Saturday December 31, 2011

Alt Text: Top 10 Things Nobody Cared About in 2011

Lore Sjöberg
Wired

It’s the end of year, which means it’s the time for all good columnists to whip out their “best of the year” lists.

Or, if they’re feeling impish, their “worst of the year” lists. Often both because, hey, two columns.
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Saturday December 31, 2011

Global hunger for plastic packaging leaves waste solution a long way off

Juliette Jowit
The Guardian

Despite measures to increase recycling, discarded plastic packaging continues to blight Earth

Five hundred tonnes of Christmas tree lights and at least 25m bags of plastic sweet wrappers, turkey coverings, drinks bottles and broken toys will be thrown away by UK homes this Christmas and new year. But only a tiny proportion of this waste will be recycled.
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Saturday December 31, 2011

Doctors sued for creating 'Valium addicts'

Nina Lakhani
Independent

Patients take legal action after being damaged by over-prescription of drugs

Doctors are being sued for creating prescription drug addicts amid claims they have failed to follow safety guidelines published more than 20 years ago.
read full story

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Saturday December 31, 2011

The city, stripped down: How ruin porn can help rebuild the Rust Belt 3

Richey Piiparinen
Grist

Living in the Rust Belt, one becomes accustomed to things that many people would find shocking. Examples: Not long ago, I saw the façade of an abandoned building fall out of itself on fire and into the street.

Firemen and neighbors gathered around to look.
read full story

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Saturday December 31, 2011

Are You Being Tracked? 8 Ways Your Privacy Is Being Eroded Online and Off

david Rosen
AlterNet

A series of ongoing battles delineate the boundary of what, in the digital age, is personal, private life and information.

In a recent hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Al Franken reminded his fellow Americans, “People have a fundamental right to control their private information.” At the hearing, Franken raised an alarm about Carrier IQ’s software, CIQ.
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Saturday December 31, 2011

New Chinese space plans are all about security and strategy on Earth

Lewis Page
The Register

Nothing much to do with manned or deep space exploring

Analysis Chinese officials have published a new white paper detailing China's aspirations in space for coming years.

Most media have chosen to focus on Beijing's vague aspirations toward deep-space and manned exploration, but in fact the concrete details given all point toward a primary emphasis on strategic advantage for China here on Earth.
read full story

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Saturday December 31, 2011

5 Companies That Did Something Good for the World This Year

Lauren Kelley
AlterNet

While no company is perfect, it's good to know that at least a few for-profit entities did some good things for the environment and society this year.

Occupy Wall Street has us all thinking about the bad things companies can do - and rightly so, because often those things are very, very bad. (The 2008 financial meltdown, anyone? How about the ongoing foreclosure crisis?)
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Saturday December 31, 2011

The $600 Billion Ripoff

Mike Whitney
Counterpunch

European Central Bank president Mario Draghi is either a liar or a fool. Either way, he should be canned immediately before he dumps more money into an EU banking system sinkhole.

What’s all the fuss about? Here’s a clip from Bloomberg that explains what’s going on:
read full story

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Saturday December 31, 2011

Capitalism and Loneliness: Why Pornography Is a Multibillion-Dollar Industry

Harriet Fraad and Tess Fraad Wolff
Truthout

Massive social changes in the US labor force and in commerce have transformed the economy and powerfully affected personal relationships.

Since 1970, we have changed from being a society of people connected in groups of every kind to a society of people who are too often disconnected, detached and alienated from one another.
read full story

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Saturday December 31, 2011

Mayo Clinic plans to sequence patients' genomes to personalise care

Ian Sample
The Guardian

Project will give doctors the genetic information they need to choose drugs that work best and minimise side effects

Doctors have drawn up plans to sequence the full genetic code of thousands of people in a landmark project to personalise their medical care.
read full story

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Saturday December 31, 2011

Will Americans Ever Stop Throwing Their Money at Corporate Crap and Give Gifts That Truly Matter?

Jim Hightower
AlterNet

Americans are buying from local artisans, fair-trade merchants, certified sweatshop-free manufacturers and others in the burgeoning non-corporate economy.

It wasn't that long ago that the act of "gift giving" didn't require a maddening trip to Walmart or a desperate online search for this season's must-have toy. Rather, a gift implied something from within, a little piece of yourself, no matter how small, showing you care.
read full story

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Saturday December 31, 2011

Sensors which monitor cells' health developed

Hillary Duncanson
Independent

Tiny sensors which monitor the health of cells have been developed by
scientists in a move which could improve the diagnosis and treatment of
cancer and degenerative illnesses.

The sensors - so small you could fit several of them into a single cell - measure the tiny electronic signals that keep cells functioning.
read full story

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Thursday December 29, 2011

Stratfor attackers prep to publish emails

Richard Chirgwin
The Register

That’s if you trust the Pastebin posts

Someone claiming to speak – or at least post – on behalf of Antisec has published a threat on Pastebin that they are planning to release e-mails obtained in the Stratfor Global Intelligence break-in.
read full story

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Thursday December 29, 2011

OWS Fights Back Against Police Surveillance by Launching "Occucopter" Citizen Drone

Noel Sharkey and Sarah Knuckey
Comment Is Free

In response to constant police surveillance, violence, and arrests, Occupy Wall Street protesters and legal observers have been turning their cameras back on the police.

The police may soon be watching you in your garden picking your vegetables or your bottom. As police plans for increasing unmanned aerial surveillance take shape, there is a new twist. Private citizens can now buy their own surveillance drones to watch the police.
read full story

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Thursday December 29, 2011

UK switch to low-carbon energy will cost £5,000 per person a year

Damian Carrington
The Guardian

Prediction using unique calculator challenges view that sustainable energy means higher costs

Every person in Britain will need to pay about £5,000 a year between now and 2050 on rebuilding and using the nation's entire energy system, according to government figures.
read full story

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Thursday December 29, 2011

Bradley Manning: Hero or Traitor?

Marjorie Cohn
Counterpunch

When he announced that the last U.S. troops would leave Iraq by year’s end, President Barack Obama declared the nine-year war a “success” and “an extraordinary achievement.”

He failed to mention why he opposed the Iraq war from the beginning.
read full story

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Thursday December 29, 2011

Are Psychiatrists Inventing Mental Illnesses to Feed Americans More Pills?

Rob Waters
Salon

Mental health professionals say new diagnoses will lead to overmedication.

Anyone who’s ever tried to get reimbursed by a health insurance company after seeing a psychiatrist or psychotherapist, or taking a child or teenager to one, has no doubt noticed the incomprehensible numbers that appear on the clinician’s
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Thursday December 29, 2011

Surface of Pluto May Contain Organic Molecules

Space.com

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted new evidence of complex organic molecules — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it — on the frigid surface of Pluto, a new study finds.

Hubble observations revealed that some substances on Pluto's surface are absorbing more ultraviolet light than expected.
read full story

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Thursday December 29, 2011

Make room, internet, there's another 5 million domains to fit in

Kevin Murphy
The Register

.com and .de top the charts in Q3 figures

There were almost 220 million internet domain names at the end of September, an increase of 4.9 million on June, according to the latest numbers from Verisign.
read full story

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Thursday December 29, 2011

Army Piles on Evidence in Final Arguments in WikiLeaks Hearing

Kim Zetter
Wired

The government finished making its case against accused WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning Thursday morning with a 60-minute closing statement that piled on new details and exhibits, including snippets of 15 pages of chats allegedly between the Army intelligence analyst and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
read full story

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Thursday December 29, 2011

The end of battery farms in Britain – but not Europe

Martin Hickman
Independent

A long-awaited ban will come into force on Sunday. But shoppers will still face an ethical choice when buying eggs

Farmers have freed more than 80 million hens from especially cruel and cramped lives in one of the most significant changes to animal welfare legislation in decades: the end of battery cages.
read full story

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Thursday December 29, 2011

The Mystery Behind Anesthesia

Courtney Humphries
Technology Review

Mapping how our neural circuits change under the influence of anesthesia could shed light on one of neuroscience's most perplexing riddles: consciousness.

A video screen shows a man in his late 60s lying awake on an operating table.
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Monday December 26, 2011

Pions don't want to decay into faster-than-light neutrinos, study finds

Physorg

When an international collaboration of physicists came up with a result that punched a hole in Einstein's theory of special relativity and couldn't find any mistakes in their work, they asked the world to take a second look at their experiment.

Responding to the call was Ramanath Cowsik, PhD, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences and director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
read full story

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Monday December 26, 2011

Add vitamin D to Scotland's food – experts

Sarah Boseley
The Guardian

Dosing whole population would help cut levels of multiple sclerosis, say scientists

International experts are calling for food in Scotland to be fortified with vitamin D, in an attempt to cut the large numbers of people who develop multiple sclerosis at sunshine-deprived northern latitudes.
read full story

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Monday December 26, 2011

Why Jurors Should Refuse to Convict Drug Arrestees

Tony Newman
AlterNet

Jurors are not required to enforce unjust laws, and can legally refuse to convict a person, even if he or she appears to be guilty.

Should juries vote “not guilty” on low-level marijuana charges to send a message about our country’s insane marijuana arrest policy?
read full story

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Monday December 26, 2011

Woman is cured of Tourette's by electrodes in the brain

Lewis Smith
Independent

A woman suffering from Tourette's syndrome has said she is cured after having electrodes implanted in her brain as part of a trial.

Jayne Bargent said the treatment worked within an hour of the electrodes being switched on, six weeks after she underwent surgery to have them implanted and a pacemaker placed in her chest to provide the power.
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Monday December 26, 2011

Are you a bit Neanderthal?

Duncan Geere
Wired UK

Most humans have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA in them. About 2.5 percent on average. But some people have rather more -- are you one of them?

Despite the Neanderthals' reputation as primitive, thuggish and a little dim, their physical characteristics don't sound too bad.
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Monday December 26, 2011

Should Animals Be Considered People?

Sue Russell
Miller-McCune

In a nation where corporations are people and others want fetuses to be, a core of philosophers and attorneys are trying develop laws to declare animals “legal persons.”

On December 19, 1994, animal protection lawyer Steven Wise — a deeply patient man — was frustrated.
read full story

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Monday December 26, 2011

United Kingdom faces threat of break-up, warns civil service chief

The Guardian

Outgoing cabinet secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell questions how long union can last amid growing calls for Scottish independence

Keeping the United Kingdom together over the next few years will be an "enormous challenge", Britain's most senior civil servant has warned in comments that were met with approval by Alex Salmond, the First Minister of Scotland.
read full story

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Monday December 26, 2011

Madness: Even School Children Are Being Pepper-Sprayed and Shocked with Tasers

Rania Khalek
AlterNet

An alarming series of incidents offers some insight into how casual police have become about deploying "less lethal" weapons.

There is something truly disturbing about a society that seeks to control the behavior of schoolchildren through fear and violence, a tactic that harkens back to an era of paddle-bruised behinds and ruler-slapped wrists.
read full story

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Saturday December 24, 2011

Man Builds Fairy Tale Home for His Family – For Only £3,000

Gaia Health

Simon Dale is a family man in Wales, the western part of Great Britain.

His interest in self-sustainability and an ecological awareness led him to dig out and build his own home—one of the loveliest, warmest, most inviting dwellings you could ever imagine.
read full story

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Saturday December 24, 2011

Experts call for 10% 'fat tax' on soft drinks to prevent obesity

Denis Campbel
The Guardian

Authors of study, including government adviser, believe cutting consumption of sugary drinks would prompt healthier lifestyles

Imposing a 10% "fat tax" on sugary drinks would help tackle soaring rates of obesity, according to new research by international experts.
read full story

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Saturday December 24, 2011

How Pay-Pal Squeezes Merchants with Unfair and Likely Illegal Business Practices

Simon Waxman
AlterNet

A class-action suit charges Pay-Pal with some shady practices that leave small businesses in a jam.

When Andrew Sauter decided to start taking online credit card payments for his small business, he didn’t think twice about PayPal, the dominant Web-based money transmitter in the United States.
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Saturday December 24, 2011

New conditions for agency workers comes into force

Alan Jones
Independent

Agency workers across the UK were set to receive a pay and conditions boost today when new rights come into force.

The Agency Workers Directive was introduced on October 1, giving equality with directly employed staff after 12 weeks in a job.
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Saturday December 24, 2011

Why Are We Forced to Worship at the Feet of 'Mythical' Financial Markets Controlled by the Elite?

Les Leopold
AlterNet

We are told to appease the market gods or face eternal financial damnation.

The markets are “jittery,” “upset,” “skittish” and “unnerved.” They are “confident” or “unsure.” They are “demanding” that political leaders “put up or shut up.” And they are “reacting unfavorably” to Obama’s newfound populism.
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Saturday December 24, 2011

I lived as a turkey for a year

Jon White
New Scientist

To lift the lid on the lives of turkeys, naturalist Joe Hutto became a full-time "mother" to a brood of poults.
What did he learn?
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Saturday December 24, 2011

Credit card crackdown targets 'hidden fees' of internet booking

The Guardian

Government to ban surcharges on payments to airlines and other firms after campaign to end 'last-minute' fees

Airlines, cinemas and holiday firms are to be banned from imposing millions of pounds in "hidden last-minute" charges on internet bookings as part of a crackdown to be announced on Monday.
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Saturday December 24, 2011

Bankers Are Using the Eurozone Crisis to Wage Warfare on Working People and Seize Control of Governments

Michael Hudson
Michael Hudson's Blog

Wages and living standards are to be scaled back and political power shifted from elected government to technocrats governing on behalf of big banks and financial institutions.

The easiest way to understand Europe’s financial crisis is to look at the solutions being proposed to resolve it. They are a banker’s dream, a grab bag of giveaways that few voters would be likely to approve in a democratic referendum.
read full story

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Saturday December 24, 2011

Officers sacked for beating up innocent man

Paul Peachey
Independent

Police constables used 'excessive force' on group of three men after car chase in north London

Two Metropolitan police officers have been sacked for gross misconduct after an innocent man was dragged from his car, beaten and threatened with police dogs after a car chase into a housing estate.
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Saturday December 24, 2011

Hybrid Bus a ‘Masterpiece of British Engineering’

Mark Brown
Wired UK

The first of London’s next-gen double-decker buses is a hybrid that officials promise is “most environmentally friendly” and “the latest, greatest masterpiece of British engineering.”

Please keep your Lucas jokes to yourself.
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Saturday December 24, 2011

Animal Research’s Changing Equation

Sue Russell
Miller-McCune

Gavels and courtrooms are replacing placards and bullhorns, says the biomedical research community, as determined legal eagles work to increase animals’ rights and possibly even grant them “personhood.”

One morning in late 2010, a few of the 32,000 registered attendees for the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting gathered in a room of the San Diego Convention Center for a panel whose name exemplified their fears: Conferring Legal Rights to Animals: Research in the Crosshairs.
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Saturday December 24, 2011

Indonesian punks undergo military drills to bring them into line

Associated Press
The Guardian

Shaven-headed punk rockers held at police detention centre after raid on concert as part of 10-day 'rehabilitation'

Mohawks shaved and noses free of piercings, dozens of youths march in military style for hours beneath Indonesia's tropical sun – part of efforts by the authorities to restore moral values and bring the "deviants" back into the mainstream.
read full story

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Saturday December 24, 2011

IBM: 'Your PC will read your mind by 2016'

Iain Thomson
The Register

Predicts the passing of passwords, junking of junk mail, more...

IBM has released its annual predictions for the future of technology, and this year’s batch includes biometric security, replacing mice with brain sensors, and an end to the “digital divide” between those online and off.
read full story

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Saturday December 24, 2011

America’s Silent Collapse

Sam Smith
Counterpunch

One of the curiosities of being chronically ahead of the mainstream is that periodically you suddenly discover that you’re not.

For example, over the past decade I’ve putting forth the notion, seemingly bizarre to many, that the First American Republic was over and that we had moved into a post constitutional adhocracy.
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Saturday December 24, 2011

Why Is the Media Lying About New NDAA Power for Indefinite Military Detention of Americans?

Ralph Lopez
War Is a Crime

At some point a sideshow to a story becomes so painfully obvious that it becomes the story, and this now should be: Why is the media taking such pains to knowingly and falsely claim that the new power of the military to detain and imprison people without charge or trial, for life, does not include US citizens?

We know what happened.
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Saturday December 24, 2011

HMRC hid 'sweetheart' tax deals for big business, MPs say

Rajeev Syal and Hélène Mulholland
The Guardian

HMRC accused of lacking fairness and transparency over corporate tax settlements 'kept from scrutiny'

Revenue and customs managers are facing demands for reform after MPs accused them of using "a veil of secrecy" to keep from scrutiny their "sweetheart" corporate tax deals worth billions.
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Saturday December 24, 2011

How to Master Facebook Timeline in 5 Quick Minutes

Christina Bonnington
Wired

Recently, Facebook rolled out its new Timeline feature to the masses.

This ultra-illustrative, chronological listing of posts, photos, shared links, check-ins, and more is a radically different arrangement than the Facebook profile you’ve been used to.
read full story

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Saturday December 24, 2011

California dreamers still make a splash

Karen Wright
Independent

A sprawling, multi-gallery exhibition of West Coast art shines a light on artists who flourished before the market took over their world, says Karen Wright

The artist John Baldessari is grumpy, or perhaps just tired.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

A new kind of metal in the deep Earth

PhysOrg.com

The crushing pressures and intense temperatures in Earth's deep interior squeeze atoms and electrons so closely together that they interact very differently.

With depth materials change. New experiments and supercomputer computations discovered that iron oxide undergoes a new kind of transition under deep Earth conditions.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

Maggots speed up cleaning of stubborn wounds

Reuters

Maggots may trump scalpels when it comes to cleaning large wounds that won’t heal easily, such as those seen in diabetics, according to French researchers.

To allow such wounds to heal, doctors usually remove infected or dead tissue with scalpels or enzymes, a process they call debridement. But that method is time-consuming and doesn’t always work.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

Methane discovery stokes new global warming fears Shock as retreat of Arctic releases greenhouse gas

Steve Connor
Independent

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane - a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

Greece in Chaos

Noëlle Burgi
Counterpunch

“Who knows what tomorrow will bring?” people ask in Athens, Salonika and right across Greece. There’s a sense of collective imprisonment, individual uncertainty and impending catastrophe.

Yet Greece has had a turbulent history, and the Greeks have always seen themselves as a gifted people, sturdy and accustomed to adversity.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

The speculative scrum driving up food prices

Frederick Kaufman
The GUardian

Bankers, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds are gambling on hunger by speculating on food supply. Global regulators should step in to stop them

Last year, the price of global food floated high as ever. That's bad news for most of us, but not for those who trade commodities.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

City banks ‘cheat’ Europe in €600m tax avoidance trading scheme

Nick Mathiason
The Bureau Of Investigative Journalism

Some of the city of London’s biggest banks are behind a huge tax avoidance trade ‘cheating’ European countries of hundreds of millions of euros a year in a development that sheds fresh light on David Cameron’s decision to wield Britain’s EU veto to protect the Square Mile.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

Canadian judge rules SSRI antidepressants like Prozac can cause children to commit murder

Jonathan Benson
Natural News

The use of antidepressant and psychiatric drugs, particularly among children, is an extremely risky activity that could have fatal consequences for both the individuals that use them, as well as their friends and family.

According to the National Post, a Canadian judge recently ruled that the extreme mind-altering effects of the antidepressant drug Prozac were in large part responsible for causing a 15-year-old boy to thrust a nine-inch kitchen knife into one of his closest friends.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

Beijing orders microbloggers to register real names

BreitBart

Beijing city authorities on Friday issued new rules requiring microbloggers to register their real names before posting online, as the Chinese government tightens its grip on the Internet.

The city government now requires users of weibos -- the Chinese version of Twitter -- to give their real names to website administrators, its official news portal said.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

Embrace Your Self-Destructive Impulses? How People Can Connect with Dark Parts of Their Psyche for Personal Change

Richard Schwartz
Psychotherapy Networker

As people relate to their disturbing inner experiences, they can become more accepting of the aspects of themselves with which they’ve been struggling.

As therapists increasingly incorporate mindfulness into their work, they’re discovering what Buddhists have known for centuries: everyone (even those with severe inner turmoil) can access a state of spacious well-being by beginning to notice their more turbulent thoughts and feelings, rather than becoming swallowed up by them.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

Computer files 'link Manning to Assange'

Richard Hall
Independent

Witness says chat logs prove contact with a person using WikiLeaks founder's name

US prosecutors claim to have found evidence of direct communication between the army intelligence analyst blamed for the biggest leak of secrets in the US history and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

Are We Immune To Viral Marketing?

Eric Smalley
Wired

Do your friends influence your taste? Not so much, according to a Harvard University study.

The Harvard researchers tracked college students’ Facebook relationships and measured how taste in music, movies and books spreads through social networks.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

The Four Occupations of Planet Earth

Tom Engelhardt
Tomdispatch.com

How the Occupied Became the Occupiers

On the streets of Moscow in the tens of thousands, the protesters chanted: “We exist!”

Taking into account the comments of statesmen, scientists, politicians, military officials, bankers, artists, all the important and attended to figures on this planet, nothing caught the year more strikingly than those two words shouted by massed Russian demonstrators.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

Coming soon: Ubiquitous surveillance from Big Brother's wayback machine

Tim Greene
Network World

Storage, search technology will enable surveillance on suspects before they became suspects

As the price of digital storage drops and the technology to tap electronic communication improves, authoritarian governments will soon be able to perform retroactive surveillance on anyone within their borders, according to a Brookings Institute report.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

Landowners turn against leasing for 'fracking'

Tom Bawden
Independent

Nearly half of the landowners who have leased their ground to shale gas developers in the north-east of America regret doing it, despite the money, according to a new report by Deloitte.

In findings that will intensify opposition to the controversial process of hydraulic fracturing, some 47 per cent of respondents in the "new shale" states of Pennsylvania and New York, who have rented out their land, said they wouldn't repeat the experience.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

Cop Art: The Rise of the Citizen Satirist

Adam Bessie
Truthout

"My name only comes up when some a-hole wants to end an argument..., " Adolf Hitler yells to his generals in the climax of a 2004 film "Der Untergang." depicting the final ten days of the Third Reich.

"Now you tell me some campus cop is 'The New Face of Evil?'"
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

Unreal Faces and Bodies: Should The Truth About Photoshopped Fashion Photos Be Exposed?

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
AlterNet

The "perfect" photo is pervasive in magazines and advertising, but with cautious optimism, there might be an end to the fakery.

Of all the things to criticize about women’s magazines and fashion advertising, nothing is more universally reviled than the airbrush.
read full story

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Tuesday December 20, 2011

Tens of thousands of children abused in Dutch Catholic institutions, report says

Ian Traynor
The Guardian

Eight hundred Catholic clergy and church employees were guilty of abusing children over 40 years, a commission reports

The Roman Catholic church in the Netherlands was shamed on Friday when a comprehensive investigation of sexual abuse of children by clergy over 40 years found one in five vulnerable children had been molested.
read full story

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Saturday December 17, 2011

10 Ways B-Movie Master Roger Corman Changed Filmmaking

Eric Steuer
Wired

For nearly 60 years, Roger Corman has been making indie films with budgets that wouldn’t even cover the catering costs of multiplex fare like Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.

The legendary king of B-movies has produced or directed close to 400 films, including cult classics like 1960’s The Little Shop of Horrors (which he famously shot in just two days), 1975’s Death Race 2000 (co-starring a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone) and the so-bad-it’s-good Carnosaur horror series from the ’90s.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Obama Reverses Himself: Administration Won't Veto 'Global Battlefield' Indefinite Detentions Measure

Steven Rosenfeld
AlterNet

President Obama is expected to sign a defense policy bill allowing the military to arrest and indefinitely hold terrorism suspects -- even Americans arrested on U.S. soil.

The Obama administration Tuesday reversed itself and said it would not veto a major 2012 defense bill that expands the American military’s authority to arrest suspected terrorists anywhere in the world—including Americans on U.S. soil—and hold them indefinitely without charge or the right to a civilian trial.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Novel device removes heavy metals from water

Physorg

An unfortunate consequence of many industrial and manufacturing practices, from textile factories to metalworking operations, is the release of heavy metals in waterways. Those metals can remain for decades, even centuries, in low but still dangerous concentrations.

Ridding water of trace metals "is really hard to do," said Joseph Calo, professor emeritus of engineering who maintains an active laboratory at Brown.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Supernova explosion gives a glimpse of how ingredients for life are created

Ian Sample
The Guardian

Scientists capture SN2011fe supernova in Pinwheel galaxy as it spews heavy elements necessary for life into space

The spectacular explosion of a star in a distant galaxy (left, above) has given astronomers a rare glimpse of how supernovae blast the basic ingredients for life into the cosmos.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Facebook rolls out Timeline to world+dog

Kelly Fiveash
The Register

Brace yourself for 'frictionless sharing' ... bitch

Facebook is finally rolling out its Timeline feature worldwide, after the company first announced the latest tweak to its social network in September.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

How Now, Brown Cloud: What Smog Hath Wrought

Michael Winship
Truthout

Have you heard about the great brown cloud?

No, it's not a new nickname for Donald Trump (his cloud is more an intergalactic nimbus of Aqua Velva and Tang), or the ominous menace in a new Stephen King novel. It's almost as nasty, though.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

The Trial of Bradley Manning - Rule of Law or Rule of Intimidation, Retaliation and Retribution

Ann Wright
War Is A Crime

Yesterday, December 16, 2011, 40 supporters of Bradley Manning saw him in person in the military courtroom at Fort Meade, Maryland and another 60 saw him on a video feed from the court, the first time Manning has been seen by the public in 19 months.

Over 100 other supporters, including 50 from Occupy Wall Street who had bused down from New York City, were at the front gates of Fort Meade in solidarity with Manning.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Chrome 15 crowned most popular browser, pushes IE to number 2

Gregg Keizer
Computerworld US

First time in years that a non-Microsoft browser has been top dog

Google's Chrome 15 has jumped into the number one spot, replacing Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) as the world's most popular browser edition.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Olympics may disrupt criminal justice system, officials warn

Owen Bowcott
The Guardian

Police and courts service negotiate contigency plans for period when transport and security resources are focused on games

Courts may be forced to close for weeks and cases could be severely delayed during the Olympics next summer because of transport disruption and the need to free police for security duties.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Eureka! The secrets of Rise of the Planet of the Apes

David Phelan
Independent

Joe Letteri is the Senior Visual Effects Supervisor at Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital Studios in Wellington, New Zealand. The CGI big cheese.

He’s been working effects magic on movies like Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, The Lord of the Rings and more.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Online game maker Zynga prices IPO at $10 a share

Barbara Ortutay and Ryan Nakashima
Physorg.com

Zynga is poised to harvest some cold hard cash in its initial public offering. Who knew that selling virtual cows and digital corn on Facebook would create a $7 billion company?

The online game developer best known for "FarmVille" priced its initial public offering late Thursday at $10 per share.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Exclusive: Iran hijacked US drone, says Iranian engineer (Video)

Scott Peterson
Christian Science Monitor

In an exclusive interview, an engineer working to unlock the secrets of the captured RQ-170 Sentinel says they exploited a known vulnerability and tricked the US drone into landing in Iran.

Iran guided the CIA's "lost" stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone's systems inside Iran.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Facebook won't deny it is sitting on huge mountain of cash

Kelly Fiveash
The Register

Mole says Zuck still owns a quarter of it

Facebook has declined to comment on a report that suggested the dominant social network had already tucked away sales of $2.5bn for the first nine months of 2011.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Jeans that purify the air

Tiffany O'Callaghan
New Scientist

She used to design titillating ensembles for Madonna.

Now, more than two decades later, Helen Storey has swapped celebrity for sustainability and abandoned the runway for the lab.
read full story

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Saturday December 17, 2011

Face-to-Face with the NYPD

Ibrahim Diallo
Counterpunch

“It is far more important to hold accountable the enforcers of the law than the perpetrators because if you don’t, you will have a nation of warlords.

– Mahmood Mamdani

New York’s Finest (also known as the NYPD) have come under a lot of scrutiny since activists from the Occupy Wall Street Movement took to the streets of New York City on September 17, 2011.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Meet the 'Ikea anarchists'

Dan Hancox
The Guardian

A bunch of 'humorous provocateurs' are reinventing the protest poster in an effort to bring us revolution with LOLs. But who are the Deterritorial Support Group?

Walking into a small room in a communal house in north London, I'm confronted by a poster depicting an Egyptian protester hurling himself into a line of riot shields, with a message in huge capitals: "WE WILL FIGHT, WE WILL KISS/LONDON CAIRO ROME TUNIS".
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Saturday December 17, 2011

FTC compensates 320,000 victims of fake antivirus scams

John E Dunn
Techworld

Defendants agree to millions in pay-outs

The tale of notorious malware multi-national Innovative Marketing has taken another extraordinary turn with the news that it is to fund refunds to hundreds of thousands of US consumers duped into buying its bogus antivirus products.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Scientists make gut-brain connection to autism

CBCNews

Compounds produced in the digestive system have been linked to autistic-type behaviour in laboratory settings, potentially demonstrating that what autistic children eat can alter their brain function, say scientists from the University of Western Ontario.

They announced their findings Thursday in Ottawa.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Poison from the Sky

Marcela Valente
Inter Press Service

Argentina's soy boom has been a major source of foreign exchange. But the other side of the coin is the toxic effects among the rural population, from spraying agrochemicals.

Research by the National University of Río Cuarto in the northwestern province of Córdoba demonstrated that glyphosate, the herbicide used on transgenic soy crops, causes genetic damage in mice and amphibians, like frogs.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

UK is biggest nation of web shopaholics - Euro poll

Kelly Fiveash
The Register

Ofcom survey also prods flagging fibre uptake

UK shoppers order more stuff online than their European neighbours - and worry the least about how their personal data is used on social networking sites even though seven out of ten Brits admit having concerns about privacy.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

How to Get Big Companies to Listen to Your Complaint

Christopher Null
Wired

Holiday gifts can come with a hidden cost: a three-hour tech-support call to Bangalore.

You can use GetHuman.com to help you bypass phone trees, but you still may languish on hold while waiting to speak to a rep (who may or may not agree to replace or repair your malfunctioning gift).
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Sheriff Will Pay You $100 to Wear a Wire and Ask People to Sell You Drugs

Scott Morgan
Stop The Drug War

Stupid silver-bullet strategies to win the war on drugs are as common as the reckless zealots who dream them up, but rarely does one find an example so deeply absurd and irresponsible as this.

Sheriff Price believes there are still many dealers on the streets. He is now asking for the public's help to catch them.
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Saturday December 17, 2011

The Politics of Doomsday

Conn Halinan
Counterpunch

In a recent New York Times article the newspaper’s senior science writer, William J. Broad, takes a dig at Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s obsession with the possibility of a “nightmarish of doomsday scenarios: a nuclear blast high above the United States that would instantly throw the United States in a dark age.”
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Saturday December 17, 2011

Theresa May to review stop and search in wake of Reading the Riots study

James Ball and Matthew Taylor
The Guardian

Home secretary says use of police tactic should be proportionate as Ed Miliband criticises her 'simplistic' response to riots

Theresa May has announced a national review of how police use stop and search powers in response to the findings of the Guardian/LSE report on the August riots.
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Friday December 16, 2011

Google promises 0.001 of revenue to free the slaves

Kelly Fiveash
The Register

'More slaves today than at any time in history'

Google is on course to smash the £30bn annual revenue barrier by the end of this year, so - in time-honoured fashion with it be Christmas 'n' all - the company has plonked just over 0.1 per cent of this cash on the philanthropic pile.
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Friday December 16, 2011

New Hipstamatic App Kicks Photography Back to the Old School

Christina Bonnington
Wired

Traditional photography is, and always has been, a fairly intimate experience.

Yes, there are photo-sharing apps that let you comment, like, and “heart” your friends’ snapshots, but the actual act of taking a photo is still very much personal.
read full story

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Friday December 16, 2011

Rule By Troika

serge Halimi
Counterpunch

Former bankers Lucas Papademos and Mario Monti have taken over in Athens and Rome, exploiting the threat of bankruptcy and the fear of chaos.

They are not apolitical technicians but men of the right, members of the Trilateral Commission that blamed western societies for being too democratic.
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Friday December 16, 2011

One in five children is obese by the end of primary school, NHS figures show

Denis Campbell
The Guardian

Ministers face call for action as figures reveal 19% of year-six pupils are obese – part of a steady rise since 2006-07

Ministers are facing fresh pleas to tackle childhood obesity after new NHS figures revealed that almost one in five year-six pupils in England (19.0%) is now obese.
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Friday December 16, 2011

Sotheby's sells Apple founding contract for £1m

Gregg Keizer
Computerworld US

Florida buyer pays 10 times the estimated sales price for 35-year-old document signed by Jobs, Wozniak

The contract that founded Apple was purchased Tuesday for nearly $1.6 million, far above the estimate of $100,000 to $150,000 put on the 35-year-old document by Sotheby's.
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Friday December 16, 2011

Air Too Dangerous to Breathe: How Gas Drilling Can Turn Rural Communities Into Industrial Wastelands [With Photos]

Nina Berman
AterNet

Drilling is just the tip of the iceberg. Compressor stations have been associated with significant headaches, bloody noses, skin lesions, blisters, and rashes.

The exploding faucet may have launched the movement against fracking, but it's the unsexy compressor station that is pushing it to maturity.
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Friday December 16, 2011

EU Bans Export of Lethal Injection Drugs to US

Luke Walker
The Fix

The human rights-based move leaves death penalty states struggling to find an alternative supply.~

A European Union ban on exporting lethal injection drugs to the US kicks in this week, leaving prisons without access to a vital ingredient of state executions.
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Friday December 16, 2011

EXCLUSIVE: Under Industry Pressure, USDA Works to Speed Approval of Monsanto's Genetically Engineered Crops

Mike Ludwig
Truthout

For years, biotech agriculture opponents have accused regulators of working too closely with big biotech firms when deregulating genetically engineered (GE) crops.
read full story

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Friday December 16, 2011

Health message with a difference – why a takeaway could save lives

Kevin Rawlinson
Independent

London Fire Brigade targets drinking and cooking in Christmas fire safety campaign

Christmas partygoers are being urged to get a takeaway on their way home, rather than trying out their drunken culinary skills, on the orders of the London Fire Brigade.
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Wednesday December 14, 2011

Graffiti: Meet the street writing women

Louisa McGillicuddy
Indepndent

Graffiti has long been dominated by men but is now shedding its macho tag, thanks to a new wave of urban female artists

In the 21 July 1971 issue of The New York Times, Richard Goldstein wrote an article on the subculture that was gaining momentum in New York City.
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Wednesday December 14, 2011

Cranes Overstay Their Welcome as Weather Grows Warmer

Julio Godoy
Inter Press Service

Migrating flocks of cranes flying overhead are normally a harbinger of spring and autumn in Europe.

But due to rising temperatures, the birds are sticking around increasingly longer in the fall before heading south.
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Wednesday December 14, 2011

Britain is ruled by the banks, for the banks

Aditya Chakrabortty
The Guardian

Is David Cameron's kid-glove treatment of the City remotely justified, when it neither pays its way nor lends effectively?

The national interest. It's a phrase we've heard a lot recently. David Cameron promised to defend it before flying off last week to Brussels.
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Wednesday December 14, 2011

Trillion-frame-per-second video

Larry Hardesty
Physorg.com

MIT researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion exposures per second.

That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a one-liter bottle, bouncing off the cap and reflecting back to the bottle’s bottom.
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Wednesday December 14, 2011

Can Broadened "Counterterrorism" Rules Open Door to Indefinitely Detaining Peaceful Protesters?

J.A. Myerson
Truthout

A lot has been written recently about the recent militarization of US police forces.

The impression is inescapable in an atmosphere saturated with imagery of Occupy protesters being bullied by domestic police who wield militarized weaponry, clad in what used to be thought of as riot gear, but is now a de rigueur feature of official responses to things that do not resemble nor threaten to become riots.
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Wednesday December 14, 2011

Brain scans should not be used in court... for now

Jessica Hamzelou
New Scientist

Should an offender's sentence be decided on the basis of a brain scan?

A group of neuroscientists have put together a report for the Royal Society to assess this issue and other ways that progress in brain science might impact the law.
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Wednesday December 14, 2011

Capitalism Is the Enemy of Democracy

Truthout

The most significant accomplishment for Occupy Wall Street (OWS) to date is that the Occupiers have managed to poke a hole in the legitimacy of neoliberal capitalism and its central claim that unregulated markets provide opportunity and freedom.
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Wednesday December 14, 2011

When the Cop Is the Criminal: Preying on Drug Addicts

Kristine Gwynne
AlterNet

Patrick J. Sullivan's experience as a cop is making him an exception when it should make him an example. The former "Sheriff of the Year" has a very shady past.

Patrick J. Sullivan, 68, was the sheriff of Arapahoe County, Colo., near Denver, for nearly 20 years before he retired in 2002. Sullivan was considered such an exemplary police officer that, in 2001, the National Sheriff's Association named him Sheriff of the Year.
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Wednesday December 14, 2011

The bugs that ate Monsanto

Tom Laskawy
Grist

Now that 94 percent of the soy and 70 percent of the corn grown in the U.S. are genetically modified, Monsanto -- one of the companies that dominates the GMO seed market -- might look to some like it's winning.

But if we look a little closer, I'd say they're holding on by a thread.
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Wednesday December 14, 2011

EU warns Britain: financial rules apply to you too

The Guardian

Commissioner Olli Rehn says City of London will still be subject to regulation from Brussels

The European commission has underlined the negative impact of David Cameron's summit gambit by pledging that the City's financial institutions would be subject to new regulations hatched in Brussels.
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Wednesday December 14, 2011

Higgs boson hunters have god particle in their sights

Anna Leach
The Register

Are universe's secrets lurking in energy spike?

The Higgs boson has been glimpsed by boffins at CERN who are now much closer to pinning down the particle after crunching through hundreds of gigabytes of raw data.
read full story

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Wednesday December 14, 2011

One Day, the Stock Market Could Eat the Power Grid

Jon Stokes
Wired

It’s now popular to bemoan the fact that Wall Street has vacuumed up a generation’s worth of high-quality math and science brainpower and turned it to the societally worthless task of scalping pennies in the stock market, and I’ve definitely done more than my share of such bellyaching.

So now I’ll move on and bellyache about a different, but related issue, which is the possibility that our wired markets could one day eat up an enormous amount of electrical power in addition to the brainpower that they already consume.
read full story

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Wednesday December 14, 2011

Suspend habeas corpus and enact martial law?

Chris Powell
Journal Inquirer

Americans seem ready to forfeit their most basic civil liberty -- actually, all their civil liberties -- without a whimper.

By a vote of 93-7 the Senate this month approved a military appropriations bill empowering the government to designate any U.S. citizen within the country as a terrorist and to have the military hold him indefinitely without trial and without the right to habeas corpus, the right to be brought before a court for a judgment on the legality of one's imprisonment.
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Wednesday December 14, 2011

The Health of Children and Consumers is Threatened by Conservative Push for Corporate Speech Rights

Steven Rosefenfeld
AlterNet

Some pro-business federal judges have shockingly approved a constitutional right for big companies to avoid revealing product dangers on labels.

In recent years, corporate lawyers representing industries whose products touch millions of American lives have stopped numerous government efforts to better inform the public about possible health risks with an eyebrow-raising legal strategy.
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Wednesday December 14, 2011

Canada abandons Kyoto Protocol

Independent

Canada is to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, its government announced last night. It will become the first signatory to pull out in a move that will undermine the world's most significant climate change treaty.

The Environment Minister, Peter Kent, said Canada is invoking the legal right to withdraw and said Kyoto does not represent the way forward for Canada or the world.
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Wednesday December 14, 2011

Could the desert sun power the world?

Leo Hickman
The Guardian

Green electricity generated by Sahara solar panels is being hailed as a solution to the climate change crisis

During the summer of 1913, in a field just south of Cairo on the eastern bank of the Nile, an American engineer called Frank Shuman stood before a gathering of Egypt's colonial elite, including the British consul-general Lord Kitchener, and switched on his new invention.
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Wednesday December 14, 2011

Move Your Money, Change the System

Gar Alperovitz
Truthout

Inspired by the Occupy movements around the country, nearly two-thirds of a million Americans joined credit unions in the brief five weeks between the beginning of October and "Bank Transfer Day," November 5, 2011.
read full story

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Tuesday December 13, 2011

US House Set to Pass Bad Drug Bills

Phillip Smith
Stop The Drug War

Going in the face of an ever-increasing clamor to reform decades of failed drug policies, the US House of Representatives is poised to pass two bills that promise more of the same.

The House is set to vote any day now--the vote was originally set until Wednesday night, but was pushed back--on HR 1254, the Synthetic Drug Control Act of 2011, which would criminalize not only synthetic stimulants ("bath salts"), but also synthetic cannabinoids ("fake pot") marketed under names such as "K2" and "Spice."
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Tuesday December 13, 2011

Skype founder to offer FREE mobile broadband for all

Bill Ray
The Register

Head in the clouds with satellite network

Niklas Zennstrom's FreedomPop has signed a mind-boggling deal with LightSquared to provide free broadband to everyone in America.

FreedomPop only exists as a landing page where one can register an interest in having free mobile broadband, and if it weren't for the involvement of one of Skype's founders it could easily be mistaken for a scam - it sounds too good to be true.
read full story

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Tuesday December 13, 2011

The Right (and Wrong) Way to Die When You Fall Into Lava

Erik Klemetti
Wired

This post is based on a question I was posed in my “Introduction to Rocks and Minerals” class. Now, mind you, it isn’t a serious question, but when I thought about how to answer it, I realized how completely wrong everybody has been about it.

The revelation was so clear I half expected the planet to be destroyed to make way for a bypass.
read full story

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Tuesday December 13, 2011

Homelessness: end of the line for the bendy-bus rough sleepers

Patrick Butler
The Guardian

Hundreds of homeless people travelled on London's bendy buses at night, finding a safe haven and a place to sleep. But now the buses have been withdrawn, where will they all go?

A few nights on a bus in the early hours of the morning was a revelation for Robert Wilkins, documentary-maker and director of a short, eye-opening Guardian film on the scores of homeless people who would clamber aboard London's N29 night "bendy bus" to find shelter and sleep in the early hours.
read full story

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Tuesday December 13, 2011

You can judge a book by its cover: How designers are helping to keep the old format alive

Nick Duerden
Independent

The growing popularity of the e-book is threatening the future of the paper version.

Towards the end of his Booker Prize-winning speech, Julian Barnes paid the following compliment to the designer of his novel's jacket: "Those of you who have seen my book, whatever you may think of its contents, will probably agree that it is a beautiful object.
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Monday December 12, 2011

Top 10 Crazy Christmas Trees Made from Bottles, Bikes, Shopping Carts and More!

Lea Bogdan,
Inhabitat

There's no reason to chop down a Christmas tree when you have a bounty of green materials and a lot of creativity.

We love seeing inspired alternatives to holiday evergreens, so to bring an extra bit of eco-cheer to the holiday season we've rounded up some of the wackiest manmade trees built from bottles, bikes, and even shopping carts!
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Monday December 12, 2011

Outrage at UK's $1bn loan deal with Brazil oil giant

Jonathan Owen
Independent

Ministers have reneged on coalition promise to champion British firms investing in clean energy, say Greenpeace and WWF

A British government decision to underwrite a billion-dollar loan to one of the world's biggest oil companies came under fire from environmentalists last night.
read full story

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Monday December 12, 2011

Ötzi the iceman's stomach throws up a surprise

Andy Coghlan
New Scientist

It's time to rethink Ötzi the iceman's last hours.

The theory that he was caught and killed after a lengthy and exhausting chase through the Alps clashes with new evidence that he sat down for a leisurely meal no more than an hour before his violent death.
read full story

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Monday December 12, 2011

Europe Takes a Big Step on Debt, EU Integration

Kevin G. Hall
McClatchy Newspapers

European leaders closed a pivotal week Friday with an agreement in principle to join a new treaty that would force all but one European Union nation into common budget discipline and would empower EU courts to enforce the new rules.

The 17 nations that use the euro as their currency agreed to support the new treaty, and nine of the 10 EU members that have their own currencies agreed.
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Monday December 12, 2011

Birmingham University protest ban attacked as 'aggressive and censorious'

Shiv Malik
Independent

Human rights groups say injunction flies in face of British tradition of academic dissent and right to protest peacefully

UK human rights groups have condemned one of Britain's biggest universities for "criminalising" sit-in protests, describing the move as worrying, aggressive and censorious.
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Monday December 12, 2011

Healers, Torture and National Security

Stephen N. Xenakis
Truthout

In 2004, the news that Americans had committed abuse and mistreatment in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo was shocking.

Even more alarming, were the revelations that physicians, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals had assisted with interrogations that bordered on torture.
read full story

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Monday December 12, 2011

Can Ecstasy Combat Autism?

Dirk Hanson
The Fix

A group of scientists believes that autism can be treated with the ultimate club drug. But not everyone is convinced.

A team of scientists at a California non-profit organization just announced a pilot study to determine if Ecstasy might help fight the effects of autism.
read full story

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Monday December 12, 2011

Ryanair's new fees: £1 for your ticket, £5 for your sandwich – £100 for your bag

Simon Calder
Independent

The no-frills airline will be increasing some of its charges by up to 150 per cent next summer

Passengers planning to fly Ryanair next summer, beware: charges on Europe's biggest budget airline will soar in 2012.

Checked-in bag fees paid in advance increase by two-thirds, while travellers checking in a bag at the airport without booking ahead face a fee of £100 – up 150 per cent.
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Monday December 12, 2011

Is Technology Ruining Christmas?

Samuel Evans
Huffington Post

As a writer, I find myself irresponsibly lost for words as I begin to write this blog. Not that I've 'hit the wall' or ran out of creative initiative but at the sheer content I come to discuss, and here is why.

I am a big fan of technology and the purposes it serves for a world that demands more than it often can give.
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Monday December 12, 2011

Civilian Police Powers And Bowler Hats

Big Brother Watch

Earlier this week, the MP for North East Somerset, Jacob Rees-Mogg said that those council officials with the power to issue fines for minor infractions should have to wear blower hats to be easily identified, and avoided, by the public.

This is in response to a plan under way in the London boroughs which may grant town hall officials the power to force offenders of minor misdemeanours to turn over their personal details so that they can be charged a fine.
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Monday December 12, 2011

Google+ rolling out facial recognition feature

PhysOrg

Google is rolling out a feature that lets members of its online social network automatically find themselves in photos posted by friends.

The "Find My Face" feature being added to Google+ over the next several days is opt-in only, meaning people have to make a point to turn it on.
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Monday December 12, 2011

Hospital admissions due to drinking double in 10 years

Denis Campbell
The Guardian

Doctors' leaders call for stricter controls over the sale of alcohol, including minimum pricing

Hospital admissions linked to alcohol problems have reached a record high, prompting fresh concern about the harm being caused by binge drinking.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Feds Link Water Contamination to Fracking for the First Time

Abrahm Lustgarten and Nicholas Kusnetz
ProPublica

In a first, federal environment officials today scientifically linked underground water pollution with hydraulic fracturing, concluding that contaminants found in central Wyoming were likely caused by the gas drilling process.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Bugs and Krill, the Other White Meats: Time to Start Eating at the Bottom of the Food Chain

Anneli Rufus
AlterNet

It's a massive paradigm shift: Raised on steak, we're now facing a dung-beetle future.

The Eon Coffee Shop in Hayward, California serves krill. Mezcal -- a Mexican restaurant in nearby San Jose -- serves grasshoppers.

Whales and birds eat these things. A growing number of cutting-edge chefs think you should too.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

An Endless War on Terror?

Joanne Mariner
Counterpunch

It might seem an odd moment for the War on Terror to expand.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks are now ten years in the past; Osama bin Laden is sleeping with the fishes; and all of the alleged 9/11 perpetrators who are not dead are in custody awaiting trial.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Chrome is the most secured browser - new study

Dan Goodin
The Register

Firefox finishes last in 3 browser security race

Google Chrome offers more protection against online attacks than any other mainstream browser, according to an evaluation that compares exploit mitigations, malicious link detection, and other safety features offered in Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Earliest human bedding didn't let the bedbugs bite

Michael Marshall
New Scientist

After a hard day hunting and gathering, humans 77,000 years ago could count on a good night's mosquito-free sleep on a comfy bed of grass and leaves.

Archaeologists have discovered the oldest evidence of humans using plant bedding, 50,000 years before it appears anywhere else.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Russian mass protests over alleged election fraud

Steve Gutterman
Independent

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets across Russia today to demand an end to Vladimir Putin's rule and a rerun of a parliamentary election in the biggest opposition protests since he rose to power more than a decade ago.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

How Mexico's drug cartels profit from flow of guns across the border

Chris McGreal
The Guardian

Cartels using US residents to buy guns legally and smuggle them across the border as Mexico pleads with Congress to act

'The majority of the weapons used by the cartels are coming from the US' Link to this video
If anyone at Academy sports shop in Houston was suspicious as John Hernandez pushed $2,600 in cash across the counter, they kept it to themselves.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Europe’s Deadly Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy

Michael Hudson
Counterpunch

The easiest way to understand Europe’s financial crisis is to look at the solutions being proposed to resolve it. They are a banker’s dream, a grab bag of giveaways that few voters would be likely to approve in a democratic referendum.

Bank strategists learned not to risk submitting their plans to democratic vote after Icelanders twice refused in 2010-11 to approve their government’s capitulation to pay Britain and the Netherlands for losses run up by badly regulated Icelandic banks operating abroad.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Do thoughts have a language of their own?

Robert Kowalski
New Scientist

The idea of machines that think and act as intelligently as humans can generate strong emotions.

This may explain why one of the most important accomplishments in the field of artificial intelligence has gone largely unnoticed: that some of the advances in AI can be used by ordinary people to improve their own natural intelligence and communication skills.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Croatia embraced as 28th member of EU

AlJazeera

Zagreb signs European Union accession treaty, but membership withheld from Serbia pending further changes.

Europe's leaders embraced Croatia as the EU's 28th member on Friday but dashed the hopes of its former Yugoslav neighbour Serbia to clear a new hurdle in its longstanding bid to join the club.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Number of empty homes is a "national scandal", said Government minister

Out-Law

The number of houses in England that are empty on a long term basis has fallen by 21,000 in the past year, but the overall number of empty houses has fallen by just 17,000, the Government has said.

Figures released by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) show that there are now 720,000 vacant houses in England, 279,000 or which are empty on a long term basis. The figures were calculated using council tax statistics.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

NASA Rover Spots Unambiguous Evidence for Water on Ancient Mars

Adam Mann
Wired

NASA’s Opportunity rover has seen a mineral on Mars that could only have formed in the presence of liquid water.

“This is the single most powerful piece of evidence that water once flowed on Mars that has been discovered,” said planetary scientist Steve Squyres of Cornell University during a briefing here at the American Geophysical Union meeting Dec. 7. “There’s no ambiguity about this.”
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Saturday December 10, 2011

The young and the restless: Kids sue government over climate change

Claire Thompson
Grist

As the U.S. delegation drags its feet at the climate talks in Durban, South Africa, this week, a pack of kids back home is trying to force the old folks into action, the American way: They're suing the bastards.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

The Real History of 'Corporate Personhood': Meet the Man to Blame for Corporations Having More Rights Than You

Jeffrey Clements
Berrett-Koehler Publishers

The real history of today's excessive corporate power starts with a tobacco lawyer appointed to the Supreme Court.

In 1971, Lewis Powell, a mild-mannered, courtly, and shrewd corporate lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, soon to be appointed to the United States Supreme Court, wrote a memorandum to his client, the United States Chamber of Commerce.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Chimp markets reveal evolution of friendship

Rowan Hooper
New Scientist

What was the basis for the earliest friendships? If wild chimps are any guide: support in a fight, borrowing a valued tool, and a bite to eat now and then. Quite similar to our friendships today, in fact.

Indeed, some chimps are so modern they have relationships that we would classify as friends with benefits.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Water shortages in Dead Sea could increase tensions in Middle East

Steve Connor
Independent

Scientists studying ancient mud samples taken from the bed of the Dead Sea separating Israel and Jordan have warned that the fragile political situation in the Middle East will be made worse by the intense water shortages their study is predicting.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Who works the longest hours in Europe?

The Guardian

Hint: it's not Germany. Find out how many hours people work in different jobs and across the EU

As Europe's leaders gather to discuss how to rescue the mediterranean economies and safeguard the single currency, it's tempting to resort to crude national stereotypes of prudent, hard-working Germans and lazy Greeks.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Who are Standard and Poor's and why should we care?

Samira Shackle
NewStatesman

The credit ratings agency has warned it could downgrade all 15 eurozone countries. Why does this matter?

If you thought that there wasn't enough pressure on eurozone leaders to resolve the debt crisis, you were wrong. In a surprise move, the credit ratings agency Standard and Poor's (S&P) has put most of the zone on "credit watch".
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Hundreds of NASA’s moon rocks missing: audit

Agence France-Presse

Researchers have sticky fingers when it comes to NASA’s moon rocks and meteorites, and hundreds of samples have gone missing after being loaned out by the US space agency, an audit said Thursday.

NASA Inspector General Paul Martin issued a report detailing foibles such as the US space agency making loans to researchers who never used the samples, or simply losing track of rare pieces dating back to the first US trip to the Moon in 1969.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Woman Arrested for Cooking Meth Inside a WalMart

AlterNet

This story offers up a perfect slice of modern America...

Tulsa police arrest a woman for mixing chemicals to make meth inside a south Tulsa Walmart on Thursday.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

The 10 Most Sugary Kids' Cereals

Kiera Butler
Mother Jones

As a kid, I once begged my mom for a product called Ice Cream Cones cereal. That name really tickled Mom, the sheer audacity of it. It wasn't even trying to sound healthy!

Needless to say, Ice Cream Cones never made it into our shopping cart.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Occupy the Police State

Jason Leopold
Truthout

The photograph on the cover of Andrew Kolin's book is all too familiar.

Police officers dressed in riot gear, gripping batons, square off against protesters in what appears to be a tense situation that is on the brink of turning violent.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Massive asteroid is 'more like a planet' say scientists

AP

Scientists say new views of the massive asteroid Vesta reveal it is more like a planet.

Since slipping into orbit around Vesta in July, Nasa's Dawn spacecraft has beamed back stunning images of the second largest object residing in the asteroid belt.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Goldman Sachs whistleblower threatened with the sack

Rajeev Syal
The Guardian

Osita Mba, who disclosed that managers had let off Goldman Sachs with tax penalties, is facing disciplinary procedures

A solicitor at HM Revenue & Customs who turned whistleblower to disclose that senior managers had quietly let off Goldman Sachs from paying millions of pounds in tax penalties is facing disciplinary procedures and possible prosecution for speaking out.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Coffee, Tea or Cancer? Almost Half of Americans Oppose X-ray Body Scanners

Michael Grabell
ProPublica

Even if X-ray body scanners would prevent terrorists from smuggling explosives onto planes, nearly half of Americans still oppose using them because they could cause a few people to eventually develop cancer, according to a new Harris Interactive poll conducted online for ProPublica.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Rats Free Trapped Friends, Hint at Universal Empathy

Brandon Keim
Wired

With a few liberating swipes of their paws, a group of research rats freed trapped labmates and raised anew the possibility that empathy isn’t unique to humans and a few extra-smart animals, but is widespread in the animal world.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Chasing the Dragon in Jail

Rick Watts
The Fix

Being locked up is an inconvenience when you and your mates crave heroin. One London prisoner and ex-user recalls that getting the drugs is the easy part.

Acquiring smack in British prisons isn’t much of a problem, if you can pay for it.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Sen. Sanders files amendment to end corporate personhood

Eric W. Dolan
The Raw Story

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a constitutional amendment to the U.S. Senate on Thursday that would overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United ruling.

The decision held that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as people, and that political spending was free speech.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Fukushima Daiichi operator considers plans to dump treated water into sea

Reuters

Tepco says it is running out of space to store water and may dump it, prompting protests from fishing groups

The operator of Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant has said it is considering dumping water treated for radiation contamination into the ocean as early as March, prompting protests from fishing groups.
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Sex and the guppy: females flock together to cope with over-lusty males

Jeremy Laurance
Independent

If a man without a woman is like a fish without a bicycle, as the feminist slogan has it, can the behaviour of our aquatic ancestors teach us anything about human relations?
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Saturday December 10, 2011

Iraq: No Lessons Learned

james Zogby
Counterpunch

With the date for US forces to be fully withdrawn from Iraq fast approaching, it is important to remind ourselves how we got into that long and deadly war in the first place, to recognise that this conflict is far from over, and to hold accountable those responsible for the horrors they created during the past eight years.
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Friday December 09, 2011

Los Angeles becomes the first major US city to vote against corporate personhood

Adbusters

On December 6th, Los Angeles became the first major U.S. city to vote against corporate personhood and further call for a Constitutional Amendment asserting that corporations are not entitled to constitutional rights and that money is not free speech.

The unanimous vote was witnessed in Council chambers packed by a standing room only crowd of hundreds of people as well as a overflow room filled to capacity by enthusiastic supporters.
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Friday December 09, 2011

Abusing Our Betters

craig
Craig Murray.org

The xenophobic yaah-booing of the Tories over the demand for Cameron to show the “Bulldog spirit” is Europe is quite sickening.

It is astonishing that the broadcast media have universally bought in to the spin that Cameron is “Defending Britain” by opposing the banking transaction tax, that all other major European powers want.
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Thursday December 08, 2011

Wikipedia founder attacks Bell Pottinger for 'ethical blindness'

David Pegg, Olivier Wright
Independent

The 'dark arts'

The co-founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales has criticised Bell Pottinger's "ethical blindness" as the lobbying company admitted altering details of its clients' reputations online.
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Thursday December 08, 2011

Alabama Agriculture Department Advances Plan to Replace Immigrant Workers With Prisoners

Marie Diamond
ThinkProgress

ThinkProgress has been reporting on the catastrophic economic consequences of Alabama’s harshest-in-the-nation immigration law.

Undocumented workers are the backbone of Alabama’s agriculture industry, and their exodus has already created a labor shortage in the state. Farmers say crops are rotting in the field and they are in danger of losing their farms by next season.
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Thursday December 08, 2011

5 Alternatives to PayPal

Michael Harrison
Wired

When you want to transfer money over the internet, there’s usually one name that comes to mind: PayPal.

With the company’s troubled past, stemming from seemingly unnecessary account freezes and cagey communication with its users, a lot of folks are seeking an alternative way to send money.
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Thursday December 08, 2011

What Really Happened in the Russian Elections

Izrael Shamir
Counterpunch

Moscow is unusually warm: the temperature refuses to dip below zero degrees Centigrade, the freezing point. Instead, it is wet and dark. The sun gets up late and goes to sleep early.

To make matters worse, President Medvedev decided to keep Russia on daylight savings time throughout winter.
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Thursday December 08, 2011

Most Israelis Favour a Nuclear-Free Middle East, Poll Shows

Mitchell Plitnick
Inter Press Service

A clear majority of Israeli Jews would support a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, even if it meant that Israel too would have to give up its stockpile of nuclear weapons.

This was the most surprising result to come out of a pair of polls conducted separately on Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
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Thursday December 08, 2011

Game changers: the women who make videogames

Keith Stuart
The Guardian

Nearly half of the UK's videogame players are women, and now they are designing and writing them too, including top sellers Gears of War 3, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. What took them so long?

Three of the biggest videogame releases this winter have something unusual in common.
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Thursday December 08, 2011

Walk on the wild side: Pedestrians could soon be given equal footing with cars

Will Dean
Independent

Traditional planning put cars at the centre of our streets but a radical rethink of how modern cities work could change all that.

I am standing at the junction of two of the busiest streets in central London – High Holborn and Shaftesbury Avenue.
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Thursday December 08, 2011

The Stop Online Piracy Act is Class War in Cyberspace, Enriching the 1% at the Expense of the 99%

Dean Baker
Truthout

SOPA would require every web site in the country to become unpaid copyright enforcement officers for Time Warner, Disney and The Washington Post, among others.

The One Percent and their employees are masters of word play. They turned the estate tax into the "death tax," life-saving health and environmental rules became "job-killing" regulations and, of course, when it comes to taxes, the richest of the rich are now "job creators" who are supposed to be exempt from paying taxes.
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Thursday December 08, 2011

Carrier IQ executive plays down 2010 content analysis patent request

Jaikumar Vijayan
Computerworld US

Firm sought patent for tech it said could read content selection, location data and app activity on mobile devices

Carrier IQ has played down the significance of the controversial location tracking company's effort to patent a technology it said can help wireless carriers undertake "advertising audience segmentation analysis and content copyright analytics".
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Thursday December 08, 2011

Austerity for Europe

Mark Weisbrot
Counterpunch

The house is on fire and the owners are arguing about what kind of safety regulations should be implemented in the future so as to prevent these types of fires.

That is what appears to be going on in the eurozone right now, as European leaders try to reach agreement on a series of measures that would impose “fiscal discipline” on member states in the future.
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Thursday December 08, 2011

How to Picture the Size of the Universe

Adam Mann
Wired

Space, as Douglas Adams once so aptly wrote, is big.

To try imagining how big, place a penny down in front of you. If our sun were the size of that penny, the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be 350 miles away.
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Thursday December 08, 2011

Exoplanet Kepler 22-b offers best hope yet for a new Earth

The Guardian

Nasa discovers planet that is about 2.4 times the size of our own and lies in the 'Goldilocks zone' of its solar system

A new planet outside Earth's solar system has been identified with many similarities to our own – making it the latest best potential target for life.
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Thursday December 08, 2011

Seven Diseases Big Pharma Hopes You Get in 2012

Martha Rosenberg
AlterNet

Supply-driven marketing not only turns the nation into pill-popping hypochondriacs, it distracts from Pharma's drought of real drugs for real medical problems.

It used to be joked that a consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is. These days, the opportunist is Big Pharma, which raises your insurance premiums and taxes while providing you "low-priced" drugs that you paid for.
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Wednesday December 07, 2011

Playing With Fire: Obama’s Risky Oil Threat to China

Michael T. Klare
TomDispatch

When it comes to China policy, is the Obama administration leaping from the frying pan directly into the fire?

In an attempt to turn the page on two disastrous wars in the Greater Middle East, it may have just launched a new Cold War in Asia -- once again, viewing oil as the key to global supremacy.
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Wednesday December 07, 2011

Are we facing the death of email?

Adam Sherwin
Independent

First the Twitterati logged off. Now a high-tech office has abandoned it altogether. So is the writing on the wall for our most popular form of communication? Adam Sherwin gets the message

Imagine it: a life freed from the drudgery of deleting an inbox full of "unbeatable offers" and the latest missive on paper clips from head office.
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Wednesday December 07, 2011

Former US economy tsar warns Britain risks catching the 'US disease'

Randeep Ramesh
The Guardian

Jared Bernstein says the UK is following America down the road to excessive inequality

Best known as the "conscience" of President Obama's economic team, Jared Bernstein is a man used to being courted.

Until this year, every morning in the White House, the Buddhist, former jazz musician and author of Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed?, used to chew over the spluttering US economy with the other four top Obama economy tsars.
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Wednesday December 07, 2011

Small farmers crave horse power

Arianna Reguzzoni
Grist

Ask any 5-year-old: Few tools symbolize the farm like a trundling tractor. In fact, you'd have to reach further back in time to find an equally enduring symbol: the horse.

And while there's little doubt that tractors have revolutionized farm labor and made farms much more efficient than they were in past centuries, a growing number of farmers are taking the back-to-the-land ethos as far as it will go and choosing horses and mules over John Deere.
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Wednesday December 07, 2011

From Occupation to “Occupy”: The Israelification of American Domestic Security

Max Blumenthal
al-akhbar

The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed against the OWS, has taken place at every level of law enforcement.

In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield.
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Wednesday December 07, 2011

Could dark matter not matter?

Steve Nerlich
Universe Today

You probably want to put on your skeptical goggles and set them to maximum for this one.

An Italian mathematician has come up with some complex formulae that can, with remarkable similarity, mimic the rotation curves of spiral galaxies without the need for dark matter.
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Tuesday December 06, 2011

Occupy London's anger over police 'terrorism' document

Shiv Malik
The Guardian

A notice sent out to businesses in the City of London has listed the protest movement among groups such as al-Qaida and Farc

Police have angered Occupy London activists after listing the movement among terrorist groups in an advisory notice sent to the business community in the City.
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Tuesday December 06, 2011

Caught on camera: top lobbyists boasting how they influence the PM

Melanie Newman
Independent

Special undercover investigation: Executives from Bell Pottinger reveal 'dark arts' they use to burnish reputations of countries accused of human rights violations

One of Britain's largest lobbying companies has been secretly recorded boasting about its access to the heart of the Government and how it uses the "dark arts" to bury bad coverage and influence public opinion.
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Tuesday December 06, 2011

Atomic Bombs Vs. Asteroids, and Other Uses for Old Nukes

Adam Weinstein
Mother Jones

Even as America's stockpile shrinks, weapons researchers are busy searching for new ways to keep the bombs (and their funding) alive.

David Dearborn is one of a small handful of people who can say they've designed their own atomic bomb, lowered it into the Nevada desert, and watched it detonate, instantly vaporizing the earth around it and swallowing the desert floor in an immense gas-filled crater.
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Tuesday December 06, 2011

Co-ops Off to a Promising Start

Claudia Ciobanu
Inter Press Service

A small wave of consumer cooperatives is rising in Central and Eastern Europe, attempting to provide food that is locally produced and healthy, and to build conviviality.

Thousands of producer and consumer cooperatives exist in post-socialist countries, many of them new initiatives created since 1989.
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Tuesday December 06, 2011

Gary McKinnon gets MPs' backing in extradition debate

Allegra Stratton,
The Guardian

Alleged hacker 'should not be treated like some gangland mobster', House of Commons told

MPs have urged the government to improve safeguards for British citizens wanted by authorities overseas by reforming extradition laws, indicating the strength of political feeling in support of Gary McKinnon, who has been battling for six years against a US extradition bid to face hacking charges.
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Tuesday December 06, 2011

Outsourcing Jobs, Offshoring Markets

Allan Nasser
Counterpunch

Conventional economic wisdom teaches that it is not in the interests of employers to drive wages down to desperation levels, since most consumers are wage earners and consumption demand generates from 66 to 72 percent of the Gross Domestic Product.

Were employers to drive wages too low they would at the same destroy their customer base, which is good for neither capital nor labor.
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Tuesday December 06, 2011

Supermassive surprise: the biggest black holes EVER

Richard Chirgwin
The Register

A blackholearama of a day!

Here’s a genuine record-breaker: a black hole with nearly ten billion times the mass of our Sun, an event horizon that would stretch five times further than the orbit of Pluto if we had the misfortune to have it drop in, and a gravitational sphere of 4,000 light-years.
read full story

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Tuesday December 06, 2011

Fair trade lite: Fair Trade USA moves away from worker co-ops

Twilight Greenway
Grist

Compared to so many other purchasing decisions -- like which humane meat label to trust, for instance -- the "Certified Fair Trade" logo has made buying ethically produced coffee a relatively simple choice.

Most of us either buy fair trade or we don't.
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Tuesday December 06, 2011

I didn't get where I am today by being nice...

Richard Hall
Independent

Study reveals agreeable men earn £4,500 less than their ruthless colleagues

It is a phrase that millions of good-natured people around the world will consider so obvious that it hardly deserves to be questioned. Nonetheless, a team of business experts claims to have proved the pessimistic notion that "nice guys finish last" – at least where money is concerned.
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Tuesday December 06, 2011

New gene study of ADHD points to defects in brain signaling pathways

Medical Xpress

Pediatric researchers analyzing genetic influences in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have found alterations in specific genes involved in important brain signaling pathways.

The study raises the possibility that drugs acting on those pathways might offer a new treatment option for patients with ADHD who have those gene variants—potentially, half a million U.S. children.
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Tuesday December 06, 2011

Japan, Russia see chance to clone mammoth

Physorg.com

Scientists from Japan and Russia believe it may be possible to clone a mammoth after finding well-preserved bone marrow in a thigh bone recovered from permafrost soil in Siberia, a report said Saturday.

Teams from the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum and Japan's Kinki University will launch fully-fledged joint research next year aiming to recreate the giant mammal, Japan's Kyodo News reported from Yakutsk, Russia.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Round One Goes to the Islamists

Cam McGrath
Inter Press Service

Islamists appear poised for a landslide victory in the first round of Egypt's parliamentary elections, putting them on track to secure a majority in the country's first parliament since the fall of president Hosni Mubarak.

Preliminary results leaked on Friday indicate that Islamist parties took at least 65 percent of votes in the opening round of Egypt's three-stage parliamentary election, which began Monday and will conclude in January.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Rioters say anger with police fuelled summer unrest

Paul Lewis, Tim Newburn and Matthew Taylor
The Guardian

Guardian-LSE study of riots – involving hundreds of interviews with participants – reveals deep antipathy towards officers

Widespread anger and frustration at the way police engage with communities was a significant cause of the summer riots in every major city where disorder took place, the biggest study into their cause has found.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Forget antibiotics, try nanoparticles instead

New Scientist

Forget antibiotics, let's try nanoparticles. That's according to DARPA, the US military's research arm, which says that rather than spend money on new antibiotics, which only work until bacterial strains grow resistant, "readily adaptable nanotherapeutics" can fight infection instead.
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Monday December 05, 2011

How a Computer Game is Reinventing the Science of Expertise

Sandra Upson
Scientific American

If there is one general rule about the limitations of the human mind, it is that we are terrible at multitasking.

The old phrase “united we stand, divided we fall” applies equally well to the mechanisms of attention as it does to a patriotic cause.

When devoted to a single task, the brain excels; when several goals splinter its focus, errors become unavoidable.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Vermont's Push to End Corporate Personhood

Greg Guma
Maverick Media

As support builds to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, organizer David Cobb returned to Vermont last week to discuss pending state legislation and Town Meeting votes aimed at amending the US Constitution.

Over the last decade more than a hundred cities and towns across the country have passed ordinances putting citizens' rights ahead of corporate interests. They have banned businesses from dumping toxic sludge, building factory farms, mining, and extracting water for bottling.
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Monday December 05, 2011

US Drug Agents Launder Profits of Mexican Cartels

Ginger Thompson
The New York Times

Undercover American narcotics agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds as part of Washington’s expanding role in Mexico's fight against drug cartels, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Eurozone Catastrophe: How Saving the Euro Could Mean Blood on the Streets

Marshall Auerback
AlterNet

The whole future shape of Europe must be resolved in a week or so. It’s a high-stakes game of poker that the Germans are determined to win--at the expense of misery for many.

The eurozone story is changing by the hour. Here's what you need to know to understand developments that will impact the entire global economy and potentially cause major social upheaval.

The eurozone is facing two distinct, but related, problems:
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Monday December 05, 2011

Autonomo Concept Is Half Car, All Driver

Keith Barry
Wired

Meet Autonomo, the half-width autonomous car that just might foreshadow next-generation personal mobility in crowded cities.

Able to split a lane and equipped with object-recognition sensors, Autonomo relies on the principles of swarm robotics to quickly move as many vehicles as possible in the smallest available space. Like schools of fish, groups of Autonomos could quickly move in tandem to maximize free space on a highway.
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Monday December 05, 2011

New green alliance in savage attack on George Osborne

Robin McKie and Toby Helm
The Guardian

Coalition on path to becoming most environmentally destructive government to hold power in the UK, say campaigning groups

An extraordinary alliance of countryside campaigners, wildlife groups and green activists has launched a savage onslaught on the government, accusing it of showing "stunning disregard" for the environment.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Wanted: more immigrants to boost British economy

Ben Chu
Independdent

George Osborne's economic strategy rests on continued high levels of immigration to Britain – in contrast to the Conservatives' policy of cutting net migration down to the "tens of thousands".

The Government will find itself in the position of either having to allow continued immigration in the hundreds of thousands or jeopardising the country's economic recovery, according to its own fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Revealed: what people look at on your Facebook page

Matt Warman
Telegraph

The profile picture is the most viewed part of any page on a social network, from Facebook to Google+, researchers say.

EyeTrackShop, a startup business that runs eye-tracking studies for advertisers, helped website Mashable to find out what users look at across social networks by applying its technology to a range of pages.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Europe Should Beware Leaders Peddling Austerity

Paul Krugman
Krugman & Co.

Alan Cowell had an interesting piece in The New York Times on Nov. 14 contrasting public attitudes toward austerity now with attitudes toward the austerity that was the norm in postwar Britain — and beautifully described by the late Tony Judt.

As Mr. Cowell notes, one major difference is that back then the sacrifice was shared: “Before he died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2010, the historian Tony Judt recalled childhood days just after World War II in a debilitated Britain that was slowly ceding its empire and its pre-eminence.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Confessions of a former Coke addict

Bruce Bradley
Grist

Yes, I've battled a Coke "addiction" more than once. Just when I think I have it beat, it worms its way back into my life.

No, this Coke isn't that white, powdery stuff; it comes in a can, and my drug of choice is Cherry Coke Zero.
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Monday December 05, 2011

UK cops seek boffins to build handheld DNA sniffer kit

Bill Ray
The Register

Just zoom and enhance - like CSI on the telly

The National Policing Improvement Agency wants to hear from companies that can supply Blighty's cops with mobile tech that spots DNA.

Apparently the cops are spending millions sending samples off for DNA analysis, only to discover that there's no human DNA present.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Northwest Oyster Die-offs Show Ocean Acidification Has Arrived

Elizabeth Grossman
e360

The acidification of the world’s oceans from an excess of CO2 has already begun, as evidenced recently by the widespread mortality of oyster larvae in the Pacific Northwest. Scientists say this is just a harbinger of things to come if greenhouse gas emissions continue to soar.

Posted in: by bubblejam at 05:58 AM | Comments (0) | Email This Entry

Monday December 05, 2011

Bahrain hires John Yates, former Met officer, to oversee reform

Damien McElroy
Telegraph

John Yates, the former assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has been appointed by Bahrain to oversee reform of its police force after an independent report found it responsible for human rights abuses.

Mr Yates has been asked to overhaul the controversial service with John Timoney, a former head of Miami police, to ensure its procedures meet international human rights standards.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Once Again, War Is Prime Time and Journalism's Role Is Taboo

John Pilger
Truthout

On 22 May, 2007, The Guardian UK's front page announced: "Iran's secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq." The writer, Simon Tisdall, claimed that Iran had secret plans to defeat American troops in Iraq, which included "forging ties with al-Qaida elements."

The coming "showdown" was an Iranian plot to influence a vote in the US Congress.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Smartphone addicts starting to feel the pain

Agence France-Presse

Users of smartphones and tablet computers are starting to get high-tech blues, as increasing numbers of the tech savvy are coming down with ailments from “text neck” to “text thumb injury”.

Health experts in Britain have warned that strain injuries stemming from long periods spent staring at small screens and tapping at tiny keys can be debilitating.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Supply teacher suspended for giving pupil ride home

Telegraph

Teacher Martin Davis suspended for giving a lift home to a 17-year-old pupil who had forgotten his bus fare.

Martin Davis, 58, thought he was doing a good turn by dropping the boy off but, instead of being praised for making sure the teenager got home safely, he was put under investigation for gross misconduct.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Fear of Flying

Mark Gong
Adbusters

Liberating the left and unleashing its animal soul.

Lefty arguments are fraught with asterisks, exceptions, caveats, considerations, footnotes, excuses and pie-in-the-sky moral posturing coded in a lexicon that most people don’t even get.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Osborne's impact laid bare: The rich get richer and the poor get poorer

Ben Chu, Olivier Wright
Independent

Government warns of new credit crunch as the poor feel the pain

The poor will be penalised and the better-off helped by George Osborne's latest economic measures, according to the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Chrome replaces Firefox as No 2 browser

Gregg Keizer
Computerworld US

StatCounter puts Chrome over the edge, but rival metric firm says won't happen until 2012

Google Chrome edged Mozilla Firefox last month to take the number two spot in the browser popularity wars, according to an Irish metrics company.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Restricting Public Demonstrations at London Olympics

Big Brother Watch

In the wake of the Occupy movement, student protests and TUC rallies in London over the past year, the Home Office has ordered officials to draft plans for avoiding public protests during the London 2012 Olympics.

Such protests can be seen as both a security threat and an embarrassment to the host country. Understandably, Government officials are keen to avoid tarnishing the much-awaited events of the coming summer with angry crowds or vocal protesters.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Dead at 13: Napster 1998-2011

Tony Smith
Hardware

P2P pioneer, later online music shop, closed in US

So, farewell then, Napster.

The company founded by Shawn Fanning - who named it after his close-crop haircut, apparently - when his peer-to-peer file-sharing app of the same name took off, is no more.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Cocaine found on 11% of UK banknotes

Alan Travis
The Guardian

Longer pub hours linked to rise in cocaine use among white men, government advisory council for the misuse of drugs is told

More than one in every 10 banknotes in circulation in Britain is contaminated with cocaine, police drug experts have said.
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Monday December 05, 2011

The New Story of Stuff: Can We Consume Less?

Fred Pearce
e360

A new study finds that Britons are consuming less than they did a decade ago, with similar patterns being seen across Europe. Could this be the beginning of a trend in developed countries? Might we be reaching “peak stuff”?

Will rich societies start consuming less? Could wealth go green? Might parsimony become the new luxury? Heresy, surely, you would say. But it might just be possible.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Quantum computing comes closer as diamonds get spooky

Lewis Page
The Register

Boffins 'entangle' synthi-gems at room temperature

International boffins are chuffed today to publish cunning research in which they demonstrate quantum entanglement - the "spooky action at a distance" so disliked by Einstein - between a pair of small synthetic diamonds: and, this is the clever bit, at room temperature rather than in a cryogenic chamber or similar, so bringing the long hoped-for quantum computer hardware that bit nearer.
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Monday December 05, 2011

Senate Wants the Military to Lock You Up Without Trial

Spencer Ackerman
Wired

Here’s the best thing that can be said about the new detention powers the Senate has tucked into next year’s defense bill: They don’t force the military to detain American citizens indefinitely without a trial.

They just let the military do that.
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Monday December 05, 2011

5 Ways to Make Banks Pay for Their Secret $7 Trillion Free Ride

Eliot Spitzer
Slate

The CEOs of major banks maintained they were in good financial shape. Meanwhile, they secretly borrowed massive amounts from the government to stay afloat.

Imagine you walked into a bank, applied for a personal line of credit, and filled out all the paperwork claiming to have no debts and an income of $200,000 per year. The bank, based on these representations, extended you the line of credit.
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Monday December 05, 2011

The moment protesters found a plain-clothes cop in their midst

Kevin Rawlinson
Independent

Campaigners complain of invasive policing tactics against Occupy movement in London

Usually, it is the police who kettle protesters. The tables were turned, though, when demonstrators unmasked and surrounded a plain-clothes officer who had infiltrated their midst during this week's public sector protests
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Monday December 05, 2011

Pakistan military ordered to return fire if attacked by Nato forces

Saeed Shah
The Guardian

Pakistan's army chief issues new directive following recent deaths of 24 soldiers in Nato helicopter assault on border posts

Pakistan's military commanders have ordered their troops to return fire if they come under attack from Nato forces, raising the prospect of further deadly clashes along the country's border with Afghanistan.
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Monday December 05, 2011

App scans Facebook for unflattering photos you haven't been tagged in

Jeremy Kirk
Techworld

A German company will soon release a comprehensive Web-based application for monitoring Facebook content

So you're at the company Christmas party, and you've drank too much. The next day, an unflattering photo is on Facebook, but you don't know it since you haven't been tagged.
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Monday December 05, 2011

States Seek Drug Tests for Welfare Recipients

Matthew Cardinale
Inter Press Service

Atlanta - At least 36 states across the U.S. are proposing laws that would require applicants for and recipients of a variety of public aid programs to undergo drug testing in which they would have to provide a urine sample.

Several states, including Arizona, Florida, Indiana and Missouri, have already passed such laws.
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Monday December 05, 2011

NHS watchdog under fire for 'putting patient care at risk'

Randeep Ramesh
The Guardian

Care Quality Commission attacked after inquiry into Stafford hospital, where poor care led to hundreds of patient deaths

The watchdog responsible for overseeing the NHS has come under fire on multiple fronts, with counsel for the public inquiry into the Mid Staffs hospital scandal calling into question its leadership and "unhealthy organisational culture" while the National Audit Office said its failures had risked "unsafe or poor quality (patient) care".
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Saturday December 03, 2011

State of Surveillance

Pratap Chatterjee
CorpWatch/The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

A German tech company is selling the ability to track "political opponents." An Italian company promises to remotely seize control of smartphones and photograph their owners.

A U.S. company allows security services to "see what they [the targets]see." A South African company can store recordings of billions of phone calls, forever.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Kenneth Clarke delays £350m legal aid cuts

Owen Bowcott
The Guardian

No explanation was given for decision to postpone reforms opposed by senior judges and social welfare organisations

Kenneth Clarke's plans to slice £350m out of the annual legal aid budget appear to be losing momentum after the justice secretary unexpectedly announced a six-month delay to the programme.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Why some wasps are good with faces – and others aren't

Wendy Zukerman
New Scientist

You don't want to mess with Ms Big, so it's useful if you recognise her when you see her. So useful that even wasps can do it.

Despite having a brain less than a millionth the size of ours, queen paper wasps (Polistes fuscatus) can recognise each other's faces. Michael Sheehan and Elizabeth Tibbetts, both at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, think they know why.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Corporations Are Patenting Human Genes and Tissues -- Here's Why That's Terrifying

Brad Jacobson
AlterNet

A medical ethicist explains the dark implications of corporate medical patents and the nightmarish scenario of our medical-industrial complex.

Do you think that granting corporations the rights of people in the Citizens United case is disturbing?
Then contemplate the fact that corporations have been patenting human genes and tissues at alarming rates -- in the last 30 years, more than 40,000 patents have been granted on genes alone.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Just Another Goldman Sachs Take Over

Paul Craig Roberts
Counterpunch

On November 25, two days after a failed German government bond auction in which Germany was unable to sell 35 per cent of its offerings of 10-year bonds, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Germany might retreat from its demands that the private banks that hold the troubled sovereign debt from Greece, Italy, and Spain must accept part of the cost of their bailout by writing off some of the debt.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

The Psychology of Nakedness

Jonah Lehrer
Wired

The human mind sees minds everywhere. Show us a collection of bouncing balls and we hallucinate agency; a glance at a stuffed animal and we endow it with a mood; I’m convinced Siri doesn’t like me.

The point is that we are constantly translating our visual perceptions into a theory of mind, as we attempt to imagine the internal states of teddy bears, microchips and perfect strangers.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

The SOPA Scoop: Anti-Piracy Bills Enrage Web Freedom Groups, Divide Congress

Mike Ludwig
Truthout

Misuse of copyrighted content is a fact of life on the Internet. Everyday, YouTube users upload homemade videos with copyrighted songs and peers share files that could have originated from a torrent site like Pirate Bay.

Now, imagine that the US government granted itself sweeping legal authority to shut down alleged pirate sites and intervene when web sites host any kind of content that infringes a copyright.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Fake forum comments are 'eroding' trust in the web

BBC News

Trust in information on the web is being damaged by the huge numbers of people paid by companies to post comments online, say researchers.

Fake posters can "poison" debate and make people unsure about who they can trust, the study suggests.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Iceland recognises Palestinian state

Associated Press

Icelandic parliament passes resolution making country the first in western Europe to accept Palestine as an independent state

Iceland has become the first western european country to recognise Palestine as an independent state.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Apple Siri pandering to anti-abortion lobby, claim activists

Gregg Keizer
Computerworld US

Embedded iPhone personal assistant allegedly refuses to locate family planning clinics

Pro-choice advocates have accused Apple's new Siri voice-activated assistant of refusing to locate family planning or abortion clinics, and have kicked off a petition urging Apple to update Siri.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Occupy London sets out agenda on how it wants to change the economic world

Peter Walker
The Guardian

Campaigners' policy statement calls for an end to tax havens and tax avoidance

The Occupy London movement has agreed its first specific set of proposals about corporations, just over six weeks since it first set up camp outside St Paul's cathedral to campaign against the perceived excesses and injustices of the global financial system.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

The Great Antidepressant Hypocrisy

Maia Salavitz
The Fix

America’s ambivalent relationship with drugs and medication pushes us to ignore critical differences between drugs, while failing to appreciate useful similarities.

When the Center for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced that one in ten Americans now takes an antidepressant—a 400% increase since 1988—there was a predictable media hand-wringing about "pill popping” and a rush to “quick fixes.”
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Thursday December 01, 2011

George Osborne's every blow falls on those with less not more

Polly Toynbee
The Guardian

With his autumn statement, the chancellor has declared class war: a Tory assault on the public sector and the poor

Class war, generation war, war against women, war between the regions: George Osborne's autumn statement blatantly declares itself for the few against the many.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Hacker cuffed in job interview sting with hotel he blackmailed

John Leyden
The Register

Hungarian demanded Marriott job after stealing secrets

A job-seeking Hungarian hacker has pleaded guilty to breaking into the systems of the Marriott hotel chain before attempting to blackmail his way into an IT job.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Only nine pay council tax in enclave for super-rich

Daniel Boffey
The Guardian

Local authority investigates ownership of world's most expensive residential block where one-bedroom flat costs millions

Only nine of the 62 apartments sold in One Hyde Park – the world's most expensive residential block – have been registered for council tax.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Can There Be Solidarity Between Movement Activists and Police Officers?

Randall Amster
New Clear Vision

Recent days have seen the increasing use of police violence against peaceful Occupy demonstrators around the country, including the gone-viral merciless pepper-spraying of students at UC Davis as well as that of 84-year-old Dorli Rainey in Seattle, and the critical wounding of Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen at Occupy Oakland.

Police often refer to such episodes as “non-lethal intervention” and “pain compliance.”
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Computer programs and languages cannot be copyrighted, says European court advisor

Jennifer Baker
Techworld

European Court of Justice advocate general claims copyright would "monopolise ideas"

The functionalities of a computer program and programming languages cannot be protected by copyright, according to the European Court of Justice's senior adviser.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Vacant or Occupied: Where Do the 99 Percent Go When Nature Calls?

J.A. Myerson
Truthout

For the Thanksgiving Family Forum, all the GOP candidates except for Mormon Messrs. Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney gathered at a megachurch in Iowa to discuss issues of concern to religious voters.

These didn't include, as one would be forgiven for suspecting, Christ's injunction that the rich give all their money in charity to the poor, or the apostles' establishment of a society wherein, "all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need." (Acts 2:44-45)
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Second US Navy robot stealth bomber takes flight

Lewis Page
The Register

Yes, but can it sing You've Lost That Loving Feeling?

A second X-47B unmanned stealth attack plane is now flying, and the US Navy expects the robot aircraft to demonstrate operations from an aircraft carrier on schedule in 2013.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Big Brother Is Watching And Listening In Oxford

Big Brother Watch

Be careful what you say if you decide to take a taxi or the bus in Oxford – every word will be recorded.

Despite being in clear breach of the guidance issued by the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) and a gross invasion of privacy, Oxford Council has decided to make it a condition for all licensed black cabs in the city to record both audio and video.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

While consumers shop, U.S. descends into planned financial implosion that favors corporate elite

Mike Adams
Natural News

We live in interesting times.

Even as our own civilization hangs on the precipice of financial solvency, the priorities of the uninformed masses as so distorted that many will actually camp out in front of a Best Buy store in order to be the first in line to save $100 on a big-screen TV.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

US branch of Fair Trade goes it alone in move 'to relax standards'

Jenny Stevens
Independent

Fair Trade USA splits from international group amid plans to water down product requirements

The leading American branch of the Fair Trade movement has cut its ties to its international parent body, sparking sharp criticism of its decision to relax the rules on which products will gain its stamp of approval.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Why Do Police Officers Use Pepper Spray?

Brandon Keim
Wired

When pepper spray became a mainstream law enforcement tool in the 1990s, it was hailed as a relatively peaceful alternative to harsh physical violence.

But as demonstrated by the routine spraying of Occupy Wall Street activists, culminating in the horrific assault at the University of California, Davis, pepper spray can too easily become a tool of first and excessive resort.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Caviar back on the menu – in an ethical way

Genevieve Roberts
Independent

Sales are rising thanks to the discovery of a kinder – and sustainable – method of harvesting the fish roe

Once the preserve of Russian tsars and British royalty, caviar was described by the great Renaissance writer François Rabelais as the finest titbit in the world.
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Posted in: by bubblejam at 06:53 PM | Comments (0) | Email This Entry

Thursday December 01, 2011

GCHQ to offer British firms expertise in cybercrime

Nick Hopkins
The Guardian

Some of the secret technologies created at the government's eavesdropping centre GCHQ are to be offered to private industry as part of cyber security strategy unveiled by ministers on Friday.

The plans could lead to the government being paid substantial sums for software developed by the intelligence agency at Cheltenham.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Why Smartphone Commercials Are Making Us Stupid

Mike Isaac
Wired

It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

Legions of nine-to-fivers stare idly at their office monitors, pretending to work in the few short hours before going on holiday. Dysfunctional families assemble for awkward turkey dinners. And, of course, all of the consumer electronics companies ramp up their ad campaigns to lure in the tired, poor and hungry masses of seasonal shoppers.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Wall Street Banks Earned Billions Off $7.7 Trillion in Secret Fed Loans Made During the Financial Crisis

AlterNet

In the lead-up to the financial crisis that crippled the American economy and plunged the country into a recession, the Federal Reserve made trillions in undisclosed loans to struggling banks and financial institutions, according to official documents obtained by Bloomberg News.

Six of the country’s largest banks then turned those loans into more than $13 billion in previously undisclosed profits.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Boys from Brazil stir up a surf war

Guy Adams
Independent

Tensions between Hawaiian surfers and energetic newcomers from South America have reached boiling point on Oahu's famous beaches

You only have to watch Edison de Paula carve his way across one of the spectacular waves that wallop Oahu's north shore each winter to realise that surfing isn't exactly what you might call a laid-back sport.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

US police use radio encryption to stop iPhone eavesdropping

John E Dunn
Techworld

Cheap smartphone apps cause a change in policy

Anxiety over the public snooping of police radios using smartphones is persuading a growing number of US police forces to take the controversial step of moving their communications to fully-encrypted operation.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Copenhagen Moves Closer to Legalizing Marijuana

Phillip Smith
Stop The Drug War

The city council of Copenhagen voted 39-9 Thursday night to set up a committee to explore how best to legalize and regulate the sale of marijuana in the Danish capital.

The move is supported by Mayor Frank Jensen.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

The 2-Year Window

Kevin Drum
Mother Jones

In The New Republic this week, Jon Cohn has an eye-opening piece, "The Two Year Window," about advances in the science of early childhood development.

It opens with a description of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a study that removed infants from warehouse-style orphanages in Romania and adopted them out:
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Petroleum Junkies of the World, Unite!

Craig Collins Ph.D.
Truthout

I'm a fossil fuel junkie. I drive a car and use electricity. My computer, TV, telephone, refrigerator, stove, lights, water and sewage all run on carbon-based energy.(1) All of the materials used to build my house and furniture were made with hydrocarbons.

The wood, sheetrock, cement, metals, glass, wiring, PVC pipes, and other plastics were all manufactured with carboniferous energy. My high-energy lifestyle mainlines fossil fuels.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Militarising the police from Oakland to NYC

Heather Digby Parton
Al Jazeera

If the infrastructure of a police state is created, it's only a matter of time before those aggressive powers are used.

What happens when a government builds a massive, unaccountable police apparatus to thwart infiltration by a foreign menace, only to see the society it's supposed to protect take to the streets for entirely different reasons?
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Ancient symbol of Rome – or a Middle Ages knock-off?

Michael Day
Independent

First Germans intervened in Italy's politics. Now they're downgrading a cultural icon

The most celebrated and supposedly one of the oldest symbols of the Eternal City may not be a product of the ancient world after all.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

The raw milk revolution

Jon Henley
The Guardian

Why a growing army of foodies is drinking unpasteurised, unhomogenised milk

"Try some," says Rosie Paul, taking a plastic bottle from the fridge and holding it up to the light. It looks different, certainly: butter-yellow, not chalk-white. The top quarter (or thereabouts) seems somehow more solid; that's a hell of a cream line. Rosie upends the bottle a couple of times, gently mixing the contents. And fills a glass.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Short of cash for lunch? How about an austerity sandwich... that's toast between two slices of bread

Fiona MacRae
Mail Online

Times are hard. But they may have to get harder before the ‘austerity sandwich’ - which scientists have acclaimed as the cheapest lunch in Britain - becomes a hit.

It consists of two slices of bread surrounding a filling of... another slice of bread.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

What Drugs Was Your Thanksgiving Turkey On?

Martha Rosenberg
AlterNet

Antibiotics and other drugs are common in the turkey that thousands of Americans eat every day.

So far, 2011 has not been a great year for turkey producers. In May, an article in Clinical Infectious Diseases reported that half of U.S. meat from major grocery chains--turkey, beef, chicken and pork--harbors antibiotic resistant staph germs commonly called MRSA.

Turkey had twice and even three times the MRSA of all other meats, in another study.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Why Artifical Intelligence Is Closer Than We Realize

Kevin Drum
Mother Jones

I haven't read Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's Race Against the Machine yet, but Matt Yglesias has and he says that one of their analogies has changed the way he thinks about technological progress.

Basically, if something improves x% per year, then the level of change looks small at first but explodes later, even though the actual rate of change has stayed the same the entire time:
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Thursday December 01, 2011

New Documentary Tracks Cultural Genocide of American Indians

Rose Aguilar
Truthout

In 1892, US Army officer Richard Pratt delivered a speech in which he described his philosophy behind US government-run boarding schools for American Indians.

"A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one," he said. "In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Mobile phone payments to replace cash by 2016: report

PC Advisor

PayPal estimates that £2.5bn will be spent using mobile phones in 2016

Using mobile phones to pay for good and services rather than cash, cheques or cards, will be commonplace by 2016, says PayPal.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Ecstasy is back in clubs as newly potent drug is taken with 'legal highs'

Jamie Doward and Silvia Suárez Jiménez
The Observer

The drug of choice in the Nineties rave scene is coming back as a powder that can be shared socially like cocaine and distinguishes its more fashion-conscious users from 'pill heads'

Ecstasy, the drug of choice for the clubbers of the early 1990s, is making a comeback.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Five Ways that Financial Elites are Destroying Democracy

Les Leopold
AlterNet

Is democracy compatible with a financial system run by billionaires? Maybe not.

Here are five ways that high finance is undermining democracy:

1. Billionaires replace one person, one vote.

Ask any American what’s wrong with our country and they will say that money rules politics. And they are correct.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Inside the Corporate Plan to Occupy the Pentagon

Adam Weinstein
Mother Jones

Behind the growing push to slash soldiers' pensions and other military costs is a little-known advisory group—stacked with Wall Street executives.

With time fast running out for the so-called deficit supercommittee, the mammoth amount of government money spent on the military has become a prime target in Washington.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Banks accused of lying to stave off regulation

sean Farrel
Independent

A member of the Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee yesterday attacked Britain's banks for dishonesty and endangering economic recovery in their lobbying against regulatory change.

Robert Jenkins accused the banks of trying to quash reform by protesting that strengthening their balance sheets would force them to lend less to support economic growth.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Blame Your Crooked Teeth on Early Farmers

Michael Balter
Wired

When humans turned from hunting and gathering to farming some 10,000 years ago, they set our species on the road to civilization.

Agricultural surpluses led to division of labor, the rise of cities, and technological innovation. But civilization has had both its blessings and its curses.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Time Banking: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

Edgar Cahn
YES! Magazine

Why let the availability of money determine the range of the possible? Time banks are taking off, in ways you never expected.

Ten years ago, Susan Dentzler of NPR was retained by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to investigate whether time banking (a system that lets people swap time and skill instead of money) was “a concept whose time was coming—or merely a fringe idea.”
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Thursday December 01, 2011

The 5 Most Toxic Energy Companies and How They Control Our Politics

tara Lohan
AlterNet

Energy companies continue to rake in massive profits. They use this wealth to leverage elections, write legislation, scale back regulations and escape accountability.

Four days after the April 5, 2010 explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, the 300 family members keeping vigil finally learned that the last of the missing miners had been found and there were no survivors among them. The explosion killed 29 men, and severely injured one. The mine was run by Performance Coal Company, a subsidiary of Massey Energy.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Dramatic increase in survival rates for some cancer types, study shows

James Meikle
The Guardian

Macmillan Cancer Support hails improvements but warns of 'woeful' lack of progress in treating other forms of cancer

Survival rates for some types of cancer, including breast and colon cancer, have improved dramatically over the last 40 years but there has been a "woeful" lack of investment in others, a study has found.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

'No security scan, no fly' policy to remain in force at UK airports

Alan Travis
The Guardian

Transport secretary Justine Greening says terror threat justifies refusal to give passengers an opt-out from scanning

The "no security scan, no fly" policy at British airports is to remain in place despite EU demands that passengers be allowed a pat-down search instead, ministers have said.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Billionaires Use Tax Loophole to Lower Their Tax Rates to One Percent

Pat Garofalo
ThinkProgress

In 2009, 1,470 households reported income of more than $1 million but paid no federal income tax on it, through their use of various tax loopholes and shelters.

Tax rates for millionaires have fallen by 25 percent since the mid-’90s, while one quarter of millionaires currently pay lower tax rates than the average middle-class household.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Clegg breaks ranks to order new review into Gary extradition

James Slack and Michael Seamark
Mail Online

Nick Clegg broke ranks with the Government over a ‘whitewash’ review into the lopsided extradition treaty that is being used to send Gary McKinnon to America.

The Deputy Prime Minister has ordered a new inquiry into extraditions between Britain and the U.S.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

China’s Game

Michael Doliner
Counterpunch

The US and NATO used Security Council Resolution 1973, which authorized a “no fly zone to protect civilians” in Libya, to launch the Libyan war. The war was also a war against China.

They had to evacuate 30,000 of their citizens who were fulfilling contracts to develop Libya’s resources.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

'Super soldiers': The quest for the ultimate human killing machine

Michael Hanlon
Independent

Guilt, tiredness, stress, shock – can specialised drugs help to mute the qualities that make soldiers human, asks Michael Hanlon?

The ancient Spartans believed that battlefield training began at birth. Those who failed the first round of selection, which took place at the ripe old age of 48 hours, were left at the foot of a mountain to die.
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Thursday December 01, 2011

Asian company hit by mega-DDoS attack

John E Dunn
Techworld

China is home of DDoS and botnets, says Prolexic

DDoS criminals are trying to batter down DDoS defences with larger attacks and new techniques, mitigation outfit Prolexic has said, only weeks after the company detected a huge assault on an Asian company.
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