Andrew Malcolm Los Angeles Times 2009-11-19 18:42:00
Even President Obama himself during his just-concluded trip to Asia admitted that he was surprised to receive the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this year without actually producing any peace.
In fact, the rookie American president ordered his own troop surge, boosting U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan to 68,000. Now, the Democrat may be preparing to send more.
And a Gallup Poll showed 61% of Americans didn't think he deserved the prize either.
Clayton Sandell / Huma Khan ABC News 2009-11-19 17:03:00
A dark chapter in the history of the Watergate scandal surrounding former President Richard M. Nixon might soon be uncovered.
The National Archives announced today it will use forensic documentation technology to try and uncover the contents of two pages of handwritten notes taken by Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman.
The notes were taken June 20, 1972, during a conversation between the president and Haldeman, three days after the infamous 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee's offices in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. The discussion between Nixon and his chief of staff was captured by the president's secret White House recording system, except for an 18 1/2-minute gap where the tape was later erased.
A poll in the US has found that the majority of Americans are confident that Barack Obama's future strategy for the war in Afghanistan will be successful.
But the Washington Post-ABC News survey, which was released on Tuesday, found that the country was divided over how many extra troops should be sent to the central-Asian nation.
At a time when the US president is mulling a new strategy to win the war in Afghanistan, a total of 55 per cent of those polled said they were confident that the strategy that Obama chooses will be the right one.
It was a day for lurid details Tuesday as authorities in El Dorado County began a multi-day hearing to determine if a 14-year-old El Dorado Hills girl should stand trial as an adult in the slaying of her mother, Joanne M. Witt, 47.
Tylar Marie Witt and her boyfriend, Steven Paul Colver, 19, are charged with killing Joanne Witt on June 11 or 12 after the mother filed a statutory rape report against Colver and kicked him out of her house.
Testimony by investigators Tuesday depicted a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship. The saga ended, authorities allege, with the mother's stabbing death at the hands of Colver, and the teen lovers fleeing toward San Francisco with plans to carry out a suicide pact.
A Connecticut woman who police say was set on fire by her boyfriend can be heard screaming in a 911 call tape released by authorities.
In a neighbor's call to police Sunday, Christina Lee of New Haven yells "He's setting my daughter on fire!" while the neighbor pleads with a dispatcher to send help. Police released the tape Wednesday.
The 35-year-old suffered burns on about 40 percent of her body and remains in critical condition at Bridgeport Hospital.
Police say Lee's boyfriend, 50-year-old Howard Stewart, poured an accelerant on Lee and her 12-year-old daughter and set Lee on fire. The girl escaped unharmed and rescued Lee's 3-month-old daughter from the burning house.
"This Administration Ended, Rather Than Extended, Two Wars"
Sure, the quote is only my fantasy. No one in Washington -- no less President Obama -- ever said, "This administration ended, rather than extended, two wars," and right now, it looks as if no one in an official capacity is likely to do so any time soon. It's common knowledge that a president -- but above all a Democratic president -- who tried to de-escalate a war like the one now expanding in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, and withdraw American troops, would be so much domestic political dead meat.
This everyday bit of engrained Washington wisdom is, in fact, based on not a shred of evidence in the historical record. We do, however, know something about what could happen to a president who escalated a counterinsurgency war: Lyndon Johnson comes to mind for expanding his inherited war in Vietnam out of fear that he would be labeled the president who "lost" that country to the communists (as Harry Truman had supposedly "lost" China). And then there was Vice President Hubert Humphrey who -- incapable of rejecting Johnson's war policy -- lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, a candidate pushing a fraudulent "peace with honor" formula for downsizing the war.
Still, we have no evidence about how American voters would deal with a president who didn't take the Johnson approach to a losing war. The only example might be John F. Kennedy, who reputedly pushed back against escalatory advice over Vietnam, and certainly did so against his military high command during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In both cases, however, he acted in private, offering quite a different face to the world.
We know that there would be those on the right, and quite a few war-fightin' liberals as well, who would go nuclear over any presidential minus option in Afghanistan. Many of them will, in fact, do so over anything less than the McChrystal plan anyway. And we know that a media storm would certainly follow. But when it comes to how voters would react, especially at a moment when unhappiness with the Afghan War (as well as the president's handling of it) is on the rise, there is no historical evidence.
Born in 1947 in Brussels, Herman Van Rompuy was educated at the Jesuit Sint-Jan Berchmans College in the Belgian capital, and studied philosophy and economics at the Catholic University of Leuven.
Before entering politics, he worked at the Belgian central bank from 1972 to 1975.
He was chairman of the Christian People's Party, a centre-right Flemish party, from 1988 to 1993 and was budget minister from 1993 to 1999 under the Christian Democrat-led government of Jean-Luc Dehaene.
Herman Van Rompuy, Belgium's prime minister, has become the first president of the European Council.
Van Rompuy, largely unknown outside his native Belgium, was named after a consensus was reached at a meeting of the leaders of the 27-member European Union on Thursday.
Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister, was ruled out of the race earlier in the day after it became clear that centre-right countries, who dominate the EU, were determined that the role should go to someone from their group.
A young couple in east China's Jiangsu Province have run afoul of the law for selling their newborn boy online for 15,000 yuan (US $2,196).
They spent the money shortly after the sale on a new computer, cell phone and other goods, police said.
The couple were unmarried and thus unable to register the child with local authorities, and because of their meager incomes they were unwilling to keep the boy, yesterday's Yangtse Evening Post reported.
The man was detained and the woman was released on bail due to poor heath. Both were accused of child trafficking, the newspaper said, though no formal charges had been filed as of late yesterday.
Police in Changzhou City began looking into the case after being tipped on November 10 that an expectant mother had posted an Internet notice offering to sell her baby.
An 11-year old Bulgarian girl gave birth to a baby girl after going into labor on her wedding day, according toThe Daily Telegraph.
Kordeza Zhelyazkova became pregnant two weeks before her 11th birthday and was set to marry boyfriend Jeliazko Dimitrov, 19, when she went into labor during her three-day wedding last month.
"I'm not going to play with toys any more -- I have a new toy now," Zhelyazkova told Britain's News of the World newspaper .
The bride-to-be was still wearing her wedding dress and tiara when she arrived at a hospital to give birth to daughter Violeta.
She admitted that she had not known about sex education or even how to get pregnant. She presumed she was putting on weight from eating too many burgers until her grandmother suggested she was pregnant.
Megan K. Stack Los Angeles Times 2009-11-19 13:25:00
Sergei Magnitsky, 37, had been in ill health, his lawyer says. Magnitsky was jailed for his work with Hermitage Capital Management, a vocal critic of official corruption.
A lawyer for Hermitage Capital Management, the investment fund locked in a scandal-soaked clash with Russian authorities, died in a Moscow jail, an Interior Ministry spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Sergei Magnitsky, 37, died of a heart attack Monday night, spokeswoman Irina Dudukina said. Jailed for the last year on tax charges related to his work with Hermitage, Magnitsky had complained that he was being kept in poor conditions and denied medical care despite his failing health.
It's time for the left to interrogate the systemic origins of the terrorism that has greeted the new Greek government
In a few weeks, Greece will commemorate the "December events", which began last year when a police officer killed a young boy in Exarhia, an area that's been described as a semi-ghetto of leftist dissidents and anarchists in the centre of Athens. Following this event, weeks of protests ensued and from there began a trajectory of decline on many levels of society, which ended with the fall of the undoubtedly inadequate government. Then, just three weeks on from the victorious election of a new government, and a wave of grassroots terrorism was making headlines. This was, apparently, unprecedented: it is said that never before had there been a substantial wave of terrorist activities during the honeymoon of a new government.
And, yet, there is nothing really surprising about it. For, despite their - quite substantial - differences, the terrorists, smaller parties, a large number of political analysts, and an even larger number of intellectuals, all agree: nothing has really changed. Neo-liberalism and capitalism are here to stay. The only promise that the new government seems to bring is that it will have a human face. Far from being a bombastic cliche, this, of course, translates into policies: a larger welfare state, more justice, less privileges for the privileged, fairer distribution of wealth etc. But instead of a friendly version of an explicitly exploitative and fundamentally unjust system, the radical left wants to negotiate the system itself.
Hamid Karzai has said he is determined that the Afghan army should be built up so it can take over responsibility from foreign troops for securing the entire country within five years. Speaking after being sworn in for a second term as president, Karzai said he wanted Afghanistan's security forces to be improved in "quantitative and qualitative terms".
Currently only one of the 34 provinces, the capital, is controlled by the country's own security forces. Karzai said that by "accelerating the training and equipping" of the army and police, more provinces could be handed over.
"It is only through this process that Afghanistan's hope with regard to a quick return of our friends' soldiers to their countries will be realised," he told a packed hall of Afghan and foreign dignitaries.
In another ambitious deadline, Karzai gave foreign and national private security companies two years notice before their activities are handed over to the Afghan security forces. Although the private security industry is highly controversial in Afghanistan, the many private companies play a major role in securing everything from military compounds to embassies.
In fresh offensive against Taliban fighters in a border town in Paktika province east of Afghanistan the troops eliminated nearly two dozen insurgents, a private television channel reported Wednesday.
"Afghan and the Coalition forces killed 23 Taliban fighters in Barmal district Tuesday," Tolo broadcast in its news bulletin.
Anna Mehler Paperny and Ingrid Peritz The Globe and Mail 2009-11-16 14:46:00
Peggy Verhoef's children were devastated earlier this month to learn their suicide support group had been put on hold. The social workers who lead the group near Montreal were reassigned to work as greeters at H1N1 vaccination centres.
Ms. Verhoef's children, 13 and 15, who attend because their father committed suicide last year, were "extremely upset," she said Monday.
"The bureaucrats didn't stop to think about how it would affect the kids."
Across the country, public health programs ranging from support groups to sexual health clinics to food-safety inspections are being postponed or suspended as officials redirect nurses and other staff to vaccinating Canadians against the H1N1 influenza.
More than 43,000 children work in mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), UNICEF reported here Thursday on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the convention on the children's rights.
The child laborers include 20,000 in the southeastern province of Katanga, 12,000 in the central province of Kasa-Occidental and more than 11,000 in the central-south province of Kasa-Oriental.
According to UNICEF, a growing number of children are living and working in the DRC towns. Among them, more than 8,000 have been identified in Kinshasa alone since the beginning of 2009, and more than 1,400 have been integrated either in families or in communities with the help of partners.
UNICEF disclosed that out of the 2 million displaced people in the country, more than 100,000 are children, whose childhood, education and other rights are threatened.
Sherri and Tom Milley's children are now exempt from completing school assignments outside the classroom
Usually it is the children, not the parents, who are loath to spend their evenings practicing spelling and learning times tables. But a Canadian couple have just won a legal battle to exempt their offspring from homework after successfully arguing there is no clear evidence it improves academic performance.
Sherri and Tom Milley, two lawyers from Calgary, Alberta, launched their highly unusual case after years of struggling to make their three reluctant children do school work out of the classroom.
After waging a long war with their eldest son, Jay, now 18, over his homework, they decided to do things differently with their youngest two, Spencer, 11, and Brittany, 10. And being lawyers, they decided to make it official.
A bomb has exploded outside a court building in the northwestern city of Peshawar in Pakistan, killing at least 18 people and wounding 34 others, police say.
"It happened outside the judicial complex," police officer Abdul Wali told Reuters on Thursday.
At least 18 people were killed and 34 others injured were brought to Peshawar's Lady Reading Hospital, said senior hospital official Sahib Gul.
Three policemen were among the dead, said senior city administrator Sahibzada Anis.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Thursday's attack.
Complications surround strategy to monitor electronic communications, says Tom Young
There have been several conflicting reports on the government's interception modernisation programme this week, ranging from "UK web snooping plans: Full steam ahead" to "Legislation to access texts and emails on hold".
The confusion over the progress of plans to tighten law enforcement agencies' power to monitor communications has arisen for two reasons.
First, although the government has said it wants to press ahead with the plans, it will not introduce them before the next election. And second, the government is still not sure what it actually wants to do.
Ann Widdecombe The Daily Express 2009-11-18 13:18:00
On Monday this paper reported a proposal by Government for inspectors to check homes for adequate child safety including smoke alarms, window locks and stair gates.
In addition to state snoopers, GPs and midwives are encour- aged to report lack of safety which they may have observed when visiting.
Recently a woman was reported to social services because she had wallpaper hanging off her walls. She says she was decorating but even if she were not what possible business is the dilapidation of her wallpa- per to anybody else?
If such a mother has not much money is she not better spending what little she can muster on food, clothes, warmth and toys for a child than on replacing wallpaper? How do these snoopers suppose parents manage who are both renovating old properties and raising young children?
Parents of five-year-olds starting school have been sent an 83-point questionnaire that probes personal details of their lives.
It asks whether their children tell lies or bully others, and if they steal at home or from shops.
Parents are questioned over whether they have friends, if they can speak freely with others in their family and how well they did at school themselves.
Mother and daughter talking with teacher
The form also delves into family routines, questioning whether they eat takeaways and if the children drink water with their meals.
If the United States came under the control of a totalitarian regime, would we recognize it? This question is of utmost importance today, when many of us harbor fears that some time in the near future ideas such as freedom, liberty, and privacy will be alien to our society. But as we witness the regular passage of legislation designed to restrict and regulate, and the tendency of the Federal government to increase rather than decrease its power (with a handful of exceptions), we are struck by the uninterrupted routine of life in the USA . As the central government brings more and more of private society under its control, we continue to watch cable TV, shop at supermarkets overflowing with products, and eat at our favorite restaurants. Could it be that we have already passed that dreaded threshold and missed it?
The trouble with diagnosing our condition is that most people are unaware of what totalitarianism actually is. Among even the most politically astute, there is little mental room for the possibility that a state in the process of becoming totalitarian might lack the most brutal and outward signs of oppressive regimes portrayed in popular culture. Because of our rather simplistic frame of reference - picture black and white images of National Socialist Germany or the Soviet Union - we recognize a country as either being in the advanced stages of totalitarianism or not at all. But just because a state maintains the structures and language of democracy and continues to have elections, for instance, that does not preclude it from being totalitarian.
The National Security Agency has been working with Microsoft Corp. to help improve security measures for its new Windows 7 operating system, a senior NSA official said on Tuesday.
The confirmation of the NSA's role, which began during the development of the software, is a sign of the agency's deepening involvement with the private sector when it comes to building defenses against cyberattacks.
"Working in partnership with Microsoft and (the Department of Defense), NSA leveraged our unique expertise and operational knowledge of system threats and vulnerabilities to enhance Microsoft's operating system security guide without constraining the user's ability to perform their everyday tasks," Richard Schaeffer, the NSA's Information Assurance Director, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a statement prepared for a hearing held this morning in Washington. "All this was done in coordination with the product release, not months or years later in the product cycle."
Laurence M. Vance Lew Rockwell 2009-11-19 12:48:00
In George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four the government had three slogans emblazoned on The Ministry of Truth building: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. True, the dystopian society depicted by Orwell existed only in his mind. Yet, the doublespeak that existed in that made-up society has increasingly been adopted by governments - our government.
It is a tragic thing that the U.S. government employs doublespeak to deceive the American people; it is even more tragic that most Americans accept government doublespeak as the gospel truth.
There is no greater instance of government doublespeak than when it comes to the military. Here are some examples:
Samantha Gross, Juan A. Lozano, Randy Herschaft, Jacquelyn Martin The New York Times 2009-11-19 15:07:00
Federal prosecutors took steps Thursday to seize four U.S. mosques and a Fifth Avenue skyscraper owned by a nonprofit Muslim organization long suspected of being secretly controlled by the Iranian government.
In what could prove to be one of the biggest counterterrorism seizures in U.S. history, prosecutors filed a civil complaint in federal court against the Alavi Foundation, seeking the forfeiture of more than $500 million in assets.
Comment: Note how easily mere "suspicions" turn into the "biggest counterterrorism seizures" in the mainstream media.
The assets include bank accounts; Islamic centers consisting of schools and mosques in New York City, Maryland, California and Houston; more than 100 acres in Virginia; and a 36-story glass office tower in New York.
On January 20, a changing of the guard occurred in the United States White House with two-term president George W. Bush being replaced by former freshman senator Barack Obama.
Bush had continued the policies of his predecessor Bill Clinton in relation to the Balkans, Iraq and Latin America - with troops and a massive military base in Kosovo, regular bombings of Iraq and a monumental expansion of military aid to Colombia - and in addition launched two wars of his own, those against Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq two years later.
Obama, so thoroughly does U.S. polity predetermine individual administrations' policies, entered office by intensifying the deadly drone missile attacks in Pakistan begun by Bush in late 2008 and announced that he was doubling the number of American troops in Afghanistan.
A FBI file reveals the Israeli embassy passed stolen classified US government information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In 1984 Israel and AIPAC jointly lobbied Congress to secure preferential Israeli access to the US market against widespread American industry opposition.
The declassified FBI report may be downloaded from the Israel Lobby Archive at: http://www.irmep.org/ila/economy/03071986INTERVIEW.pdf The FBI file, kept secret for 25 years, was recently released to the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The declassified files, their historical context, and long term impact on jobs and exports are detailed in the new book Spy Trade: How Israel's Lobby Undermines America's Economy.Spy Trade also analyzes AIPAC's long history of guidance and material support from the Israeli government.
The parade of the self-righteous got underway Sunday night: Yaakov Teitel was described as a "foreign element," "wild thorn" and "rotten apple." Even if he acted alone, spoke and hallucinated in English, even if he was mentally disturbed, as his attorney claimed, it does not change the fact that Jack the Ripper from the West Bank settlement of Shvut Rachel - contrary to his predecessor in London - acted on ground that was fertile like no other.
Yes, the settlements and especially the illegal outposts where Teitel lived and hid his weapons, along with the Kahanist settlement of Kfar Tapuah where he got his start - these are the places for such dangerous nuts. This is their refuge, where they can hide arms without being bothered and go on hate-filled killing sprees without being seen.
It is no coincidence that a terrorist or killer has never risen from within Peace Now, Gush Shalom or Yesh Gvul. However, with God's help, we have already seen two murderous terrorists from Shvut Rachel. Never has a leftist called for the death of someone who disagrees with him - and we must always remember this when we speak of left and right.
Gilad Atzmon Information Clearing House 2009-11-02 00:47:00
Gordon Brown urged European Socialist leaders last week to appoint Tony Blair as the European President. "Get real", he told them, "This is a unique opportunity to get a strong progressive politician to be the president."
Brown is obviously correct, nothing could be more refreshing, innovative 'real' and 'progressive' than assigning the job to a man who has more blood on his hands than any other person in Europe. It may also be right to argue that there is just one living person on this planet with more blood on his hands than Blair. That man dwells in Texas, his name is George and actually unlike our Bonaparte figure, he keeps relatively quiet. Unlike George, our Boney is craving for recognition, he cannot live without a crown or an official title. Someone should remind Boney that he already made it into history, he can really take a break. With more than one million fatalities in Iraq, he is not far behind Hitler and Stalin.
Peter Eyre The Palestine Telegraph 2009-11-18 23:30:00
Gaza - Anyone with an ounce of intelligence can see that the writing is on the wall for more trouble in the Middle East. They cannot see the bigger picture that this could spark off a major war in the region or maybe this is exactly what they want.
We again see nice calm words coming from the lips of IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei when he made it very clear that Iran was nothing to worry about.
Amidst this calm of the IAEA Director General we again see the US rallying up support for more decisive actions against Iran. One could ask the question why insist on sending in the experts from the IAEA but not waiting for their report. Why is Obama so aggressive in his mannerism towards Iran......could it be that he really does want conflict and is just waiting for an excuse in much the same way as his predecessor?
Alexandra Bouillon / Sheila Menon Youtube 2009-11-15 14:12:00
Imagine if your country was controlled by the military and you had to go through specific checkpoints to go to school, go to work, visit your friends or go to the hospital.
Norman Finkelstein interviewed on Danish public service TV by Jewish, and pro-Zionist host Adam Holm.
Adam Holm was corrected by his superiors from Danmarks Radio recently for having published a news paper article expressing his strong support for Israel.
On this occation a stoic Finkelstein manages to get Adam Holm off balance as Holm more and more desperately tries to counter Finkelsteins simple message: Uphold international law in connection with Israel as with any other state. Adam Holms clearly emotional approach says more than a thousand words.
Parliamentary by-elections in Britain are usually the last thing on the mind of citizens of this country, but Israelis should be cheered by the news that the Labor Party, led by Gordon Brown, has beaten back the Scottish National Party (SNP) in a crucial contest in the commercial city of Glasgow.
The SNP is mounting the most serious challenge to the Union of Scotland and England in three centuries. The next British general election will be a battle for Britain, and the outcome could matter immensely to Israel.
Gordon Brown is probably the most pro-Israeli British premier ever. As he recounted in an emotional address to the Knesset shortly after taking office, he has had a deep affection and respect for Israel dating back to his boyhood. His father was a minister of the Church of Scotland who learned Hebrew and travelled back and forth to the Holy Land at least twice every year, as chairman of the Israel committee. After each trip, he would roll out an old film projector and regale young Gordon with favorable images of Israel.
Gilad Atzmon Information Clearing House 2009-11-20 11:25:00
It is rather impossible to grasp the magnitude of the crimes against humanity performed by the Jewish state in the name of the Jewish people unless one elaborates on Jewish culture in the light of Judaic teaching.
Zionism was founded as a secular movement. It was there to provide the emancipated Diaspora Jew with a 'national home land' of his or her own. However, Zionism was rather effective in transforming the Old Testament from a spiritual text into a land registry. As the truth of Israeli barbarism is unfolding a devastating continuum is being established between Israeli murderous policies and Judaic Goy hating.
It would be fair to argue that Judaic teaching is not monolithic. As we know, one of the only Jewish collectives that stands with the Palestinians call themselves the Torah Jews (Neturei Karta), a Jewish orthodox sect. In other words, the Torah must have a humanist side to it.
The Houthi fighters say they have destroyed several Saudi Arabian military vehicles as Riyadh continues targeting Houthis north of Yemen.
The Shia fighters say they have destroyed six Humvees (High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle) and three tanks in the northern provinces of Omran and Harf Sufyan.
On Wednesday, the Houthis accused Saudi Arabia of relentless missile attacks and artillery fire against civilians on the Yemeni soil.
The Saudis reportedly fired over 150 missiles and carried out 18 airstrikes.
Yemeni and Saudi forces have been jointly pounding the Houthis who have taken arms in protest to the Sunni-dominated Sana'a government's repression and discrimination against the country's Shia minority.
Dr. Mads Gilbert has accused Israel of being a "terrorist state" led by losers, whose natural place is in prison after standing trial at the international court of justice for their crimes against the Palestinian people.
The Norwegian doctor told Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper published on Sunday in London that he supported the Palestinian people's right of choosing their representatives when asked about Israeli charges that he was dealing with Hamas leaders.
He said that Israel did not table a single proof to refute "our evidence and testimonies".
The doctor said that he was not frustrated because of the Israeli lies, adding, "We must be patient ... history taught us that many empires that lasted for centuries had collapsed in the end ... we must be optimistic because if we let down that means that we betrayed the Palestinian people".
The following story is a potential fictional time line for the day the dollar died. I hope not to instill fear or loathing but to give everyone some perspective on a POSSIBLE outcome which does not really take much of a reach to come to any conclusion. Despite popular belief and promises from those who wish to rob you of your savings and investments, the collapse of the dollar might just be an event measured in hours, not days as their control is not what it seems.....
* * * * * *
Mike was less than an hour from home in Minnesota after dropping his load off in Fargo but knew he needed to top his tank off this Sunday evening to insure his rig would make it home. He pulled into the Petro Truck Stop just outside of Fargo and hopped out of the cab into the bitter twenty below temperatures which he could not believe had already hit at ten o'clock at night. He slid his fuel card into the pump waiting for the next prompt when the "SEE ATTENDANT" message flashed in the screen. He blustered, figured it was another card problem and whipped out his Master Card and slid it in after the pump reset and again the "SEE ATTENDANT" message flashed up. "What the hell is going on?" he thought to himself as he wandered into the long line of drivers boisterously yelling at managers and clerks alike.
A grand jury in the southeastern state of Atlanta indicted eight people Tuesday in a credit card fraud ring that stole nine million dollars in 280 cities around the world, the Justice Department said.
Five of the indicted are Estonians. One of them, the suspected mastermind of the scheme, is in prison in Estonia awaiting extradition to the United States, the department said.
One is Russian and another is Moldovan; the nationality of the eighth has not been disclosed.
Alan Wheatley and Simon Rabinovitch canada.com 2009-11-17 00:00:00
The imperative of greater global currency stability means the world can no longer rely, as it has done since the end of the gold standard, on a currency issued by a single country, the head of the IMF said on Tuesday.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, restated his view that a new global currency might evolve out of the Special Drawing Right, the Fund's in-house unit of account.
"That probably has to be a basket," Strauss-Kahn said of the eventual replacement for the dollar. "In a globalised world there is no domestic solution," he told a forum
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard The Telegraph 2009-11-19 01:18:00
Société Générale has advised clients to be ready for a possible "global economic collapse" over the next two years, mapping a strategy of defensive investments to avoid wealth destruction.
In a report entitled "Worst-case debt scenario", the bank's asset team said state rescue packages over the last year have merely transferred private liabilities onto sagging sovereign shoulders, creating a fresh set of problems.
Overall debt is still far too high in almost all rich economies as a share of GDP (350pc in the US), whether public or private. It must be reduced by the hard slog of "deleveraging", for years.
"As yet, nobody can say with any certainty whether we have in fact escaped the prospect of a global economic collapse," said the 68-page report, headed by asset chief Daniel Fermon. It is an exploration of the dangers, not a forecast.
Under the French bank's "Bear Case" scenario, the dollar would slide further and global equities would retest the March lows. Property prices would tumble again. Oil would fall back to $50 in 2010.
Two earthquakes hit near New Zealand North Island's Palmerston North on Thursday morning. There have been no immediate reports of injury or damage.
The New Zealand Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences (GNS Science) said the first tremor of 5.1 magnitude struck at 7:04a.m. (18:04 GMT Wednesday), 10 km south of Palmerston North at a depth of 40 km.
Biologists at UC San Diego have discovered that honeybees can discriminate between food at different temperatures, an ability that may assist bees in locating the warm, sugar-rich nectar or high-protein pollen produced by many flowers.
While other researchers had previously found hints that bees might have the ability to do this, the UCSD biologists provide the first detailed experimental evidence in a paper that will be published in the December 1 issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology.
"We show that honeybees have the ability to associate temperature differences with food," said James Nieh, an associate professor of biology who headed the study. "This information may help guide bees looking for food by allowing them to distinguish which bees are returning to the hive with the highest quality of food."
Most people know the term of "migrating bird" but "migrating bat" is not very established. However, some bat species migrate every year long or short distances. Whereas birds migrate to exploit seasonal food resources, the majority of bats migrate with the intention to find better hibernating conditions.
In Europe about 30 percent and in North America around 45 percent of bird species migrate; the migration of bats however is a rather rare phenomenon. Only about three percent of the approximately 1,000 bat species migrate, of those less than 0.016 percent migrate further than 1,000 kilometers. The vast majority of bats of the temperate zone hibernate during winter, as a result of the food shortage at this time.
Together, researchers of the University of Princeton in the U.S. and the Max-Planck Institute for Ornithology have analyzed the genealogical tree of bats on the basis of their migratory behavior. They are confining themselves to only the family of the Vespertilionidae, also called the vespertilionid bats, which includes 316 species or about a third of all bat species. Of about 32 migrating bat species, 23 are part of this family. Eleven of those migrate over long distances longer than 1,000 kilometers. The remaining twelve only fly short distances that vary between 100 and 1,000 kilometers.
A series of studies carried out at the University of Haifa have found that rodent, reptile and ant lion species behave differently on either side of the Israel-Jordan border. "The border line, which is only a demarcation on the map, cannot contain these species, but the line does restrict humans and their diverse impact on nature," says Dr. Uri Shanas.
Is a border line simply a virtual line appearing on the map? If so, why is it that Israeli rodents are more cautious than Jordanian rodents? Why is it that there are more ant lions in Israel than in Jordan? And how come there are more reptile species in Jordan than in Israel? A series of new studies at the University of Haifa's Department of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology and the University of Haifa-Oranim's Faculty of Sciences and Science Education are exploring the answers.
"The boundary is only a virtual marking that appears on the map and is not capable of keeping these species from crossing the border between Israel and Jordan; but the line does stop humans from crossing it and thereby contains their different impact on nature," says Dr. Uri Shanas, a participant in the research.
The series of studies, which have been carried out in cooperation with Jordanian researchers, has examined a variety of reptile, mammal, beetle, spider and ant lion species on either side of the border in the Arava region. The Israeli team includes Dr. Shanas and research students Idan Shapira and Shacham Mitler, who set out to reveal whether the border -- unknown to the species -- could affect differences between them and their numbers on either side of the frontier, even though they share identical climate conditions.
Kerry Trueman The Huffington Post 2009-11-19 09:55:00
You may think bats are scary, but what's truly terrifying is the mysterious fungus that's decimating the bat population, according to an article by Stacy Chase in last Sunday's Boston Globe:
At least 1 million bats in the past three years have been wiped out by a puzzling, widespread disease dubbed "white-nose syndrome" in what preeminent US scientists are calling the most precipitous decline of North American wildlife in human history. If it isn't slowed or stopped, they believe bats will continue disappearing from the landscape in huge numbers and that entire species could become extinct within a decade.
This would have drastic repercussions for the rest of us. As Tim King, a conservation geneticist with the US Geological Survey in West Virginia, told Chase, "We're at the vanguard of an environmental catastrophe."
At least 1 million have died in the past three years from a mysterious disease, posing serious questions for our environment. But one Boston University biologist is leading the hunt for answers.
Thomas Kunz emerges from Aeolus cave in East Dorset, Vermont, with a half-dozen metal ID bands -- smaller than SpaghettiOs -- cupped in the palm of his latex-gloved hand. They're tiny emblems of death, having once been affixed to the forearms of little brown bats.
The renowned bat biologist from Boston University, who bears a passing resemblance to Harrison Ford, minutes earlier had recovered the bands while trudging, like a real-life Indiana Jones, through a slippery mud-like ooze of rotting bat carcasses, liquefied internal organs, toothpick-sized bones, piles of guano, and a strange white fungus on the cave floor.
If bats had come out of hell, it couldn't have been worse than this.
"What we saw was bat soup. There were a lot of bones of wings and skulls and emulsified bodies," Kunz says. "There were dead bats -- decomposing bats -- hanging from the walls of the cave.
"My heart sunk," he says, noting some of the bands bore his initials, THK. "It was as if I had lost family members."
It's late August, when bats are in their swarming phase, and the 71-year-old Kunz and two fellow biologists have trekked, at night, in hard rain, with heavy gear, 2,520 feet up the rugged Taconic Mountains to Aeolus -- the largest bat hibernaculum in the Northeast -- to bleed live bats and collect samples for researchers leading the hunt for clues into the cause of mysterious bat deaths like these.
Decatur, Georgia -- Gigi reaches up into her sun salutation. She steps back into her high lunge and kicks her legs straight into plank pose, a push-up she holds without wobbling for 10 seconds before looking up impatiently at her yoga teacher.
It's close to 6 p.m. She's had a long day.
She collapses on her mat, rolls on her back and closes her eyes. And then sends one finger digging up her nose.
What? C'mon, she's only 5.
This is yoga for kids. Once an oddity reserved for only the crunchiest communities, downward dog for the grade-school set is now being taught in studios from Minnetonka, Minnesota, to Moscow, Russia. And educators, including Chicago's Namaste School, which serves mostly poor kids who speak a language other than English, are turning to yoga to connect with a generation that many say has been dismissed as deficit this or hyperactive that.
At Decatur Yoga and Pilates studio, just outside Atlanta, Georgia, Dylan Laakmann, sits quietly next to his mother. The lanky 12-year-old whose fashionably long hair hangs in his face, describes himself as a "downer" before he started taking yoga two years ago.
There has been a flurry of contradictory swine flu events reported here and from Ukraine this early fall. These coincided with a CBS news program releasing information that very few reported swine cases actually tested positive for H1N1. CBS's state by state survey discovered that less than 5 percent of flu cases reported in most American states were confirmed as H1N1.
In most states less than half the reported cases were not even a flu of any type! The CDC and WHO conveniently canceled the need for laboratory swine flu confirmations in mid-summer 2009. That makes it easier to pump up the statistics, doesn't it?
Back Ground Details
Since the WHO this year changed the criteria for declaring a pandemic from worldwide high mortality rates to infections only, it's easier to claim a pandemic with the Swine Flu. Connect these dots: Swine Flu is actually less severe than a normal seasonal flu. But it is highly contagious!
So why bother with this rule juggling to make it easy to categorize a spreading flu as a pandemic? Once the stage 6 pandemic level is called, and it has been, the WHO via the United Nations becomes a medical dictator by international law to almost 200 member nations.
And over the past few years, laws have been arranged to exclude Big Pharma and governments from being financially liable for vaccine related injuries and deaths during a pandemic. A license to kill?
Until recently, scientists believed that, following a stroke, a patient had about six months to regain any lost function. After that, patients would be forced to compensate for the lost function by focusing on their remaining abilities. Although this belief has been refuted, a University of Missouri occupational therapy professor believes that the current health system is still not giving patients enough time to recover and underestimating what the human brain can do given the right conditions.
In a recent article for OT Practice Magazine, Guy McCormack, clinical professor and chair of the occupational therapy and occupational science department at the MU School of Health Professions, argues that health practitioners believe their clients need more time and motivation to reclaim lost functions, such as the use of an arm, hand or leg. With today's therapies, it is possible for patients to regain more function than ever thought possible, McCormack said.
"Patients are able to regain function due to the principle of neuroplasticity, or the brain's ability to change, especially when patients continue therapy long after their injuries," McCormack said. "Therapists once believed the brain doesn't develop new neurons; but, now they know neurons change their shape and create new branches to connect with other neurons, rewiring the brain following an injury or trauma."
Smokers may soon be able to break their habit with an injectable vaccine that prevents nicotine in tobacco entering the brain, where it creates a highly addictive sensation of pleasure.
The NicVAX vaccine moved closer to the market on Monday after a deal between GlaxoSmithKline and the US biotech company Nabi Pharmaceuticals, which developed the product.
GSK will pay $40m (£24m) up front and as much as $500m in the future to Nabi at a time of growing concern over the heavy burden of tobacco-related diseases as one of the leading preventable causes of death worldwide.
The product potentially opens a new front in the tobacco wars, with most existing so-called smoking cessation products and methods failing to prevent many people from returning to their tobacco habits.
The resting place of the USS Westfield is being disturbed to retrieve what's left of the Civil War-era vessel from a Texas ship channel.
Archaeologists seek to recover the remains to allow deepening of the Texas City channel by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Experts say a cannon is believed to be the largest remnant of the USS Westfield, a Union ship scuttled by the crew to avoid capture during the 1863 Battle of Galveston.
The cannon search began Wednesday as part of the $71 million ship channel upgrade.
The artifacts will go to the Texas A&M Conservation Research Laboratory, in an effort that could land some items at museums.
New fossils unearthed in what is now the Sahara desert reveal a once-swampy world divided up among a half-dozen species of unusual and perhaps intelligent crocodiles, researchers reported Thursday.
They have given some of the new species snappy names -- BoarCroc, RatCroc, DogCroc, DuckCroc and PancakeCroc -- but say their findings help build an understanding of how crocodilians were and remain such a successful life form.
They lived during the Cretaceous period 145 million to 65 million years ago, when the continents were closer together and the world warmer and wetter than it is now.
"We were surprised to find so many species from the same time in the same place," said paleontologist Hans Larsson of McGill University in Montreal who worked on the study.
"Each of the crocs apparently had different diets, different behaviors. It appears they had divided up the ecosystem, each species taking advantage of it in its own way."
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) on Wednesday announced that its researchers have made significant progress toward creating a computer system that simulates the way the brain works.
Reporting their results at a supercomputing conference being held in Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon, IBM researchers said they have achieved a simulation with 1 billion neurons and 10 billion synapses using a supercomputer that has 147,456 processors.
Neurons are the key functional elements of the brain and synapses are the connections between them.
The advancement represents the first near real-time simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat's cerebral cortex, a structure within the brain that plays a key role in memory, attention and thought.
The results indicate the feasibility of building a cognitive computing chip, Dharmendra Modha, one of the researchers, wrote in a blog posting.
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez says he will join a team of Cuban scientists on flights to "bomb clouds" to create rain amid a severe drought that has aroused public anger due to water and electricity rationing.
Chavez, who has asked Venezuelans to take three-minute showers to save water, said the Cubans had arrived in Venezuela and were preparing to fly specially equipped aircraft above the Orinoco river.
"I'm going in a plane; any cloud that crosses me, I'll zap it so that it rains," Chavez said at a ceremony late on Saturday with family members of five Cubans convicted of spying in the United States.
Many countries have programs aimed at altering weather patterns, commonly known as cloud seeding, although the effectiveness of such techniques is disputed.
Firing silver iodine at clouds is one common method. China uses rockets loaded with the chemical to spur rainfall in arid regions. Chavez did not say what technology the Cubans will use.
Henry Bortman Astrobiology Magazine 2009-11-16 23:03:00
Scientists with NASA's IceBite project are heading this week for University Valley, a hanging valley perched more than 1600 meters (more than 1 mile) above sea level in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys. Their objective: to test a set of ice-penetrating drills and select one for use on a future mission to the martian polar north, the same region of the planet that NASA's Phoenix lander investigated in 2008.
The northern polar region on Mars is of particular interest to scientists because it once may have provided a habitable environment for life. Due to variations over time in Mars' orbit and the angle at which it tilts toward the Sun, Mars' north pole received much more sunlight several million years ago than it does today -- enough sunlight to produce liquid water, enough liquid water to support life. Indeed NASA's Phoenix lander found evidence in martian Arctic soil that liquid water had been present there in the past.
That makes the martian northern plains a favored place for a future mission to Mars targeted at the search for life. And it makes analogue sites on Earth, locations that mimic the conditions encountered by Phoenix, a good place to prepare for a Phoenix follow-up mission. University Valley, where IceBite researchers will conduct their field work, is just such a site.
Pascagoula - The boom that rattled windows in Pascagoula and Moss Point, swamped police phone lines and brought entire neighborhoods of people out of their homes to see what was happening was almost as much a mystery Wednesday as it was Tuesday night when it happened.
Keesler Air Force base told city police around 8:45 p.m. Tuesday the boom was caused by military jets on a training exercise in the Gulf, but that the jets were not from Keesler.
On Wednesday security at the base reconfirmed the jets had contacted the tower Tuesday night and were told there was a training exercise.
But what jets, and whose jets were flying at supersonic speeds over the Gulf at night?
A basketball-sized chunk of ice crashed through the roof of a family's Colorado home after apparently falling from an airplane passing overhead. Danelle Hagan and her 9-year-old daughter were at home in Brush on Saturday when they heard the kitchen ceiling come crashing down. They were not injured.
"I hear a huge, what sounded like an explosion. And I look over and my kitchen is basically in shambles," Hagan told KMGH-TV in Denver. "It was very terrifying."
The Federal Aviation Administration was sending investigators to the home to investigate whether the ice came from an airplane. The Hagans put some of the ice in their freezer.
FAA spokesman Mike Fergus said Wednesday the ice chunk appears to be "Rime ice," which can build up on the outside of a plane's fuselage when it flies through cold and wet air.
Clara Kilbourn The Hutchinson News 2009-11-18 23:20:00
Liberal - - The 2-inch-diameter gun-metal black rock that 10-year-old Chandler Harp found Saturday in his Liberal backyard traveled a long way to get there.
"There's no question in my mind whatsoever that what they have is a meteorite," said Don Stimpson of Haviland, a biophysicist who owns the Kansas Meteorite Museum and Nature Center on U.S. 54/400 near Greensburg.
A fast moving meteor lit up the night skies over most of Utah just after midnight Wednesday. Moments later, the phones lit up at KSL as people across the state called to tell us what they saw and ask what it was.
Utahns are still talking Wednesday about what scientists are calling a "remarkable midnight fireball." The source of all the excitement was basically a rock, falling from space. When a meteor enters the atmosphere, it gives off a lot of heat and light.
Folks at the Clark Planetarium say this rock was big--between the size of a microwave and washer-dryer unit.
Iain Martin The Wall Street Journal 2009-11-19 16:16:00
For the Wall Street Journal Europe I've written an analysis of the election race (can we call it that?) for the post of president of the European council. The man leading the way according to bookmakers is Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy of Belgium. It has been widely reported that in his spare time he likes to write poetry, or compose haikus. Herman has been derided widely for this but I think it's unfair. They're rather good.
A 2-year-old in north Mississippi has done something few toddlers can: he helped his mother give birth to his brother.
Bobbye Favazza told The Commercial Appeal she went into labor this past Friday and gave birth on the family's living room couch in Olive Branch. She said her toddler, Jeremiha Taylor, got her a towel and caught the baby before firefighters arrived to cut the umbilical cord.
Favazza gave birth to a 7-pound, 4-ounce baby boy, Kamron Taylor.
City emergency services supervisor, Greg Mynatt, said the 911 call about Favazza was probably the third this year about a woman in labor, but usually the mother makes it to the hospital before delivery.
Is this taking the whole Star Trek thing a teensie weensie bit too far? d'Armond Speers spoke only Klingon to his child for the first three years of its life.
Klingon? Not Spanish, French, Mandarin? Not some gutteral genuflecting concoction from the deepest recesses of Borneo? Klingon? You heard it right. (And if you don't know about the Klingon Empire, look it up.)
"I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language," Speers told the Minnesota Daily. "He was definitely starting to learn it."
And get this, Speers says he isn't really a huge Star Trek fan.
Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a Houston lawyer and Democratic candidate for attorney general, says that a 22-word clause in a 2005 constitutional amendment designed to ban gay marriages erroneously endangers the legal status of all marriages in the state.
The amendment, approved by the Legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by voters, declares that "marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman." But the troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:
"This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, asked whether she'd campaign with Fox News' personality Glenn Beck as her running mate, chuckled, but according to a conservative website, "wouldn't rule it out."
"It's no secret that former GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Fox News host Glenn Beck share great respect and admiration -- so their fans can be forgiven for wondering: Is a 'dream ticket' of Palin-Beck ticket is completely out of the question?" Newsmax's David Patten wrote Tuesday night.
"Perhaps not," he added.
"Palin initially chuckled when Newsmax broached the idea," he continued. "But then she had some serious words of praise for the popular Fox personality."
"I can envision a couple of different combinations, if ever I were to be in a position to really even seriously consider running for anything in the future, and I'm not there yet," Palin reportedly told Newsmax. "But Glenn Beck I have great respect for. He's a hoot. He gets his message across in such a clever way. And he's so bold - I have to respect that. He calls it like he sees it, and he's very, very, very effective."
