2009-11-20T16:59:17Z Signs of the Times tag:sott.net,2009-11-20:/:signsofthetimes tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197414 2009-11-20T16:36:51Z

There's new evidence that Wednesday morning's spectacular fireball meteor may have landed in Utah.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197413 2009-11-20T16:36:47Z

Posted: November 19, 2009 Location of Sighting: Garndiffaith, Pontypool, Torfaen, South Wales. Date of Sighting: 08112009 Time: 12.30am Sunday 8th 2009 Witness Statement: At12.30am I was checking on my two boys who were asleep when something made me look out of their window, as I moved the curtains I noticed what I thought was a plane coming over the houses opposite, there seemed something unusual about it. As it got nearer I could see it was very large and shaped like a triangle with three orange lights, two at the bottom and one on the top, I was so surprised by this, I ran into our other bedroom were my wife was, and got her to look out at it. This is when we saw the second object, following in the same southerly direction, the lights were not flashing and there was no sound of engines running as by this time I had opened the window to have a better look.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197412 2009-11-20T16:36:43Z

Date: November 19, 2009 Time was for 2 hours between 6:30pm CST(Central Standard Time) to 8:45pm. Place is Tira, Texas 75482...that's 16 miles north of Sulphur Springs. This area is about half-way between Dallas and Texarcana in Hopkins County. Our house is on FM1536 which is off HWY19 and about 2 miles from Cooper Damn. Sky is real clear with hardly any humidity, no clouds, cold, with no wind. I like to go outside and watch/search the skies after dark to see what everything looks like. Having done this so often, I become familiar with overhead airline flight patterns, random small planes, occasional helicopters, their shapes, colors, sounds, and usual flight patterns and motions...and their height in the sky. I also see many meteors and unexplained sights than most just because I go out sometimes more than once a night, if weather permits. Now, the story I'm going to tell you is true and I will try to give specific details. I have no good binoculars, telescope, or digital camera, so I cannot document my story except for the fact that tonight my 19 year old son witnessed most of this with me.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197411 2009-11-20T16:06:13Z

The University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Centre appears to have suffered a security breach earlier today, when an unknown hacker apparently downloaded 1079 e-mails and 72 documents of various types and published them to an anonymous FTP server. These files appear to contain highly sensitive information that, if genuine, could prove extremely embarrassing to the authors of the e-mails involved. Those authors include some of the most celebrated names among proponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The FTP link first appeared on a blog called The Air Vent. The blog's owner, identified as "Jeff Id", downloaded the file, examined it, and posted a brief summary on his blog. Another commenter, identified as "Steven Mosher," passed the information on to Steven McIntyre's Climate Audit blog and to another blog, The Blackboard, run by a blogger identified as "Lucia." Most recently, blogger Anthony Watts, who runs a blog titled Watts Up With That? mentioned the FTP archive in his own blog. Commentary on all the blogs involved has been brisk, except, oddly enough, at The Air Vent, where only seven comments have been received.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197410 2009-11-20T15:46:27Z

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents. At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average. Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year. Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197409 2009-11-20T15:42:43Z

Introduction Even before Barack Obama was elected president, religious figures loomed large in his political career. The greatest threat to his presidential campaign came not from another candidate but from his longtime pastor, Jeremiah Wright, whose controversial sermons prompted questions about Obama's judgment in associating with him. After Election Day, the first big controversy of the Obama era was the president-elect's invitation to evangelical preacher Rick Warren, an opponent of abortion rights and gay marriage, to give the opening prayer at his inauguration. And Obama has offered religious leaders an unusually prominent role in his administration by convening an advisory council for the White House faith-based office that's dominated by clergy and heads of religious groups.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197408 2009-11-20T15:39:51Z

Hundreds of emails and documents exchanged between world's leading climate scientists stolen by hackers and leaked online Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world's leading climate scientists during the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today. The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change. Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege they provide "smoking gun" evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind. The veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197406 2009-11-20T15:31:09Z

Los Angeles - As the White House considers sweeping strategic shifts in the war in Afghanistan, heroin addicts across the nation called on President Obama Monday to stick with the current U.S. policy, which has flooded the world market with low-price narcotics.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197405 2009-11-20T15:29:05Z

A lesbian soldier, who says she deserted the U.S. military because she was constantly harassed and threatened with death, won a reprieve from deportation Friday in a Federal Court ruling that ordered the Immigration and Refugee Board to reconsider her failed asylum claim. Pte. Bethany Smith, who adopted the name Skyler James upon fleeing to Canada two years ago, contends she was denied a discharge from the army because her superiors wanted to send her to Afghanistan. She took her case to Federal Court after being rejected as a refugee by the Immigration and Refugee Board.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197404 2009-11-20T14:54:24Z

The patient data associated with the 10 Ukraine isolates sequenced by Mill Hill and deposited at GISAID has been updated with demographic information, suggesting that the samples were from 10 individuals and four of the samples were from deceased patients. These are the same four samples that have D225G (see list below). This association suggests that swine H1N1 with D225G is more aggressive and is cause for concern. As noted earlier, D225G has been appended onto multiple genetic backgrounds via recombination, and the data from Ukraine adds further support. Samples from Ternopil and Khmelnitsky (see updated map) have a regional marker that is found in swine but no other human isolates. This marker is on all 6 Termopil isolates, indicating it was an early acquisition, but only the two fatal cases have D225G indicating it was appended onto the Ternopil genetic background. However, it is also found in the two fatal cases from Lviv, which do not have the regional marker. Similarly, earlier isolates with D225G represent distinct genetic backgrounds with D225G.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197403 2009-11-20T14:50:26Z

New revelations of a big hole in the moon don't revive the notion that our cosmic companion is made of Swiss cheese. Instead, scientists say, the unusually proportioned feature is most likely a portal into an underground cavern that once held flowing lava. Analyses of high-resolution images taken by a moon-orbiting probe suggest that the 65-meter-wide, nearly circular feature is between 80 and 88 meters deep, says Carolyn H. van der Bogert, a planetary geologist at Westphalian Wilhelm's University Münster in Germany. Typical impact craters of this size, she notes, are less than 15 meters deep. Although the hole is located in a lunar province once home to widespread volcanic activity, a dearth of hardened lava around the hole indicates that it isn't a volcanic crater, she and her colleagues report in the Nov. 16 Geophysical Research Letters. The geology of the region also suggests that the hole isn't associated with a fault zone.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197402 2009-11-20T14:36:30Z

Further to an agreement with leading multinationals, from January 2010 advertising of snacks, burgers, fries and sugary drinks addressing children under 12 years will no longer be allowed in Russia. The multinationals that have signed the agreement are Coca-Cola, Kellogg's, Kraft Foods, Bolshevik, Mars, PepsiCo, Unilever, and Nestlé Inmarko, an article in the Pravda paper notifies.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197401 2009-11-20T13:33:25Z

Go back to jail. That's the message from Obama administration lawyers to former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, whose case became a cause célèbre among Bush administration critics as ground zero of alleged political prosecutions. The seeming disconnect between Obama's team and numerous Democrats -- including House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr., who's investigated Siegelman's case -- may be because President George W. Bush's US Attorney in Alabama is still in office. Democrats still haven't settled on a replacement, some eleven months after Obama's inauguration. In advice to the Supreme Court made public early this week, Obama's Justice Department stood firmly behind the position of Bush US Attorneys who won Siegelman's conviction on bribery charges in 2006. The two US Attorneys connected to the case were Bush appointees -- whose numerous conflicts of interest were documented in the Raw Story series, "The Permanent Republican Majority," which received a nomination for best investigative reporting by the Online News Association in 2008.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197400 2009-11-20T13:25:24Z

Scientists in Norway announced Friday they had detected a mutated form of the swine flu virus in two patients who died of the flu and a third who was severely ill. In a statement, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health said the mutation "could possibly make the virus more prone to infect deeper in the airways and thus cause more severe disease," such as pneumonia. The institute said there was no indication that the mutation would hinder the ability of the vaccine to protect people from becoming infected or impair the effectiveness of antiviral drugs in treating people who became infected.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197399 2009-11-20T13:24:08Z

The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week. Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time. "The activities in that prison were illegal," said human rights researcher John Sifton. "They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions." Lithuanian officials provided ABC News with the documents of what they called a CIA front company, Elite, LLC, which purchased the property and built the "black site" in 2004. Lithuania agreed to allow the CIA prison after President George W. Bush visited the country in 2002 and pledged support for Lithuania's efforts to join NATO. "The new members of NATO were so grateful for the U.S. role in getting them into that organization that they would do anything the U.S. asked for during that period," said former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, now an ABC News consultant. "They were eager to please and eager to be cooperative on security and on intelligence matters."

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197398 2009-11-20T13:21:42Z

A man with an automatic weapon has opened fire on a car near a Paris train station, killing one man and wounding two others. The shooting took place near the Gare du Nord train station, for trains to London and other international destinations. Such an incident is told to be rare in France, which has strict gun control laws, AP reported. A police officer said one of the occupants was hit in the head and died soon after. The other two victims have been hospitalized.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197397 2009-11-20T13:14:36Z

The Pakistani arm of the Taliban has denied responsibility for a recent series of terrorist attacks in Pakistan, instead pointing the finger at Xe Services, the security contractor formerly known as Blackwater, as well as the country's own security services. "The Tehreek-e-Taliban are not responsible for the bombings, but Blackwater and Pakistan's spy agency are behind them," said Pakistani Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq, according to a translation from Al-Jazeera English. ''The dirty Pakistani intelligence agencies, for the sake of creating mistrust and hatred among people against the Taliban, are carrying out blasts at places like the Islamic university, Islamabad, and the Khyber bazaar, Peshawar,'' the Associated Press quoted Tariq as saying.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197396 2009-11-20T12:58:36Z

The UK has apologized to Spain after the Royal Navy used a buoy with the Spanish colors for target practice. The exercise took place off the coast of Gibraltar earlier this week. The UK ambassador was summoned to the foreign ministry in Madrid to explain. According to local reports, the navy hastily removed the buoy, which had a red-and-yellow marker, when approached by a Spanish police launch on Tuesday. Ambassador Giles Paxman conceded it was insensitive and an error of judgment. While acknowledging that the target had appeared "similar" to the Spanish flag, he insisted that was not what it was supposed to represent.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197395 2009-11-20T12:53:10Z

Israeli photos depicting shipping documents pointing to an alleged Iranian arms delivery to Hezbollah are forgeries, Iranian media claims. The Israeli army in early November said it unloaded 36 containers of weapons at the Israeli port of Ashdod from the Antigua-flagged vessel Francop. Thirty tons of weapons, rockets, missiles, hand grenades and ammunition were hidden behind thousands of plastic polyethylene bags, the army said. Israel claimed the Iranian- and Russian-made arms were due to be unloaded in the Syrian port of Latakia and from there transferred to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197394 2009-11-20T12:45:42Z

President Obama directly acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay will not close by the January deadline he set, but he said he hoped to still achieve that goal sometime next year. Obama refused, however, to set a new deadline. In an interview in the Chinese capital with Major Garrett of Fox News, Obama said he was "not disappointed" that the Guantanamo deadline had slipped, saying he "knew this was going to be hard." "People, I think understandably, are fearful after a lot of years where they were told that Guantanamo was critical to keep terrorists out," Obama said. Closing the facility, he added, is "also just technically hard." Obama came to office pledging to shut a detainee facility that had become a symbol for prisoner abuse at the hands of American officials. He signed orders to shut the military prison by January 2010, but White House officials quickly encountered resistance from members of Congress opposed to moving prisoners to U.S. soil and from other countries they had hoped would accept detainees.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197393 2009-11-20T12:44:04Z

Oxford University scientists are using brain-scanning technology to understand how we learn to recognize and 'read' faces as children. The research will also investigate whether there are any differences in the way people with autism spectrum disorders respond to seeing faces. 'Faces are really very similar in their basic features, but we are very good at recognizing different faces instantly. The brain has to be very specialized to be able to do this quickly and accurately,' says Dr Jennifer Swettenham, who is leading the study. The ability to recognize faces is very important for communication and socializing. We need to be able to recognize people's facial features, and also understand their emotions, respond to where they are looking, and many other signs and indications.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197392 2009-11-20T12:37:15Z

The culture of fear and distrust that has grown up around this century's terror culture and its associated wars has created vast new markets for anything that can be branded with the words security or defence. In April 2010, London's Kensington Olympia will play host to a Counter Terror Expo, put on by DSEi's infamous events' organiser, Clarion, and sponsored by French arms company, Thales. Officially supported by a plethora of military, police and private security associations, the expo will showcase over 250 security, surveillance and specialist logistics companies; state agencies including NATO and the MoD; and anyone else claiming to provide protection against terrorism for both the armed forces and civilian populations. Joining the fray are a number of corporations involved in creating identity verification technologies. The biometrics and database management companies whose invasive products, based on the recognition of physiological characteristics, are finding voice as futuristic 'solutions' in, what is deemed, an 'increasingly dangerous world'.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197391 2009-11-20T12:33:55Z

The US public debt topped 12 trillion dollars for the first time in history, Treasury officials disclosed Tuesday, moving past a key barrier that raised hackles in Congress. Treasury data showed Monday's outstanding debt at 12.031 trillion dollars, up from 11.999 trillion on Friday. The ballooning debt reflects the massive deficit spending by the government in an effort to revive an ailing economy over more than one year. The public debt topped 10 trillion dollars in September 2008. The debt is quickly approaching the statutory limit of 12.104 trillion dollars, meaning Congress would have to raise the ceiling to prevent a shutdown of government operations.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197390 2009-11-20T12:30:59Z

There's no armor, it turns out, for conscience. So our men and women are coming home from the killing fields wounded in their heads, used up, greeted only by the military's own meat grinder of inadequate health care and intolerance for "weakness." "Frankly, in my more than 25 years of clinical practice, I've never seen such immense emotional suffering and psychological brokenness." This is what whistleblower psychiatrist Kernan Manion wrote recently to President Obama about his experience counseling Marines at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, as reported by Salon. In September, Manion, having been told to "cease and desist all further correspondence with the government," was fired by the Navy for his urgent, outspoken communiqués about the mental-health minefield the military has on its hands. Two months later, of course, the issue of PTSD was blown into the national headlines by the massacre at Fort Hood. And a day after that, according to Salon, the body of a Marine was found at Camp Lejeune and a fellow Marine was arrested for the murder. The wars we fight keep getting worse, or seem at any rate to back up on us with an ever-intensifying fury. Our war on terror is tightening the psychological vise on our collective insecurity, beginning with the soldiers who are fighting it. Salon, citing official figures, reported that 42 Marines committed suicide in 2008 and 146 attempted to do so.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197389 2009-11-20T12:30:57Z

The internet is such a huge part of life that Mandelson's plans to cut people off for copyright breach is a clear restriction of liberty At 33 years old I'm more Generation X than Generation X-Box. I'm too old to be one of the new wave of "digital natives" who've never known life without the internet, but I'm just about young enough (and geeky enough) to consider myself an enthusiastic immigrant. I moved in about 13 years ago, and if I could swear an oath of allegiance to some Head Of The Internet State, I wouldn't hesitate. Sadly there is no president of the internet, which is a shame because it means I'm stuck with my British passport instead. And relations between Britain and the internet have been strained of late. Lord Mandelson is seeking to grant himself significant powers in the fight against copyright infringement - the ability to do just about anything so long as it's in the interest of protecting copyright, and without having to go through parliament.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197388 2009-11-20T12:25:56Z

Although we are slightly relieved that no Communications Data Bill has been sneaked into the Queen's Speech, as originally threatened by the disgraced former Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, this Labour Government simply cannot resist producing some more useless and repetitive legislation, as a public relations diversion to hide their failure to control aspects of modern technology.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197387 2009-11-20T12:11:02Z

Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch accused the government on Wednesday of ignoring illegal settlement construction in one of several barbed remarks that could presage a first High Court of Justice decision ordering the demolition of illegal housing in the West Bank. Beinisch made the comments while hearing a petition from Palestinian-rights advocacy group Yesh Din, which is asking the court to compel the government to implement an existing demolition order for nine homes in the West Bank settlement of Ofra. Yesh Din argues that the homes were built on private Palestinian land, and while the government conceded on Wednesday that it is not claiming the construction is legal, it said the demolition orders would be carried out in order of priority.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197386 2009-11-20T12:03:59Z

If you have read any of my articles at OpEdNews over the past two years, or any by the many physicians who have also written articles and letters to the FDA commissioner, you will recognize what a bunch of stupid gobbledegook appears below. These critics of aspartame include Neurosurgeon Russell Blaylock, Internist H.J. Roberts, Psychiatrist Ralph Walton, and Pediatrician Kenneth Stoller, all medical doctors. This new press release is one of the dumbest things I have ever read, but no surprise: aspartame is at the heart of the many reasons that Americans have gotten dumber, after decades of the "dumbing down" processes....

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197385 2009-11-20T11:51:58Z

Oprah Winfrey, one of the most powerful people in the entertainment industry, will announce Friday that her iconic daytime talk show will wrap at the end of its 25th season. But don't panic -- her final appearance as host of The Oprah Winfrey Show is nearly two years away. And it's possible she'll move the whole shebang to the cable network she's setting up, called, naturally, the Oprah Winfrey Network. "The sun will set on the Oprah show as its 25th season draws to a close on September 9, 2011," Winfrey's Harpo Productions said in an e-mail to TV station executives Thursday evening. "As we all know, Oprah's personal comments about this on tomorrow's live show will mark a historic television moment that we will all be talking about for years to come."

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197384 2009-11-20T11:42:44Z

An eminent rabbi was so exhausted after three days of constant cocaine-fuelled partying with escorts that his pimp grew worried and cancelled that day's supply of girls, a jury was told. Rabbi Baruch Chalomish, 55, who has a £6 million fortune, was a scholarly academic, an accomplished businessman, a charity giver and a dutiful family man until his first wife died of cancer and his world fell apart. He turned to alcohol in his depression, then took refuge in cocaine, spending up to £1,000 a week. He lived in squalor, seeking comfort from prostitutes, Manchester Crown Court was told. The prosecution said that Chalomish was the financier in a commercial cocaine supply business while Nasir Abbas, 54, a convicted drug dealer, provided the drugs and the customers.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197383 2009-11-20T11:32:27Z

A team of US scientists has uncovered the complete genetic code of corn, a discovery that promises to speed development of higher yielding varieties of one of the world's most important food crops. Corn is the third most abundant cereal crop, after rice and sorghum, researchers said. Advances in corn production could mean major steps toward feeding the world's growing population as it struggles with climate change. The team of 150 experts, led by Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, said Thursday they had identified some 32,000 DNA sequences, or genes, in the 10 chromosomes that make up the genome of maize, the largest of any plant examined so far. By comparison, the human genome includes 20,000 genes distributed in 23 chromosomes.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197382 2009-11-20T11:29:09Z

Much of our planet's mineral wealth was deposited billions of years ago when Earth's chemical cycles were different from today's. Using geochemical clues from rocks nearly 3 billion years old, a group of scientists including Andrey Bekker and Doug Rumble from the Carnegie Institution have made the surprising discovery that the creation of economically important nickel ore deposits was linked to sulfur in the ancient oxygen-poor atmosphere. These ancient ores -- specifically iron-nickel sulfide deposits -- yield 10% of the world's annual nickel production. They formed for the most part between two and three billion years ago when hot magmas erupted on the ocean floor. Yet scientists have puzzled over the origin of the rich deposits. The ore minerals require sulfur to form, but neither seawater nor the magmas hosting the ores were thought to be rich enough in sulfur for this to happen. "These nickel deposits have sulfur in them arising from an atmospheric cycle in ancient times. The isotopic signal is of an anoxic atmosphere," says Rumble of Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory, a co-author of the paper appearing in the November 20 issue of Science.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197381 2009-11-20T11:26:31Z

Surplus biomass from the production of flax shives, and generated from Brassica carinata, a yellow-flowered plant related to those which engulf fields in spring, can be used to produce bioethanol. This has been suggested by two studies carried out by Spanish and Dutch researchers and published in the journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. "These studies evaluate, from an environmental point of view, the production of bioethanol from two, as yet unexploited sources of biomass: agricultural residue from flax (for the production of paper fibres for animal bedding), and Brassica carinata crops (herbaceous plant with yellow flowers, similar to those which carpet the countryside in spring)," Sara González-García, researcher of the Bioprocesses and Environmental Engineering Group of the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), said. González-García, along with other researchers from USC, the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of Leiden (Holland), has confirmed that if bioethanol is produced from these two types of biomass "both CO2 emissions and fossil fuel consumption will be reduced, meeting two of the objectives established by the European Union to promote biofuels."

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197380 2009-11-20T11:26:20Z

Peering inside your packets Ofcom has held talks over a monitoring system that would peer inside filesharing traffic to determine the level of copyright infringement, in preparation for new laws designed to protect the music, film and software industries. The Digital Economy Bill, to be published by Lord Mandelson tomorrow, will require the communications regulator to measure how filesharers who exchange copyright material respond to a regime of warning letters. If the overall level of infringement is not cut by 70 per cent in a year, further provisions will be triggered, compelling ISPs to impose speed restriction after warnings. Internet access will be suspended for the most persistent infringers.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197379 2009-11-20T11:23:06Z

It is ironic that President Barack Obama would travel to China and speak against government control over the internet. If the American Department of Homeland Security has its way new cybersecurity laws will enable Obama's administration to take control of the internet in the event of a national crisis. How that national crisis might be defined would be up to the White House but there have been some precedents that suggest that the response would hardly be respectful of the Bill of Rights. Many countries already monitor and censor the internet on a regular basis, forbidding access to numerous sites that they consider to be subversive. During recent unrest, the governments of both Iran and China effectively shut down the internet by taking control of or blocking servers. Combined with switching off of cell phone transmitters, the steps proved effective in isolating dissidents. Could it happen here? Undoubtedly. Once the laws are in place a terrorist incident or something that could be plausibly described in those terms would be all that is needed to have government officials issue the order to bring the internet to a halt.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197378 2009-11-20T11:16:07Z

In a strange case of science imitating art, one hobbit has again become the center of a heated and ongoing conflict. Since its 2003 discovery on the Indonesian island of Flores, the Homo floresiensis (nicknamed hobbit because it only grew to be about three feet tall) has caused scientists across the world to debate whether the find is a new species or simply a variation of the modern human. The difference could signal a major paradigm shift in the study of primitive humans. Although several partial H. floresiensis skeletons have been identified, the majority of the attention has been given to a specimen called LB1 (the first to be discovered) because it is the most complete skeleton and the only one that has an entire cranium. The earliest known hobbit lived approximately 18,000 years ago, although archaeological records of ancient tools suggest that hobbits may have been alive as early as 12,000 years ago. Until the discovery of LB1, scientists had widely believed that the last non-modern humans were the Neanderthals, which became extinct around 24,000 years ago. If hobbits are indeed a new species, they will replace Neanderthals as the most recent non-modern humans.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197377 2009-11-20T11:09:27Z

Children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) have a number of cognitive deficits, but mathematical ability seems particularly damaged. Little is known about the brain structures related to mathematical deficits in children with FASD. A new study that used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to investigate the relationship between mathematical skills and brain white matter structure in children with FASD supports the importance of the left parietal area for mathematical tasks. Results will be published in the February 2010 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research. "Children with FASD have learning difficulties with reading, memory, executive functioning, attention, and mathematics," said Christian Beaulieu, associate professor in the department of biomedical engineering at the University of Alberta and senior author for the study. "Specific deficits in mathematics exist even when their global deficits are taken into account," added Claire D. Coles, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Emory University School of Medicine. "Children with FASD are similar in their presentation to children with nonverbal learning disabilities, which are sometimes associated with visual/spatial deficits and math deficits; one of the factors thought to produce these effects is deficits in white matter integrity."

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197376 2009-11-20T11:06:50Z

At least four people were shot dead and six South Korean visitors wounded when a gunman fired into a crowd of tourists on the resort island of Saipan, South Korea's Foreign Ministry said on Friday. The gunman appeared to have taken his own life after the shooting spree, a ministry official said, adding that there were no further details immediately available.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197375 2009-11-20T11:06:36Z

Tomorrow morning Lord Mandelson will present the Digital Economy Bill to the public, which among other things is aimed at reducing illicit file-sharing. According to parts of the bill that leaked today, the legislation could lead to jail terms for file-sharers and unprecedented power for the entertainment industries. Over the past months the UK government has tried to tackle the issue of online piracy. This has resulted in a proposal from Lord Mandelson, who plans to disconnect alleged file sharers without any judicial process. Tomorrow the exact text of the bill is expected to be made public, but according to early reports, the legislation will open all doors for a digital police state where alleged pirates will be crucified by private companies. Judging from some of the plans that leaked earlier today, the endless lobbying efforts of the entertainment industry by anti-piracy outfits including IFPI and the BPI have definitely paid off.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197374 2009-11-20T10:53:29Z

It's a scenario of some residents' dreams: After returning home from a weekend getaway they find that someone has decorated their place for the holidays. But it wasn't a dream for a Herscher family who came home to that very situation Monday, and police now are investigating the case as a crime. The woman and her children left their apartment after 1 p.m. Saturday in the 600 block of East Second Street, and when they returned Monday morning they found a host of holiday decorations and lights had been put up, Herscher Police Chief Rick Gilbert said Tuesday.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197373 2009-11-20T10:41:23Z

San Francisco - In January, Mike Rowland was so broke that he had to raid his retirement savings to move here from Boston. A week ago, he and a couple of buddies bought a two-unit apartment building for nearly a million dollars. They had only a little cash to bring to the table but, with the federal government insuring the transaction, a large down payment was not necessary. "It was kind of crazy we could get this big a loan," said Mr. Rowland, 27. "If a government official came out here, I would slap him a high-five." In its efforts to prop up a shattered housing market, the government is greatly extending its traditional support of real estate, including guaranteeing the mortgages of middle-class and even upper-class buyers against default.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197371 2009-11-20T10:35:42Z

Chronic stress in humans has been implicated in heart disease, weight gain, and diabetes, among a host of other health problems. Extreme environments, a source of chronic stress, present a challenge even for the hardiest organisms, and plants are no exception. Yet, some species somehow manage to survive, and even thrive, in stressful conditions. A recent article by Dr. Yuri Springer in the November issue of the American Journal of Botany finds that certain wild flax plants growing in poor soils have succeeded in balancing the stress in their lives -- these plants are less likely to experience infection from a fungal pathogen. Walking the fine line between the costs associated with surviving under stressful conditions and the benefits that may be derived from growing in an environment with fewer interactions with antagonistic species is a tricky balancing act. For plants, serpentine soils are one example of an extreme environment. Serpentine soils are those that provide a stressful medium for plant growth, due to features of the soil, such as a rocky texture, low water-holding capacity, high levels of toxic metals, and/or low levels of necessary nutrients.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197370 2009-11-20T10:33:33Z

New York - Budget shortfalls poses a direct threat to millions of U.S. jobs, many in the private sector, as state and local governments lay off workers and cut spending on contracts and other business services, a think tank said on Thursday. State and local governments will have to raise taxes and cut spending in the current and next two fiscal years to cover shortfalls totaling $469 billion, according to an Economic Policy Institute report. The think tank -- where White House adviser Jared Bernstein spent years developing ideas found in the $787 billion economic stimulus plan he oversees -- said the U.S. government must give states and cities $150 billion in direct budget relief to save between 1.1 million and 1.4 million jobs. "Given the fragility of the economy, already high unemployment and the magnitude of the budget shortfalls, it is clear that we cannot afford inaction," the report said, calling the gaps "a ticking time bomb for the economy."

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197369 2009-11-20T10:31:08Z

They were in a deep sleep, yet sounds, such as a teakettle whistle and a cat's meow, somehow penetrated their slumber. The 25 sounds presented during the nap were reminders of earlier spatial learning, though the Northwestern University research participants were unaware of the sounds as they slept. Yet, upon waking, memory tests showed that spatial memories had changed. The participants were more accurate in dragging an object to the correct location on a computer screen for the 25 images whose corresponding sounds were presented during sleep (such as a muffled explosion for a photo of dynamite) than for another 25 matched objects. "The research strongly suggests that we don't shut down our minds during deep sleep," said John Rudoy, lead author of the study and a neuroscience Ph.D. student at Northwestern. "Rather this is an important time for consolidating memories."

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197368 2009-11-20T10:28:05Z

Many biological processes are controlled by small molecules known as microRNAs, which work by suppressing the expression of specific sets of genes. Xiang-Hang Luo and colleagues, at Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, People's Republic of China, have now identified a previously unknown microRNA (miR-2861) as crucial to bone maintenance in mice and humans. Of clinical importance, expression of functional miR-2861 was absent in two related adolescents with primary osteoporosis. Several lines of evidence determined the key role of miR-2861 in maintaining bone. First, miR-2861 promoted the in vitro development of a mouse stromal cell line into the cells responsible for bone formation. Second, in mice, in vivo silencing of miR-2861 inhibited bone formation and decreased bone mass. Last, analysis of ten patients with primary osteoporosis revealed two related adolescents in whom disease was caused by a mutation in the miR-2861 precursor (pre-miR-2861) that blocked expression of miR-2861. These data led the authors to conclude that miR-2861 has an important role in controlling the generation of the cells responsible for bone formation and that defects in the processing of its precursor can cause osteoporosis.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197367 2009-11-20T10:22:36Z

The number of home loans in the US that are either in foreclosure or at least one payment past due reached one in seven last month, a record high, according to a survey released Thursday by the Mortgage Bankers Association. The survey found that nearly 10 percent of mortgage holders were at least one payment behind on their mortgages, while 4.47 percent of them were in foreclosure. Both of these are the highest figures on records dating back to 1972. About 7 million households are behind on payments or in foreclosure. These figures present just one indicator of the worsening conditions facing US workers caught up in the longest economic downturn since the Great Depression. The number of people behind on their mortgage payments has doubled since last year, as has the percentage in foreclosure, according to the survey. The foreclosures were spread throughout all borrower categories, with high-quality, fixed-rate mortgages showing the fastest growth in delinquencies, not the sub-prime mortgages that initiated the foreclosure crisis.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197366 2009-11-20T10:15:10Z

People preferentially marry those with similar ancestry, but their decisions are not necessarily based on hair, eye or skin colour. Research, published in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Biology, shows that Mexicans mate according to proportions of Native American to European ancestry, while Puerto Ricans are more likely to settle down with someone carrying a similar mix of African and European genes. Neil Risch, from the University of California, San Francisco, worked with a team of researchers to study the effects of ancestry on partner choice in Mexicans and Puerto Ricans living in their own countries or in the USA. The subjects came from The Genetics of Asthma in Latino Americans (GALA) study, conducted by Risch's UCSF colleague, Esteban Gonzalez Burchard. Risch said, "Latin America provides a unique opportunity to study population structure and non-random mating, due to the historical confluence of European, Native American and African racial groups over the past five centuries. We found that assortative mating, that is partner choice based on a shared ancestry, is very common in these populations." Quite how our DNA influences our desires remains mysterious. Risch and his colleagues did not find that geography or socio-economic status could explain the ancestral influence on romance, and factors like hair, eye and skin colour individually only had a minor role. According to Burchard, "Certainly physical characteristics, such as skin pigment, hair texture, eye color, and other physical features are correlated with ancestry and are likely to be factors in mate selection. However, the spouse correlation for these traits and the correlation of these traits with ancestry were actually below what would be required to fully explain the phenomenon."

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197365 2009-11-20T10:12:05Z

Researchers from North Carolina State University have identified a gene that tells embryonic stem cells in the brain when to stop producing nerve cells called neurons. The research is a significant advance in understanding the development of the nervous system, which is essential to addressing conditions such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and other neurological disorders. The bulk of neuron production in the central nervous system takes place before birth, and comes to a halt by birth. But scientists have identified specific regions in the core of the brain that retain stem cells into adulthood and continue to produce new neurons. NC State researchers, investigating the subventricular zone, one of the regions that retains stem cells, have identified a gene that acts as a switch -- transforming some embryonic stem cells into adult cells that can no longer produce new neurons. The research was done using mice. These cells form a layer of cells that support adult stem cells. The gene, called FoxJ1, increases its activity near the time of birth, when neural development slows down. However, the FoxJ1 gene is not activated in most of the stem cells in the subventricular zone -- where new neurons continue to be produced into adulthood.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197364 2009-11-20T10:09:20Z

A new technique using near-infrared images, obtained with ESO's 3.58-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT), allows astronomers to see through the opaque dust lanes of the giant cannibal galaxy Centaurus A, unveiling its "last meal" in unprecedented detail -- a smaller spiral galaxy, currently twisted and warped. This amazing image also shows thousands of star clusters, strewn like glittering gems, churning inside Centaurus A. Centaurus A (NGC 5128) is the nearest giant, elliptical galaxy, at a distance of about 11 million light-years. One of the most studied objects in the southern sky, by 1847 the unique appearance of this galaxy had already caught the attention of the famous British astronomer John Herschel, who catalogued the southern skies and made a comprehensive list of nebulae. Herschel could not know, however, that this beautiful and spectacular appearance is due to an opaque dust lane that covers the central part of the galaxy. This dust is thought to be the remains of a cosmic merger between a giant elliptical galaxy and a smaller spiral galaxy full of dust. Between 200 and 700 million years ago, this galaxy is indeed believed to have consumed a smaller spiral, gas-rich galaxy -- the contents of which appear to be churning inside Centaurus A's core, likely triggering new generations of stars.

tag:www.sott.net,2009-11-20:/articles/show/197363 2009-11-20T10:05:03Z

The CDC now reports that nearly 4,000 Americans have been killed by H1N1 swine flu. This number is supposed to sound big and scary, motivating millions of people to go out and pay good money to be injected with untested, unproven H1N1 vaccines. But let's put the number in perspective: Did you know that more than four times as many people are killed each year by common NSAID painkillers like aspirin? The July 1998 issue of The American Journal of Medicine explains it as follows: "Conservative calculations estimate that approximately 107,000 patients are hospitalized annually for nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID)-related gastrointestinal (GI) complications and at least 16,500 NSAID-related deaths occur each year among arthritis patients alone." (Singh Gurkirpal, MD, "Recent Considerations in Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug Gastropathy", The American Journal of Medicine, July 27, 1998, p. 31S) So for every person the CDC claims was killed by H1N1 swine flu this year, common painkillers like aspirin have killed four! Yet you don't see the CDC, FDA, WHO or mainstream media running around screaming about the extreme dangers of aspirin, do you? All those deaths apparently don't matter. Only swine flu deaths lead to hysteria.