My article, "The Plot Against Art," elicited an unprecedented number of emails. These came mostly from angry artists who believed that they had produced works of high quality that had been spurned by the art establishment. The artists who had achieved world fame, on the other hand, had in many cases done so only because they had produced decadent works of trash designed to deprave and corrupt the public: such as pornographic Madonnas, crucifixes offensively placed in urine, cans stuffed with the artist's own excrement, and unmade beds with condoms and blood-stained panties conveniently scattered around as "significant" litter.
These puerile charlatans had set out to destroy traditional values, promote sexual perversion, mock Christianity, and, in general, create ugliness and despair - a sorry situation promoted by an art establishment that has been dominated since the early 20th century by Jewish art critics, collectors and dealers. This Jewish influence on art is of course in accordance with the openly declared aims of the Frankfurt School, a Jewish revolutionary movement dedicated to the destruction of traditional Western values - and indeed to the very people who live by those cherished values.
Unbelievable? Absolutely. If it weren't unbelievable, it wouldn't be true.
I ought perhaps to mention my reasons for discussing these emails in public. (With one exception, pseudonyms are used, because this was generally insisted on as the condition for publication. I also had to do some editing for style and brevity.)
President Obama has shattered the budget record for first-year presidents -- spending nearly double what his predecessor did when he came into office and far exceeding the first-year tabs for any other U.S. president in history.
In fiscal 2009 the federal government spent $3.52 trillion -- $2.8 trillion in 2000 dollars, which sets a benchmark for comparison. That fiscal year covered the last three-and-a-half months of George W. Bush's term and the first eight-and-a-half months of Obama's.
That price tag came with a $1.4 trillion deficit, nearly $1 trillion more than last year. The overall budget was about a half-trillion more than Bush's for 2008, his final full fiscal year in office.
Paul D'Amato Socialistworker.org 2009-11-25 13:57:00
Paul D'Amato tells the real story of the "first Thanksgiving"--and the history of conquest and resistance that followed after it
The Thanksgiving myth is intertwined with this country's origin myth.
Puritans fleeing religious persecution in England landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620 in search of freedom. Indians helped them plant corn and survive. They made a compact that is the basis of our first constitution, and they held a feast, together with some Indians, to celebrate and give thanks to God for their first bounteous harvest.
The story has elements of truth, but not much more than elements. What children learn is the overarching message--that Pilgrims were everything good about America: European, Christian, sober, democratic, generous, God-fearing, and so on and so forth.
True, an Indian named Squanto did teach the Pilgrims how to plant corn and saved the invaders from total starvation. What we aren't told is that Squanto learned English because he had been abducted and made a slave in Europe some years before, and the place where he taught the new settlers to plant corn was the village he had grown up in, Patuxet, now depopulated by the impact of European diseases.
Gilbert Mercier News Junkie Post 2009-11-26 03:00:00
Today, about 49 million Americans experience what the US government refers to as "food insecurity with hunger". It is Thanksgiving, a perfect time to reflect on hunger. Hunger is a miserable feeling and a powerful word that rightly produces anger and outrage. Today's hunger and poverty crisis is similar, in scope, to the one of the Great Depression.
One in six people in America suffer from chronic hunger. In a nation that is both, the world's largest economy and its most productive food producer, it is simply not acceptable. In Los Angeles, one of the wealthiest cities in California, which is the world's eight largest economy and America's top agricultural state, one in eight people suffer from hunger.
Los Angeles county is in the middle of an unprecedented hunger crisis with over 1 million people confronting hunger and food insecurity on a daily basis. This is not including the homeless population, which is currently estimated at 100,000 in Los Angeles county. One in eight Angelinos must often make the decision between paying the rent or buying food to feed themselves and their families. The daily struggle of 1 million people in Los Angeles that the US government defines, in an understatement, as "food insecurity" is real, and it is on a dramatic rise all across America.
The Secret Service is investigating how an uninvited couple was admitted to U.S. President Barack Obama's White House state dinner, penetrating layers of security, a spokesman said on Wednesday.
The agency charged with protecting the president and other high-level officials is conducting a comprehensive review of the security breach on Tuesday at the dinner in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, U.S. Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan said.
The Washington Post first reported that a northern Virginia couple, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, not on the official guest list, crashed the White House party but were never seated at a table in the South Lawn tent where the dinner was held.
The White House has asked the Secret Service for a full review of what happened, an official said.
Greg Blustein The Seattle Times / Associated Press 2009-11-25 11:36:00
A metro Atlanta nurse anesthetist has been charged with molesting and sodomizing anesthetized patients in dental and medical offices, and police say the videotaped abuses could involve 100 or more victims
Paul Patrick Serdula, 47, who worked in dental and medical offices across metro Atlanta, was arrested Monday night on child molestation and sodomy charges. The arrest came after authorities found several videos showing him fondling and groping patients who were under anesthesia at various offices, said Cobb County police officer Joe Hernandez.
And authorities reviewing the videos to find more victims say the assaults could go back years and involve residents of other states who were treated by Serdula while they were in Georgia.
"The magnitude of this is almost surreal," said Cobb County Police Sgt. Dana Pierce.
Around a quarter of a million workers took to picket lines across the Twenty-Six Counties on Tuesday as public sector staff struggle to protect their pay and conditions.
Nurses, teachers, firefighters, civil servants and other workers all joined the stoppage in protest against plans to cut 1.3 billion Euro from the public pay bill in the state.
A decision on a second stage of industrial action is expected to be announced by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions soon, which could involve a rolling series of regional stoppages or a further, state-wide 24-hour strike.
Firefighters were the first to go on strike at midnight, while hundreds of primary school teachers marched to the Twenty-Six County Department of Education headquarters at Marlborough Street in Dublin later in the morning.
A second public service workers' strike is set to take place on Thursday, December 3rd, if talks fail to produce an alternative to compulsory redundancies and pay cuts, it was announced on Tuesday.
The British Army's elite Special Reconnaisance Regiment were involved in the ambush in county Fermanagh last week in which a number of shots were fired, it has emerged.
Local representatives have said it was a miracle that no-one was injured in the incident, which bore the hallmarks of a carefully planned military operation.
The operation was being portrayed in the mainstream media as an (abortive) arrest operation rather than a shoot-to-kill attempt. It was confirmed that MI5, SRR and Special Branch PSNI police were involved.
Three of five men subsequently arrested in the incident have been released, while two have been charged with planning an attack on a local member of the PSNI police.
The Christian Brothers religious order is to give €161 million (£146 million) in cash and property in reparation for its role in decades of child abuse in Ireland.
The Brothers said that €34 million in cash would be used to help victims of abuse, whose plight was identified in a government report in May. However, the move was criticized, with one victims' group describing it as "mere smoke and mirrors".
The Ryan report chronicled cases of tens of thousands of children who suffered systematic sexual, physical and mental abuse over decades at residential homes run by 18 congregations. It concluded that the Brothers order was responsible for most of the cases.
A transfer of €127 million in property will be used to "begin to repair trust with so many people in Ireland, who felt betrayed by the Brothers", the order said in a statement. "We understand and regret that nothing we say or do can turn back the clock for those affected by abuse," the statement said. "Our response reflects the moral obligation we collectively and individually feel."
The decline of water level in the Xiangjiang River, a major tributary of the Yangtze River, has affected the drinking water supply for more than 100,000 people in central China's Xiangtan City.
The water level at the Xiangtan section of the river went below 27 meters Wednesday and was approaching the record low of 26.86 meters, which caused serious water shortages in the city proper.
Drinking water supplies to some residential areas in the city have been cut off and were only available in some other parts during lunch and dinner hours. A number of enterprises were forced to suspend or limit production.
A student opened fire at a university in the southern Hungarian city of Pecs Thursday, killing one student and wounding three other people, a university spokesman said.
Zoltan Gyorffy, press chief of Pecs University, told Reuters the shooting happened at the biophysics research institute and the attacker was a pharmacology student.
He said the student opened fire and killed another student. Another student, a teacher and a cleaner were seriously hurt.
"Both the attacker and the victim were Hungarians," Gyorffy said.
Ambulance spokesman Pal Gyorfi confirmed that one person died in the attack and said three more were severely injured.
National news agency MTI said the police had caught the 23-year-old attacker, whose motives were unknown.
Police shot and killed an allegedly insane man after he stabbed dead a pedestrian and injured 12 others in a street in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province early Thursday.
At around 7:09 a.m., local police received calls from members of the public in Acheng district of Harbin, the provincial capital, reporting that a man had assaulted pedestrians with a knife on Pailu Avenue, said a police spokesman.
Police rushed to the scene and shot Pan Yuanfei dead as he allegedly attacked two policemen with a knife after tear gas failed to subdue him.
Four of the 12 injured were seriously hurt and all were being treated in hospital.
The first victim was Pan's elder sister, who lives in Pailu Avenue and was seriously wounded at her home. The other 12 victims were unknown to Pan.
Rescuers plucked a woman from choppy waters Monday, some 25 hours after she jumped from a crowded ferry that sank in a storm off Indonesia's Sumatra island. At least 29 people drowned and 20 others were missing.
A total of 255 survivors have been pulled from the sea since Sunday when the Dumai Express 10 was hit by towering waves and sank about 90 minutes into an inter-island trip from Batam to Dumai in Riau, a province off Sumatra island in western Indonesia. A second ferry ran aground nearby, but all its passengers were said to be safe.
The rescued woman in her 30s was spotted by fishermen and she was in stable condition in a hospital, said Lt. Col. Edwin, a navy officer. Like many Indonesians he only uses one name.
"Fishermen saw her floating with a life jacket on the rough sea in the rain ... She is very tough," said Edwin.
The US burdens an enormous human and financial cost to fight the insurgency in Afghanistan, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs claims.
Gibbs said that it costs about a million dollars per year for each deployed US soldier, beyond the expense of training and maintaining a security force.
Burdened by two wars, the American military already has more than 180,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and will have to draw on the handful of remaining brigades to carry out Obama's plan, expected to see the deployment of some 34,000 more troops in Afghanistan.
More than 800 American soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan, and October was the deadliest month since the start of the war in 2001 with 74 US soldiers killed.
Apart from the human toll, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost 768.8 billion dollars so far and by the end of this fiscal year, the price tag will approach one trillion.
China State Construction Engineering Corp, the largest contractor in China, has bagged a subway ventilation project worth about $100 million in New York's Manhattan area, marking the construction giant's third order in the United States' infrastructure space this year.
The contract was given to China Construction American Co, a subsidiary, the Wall Street Journal quoted a source as saying.
"The new project, along with the $410-million Hamilton Bridge project and a $1.7-billion entertainment project it won earlier this year, signals China State Construction's ambition to tap the American construction market," said Li Zhirui, an industry analyst at First Capital Securities.
Li, however, said the order came as no surprise as the US government is spending massively on infrastructure projects.
Somali pirates said they freed a Greek ship on Thursday that they hijacked more than six months ago as it sailed to the Middle East from Brazil.
But there were contradictory reports about whether the Maltese-flagged vessel had actually been released, and the Ukrainian government denied it.
The Ariana was carrying 24 Ukrainian crew when it was seized on May 2 north of the capital Mogadishu. The ship belongs to All Oceans Shipping in Greece.
Last month, the pirates said they had agreed a $3.5 million ransom and expected to release the vessel soon.
"After days of negotiations we freed the Greek ship Ariana today," an associate of the gang named Abdinor told Reuters by telephone from the coastal town of Haradheere.
The German army's chief of staff has stepped down after reports of Afghan civilian deaths in a September air strike involving German troops.
Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg told parliament on Thursday that Wolfgang Schneiderhan had submitted his resignation.
Schneiderhan "has released himself from his duties at his own request," zu Guttenberg said, thanking the former chief for his services.
The Afghan government has said that the September 4 operation, in which 69 militants and more than 30 civilians were killed, was the deadliest involving German troops since World War II.
Following the strike, Franz Josef Jung, who was defense minister at the time, denied there were any civilian victims.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed while standing next to President Hugo Chavez that Iran and Venezuela would "stand together until the end" in the face of US "imperialism."
Ending a tour of Latin American allies, Ahmadinejad praised his "brave brother" Chavez, saying: "Today the people of Venezuela and Iran, friends and brothers in the trench warfare against imperialism, are resisting.
"We'll stand together until the end," he yelled, raising Chavez's hand in front of the television cameras and shouting in Spanish: "Viva Venezuela! Viva Chavez!"
Before arriving in Caracas late Tuesday Ahmadinejad was in Bolivia, where he and President Evo Morales, another close Chavez ally, hailed their own alliance against "imperialism," meaning the United States.
Frances Webber Institute of Race Relations 2009-11-26 11:48:00
This report is an indispensable reference manual on the threats posed to citizens by the convergence of neo-con ideology, power and technology in the name of national security.
'A new kind of arms race, one in which all the weapons are pointing inwards', the product of a marriage between the imperatives of profit and the irrational politics of paranoia, is the theme of this alarming new report, NeoConOpticon: The EU security-industrial complex. Its title marries Jeremy Bentham's late eighteenth-century surveillance prison with late twentieth and early twenty-first century ideologies and economics of Western 'full spectrum dominance', implying intensive surveillance and militarised policing for 'a long, sustained and proactive defence of their societies and way of life ... keep[ing] risks at a distance while ... protecting their homelands' (according to NATO's 2008 Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World).
The Obama administration is seeking to reverse a federal appeals court decision that dramatically narrows the government's search-and-seizure powers in the digital age.
Solicitor General Elena Kagan and Justice Department officials are asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its August ruling that federal prosecutors went too far when seizing 104 professional baseball players' drug results when they had a warrant for just 10.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' 9-2 decision offered Miranda-style guidelines to prosecutors and judges on how to protect Fourth Amendment privacy rights while conducting computer searches.
'Because we can' is not proper grounds for an arrest
Police in Kent have at last acknowledged that arresting people for being too tall might not be a very good idea.
Or rather, arresting someone for no better reason than "because they could" was unlawful and not altogether sensible.
The story begins this July when photographer Alex Turner was stopped whilst taking snaps in Chatham High St and approached by two men, who refused to identify themselves, but demanded that he show them some ID. When he refused, they called for back-up. A PCSO and WPC arrived: Turner took a photo of the pair, and was promptly arrested.
He was then handcuffed, held in a police van for 20 minutes, searched in public by plain clothes officers before being released. It remains unclear, both from from his own account and from subsequent police explanations, exactly why he was arrested - although he did note at the time that the WPC stated she had felt threatened by his size - 5' 11" and about 12 stone - and implied that she found it intimidating.
That's what a federal appeals court is telling Scott Tooley of Kentucky in dismissing his civil rights lawsuit. Tooley believes the government put him under blanket surveillance after he said the word bomb to an airline agent.
Tooley sued the government on allegations of invasion of privacy and for violation of his First Amendment speech rights, claiming he was subjected to "round-the-clock surveillance" following his 2002 B-word utterance.
The alleged spying targeting Tooley ranged from phone taps to RFID chips on his vehicles. He claimed he was placed on an airline travel watchlist, and, in 2005, spotted an undercover agent in a Ford Crown Victoria parked outside his Louisville house for about six hours a day.
Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created "a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System", or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for people to use the internet without detection. By downloading Clarke's software, which he intended to distribute for free, anyone could chat online, or read or set up a website, or share files, with almost complete anonymity.
"It seemed so obvious that that was what the net was supposed to be about - freedom to communicate," Clarke says now. "But [back then] in the late 90s that simply wasn't the case. The internet could be monitored more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than more old-fashioned communications systems like the mail." His pioneering software was intended to change that.
His tutors were not bowled over. "I would say the response was a bit lukewarm. They gave me a B. They thought the project was a bit wacky ... they said, 'You didn't cite enough prior work.'"
David Brown and Francis Elliott Times Online 2009-11-26 10:00:00
Intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have access to weapons of mass destruction was received by the Government ten days before Tony Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq, the inquiry into the war was told yesterday.
Inspectors in Iraq had also told the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that they believed that Saddam might not have chemical and biological weapons. But with British and US troops massed on the border, the new intelligence was dismissed.
Sir William Ehrman, the Foreign Office's director-general of defence and intelligence at the time, told the inquiry that information was receivedjust before the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. "We did at the very end, I think on March 10, get a report that chemical weapons might have remained disassembled and Saddam hadn't yet ordered their assembly," he said. "There was also a suggestion that Iraq might lack warheads capable of effective dispersal of agents."
Jerusalem Post Internet Edition 2009-11-26 15:08:00
Two senior officials from the White House, Dennis Ross and Jeffrey Bader, made a trip to China on a "special mission" to garner support in Beijing over the Iranian nuclear program, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Post. The officials visited China two weeks before US President Barack Obama arrived in Beijing.
The officials reportedly carried the message that if China would not support the US on the issue, Israel would be likely to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. The paper quoted the officials as saying that Israel saw the issue as "an existential issue," and that "countries that have an existential issue don't listen to other countries."
They stressed that were Israel to bomb Iran, the consequences for the region would be severe.
More than 150 countries have agreed to the Mine Ban Treaty's provisions
Washington - The Obama administration has decided not to sign an international convention that bans land mines.
State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Tuesday that the administration recently completed a review and decided not to change the Bush-administration era policy.
"We decided that our land mine policy remains in effect," he said.
More than 150 countries have agreed to the Mine Ban Treaty's provisions to end the production, use, stockpiling and trade in mines. Besides the United States, holdouts include: China, India, Pakistan, Myanmar and Russia.
Human rights groups had expressed hope that the Obama administration would sign the treaty.
Michel Chossudovsky Global Research 2008-11-30 12:52:00
The Mumbai terror attacks were part of a carefully planned and coordinated operation involving several teams of experienced and trained gunmen.
The operation has the fingerprints of a paramilitary-intelligence operation. According to a Russian counter terrorist expert, the Mumbai terrorists "used the same tactics that Chechen field militants employed in the Northern Caucasus attacks where entire towns were terrorized, with homes and hospitals seized". (Russia Today, November 27, 2008).
The Mumbai attacks are described as " India's 9/11".
The attacks were carried out simultaneously in several locations, within minutes of each other.
The first target was in the main hall of Mumbai's Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station (CST), where the gunmen fired indiscriminately into the crowd of passengers. The gunmen " then ran out of the station and into neighboring buildings, including Cama Hospital"
Attacks by separate groups of gunmen took place at two of Mumbai's luxury hotels - the Oberoi-Trident and the Taj Mahal Palace, located at the heart of the tourist area, within proximity of the Gateway of India.
Reuters states that at least 80 people have been killed and that, "An organisation calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen claimed it was behind attacks". CNN television is already stating as fact that the Mumbai attacks were funded and supported by foreign sources, implicating Pakistan where President-elect Obama promised to take the so-called "war on terrorism" when he assumes office in January. The attacks which are on-going at this moment set the stage for redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq to Pakistan as Obama promised. George W. Bush has been quick to condemn the attacks and CNN is giving round-the-clock coverage, reminiscent of corporate media coverage of the 9/11 attacks in the United States.
Linking Pakistan, Al-Queda, Muslims and Terrorism
CNN, Reuters and other corporate media immediately called these attacks with bombs, automatic weapons and hand grenades "terrorist attacks" emanating from Pakistan with roots in "Al Queda" and "Islamist Terrorists". CNN TV also states that these attacks target "western business people and well-heeled western tourists", staying at Mumbai's luxury hotels. The Deccan Herald states that the Deccan Mujahideen claimed responsibility via a convenient e-mail message received by the Deccan Herald (DC). DC states,
The Palestinian Information Center 2009-11-26 17:47:00
The department of pharmaceutics at the health ministry in the Gaza Strip has announced that a big number of medications and medical items were out of stock in its stores.
The department in a statement on Wednesday said that 141 types of medicine and medical items including a number of badly needed types were out of stock.
Munir Al-Barsh, the director of the department, said that dialysis items were among those types along with others needed for major surgeries. He added that 10 other types would be consumed within three months, 26 types within two months and 29 types within one month.
Alexandra Sandels Los Angeles Times 2009-11-26 15:59:00
Less than a year after authorities stormed the offices of Iranian human-rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, taking sensitive documents and her computer, unidentified authorities have now allegedly taken the Nobel Peace Prize medal and diploma from Ebadi's bank safety deposit box, said officials in Norway, which administers the prize.
Outraged officials in Oslo say the incident is unprecedented and has sent shock waves through the Norwegian foreign ministry.
"This is the first time a Nobel Peace Prize has been confiscated by national authorities," Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Store said in a statement posted to his agency's website. "The medal and the diploma have been removed from Dr. Ebadi's bank box, together with other personal items. Such an act leaves us feeling shock and disbelief."
Ebadi was awarded the prestigious prize in 2003 for her many years of legal work advocating on behalf of Iranian political activists, religious and ethnic minorities, women and children. She was the first Iranian to win the prize.
But intimidation and harassment from Iranian authorities have become a part of everyday life for Ebadi. She has had her home vandalized, apparently by members of hard-line political groups close to the government, had her office raided and shut down by police, and has received scores of death threats.
Lebanon's new cabinet has agreed to acknowledge the Islamic Hezbollah movement's right to use armed resistance against the Israeli acts of hostility.
A cabinet committee commissioned with drafting a policy statement for the country's new government met for the ninth time on Wednesday, when it reached an agreement on the issue, said Information Minister Tarek Mitri.
He added that the new statement would retain the same clause approved by the previous cabinet.
The clause states the right of "Lebanon, its government, its people, its army and its resistance [a common reference to Hezbollah in Lebanon]" to liberate all the Lebanese territory.
The decision came in the face of opposition from some members of the ruling majority against the arms possessed by Hezbollah, which parried an Israeli offensive against southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006.
Damian Paletta The Wall Street Journal 2009-11-25 17:38:00
U.S. lenders saw loans fall by the largest amount since the government began tracking such data, suggesting that nervousness among banks continues to hamper economic recovery.
Total loan balances fell by $210.4 billion, or 3%, in the third quarter, the biggest decline since data collection began in 1984, according to a report released Tuesday by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The FDIC also said its fund to backstop deposits fell into negative territory for just the second time in its history, pushed down by a wave of bank failures.
The U.S. Mint said Wednesday it will suspend sales of the popular American Eagle 1-ounce bullion coins as rising demand depleted its inventory.
"The United States Mint has depleted its current inventory of 2009 American Eagle 1-ounce gold bullion coins due to the continued strong demand for this product," the Mint told its authorized dealers in a memorandum on Wednesday.
November sales to date were at 124,000 ounces, higher than the 115,500 ounces sold in each month of September and October, the Mint said. The Mint said it expects to resume sales in early December.
Britain's bankers received a double boost yesterday as they celebrated a landmark court victory over unauthorized overdraft fees and saw off the threat of a crackdown on pay.
Consumer groups reacted with dismay as the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the banks in the long-running legal battle over £10 billion in overdraft charges. Millions of customers had hoped to be reimbursed. Instead, the banks can keep the cash.
In addition, the Government's Walker review stopped short of draconian plans to name hundreds of the highest-paid bankers and dropped or watered down other proposals.
The two judgments will come as relief to Britain's bankers who feel under siege - resented for taking £1.3 trillion in public money, loans and guarantees and blamed for triggering the longest recession of modern times.
Nicholas Larkin and Halia Pavliva Bloomberg 2009-11-25 10:09:00
Gold climbed to the highest price ever, capping the longest rally in 27 years, as the dollar's slump deepened and on a report that India's central bank may add to last month's 200 metric-ton purchase.
Gold reached a record $1,189 an ounce and has rallied 13 percent since Nov. 2, after India said it bought bullion from the International Monetary Fund. The country, the world's largest gold consumer, may buy more from the IMF, the Financial Chronicle reported. U.S. Dollar Index, a six-currency gauge of the greenback's strength, fell to a 15-month low.
"There is a lot of central-bank buying, hedge-fund buying and gold is obviously getting to $1,200 an ounce before the end of the year," David Lee, a trader at Heraeus Precious Metals Management in New York, said in a telephone interview. The metal has climbed 34 percent this year, heading for the sharpest annual increase since 1979.
Fannie Mae (FNM.N), shrunk its gross mortgage portfolio by an annual rate of about 28 percent in October and delinquencies on loans it guarantees rose sharply in September, the largest U.S. home funding company said on Tuesday.
The government-controlled company slashed its mortgage holdings to $771 billion last month, for a 2.4 percent drop year-to-date.
The portfolio was even smaller at the end of October after factoring in $44.3 billion of net outstanding commitments to sell. That reduced the gross retained mortgage assets to $727.1 billion.
In another sign of the struggle homeowners face in making timely loan payments, Fannie Mae reported a continual jump in the rate delinquency on loans it guarantees in September, the most recent figures available.
China's foreign-exchange reserves face a "triple whammy" as inflation, oversupply and the "inevitable" decline of the dollar threaten to erode the value of its holdings of U.S. Treasuries, said Yu Yongding, a former adviser to the Chinese central bank.
China needs to divert its trade and investment surpluses away from U.S. debt if it is unable to reduce them, Yu, a member of the central bank's monetary policy committee from 2004 to 2006, said in a speech in Melbourne last night. The nation, with the world's largest foreign-exchange reserves of $2.3 trillion, is the U.S.'s biggest creditor, holding $798.9 billion of Treasuries as of September.
"Capital losses -- let alone obtaining decent returns -- seem inevitable," said Yu, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "There is no question whatsoever that the U.S. dollar will go south, which started in April 2002 and, after a short interval, restarted in March 2009."
Carol Driver Daily Mail Online 2009-11-26 16:20:00
The controversy surrounding the global warming e-mail scandal has deepened after a BBC correspondent admitted he was sent the leaked messages more than a month before they were made public.
Paul Hudson, weather presenter and climate change expert, claims the documents allegedly sent between some of the world's leading scientists are of a direct result of an article he wrote.
In his BBC blog three days ago, Hudson said: 'I was forwarded the chain of emails on the 12th October, which are comments from some of the world's leading climate scientists written as a direct result of my article "Whatever Happened To Global Warming".'
That essay, written last month, argued that for the last 11 years there had not been an increase in global temperatures.
It also presented the arguments of sceptics who believe natural cycles control temperature and the counter-arguments of those who think it's man's actions which are warming the planet.
The leaked files - which show 4,000 documents which have allegedly been sent by scientists over the past 13 years - were apparently taken from servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, which is a world-renowned centre focused on studying climate change.
An Australian man was almost drowned by a kangaroo after he dived into his farm dam to save his pet dog.
Chris Rickard, 49, of Arthurs Creek, is being assessed by Austin Hospital surgeons after being mauled by the nearly 5-foot roo at 9 a.m. AEDT. He only managed to end the attack when he elbowed the kangaroo in the throat as it tried to hold him under water, The Herald Sunreported.
By then he had already suffered a deep gash across his abdomen as the kangaroo tried to disembowel him with its hind legs, as well as a deep gash across his forehead and further cuts and scratches across his chest.
Speaking from the hospital's emergency department, Mr Rickard said he was walking his blue heeler dog Rocky at the back of his property about a quarter mile from his home when they woke the kangaroo which had been sleeping in long grass near the dam.
Using gravity measurement data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, a team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin has found that the East Antarctic ice sheet-home to about 90 percent of Earth's solid fresh water and previously considered stable-may have begun to lose ice.
The team used Grace data to estimate Antarctica's ice mass between 2002 and 2009. Their results, published Nov. 22 in the journal Nature Geoscience, found that the East Antarctic ice sheet is losing mass, mostly in coastal regions, at an estimated rate of 57 gigatonnes a year. A gigatonne is one billion metric tons, or more than 2.2 trillion pounds. The ice loss there may have begun as early as 2006. The study also confirmed previous results showing that West Antarctica is losing about 132 gigatonnes of ice per year.
"While we are seeing a trend of accelerating ice loss in Antarctica, we had considered East Antarctica to be inviolate," said lead author and Senior Research Scientist Jianli Chen of the university's Center for Space Research. "But if it is losing mass, as our data indicate, it may be an indication the state of East Antarctica has changed. Since it's the biggest ice sheet on Earth, ice loss there can have a large impact on global sea level rise in the future."
Heavy rains have left 48 people dead in a number of provinces in Saudi Arabia, the Al Riyadh paper said on Thursday.
Rains lashed Jeddah and the adjacent holy places of Mina, Muzdalifah and Arafath, where pilgrims spent their first day of Hajj on Wednesday.
Traffic in Jeddah, located 80 km (50 miles) west of Mecca, was logged, and the sewage system was severely affected.
Meanwhile, the number of foreign pilgrims gathering for today's Hajj in Mecca has exceeded 1.6 million, Prince Naif, Saudi Arabia's second deputy prime minister, said in a telegram to Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz on Thursday.
A total of 11 people were killed due to the heavy rain that has been lashing southern Brazil since last week, authorities confirmed on Wednesday.
The most recent death occurred in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, when 45-year-old Luiz Alberto Carvalho Nene was struck by lightning.
On Wednesday, the towns of Cacapava do Sul, Cerrito and Manoel Viana in the state declared a state of emergency. So far, 48 of the 496 municipalities in Rio Grande do Sul have declared a state of emergency.
Over 14,000 people in Rio Grande do Sul had to leave their homes due to the floods, and a power cut affected almost 10,000 people in the state.
Thargomindah, in the outback of Queensland, Australia, is a quiet small town with a population of 203. That is, until nightfall when the town's population doubles with the arrival of hundreds of other Australians...kangaroos and emus desperate to find food and water.
Some 700 miles west of Brisbane, Thargomindah is suffering its worst drought in 50 years. Both the wildlife and grazers are suffering. But as kangaroos reach plague proportion, farmers complain that the animals are eating any new growth available.
[Scott Fraser, Local Farmer]:
"It's possible to shoot seven-hundred a night, they're that thick. They're swarm proportions, you have no idea, it gives you a creepy feeling when you see them that thick."
It was once imparted to the father over the phone, yet now it's men themselves who often tell their exhausted partner the sex of the child she has just delivered. But could men be more of a hindrance than a help in the delivery room?
French obstetrician Michel Odent says yes, and even blames fathers for an increasing rate of births by Caesarean section.
At a debate hosted this week by the Royal College of Midwives, Mr Odent will argue against what he dubs "the masculinisation of the birth environment".
The presence of an anxious male partner in the labour room makes the woman tense and slows her production of the hormone oxytocin, which aids the process of labour, so the French doctor contends.
This, he says, makes her much more likely to end up on the operating table having an emergency Caesarean section.
"Having been involved for more than 50 years in childbirths in homes and hospitals in France, England and Africa, the best environment I know for an easy birth is when there is nobody around the woman in labour apart from a silent, low-profile and experienced midwife," he says.
For a considerable time already there has been discussion within scientific circles about whether knowing and using multiple languages could possibly have positive effects on the human brain and thinking. There have been a number of international studies on the subject, which indicate that the ability to use more than one language brings an individual a considerable advantage.
The report of the research team appointed by the European Commission, "The Contribution of Multilingualism to Creativity," presents the first known macro analysis based on the available evidence, which has been conducted by searching through several studies and giving particular attention on recent research on the brain.
David Marsh, specialized planner at the Continuing Professional Development Centre of Jyväskylä University, who coordinated the international research team behind the study, says that especially the research conducted within neurosciences offers an increasing amount of strong evidence of versatile knowledge of languages being beneficial for the usage of an individual's brain.
Even before they start school, many young girls worry that they are fat. But a new study suggests watching a movie starring a stereotypically thin and beautiful princess may not increase children's anxieties.
Nearly half of the 3- to 6-year-old girls in a study by University of Central Florida psychology professor Stacey Tantleff-Dunn and doctoral student Sharon Hayes said they worry about being fat. About one-third would change a physical attribute, such as their weight or hair color.
The number of girls worried about being fat at such a young age concerns Tantleff-Dunn because of the potential implications later in life. Studies have shown that young girls worried about their body image are more likely to suffer from eating disorders when they are older.
The encouraging news for parents is that taking their young daughters to see the new Disney film The Princess and the Frog isn't likely to influence how they perceive their bodies.
The fact that many cultures emphasize the concept of "noblesse oblige" (the idea that with great power and prestige come responsibilities) suggests that power may diminish a tendency to help others. Psychologist Gerben A. van Kleef (University of Amsterdam) and his colleagues from University of California, Berkeley, examined how power influences emotional reactions to the suffering of others. A group of undergraduates completed questionnaires about their personal sense of power, which identified them to the researchers as either being high-power or low-power. The students were then randomly paired up and had to tell their partner about an event which had caused them emotional suffering and pain. Their partners then rated their emotions after hearing the story. In addition, the researchers were interested in seeing if there were physical differences in the way high-power people and low-power people responded to others' suffering; specifically they wanted to test if high-powered individuals would exhibit greater autonomic emotion regulation [or respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) reactivity]. When we are faced with psychological stress, our RSA reactivity increases, resulting in a lower heart rate and a calmed, relaxed feeling. To measure RSA reactivity and heart rates, all of the participants were connected to electrocardiogram (ECG) machines during the experiment.
David Dobbs Scientific American 2009-11-25 12:25:00
Researchers pinpoint a crucial crossroads for brain communication and a target for a radical depression treatment
When Helen Mayberg started curing depression by stimulating a previously unknown neural junction box in a brain area called Brodmann's area 25 - discovered through 20 years of dogged research - people asked her where she was going to look next. Her reaction was, "What do you mean, Where am I going to look next? I'm going to look more closely here!"
U.S. scientists have uncovered evidence of a primitive emotion-like behavior in the fruit fly, and their finding may facilitate studies of the relationship between a corrective medicine and a learning disability.
The evidence, published by researchers with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the December issue of the journal Neuron, may be relevant to the relationship between the neuro-transmitter dopamine and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Caltech researchers said that the brain of the fruit fly Drosophila contains only about 20,000 neurons, or nerve cells, and has long been considered enough for the studies of the genetic basis of such behavior as learning, memory, courtship and metabolism otherwise known as circadian rhythm.
But they are not yet sure whether the Drosophila brain could also be used to study the genetic basis of "emotional" behavior.
Oh, to catch a rainbow. Well, it's been done for the first time ever - and with just a simple lens and a plate of glass at that. The technique could be used to store information using light, a boon for optical computing and telecommunications.
All-optical computing devices promise to be faster and more efficient than current technology, but they suffer from the drawback that signals have to be converted back and forth from optical to electrical. The ability to "slow" light to a crawl or even trap it helps, as information in the light can then be manipulated directly.
In 2007, Ortwin Hess of the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, and colleagues proposed a technique to trap light inside a tapering waveguide, which is a structure that guides light waves down its length. The waveguide in question would use metamaterials - exotic materials that can bend light sharply.
Rachel Courtland New Scientist 2009-11-26 13:02:00
After decades of searching, astronomers have confirmed that a gluttonous stellar remnant that glows brightly in X-rays can create high-energy gamma rays as well. The tiny powerhouse could serve as a nearby laboratory to study how particles are accelerated in the universe's biggest black holes.
Cygnus X-3, a pair of objects that sit some 30,000 light years from Earth, has long been a puzzle. The system is thought to contain the dense remnant of a star - either a black hole or a neutron star - that is feeding on a disc of material stolen from a companion star.
The pair orbit each other once every 4.8 hours, shining in X-rays and occasionally sending jets of material, or flares, outwards at close to the speed of light. Because of these flares, Cygnus X-3 has been dubbed a "microquasar", since it resembles quasars, the flaring supermassive black holes at the centres of some galaxies.
Interest in Cygnus X-3 has grown since the flares were first discovered by radio telescopes in 1972. In the following decades, astronomers have found hints that gamma rays - the universe's highest-energy photons - could be coming from Cygnus X-3 with energies as high as trillions or even quadrillions of electronvolts (eV).
Richard Hund American Journal of Botany 2009-11-25 19:36:00
It is well known that some animal species use camouflage to hide from predators. Individuals that are able to blend in to their surroundings and avoid being eaten are able to survive longer, reproduce, and thus increase their fitness (pass along their genes to the next generation) compared to those who stand out more. This may seem like a good strategy, and fairly common in the animal kingdom, but who ever heard of a plant doing the same thing?
She was probably 16 years old and had a wide, flat Asian face, a long neck and a slim figure. The girl died 1,500 years ago. But now she's reborn - well, partially, at least.
At the National Palace Museum of Korea yesterday officials from the Gaya National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage in Korea unveiled the restored model of the girl from the Gaya confederacy era (42-562)
Aliens from outer space are already among us on earth, say Bulgarian government scientists who claim they are already in contact with extraterrestrial life.
Work on deciphering a complex set of symbols sent to them is underway, scientists from the country's Space Research Institute said.
They claim aliens are currently answering 30 questions posed to them.
Lachezar Filipov, deputy director of the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, confirmed the research.
He said the centre's researchers were analysing 150 crop circles from around the world, which they believe answer the questions.
"Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time," Mr Filipov told Bulgarian media.
Matt Hildner The Pueblo Chieftain 2009-11-26 08:45:00
UFO investigator finds similarities with San Luis and Trinidad incidents.
A string of calf mutilations earlier this month have left a local rancher and law enforcement scratching their heads.
Rancher Manuel Sanchez has had four calves mutilated over a three-week span in a pasture he leases near Los Vallejos, just southeast of here, with the most recent victim coming on Nov. 16.
In each case, Sanchez found his calves with skin peeled back and organs cleaned out from the rib cage.
He found no signs of human attackers such as ATV tracks or footprints in the pasture that's guarded by two locked gates.
Nor did he find any evidence of animal predators such as a coyote or a mountain lion. There were no blood pools near the animals, or drag marks on the ground. "There's nothing really to go by," said Sanchez, who's ranched for nearly 50 years. "I can't figure it out."
Residents of Paphos spotted three strange lights zipping off the coast on Tuesday night in the latest in a series of incidents of unidentified objects in our skies.
According to the Cyprus Mail, three bright balls were witnessed hovering in the skies around 10 Kilometers out to sea.
Recently Cyprus has been flooded with UFO reports from all parts of the island; with strange lights and flying objects being spotted in almost every region of the island.
In August a UFO was spotted by a Paphos resident who described seeing, "An orange ball the size of a full moon, coming down fast, as falling from height, and stayed same size and fell towards Limassol. I ran to get neighbour and within a few minutes another came but this time, was same size but higher and seemed to fly over towards the sea staying at the same height and gradually getting smaller." - C
Our flat faces west looking out over the city of London. My wife and I noticed a bright light within the vicinity of Tower Bridge, moving towards our flats.
We thought it was a helicopter, but as it got closer flying west to east, it looked more orange and very bright. The object was moving fast.
We then thought it might be a Chinese lantern, but its velocity and the fact that there is only a very light breeze would discount that.
As the object 'flew' over, there was no sound whatsoever. The light was a very bright orange. We are used to seeing helicopters flying over London all the time, and this was definitely not a chopper.
Date of Sighting: November 24, 2009
Time of Sighting: 3:42 PM PST
Location of Sighting: On Freeway Near La Mesa, California
Description: I was driving on the freeway. The sun was to my right. The sky was clear with no clouds. I saw an object that was going straight up and moving very slow. At the top it was a very bright white. I pulled over and lowered my driver's window. I took the picture from my cell phone. Then it just disappeared all of it tail and light as seen in photo. The resolution on my camera was 2048X1536. I saw it for approximately 2 minutes. There were several people on the freeway looking, but no one pulled over that I know of. Any ideas of what it is?
A father-of-two has told how he saw strange objects darting across the skies above the East Lancs Road in St Helens.
The 34-year-old, who has asked not to be named, says he was driving back from work late on Tuesday night when he spotted the UFO.
"It was incredibly weird, I have never seen anything like this before and I often travel along the East Lancs," he said.
"I was approaching the lights near the Waterside pub in Carr Mill at about 11.30pm when I saw this round object in the sky. It was certainly too low to be an aeroplane and was moving in quite an erratic fashion.
Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin today issued the following "thankfulnesses list":
This being my list of the thankfulnesses I'm tapping into this year...
I have thankfulness that we have a President who is learning to celebrate our American holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas also, even though he didn't have either of those days when he was growing up in Kenya.
I have thankfulness that we live in a country where we have the freedom to speak, even though Todd has never done so actually.
I have thankfulness that little Falcon was found safe and sound in that box, being that I was worried sick about him flying around in that balloon.
I have thankfulness for all of those Jewish settlements on the West Bank, seeing that Jewish people will be flocking to the Holy Land to celebrate Thanksgiving.
