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Corey Schink
Sott.net 2012-11-24 05:41:00
Walking along the cracked sidewalk that charts my route home from college, my head was filled with thoughts of Gaza and the recent 'ceasefire' and the fact that 160 Gazans had been ruthlessly slaughtered in eight days. As I ambled along, constating how lucky I was not to have to fear the sound of F16's or a sudden missile strike or being burnt alive by white phosphorous, I was stopped dead in my tracks by an unusual sight. Scattered on the ground in front of me were many bloody feathers, and lying right in the middle of the sidewalk, as if placed there by someone, was the head of a pigeon. Blood still dripped from its severed spinal cord, right below the neck. Light still shined from its eye. I asked a girl who happened to be standing next to me if she'd ever seen a bad omen. She just shrugged and walked away. | |
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Eleanor Brockel
Sott.net 2012-11-24 05:22:00
How on this Earth did we get here? This is a question I find myself desperately seeking the answer to several times a day. How did we get to the stage where the mass of humanity cannot or will not see the true horror of our situation? How did we get to the stage where most people can't even imagine an alternative or have given up on any other way, citing simply 'human nature' as a fact? How did we get to the stage where true consciousness ceased to even be a potential for most? We, humanity, were gifted with something incredible - the potential for active consciousness. That is, the ability to know and to engage with the immeasurable, the unquantifiable. It is that which supersedes mechanical physiological functioning; it is the possibility of objective understanding and true life. We viciously take from our Mother Earth to feed these base motor functions, the bottom rung of Maslow's hierarchy of needs but we appear to have gotten no higher up the ladder for millennia. An analogy I use to describe what human beings do to meet these needs is as follows: A son repeatedly steals money from his mother to feed his drug habit. She watches in horror as he spirals ever downwards, further and further from salvation. She feels guilty, wondering how she went so wrong raising him. Eventually enough is enough and she tells him that she knows what he is doing and asks him to stop. He immediately flies into a rage and beats his mother until she is a bloody mess, her nose broken and several ribs cracked. She begs him to think of his future, to think of her, but he only feels rage towards her, blaming her for his predicament. He leaves her bleeding on the floor and finds other ways to get money for his next fix. Eventually, he loses the sympathy of everyone around him and loses his sanity to boot. A few years later he is found dead in the squalor of his own vomit and feces. He has been living in abject poverty, seeking only that original high that he could never again attain. | |
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Kim Sengupta
The Independent 2012-11-25 10:15:00
The rockets slammed in, two in succession, just after 11.30 at night. When Huda Tawfil had shaken herself awake through the confusion and terror, her first thoughts were for her baby. Seeing what she did through the smoke and flames, she burst into tears. The 20-year-old started digging through the rubble with her hands as other members of the family ran into the room and joined in. She then cradled her little girl on the way to hospital in her husband's car. There was an emergency operation, but the injuries from the shrapnel proved to be too severe. The name of Hanin Tawfil was added to a growing and particularly grim list from the latest Gaza conflict. Out of 104 civilians killed and 970 wounded, 34 and 274 respectively were children; dozens of others who survived have been orphaned and left traumatised by the violence. The figures are startling even by the vicious standards of the recent bloodlettings in this region. It is, of course, the case that rockets fired from Gaza by Palestinians, often indiscriminately, had led to casualties among young boys and girls in Israel. But the ministry of defence in Tel Aviv had repeatedly stressed in the course of this mission that its attacks were surgical and all efforts possible had been made to avoid collateral damage. | |
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Jeff Franks
Reuters 2012-11-26 16:58:00
Peace negotiations between Colombia and Marxist guerrillas are off to a good start in Cuba, a rebel negotiator said on Tuesday, after delays and rocky moments in the weeks before talks began to end Latin America's longest-running insurgency. Tempered by a history of failure, Colombia's government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, started discussions on Monday with rebels calling a unilateral truce, boosting hopes for an end after nearly 50 years of fighting. Rebel negotiator Jesus Santrich, wearing a gray jacket and dark neck scarf, told reporters outside a Havana convention center that the first session on Monday went smoothly. | |
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Press TV
2012-11-26 14:39:00
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has censured the French government for supporting the insurgents in Syria. "The question is how right it is to... decide to support another political force if that political force is in direct confrontation with the officially recognized government of another country," Medvedev said prior to a visit to the French capital Paris on Monday. "And from the point of view of international law, it seems to me that is absolutely unacceptable." France became the first European country to recognize Syria's opposition coalition on November 13. Paris said it would look into the issue of arming the insurgents against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. | |
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Najmeh Bozorgmehr
Washington Post 2012-09-04 14:29:00
The tightening of U.S. banking sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program has had an impact on all sectors of the economy but is increasingly hitting vulnerable medical patients as deliveries of medicine and raw materials for Iranian pharmaceutical companies are either stopped or delayed, according to medical experts. The effect, the experts say, is being felt by cancer patients and those being treated for complex disorders such as hemophilia, multiple sclerosis and thalassemia, as well as transplant and kidney dialysis patients, none of whom can afford interruptions or delays in medical supplies. Milad, an 8-year-old Iranian boy suffering from severe hemophilia, lives in Kuhdasht, a town 400 miles southwest of Tehran, and relies on injections of a U.S.-made treatment, Feiba, which is no longer available locally in large enough quantities. His parents took him on the 12-hour bus journey to the capital hoping to find supplies of the vital medicine but were given enough for only two days. The boy is now at risk of losing the use of his right leg and is suffering continuous nose bleeds that could be life-threatening. | |
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Press TV
2012-11-26 14:24:00
Israeli Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan says the Tel Aviv regime's Minister for Military Affairs Ehud Barak totally misread the political situation in the Middle East. "His [Barak] political and ideological approach was completely wrong. We are currently acting to raise the election threshold in order to have a proper... leadership, unlike Barak's which has totally misread the political situation in the Middle East," Erdan said on Monday, commenting on Barak's decision to end his political career. Barak announced earlier on Monday that he is retiring from politics and will not contend in the parliamentary elections on January 22. The 70-year-old served as Israel's 14th chief of staff and has a 36-year military career. | |
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Press TV
2012-11-26 14:05:00
Bahraini security forces have fired tear gas and stun grenades to disperse demonstrators protesting against the Al Khalifa regime. Protesters were attacked by regime forces on Tuesday, as they marched from the village of Deih to the former Pearl Square, the site of month-long anti-regime demonstrations that were brutally suppressed by the government last year. The Bahraini Interior Ministry said on its Twitter page that police confronted a "group of vandals" on the Budaiya artery, after they "blocked the road, hurled petrol bombs, and terrified passers-by." A report published by the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry in November 2011 found that the Al Khalifa regime had used excessive force in the campaign of suppression and accused Manama of torturing political activists, politicians, and protesters. | |
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News Unspun
2012-11-22 16:32:00
Rarely would a state get such an easy run from the media after killing so many civilians, many of whom were children, in what the BBC now calls the 'flare-up' of violence. Last night a ceasefire came into effect after a week of attacks on Gaza which left over 150 Palestinians dead (at least 40 of them children) and rocket fire into Israel which left 5 Israelis dead. Before the news of the ceasefire became the front-page headline on the BBC News website, the headline story for the entire day concerned the bus bombing in Tel Aviv, which injured 21 civilians. Luckily this attack did not result in civilian deaths, however it was still deemed more newsworthy than the 13 Palestinians in Gaza who were killed by air strikes that same day. The news coverage was another glaring example of the different value assigned to life by our media, depending on which side of the Gaza border it resides. | |
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Jamie Doward
The Observer 2012-11-25 07:04:00
Channel Islands and Isle of Man will be among those ordered to reveal names behind hidden accounts Radical plans to force the UK's tax havens to reveal the names behind hidden companies, account holders and trusts have been drawn up by the Treasury. The news has delighted tax justice campaigners, who predict that the move, which is expected to be unveiled in the chancellor's autumn statement and come into force in 2014, will have major consequences for those trying to hide their money offshore. Comment: Plenty of time for them to move the money elsewhere then. Elite Pathocrats Hide £13 Trillion Hoard from Taxman A leaked document reveals that the UK plans to impose its own version of the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca) on the crown dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, as well as its overseas territories, such as the Cayman Islands. | |
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Anthony Boadle
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, moving quickly to nip a new scandal in the bud, ordered the dismissal on Saturday of government officials allegedly involved in a bribery ring, including the country's deputy attorney general.Reuters 2012-11-24 01:57:00
Federal police raided government offices in Brasilia and Sao Paulo on Friday and arrested six people for running an influence peddling ring that sold government approvals to businessmen in return for bribes. Among those under investigation are the former personal secretary of ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Rosemary de Noronha, who has headed the regional office of the presidency in Sao Paulo since 2005. The bribery scandal erupted on the heels of Brazil's biggest political corruption trial that sentenced some of Lula's closest aides to prison terms for buying support in Congress for his minority Workers' Party government after taking office in 2003. Rousseff, Lula's chosen successor, was not affected by the vote-buying scandal and she has built on his popularity by gaining a reputation for not tolerating corruption. But the ruling Workers' Party was rocked by the scandal which tarnished Lula's legacy even though he was not implicated. The new corruption case could further hurt the standing of Lula, who remains Brazil's most influential politician. | |
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Jihan Abdalla
The body of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will be exhumed on Tuesday, eight years after his death, in an investigation to establish if he was murdered, a Palestinian official said on Saturday. Reuters 2012-11-24 08:38:00
Ramallah - A French court opened a murder inquiry in August into Arafat's death in Paris after a Swiss institute said it had discovered high levels of radioactive polonium on his clothing, which was supplied by his widow, Suha. Tawfiq al-Tirawi, in charge of the Palestinian committee overseeing the investigation, told reporters in Ramallah on Saturday "it is a painful necessity" to exhume the body of Arafat, who came to symbolize the Palestinian quest for statehood throughout decades of war and peace with Israel. Tirawi said the Palestinians had "evidence which suggests Arafat was assassinated by Israelis". Israel denies any involvement. The exhumation and renewed allegations of Israeli involvement could stir further tension between the Palestinians and Israel, which are observing a truce after a week of fierce fighting in Gaza. Any positive results for polonium could rekindle Palestinian hostility toward Israel and suspicions that a local collaborator may have poisoned him under directions from the Jewish state. | |
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Al Arabiya
2012-11-24 00:00:00
Russian warships anchored off the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea to prepare the evacuation of Russians in the area, should the conflict in Gaza escalate, The Voice of Russia quoted a Russian Navy Command source on Friday. "The detachment of combat ships of the Black Sea Fleet, including the Guards missile cruiser Moskva, the patrol ship Smetliviy, large landing ships Novocherkassk and Saratov, the sea tug MB-304 and the big sea tanker Ivan Bubnov, got the order to remain in the designated area of the Eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea for a possible evacuation of Russian citizens from the area of the Gaza strip in case of escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict", the spokesperson said. He added that ship crew members will continue routine combat training, maintenance of equipment and weapons along with other military services. Meanwhile, Israeli troops fired on Gazans surging toward Israel's border fence Friday, killing one person but leaving intact the fragile two-day-old cease-fire between Hamas and the Jewish state. The truce, which calls for an end to Gaza rocket fire on Israel and Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, came after eight days of cross-border fighting, the bloodiest between Israel and Hamas in four years. In a letter to the U.N. Security Council, the Palestinian U.N. observer Riyad Mansour called the situation in Gaza "extremely fragile" and said Israel's cease-fire violations and other illegal actions risk undermining the calm that was just restored. | |
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James G. Neuger and Svenja O'Donnell
Bloomberg 2012-11-23 12:11:00
European Union leaders failed to agree on the 27 nation bloc's next seven-year budget, replaying the clash between rich and poor countries that has stymied the response to the euro debt crisis. National chiefs plan another summit early next year, when northern countries including Britain and Germany may have the upper hand in seeking to cut subsidies to lesser-developed southern and eastern economies clamoring for EU investment. "Anything short of admitting that our talks have been extraordinarily complex and difficult would not reflect reality," Jose Barroso, head of the European Commission, which manages the subsidy programs, told reporters after a two-day meeting in Brussels. Britain's defense of its cash-back guarantee and France's clinging to farm aid gave the summit the flavor of EU negotiations in the 1970s or 1980s, diluting efforts to equip Europewith a budget to make it more competitive. Eastern and southern countries said reduced financing for public-works projects would condemn them to lag behind the wealthier north. The euro rose to $1.2977 at 7 p.m. in Brussels from $1.2880 late yesterday. The Euro Stoxx 50 index rose 0.9 percent to 2,557.03. In the EU's last budget round, it took two summits, in June and December 2005, to strike a bargain. No date was set for the next negotiations. In the absence of an accord by late 2013, the EU would roll over its annual budget. | |
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Dennis Bernstein
Counter Punch 2012-11-21 13:08:00
An Interview With John Pilger Dennis Bernstein: Noted Documentary Filmmaker, John Pilger, is somebody who knows a great deal about the Gaza Strip, and about the extreme conditions Palestinians there have been forced to endure under a Brutal Israeli Occupation. Pilger has actually made two films about it with the same name, twenty-five years apart: "Palestine is Still the Issue." Pilger, a London based Australian journalist, is a widely respected, Emmy award winning documentarian. His articles regularly appear world-wide in newspapers such as the Guardian of London, the Independent, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times. JP: Thank you Dennis. DB: You know a great deal about the situation. You've made not one film, Palestine is the Issue, but two. Let me get your initial response to we're continuing to hear reports of massive bombing and injury, and death to civilian life, to children. JP: Well, the first thing is the....we should be disgusted. That is a normal, human response, to this. And the second is that we ought not to be surprised, but we should understand this has nothing to do with Hamas, or rockets. It is an ongoing assault on the Palestinian people. And especially the people of Gaza, which began a very long time ago and the plan is to effectively get rid of them as an entity. And I'm not exaggerating, it's often difficult to reach back to the history in times like this, but it's very important that we contextualize it. The infamous Plan D that was executed in the late 1940s just before Israel came into being was to expel the population of Palestine; to get rid of them. And 369 villages were attacked, the people thrown out, the record is there. Historical record is very clear, Israeli historians, Benny Morris through, have documented this, the Hebrew archives have thrown it up. The sum of it is that we see a form of genocide under way in Palestine. And this is the later stage. And what your listeners should be in no doubt about is that although Israelis are doing the bombing, it's really the United States that is really pushing the buttons. Because it's only Israelis who are flying, the American planes. Those are American planes supplied for this very exercise, and if you look at the response of President Obama you understand that this is, in effect, an American/Israeli assault on a people who live in effectively in an open prison. The United Nations special reporter, Richard Falk has likened their situation to the Warsaw Ghetto. When in Warsaw and Poland the Jewish Ghetto there rose up against the Nazis, who were crushed. These days fascism is not a word easily used, nor should it be. But we have as close to a fascist state in Israel, and those historic parallels that Faulk draws, actually to be correct. So we're seeing an historical process at work here, and it is up to the rest of the world to recognize that, and do something about it. DB: John, you've, as I mentioned in the introduction made not one film but two films with almost the same name, about twenty-five years apart. And that's Palestine is the Issue...why did you... JP: Palestine is Still the Issue... | |
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Eric Peters
EricPetersAuto 2012-11-24 13:19:00
Incrementalism has proved depressingly effective as a tool for getting most people to quietly surrender their rights piecemeal. For gradually habituating them to an ever-diminishing circle of liberty. When the circle finally closes and their rights no longer exist atall, they hardly notice - because by that time, most of their rights have already been taken. The final surrender is met with a shrug rather than a scream of outrage. Think how Americans have been habituated to arbitrary search and seizure. Something like the TSA would simply not have been tolerated if it came out of the blue sky circa 1980. And no, the terrr attacks of nineleven did not "change everything." Getting people to accept "sobriety checkpoints" beginning around 1980 changed everything. Accept that - and something like Gate Rape is inevitable. The same process works just as well when it comes to dismantling due process - and removing limits on what the government may not do to us. We didn't get to legal strip searches for jaywalking or littering in one fell swoop. Nor rendition, torture as policy - and presidential kill lists. It is a matter of getting them - getting us - to tolerate "A" so that "B" will be accepted in turn. This is how the citizens of the United States will be disarmed. No sudden, mass ban or attempt at confiscation - because that would probably lead to open violence on a large scale and they - people like Dear Leader Obama and hisVyshinsky, AG Eric Holder, know this. | |
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Paul Buchheit
Common Dreams 2012-11-19 12:57:00
The numbers reveal the deadening effects of inequality in our country, and confirm that tax avoidance, rather than a lack of middle-class initiative, is the cause 1. Only THREE PERCENT of the very rich are entrepreneurs. According to both Marketwatch and economist Edward Wolff, over 90 percent of the assets owned by millionaires are held in a combination of low-risk investments (bonds and cash), personal business accounts, the stock market, and real estate. Only 3.6 percent of taxpayers in the top .1% were classified as entrepreneurs based on 2004 tax returns. A 2009 Kauffman Foundation study found that the great majority of entrepreneurs come from middle-class backgrounds, with less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs coming from very rich or very poor backgrounds.photo: 2. Only FOUR OUT OF 150 countries have more wealth inequality than us. In a world listing compiled by a reputable research team (which nevertheless prompted double-checking), the U.S. has greater wealth inequality than every measured country in the world except for Namibia, Zimbabwe, Denmark, and Switzerland. 3. An amount equal to ONE-HALF the GDP is held untaxed overseas by rich Americans. The Tax Justice Network estimated that between $21 and $32 trillion is hidden offshore, untaxed. With Americans making up 40% of the world's Ultra High Net Worth Individuals, that's $8 to $12 trillion in U.S. money stashed in far-off hiding places. Based on a historical stock market return of 6%, up to $750 billion of income is lost to the U.S. every year, resulting in a tax loss of about $260 billion. | |
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Michel Chossudovsky
The following article was first published by Global Research in January 2009 at the height of the Israeli bombing and invasion under Operation Cast Lead. Global Research 2012-11-17 10:44:00 The ongoing attack on Gaza, which envisages a ground invasion, is from the point of view of Israeli military planners a followup to the December 2008 attack on Gaza. The [December 2008] military invasion of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves. This is a war of conquest. Discovered in 2000, there are extensive gas reserves off the Gaza coastline. British Gas (BG Group) and its partner, the Athens based Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) owned by Lebanon's Sabbagh and Koury families, were granted oil and gas exploration rights in a 25 year agreement signed in November 1999 with the Palestinian Authority. The rights to the offshore gas field are respectively British Gas (60 percent); Consolidated Contractors (CCC) (30 percent); and the Investment Fund of the Palestinian Authority (10 percent). (Haaretz, October 21, 2007). The PA-BG-CCC agreement includes field development and the construction of a gas pipeline.(Middle East Economic Digest, Jan 5, 2001). The BG licence covers the entire Gazan offshore marine area, which is contiguous to several Israeli offshore gas facilities. (See Map below). It should be noted that 60 percent of the gas reserves along the Gaza-Israel coastline belong to Palestine. The BG Group drilled two wells in 2000: Gaza Marine-1 and Gaza Marine-2.Reserves are estimated by British Gas to be of the order of 1.4 trillion cubic feet, valued at approximately 4 billion dollars. These are the figures made public by British Gas. The size of Palestine's gas reserves could be much larger.
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Chicago Tribune
The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from the Cook County state's attorney to allow enforcement of a law prohibiting people from recording police officers on the job.2012-11-26 11:41:00
The justices on Monday left in place a lower court ruling that found that the state's anti-eavesdropping law violates free speech rights when used against people who tape law enforcement officers. The law set out a maximum prison term of 15 years. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in 2010 against Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez to block prosecution of ACLU staff for recording police officers performing their duties in public places, one of the group's long-standing monitoring missions. Opponents of the law say the right to record police is vital to guard against abuses. Last May, a federal appeals court in Chicago ruled that the law "likely violates" the First Amendment and ordered that authorities be banned from enforcing it. The appeals court agreed with the ACLU that the "Illinois eavesdropping statute restricts far more speech than necessary to protect legitimate privacy interests." The appeals court ruling came weeks before the NATO summit when thousands of people armed with smart phones and video cameras demonstrated in the city. Officials had already announced that they would not enforce the law against summit protesters. | |
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Pete Jones & Jerome Delay
Huffington Post 2012-11-26 14:49:00
Congo's president has suspended the army's chief of staff, following the publication of a United Nations report which reveals that Gen. Gabriel Amisi oversaw a criminal network selling arms to rebels in the country's troubled east. The firing of the general indicates that Congo is finally getting tough on its notoriously dysfunctional and internally divided army. It comes as an eight-month-old rebel group, made up of soldiers who defected from the army, pushed beyond Goma, the bustling regional capital of eastern Congo, which fell to the fighters earlier this week. On Friday, M23 rebels patrolled the town of Sake, the next town on the road south from Goma. They manned checkpoints, drank vodka in local bars and let the corpses of Congolese soldiers rot in the streets. One of the soldier's bodies bore an execution-style bullet wound to the temple. The rebellion is led by soldiers who defected from the Congolese army. Before their recent defection, their commanders benefited from a privileged relationship with Congo's government, despite mounting evidence of their complicity in grave abuses. The leader of the M23 is believed to be Gen. Bosco Ntaganda, who is wanted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. | |
Comment: Actually, this kind of thing is really common in today's fake war theaters, where the psychopaths in power distract the masses back home while plundering resources from under the noses of traumatised people.
They're currently routing illegal arms to both 'sides' of the Congo 'war' through their Mafia connections in Albania: Albanian weapons in the Democratic Republic of Congo But the lion's share of the blame belongs back home, not to our Mafia friends 'over there'... Those figures are dwarfed by the post-9/11 flow of arms to Africa under the Bush and Obama regimes. Then there's Afghanistan. Not that long ago, US and UK military brass were caught organising the transportation of 'Taliban' forces around Afghanistan in an effort to make it seem like a real war was taking place: British army is airlifting Taliban around Afghanistan US counter-insurgency in action: Blackwater helicopters airlifting 'Taliban terrorists' around AfPak War by design: Helicopter rumors refuse to die | |
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Peter Westmacott and Melanne Verveer
The Daily Beast 2012-11-25 03:45:00
Nearly 40,000 people have died already in Syria's civil war, and close to 100 are still being killed each day. Homes, hospitals, water infrastructure, and sanitation systems have been destroyed. But one element of this ongoing brutality has been largely overlooked in the media: the appalling sexual violence being visited on the Syrian people by government and militia forces. Such use of sexual violence as a tactic of war is shocking - yet depressingly familiar. Today, Nov. 25, marks International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, the beginning of the 16 days of Activism Against Gender Violence. These awareness-raising campaigns are vital, both because, as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has repeated time and again, women's rights are human rights; and because, without accountability for sexual violence and other acts of severe violence against women and girls - which are often designed to humiliate and degrade victims and the groups with which they identify - security and development are impossible. William Hague, the British foreign secretary, has referred to sexual violence as the "silent scourge of war." The sheer scale of the brutality, and the lack of accountability surrounding it, is nothing short of sickening. During the Bosnian War, between 20,000 and 50,000 women were raped, many of them in camps specifically designed for the purpose. But this tidal wave of systematic brutality has resulted in only 30 convictions. All this took place in Europe within the past two decades. | |
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Howard Mintz
Mercury News 2012-11-25 08:28:00
When the U.S. Supreme Court convenes behind closed doors Friday, the justices will weigh whether to jump headlong into the historic same-sex marriage debate -- or merely dip their toes in the roiling legal waters. The high court could decide whether to rule once and for all on California's Proposition 8, the 2008 voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage. And it could choose to hear up to eight other cases that challenge the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act, which bars federal benefits to same-sex couples. Depending on how far the court goes, it could end up legalizing gay marriage nationwide, banning it nationwide, or continuing the current state-by-state experiment in whether gays and lesbians can marry and whether they are entitled to equal benefits under federal law. All the cases on the court's docket involve lower court decisions declaring gay marriage restrictions unconstitutional. Both sides in the gay marriage battle and legal experts have little doubt the Supreme Court will take up at least some of the cases to put its stamp on one of the country's most pressing social issues. The mystery is in how far it will go. If the Supreme Court chooses not to review the challenge to Proposition 8, gay and lesbian couples will have the right to legally marry in California. | |
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Bill Hutchinson
New York Daily News 2012-11-25 08:50:00
The search was made from a computer in Anthony's home on the day her daughter was last seen alive. Florida sheriff's investigators missed a key piece of evidence - a Google search of "fool-proof" suffocation - in the Casey Anthony murder probe, they acknowledged Sunday. The search, made from a computer in Anthony's home on the day her daughter was last seen alive, could have helped convict her in the death of 2-year-old Caylee, said Orange County Sheriff's Capt. Angelo Nieves. "It's just a shame we didn't have it," prosecutor Jeff Ashton told an Orlando TV station. In July 2011, a jury acquitted Anthony, 24, of murdering Caylee, whose skeletal remains were found six months after she vanished in a wooded area near her home. Nieves said the sheriff's office's computer investigator missed a June 16, 2008, search made from a computer Anthony used. | |
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Jill Vejnoska
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 2012-11-25 13:15:00
The Black Friday shopping weekend apparently took a tragic turn early Sunday morning when an alleged shoplifter died while being apprehended by employees and a contract security officer outside a Lithonia Walmart. Two associates who helped catch and subdue the suspect before police arrived have been placed on leave; the security officer who police say may have placed the suspected thief in a choke hold, is no longer working for Walmart. "No amount of merchandise is worth someone's life," Walmart spokesperson Dianna Gee said Sunday in a statement that emphasized that it was early in the investigation into the incident and all the facts were not known yet. "Associates are trained to disengage from situations that would put themselves or others at risk." | |
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Nicholas K. Geranios
Huffington Post 2012-11-15 21:14:00
Spokane, Washington -- A police officer was sentenced Thursday to more than four years in prison for using excessive force against a mentally disabled janitor who died after being erroneously suspected of stealing money from an ATM. Officer Karl F. Thompson Jr., 65, was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Fred Van Sickle to four years and three months for his role in the 2006 death of Otto Zehm. Van Sickle said he hoped the sentence would begin to bring closure to Zehm's family and to the Spokane community, which has been at odds with the police department as a result of this case and others. "This had a significant impact on the community and how it viewed its police department," Van Sickle said. Van Sickle also ordered that Thompson be taken into custody immediately, over the objections of defense lawyers, who wanted him to remain free while the verdict is appealed. | |
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Jon Humbert
Komo News 2012-11-16 11:10:00
Everett, Washington -- Rose Saffioti is trying to make the best of Friday night. She's keeping busy at her family restaurant along Mukilteo speedway, but mostly, she's thinking of her son Michael. "When I have to sleep at night, and close my eyes, it's hard," she said. "Believe me, when I got the call that my son was dead -- I couldn't even -- like, why? Something was wrong." Earlier this year, Michael went to the Snohomish County jail for one night. He had missed a court date and turned himself in. He was asthmatic, had anxiety problems and self-medicated with marijuana to calm down. But he didn't have a medical card and it got him into trouble. Michael was also acutely allergic to dairy. And that early morning changed everything. | |
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David Rising and Maria Cheng
Associated Press 2012-11-25 16:11:00
German pastor Gabriele Stangl says she will never forget the harrowing confession she heard in 1999. A woman said she had been brutally raped, got pregnant and had a baby. Then she killed it and buried it in the woods near Berlin. Stangl wanted to do something to help women in such desperate situations. So the following year, she convinced Berlin's Waldfriede Hospital to create the city's first so-called "baby box." The box is actually a warm incubator that can be opened from an outside wall of a hospital where a desperate parent can anonymously leave an unwanted infant. A small flap opens into the box, equipped with a motion detector. An alarm goes off in the hospital to alert staff two minutes after a baby is left. "The mother has enough time to leave without anyone seeing her," Stangl said. "The important thing is that her baby is now in a safe place." Baby boxes are a revival of the medieval "foundling wheels," where unwanted infants were left in revolving church doors. In recent years, there has been an increase in these contraptions - also called hatches, windows or slots in some countries - and at least 11 European nations now have them, according to United Nations figures. They are technically illegal, but mostly operate in a gray zone as authorities turn a blind eye. But they have drawn the attention of human rights advocates who think they are bad for the children and merely avoid dealing with the problems that lead to child abandonment. At a meeting last month, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child said baby boxes should be banned and is pushing that agenda to the European Parliament. There are nearly 100 baby boxes in Germany. Poland and the Czech Republic each have more than 40 while Italy, Lithuania, Russia and Slovakia have about 10 each. There are two in Switzerland, one in Belgium and one being planned in the Netherlands. In the last decade, hundreds of babies have been abandoned this way; it's estimated one or two infants are typically left at each location every year, though exact figures aren't available. "They are a bad message for society," said Maria Herczog, a Hungarian child psychologist on the U.N. committee. "These boxes violate children's rights and also the rights of parents to get help from the state to raise their families," she said. "Instead of providing help and addressing some of the social problems and poverty behind these situations, we're telling people they can just leave their baby and run away." | |
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KCEN TV
2012-11-25 15:35:00
And if the devastation from Superstorm Sandy wasn't bad enough, now victims are dealing with thieves. Some residents in queens, New York returned home after Thanksgiving to find their homes ransacked and burglarized. Police say the bandits didn't go after big items like TV's but instead jewelry and cash. Burglary victim Dorenda Bainbridge says, "How dare you kick us when we're down? Ya know, that's what you feel in your gut, you feel it deep inside you, it's such a wound." In the immediate aftermath of Sandy there were reports of looting in hard hit areas from Staten Island to the Jersey Shore. Some storm victims are warning would-be burglars they have guns and will use them if necessary. | |
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Marni chan
Policymic 2012-11-25 09:54:00
America is a country of two minds, and we're not talking about the election anymore. When it comes to unions, we feel strongly. Depending on the situation however, we have a tendency to flip flop. We're pro union when it comes to sports - sometimes. When millionaire players are brattily asking for more millions, like the current NHL lockout, they don't get much sympathy. But when the pro football referees went on strike for more reasonable pay, fans everywhere almost unanimously backed their demands, especially after the Seahawk replacement ref disaster. The recent Chicago teacher's strike pitting Mayor Rahm Emanuel against the unions was a case study in American's ambivalence toward unions. Everyone wanted the best for the city's kids, but whether or not the teachers were being selfish, or an instrumental part of their welfare was a matter of fiery debate. Most recently, on Black Friday, thousands of Walmart employees collectively protested low wages, alleged unsafe working conditions, and unreasonable hours. This map from the Corporate Action Network shows that strikes occurred across the country. According to The Nation's Josh Eidelson's liveblog of the strikes, as of 2:00pm on Friday "there [were] Black Friday strikers in at least 100 cities and protests in forty-six states." | |
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The Guardian
2012-11-25 06:49:00
Blaze broke out at the seven-storey factory on Saturday and firefighters recovered more than 100 bodies on Sunday morning At least 112 people have been killed in a fire that raced through a multi-storey garment factory just outside of Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka. The blaze broke out at the seven-storey factory operated by Tazreen Fashions late on Saturday. By Sunday morning, firefighters had recovered 100 bodies, fire department operations director major Mohammad Mahbub said. He said another 12 people who had suffered injuries after jumping from the building to escape the fire later died at hospitals. The death toll could rise as the search for victims was continuing, he said. | |
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Yahoo! Canada News
2012-11-24 00:00:00
Vancouver, British Columbia - The RCMP has issued its latest denial in a series of harassment lawsuits filed by female Mounties. The latest case involves Const. Karen Katz, who has launched two lawsuits - the first alleging harassment by one of her colleagues, and a second alleging widespread harassment and abuse throughout her career on the force. The RCMP already issued a statement of defence earlier this year denying the allegations in Katz's first lawsuit, which targeted Corp. Baldev (David) Singh Bamra, an officer who Katz worked with in the Vancouver area. Bamra has also denied all of her allegations. The Mounties filed a statement of defence last week in Katz's second lawsuit. In that suit, filed in July, Katz alleged she was harassed, bullied and sexually harassed by various colleagues and superiors from when she joined the force in 1988 until she went on medical leave for post-traumatic stress in 2009. The RCMP's statement of defence denies all of Katz's allegations and says the officer should have launched a formal grievance if she had concerns that needed to be addressed. "Many of the alleged acts of harassment, conflict and intimidation alleged (by Katz) were first brought to the RCMP's attention with the filing of this notice of claim," said the statement of defence, filed in B.C. Supreme Court. | |
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CBS News - Atlanta
2012-11-23 03:14:00
An Alabama lawmaker is again pushing legislation that would let employees take handguns to work. The Montgomery Advertiser reported Friday that state Sen. Roger Bedford, D-Russellville, said the bill is aimed at increasing personal safety. "I think it's necessary so people will have peace of mind when they're traveling to and from work," he said. A similar bill has been introduced twice before, but it failed despite support from the National Rifle Association. The Business Council of Alabama opposes the measure, said President Bill Canary. | |
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The Associated Press
2012-11-24 09:13:00
Paris - Protesters squatting in treetop tents and makeshift shelters are battling French riot police trying to expel them from the site of a planned airport in western France. Officers hurled tear gas projectiles and protesters responded with gas bombs and stones, as the two sides went head to head for a second day over a project that critics say will destroy woodland and cause pollution. Eight people were arrested Saturday and three were hurt in the fighting, according to the Sipa news agency. The issue has split the Socialist-led government of Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, which includes some Green Party members. Ayrault is the longtime mayor of the nearby city of Nantes and has championed the airport plan. | |
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| Secret History |
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Paul Woodward
War in Context 2012-11-25 00:42:00
The advent of writing is generally viewed in terms of its significance as a cultural advance - less attention is given to its political implications. Yet it looks like the most important function writing originally served was in the management of slavery and the regulation of society. The BBC's Sean Coughlan reports on efforts to understand proto-Elamite, the world's oldest undeciphered writing system, which was used in an area that is now in south-western Iran over 5,000 years ago. The script was imprinted in clay tablets.
If we think of writing as an observer's record-keeping we might imagine some kind of proto-historian assuming the task of creating these first tablets, yet their content as described above makes it clear that these texts had a purely utilitarian function - they were records for the ruling class. Indeed, the creation of writing was likely one of the necessary conditions that facilitated the development and expansion of ownership. | |
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The Times of India
2012-11-24 16:13:00
Rock sculptures dating back to between 4,000-7,000 BC have been found in a well-preserved condition in the forests near Kudopi village in Sindhudurg district of coastal Konkan region, an official said here Tuesday. There are more than 60 big and small images of Mother Goddess, birds and animals, found in a single location of around 20,000 square feet, considered one of the biggest such concentration anywhere in the country, Satish Lalit, leader of an expedition team which made the discovery last May, said. "Though similar carvings have been found in other parts of India, this is the first find on a red soil laterite plateau. These are petro-glyphs unlike the picto-graphs found in places like Amravati," Lalit, a member of Rock Art Society of India (RASI), said. With this significant historical find dating back to over 6,000 years from now, Sindhudurg district, around 490 km from Mumbai on the Maharashtra-Goa border, will be catapulted onto the global rock-art map. Last week (Nov 17) Lalit, who is also the media advisor to Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan, presented his findings before the RASI's 17th National Congress held in Badami, Karnataka. | |
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Agence France-Presse
2012-11-24 16:05:00
Italian archaeologists say they have discovered a cemetery that reveals complex funeral rites dating back more than 3,000 years in Pakistan's Swat valley, recently controlled by the Taliban. The Italian mission began digging in the 1950s at Udegram, a site of Buddhist treasures in Swat, the northwestern district formerly known as the Switzerland of Pakistan for its stunning mountains, valleys and rivers. Archaeologists were aware of a pre-Buddhist grave site in Udegram, but only recently discovered the collection of almost 30 graves, tightly clustered and partially overlapping. "Some graves had a stone wall, others were protected by walls and enclosures in beaten clay," Luca Maria Olivieri, head of the Italian mission, told AFP. "The cemetery... seems to have been used between the end of the second millennium BCE and the first half of the first millennium BCE," he added. Olivieri says the tombs point to the culture that predates the Buddhist Gandhara civilisation that took hold in northwest Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan from the first millennium BCE to the sixth century AD. | |
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| Science & Technology |
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Brian Shane
USA Today 2012-11-26 16:15:00
At schools in Pinellas County, Fla., students aren't paying for lunch with cash or a card, but with a wave of their hand over a palm scanner. "It's so quick that a child could be standing in line, call mom and say, 'I forgot my lunch money today.' She's by her computer, runs her card, and by the time the child is at the front of the line, it's already recorded," says Art Dunham, director of food services for Pinellas County Schools. Students take about four seconds to swipe and pay for lunch, Dunham says, and they're doing it with 99% accuracy. "We just love it. No one wants to go back," Dunham says. Palm-scanning technology is popping up nationwide as a bona fide biometric tracker of identities, and it appears poised to make the jump from schools and hospitals to other sectors of the economy including ATM usage and retail. It also has applications as a secure identifier for cloud computing. | |
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Clara Moskowitz
LiveScience 2012-11-25 17:11:00
Subatomic particles don't care if time moves forward or backward - it's all the same to them. But now physicists have found proof of one theorized exception to this rule. Usually, time is symmetrical for particles, meaning events happen the same way if time progresses forward or backward. For example, a video of two particles colliding and scattering off each other can be played forward or backward, and makes sense either way. (That's not the case for macroscopic objects in the real world. You can spill a glass of milk on the floor, but if time were to move backward, the milk can't pick itself up and fall back into the glass.) However, physicists thought there might be cases where time wasn't symmetrical for particles either - where certain events worked with time flowing in one direction and not the other. Now, for the first time, they've found proof of this phenomenon. Researchers working on the BaBar experiment, which ran from 1999 to 2008 at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, analyzed nearly 10 years of data from billions of particle collisions. They now report that certain types of particles change into one another much more often in one direction than they do in the reverse, confirming that some particle processes have a preferred direction in time. This is the first solid proof of time asymmetry for subatomic particles. | |
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Anthony Gucciardi
Natural Society 2012-11-26 02:12:00
The lead researcher behind the monumental study that linked Monsanto's GMOs and best-selling herbicide Roundup to tumor development and early death is now blowing the whistle on many corporate scientists who are not just close to Monsanto and profit-harvesting GMO crops - many of them actually have or are seeking their own GMO patents. These patents, of course, enable them to make bountiful amounts of cash. Other corporate scientists are on (or 'were' at one point) Monsanto's pay roll, including former Monsanto executive turned Deputy Commissioner for Foods at the FDA Michael R. Taylor. Dr. Gilles-Eric Séralini, a French scientists who has been under assault from Monsanto and pro-GMO scientists, was responsible for perhaps the largest awakening over the dangers of Monsanto's GMO foods that we have ever seen. Not only did the public begin to further recognize the existence and threat of GMOs thanks to his research, but numerous countries like Russia and others actually enacted a suspension on the import of genetically modified maize due to public health concerns. This, of course, upset the Monsanto-funded corporate scientists who proverbially 'unleashed the dogs' on Dr. Séralini. Even Monsanto released a comment, stating that the lifelong rat study wasn't sufficient to substantiate any real health concerns. The company itself, amazingly, only conducted a 90 day trial period for its GMOs before unleashing them on the public. | |
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Will Parker
Science Agogo 2012-11-25 20:28:00
By performing supercomputer simulations of the Universe, researchers have shown that the causal network representing the large-scale structure of space and time is a graph that shows remarkable similarity to other complex networks such as the Internet, as well as social and biological networks. A paper describing the simulations in the journal Nature's Scientific Reports speculates that some as-yet unknown fundamental laws might be at work. "By no means do we claim that the Universe is a global brain or a computer," said paper co-author Dmitri Krioukov, at the University of California, San Diego. "But the discovered equivalence between the growth of the Universe and complex networks strongly suggests that unexpectedly similar laws govern the dynamics of these very different complex systems." For the simulations, the researchers found a way to downscale the space-time network while preserving its vital properties, by proving mathematically that these properties do not depend on the network size in a certain range of parameters, such as the curvature and age of our Universe. | |
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Emma Woollacott
TG Daily 2012-11-25 16:39:00
A proposed new center at Cambridge University will examine technologies, from biotechnology to artificial intelligence, that could perhaps threaten the future of our species. "At some point, this century or next, we may well be facing one of the major shifts in human history - perhaps even cosmic history - when intelligence escapes the constraints of biology," says Huw Price, the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and one of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER)'s three founders. "Nature didn't anticipate us, and we in our turn shouldn't take [artificial general intelligence] AGI for granted. We need to take seriously the possibility that there might be a 'Pandora's box' moment with AGI that, if missed, could be disastrous." While there's little doubt that advances in engineering - from longer life to global networks - have brought great benefits to humanity, Price and his colleagues question whether the acceleration of human technologies will increase our chances of long-term survival - or do the opposite. | |
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The Physics arXiv Blog
MIT Technology Review 2011-10-17 07:29:00
A reanalysis of historical observations suggest Earth narrowly avoided an extinction event just over a hundred years ago. On 12th and 13th August 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation. José Bonilla counted some 450 objects, each surrounded by a kind of mist, passing across the face of the Sun. Bonilla published his account of this event in a French journal called L'Astronomie in 1886. Unable to account for the phenomenon, the editor of the journal suggested, rather incredulously, that it must have been caused by birds, insects or dust passing front of the Bonilla's telescope. (Since then, others have adopted Bonilla's observations as the first evidence of UFOs.) Today, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and a couple of pals, give a different interpretation. They think that Bonilla must have been seeing fragments of a comet that had recently broken up. This explains the 'misty' appearance of the pieces and why they were so close together. | |
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Carol Aloysius
The Nation, Sri Lanka 2012-11-24 13:43:00
Michael Crichton in his 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain deals with a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism that rapidly and fatally clots human blood. A military satellite designed to capture upper-atmosphere microorganisms upon reentering the Earth wreaks havoc in Piedmont, Arizona, where the satellite lands. This may not seem like the stuff sci-fi anymore, now with some leading scientists claiming that the microorganism found in 'red rain' in Sri Lanka is of extraterrestrial origin. Red rain which caused fear and panic in four different areas in the country namely, Monaragala, Polonnaruwa, Sewanagala and Manampitiya leaving red frost in the latter two districts, continue to baffle local scientists still studying samples of the freak showers. Similar showers of 'blood rain' were experienced in Kerala, South India during two consecutive months from July to September this year, spawning several scientific and non-scientific theories with regarding to its origin. So from where exactly does this mysterious rain originate? Is it from the earth whose natural elements we are familiar with having growing in these environments since the day we were born? Or from some extraterrestrial origins we are completely alien to? Was Sri Lanka's best known expatriate resident, Sir Arthur C Clarke was correct when he said that alien life existed wishing that he would live to see proof of this before his death? Are we at the brink of a close encounter with aliens, which has coincided with many other strange happenings occurring both here and in other parts of the world? For example the mysterious allergies in school children, the cause of which scientists are still trying to work out. Does the red rain have a cosmic ancestry - a hypothesis first trotted out by Godfrey Louis and Santhosh Kumar (of Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam) in a paper that won world recognition, which pointed to higher life forms including intelligent life? In a bid to allegedly prevent 'bio-scientific problems in the future' to quote a leading state paper, the Health Ministry is to dispatch six doctors to the affected areas. The same paper states that further studies by the Industrial Technology Institute and Nano Technology Institute also found the algae was harmless and had no impact on human health. | |
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As mentioned in my last post, Mars has two moons. Jupiter has... well, it's complicated. Galileo discovered the four big ones in 1609 - 1610. Today they're known as the Galilean Moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. It took 282 years for the next Jovian moon to be spotted, which is remarkable, because a lotwas discovered in the meantime (including the moons of Mars). That next-discovered moon was known as "Jupiter V" until 1975, when it got the name Amalthea. Many Jovian moons were discovered since then; the current count stands at 67. Two were discovered in 2010 and two more in 2011, so others probably remain to be found. The four Galilean moons are much, much bigger than all the others, which is why it took the others so long to be found. Comment: ...or, the others are relatively recent arrivals. The fact that moons continue to be discovered isn't the only complicating factor, however.Jupiter can capture asteroids or comets, turning them into moons. Actually, any planet can do that, but Jupiter's large mass makes it very good at capture. Most of Jupiter's small moons are thought to be captured asteroids (or captured asteroids that broke into pieces). | |
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| Earth Changes |
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Will Campbell
The Canadian Press 2012-11-26 13:52:00
Toronto - The Weather Network's top forecaster is advising Canadians to keep their winter mitts close and snow shovels even closer as he expects much of the country is in for a harsher blast of winter than it was dealt last year. "We'll get more winter this year than we did last year," said director of meteorology Chris Scott. And that means a return to more "typical" historic conditions of cold and snow gripping much of the country, he said. "If you think back on Christmas Day (2011) there were many major cities in the country that didn't have a lot of snow on the ground - and that was the theme for the winter." "The way things are shaping up right now we think there'll be more cold air to work with and as a result we think that some of these storm systems that track through will dump a bit more snow than they did last year," Scott said. | |
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Rik Sharma
At first glance these beautiful images from the Antarctic appear to show 50-ft tall waves that have been instantly frozen as they break. Some people have posted the pictures online, taken by scientist Tony Travouillon at Dumont D'Urville, with a description claiming they are a tsunami wave which was frozen. But although email chains and internet forums back this claim up, what is really pictured is the natural phenomenon of blue ice.Daily Mail 2012-11-26 12:55:00
These freezing blue towers were created when ice was compressed and the trapped air bubbles were squeezed out. During the summer the surface ice melts and new ice layers compress on top. The ice appears blue because when when light passes through thick ice, blue light is transmitted back out but red light is absorbed. Additional Images | |
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The Jordan Times
2012-11-25 17:24:00
Amman -- Some streets in Zarqa Governorate were submerged with rainwater on Sunday after a heavy downpour caused the formation of floods, according to authorities and town residents. Motorists abandoned their cars in the middle of the streets after rainwater inundated the vehicles, crippling traffic movement in the already-congested streets of Zarqa, 22km east of Amman, according to eyewitnesses. "The weather became suddenly cloudy and rain started pouring heavily at around 1:00pm. Ten minutes later, some of the streets turned into streams," town resident and taxi driver, Abu Haitham, told The Jordan Times. Authorities diverted traffic to different routes and waited for the floods to end before they started pumping out water from submerged streets and tunnels, he added. "The rain stopped less than an hour later, but the floods continued coming from higher areas. I have never seen this much rain in my life in Zarqa," the town resident said. Abu Rasoul, another resident of Zarqa, said that manholes in the streets were over-flooded with the heavy rain, noting that water flooded several shops, including his mini-market. "The last time I saw such heavy rain was in the 1970s," the 70-year-old man, said. | |
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Whitney McFerron
Winter wheat in the U.K., which had its wettest summer in a century this year, showed the worst-ever symptoms in the current season of fungal diseases fusarium ear blight and septoria tritici, CropMonitor said.Bloomberg 2012-11-20 00:00:00 There was a "marked increase" in ear blight, with 96 percent of field samples displaying symptoms, the crop-quality service said in a report e-mailed today. Some types of fusarium can result in yield losses or the development of mycotoxins, chemicals that can harm humans and animals, according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board. "Ear blight symptoms were recorded at the highest-ever levels since the survey began," said CropMonitor, which is run by government and industry groups. Some field samples also showed fusarium on plant stems and nodes, where leaves emerge from stems, according to the report. Septoria tritici, which also can cut yields, was the most common foliar disease, with 97 percent of crops affected, CropMonitor said. Brown rust was recorded on 17 percent of field samples and tan spot affected 14 percent of crops. Powdery mildew affected only 4 percent of crops, the lowest level ever recorded and down from last year's results showing 34 percent of crops were infected. |
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Steven Morris
The Guardian 2012-11-25 06:43:00
A 21-year-old woman was killed when a tree smashed into her tent while she was sleeping, as torrential rain and fierce winds continued to cause chaos in parts of the UK. Two men who are also believed to have been in the tent, near Exeter city centre, were injured when the large tree toppled into their shelter. It is not yet known why the three were in the tent. The government said on Sunday morning that almost 500 homes and businesses had been flooded, mainly in the south-west of England and the Midlands. Overnight four severe flood warnings - meaning lives are in danger - were issued for Cornwall, though by first light this had been reduced to two. Dozens of sections of roads in the west country, including the M5 and M50, were flooded . | |
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Tony Paterson
The Independent, UK 2012-11-24 16:20:00
Naturalists in Berlin have sighted a pack of wolves and their cubs just 15 miles south of the German capital for the first time in more than 100 years. The German office of the World Wildlife Fund said yesterday that farmers had alerted its field workers to the existence a wolf pack which appeared to have moved into a deserted former Soviet army military exercise area near the village of Sperenberg south of Berlin. Janosch Arnold, a WWF wolf expert, told Berlin's Die Tageszeitung that naturalists equipped with infra-red night vision cameras had filmed the animals in the area overnight. "There is definitely a wolf pack with cubs and they seem to be on top of the world," he said. | |
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Dan Stamm
NBC 10 - Philadelphia 2012-11-23 05:51:00
No reports of injuries from 2.1 magnitude quake centered in Clementon. New Jersey - A loud boom that shock homes in Camden County very early Friday was actually an earthquake. The U.S. Geological Survey reports that the 2.1 magnitude quake hit near Clementon, N.J. at 12:13 a.m. The epicenter was near W. Atlantic Avenue and Oak Lane -- a short distance from Clementon Park, according to the USGS. The whole floor just started shaking really hard, said MaryLou Gicker of nearby Sicklerville. Residents reported to NBC10 feeling the quake in nearby Pine Hill, Erial and Lindenwold --some calling and e-mailing the station to say they believe something may have exploded. "We went outside in the backyard we were looking in the sky to see if there were any fires," said Sicklerville's Bill Chalef. "We were listening for sirens going off to see if there was an accident or explosion." There was no explosion though, just the movement of the earth. There were no reports of injuries or damage from the 3.2-mile deep quake.
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Nathan Rao
The Express UK 2012-11-23 22:59:00
Britain's storms claimed their first victim last night as a man died after being trapped in his car by flood water and heavy rain The victim, was caught in Chew Stoke in Somerset as flood waters wedged his car under a bridge near a ford. Emergency services were called and the man was pronounced dead at the scene. Meanwhile Britain is braced for yet more devastating storms tomorrow, which are set to bring torrential rain and 100mph gales. The entire country is on flood alert with hurricane-force gusts likely to fell trees and damage buildings. Forecasters said flood-hit regions face further mayhem as a deep depression from the Continent roars in tomorrow morning. And parts of the country that have so far escaped the worst of the downpours face a battering with virtually everywhere on standby for lashing rain. | |
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| Fire in the Sky |
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lunarmeteoritehunters.
24 November 2012 - Brett Hankins Sonora, CA USA PST 5 seconds 9:05 N E
24 November 2012 - David Wright Fallon, NV, US 2100 Pacific time
24 November 2012 - Patty Howard Clovis, CA USA 9:05 PM Pacific
2012-11-24 00:00:00 |
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| Health & Wellness |
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Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post 2012-11-24 16:56:00
For drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, the 17-page article in the New England Journal of Medicine represented a coup. The 2006 report described a trial that compared three diabetes drugs and concluded that Avandia, the company's new drug, performed best. "We now have clear evidence from a large international study that the initial use of [Avandia] is more effective than standard therapies," a senior vice president of GlaxoSmithKline, Lawson Macartney, said in a news release. What only careful readers of the article would have gleaned is the extent of the financial connections between the drugmaker and the research. The trial had been funded by GlaxoSmithKline, and each of the 11 authors had received money from the company. Four were employees and held company stock. The other seven were academic experts who had received grants or consultant fees from the firm. | |
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Ellen Feely
3AW693, Australia 2012-11-25 21:04:00
The medical community has called for the anti-immunisation lobby to wind back its efforts after figures showed the number of parents refusing to vaccinate their children has increased six fold. The Academy of Science, supported by the Australian Medical Association, is today launching a 20-page booklet to explain the benefits of immunisation and try to debunk common myths. Neil Mitchell has said that in his non-expert view, the actions taken by parents who refuse to vaccinate their children is 'tantamount to child abuse'. President of the Australian Vaccination Network, Meryl Dorey told Neil Mitchell the government and media had worked to 'actively suppress' information regarding the risks immunisation posed, and said she supported people's right to make their own choice. "We believe that everyone has the right to make an informed decision about vaccination, and that includes having access to both sides of this issue," she said. "We absolutely oppose any form of compulsory vaccination." Ms Dorey said whooping cough vaccinations had reached their highest level, yet the number of reported cases of whooping cough had also reached a crescendo. "We have more whooping cough now than we had since before the vaccine was added to the mass vaccination schedule in 1953," she said. | |
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ScienceDaily
Johns Hopkins researchers have uncovered a protein "partner" commonly used by breast cancer cells to unlock genes needed for spreading the disease around the body. A report on the discovery, published November 5 on the website of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, details how some tumors get the tools they need to metastasize.2012-11-25 13:36:00 "We've identified a protein that wasn't known before to be involved in breast cancer progression," says Gregg Semenza, M.D., Ph.D., the C. Michael Armstrong Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the Vascular Program at Hopkins' Institute for Cell Engineering. "The protein JMJD2C is the key that opens up a whole suite of genes needed for tumors to grow and metastasize, so it represents a potential target for cancer drug development." Semenza and his colleagues made their finding when they traced the activity of HIF-1, a protein known to switch on hundreds of genes involved in development, red blood cell production, and metabolism in normal cells. Previous studies had shown that HIF-1 could also be hijacked to switch on genes needed to make breast tumors more malignant. |
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Anne Gordon, RN
GreenMedInfo 2012-11-25 05:00:00
It appears that food, air, water, power, pets, and your physiology, etc., are targets for control. Think about it. We have already unknowingly eaten GM food, been victims of toxicenvironmental disasters, un-leashed depleted uranium upon the earth, yet we sit on the sidelines watching total control unfold. Today we have diseases that did not exist in the past, with odd symptoms. Clever people name them something and they become a new normal 'abnormal'. For example,fibromyalgia, was not a popular diagnosis in the 60's, yet today, it is more common, than not. We see 'run away' morbid obesity, and people who become helpless pharmaceutical repositories obediently following their prescribed chemical path. Each in hopes to actualize their dreams of being healthy and happy again. For a few years, genetically modified mosquitoes have been released as experiments in the Cayman Islands, Malaysia, and Brazil. Today, that manufacturer of these GM insects want to release millions in Britain, but not just mosquitos. This company has been recently working on genetically modifying the diamond-back moth in addition to the already released mosquito. The large British corporation has been working on the GM insects designed to kill off pests feeding on cabbage, broccoli, tomatoes, fruit, and olives. This sort of insect manipulation is being sold as a 'green' alternative to spraying. (As if spraying would stop). The technology involves inserting a 'lethal' gene into male insects (to prevent the females from reproducing) which is passed on to offspring, such as caterpillars that die quickly....this theoretically boosts farm yields (profits). The original idea was that reduction of the mosquitoes could reduce Dengue fever to humans. | |
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Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D.
Psychology Today 2012-10-17 19:08:00
What's the unquenchable thirst for wealth all about? What connects the various addictions is that enough is never enough - not for long anyway. As addicts progress (or rather, regress) into their addiction, to derive sufficient gratification they must constantly seek more and more of their drug of choice. For "more" is the keyword of addiction. It doesn't matter whether they're addicted to a substance, relationship, or activity - the "ante" for getting enough of the object of their craving must continually be raised. But of all the things one might be addicted to, nothing tops the greed-laden pursuit of wealth in its audacity, manipulativeness, and gross insensitivity to the needs and feelings of others. Not to mention its extreme, short-sighted, irresponsible covetousness. Ask a multi-millionaire or billionaire so afflicted (if you can find one willing to talk to you!), and you'll discover that their "mega-fortune quest" really has no end point. They won't be able to name the definitive "millionth" or "billionth" that, finally, will do it for them. They can't because the means by which they reap their riches has itself become the end. Chasing every financial opportunity - and, it cannot be overemphasized, to the detriment of virtually everything else in their life - has become their be-all and end-all. For that, frankly, is where the dopamine is: the master molecule of pleasure and motivation. And the "end" for them is simply the high (or dopamine release) they receive each time they do a deal, turn a profit, or make a "killing." And just like other addicts, over time (because of the related phenomena of tolerance and dependency) they'll need to make bigger and bigger "killings" to get the ego gratification they require in order to feel good about themselves. | |
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Dan and Sheila Gendron
Activist Post 2012-11-23 18:46:00
First of all, let me say here that we are not offering medical advice. The information here is simply our opinion, based on our own research and experience. If you are wondering how it has been so easy for TPTB to have turned the overwhelming majority of American population into sheep who believe everything they are told and comply with outrageous demands and actions, it is partly because they have for decades been replacing our good, healthy, natural foods with foods laced with poisons. Why would anyone take pleasure in adulterating the food supply? Try this theory - if TPTB can make the masses believe that the cheap crap they get fed (butter substitutes from hydrogenated oils, sugar substitutes, flavor substitutes, etc.) is actually good food, then the less the peons need to have money and the more money is available for TPTB to harvest. The assault has been revved up in the recent past with MSGs (monosodium glutamates - of whatever name they call it, and there's a list a mile long), HFCS (high fructose corn syrup), Artificial Sweeteners, GMO (genetically modified organisms), Canola Oil, Hydrogenated Oils and emasculating Soy products among the worst, as well as fluoride in the water. | |
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Jim Morris
The Center for Public Integrity 2012-11-19 13:33:00
A new study exposes the high levels of breast cancer in women who work with chemicals that have entered our air and water. Windsor, Ontario - For more than three decades, workers, most of them women, have complained of dreadful conditions in many of this city's plastic automotive parts factories: Pungent fumes and dust that caused nosebleeds, headaches, nausea and dizziness. Blobs of smelly, smoldering plastic dumped directly onto the floor. "It was like hell," says one woman who still works in the industry. The women fretted, usually in private, about what seemed to be an excess of cancer and other diseases in the factories across the river from Detroit. "People were getting sick, but you never really thought about the plastic itself," said Gina DeSantis, who has worked at a plant near Windsor for 25 years. Now, workers like DeSantis are the focal point of a new study that appears to strengthen the tie between breast cancer and toxic exposures. | |
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Jennifer Yang
A new coronavirus from the same family as SARS has now infected six people in the Middle East, two of whom have died, the World Health Organization announced Friday.Toronto Star 2012-11-23 10:34:00 The UN health agency said four new cases have been confirmed, in addition to a previous patient from Saudi Arabia, who died in June, and another one from Qatar still undergoing treatment in the United Kingdom. Three of the new cases are Saudis - and two are family members who lived together, the WHO said in a news release. One died and the other is recovering. Two other relatives of that family have also shown the pneumonia-like symptoms of the novel coronavirus. One relative died but laboratory results have not yet confirmed whether he or she had the virus; the second relative is recovering and tested negative. The fourth of the new cases is a Qatari citizen, according to the WHO. On Friday, Germany's national health institute also announced a German clinic had been treating a Qatari patient with the novel coronavirus, who fell ill in October and was released this week. |
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| Science of the Spirit |
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Tia Ghose
LiveScience 2012-11-26 14:03:00
What is going on inside the heads of individuals in a coma has been steeped in mystery. Now, a new study finds coma patients have dramatically reorganized brain networks, a finding that could shed light on the mystery of consciousness. Compared with healthy patients in the study, high-traffic hubs of brain activity are dark in coma patients while more quiet regions spring to life. "Consciousness may depend on the anatomical location of these hubs in the human brain network," said study co-author Sophie Achard, a statistician at the French National Center for Scientific research in Grenoble. The findings have several important implications, said Indiana University neuroscientist Olaf Sporns, who was not involved in the study. "It gives us a handle on what may be different between healthy conscious people and people who have loss of consciousness," Sporns told LiveScience. "The traffic patterns have totally reorganized. And maybe it's the rerouting of the traffic patterns that underlies the loss of consciousness," or the mysterious ability to be self-aware that seems to set humans apart from other animals. In the future, the research could also help doctors determine which coma patients are likely to recover based on activity in high-traffic brain regions, he said. The research could potentially even suggest ways to stimulate the brains of patients in a coma to improve their outcome, he added. The study was published today (Nov. 26) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. | |
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Anna Mikulak
Association for Psychological Science 2012-11-20 15:27:00
Infants seem to develop at an astoundingly rapid pace, learning new things and acquiring new skills every day. And research suggests that the abilities that infants demonstrate early on can shape the development of skills later in life, in childhood and beyond. Read about the latest research on infant development published in the November 2012 issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. How Do You Learn to Walk? Thousands of Steps and Dozens of Falls per Day Karen E. Adolph, Whitney G. Cole, Meghana Komati, Jessie S. Garciaguirre, Daryaneh Badaly, Jesse M. Lingeman, Gladys L. Y. Chan, and Rachel B. Sotsky How do babies learn to walk? In this study, Adolph and colleagues recorded 15- to 60-minute videos of spontaneous activity from infants. They then coded the videos for the time infants spent walking and crawling, the number of crawling and walking steps infants took, and the number of falls infants experienced whether walking or crawling. The researchers found that the infants moved a tremendous amount and that new walkers moved faster than crawlers but had a similar number of falls at first and fewer as they became more experienced. This suggests that infants are motivated to begin walking because they move faster without falling more and that they dramatically improve their walking skills through immense amounts of practice. | |
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Linda Brooks
Radiological Society of North America 2012-11-25 14:22:00
Mental activities like reading and writing can preserve structural integrity in the brains of older people, according to a new study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). While previous research has shown an association between late-life cognitive activity and better mental acuity, the new study from Konstantinos Arfanakis, Ph.D., and colleagues from Rush University Medical Center and Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago studied what effect late-life cognitive activity might have on the brain's white matter, which is composed of nerve fibers, or axons, that transmit information throughout the brain. "Reading the newspaper, writing letters, visiting a library, attending a play or playing games, such as chess or checkers, are all simple activities that can contribute to a healthier brain," Dr. Arfanakis said. The researchers used a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method known as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to generate data on diffusion anisotropy, a measure of how water molecules move through the brain. In white matter, diffusion anisotropy exploits the fact that water moves more easily in a direction parallel to the brain's axons, and less easily perpendicular to the axons, because it is impeded by structures such as axonal membranes and myelin. "This difference in the diffusion rates along different directions increases diffusion anisotropy values," Dr. Arfanakis said. "Diffusion anisotropy is higher when more diffusion is happening in one direction compared to others." | |
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Leslie Kaufman
The New York Times 2012-11-25 13:28:00
For years Dr. Eben Alexander III had dismissed near-death revelations of God and heaven as explainable by the hard wiring of the human brain. He was, after all, a neurosurgeon with sophisticated medical training. But then in 2008 Dr. Alexander contracted bacterial meningitis. The deadly infection soaked his brain and sent him into a deep coma. During that week, as life slipped away, he now says, he was living intensely in his mind. He was reborn into a primitive mucky Jell-o-like substance and then guided by "a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and deep blue eyes" on the wings of a butterfly to an "immense void" that is both "pitch black" and "brimming with light" coming from an "orb" that interprets for an all-loving God. Dr. Alexander, 58, was so changed by the experience that he felt compelled to write a book, "Proof of Heaven," that recounts his experience. He knew full well that he was gambling his professional reputation by writing it, but his hope is that his expertise will be enough to persuade skeptics, particularly medical skeptics, as he used to be, to open their minds to an afterworld. Dr. Alexander acknowledged that tales of near-death experiences that reveal a bright light leading to compassionate world beyond are as old as time and by now seem trite. He is aware that his version of heaven is even more psychedelic than most - the butterflies, he explained, were not his choice, and anyway that was his "gateway" and not heaven itself. Still, he said, he has a trump card: Having trained at Duke University and taught and practiced as a surgeon at Harvard, he knows brain science as well as anyone. And science, he said, cannot explain his experience. "During my coma my brain wasn't working improperly," he writes in his book. "It wasn't working at all." | |
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| High Strangeness |
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Austrian Times
2012-11-24 11:00:00
Sales of garlic are booming in western Serbia after the local council issued a public health warning that a vampire was on the loose. The warning came after an old ruined mill said to once have been the home of the country's most famous monster in the form of vampire Sava Savanovic collapsed. Sava Savanovic was said to have lived in the old watermill on the Rogacica river, at Zarozje village in the municipality of Bajina Basta where he drank the blood of anybody that came to mill their grain. The watermill was bought by the local Jagodic family, and they were too scared to use it as a mill - but discovered it was a goldmine when they started advertising for tourists to come and visit it - always during the day. But the family were worried about carrying out building work on the mill because they were scared they might disturb the vampire or unleash his wrath if his home was messed around with - and now the property has collapsed through lack of repair. But for locals it has sparked rumours that the vampire is now free once again. | |
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| Don't Panic! Lighten Up! |
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Ben Weitzenkorn
TechNewsDaily 2012-11-26 15:00:00
When we "laugh out loud" online, are we really praying to Satan, the prince of darkness himself? The answer is no, but an image posted by a user on the social news site Reddit is warning the Internet otherwise. According to the directive, which is meant to be shared "with Christians," the classic and ubiquitous "LOL" acronym stands for "Lucifer our lord," something the image's creator doesn't find funny at all. "BEWARE: Stop using the abbreviation 'LOL,'" the hastily made image that invokes the same qualities as a Westboro Baptist Church sign reads. "'LOL stands for 'Lucifer our Lord.' Satanists end their prayers by saying Lucifer our Lord,' in short, "LOL.' Every time you type 'LOL' you are endorsing Satan." If the warning, posted by Redditor DkryptX, in the "atheism" subreddit, were true, there would be a lot of Satanists on Twitter. | |
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John Viall
Addiction Info Org 2012-11-24 00:19:00
If you missed the story because you were too busy watching American Idol or Two Broke Girls to tune in to the Christian Broadcasting Network, Reverend Pat Robertson has been doing a little soul-searching since Election Day. Or, perhaps, he's going to an audiologist to have his hearing checked carefully. After assuring his gullible - no, we meant to say "loyal" - listeners during broadcasts of the 700 Club that Mitt Romney was going to win the presidency, because God kind of told him so, Robertson is now doing some theological backpedaling. The good Reverend was all but sure God was telling him Mitt was going to win. (Not to mention what Sean Hannity and all the experts on Fox News were saying.) Robertson simply misunderstood. God, that is. Not Hannity. He listened to God and mixed up His message. Earlier this year the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network informed his audience (please, don't forget to send in hefty donations) that he had spent a week listening carefully to what God was telling him. God was pretty specific, too. Robertson took notes. "Your president holds a radical view of the direction of your country which is at odds with the majority. Expect chaos and paralysis," Robertson said the Lord had warned. Robertson got it all down on a yellow legal pad. Worse yet, the United States would soon "begin disintegrating." The nation would face the gravest crisis since at least 1960, when CBN was founded. Robertson decided to play 20 Questions with the Almighty. Would it be some kind of cosmic event? "No," sayeth the Lord. An attack by Iran? "Nope," sayeth the Lord. Would the Mayans end up being correct? "No way, José," sayeth the Lord. How about a volcano? "Noooooooooooooooo," sayeth the Lord, in His imitation Mr. Bill voice. (Maybe the Lord, Who is a Big Fan of old Saturday Night Live shows, was messing with Reverend Pat.) |
