicked governments to put a clamp on criminal activity.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

Antarctic Ice Shelf In Peril as Bridge Snaps

Michael Vincent
ABC News

The Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica is in the final stages of collapse and scientists are concerned the event shows climate change is happening faster than previously thought.

An ice bridge, up to 40 kilometres long but at its narrowest just 500 metres wide, was thought to be holding the giant shelf to the Antarctic continent, but it recently snapped.
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Tuesday April 14, 2009

Solution to the carbon problem could be under the ground

Steve Connor
Independent

Hope for the fight against climate change as study finds greenhouse gas can be buried without fear of leaking

Carbon dioxide captured from the chimneys of power stations could be safely buried underground for thousands of years without the risk of the greenhouse gas seeping into the atmosphere, a study has found.
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Thursday April 09, 2009

EU warns China over increasing steel exports

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Telegraph

A simmering trade conflict between Europe and China is nearing the boil as state-supported Chinese steel companies ramp up capacity despite drastic cuts by the rest of the world.

ArcelorMittal, the world's biggest steelmaker, yesterday told its European workforce that production cuts of 50pc would continue indefinitely due to the "exceptional economic environment", raising fears that chunks of Europe's steel industry face closure.
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Thursday April 09, 2009

Cheery traders may encourage risk taking

Peter Aldhous
New Scientist

Was it just greed that prompted the risky financial decisions that triggered global economic meltdown, or could other factors have been at work?

Before rushing to condemn the traders and bankers responsible, consider this: perhaps they were in too good a mood. That's the intriguing implication of experiments showing that even a fleeting exposure to a smiling face makes people more likely to make risky investment decisions.
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Thursday April 09, 2009

Paul Dirac: The man who conjured laws of nature from pure thought

Tim Radford
Th Guardian

A fellow quantum physicist has said his discoveries were like 'exquisitely carved statues falling out of the sky, one after another'. In The Strangest Man, Graham Farmelo gets under the skin of one of the most baffling geniuses the world has seen

Here's a puzzle. Bristol boy – slightly older contemporary of Bristol's other boy Cary Grant – has an unhappy childhood, but doesn't mention it for 50 years; learns to speak French, German and Russian, but becomes famous for his long silences; embarks on the wrong career; gets interested in mathematics and ends up at Cambridge, where he becomes famous for his even longer silences; hears about Einstein and gets into advanced physics; and then goes to Copenhagen to meet Niels Bohr, who grumbles to Ernest Rutherford, "This Dirac, he seems to know a lot of physics, but he never says anything."
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Thursday April 09, 2009

The police: Unaccountable, secretive and out of control

Independent

This assault shows why the police are in urgent need of reform

There are circumstances under which the police might need to use reasonable force to subdue political demonstrations that turn violent. But what is so damning about the video footage that has emerged from last week's G20 protests in London is that there is nothing in the slightest bit reasonable about the force that was used against Ian Tomlinson.

Mr Tomlinson was plainly walking away from riot officers when he was struck. It is impossible to say for certain that this assault by a baton-wielding riot officer brought on Mr Tomlinson's heart attack only a few minutes later. But most people will find it impossible to disconnect the two events.
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Thursday April 09, 2009

Batteries grown from 'armour-plated' viruses

Catherine Zandonella
New Scientist

Genetically engineered viruses that assemble into electrodes have been used to make complete miniature rechargeable batteries for the first time. The new lithium ion batteries are as powerful as existing devices but smaller and cleaner to make, claim the team behind the work. The technology could improve the performance of hybrid electric cars and electronic gadgets.

Lithium ion batteries exploit the reactivity of lithium to produce a current. Inside the battery, lithium ions move from the anode to the cathode, forcing electrons in the opposite direction around an external circuit. This process is reversed when the battery is recharged.
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Thursday April 09, 2009

The IMF Rules the World

Michael Hudson
Counterpunch

Not much substantive news was expected to come out of the G-20 meetings that ended on April 2 in London – certainly no good news was even suggested. Europe, China and the United States had too deeply distinct interests. American diplomats wanted to lock foreign countries into further dependency on paper dollars.

The rest of the world sought a way to avoid giving up real output and ownership of their resources and enterprises for yet more hot-potato dollars. In such cases one expects a parade of smiling faces and statements of mutual respect for each others’ position – so much respect that they have agreed to set up a “study group” or two to kick the diplomatic ball down the road.
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Thursday April 09, 2009

Global Crime Wave? A Syndrome of Crime, Violence and Repression on the Way

Michael T. Klare
TomDispatch.com

In all catastrophes, there are always winners among the host of losers and victims. Bad times, like good ones, generate profits for someone. In the case of the present global economic meltdown, with our world at the brink and up to 50 million people potentially losing their jobs by the end of this year, one winner is likely to be criminal activity and crime syndicates.

From Mexico to Africa, Russia to China, the pool of the desperate and the bribable is expanding exponentially, pointing to a sharp upturn in global crime. As illicit profits rise, so will violence in the turf wars among competing crime syndicates and in the desperate efforts by panicked governments to put a clamp on criminal activity.
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Thursday April 09, 2009

Having a sister 'is good for you'

Independent

Being brought up with a sister makes people more balanced, ambitious and optimistic, research suggests.

A study of 571 families comprising brothers, sisters, a mixture of both and single children found that having a sister in the home led to siblings of either sex scoring more highly on a range of standard tests for good mental health.
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Thursday April 09, 2009

Skype under attack for iPhone restrictions

Dan Moren
Macworld.com

Regulatory authorities in the US and Europe have been asked to investigate Skype's implementation on iPhone, specifically that it works via Wi-Fi only and not through a 3G connection.

That restriction has been described as anti-competitive and, according to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Communications Commission has been asked by an Internet advocacy group called Free Press whether the restriction is in violation of federal law.
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Thursday April 09, 2009

New York Lightens Up on Some of the Harshest Drug Laws in the Country

Steven Wishnia
AlterNet

Let's hope the changes mark the beginning of the end of New York's Rockefeller drug laws.

New York State is about to enact major changes in its Rockefeller drug laws, which contain some of the harshest mandatory-minimum sentences in the nation. The activists who've been trying to repeal those laws for years say it's a very welcome move but doesn't go far enough.
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Thursday April 09, 2009

Ice-Free Arctic Ocean Possible in 30 Years, Not 90 as Previously Estimated

ScienceDaily

A nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in the summer may happen three times sooner than scientists have estimated. New research says the Arctic might lose most of its ice cover in summer in as few as 30 years instead of the end of the century.

The amount of the Arctic Ocean covered by ice at the end of summer by then could be only about 1 million square kilometers, or about 620,000 square miles.
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Thursday April 09, 2009

Israel's new foreign minister dismisses two-state solution

Ben Lynfield
Independent

Far-right Lieberman rejects US-led talks with Palestinians

Far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman stunned diplomats in his first speech as Israel's foreign minister yesterday when he rejected the past year of US-led negotiations and said that a previous commitment Israel made to Palestinian statehood "had no validity".

Mr Lieberman reinforced fears that his government will steer the country in a more hawkish direction when he added that concessions to Palestinians would be "mistaken".
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Thursday April 09, 2009

Obama Tells Europe to Pick Up Strain in Afghanistan

Crispian Balmer
Reuters

Strasbourg, France - U.S. President Barack Obama told Europe on Friday it must do more to help the United States win the war in Afghanistan, looking to leverage his huge popularity here to wring concessions from NATO allies.

Greeted like a hero by the crowds after flying into France for a NATO summit, Obama said he wanted to see a world without nuclear weapons, but warned Europe that it had to face up to the threat still posed by al Qaeda.
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Thursday April 09, 2009

As Mexico Battles Cartels, the Army Becomes the Law

Steve Fainaru and William Booth
The Washington Post

Petatlan, Mexico - President Felipe Calderón is rapidly escalating the Mexican army's role in the war against drug traffickers, deploying nearly 50 percent of its combat-ready troops along the U.S.-Mexico border and throughout the country, while retired army officers take command of local police forces and the military supplies civilian authorities with automatic weapons and grenades.

U.S. and Mexican officials describe the drug cartels as a widening narco-insurgency. The four major drug states average a total of 12 murders a day, characterized by ambushes, gun battles, executions and decapitated bodies left by the side of the road.
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Thursday April 09, 2009

Taking the fizz out of Coke ad claims

Rob Taylor
Reuters

Claims Coke will not make children fat or rot their teeth have landed Coca-Cola in trouble with Australia's consumer watchdog, which Thursday ordered the soft drink company to correct its advertising.

Coca-Cola South Pacific (CCSP) last year ran advertising titled "Motherhood & Myth-Busting," featuring popular Australian actress Kerry Armstrong and claiming Coke was "kiddy-safe."
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Thursday April 09, 2009

The Startling Effects of Going Vegetarian for Just One Day

Kathy Freston
Huffington Post

Sometimes, solutions to the world's biggest problems are right in front of us. The following statistics are eye-opening, to say the least.

I've written extensively on the consequences of eating meat -- on our health, our sense of "right living", and on the environment. It is one of those daily practices that has such a broad and deep effect that I think it merits looking at over and over again, from all the different perspectives. Sometimes, solutions to the world's biggest problems are right in front of us. The following statistics are eye-opening, to say the least.
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Wednesday April 08, 2009

Taliban in policy shift on beards and burqas

Kim Sengupta and Jerome Starkey
Independent

Negotiations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai reveal new pragmatism ahead of US offensive

The Taliban, whose extreme interpretation of Sharia law and its harsh punishments made Afghanistan one of world's most repressive and reviled regimes, have agreed to soften their position on such things as beards and burqas as part of a trade-off in negotiations with the Afghan government.
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Wednesday April 08, 2009

Google Shows Alternative Energy Firms the Way

David R. Baker
The San Francisco Chronicle

Picking the right place for an immense solar power plant or wind farm is a tricky business, one that can turn natural allies into enemies.

An open stretch of desert might look empty to a renewable-power developer who wants to blanket a few hundred acres with solar panels or mirrors. To environmentalists, the same spot could be vital habitat for an endangered lizard or bird - an ecosystem too delicate to touch.
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Saturday April 04, 2009

New cosmic map reveals colossal structures

David Shiga
New Scientist

Enormous cosmic voids and giant concentrations of matter have been observed in a new galaxy survey, one of the biggest completed so far. One of the voids is so large that it is difficult to explain where it came from.

Called the Six Degree Field Galaxy Survey (6dFGS), the project scanned 41% of the sky, measuring positions and distances for 110,000 galaxies within 2 billion light years of Earth.
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Saturday April 04, 2009

The Growing Storm

Dahr Jamail
Truthout

Last weekend, the Iraqi government arrested an Awakening Group leader of a Baghdad neighborhood, then moved into the area. With the help of US occupation forces, they disarmed the militiamen under his control, but only after fighting broke out between US-backed Iraqi government security forces and the US-formed Sunni Awakening Group militia.

This disturbing event is the realization of what most Iraqis have long feared - that the relative calm in Iraq today would eventually be broken when fighting erupts between these two entities.
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Saturday April 04, 2009

The protests: Complaints of heavy-handed tactics after raids on squats

Jerome Taylor
Independent

The activists had just got up to cook a midday breakfast, after a busy 24 hours spent fighting capitalism, when the armoured police vans pulled up outside their three-storey red-brick squat in east London.

A few minutes later riot police wearing balaclavas and carrying Taser stun guns scaled the roof with ladders and ropes and smashed through a trapdoor into the rooms below.
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Saturday April 04, 2009

"We the People" to "King of the World": "YOU'RE FIRED!"

Michael Moore
Michael Moore.com

Nothing like it has ever happened. The President of the United States, the elected representative of the people, has just told the head of General Motors -- a company that's spent more years at #1 on the Fortune 500 list than anyone else -- "You're fired!"

I simply can't believe it. This stunning, unprecedented action has left me speechless for the past two days. I keep saying, "Did Obama really fire the chairman of General Motors? The wealthiest and most powerful corporation of the 20th century? Can he do that? Really? Well, damn! What else can he do?!"
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Saturday April 04, 2009

Who counts as 'human'?

Costas Douzinas
The Guardian

Those of the wrong class, gender, colour or sexuality have always been left outside locally defined 'humanity' – where does this leave a bill of rights?

A number of posts responding to this series have argued that human rights are self-evident, that they are expressions of the good society or, more extravagantly, that they are natural properties attaching to people like arms or legs. Common to these arguments is the assertion that rights belong to humans on account of their humanity and not of a narrower membership such as nation or state.
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Saturday April 04, 2009

The Stunning Consequences of Not Getting Enough Sleep

Allison Ford
Divine Caroline

Many people don't get as much sleep as they should. And their brains are paying the price.

Nothing feels worse than hearing your alarm clock ring in the morning when your body is screaming for a few extra hours of rest. Given the opportunity, who wouldn’t get more sleep? If I had a choice between a year of unlimited Easter candy and a year of unlimited sleep, I’d say “Bye-bye Cadbury” and “Hello, bed!”
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Saturday April 04, 2009

Tasers Are the New Killers: Watch Their Popularity Surge!

Liliana Segura
AlterNet

Watch out: 50,000-volt Tasers are deployed in London this week; meanwhile, a new model can 'instantly incapacitate' multiple people at a time.

As protesters descend upon London's financial district to demonstrate the G-20 summit this week, they are being met by thousands of Metropolitan police officers carrying out what has repeatedly been described as the biggest police operation ever undertaken in the capital. Pre-emptive arrests were made earlier this week and despite the mainly nonviolent protests -- overshadowed by media reports of a "seige" on the Bank of England -- by Wednesday night, more than 60 people had been arrested and one man was dead.
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Saturday April 04, 2009

Greenpeace slams HP, Dell and Lenovo for toxic substances

Tom Jowitt
Techworld

PC makers Dell, HP and Lenovo have been criticised in the latest edition of Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics, after the environmental campaigner said they are breaking their promises to phase-out toxic chemicals in 2009.

Companies in the quarterly survey are scored based on their recycling policies, environmental efforts and the chemical content and energy consumption of their products.
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Saturday April 04, 2009

Drug barons discover Africa

Caroline Sourt
The Guardian

The price of cocaine is falling as traffickers use unstable nations such as Guinea as conduits. Perhaps the EU should stop them

According to the Home Office, class A drugs, which include cocaine, cost the country more than £15bn in crime and health bills every year. In Britain, a line of cocaine is now cheaper than a pint, and while there have been reports that drug use has levelled off in the last year, these statistics are soon likely to change for the worse.
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Saturday April 04, 2009

Glimmer of hope for Madoff's victims

Stephen Foley
Independent

Thousands of victims of Bernard Madoff have new hope of recovering some of their money, as prosecutors go after the "feeder funds" that channeled their investments into Wall Street's biggest ever fraud.

A Connecticut hedge fund manager who put $7.2bn of his clients' money into Madoff's fake investment business is being sued for misleading investors and negligence, and the securities regulator who brought the action says it is just the first.
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Saturday April 04, 2009

BP axes 620 jobs from solar business

Terry Macalister
The Guardian

Petrochemical company blames cuts on financial crisis, but claims reduction in workforce will lead to cheaper solar power

BP is to axe 620 jobs from its solar power business – more than a quarter of that workforce – in a move it said was part of the long-term strategy to "reduce the cost of solar power to that of conventional electricity."
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Saturday April 04, 2009

Despite Obama’s Vow, Combat Brigades Will Stay in Iraq

Gareth Porter
Inter Press Service

Despite President Barack Obama’s statement at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina Feb. 27 that he had "chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months," a number of Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs), which have been the basic U.S. Army combat unit in Iraq for six years, will remain in Iraq after that date under a new non-combat label.

A spokesman for Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates, Lt. Col. Patrick S. Ryder, told IPS Tuesday that "several advisory and assistance brigades" would be part of a U.S. command in Iraq that will be "re-designated" as a "transition force headquarters" after August 2010.
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Saturday April 04, 2009

The straight dope on local, organic weed

Lou Bendrick
Grist

The Grass Isn't Always Greener

In Checkout Line, Lou Bendrick cooks up answers to reader questions about how to green their food choices and other diet-related quandaries. Lettuce know what food worries keep you up at night.

Dear Checkout Girl:

"Is it better to buy locally grown marijuana which may have been fed with chemicals, or organic hooch from far away?

Sincerely,

Erik"
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Saturday April 04, 2009

US to Join UN Human Rights Council, Reversing Bush Policy

Colum Lynch
The Washington Post

United Nations - The Obama administration decided Tuesday to seek a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, reversing a decision by the Bush administration to shun the United Nations' premier rights body to protest the influence of repressive states.

"Human rights are an essential element of American global foreign policy," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement. "With others, we will engage in the work of improving the U.N. human rights system.... We believe every nation must live by and help shape global rules that ensure people enjoy the right to live freely and participate fully in their societies."
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Saturday April 04, 2009

Man sentenced for killing game-obsessed partner

Associated Press

A man who fatally stabbed his partner after an argument about her heavy use of a Playstation was sentenced today to at least 14 years in prison.

Malcolm Palmer pleaded guilty to the murder of Carol Cannom in front of the couple's 10-year-old son on 18 November last year at their home in Long Sutton in northern England.

Cannom suffered at least 30 knife wounds, and their son was slightly injured while trying to pull his father away during the attack.
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Saturday April 04, 2009

First link found between latitude and sex of babies

Andy Coghlan
New Scientist

If you're desperate for a little girl, go live in the tropics. A global survey of birth data shows that more girls are born there than anywhere else. The work is the first to demonstrate that latitude affects the sex of human babies.

Variations in temperature and day length that depend on latitude could explain the differences, but there's no obvious explanation. And the results hold up when countries in which parents selectively abort girls are taken into account.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

City Workers Urged To Dress Like Scum And Talk About 'Corrie'

The Daily Mash

Workers in the City of London can protect themselves from violent protesters by dressing like scum and talking about something called 'Corrie', it was claimed last night.

Financial institutions in the Square Mile and Canary Wharf are advising staff after the Metropolitan Police warned that militant activists will use the G20 summit to target any well- nourished person in a suit who looks as if they earned more than £40,000 in the last year.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Masturbation could bring hay fever relief for men

David Robson
New Scientist

Spring is here and with it come the woes of hay fever. Never fear, however, as there may be a quick and pleasurable treatment to clear those bunged noses, for guys at least – a well-timed ejaculation.

That's what Sina Zarrintan, a neurologist from the Tabriz Medical University in Iran proposes, anyway. The logic behind the proposal is based on the fact that the nose and the genitals are both connected to the same part of the nervous system that controls certain reflexes – the sympathetic nervous system.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

The Big Question: How did the April Fool's Day tradition begin, and what are the best tricks?

Archie Bland
Independent

Why are we asking this now?

Because it's that day again: after another boring 364 days of sober honesty all round, the beloved annual festival of practical jokery is upon us once more. If you're reading this before midday, it's your one chance in the year to pull the wool over somebody's eyes with impunity.

So why are the rules different on 1 April?

The stories surrounding the origin of April Fool's Day are widely various and it's hard to be certain about the truth – especially when you consider that people feel they have carte blanche to make things up when it comes to this subject.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink

Rio Palof
The Guardian

Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.

The move, described as "epochal" by media commentators, will see all Guardian content tailored to fit the format of Twitter's brief text messages, known as "tweets", which are limited to 140 characters each.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Second Khodorkovsky trial begins

Shaun Walker
Independent

Mikhail Khodorkovsky opened his defence at the start of a new trial in Moscow for money-laundering by condemning the Russian government and legal system. He labelled the charges against him as “senseless”.

The trial could see Mr Khodorkovsky, formerly the richest man in Russia, sentenced to another two decades in prison. On the first day, his defence team presented a list of 478 people they wanted to call to the witness stand during the trial, including Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and other top Russian officials.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Five million people now on DNA database

Murray Wardrop
Telegraph

The number of profiles held on the national DNA database has risen by 40 per cent in two years and has topped five million, it was disclosed last night.

Figures released by the Home Office showed that there are now 5.1 million profiles on the database – up 1.4 million since February 2007.

The Home Office estimates that because of duplicates there are about 13 per cent more profiles than individuals on the database.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Russia, China cooperate on new currency proposals

AFP

Russia and China are coordinating proposals on a new global currency that could replace the US dollar as a reserve currency to prevent a repeat of the global economic crisis, the Kremlin said on Monday.

“We have received proposals from our colleagues in China, detailed proposals,” President Dmitry Medvedev’s top economic adviser Arkady Dvorkovich said. “Our positions are very similar.

“We have similar positions on the development of the international financial architecture,” he told reporters.
,a href="http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.7e6cab4fec704a0fdd135ecdac00673b.9c1&show_article=1">read full story

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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Does US Face G20 Mutiny?

Michael Hudson
Counterpunch

Financing the Empire

I am travelling in Europe for three weeks to discuss the global financial crisis with government officials, politicians and labor leaders. What is most remarkable is how differently the financial problem is perceived over here. It’s like being in another economic universe, not just another continent.

The U.S. media are silent about the most important topic policy makers are discussing here (and I suspect in Asia too): how to protect their countries from three inter-related dynamics:
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

What Is NATO's Role?

Spiegel International

The Reluctant Globocop

NATO is celebrating its 60th birthday this week at a summit co-hosted by Germany and France. But the ceremonies cannot disguise the fact that the alliance, despite its successes, is facing huge challenges in Afghanistan and its dispute with Russia.

NATO has rarely succeeded in striking the right tone. In fact, the world's most important defense alliance has always come out on the shrill side -- musically speaking, at least.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Foreign phisher makes history with US conviction

Robert McMillan
IDG News Service

A 23-year-old Romanian man has become the first foreigner to be convicted by a US court for phishing.

Ovidiu-Ionut Nicola-Roman, of Craiova, Romania, was sentenced to four years and two months in prison Monday for his role in an international phishing operation. Prosecutors had charged him with setting up fake banking sites and then sending out tens of thousands of fraudulent spam messages in hopes of tricking victims into giving up their account information.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Is Milk a Culprit for Bad Health?

Dr. Thomas Cowan
Chelsea Green Publishing

A new book uncovers why milk from certain kinds of cows can cause health concerns.

The following is an excerpt from Devil in the Milk: Illness, Health, and the Politics of A1 and A2 Milk by Keith Woodford. It has been adapted for the Web.

"What North Americans should be concerned about is that North American milk is very high in A1 beta-casein, and no one is doing anything about it."
-- Keith Woodford

My career as a physician, which now spans over 25 years, has been closely linked to milk and other dairy products. That connection is thanks in part to a book I came across early in my medical training -- The Milk of Human Kindness Is not Pasteurized, by William Campbell Douglass, MD, a true medical rebel. It turned out to be one of the most important books on medicine that I have ever read, and it helped form my views on medicine. (The book has since been republished as The Milk Book.)
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

The polypill: Medicine's magic bullet

Jeremy Laurance
Independent

The capsule costs pennies, contains a simple cocktail of medicines, and halves the number of strokes and heart attacks. Doctors want to hand it out in the first mass medication for the middle-aged in Britain. So why are the big drug companies so uninterested?

A pill which could prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths from heart disease, the biggest killer across the Western world, has been shown to be safe and effective in its first trials on humans.

The magic bullet, containing five medicines in a single capsule, sharply reduced cholesterol and blood pressure levels and has the potential to "halve cardiovascular events in average middle-aged individuals", the researchers say.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Shampoo in the water supply triggers growth of deadly drug-resistant bugs

Robin McKie
The Observer

Household cleaning products are creating a bacterial timebomb in our drains and rivers

Fabric softeners, disinfectants, shampoos and other household products are spreading drug-resistant bacteria around Britain, scientists have warned. Detergents used in factories and mills are also increasing the odds that some medicines will no longer be able to combat dangerous diseases.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

EC looks to get tough on online profiling

Paul Meller
IDG News Service

The European Commission is to launch an investigation into how consumers' online data is being used by search companies, social networking websites and Internet service providers, according to an EC spokeswoman.

Officials are particularly concerned about the growing use of deep packet inspection techniques that allow broadband providers to track online activity even if consumers have tried to delete tracking cookies set by the websites they visit.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Officials: Torture Confessions Not Proven Useful

Peter Finn and Joby Warrick
The Washington Post

Washington - When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an Al Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of Al Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Insurers Shun Those Taking Certain Meds

John Dorschner
The Miami Herald

Trying to buy health insurance on your own and have gallstones? You'll automatically be denied coverage. Rheumatoid arthritis? Automatic denial. Severe acne? Probably denied. Do you take metformin, a popular drug for diabetes? Denied. Use the anti-clotting drug Plavix or Seroquel, prescribed for anti-psychotic or sleep problems? Forget about it.

This confidential information on some insurers' practices is available on the Web - if you know where to look.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Michael Brown: Our Home Secretary is now a joke

Michael Brown
Independent

As a Tory sympathiser, I hope the opposition resists the temptation to call for her dismissal

Jacqui Smith and her husband have a maximum of 13 more pay packets and expenses claims before the voters of her Redditch constituency call time on both their services. Simultaneously she will be relieved of her jobs as Home Secretary and Member of Parliament.

As a consequence, her husband will also be dismissed as her £40,000-a-year constituency organiser. There can now be no doubt that Ms Smith is on political death row. The only question is whether it will be the Prime Minister or the voters who carry out the ministerial death sentence.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

The Great Afghan Bailout: It's Time to Change Names, Switch Analogies

Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com

Let's start by stopping.

It's time, as a start, to stop calling our expanding war in Central and South Asia "the Afghan War" or "the Afghanistan War." If Obama's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke doesn't want to, why should we?

Recently, in a BBC interview, he insisted that "the 'number one problem' in stabilizing Afghanistan was Taliban sanctuaries in western Pakistan, including tribal areas along the Afghan border and cities like Quetta" in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

"Life of Brian" Resurrected in Welsh Town

Maya Schenwar
Truthout

The historic town of Aberystwyth, Wales, was founded in 1109 on a land grant from King Henry I, conquered by Prince Harry of England in 1408 and razed by Parliamentarian troops in 1649. It erected the first-ever Welsh Evangelical Church in the mid-20th century.

But the town didn't become relevant to the international comedy community until 1979, when it banned Monty Python's classic Jesus spoof "Life of Brian."
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Germans announce: Revenge is inefficient

Lewis Page
The Register

If only we'd discovered this sooner

In development which should strike fear into the hearts of action-movie scriptwriters and BOFHs everywhere, remorselessly efficient German economists have calculated that revenge is inefficient.

According to the German national socio-economic database, vengeful people are more likely to be unemployed, have fewer friends and are less satisfied with their lives than those who occasionally let a bad turn go unpunished.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

283 Bases, 170,000 Pieces of Equipment, 140,000 Troops, and an Army of Mercenaries: The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Jeremy Scahill
AlterNet

Why you'll be paying for the occupation for years to come, withdrawal or not.

With last week's announced escalation of the war in Afghanistan, including an Iraq-like "surge" replete with 4,000 more U.S. troops and a sizable increase in private contractors, President Barack Obama blew the lid off of any lingering perceptions that he somehow represents a significant change in how the U.S. conducts its foreign policy.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

International organisations hit by spy attack

Jeremy Kirk
IDG News Service

Computers in more than a 100 countries have been infected by malware used for industrial spying. A 10-month investigation has found that 1,295 computers in 103 countries and belonging to international institutions have been spied on.

The report does not conclusivlely identify a source for the attacks, although there is some strong circumstantial evidence suggesting China may be to blame. However, a second report on cyberespionage does link malware to Chinese sites.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Torture inquiry reveals 15 new cases

Duncan Gardham and Con Coughlin
Telegraph

MI5 and MI6 have identified at least 15 cases of possible complicity by British officers in the torture or mistreatment of terror suspects following the case of the Guantánamo detainee Binyam Mohamed.

Inquiries have revealed British security and intelligence officers have raised concerns about the treatment of several detainees, interviewed while in US custody abroad.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Forget carrots, video games boost night vision

Steve Connor
Indepenndent

Targeting virtual objects on screen helps train eyes to work in low-light, study finds

Computer and video games that involve guns and shooting may not do much for a child's education but they can improve eyesight, according to a study showing that a person's night-time vision gets better after playing electronic action games.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Is there any gold inside Fort Knox, the world's most secure vault?

Chris Ayres
Timesonline

It is said to be the most impregnable vault on Earth: built out of granite, sealed behind a 22-tonne door, located on a US military base and watched over day and night by army units with tanks, heavy artillery and Apache helicopter gunships at their disposal.

Since its construction in 1937 the treasures locked inside Fort Knox have included the US Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, three volumes of the Gutenberg Bible and Magna Carta.
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Wednesday April 01, 2009

Spain May Open Torture Probe of Six Bush Officials

Reuters

A top Spanish court has moved toward starting a probe of six former Bush administration officials including ex-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in connection with alleged torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, The New York Times said on Saturday.

The criminal investigation would focus on whether they violated international law by providing a legalistic justification for torture at the U.S. detention camp in Cuba, the Times said.
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