Sunday August 29, 2010

Free market has turned us into 'Matrix' drones

Rachel Shields
Independent

Ha-Joon Chang, the new kid on the economics block, is out to bust open a few myths

A leading economist has likened the nation's acceptance of free-market capitalism to that of the brainwashed characters in the film The Matrix, unwitting pawns in a fake reality.
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Wednesday August 18, 2010

Big Brother: the series that made surveillance acceptable

John Walsh
Independent

It was the TV show billed as a social experiment. But as Big Brother draws to a close, John Walsh argues that it has made Britain more like Orwell's dystopia than we could have imagined

Soon it will all be over. Next Tuesday, the nation will decide whether John James, the handsome but peevish Australian, or Sam Pepper, the goofy prankster, or jolly Josie, the farm girl turned MC, or indeed somebody quite unforeseen is the housemate who should win the prize money of £50,000 plus a brief sojourn in the national limelight.
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Tuesday August 17, 2010

Hungary Defies IMF and European Authorities

Mark Weisbrot
Counterpunch

The government of Hungary has taken on a lot of powerful interests in the last couple of months, and so far appears to be winning – despite provoking outrage from “everybody who’s anybody.”

“The IMF should hold the line,” shouted the Financial Times in an editorial the day after Hungary sent the IMF packing in July. “With so many countries in vulnerable positions, it cannot be seen to be a soft touch. Showing a few yellow and red cards is a good way to send a signal to other governments that might be tempted to flirt with indiscipline.”
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Tuesday August 17, 2010

The Ecstasy of Empire

Paul Craig Roberts
Counterpunch

The United States is running out of time to get its budget and trade deficits under control. Despite the urgency of the situation, 2010 has been wasted in hype about a non-existent recovery. As recently as August 2 Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner penned a New York Times column, “Welcome to the Recovery.”

As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear on many occasions, an appearance of recovery was created by over-counting employment and undercounting inflation.
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Tuesday August 17, 2010

Scientists reveal bacteria have 'noses'

John von Radowitz
PA

Common bacteria have "noses" that respond to smells, scientists said.
A study shows how certain bugs detect the presence of rivals by picking up whiffs of chemicals in the air.

The discovery means lowly bugs are now known to possess four of our familiar five senses.
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Monday August 16, 2010

New Outrages Keep Gushing From BP

Jim Hightower
t r u t h o u t

With BP's well capped and CEO Tony Hayward exiled to Russia, perhaps you thought that surely there will be no additional revelations about BP to enrage you. But now comes this: prison labor.

In its national PR blitz to buff up its image, the oil giant has loudly been boasting that it has hired devastated, out-of-work local people to handle the clean-up.
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Monday August 16, 2010

Shark Slaughter Advances Into Red Sea

Cam McGrath
Inter Press Service

Six Yemeni fishing boats captured in Egyptian territorial waters in June might have gone unnoticed if not for their unusual cargo -- several kilometers of long lines and over 20 tons of dead sharks.

"The capture of these boats provided more evidence that a commercial shark fishery is operating in the Red Sea," says Amr Ali, managing director of the Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association (HEPCA), a local environmental NGO.
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Monday August 16, 2010

Fallible DNA evidence can mean prison or freedom

Linda Geddes
New Scientist

You are the juror: would you trust DNA evidence? Most people regard it as near infallible- it produces the right result or no result, exonerating the innocent and securing convictions where other evidence fails.

But DNA is not as objective as you might think.
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Monday August 16, 2010

Computer Aid: Reuse, don't recycle, old PCs

Anh Nguyen
Computerworld UK

Reusing computers is 20 times more energy efficient than recycling

Computer Aid has called for vendors and the government to promote the reuse of old IT equipment.

In the report entitled “Why reuse is better than recycling”, Computer Aid, which supports the recycling of electronic waste, argued that reusing working computers is up to 20 times more energy efficient than recycling them.
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Wednesday August 11, 2010

Air steward resigns via emergency chute

Lester Haines
The Register

Abuses passenger, grabs beers and slides into net celebrity

The internet has wasted no time in celebrating the dramatic resignation of air steward Steven Slater.

Slater, 39, took exception to a jetBlue passenger who "refused to apologize after accidentally striking him with luggage" as Flight 1052 from Pittsburgh taxied to a halt at New York's JFK airport yesterday.
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Wednesday August 11, 2010

Antibiotics' efficiency wanes due to global spread of drug-resistant bacteria

Sarah Boseley
The Guardian

Gene giving high levels of resistance to drugs found in increasingly prevalent intestinal bacteria

International travel and medical tourism have led to the rapid, global spread of drug-resistant bacteria that may presage the end of antibiotics and leave doctors struggling to treat infected patients, scientists warn today.
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Wednesday August 11, 2010

Bedroom Layouts Reflect Ancestors’ Preferences

Tom Jacobs
Miller-McCune

German researchers find evolutionary logic behind the way we lay out our bedrooms.

As evolutionary psychologists persistently point out, vestiges of our prehistoric past often turn up in unexpected places. Newly published research suggests one of them may be your bedroom.
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Wednesday August 11, 2010

Surgeon gets go-ahead to carry out world's first full leg transplant

Alasdair Fotheringham
Independent On Sunday

Pedro Cavadas has no time for vanity surgery. The poor and those maimed in war or by landmines are his first priority, he tells Alasdair Fotheringham

Pedro Cavadas is a remarkable man. The Spanish plastic surgeon works up to 14 hours a day on patients needing reconstructive microsurgery.
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Wednesday August 11, 2010

Out of Sight, Out of Mind (Even When It's Not Out of Sight)

Dahr Jamail and Erika Blumenfeld
Dahr Jamail's Dispatches

Since BP announced that CEO Tony Hayward would receive a multi-million dollar golden parachute and be replaced by Bob Dudley, we have witnessed an incredibly broad, and powerful, propaganda campaign.

A campaign that peaked this week with the US government, clearly acting in BP’s best interests, itself announcing, via outlets willing to allow themselves to be used to transfer the propaganda, like the New York Times, this message: “The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.”
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Wednesday August 11, 2010

Canola gone wild! Uh-oh, transgenic plants are escaping and interbreeding 27

Tom Laskawy
Grist

One of the primary concerns with transgenic (aka genetically modified) crops is the risk of genetic contamination, i.e. the transfer of engineered genes to wild versions of the same plant.

The corporations involved in genetic engineering, such as Monsanto and Bayer CropScience, have time and again assured regulators and the public that this risk is minimal.
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Wednesday August 11, 2010

How Facebook Betrayed Users and Undermined Online Privacy

Allan Badiner
AlterNet

Facebook has collected loads of private information about their users -- information that is being sold to marketers.

In just six years Facebook has crossed the threshold of 500 million users. In the past nine months it has doubled in size and is now the number one most visited Web site in the world, surpassing Google.
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Wednesday August 11, 2010

Huge ice island could pose threat to oil, shipping

Karl Ritter
Associated Press

An island of ice more than four times the size of Manhattan is drifting across the Arctic Ocean after breaking off from a glacier in Greenland.

Potentially in the path of this unstoppable giant are oil platforms and shipping lanes — and any collision could do untold damage. In a worst case scenario, large chunks could reach the heavily trafficked waters where another Greenland iceberg sank the Titanic in 1912.
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

All new homes to run on green power by 2016

Matt Chorley
Independent

Developers failing to reach zero-carbon standards will be charged a levy to fund local energy plants

Every new home is to be powered by a green energy plant to offset its environmental impact under government plans for zero-carbon living from 2016.
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

Leaks

Amy Davidson
The New Yorker

Last September, an assessment of the war in Afghanistan, by the American commander General Stanley McChrystal, was leaked to the press. The timing was not incidental.

President Obama was trying to make up his mind about what kind of war he wanted to wage, for how long, and with how many soldiers.
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

Looking for Answers in Duisburg

Spiegel International

The death of 21 people at the Love Parade in Duisburg on July 24th was far from a random accident. It was the result of a series of failures made by the city, the police and the event organizers. Particularly damning, at the height of the crush, there was no way out.

She was hoping for a phone call. By late evening on July 24, Stefanie M. had heard about the disaster that had befallen the Love Parade in Duisburg. She and her husband Klaus-Peter knew there had been deaths, they knew that hundreds had been injured. But they didn't know where their son Eike was. They had heard nothing.
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

A new look at the bygone beauty of planet Earth

Victoria Klein
Ode Magazine

Past the strip malls, highways, and shrinking public parks, there’s a side of the Earth you’ve never seen. At 4.5 billion years old, planet Earth has been around a lot longer than you or me (obvious, no?).

Before some companies attempt to pave over all of our land masses, one woman is working to capture the ancient areas of our home.
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

The ADHD-ventures of Tom Sawyer

Anne Applebaum
Slate

The strange comforts of reading Mark Twain in the age of oppositional defiant disorder.

Everyone remembers the whitewashing scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but how many recall the scene that precedes it? Having escaped from Aunt Polly, Tom Sawyer is "playing hooky" and teaching himself to whistle, when he suddenly spies a "newcomer" in his village—a newcomer with "a citified air." Their conversation unfolds like this:
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

Hush Money Generation

James Rothenberg
Counterpunch

I went to a good concert recently. Essentially two headline acts, with Steve Winwood opening for Carlos Santana. Of equal interest was the venue, Bethel Woods, in Sullivan County, New York. This is the music center built on the site of the original 1969 Woodstock festival.

It’s a modern amphitheater with outdoor lawn seating together accommodating 15,000 people, just up the hill and facing the other way from the original concert setup.
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

Special Forces’ Robocopter Spotted in Belize

Olivia Koski
Wired

Watch out, humans, the U.S. military has released an all-seeing, unmanned helicopter into the wild, according to Aviation Week. The Boeing A160T Hummingbird was photographed in Belize, where it was test flying a tree-penetrating Darpa radar called FORESTER.

Locals were given a heads-up thanks to a press release from the U.S. Embassy.
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

Barbecue meals under fire for exceeding healthy calorie intake

Jill Insley
The Guardian

Study shows alfresco eating can lead to 1,000 calories more than recommended daily amount for women and 500 for men

Beer, ice-cream, crisps, Indian takeaways, chips and anything in batter: normally, it's a particular food type that gets blamed for helping the British to pile on the pounds. But now a whole style of cooking and eating has come under fire for encouraging obesity in the UK.
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

The world's first really green oil deal

Esmé McAvoy
Independent On Sunday

Ecuador's £3.6bn scheme to save its rainforest from exploitation could point the way to sparing other threatened landscapes

The world's first genuinely green energy deal is about to be sealed. In a plan which could be a blueprint for saving large tracts of the planet from exploitation, a greater value is being put on a pristine wilderness than on the oil that lies beneath
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

Junk food-addicted rats chose to starve themselves rather than eat healthy food

David Gutierrez
Natural News

A diet including unlimited amounts of junk food can cause rats to become so addicted to the unhealthy diet that they will starve themselves rather than go back to eating healthy food, researchers have discovered.

In a series of studies conducted over the course of three years and published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Scripps Florida scientists Paul Johnson and Paul Kenny have shown that rats' response to unlimited junk food closely parallels well-known patterns of drug addiction -- even down to the changes in brain chemistry.
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

Study: CIA doctors ‘gave green light to torture’

Muriel Kane
Raw Story

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals that physicians with the CIA's Office of Medical Services (OMS) played an even greater role in facilitating the torture of detainees than was previously recognized.
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

Should Videotaping the Police Really Be a Crime?

Adam Cohen
Time

Anthony Graber, a Maryland Air National Guard staff sergeant, faces up to 16 years in prison. His crime?

He videotaped his March encounter with a state trooper who pulled him over for speeding on a motorcycle. Then Graber put the video - which could put the officer in a bad light - up on YouTube.
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

Genetically Modified Salmon Present a Number of Risks to Consumer Health and Environment

danbacher
AlterNet

The New York Times (last month) and Washington Post (yesterday) published stories claiming that the FDA may soon allow for the sale of genetically modified salmon.

Please see below for Food & Water Watch’s take on the controversial practice.
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

What the Heck Are US Marines Doing in Costa Rica? Obama's Tilt to the Right on Latin America

Nikolas Kozloff
t r u t h o u t

The USS Makin Island, an amphibious assault aircraft carrier, is an intimidating ship. Built by Northrup Grumman, Makin Island is 45,000 tons of cold steel and has living quarters for almost 3,200 sailors and Marines.

Weighing in at a whopping 42,800 tons, the ship is 844 feet long and 106 feet wide.
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

A Looming Oxygen Crisis and Its Impact on World’s Oceans

Carl Zimmer
e360

As warming intensifies, scientists warn, the oxygen content of oceans across the planet could be more and more diminished, with serious consequences for the future of fish and other sea life.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is overshadowing another catastrophe that’s also unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico this summer: The oxygen dissolved in the Gulf waters is disappearing. In some places, the oxygen is getting so scarce that fish and other animals cannot survive.
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Tuesday August 10, 2010

WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File

Kim Zetter
Wired

In the wake of strong U.S. government statements condemning WikiLeaks’ recent publishing of 77,000 Afghan War documents, the secret-spilling site has posted a mysterious encrypted file labeled “insurance.”

The huge file, posted on the Afghan War page at the WikiLeaks site, is 1.4 GB and is encrypted with AES256. The file’s size dwarfs the size of all the other files on the page combined. The file has also been posted on a torrent download site.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Punished for Fighting AIDS

Pavol Stracansky
Inter Press Service

Drug users and doctors legally prescribing substitution drugs to addicts -- a key tool in the battle with the country's growing HIV epidemic -- are facing illegal police intimidation and imprisonment, HIV/AIDS activists in the Ukraine say. Fears are rising that the country's approach to the disease could be changing for the worse.

Two doctors have been arrested, medical centres treating drug users raided by police, and drug users receiving substitute treatments detained en masse in a series of recent concerning events, they say.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Solar vibrator helps women get off while getting off the grid 6

Ashley Braun
Grist

Let's give a squeal of welcome to the newest member of the solar community: the Micro-Kitty sex toy! Yes, yes, YES, it is the "world's first solar-powered vibrator."

Not only is there guilt-free power generation for every gyration, but this silicone toy is free of toxic phthalates, which will have your reproductive parts cheering even more.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Smartphones will make up 25% of mobile phones by 2013, says ABI

Brad Reed
Network World US

BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, webOS or Symbian to take over

More than one-fourth of mobile phones sold in 2013 will be classified as smartphones, according to ABI Research.

ABI released its projections today as part of its mid-year report on the smartphone market.
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Monday August 09, 2010

The End of (Military) History?

Andrew J. Bacevich
Tomdispatch.com

“In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history.”

This sentiment, introducing the essay that made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention today, albeit from a different perspective.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Tony Blair Must Be Prosecuted

John Pilger
t r u t h o u t

Tony Blair must be prosecuted, not indulged like his mentor Peter Mandelson. Both have produced self-serving memoirs for which they have been paid fortunes.

Blair's will appear next month and earn him £4.6 million. Now, consider Britain's Proceeds of Crime Act.
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Monday August 09, 2010

8 Inspiring Green Kids and Their Eco-Innovations

Jasmin Malik Chua
Inhabitat

As kids, most of us spent our days playing hopscotch, toying with action figures, maneuvering Tetris blocks, and wrestling with Donkey Kong. Not these creative tykes, however!

These eight amazingly innovative kids and adolescents are inventing up a storm — whether for their own personal kicks (Hibiki Kono’s wall-scaling backpack), to help their community (Kelydra Welcker’s water-filtration method), or to save the world (Javier Fernández-Han’s algae-driven super-system).
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Monday August 09, 2010

Environmental research: Nature's choreography

The Guardian

Researchers have shown how the Amazon rainforest depends on the Sahara desert for half of its fresh mineral nutrients

Deserts cover a third of the world's land surface, they have a powerful role in the planetary climate machine, and they are home to 500 million people.

And – as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature has been saying at the world heritage committee meeting in Brasilia, which finished last week – deserts are unique and fragile environments that are home to a remarkable array of plants and animals.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Will California Legalize Pot?

Daniela Perdomo
AlterNet

With only a few months to go until the election, the campaign to legalize marijuana in California has only $50,000 in cash on hand. The question now is: How can it win?

Today, at least a third of Americans say they've tried smoking weed. Is it possible that after half a century of increasingly mainstreamed pot use the public is ready for marijuana to be legal? We may soon find out.
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Monday August 09, 2010

The war isn't working

National Post

Last week, Canadians heard howls of protest that Stephen Harper hadn't attended the World AIDS Conference in Vienna, and that Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq had "failed" to sign the Vienna Declaration on global antidrug policy.

This did not speak well of Canadian politics, which can be insufferably myopic. It seems no other G20 leader attended the conference, and certainly no world leader or health minister has signed, or would dare sign, the Vienna Declaration -- which essentially calls for a wholesale reassessment of our current approach to fighting drug trafficking and addiction.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Five millennia on, Iceman of Bolzano gives up DNA secrets

Michael Day
Independent

Oetzi's genetic code could shed light on hereditary diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and cancer.

Nearly 20 years after the dead man's head was found peeping from a melting Alpine glacier, investigators have finally seen fit to contact his relatives.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Big Brother facial recognition cameras being rolled out in NCP car parks

Jaya Narain
Daily Mail

Cutting-edge cameras will scan drivers' faces and check them against a crime database as they enter car parks, it emerged last night.

NCP, which is trialling the system at 40 sites, hopes it will help identify potential car thieves.
But privacy campaigners reacted with fury, saying the technology could criminalise innocent people.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered

oleoleolson
Alternet

A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives.

An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Millions spent on doctor 'gagging orders' by NHS, investigation finds

Nigel Morris
Independent

A combination of pay-offs and fear is preventing whistleblowers going public with criticisms over care, reports Nigel Morris

Hospital doctors who quit their jobs are being routinely forced to sign "gagging orders" despite legislation designed to protect NHS whistleblowers, it is revealed today.
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Monday August 09, 2010

How Disney Magic and the Corporate Media Shape Youth Identity in the Digital Age

Henry Giroux and Grace Pollock
t r u t h o u t

While the "empire of consumption" has been around for a long time[1], American society in the last 30 years has undergone a sea change in the daily lives of children - one marked by a major transition from a culture of innocence and social protection, however imperfect, to a culture of commodification.

Youth are now assaulted by a never-ending proliferation of marketing strategies that colonize their consciousness and daily lives.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Hamas Slowly Islamising Gaza

Mel Frykberg
Inter Press Service

Gazans are caught between a rock and a hard place. While Israel continues to apply a crippling siege on the coastal territory, Gaza's Hamas government is cracking down on civil and political liberties in what appears to be a campaign to slowly Islamise Gaza.

Last week detectives from Gaza's de facto Hamas government raided several stores and seized clothing which they alleged bore "immoral words". Cotton shirts produced in Gaza city with the slogan 'Porn Man Clothing' emblazoned on were confiscated.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time

Anil Ananthaswamy
New Scientist

Physicists struggling to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics have hailed a theory – inspired by pencil lead – that could make it all very simple

It was a speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was 1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster and time becomes distorted.
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Monday August 09, 2010

First robot able to develop and show emotions is unveiled

Alok Jha
The Guardian

Nao, developed by a European research team, models the first years of life and can form bonds with the people he meets

When Nao is sad, he hunches his shoulders forward and looks down. When he's happy, he raises his arms, angling for a hug. When frightened, Naohe cowers, and he stays like that until he is soothed with some gentle strokes on his head.
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Monday August 09, 2010

"You Need to Know What's Really Going On": WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange on the Fight for the Truth

Ron Synovitz and Christopher Schwartz
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

Assange: "In order to make any just decision you need to know and understand what abuses or plans for abuses are occurring."

Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks, says his work is based on the "ancient vision" of uncovering the truth. And he says sources would rather turn over their information to him than to traditional news outlets because he can protect them better.
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Monday August 09, 2010

If I Can’t Dance It’s Not My Revolution

Bradford Keeney
Adbusters

Shake yourself into ecstatic truth!

IN THE BEGINNING OF HUMAN CULTURE, PEOPLE KNEW HOW TO SHAKE THEIR BOOTIES AND IN DOING SO, THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE WERE REVEALED.

Then along came language, social hierarchy, overinflated beliefs and the mirages of under-standing. Whereas human beings embodied the most important truths in the beginning, it all went to hell when we stilled our bodies and fed too many words to our minds.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Use of 'toxic stew' to get rid of oil brings more trouble for BP

Guy Adams
Independent

The Gulf of Mexico has been "carpet- bombed" with a highly toxic chemical dispersant for months on end, breaking official guidelines issued in the aftermath of April's Deepwater Horizon disaster which stated that BP should use the substance only in "extremely rare" cases, according to documents released by a US House of Representatives committee at the weekend.
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Monday August 09, 2010

'There wasn't much blood about': Detective who found weapons expert David Kelly's body raises questions over his death

Rebeca Camber
Daily Mail

The mystery surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly deepened yesterday after the detective who found his body claimed he didn't see 'much blood'.

The revelation by Detective Constable Graham Coe casts further doubt on the Hutton Report's verdict that the Ministry of Defence scientist died of blood loss after slitting his wrist.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Will Vince Cable be the first to leave Cameron's Cabinet?

by Mehdi Hasan
NewStatesman

The Business Secretary's comments in the Sunday Telegraph seem to confirm reports that he isn't a happy man.

Who will be the first Lib Dem member of the Cabinet to quit this coalition during the course of this "fixed term" parliament? I know we've already had one Lib Dem departure: the former chief secretary to the Treasury, David Laws, of course, resigned after just 17 days on the job. But he didn't really have a choice.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Spider Silk Produced from Metabolically Engineered Bacteria

Diane Pham
Inhabitat

Stronger than steel, yet thinner than a human hair, spider silk is an incredible material created by nature that has amazing potential in real-world application.

Unfortunately, accumulating enough of this prized textile can prove to be quite a challenge — not only are the silk producers diminutive in size, but they also fail to be friendly enough to live collectively without killing one another (there goes the spider farm idea).
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Monday August 09, 2010

How Google Counted The World’s 129 Million Books

Mark Brown
Wired

In a blog post published this week, search mammoth Google explained the deep and thoroughly elaborate algorithm used by its literary offshoot, Google Books, to count just how many books exist in the world, right now.

Seeing as there’s no official standard to cataloging tomes (the final term Google settled on for defining what is and isn’t worth cataloging in Google Books, tomes are bound volumes that can be printed millions of times, or just once), plenty of systems were deemed unreliable.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Hoax Facebook virus makes more trouble than a real virus

John Leyden
The register

Don't tell all your friends

A hoax Facebook virus is spreading rapidly across the social network.

Many users have been hoodwinked into forwarding an inaccurate warning about the spread of non-existent malware that claims a girl committed suicide over a post her father wrote on her Facebook wall.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

Ryan Blitstein
Miller-McCune

David Cope’s software creates beautiful, original music. Why are people so angry about that?

The office looks like the aftermath of a surrealistic earthquake, as if David Cope‘s brain has spewed out decades of memories all over the carpet, the door, the walls, even the ceiling. Books and papers, music scores and magazines are all strewn about in ragged piles.
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Monday August 09, 2010

UN Declares Water a Fundamental Human Right -- U.S. Abstains from Voting on Resolution

Amy Goodman
Democracy Now

The planet is running out of water. It was about time for the UN to recognize the right of every human being on earth to water and sanitation.

The United Nations General Assembly has declared for the first time that access to clean water and sanitation is a fundamental human right. In a historic vote Wednesday, 122 countries supported the resolution, and over forty countries abstained from voting, including the United States, Canada and several European and other industrialized countries.
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Monday August 09, 2010

5 Stupid, Unfair and Sexist Things Expected of Men

Greta Christina
AlterNet

We know the many ways sexism hurts women. But we don't talk as much about how sexism hurts men.

If you have a scrap of progressive politics in your bones, it's no surprise to you that sexism hurts women. Like, duh. That's kind of the definition of the word.

But we don't talk as much about how sexism hurts men. Understandably.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Dogs: face to face with my worst enemy

Sarfraz Manzoor
The Guardian

Many Muslims, growing up in devout households, are taught that dogs are dirty and scary. So could Sarfraz Manzoor learn to love Cookie the bulldog?

I don't like dogs. I find them frightening and unpredictable; I don't like their panting, drooling ways and I feel uncomfortable not being able to tell which dog is friendly and which wants to chew off my arm.
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Monday August 09, 2010

Catalonia votes to ban all forms of bullfighting in nationalist move

Anita Brooks
Independent

Animal rights groups are celebrating, but fans say the ruling is nothing but a desire to be un-Spanish

In a tense, historic vote, Catalonia's regional parliament yesterday banned Spain's "national fiesta" – bullfighting, handing a victory to animal rights activists, who predicted the start of a bloodless era across the country.
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Monday August 09, 2010

A Second Slave Rebellion in Haiti: What's the Worth of a Haitian Child? (

Beverly Bell and Tory Field
t r u t h o u t

One of the many effects of poverty in Haiti is that desperate parents regularly give away their children in the hope that the new family will feed and educate the children better than they themselves can.

Instead, the children usually end up as child slaves, or restavèk.
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Monday August 09, 2010

UFO Sightings: UK Government Releases UFO-Related Documents (Video)

Helena Zhu
Epoch Times

Britain’s National Archives released files containing many UFO-related documents, drawings, letters, and parliamentary questions from between 1995 and 2003 on Wednesday.
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Sunday August 08, 2010

Warning over useless products

Josie Clarke
Independent

Shoppers should look out for far-fetched claims about certain household products, the consumer magazine Which? says today.

The magazine released a list of 10 "money-wasting products you don't need" after tests found they failed to live up to the claims on the packaging.
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Sunday August 08, 2010

BP Fires 10,000 Cleanup Workers

Mac McClelland
Mother Jones

New BP CEO Bob Dudley wasn't kidding when he announced last week that it was time for the company to scale back oil-spill cleanup operations. In fact, by the time he'd said that, the responder force had been drawn down by about 25 percent.

On July 13, the Deepwater Horizon Joint Command was reporting 46,000 responders. On July 23, it was down to 30,000, and the numbers have hovered around the low 30s since.
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Sunday August 08, 2010

Grassroots Struggle

Schnews

As police notch up another victory in the war against fun

Yet another independent festival has been cancelled after a concerted campaign by bureaucrats, nimbys and police.

The Grassroots Feastival was a small volunteer-run event due to take place in Cambridgeshire in early September. Organisers had lined up three days of revelry, from poetry to Drum ‘n’ Bass and culminating in a communal banquet replete with juggling waiters.
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Sunday August 08, 2010

Size isn't everything: The big brain myth

Alison Motluk
New Scientist

Oversized brains are to humans what trunks are to elephants and elaborate tail feathers are to peacocks - our defining glory. What would we be without our superlative, gargantuan, neuron-packed brains?

Like Donald Trump without his towers, Simon Cowell without his sneering put-downs or Bridget Jones without her diaries. We would just be ordinary primates. Unquestionably smart ones, of course, just not special.
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Sunday August 08, 2010

Zombie Neocon Strategy Behind Israel's "Bomb Iran" Campaign

Gareth Porter
t r u t h o u t

Reuel Marc Gerecht’s screed justifying an Israeli bombing attack on Iran coincides with the opening the new Israel lobby campaign marked by the introduction of House resolution 1553 expressing full support for such an Israeli attack.

What is important to understand about this campaign is that the aim of Gerecht and of the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is to support an attack by Israel so that the United States can be drawn into direct, full-scale war with Iran.
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Sunday August 08, 2010

Conrad Black: My prison education

Conrad Black
National Post

In my 28 months as a guest of the U.S. government, I often wondered how my time in that role would end.

I never expected that I would have to serve the whole term, though I was, and am, psychologically prepared to do so, now that I have learned more of the fallibility of American justice, which does convict many people, who, like me, would never dream of committing a crime in a thousand years.
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Sunday August 08, 2010

Pollution reaches new high as smog smothers Moscow

Vladimir Isachenkov
Independent

Residents don face masks while authorities fight to keep forest fires away from nuclear installation

A suffocating smog from wildfires hung over the Russian capital on Saturday, raising the concentration of dangerous pollutants to a new high as residents donned masks and dozens of flights were delayed at the city's airports.
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Saturday August 07, 2010

Watching the Corporations: Will Europe become completely genetically modified?

Corporate Watch

On 13th July the European commission (EC) approved changes to genetic modification (GM) cultivation regulations by allowing national governments to decide whether to permit GM cultivation within their borders.

For the last 12 years, there has been a virtual freeze on GM farming throughout the EU. The changes are being justified by the argument that it will make it easier for states to ban GM crops on their own soil, even if this will happen in exchange for having less say over what other states decide to do, meaning easier authorisation for GM at the EU level. GM crops can now in theory be banned in individual states on the grounds of prevention of contamination, but it may take up to two years for prevention on non-scientific grounds to be implemented due to legislative processes.
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Saturday August 07, 2010

There will be blood

Roger Dobson
Independent

The most precious liquid in the world is spilled every day on battlefields and in operating theatres. So creating a synthetic version in the lab is more vital than ever, says Roger Dobson

For centuries, scientists have been trying to find a substitute for blood. Almost anything and everything was tried, including milk, red wine, water, and even urine, but with no success.
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Saturday August 07, 2010

Car fuel 'could be made from thin air'

Tom Chivers
Telegraph

Car fuel could be created from thin air using an enzyme from a common soil bacterium, say scientists.

It is hoped that this will lead to a cheap way of making environmentally friendly, carbon-neutral 'green' fuel that can be used without major redesigns of car engines.

Azotobacter vinelandii, a microbe found around the roots of various food plants, creates an enzyme - vanadium nitrogenase - which in nature produces ammonia from nitrogen gas.
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Saturday August 07, 2010

Speed cameras have caused 28,000 accidents in a decade

Daily Mail

Speed cameras have triggered at least 28,000 crashes since 2001, according to new research.

The devices also cause motorists to drive erratically, to not concentrate on the road and to brake suddenly when one comes into sight, a study has revealed.
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Saturday August 07, 2010

The Internet Generation Prefers the Real World

Manfred Dworschak
Spiegel International

They may have been dubbed the "Internet generation," but young people are more interested in their real-world friends than Facebook. New research shows that the majority of children and teenagers are not the Web-savvy digital natives of legend. In fact, many of them don't even know how to google properly.

Seventeen-year-old Jetlir is online every day, sometimes for many hours at a time and late into the night. The window of his instant messaging program is nearly always open on his computer screen.
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Saturday August 07, 2010

Appeals court bashes warrantless GPS tracking

Dan Goodin
The Register

No more illicit snoop-dart blow guns

A federal appeals court has roundly rejected US government claims that it doesn't need a search warrant to surveil suspects using global positioning system location-tracking devices.
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Saturday August 07, 2010

White Citizenship

Margaret Kimberley
Counterpunch

The founding fathers made one thing perfectly clear when they ratified the constitution in 1787. Full citizenship rights were meant only for white men of property.

Over a period of nearly 200 years, people’s movements guaranteed that those rights were extended to everyone regardless of race or gender, but the fact that the struggle literally took centuries should not be forgotten.
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Saturday August 07, 2010

Gaza aid flotilla to set sail from Lebanon with all-women crew

Ruth Sherlock
The Guardian

Arabic singer joins crew of nuns, doctors, lawyers and journalists for humanitarian mission despite Israeli warning

A ship bearing aid for Gaza is preparing to leave Tripoli in Lebanon this weekend in the latest attempt to defy the Israeli blockade – with only women on board.
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Saturday August 07, 2010

Greatly Exaggerated: Rumors of the Euro’s ‘Collapse’

Michael Scott Moore
Miller-McCune

With the pan-European currency trading in the middle of its historical range, perhaps the doomsayers should reduce their caffeine intake a bit.

The demise of the euro has been rumored for months, and Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis ginned up a cloud of speculation this year that the currency would “collapse.”
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Saturday August 07, 2010

The dead sea: Global warming blamed for 40 per cent decline in the ocean's phytoplankton

Steve Connor
Independent

Microscopic life crucial to the marine food chain is dying out. The consequences could be catastrophic

The microscopic plants that support all life in the oceans are dying off at a dramatic rate, according to a study that has documented for the first time a disturbing and unprecedented change at the base of the marine food web.
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Saturday August 07, 2010

Solar Tsunami Celestial Show to Visit Earth

Helena Zhu
Epoch Times

A “solar tsunami” eruption of plasma on the surface of the sun will lead a shower of ionized atoms to strike the Earth Tuesday or Wednesday night.

Earth orbiting satellites detected that nearly the entire Earth-facing side of the sun erupted on Aug. 1 in a series of C-class solar flares, propelling one or possibly two coral mass ejections (CMEs).
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Saturday August 07, 2010

Watch: What a Legal Pot Economy Would Look Like

Haik Hoisington
Alternet

How everyone stands to benefit from ending the war on weed.

This fall Californians will go the polls with a chance to make history. They will be able to cast a vote to tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol or cigarettes. California's Proposition 19 is one of many similar initiatives cropping up on state ballots across the country.
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Saturday August 07, 2010

Main Street Businesses Take on Corporate Tax Havens

Chuck Collins
Yes!

When Wall Street dodges taxes, Main Street is left to pick up the slack. Now a coalition of small businesses, community banks, and domestic manufacturers are joining forces to hold corporations accountable.

How is it possible that the Ula Café and City Feed & Supply pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than profitable Wall Street firms and Fortune 500 companies? Multinational corporations—but not mom-and-pop businesses—are able to make use of overseas tax havens to avoid paying their fair share.
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Saturday August 07, 2010

Nissan Leaf or Chevy Volt? Choosing your green drive

Todd Woody
Grist

Are you a Volt kind of gal or a Leaf guy?

With General Motors and Nissan revving up to put the first mass-produced electric cars in showrooms in a few months, the shape of the nascent market is starting to emerge as the engineers complete their work and the marketers begin theirs.
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Saturday August 07, 2010

Education and diet are key to beating dementia

Nic Fleming
New Scientist

Combating diabetes and depression, as well as improving educational standards and diets, are the best ways to reduce the incidence of dementia.

That's the conclusion of a study published today in the BMJ that followed 1433 elderly people living in the south of France, testing them for signs of dementia over seven years.
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Saturday August 07, 2010

How to get the salt out of your food

Relaxnews

Too much salt and sodium is linked with a variety of health risks including diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular problems. Here are some ways to enhance a variety of dishes without a sprinkle of salt.
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Saturday August 07, 2010

Has the Most Common Marijuana Test Resulted in Tens of Thousands of Wrongful Convictions?

John Kelly
AlterNet

More than 800,000 people are arrested on marijuana charges each year in the United States, many on the basis of an error-prone test.

Raised in Montana and a resident of Alaska for 18 years, Robin Rae Brown, 48, always made time to explore in the wilderness. On March 20, 2009, she parked her pickup truck outside Weston, Florida, and hiked off the beaten path along a remote canal and into the woods to bird watch and commune with nature.
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Friday August 06, 2010

Has the internet just sold its soul?

Stephen Foley
Independent

As Google closes in on a deal to buy preferential web access, time is running out to save one of the founding principles of the net

Google stood accused last night of betraying the founding principles of the internet, as it readied a deal that will abandon key parts of its support for "net neutrality", which has guaranteed equal access to the worldwide web since its inception.
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Thursday August 05, 2010

Microsoft gets dirty with Gmail cloud cash fight

Gavin Clarke
The register

Dressing up what you kill

Microsoft is so committed to the cloud that it's throwing everything at rivals like Google to crack open the door on sales and gain momentum online.

Chief operating officer Kevin Turner painted a rosy future for Microsoft in the cloud for Wall Street this week, but at the same time, Microsoft has been getting dirty.
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Thursday August 05, 2010

Gulf oil spill: White House accused of spinning report

Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian

Scientists say it is 'just not true' that the vast majority of oil from the BP spill has gone

The White House was accused today of spinning a government scientific report into the amount of oil left in the Gulf of Mexico from the BP spill which had officials declaring that the vast majority of the oil had been removed.
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Wednesday August 04, 2010

Industrial virus revives power grid hacking fears

Jaikumar Vijayan
Computerworld US

Safety of power plants and distribution in question

Last week's disclosure of a sophisticated malware program targeting control system software from Siemens AG has renewed long-standing concerns about whether the US power grid can withstand targeted cyberattacks.
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Wednesday August 04, 2010

Lending to businesses must come before bonuses, banks are warned

Jill Treanor
The Guardian

Barclays to set aside 40% of investment banking income for bonuses and Lloyds Bank anticipates profits of £1bn against losses of £4bn last year

Banks were warned last night that paying out big bonuses to their staff and large dividends to shareholders must not come at the expense of increasing lending to businesses and bolstering their capital bases.
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Wednesday August 04, 2010

Water torture: 3,300,000,000 litres are lost every single day through leakage

Andrew Johnson and James Burton
Independent

After a £7.5bn investment more water is being lost through leakage now than a decade ago. The companies argue with the regulator, each accusing the other of slowing repairs, and yet they still increase their profits.

Ofwat, the water industry watchdog, faces calls for it to be overhauled amid accusations that it is not doing enough to remedy leaking drinking water while privatised water companies enjoy soaring profits and consumers face high bills.
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Wednesday August 04, 2010

U.S. farmers may face crackdown on pesticide use

Les Blumenthal
McClatchy Newspapers

The nation's farmers could face severe restrictions on the use of pesticides as environmentalists, spurred by a favorable ruling from a judge in Washington state, want the courts to force federal regulators to protect endangered species from the ill effects of agricultural chemicals.
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Wednesday August 04, 2010

Yahoo to pay hackers with good ideas

John Ribeiro
Techworld

Independent hackers could help Internet compnay convert ideas into products

Yahoo is considering investing in hackers with good ideas and technologies, a company executive said on Saturday.

"We are open to many ways of having a stake in creative young companies," said Jeff Kinder, Yahoo’s senior vice president for media products and solutions, on the sidelines of a Yahoo Open Hack Day in Bangalore.
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Wednesday August 04, 2010

Elon Musk: 'I'm planning to retire to Mars'

Paul Harris
The Observer

The SpaceX founder is convinced that humanity's survival rests on its ability to move to the red planet. He tells Paul Harris how his company is making the leap to the stars an affordable dream

The fresh-faced 39-year-old man, in a dark T-shirt and jeans, is talking about travelling to Mars. Not now, but when he's older and ready to swap life on Earth for one on the red planet. "It would be a good place to retire," he says in all seriousness.
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Monday August 02, 2010

Police forces 'accept cuts will mean losing officers'

Andrew Woodcock
Press Association

Police forces accept that they will have to lose officers as part of the Government's austerity drive, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers said today.

But Sir Hugh Orde said that in order to maintain frontline policing, officers must be released from some of the constraints imposed by legislation over recent years, and given more freedom to use their own discretion in response to incidents - even if this means that sometimes things go wrong.
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Monday August 02, 2010

A New View of Why Women Shun Science Careers

Tom Jacobs
Miller-McCune

New research suggests one reason women are underrepresented in science and math is they see such careers as impeding their desire to help others.

It’s a nagging question that has long haunted the equality-minded world of academia: Why are women so underrepresented in the fields of science and technology?
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Monday August 02, 2010

Let Them Eat Cake

Paul Craig Roberts
Counterpunch

It is not unusual for members of the diminishing upper middle class to drop $20,000 or $30,000 on a big wedding. But for celebrities this large sum wouldn’t cover the wedding dress or the flowers.

When country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum hardly counts as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000.
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Monday August 02, 2010

Social-engineering contest reveals secret BP info

Dan Goodin
The Register

Hacking human gullibility at Defcon

A hacker competition that challenges contestants to trick employees of large companies into divulging potentially sensitive information aims to show how human gullibility is the biggest security vulnerability of all. During its first day at the Defcon hacker contest in Las Vegas, it had clearly achieved its goal.
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Monday August 02, 2010

Campaigners try to force MoD to court over Afghan killings

David Leigh and Ed Pilkington
The Giardian

Move follows last week's disclosure of a series of civilian shootings on WikiLeaks

The prospect of a judicial review into previously covered-up civilian shootings in Afghanistan has opened up after human rights campaigners launched an attempt to take the Ministry of Defence to court.
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Monday August 02, 2010

Greek Mythology: The Real Story of the European Debt Crisis

Walden Bello
Yes!

Why what you’re hearing about the European debt crisis—and how to fix it—is wrong.

Cafés are full in Athens, and droves of tourists still visit the Parthenon and go island-hopping in the fabled Aegean. But beneath the summery surface, there is confusion, anger, and despair as this country plunges into its worst economic crisis in decades.
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