The president taps an exec from the pesticide lobby - which slammed Michelle Obama's organic garden - for a top agriculture post.
When Michelle Obama announced plans to plant an organic garden at the White House, nearly everybody thought it was a great idea. Everybody except for the pesticide industry. Representatives from a branch of the industry's main trade association, CropLife America (CLA), wrote to the First Lady asking her to respect the role of "conventional agriculture;" they added in a separate note to supporters that the thought of the White House's chemical-free vegetables made them "shudder." But the public swipe at the president's wife didn't stop the administration from nominating senior CLA executive Islam "Isi" Siddiqui to a key post: chief agricultural negotiator for the office of the US Trade Representative (USTR). If confirmed, Siddiqui will be responsible for, among other things, negotiating international agreements governing the use of pesticides.
In May, President Obama nominated a renowned scientist known as the "father of green chemistry" to head the EPA's Office of Research and Development. For an administration that supports ambitious climate change legislation and stresses the importance of sustainability, the nomination of Paul Anastas, director of Yale's Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering and a former White House environment director, was very much in keeping with its broader agenda. Anastas' nomination was unanimously approved in committee in July, and his confirmation seemed all but assured. Yet six months later Anastas still isn't confirmed. Standing in his way is Senator David Vitter (R-La.), whose block on Anastas' nomination raises questions about Vitter's close ties to the formaldehyde industry.
MIT researchers think America's obesity epidemic can be reversed via 'foodsheds,' in which healthier, more affordable food is produced and consumed regionally.
In the last three decades, childhood obesity in the United States has become a massive public-health problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control, between 1980 and 2006 the percentage of obese teenagers in the United States grew from 5 to 18, while the percentage of pre-teens suffering from obesity increased from 7 to 17. Such children often become overweight adults, leaving themselves especially susceptible to heart illness, Type 2 diabetes, strokes, and some forms of cancer.
A Clackamas County woman fights to clear her name after her identity is stolen and police arrest her in front of her family for crimes she didn't commit.
Kim Fossen came to KATU News last week after Clackamas County deputies shackled her and locked her up in front of her two-year-old child on a felony fugitive warrant, accusing her of theft and prostitution.
The warrant was out of the state of New York charging her with burglary in the second degree and grand larceny.
Fossen sat in jail for more than a day but she wasn't the criminal; instead, it was 22-year-old Lien Thi Huynh, a Miami Beach escort who was using Fossen's identity for at least three years and committing crimes in her name.
But in Naples, Florida police finally got the right person - Huynh - the fake Kim Fossen.
Thomas Jefferson made one thing very clear in his notes and letters. The First Amendment clause that states "congress shall make no law with respect to the establishment of religion" was not so much to foster freedom of religion, though that is certainly a by product, but to make sure the government of the United States was, and always would,have, free from religion.
The one thing Jefferson and the Founders made clear and wanted to be very sure of, was that there would never be anything in the United States like the Church of England of which Jefferson and most of the Founders had a very low opinion .
Jefferson specifically wrote in his letters that the First Amendment regarding religion was designed, in Jefferson's words, "to build a wall between the government and the church". The Founders wanted to make sure the church would never have any official influence or hand in the affairs of state.
All indications are now that it was the US Conference of Catholic Bishops who were instrumental in the anti-abortion amendment that was attached to the health care reform bill in the House. And that wall established by the Constitution was taken down by Nancy Pelosi and Barrack Obama when they caved in to political pressure by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops who are credited with creating the anti- abortion language in the health care bill.
Greg Mitchell Huiffington Post 2009-11-12 11:30:00
With the publication of an interview with Sgt. Mark Todd, the actual cop who gunned down the killer at Fort Hood -- following its account of an unnamed eyewitness last night -- the New York Times finally underlined what some of us noticed from nearly the start: the media fell hook, line and sinker once again for a military account of what happened during the tragedy.
First, it was the "death" of Major Hasan, not corrected for many hours. Then, for days, the story of how a female cop brought down the shooter, even as she was receiving serious wounds. Yet I noticed just hours after the attack that scattered eyewitnesses, via the Web and Twitter, were saying that the killer re-loaded after Kimberly Munley went down.
How could he have done that if she had just plugged him four times, supposedly ending the rampage? Some of those witnesses said they yelled at the second cop to shoot Hasan--which he did, and then went up and kicked his gun away. Yet for days the media rarely questioned the military's "official" story of Munley as savior. The New York Times was one of many who put Munley on the front page and declared, on Nov. 7, that she was the person who nailed Hasan. Its headline: "She ran to gunfire, and ended it." It said flatly that she "brought down the gunman."
A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for "doing his duty".
Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday - after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year.
The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year's imprisonment for handing in the weapon.
In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said: "I didn't think for one moment I would be arrested.
"I thought it was my duty to hand it in and get it off the streets."
The court heard how Mr Clarke was on the balcony of his home in Nailsworth Crescent, Merstham, when he spotted a black bin liner at the bottom of his garden.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has criticized the country's raw-material based economy and urged a speedy modernization of the 'whole' system.
Medvedev scolded the Soviet era economic and governance policies and pledged to overhaul the country's political and financial institutions which, he stated, have been built on a primitive infrastructure.
The Russian leader who was delivering his annual state of the union address before the country's economic and political elite at the presidential palace at the Kremlin on Thursday, pledged to fight corruption, deal with "unprincipled" officers in law enforcement and called for a change in the country's foreign policy agenda.
He also hinted at the possibility of liberalism without resorting to chaos and instability in Russia's polity, noting, "Instead of the archaic society, in which the leaders think and make decisions for everyone, we will be a country of intelligent, free and responsible people."
A 25-year old man was killed, dismembered, eaten and parts of his body sold to a nearby fast-food stand in the Perm region of the Russian Urals, criminal investigators have reported.
According to the official site of the local Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor's office, three homeless men killed the victim out of "personal enmity."
"They stabbed him several times with a knife and a hit him with a hammer. The victim died at the scene of the crime," the site reports.
More than 100 rapists have been let off with a police caution, it was revealed yesterday. The 111 cases included 66 incidents of child rape.
The extent to which police forces have handed cautions to rapists, whose crime carries a maximum sentence of life in jail, was made public as Justice Secretary Jack Straw announced a full-scale review of the system of punishing crime with cautions and on-the-spot fines.
Mr Straw acted after a weekend when senior police chiefs and the Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer QC called for curbs on the use of out-of-court punishments.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson also condemned the 'uncontrollable increase in cautions' and said that on-the-spot fines, now often used to punish offences such as shoplifting, 'in the public's minds equate to a parking ticket.'
Silvio Berlusconi came under fire on Tuesday for a controversial proposal to reduce the length of time trials can last, in a move condemned by his critics as a way for him to eliminate at a stroke his own legal entanglements.
The prime minister's most important ally, faction leader Gianfranco Fini, said a bill would be introduced to parliament which would propose capping the length of Italian trials, which can currently last more than a decade.
The Italian justice system is in desperate need of reform - official figures show that there is a backlog of 3.6 million criminal cases and 5.4 million civil cases.
But there is little doubt that the proposal to change the country's statute of limitations would also benefit Mr Berlusconi, 73, who faces two corruption trials which are due to start this month.
An MP from the opposition Democratic Party, Donatella Ferranti, said parliament should reject any "tailor-made laws" designed to let Mr Berlusconi off the hook.
Antonio Di Pietro, a former anti-corruption investigator and the leader of the small Italy of Values opposition party, described the proposed changes as "criminal". A colleague, Felice Belisario, said: "This is just a masked trick to save the prime minister."
The head of Britain's climate change watchdog predicted today that households will need to spend up to £15,000 on a full energy efficiency makeover if the government is to meet its ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions.
Warning that Britain needs to step up its efforts to reduce greenhouse gases after picking all the "low-hanging fruit", Adair Turner said radical steps would be needed for electricity generation, cars and homes.
Amid growing concern that next month's Copenhagen climate change summit could end in bitter failure, the chairman of the government's climate change commission warned against using the drop in emissions caused by the longest recession since the 1930s as an excuse to relax in the fight against climate change.
Battling with one of the world's highest murder rates, Venezuela on Wednesday crushed more than 30,000 guns seized from the streets during police raids this year.
Policemen used blow-torches to chop up some of shotguns and pistols. They compacted weapons including home-made pistols into a 5 ton block, said Interior Minister Tarek Al Aisammi.
"Here we have weapons captured in operations during 2009," he said on state television. "This act forms part of the disarmament policies that we have been promoting."
With 13,000 murders in 2007, the last time figures were published, violent crime consistently registers as Venezuelans' main concern in opinion polls.
Pakistan Friday strongly rejected as baseless the allegations contained in an article of Washington Post that China provided Pakistan with weapons grade uranium for two bombs in 1982, the official news agency APP reported.
"Pakistan strongly rejects the assertions in the article that is evidently timed to malign Pakistan and China," the Foreign Office spokesman said when his attention was drawn to a Washington Post article about Pakistan-China nuclear cooperation.
"This is yet another attempt to divert attention from the overtand covert support being extended by some states to the Indian nuclear programme since its inception and intensified more recently in stark contradiction to their self-avowed commitment to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty," the spokesman said in a statement.
He said the fact is that Pakistan and China have comprehensive and all-dimensional cooperation, which includes civilian nuclear cooperation for peaceful purposes.
Julie Hyland World Socialist Web Site 2009-11-12 09:47:00
A global poll by the British Broadcasting Corporation's World Service shows widespread disaffection with the capitalist free market, including a significant opposition to capitalism per se.
Conducted by GlobeScan/PIPA, the poll interviewed more than 29,000 people in 27 countries, between June 19 and October 13, 2009. These were in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Panama, Costa Rica, Chile, Australia, Japan, Indonesia, Philippines, India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, France, Italy, the UK, Spain, Nigeria, Egypt and Kenya.
The poll found that more than three in five respondents were opposed to free-market capitalism. Some 89 percent believed that capitalism was not working, with a majority of those questioned in 22 of the countries indicating strong support for government intervention to support greater regulation of business and the market, in favour of a more socially equitable division of wealth.
Canadian riot police called in as army hall in Montreal is besieged by protesters chanting anti-monarchy slogans
Prince Charles's official visit to Canada has been marred by anti-monarchy protests as a group of Quebec nationalists clashed with riot police during a demonstration in Montreal.
The group staged a sit-in protest outside the regimental hall of the Black Watch of Canada last night. More than 100 protesters held a demonstration as Charles, who is colonel-in-chief of the regiment, was due to present new regimental colours. The arrival of the prince and Camilla Parker-Bowles, the Duchess of Cornwall, was delayed by 40 minutes as police cleared the streets.
Waving the provincial flag of Quebec and anti-royal placards, protesters chanted "Majesty go home" and the independence call "The Quebecois in Quebec". Some of the group threw eggs at soldiers leaving the regimental hall before police arrived.
On the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's worthwhile to remember that ending a stupid, harmful war is the most admirable thing a great leader can do.
"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." That biblical quotation certainly applies to Mikhail Gorbachev, a man not honored enough for the example he set and whose past practices and recent cautions about Afghanistan should be heeded by Barack Obama. Or, on a secular note, if the Sermon on the Mount doesn't cut it for you, take German Chancellor Angela Merkel's praise for the former Soviet leader at the ceremony marking the fall of the Berlin Wall, which he helped destroy: "You courageously allowed things to happen, and that was much more than we could have expected."
Lehaz Ali Agence France-Presse 2009-11-12 00:44:00
Suicide car bombs tore through security offices in Pakistan on Friday, killing at least 11 people and heavily damaging the Peshawar headquarters of the country's top intelligence agency.
The deadly assaults on Pakistan's police and intelligence agents come with 30,000 troops pressing their most ambitious offensive to date against homegrown Taliban networks in their mountain strongholds on the Afghan border.
The three-storey Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) provincial headquarters in the northwestern city of Peshawar was heavily damaged, with huge clouds of smoke spewing into the sky and debris littering the ground, witnesses said.
Could Americans who refuse to buy health insurance actually be imprisoned?
The House health reform bill would require all Americans who can afford insurance to buy it, raising a thorny question: What happens to those who opt out, then suddenly get sick, and stick the rest of Americans with their medical bills? President Obama supports a "penalty...high enough that people don't game the system." How high exactly? Republicans point out that the House bill specifies "a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years." Could Americans really go to jail for forgoing health insurance? (Watch Obama's comments about penalizing the uninsured)
The Dems have gone too far this time: "This is the ultimate example of the Democrats' command-and-control style of governing - buy what we tell you or go to jail," says Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), as quoted by Nolan Finley in The Detroit News. Obama's health care reform is looking more and more like the product of "a totalitarian regime." - "Buy insurance or go to the gulag"
US Navy Intelligence is soon to deploy radical new computer monitoring software able to sniff out "deviations" among hundreds of thousands of sailors at sea on the world's oceans.
Rather than some kind of Orwellian porn-enforcement system for use on the USN's own matelots, however, the so-called Predictive Analysis for Naval Deployment Activities (PANDA) technology will instead be used to sift a global plot of worldwide shipping movements to identify vessels acting in a menacing fashion.
"With tens of thousands of ships on the world's oceans every day, it is very difficult to identify behaviour that may indicate a threat," said Rich Dickinson, PANDA honcho at Lockheed Advanced Technology Labs, providing the kit. "We believe PANDA provides a great improvement for [maritime domain awareness] by automatically detecting deviations and alerting operators to them."
The idea is that the Office of Naval Intelligence will deploy PANDA at its National Maritime Intelligence Centre in Maryland, where the new tech will be able to monitor tracking information covering much of the watery globe.
A high-flying city lawyer was fired from her £150,000-a-year job after a 'routine security check' revealed her DNA was held on the national database - over a 'false allegation' made against her.
Lorraine Elliott said that she felt 'gobsmacked and depressed' after bosses spotted her file during 'background clearance' checks as she was just about to start work on a new project.
The mother-of-three today described her reputation as having been 'tainted' after she was dismissed from her post following the discovery of her DNA profile - despite never having been charged with an offence.
A Canadian civil liberties group has accused police of quietly buying a high-tech audio weapon for possible use against protesters at next year's Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
The so-called long range acoustical device can fire a concentrated blast of sound powerful enough to cause hearing damage and temporary vision disruption, according to the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association.
The group, monitoring security for the 2010 Games, said there should have been independent safety testing of the 'sonic gun' before Vancouver Police were allowed to buy it, executive director David Eby said.
The purchase, which was never publicly announced, "reduces the credibility of blandishments from city officials about not interfering with lawful and peaceful demonstrations", the civil liberties group said.
A British soldier who refused to return to Afghanistan after developing a principled opposition to the war, has been re-arrested and charged with five more offences following his part in an anti-war demonstration.
While details of the charges remain unclear, the re-arrest of Joe Glenton has raised fears over the abuse of civil liberties, and in particular the freedom to protest.
Glenton participated in an anti-war protest in London on 24 October. It is thought that the charges brought in the light of this include "refusal to obey a lawful order" and speaking to the media without permission.
Hotmail users are now unable to log out of their account if the browser they are using does not accept third party cookies.
The move by Microsoft raises security concerns, particularly as PCs on corporate networks and in cybercafes and libraries are often set to reject cookies.
The error screen* that greets users who try to log out tells them they must re-enable third party cookies or close every browser window.
Third party cookies are most commonly used by advertising networks to track surfers across the web.
President Obama has had a hard time dislodging misperceptions about his health care proposal - those stubborn beliefs that there are death panels and free care for illegal aliens that don't actually exist in the legislation. Recent research about the way people defend their faith in false information, though, suggests calling out the inaccuracies may not be all that effective in converting the suspicious.
Sociologists at the University of North Carolina and Northwestern University examined an earlier case of deep commitment to the inaccurate: the belief, among many conservatives who voted for George W. Bush in 2004, that Saddam Hussein was at least partly responsible for the attacks on 9/11.
The rest came up with an array of justifications for ignoring, discounting or simply disagreeing with contrary evidence - even when it came from President Bush himself.
Of 49 people included in the study who believed in such a connection, only one shed the certainty when presented with prevailing evidence that it wasn't true.
No, this can't be. According to an article appearing in one of Israel's biggest mainstream news outlets - Haaretz - Israeli Military Intelligence is AT THIS VERY MOMENT trying to "figure out" what went wrong in 1954 with something known as the "Lavon Affair", described by the news outlet as a "sabotage operation" by Israel in "bombing theaters, post offices and U.S. and British institutions, and making it seem as though Egypt was behind the bombings".
Ohhhh, this simply can't be, or as the character Vizzini infamously said over and over again in that adorable movie the Princess Bride - "INCONCEIVABLE". Israel - the apple of God's eye - deliberately bomb American buildings with the intention of blaming it on her Arab enemies in order to achieve a desired political outcome? Deliberately put innocent civilian life in jeopardy with an overt act of state terrorism?
She would NEVER do something like this, and especially not to her bestest buddy in da whole-wide woyld, America. After all, the Jews are God's chosen people, and something like this would be a sin and they - the Jewish people - don't sin.
David Edwards and John Byrne Raw Story 2009-11-13 08:39:00
Shocker: Fox News isn't always fair and balanced.
After Comedy Central's The Daily Show pointed out Tuesday night that Fox News' Sean Hannity program used footage from another GOP protest in a clip about a recent teaparty rally, Hannity admitted the network incorrectly used bogus footage in their interview with Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN).
"Finally tonight...Although it pains me to say this, Jon Stewart, Comedy Central - he was right," Hannity admitted Wednesday.
Richard Golstone, the celebrated war crimes prosecutor who lead UN inquiries on Rwanda, Yugoslavia and Gaza, is obsessed with Israel and cares little for justice, according to Israeli President Shimon Peres.
"Goldstone is a small man, devoid of any sense of justice, a technocrat with no real understanding of jurisprudence," Peres was quoted as telling Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Wednesday.
The Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported on Thursday that Peres termed Goldstone's UN-backed fact-finding inquiry on alleged war crimes committed in Gaza was "a one-sided mission to hurt Israel... If anyone should be investigated, it should be him."
On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban's rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime's ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat's right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.
But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.
The Christian Anti-Defamation Commission plans to protest the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which President Obama signed into law last month, by preaching outside of the Justice Department. Pastor Paul Blair is apparently concerned that the law will infringe on Christians' constitutional rights to act out their bigotry.
On November 16, 2009, at 1:30 PM, an ad hoc coalition of concerned ministers from various denominations will be holding a Press Conference and Rally for Religious Freedom in front of the Department of Justice.
A group of ministers including Rick Scarborough of Vision America, Gary Cass of the Christian Anti Defamation Commission, Bishop Earl Jackson of STAND America, Paul Blair and Steve Kern of Reclaim Oklahoma, Pat Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition, Brad Cranston of Iowa Baptists for Biblical Values and Jim Garlow, a leader in the Prop 8 battle in California will join together with others and boldly preach Biblical truth concerning the subject of homosexuality. If believing and proclaiming the Bible is considered a Hate Crime, then they are willing to be arrested, if necessary, in order to stand for the guaranteed First Amendment right to free speech for all ministers of the Gospel.
Former top executives at Blackwater have said the security firm sent $1 million to its Iraq office with the intention of paying off officials in the country who were angry about the fatal shootings of 17 civilians by Blackwater employees, The New York Times reported.
Four former executives described the plan under the condition of anonymity, the newspaper said.
Iraqis had long complained about ground operations by the North Carolina-based company, now known as Xe Corp even before the shooting by Blackwater guards in Baghdad's Nisoor Square in September 2007 left 17 civilians dead, further strained relations between Baghdad and Washington and led US prosecutors to bring charges against the Blackwater guards involved.
Let's once and for all stop getting excited about America mounting pressure on Israel to freeze West Bank settlements. The entire fascination with the topic is a product of Zionist spin. It is there to divert attention from the root cause of the conflict: The robbery of Palestine and Palestinians in the name of a 'Jewish home coming'. The call to stop Israeli construction in the West Bank is there to leave us with the false impression that the robbery of Palestine started in 1967. The facts are known to many of us, but not to all. The vast majority of Palestinians were expelled from their towns, villages, fields and orchards in 1948.
What seems as an American peace initiative putting pressure on Israel to halt its expansion into the West Bank is in fact an agenda that is promoted by Zionists within the US Administration who realise like the late Sharon, that the only chance for the Jewish state to survive the next decade, is to shrink into a little Jewish shtetle (ghetto). The Two state solution is indeed the last effort to keep Zionism alive.
Netanyahu is far from being stupid. He understands it all. He knows that his Zionist Revisionist father's dream of 'greater Eretz Yisrael' is unattainable.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich cancelled his keynote speech at a Democratic Party fund-raising dinner after several elected officials protested his stance on Israel.
Kucinich (D-Ohio),who e-mailed the Palm Beach County, Fla., chairman on Nov. 6 to bow out of giving his talk next week, has a history of criticizing Israel .He has voted against multiple resolutions supporting the state and opposed sanctions against Iran's anti-Israel regime.
Kucinich, a perpetual dark-horse Democratic presidential candidate, said in the e-mail that he did not want his speech or appearance to hamper Democratic fund-raising efforts, according to the Palm Beach Post.
A young student deported from the West Bank to Gaza is just the latest victim of Israeli efforts to sever ties between the territories
Twenty-one-year-old Palestinian student Berlanty Azzam was seized by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in the West Bank last month. Bound and blindfolded, she was forcibly deported to the Gaza Strip. Berlanty was in her final semester at Bethlehem University in the West Bank, and was returning from a job interview in Ramallah.
The problem was that she had an ID card registered in Gaza, and the Israeli occupation, in the words of the human rights organisation, B'tselem, "almost completely forbids the movement of Palestinians between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip".
Bethlehem university has had "continuous problems" getting Gaza students the requisite permission from Israel, according to communications officer Stephanie Rhodes.
In the summer of 2007, Israel instated a new procedure regarding residents of the Gaza Strip wishing to exit Gaza in order to receive medical treatment. According to the procedure, authorization some of these requests are authorized only if the resident first undergoes a questioning by the Israeli Security Agency (ISA). In a response by the Prime Minister's Office to a letter from Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) on 22 May 2008, the purpose of the questioning was described as "evaluating the degree of danger posed by the applicant". However, testimonies given to human rights organizations in Israel indicate otherwise. The organizations have documented cases in which the ISA has exploited the questionings to exert inappropriate pressure on ill persons, with the aim of forcing them to collaborate with the Agency and give information to agents, as a prerequisite for receiving a permit to exit Gaza for medical treatment. As the questionings take place in Erez Checkpoint, the ISA has even used them, in some cases, as a means to arrest persons and take them to interrogation within Israel.
Say recently revealed facility appears too small to house civilian program
Vienna - Iran's recently revealed uranium enrichment hall is a highly fortified underground space that appears too small to house a civilian nuclear program, but large enough to serve for military activities, diplomats told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Iran began building the facility near the holy city of Qom seven years ago, and after bouts of fitful construction could finish the project in a year, the diplomats said.
Both the construction timeline and the size of the facility - inspected last month by the International Atomic Energy Agency - are significant in helping shed light on Tehran's true nuclear intentions.
Iran says it wants to enrich only to make atomic fuel for energy production, but the West fears it could retool its program to churn out fissile warhead material.
When I read the headline "American Wages out of Balance" on page 2 of the New York Times business section, I figured it would be a well-reasoned piece about our obscene distribution of income. It would be good for the Times to describe how Wall Street profits and bonuses, derived from our bailout funds, will further exacerbate problematic wealth disparities.
No such luck. The Breakingviews.com column was all about how the American worker is overpaid! I kid you not. Edward Hadas, Martin Huchinson and Antony Currie inform us that:
American manufacturing workers should take average real wage cuts of as much as 20 percent to get into global balance.
They don't mention that the average non-supervisory worker has already taken an 18 percent cut in real wages between 1973 and 2007. What's worse, they claim that if workers don't take these additional cuts, these "overpaid" working stiffs will be the cause of another Great Depression, and I'm not overstating their claim. They write:
But if American wages get stuck above global market-clearing levels, as in the 1930s, the result could well be something approaching Depression-era levels of unemployment.
Shobhana Chandra and Bob Willis Bloomberg 2009-11-13 15:16:00
Confidence among U.S. consumers unexpectedly dropped in November as the loss of jobs threatened to undermine the biggest part of the economy.
The Reuters/University of Michigan preliminary sentiment index decreased to a three-month low of 66 from 70.6 in October. A report from the Commerce Department showed the trade deficit widened in September by the most in a decade as rising demand for imported oil and automobiles swamped a fifth consecutive gain in exports.
Rising joblessness puts the economy at risk of slipping into a vicious circle of firings and declines in consumer spending that will limit the emerging recovery. The dollar's 12 percent decline since March and growing demand from Asia and Europe will probably spur exports further, giving factories a lift and making up for some of the weakness among households.
Gerald Celente is one of the world's best trend forecasters. In the following 4-part radio interview, Celente blasts current political and economic "leadership" as beholden to large corporate and financial interests. As I've documented, professionals who work with economics are using unprecedented harsh language in attempt to get Americans' attention to the loss of trillions of our collective dollars. His comments include (paraphrased):
Too big to fail" banks are anathema to real capitalism.
US economy is like a ruthless mafia ripping-off the American public. The US is being looted.
US economy is no longer capitalism, it's oligarchies and fascism.
We are witnessing the greatest heist in American history, and the banks are doing it.
I don't like getting raped. I don't like my money going to Goldman Sachs."
Do you have eyes to see and a mind to understand? These crimes are an affront to my intelligence.
Bankers are money junkies lying to get their money fix. We have a criminal gang of money junkies dealing scams to get money from us. They never have enough. And for what? For gambling.
This is no different from the French Revolution.
The money junkies are in for a shock. The second American Revolution has begun.
They are not my political leaders; they are political hacks. We are going back to royalty and serfs.
This country doesn't have a clue what's going on, their minds have been deadened looking at presidential reality shows and bowing to political demagogues. What people have to do more than ever is think for themselves.
And reform is not on the way. Senator Bird's "reform" bill is nothing but empty rhetoric. My favorite economic analyst, Washington's Blog, gives a great overview. One helpful context to consider is the American economy is suffering from parasites.
Rain from Tropical Storm Ida further slowed the cotton, soybean and sweet potato harvest in Mississippi, where crop losses were devastating even before the storm hit, a state agriculture official said on Thursday.
"We're seeing catastrophic losses," Andy Prosser, a spokesman for the Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce, said in a phone interview.
Ida swept in from the Gulf of Mexico into neighboring Alabama on Tuesday. Mississippi was spared a direct hit but still got an unwelcome soaking.
"We got a few counties in east Mississippi that did get a lot of rain. Of course any more rain at this point is not good in terms of crop harvest," Prosser said.
At the start of the month, state economists estimated Mississippi's crop losses at $485 million. The southern U.S. state expected to lose two-thirds of its sweet potato crop, half its cotton and 44 percent of its soybeans.
The dollar dropped to a new 15-month low as the the euro rose above $1.50 Wednesday morning, even as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner reiterated the administration's stance that a strong dollar is good for the U.S. economy.
Geithner, in a speech in Tokyo on his way to a summit of Asian finance ministers in Singapore, also said low interest rates and other government supports for the economy were still needed.
The expectation that the Federal Reserve will keep the key U.S. interest rate near zero has been weighing on the dollar. Higher interest rates make a currency more attractive for investors, since bets made in that currency can earn higher returns.
In morning trading in New York, the 16-nation euro rose to $1.5026 from $1.4978 late Tuesday. The British pound fell to $1.6665 from $1.6737, and the dollar edged up to 89.80 Japanese yen from 89.77 yen.
China is facing the biggest challenge to its currency policy since the start of the global recession as economists warn the peg to the dollar risks causing an asset bubble.
As recently as Nov. 9, People's Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said he didn't feel much pressure to let the yuan rise, deflecting calls for an increase as exports start to recover and President Barack Obama prepares to discuss the issue in Beijing next week. China's stance risks adding to liquidity after credit surged by $1.3 trillion this year, according to Fred Hu at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
China's sales of yuan to keep it fixed to the dollar contributed to a 29 percent jump in money supply, and the peg helped spur more than $150 billion in speculative funds from overseas in the past six months, China International Capital Corp. says. Record apartment prices and a 74 percent climb in the benchmark stock index this year are prompting warnings that the policy is inflating asset prices excessively.
Jennifer Viegas Discovery News 2009-11-13 09:15:00
Last year we told you about a turtle named after Steve Irwin. Now yet another species, described in the following Queensland Museum release, has been named after the popular television host, wildlife expert and conservationist, who died in 2006.
Queensland Museum scientist Dr John Stanisic has named a rare species of tree snail discovered in north Queensland in honor of wildlife advocate and conservationist Steve Irwin.
The snail, Crikey steveirwini, was found in the mountainous regions of north Queensland's Wet Tropics near Cairns.
Honorary Research Fellow Dr Stanisic said that like its namesake, the Crikey steveirwini is a unique creature with some interesting qualities that set it apart from other land snails.
Richard Brooks The Press-Enterprise 2009-11-13 07:42:00
A magnitude 3.4 earthquake rattled the Devore and northwest Rialto areas this morning near the base of the Cajon Pass but went largely unnoticed, San Bernardino County Fire Department dispatchers say.
"That would put it right here," Dispatch Supervisor Sue Hood said from the department's command center at Rialto Municipal Airport. "We didn't feel a thing. And I got no calls on it at all."
The minor quake struck at 2:11 a.m. three miles south-southwest of Devore and five miles north-northwest of Rialto, according to U.S. Geological Survey seismographs.
Dean Miller, an Australian fur seal biologist, was the first person to spot the large white object floating past Macquarie island in the far south-west corner of the Pacific Ocean.
"I've never seen anything like it. We looked out to the horizon and just saw this huge floating island of ice," Miller told the Australian Antarctic division. "It was a monumental moment for me as it was the first iceberg I have seen."
Estimated to be about 50m high - from the waterline - and 500m long, the iceberg is now about five miles (8km) off the north-west of Macquarie island, halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica south-west corner of the Pacific Ocean.
Scientists have said it is rare for icebergs to be seen so far north. Neil Young, an Australian Antarctic division glaciologist, said: "The iceberg is likely to be part of one of the big ones that calved from the Ross ice shelf nearly a decade ago.
"Throughout the year several icebergs have been drifting slowly northwards with the ocean current towards Macquarie Island. We know there are also a few more icebergs 100km-200km to the west of the island."
The Greenland ice sheet is losing its mass faster than in previous years and making an increasing contribution to sea level rise, a study has confirmed.
Published in the journal Science, it has also given scientists a clearer view of why the sheet is shrinking.
The team used weather data, satellite readings and models of ice sheet behaviour to analyse the annual loss of 273 thousand million tonnes of ice.
Melting of the entire sheet would raise sea levels globally by about 7m (20ft).
Bryan Nelson Mother Nature Network / MSNBC 2009-11-10 20:21:00
Parts of the New Mexico town near Carlsbad Caverns National Park could collapse because of irresponsible extraction practices by the oil industry.
"U.S. 285 south subject to sinkhole 1,000 feet ahead," reads a bright yellow sign along the stretch of highway heading through Carlsbad, N.M.
Normally a motorist driving through the area might not find a sign like that unusual. The city is, after all, home to Carlsbad Caverns National Park, a network of some of the largest natural caverns in North America. But on this occasion, the sign's sharp colors make the message clear: what's happening in Carlsbad is not natural.
In fact, the massive sinkhole currently running through the center of town was created by the oil industry. As MSNBC reports, it was formed over three decades as oil field service companies pumped fresh water into a salt layer more than 400 feet below the surface and extracted several million barrels of brine to help with drilling.
If it collapses, the unnatural cavern is likely to take with it a church, a highway, several businesses and a trailer park. Massive fissures currently cleave through town, and one business owner has said that structural cracks have even formed in his store.
Tests with westerners and African nomads suggest that brain has innate sense of geometry; incidental result: baby likely can do without ubiquitous shape sorter
Despite minimal exposure to the regular geometric objects found in developed countries, African tribal people perceive shapes as well as westerners, according to a new study.
The findings, published online this week in Psychological Science, suggested that the brain's ability to understand shapes develops without the influence of immersion in simple, manufactured objects.
"In terms of perceiving the world ... either genetics or the natural world will give you the right type of experiences," said lead author Irving Biederman, an expert on perception who holds a named chair in neuroscience at the University of Southern California's College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Penn neuroscientists Martha Farah and Anjan Chatterjee believe the answer is more complicated than you think.
It was somehow appropriate that it started with a clock-radio alarm. There were two overarching constants in Chris Miner's life: Every slumber was a product of pure exhaustion and every awakening was rude. It wasn't his private equity job. That merely consumed the daylight and dinner hours. It was the fact that getting home at nine or ten at night marked the beginning of a second shift. Ever since he'd started studying for the GMAT for business school, which meant an additional few hours of intellectual exertion with little more than his commute as a spell of rest, Miner felt like a circuit breaker full of shorts.
So he remembers the morning he first heard about modafinil the way a man lost in the forest remembers the sound of a search party's shotgun blast. A news segment about the drug, marketed under the brand name Provigil as a treatment for narcolepsy and excessive daytime drowsiness associated with obstructive sleep apnea, detailed recent experimental evidence of its effects on healthy subjects. The take-home lesson was enticing. Modafinil not only boosted their mental alertness and stamina, it also appeared to enhance their performance on several learning- and memory-related tasks.
Sarah Hutcheon Medical News Today 2009-11-13 04:00:00
Curiosity plays a big part in preschoolers' lives. A new study that explored why young children ask so many "why" questions concludes that children are motivated by a desire for explanation.
The study, by researchers at the University of Michigan, appears in the November/December 2009 issue of the journal Child Development.
The researchers carried out two studies of 2- to 5-year-olds, focusing on their "how" and "why" questions, as well as their requests for explanatory information, and looking carefully at the children's reactions to the answers they received from adults. In the first study, the researchers examined longitudinal transcripts of six children's everyday conversations with parents, siblings, and visitors at home from ages 2 to 4. In the second study, they looked at the laboratory-based conversations of 42 preschoolers, using toys, storybooks, and videos to prompt the children, ages 3 to 5, to ask questions.
By looking at how the children reacted to the answers they received to their questions, the researchers found that children seem to be more satisfied when they receive an explanatory answer than when they do not. In both studies, when preschoolers got an explanation, they seemed satisfied (they agreed or asked a new follow-up question). But when they got answers that weren't explanations, they seemed dissatisfied and were more likely to repeat their original question or provide an alternative explanation.
Bicarbonate of soda or baking soda to cure cancer? The amazing abundance of alternative cancer cures is more than most of us know, close to 400! The more notorious alternative cancer cures are the ones that get attacked viciously by the Medical Monopoly. Those cures are the ones that begin to develop into public practices that threaten their monopoly.
Then there are those inexpensive non-toxic remedies that slip by the Medical Monopoly virtually unnoticed. Some become like folk medicines that can be administered individually. This type of application worked for Vernon Johnston. He used baking soda and molasses as the driving force to recover from aggressive stage 4 prostate cancer, which had even metastasized into his bone matter!
His Brother's Advice
After Vernon was diagnosed, Vernon's brother Larry told him to work on raising his pH because cancer cannot thrive in a high or alkaline pH. Larry recommended cesium chloride to raise Vernon's pH levels into a high alkaline level physiologically. Cesium chloride is another one of those alternative cancer remedies that are not well known.
Cesium treatment protocols used by doctors in conjunction with ozone or DMSO had a 50% cure rate. But this unimpressive cure rate, albeit better than orthodox treatments, included patients who had received some or all of the surgery, radiation and toxic chemotherapy that the AMA could offer.
Sarah Hutcheon Medical News Today 2009-11-13 04:00:00
Societal and technological changes have taken place at a dizzying pace over recent decades. A new cross-cultural study aimed to determine whether these dramatic changes have had an effect on the thinking skills that are learned over the course of childhood.
The study, by researchers at the University of California, Riverside, and Pitzer College, is published in the November/December 2009 issue of the journal Child Development.
Using previously collected data from the late 1970s, the researchers looked at almost 200 children ages 3 to 9 in Belize, Kenya, Nepal, and American Samoa. When the data were collected, these four communities differed in the availability of resources that are typically associated with modernity, such as having writing tablets and books, electricity, a home-based water supply, a radio and TV set, and a car.
Children in communities with more modern resources performed better in some areas of cognitive functioning, such as certain types of memory and pattern recognition, and they took part in more complex sequences of play. The researchers note that these differences don't mean that children from more modern communities are more advanced intellectually; rather, the findings reflect the cognitive skills that are valued and promoted in the communities where the children live.
Sarah Hutcheon Medical News Today 2009-11-13 04:00:00
Most adolescents who belong to an ethnic minority group wrestle not only with their self-esteem (like most teens), but also with identity issues unique to their ethnic group, such as dealing with social stigma. A new study tells us that young people's ethnic pride may affect their mental health.
The study, carried out by researchers at Northwestern University, Loyola University Chicago, and Walden University, appears in the November/December 2009 issue of the journal Child Development.
The researchers studied more than 250 African American youths from urban, low-income families in an effort to assess the unique effects of racial identity and self esteem on mental health. They found that when young people's feelings of ethnic pride rose between 7th and 8th grades, their mental health also improved over that period, regardless of their self-esteem. Even for those with low self-esteem, the investigators found, a sense of pride in their ethnic group served as a buffer to some mental health problems. Racial identity was a stronger buffer against symptoms of depression for boys than for girls.
Danielle Reeves Medical News Today 2009-11-13 06:00:00
Research into designing and building unique 'metamaterials' has received a £4.9 million funding boost from The Leverhulme Trust. Metamaterials can be used for invisibility 'cloaking' devices, sensitive security sensors that can detect tiny quantities of dangerous substances, and flat lenses that can be used to image tiny objects much smaller than the wavelength of light.
The new grant has been made to a team of Imperial College London scientists and engineers, who, in collaboration with scientists at the University of Southampton, will develop new applications for metamaterials that can bend, control and manipulate light and other kinds of electromagnetic waves. Metamaterials is a new, emerging field of science lying at the borders of physics and materials science. The concept relies not on clever chemistry, which is normally used to create new materials, but instead on creating clever patterns on the surface of existing materials, particularly metals.
The new grant is one of two The Leverhulme Trust is awarding for 'embedding emerging disciplines'. The project team is led by two of Imperial College London's Professors: Sir John Pendry, a world-leading physicist and pioneer in the field, who first proposed that metamaterials could be used to build an invisibility 'cloak' in 2006, and Professor Stefan Maier who is a leading experimentalist in the field of plasmonics. Also collaborating in the Project is Professor Nikolay Zheludev's team at the University of Southampton.
A top boffin at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) says that the titanic machine may possibly create or discover previously unimagined scientific phenomena, or "unknown unknowns" - for instance "an extra dimension".
"Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it," said Sergio Bertolucci, who is Director for Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, briefing reporters including the Reg at CERN HQ earlier this week.
The LHC, built inside a 27-km circular subterranean tunnel deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva, functions like a sort of orbital motorway for extremely high-speed hadrons - typically either protons or lead ions.
Danish nanophysicists have developed a new method for manufacturing the cornerstone of nanotechnology research -- nanowires. The discovery has great potential for the development of nanoelectronics and highly efficient solar cells.
It is PhD student Peter Krogstrup, Nano-Science Center, the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, who developed the method during his dissertation.
"We have changed the recipe for producing nanowires. This means that we can produce nanowires that contain two different semiconductors, namely gallium indium arsenide and indium arsenide. It is a big breakthrough, because for first time on a nanoscale, we can combine the good characteristics of the two materials, thus gaining new possibilities for the electronics of the future," explains Peter Krogstrup.
Homs (central Syria) Museums and Antiquities Department recently discovered a cave in Wadi al-Zahab that includes a cemetery of three tombs which are not completed because no one was buried in them. The cemetery dates back to the Byzantine era.
Head of the Department Farid Jabbour said the cemetery was discovered during the excavations carried out by the General Establishment for Water studies to keep off floods.
Moreover, The Syrian-Lebanese-Spanish joint expedition concluded archeological surveys which began in mid September in the villages of Qazhal, al-Rabiyeh, al-Mashahdeh, al-Rabieaa and Khurbat Ghazi north of the city of Homs.
Lynn Duke icPerthshire/Strathearn Herald 2009-11-06 17:54:00
More mysterious "big cat" sightings have been reported around the strath this week taking the total up to nine.
Elizabeth Seaward of Comrie spotted a jet black creature in the middle of the day in a garden near the Ross Bridge. "It was prowling around a tree," she told the Herald. "It was like a very big elongated cat with little prick ears but with a face bigger than a normal cats."
Mrs Seaward says the creature was very similar to the bearcat pictured in the Strathearn Herald on October 16. What struck her most was the creature's tail. "It came right down to its feet and curved up again," she added.
Fife residents are once again on the lookout for a big cat, following a fresh sighting in Culross.
Two men believe they spotted a panther while out hunting rabbits last Tuesday.
James McGarry said his suspicions were raised when he and his friend Alan Yates entered a field near Balgownie.
The 25-year-old said: "It was a really bright night and the moon was out - I thought it was strange because there were no rabbits about.
"We started scanning the field and saw a pair of green eyes among the bushes - it was enormous and we could make out an outline although it was jet black."
The apprentice plumber and tiler said he was around 50 yards away from the beast when he spotted it.
The UFO Traffic Report for Wednesday, November 4, 2009, includes 7 selected sightings over 6 states, according to witness statements filed in the past 72 hours with the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) database.
Please keep in mind that most UFO reports can be explained as something natural or manmade. If MUFON investigates and reports back on any of these cases, I will update this page. The following reports and their headlines are unedited and uninvestigated.
TX, November 1, 2009, I heard a loud noise - looked outside and saw theUFO hovering. MUFON Case # 20264.
A Texas witness heard what was first thought to be a nearby plane, but the sound was so loud the witness stepped outside for a better look. The witness observed a large, dark metallic, disc-shaped object that was black in color.
Two brothers reported seeing a red glowing object hovering over the San Francisco Bay area on May 7, 2009, according to a statement they made to the UFO Examiner.
They were able to take more than two minutes of video of the object. The photography with this story is digital still photos taken from a television screen of the video. They also provided photoshoped images that depict what they saw.
The object was first spotted south of the eastern end of the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland.
The following is the unedited statement they made to the UFO Examiner. Please keep in mind that most UFO reports can be explained as something natural or manmade. We encourage the reporting witnesses to file this case with the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) at mufon.com.
Date: November 4 2009
Time: 7.10pm
Number of witnesses: 1
Number of objects: 1
Shape of objects: Could not make out a shape, it was just a very bright orange light
Weather Conditions: Clear, partial cloud
Description: I was outside my front door and noticed this really bright orange light,it was moving quite fast below the level of the clouds, glowing bright orange and was totally silent and moving in a perfectly straight line!!as it went from my right(west) to my left(east) the intensity of the light stayed exactly the same. I couldn't make any shape out as it was just light!! I watched it for about a minute until it disappeared over the tree/house line! I live in Sutton Coldfield and we seem to have had a lot of recent "UFO" activity which has been reported in the local press with similar descriptions.
Hello, My name is (removed by Brian Vike) and I have seen something on the ocean. I don't know what it was, so I took a picture of it. Here is how it happened. I was on a Cruise returning from Bahamas. It was a clear day. At 5 o'clock I decided to sit on the deck to wait for the sun to set. It was Halloween on the ship, so most were dressed in costumes. I started to take pictures of the sun as it was going down. At about 5:15 I saw this shadow moving across the water. I looked around to see if anyone else saw it, but there was no one around. This shadow was surrounded by a green light. I knew no one would believe me so I took a picture of it. To my amazement the picture came out clear.
Want to know how far it is from the eastern end of Interstate 40 in North Carolina to the western end in California? You'll have to punch it into your GPS or try MapQuest.
The Star-News of Wilmington reports that a popular sign showing the distance between Wilmington, N.C., and Barstow (BARHS'-toh), Calif., has been stolen for at least the fourth time - and the last.
North Carolina transportation engineer Joe Chance says with the repeated thefts, there won't be another sign that tells motorists it's 2,554 miles to Barstow. That's where the interstate ends.
The sign was a familiar sight to travelers heading west out of Wilmington and had been up for years.
A man in a Spider-Man costume was arrested on outstanding warrants in Los Angeles after he allegedly hit a man on Hollywood Boulevard Wednesday, police said.
First, officers had to figure out which Spider-Man impostor was which, because they found four of them dressed as the superhero about 12:30 p.m., police said.
"They stopped one; it wasn't him," Lt. Beverly Lewis told the Los Angeles Times. "They stopped the second, and it was the suspect."
The victim told police he was hit in the face and arms but did not want to press charges against the suspect, Christopher Loomis, 39. But Loomis was booked on outstanding misdemeanor warrants and held on $5,500 bond.
Sue Manning The Associated Press 2009-11-12 20:26:00
Only one animal got credit for a record Thursday, the same day Norway registered the world's largest gingerbread man; the most people hugging in one minute were in the U.K.; Italy set the mark for the fastest consumption of a bowl of pasta; Finland had the most nationalities in a single sauna; and a team from Mexico assembled the world's longest paper clip chain.
In the midst of it all, Guinness World Records officially named Titan, an ailing 4-year-old white Great Dane from San Diego, as the world's tallest dog.
Titan is blind, deaf, epileptic and undergoes acupuncture and chiropractic adjustments every three weeks, owner Diana Taylor said.
Great Danes are built like giraffes one way and submarines the other, Taylor said, so they have spine issues. Titan is doing well on his treatments and medication. He hasn't had a seizure in a year.
He is a gentle soul who befriends everyone during his daily walks on the beach and is often mistaken by young children for a horse or cow, Taylor said.
Utterance from The Muppet Show was used repeatedly to interrupt school
Who knew "meep!" was a four-letter word?
The utterance favored by bungling lab assistant Beaker of The Muppet Show has been banned at Danvers High School in Massachusetts after students said it to repeatedly interrupt school.
Principal Thomas Murray says the word was part of a disruption planned using Facebook.
