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| Puppet Masters |
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Lucas Powers
Three-country tour meant to entice African trading partners away from ChinaCBC News 2013-07-02 05:10:00
When U.S. President Barack Obama wraps up an African tour today, it will mark the end of what some international development experts say is an attempt tocounter China's growing influence throughout sub-Saharan Africa and assert American economic dominance on the continent. China surpassed the U.S. in total trade in sub-Saharan Africa in 2009, but its increasingly strong economic ties took root in 2000, when then-Chinese president Hu Jintao hosted representatives from 44 African nations in Beijing to establish the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation. That meeting "set a mandate for China to become Africa's largest trading partner," says Richard Poplak, a Johannesburg-based Canadian author and journalist writing a book about China's growing role in Africa. | |
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Annysa Johnson
JSonline.com 2013-07-02 07:54:00
Four years before the Archdiocese of Milwaukee filed for bankruptcy, then-Archbishop Timothy Dolan sought Vatican approval to move nearly $57 million in cemetery funds off the archdiocese's books and into a trust to help protect them "from any legal claim or liability," according to documents made public Monday. | |
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| Society's Child |
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Naomi Wolf
New York - Around the world, people's understanding of why rape happens usually takes one of two forms. Either it is like lightning, striking some unlucky woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time (an isolated, mysterious event, caused by some individual man's sudden psychopathology), or it is "explained" by some seductive transgression by the victim (the wrong dress, a misplaced smile).Project Syndicate 2013-06-30 21:54:00 But the idea of a "rape culture" - a concept formulated by feminists in the 1970's as they developed the study of sexual violence - has hardly made a dent in mainstream consciousness. The notion that there are systems, institutions, and attitudes that are more likely to encourage rape and protect rapists is still marginal to most people, if they have encountered it at all. That is a shame, because there have been numerous recent illustrations of the tragic implications of rape culture. Reports of widespread sexual violence in India, South Africa, and recently Brazil have finally triggered a long-overdue, more systemic examination of how those societies may be fostering rape, not as a distant possibility in women's lives, but as an ever-present, life-altering, daily source of terror. The latest "rape culture" to be exposed - in recent documentaries, lawsuits, and legislative hearings - is embedded within the United States military. As The Guardian reported in 2011, women soldiers in Iraq faced a higher likelihood of being sexually assaulted by a colleague than they did of dying by enemy fire. So pervasive is the sexual violence aimed at American women soldiers that a group of veterans sued the Pentagon, hoping to spur change. Twenty-five women and three men claimed that they had endured sexual assaults while serving, and lay the blame at the feet of former US Defense Secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates. The reason, the lawsuit claims, is that these men oversaw an institutional culture that punished those who reported the assaults, while refusing to punish the attackers. |
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| Secret History |
Newly declassified French military documents have revealed that nuclear tests at Mururoa Atoll were far more deadly than has previously been admitted with plutonium fallout at much higher levels and over wider areas. The documents cover the 46 atmospheric nuclear tests conducted at Mururoa and Fangataufa in French Polynesia between 1966 and 1974 and reveal that warships near the tests were hit by higher levels of radioactivity than known. A New Zealand Labour Government in 1974 sent two warships, HMNZS Canterbury and HMNZS Otago, to monitor the Mururoa tests. It was not believed, at the time, that they may have received nuclear dusting but these new documents reveal there were much higher levels of radiation than were known. A 1974 test, code named Centaur, dumped 500 times the maximum allowed level of plutonium fallout on Tahiti, 1250 kilometres away, the documents show. There were also 140 more incidents of nuclear fallout above the 209 incidents already known. Tahiti, home to around 178,000 people, was hit 37 times by fallout. Radiation levels frequently rose in New Zealand 4700 kilometres away following each test. Opposition to the testing was a key political issue in New Zealand, not only prompting the despatching of warships, but also a successful International Court of Justice case against France. In 1985 French secret agents sank a Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, as it was preparing to leave Auckland for Mururoa. One man was killed. Today in French Polynesia the 47th anniversary of the first nuclear test at Mururoa (a plutonium fission bomb code-named Aldebaran) is being marked. | |
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| Science & Technology |
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Ken Croswell
ScienceNow 2013-07-02 13:37:00
A few months ago, when William Shatner, the actor who played Star Trek's Captain Kirk, heard that scientists were asking people to vote on names for Pluto's fourth and fifth moons, he lobbied that one satellite be called Vulcan, the home planet of Mr. Spock - and the name came out on top, far surpassing all others in the voting. Today, however, scientists announced that the moons will instead bear names that better reflect Pluto's role in mythology as the god of the underworld. One satellite will be christened Kerberos, for Pluto's three-headed dog, and the other Styx, for the river dividing the world of the living from the underworld. Kerberos is the Greek name for Cerberus, which placed number two in the voting, while Styx came in third. Why not Vulcan? Astronomers once used that name for what turned out to be a nonexistent planet inside Mercury's orbit, and its connection to the mythological Pluto was tenuous; so rejecting the name was - as Mr. Spock might say - the logical thing to do. | |
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Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today 2013-07-02 14:31:00
The Hubble Space Telescope team has released a video of Comet ISON is tearing toward its encounter with the Sun, zooming at 77,250 km/h (48,000 miles per hour). The comet's motion is captured in a timelapse movie, below, made from a sequence of pictures taken May 8, 2013. On that date, the comet was 650 million km (403 million miles) from Earth, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. This sungrazing comet will comes closest to the Sun in November 2013, and thedebate is on whether it will dazzle the skies and be visible in the daytime or fizzle out due to its close proximity to the Sun. The movie shows a sequence of Hubble observations taken over a 43-minute span, compressed into five seconds. In that 43 minutes, the comet traveled about 55,000 km (34,000 miles). ISON streaks silently against the background stars. Source: HubbleSite | |
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| Earth Changes |
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The Canberra Times
2013-07-01 15:14:00
Butterflies are the essence of cool in the insect world, a favorite muse for poets and songwriters who hold them up as symbols of love, beauty, transformation and good fortune. But providing good fortune apparently goes only one way. As humans rip apart woods and meadows for housing developments and insecticide-soaked lawns, butterflies across the US are disappearing. The US Fish and Wildlife Service recently announced that two brown, moth-like butterfly subspecies are likely extinct in south Florida, which some entomologists say is ground zero for the number of butterfly species on the verge of annihilation. The rockland grass skipper went missing in 1999, and the Zestos skipper hasn't been seen since 2004. Several other species, such as the ebony-and-ivory-colored Schaus swallowtail, are listed as endangered, and many others are threatened, including the silvery Bartram's hairstreak. "We look at it as a signal that we've got a serious problem with butterflies and other insects and pollinators here in Florida," said Larry Williams, a supervisor for the ecological services program at Fish and Wildlife. "We're looking at this as sort of a wake-up call that we need to be watching butterflies more closely." At least one species of butterfly has vanished from the United States, along with the two subspecies in Florida. Seventeen species and subspecies are listed as endangered nationwide, and two are listed as threatened. | |
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The Extinction Protocol
2013-07-02 12:45:00
An earthquake of preliminary magnitude 3.6 struck early yesterday, beneath Lake Erie, just outside of Cleveland, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The temblor's epicenter was 4 miles (6 km) northwest of Fairport Harbor, Ohio. It originated 3.7 miles (6 km) deep and struck at 3:48 a.m. local time (07:48 UTC), the USGS reports. Some light shaking was felt in coastal towns just northeast of Cleveland, but no damages were reported, according to The Columbus Dispatch. Damaging earthquakes are rare in the region. The largest temblor on record in the Northeast Ohio seismic zone struck in 1986 with a magnitude of 4.8, according to the USGS. That quake, which caused minor property damage and a few injuries, was felt over a wide area from Illinois to New York. In Ohio, Lake County officials received multiple calls. "I heard a gigantic explosion, and it rumbled entire house," one caller said. "I'm sorry; I'm like shaking so bad right now," she went on. The quake was felt in places like Perry, and Fairport Harbor. Even Eileen Steele of Mentor heard the pictures on her walls shake. "It was pretty significant, like an explosion had gone off far away and you kind of feel the rumble from it," said Steele. "This was different. The bed shook," she said. All of her animals were alert and scared too, especially her dog. According to the United States Geological Survey, this was a 3+ magnitude earthquake. Even At the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, this seismograph machine picked up the activity at 3:49 a.m. The machine is part of the museum's Earthquake Zone display, which is full of information about the natural disasters. But the kind of shaking and rumbling some Lake County residents felt, is something they don't want to experience again. "It was scary," Steele said. - Live Science , Fox8 USGS data | |
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GlobalPost.com
A powerful 6.1 magnitude earthquake hit Indonesia's northwestern Aceh province, on the island of Sumatra. Dozens have been reported injured. The epicenter of the quake was roughly 55 kilometers from the town of Bireuen, a regency of the larger Aceh province, and took place at 7:37 AM local timeaccording to data from the US Geological Survey. 2013-07-02 12:28:00 Although it's unknown how many were injured, Sky News estimates"at least 50 people," and numerous buildings have collapsed as an effect of the powerful tremblor. The quake appears to have shaken the provincial capital of Banda Aceh, which is located at the northern tip of the Sumatran land mass. "I see many houses were damaged and their roofs fell onto some people," said central Aceh district resident Bensu Elianita to the Associated Press. "Many people were injured but it is difficult to evacuate them due to traffic jams."
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wildlifeextra.com
New crow and spectacular tree creeper amongst new discoveries2013-06-30 12:11:00
Since the second half of the nineteenth century Brazilian ornithology has not made a significant contribution to enlarging the knowledge of Brazilian biodiversity, but that is about to change in a major way. 15 new species! 15 new species of birds from the Brazilian Amazon will be formally described for the first time in a number of scientific articles published in July, and will also appear in a special volume of the Handbook of the birds of the world. The authors of the descriptions belong to three national research institutions-the Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo (MZ-USP), Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (Inpa), Manaus, and Emí-lio Goeldi Paraense Museum (MPEG), Belém - and to the Museum of Natural Science at the State University of the Louisiania (LSUMNS), United States. Not since1871, when Austrian August von Pelzeln described 40 new species, have so many new birds from Brazil been described simultaneously. | |
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It's a weird, lopsided fight if ever there was one: seagulls divebombing to attack and feed on the fat of 50-ton whales and their babies. And the birds are winning. The battle, new in recent years, is playing out in the South Atlantic off the coast of Argentina's Patagonia region, and is not known to be happening in waters elsewhere in the world that are home to the mighty mammals. The effect of all the relentless nibbling is a pernicious disruption of an eco-system. One theory as to why it is happening there is an overpopulation of seagulls -- in this case, the kelp gull. Whales use these Argentine waters to mate, give birth and nurse their young, and what with all the airborne harassment, whales are taking new evasive measures as they swim, separating mothers from their calves and denying them nourishment. Whales do not have lips for sucking, so mothers expel a thick milk in the water for their calves to ingest. The babies need more than 100 litres of it per day. "With each attack this process is interrupted, and it is a crucial moment for the growth of the whales," said Mariano Sironi, director of studies at Argentina's Institute for Whale Conservation. | |
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US Geological Survey
2013-07-02 03:20:00
Event Time 2013-07-02 07:37:02 UTC 2013-07-02 14:37:02 UTC+07:00 at epicenter Location 4.698°N 96.687°E depth=10.0km (6.2mi) Nearby Cities 55km (34mi) S of Bireun, Indonesia 72km (45mi) SE of Reuleuet, Indonesia 74km (46mi) SW of Lhokseumawe, Indonesia 87km (54mi) NE of Meulaboh, Indonesia 581km (361mi) WNW of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Technical Details | |
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| Fire in the Sky |
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| Health & Wellness |
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Lindsey Archibald
All three wardens walked away from the job at Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow in just one week after being intimidated and verbally abused by smokers outside the building. Daily Record, UK 2013-07-02 06:11:00
Three wardens hired to stop people smoking outside hospitals have quit in disgust over the levels of verbal abuse. All three walked away just days after starting the £12,000-a-year job, blaming intimidation from smokers. The wardens were hired as part of an NHS drive to stop people flouting no smoking rules outside hospitals. It was hoped they would encourage people to stop lighting up as doctors have warned the fog of smoke at hospital doors could harm the health of visitors and patients. The three wardens began work last week at Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow, which is also home to the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre. But they quit within days, citing unbearable intimidation and verbal abuse from people they caught smoking in the grounds. NHS Glasgow and Clyde rolled out the scheme at 11 hospitals, employing 17 full-time wardens. The scheme has seen them rebrand hospital entrances with red warning signs and giant no smoking zones. | |
Comment: "Smoke from cigarettes can get into the hospital and harm patients."
Insanity! Smoking is healthier than fascism. No wonder these anti-smoking police were run out of town! Fewer and fewer people smoke, and fewer and fewer people are exposed to tobacco smoke, yet the hospitals continue to fill up with more and more sick people... coincidence? | |
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Sam Wong
Imperial College 2013-07-01 14:28:00
Long-term cannabis users tend to produce less dopamine, a chemical in the brain linked to motivation, a study has found. Researchers found that dopamine levels in a part of the brain called the striatum were lower in people who smoke more cannabis and those who began taking the drug at a younger age. They suggest this finding could explain why some cannabis users appear to lack motivation to work or pursue their normal interests. The study, by scientists at Imperial College London, UCL and King's College London, was funded by the Medical Research Council and published in the journal Biological Psychiatry. | |
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Rachael Rettner
LiveScience 2013-07-02 11:47:00
The percentage of U.S. women overdosing on prescription painkillers has increased sharply in recent years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Between 1999 and 2010, the proportion of deaths from painkiller overdose increased 400 percent among women, while rising 265 percent among men. "Prescription painkiller deaths have skyrocketed in women," Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the CDC, said at a news conference today (July 2). "Mothers, wives, sisters and daughters are dying of overdoses at rates we have never seen before," Frieden said. While men remain more likely to die of a prescription painkiller overdose, deaths among women have increased at a higher rate, and are catching up to those of men, Frieden said. In 2010, more than 6,600 women died from prescription painkiller overdose, which is four times the number of women who died from cocaine and heroin overdoses combined, the CDC says. Most of these deaths are accidental. The death rate was highest among women ages 45 to 54. There were also more than 200,000 emergency department visits for opioid abuse among women in that year. | |
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Cody Mooneyhan
New research in The FASEB Journal suggests that fish oil DHA is used to create Maresins, which cause macrophages to 'turn off' inflammation.Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology 2013-07-01 14:03:00 Chronic inflammation is a major factor in a wide range of problems from arthritis to cardiovascular disease, and DHA (found in fish oil) is known to temper this problem. A new research report appearing in the July 2013 issue of The FASEB Journal, helps explain why DHA is important in reducing inflammation, and provides an important lead to finding new drugs that will help bring people back to optimal health. Specifically, researchers found that macrophages (a type of white blood cell) use DHA to produce "maresins," which serve as the "switch" that turns inflammation off and switches on resolution. "We hope that the results from this study will enable investigators to test the relevance of the maresin pathway in human disease," said Charles N. Serhan, Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass. "Moreover, we hope to better understand resolution biology and its potential pharmacology so that we can enhance our ability to control unwanted inflammation and improve the quality of life." |
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Prevent Disease
2013-07-01 21:23:00
The transparency campaign initiated by McDonald's last year was intended at marketing a more health conscious image of McDonald's Corp. - and at using social media more effectively, but instead of talking about their love for the brand, the hashtag became a forum for people to talk about how disgusting they believe the food is. The ingredients in their french fries went viral. Instead of the basic two ingredients-potatoes and oil, consumers found out McDonald's french fries contain 17 ingredients. The campaign isn't brand new. Launched by McDonalds last June using a YouTube video to answer a consumer's question about why their food looks so drastically different in commercials than in the restaurant, the "Our Food, Your Questions" premise opened McDonalds' kitchen doors, lending the brand to a supposed more honest and transparent feel. By prompting consumers to ask their questions on Facebook or Twitter, McDonalds hoped to build trust and credibility in a marketplace where bad press has followed them in the form of viral videos and unappetizing images. McDonald's eventually began disclosing the secret behind how the fast food chain's fries are made. They produced a video answering a series of questions about McDonald's fries: where the potatoes come from, how they are processed, what kind of oil they're fried in, and why there is so much salt on them. | |
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| Science of the Spirit |
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Ulrike Lippe
A new study shows an increase in humorous creativity when individuals are primed with thoughts of death.Versita 2013-07-02 11:29:00 Humor is an intrinsic part of human experience. It plays a role in every aspect of human existence, from day-to-day conversation to television shows. Yet little research has been conducted to date on the psychological function of humor. In human psychology, awareness of the impermanence of life is just as prevalent as humor. According to the Terror Management Theory, knowledge of one's own impermanence creates potentially disruptive existential anxiety, which the individual brings under control with two coping mechanisms, or anxiety buffers: rigid adherence to dominant cultural values, and self-esteem bolstering. A new article by Christopher R. Long of Ouachita Baptist University and Dara Greenwood of Vassar College is titled Joking in the Face of Death: A Terror Management Approach to Humor Production. Appearing in the journal HUMOR, it documents research on whether the activation of thoughts concerning death influences one's ability to creatively generate humor. As humor is useful on a fundamental level for a variety of purposes, including psychological defense against anxiety, the authors hypothesized that the activation of thoughts concerning death could facilitate the production of humor. |
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| High Strangeness |
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Silvia Stanciu
Policymic 2013-07-02 14:57:00
July 2 marks World UFO Day, and for those of you who grew up with Earth Versus the Flying Saucers, Close Encounters Of the Third Kind, and even The X-Files, it is time to go down memory lane and celebrate those unrealistic special effects and their apropos approach to extra-terrestrial life. You almost believed that that UFO's were real. Whoever didn't shed a tear for a small, harrowing creature who wanted to "phone home" should throw the first stone. Whether you're a proud proponent or slandering skeptic, please see below nine of the most famous and controversial UFO and alien-related sightings in history. | |
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Dana Matthews
WhoForted? 2013-07-02 14:52:00
It appears that the Vampire Beast of North Carolina, a monster blamed for dozens of blood-drained animal corpses, is back on the prowl and hungrier than ever. In 1953 the Bladenboro Newspaper covered a story about a strange creature that had blamed for the deaths of numerous dogs, draining them of their blood. Local eyewitnesses who spotted the beast claimed it possessed the body of a bear, the head of a cat, and that when it opened its mouth to growl it made the sound of a woman screaming. The original newspaper article stirred up quite a bit of controversy, so much, in fact, that groups of farmers from neighboring towns came to Bladenboro to hunt and kill the creature. They never did track the beast down, and fortunately for them, the killings eventually stopped on their own. The bizarre animal exsanguination began again in 2003, only this time it seemed the creature had broadened his horizons and was now killing in a 150-miles radius beyond Bladenboro. During its second blood-run, the Vampire Beast of North Carolina was managing to slay even the bulkiest of Pit Bulls with ease and many Bladenboro residents claimed to have found strange tracks around their dead pets that even wildlife biologists couldn't explain. And then, much like in 1953, the killings stopped just as quickly as they began. Until last month, that is.. | |
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Adolfo Arranz
July 2, 2013 is World UFO Day, where like-minded people would celebrate the unidentified flying object (UFO) phenomenon. Whether you are a believer or a naysayer, it is undeniable how much impact these "flying saucers" have on shaping post-Cold War culture.South China Morning Post 2013-07-02 14:49:00 |
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Galien Report
2012-02-12 11:29:00
The study of UFOs, for the most part, is concomitant with the alleged presence of intelligent alien life visiting planet Earth. Ever since the late 1940s, when strange and highly-advanced aircraft began to appear that was unrecognizable to a majority of our military institutions in countries around the world, members of the scientific community and intelligence agencies that were bold enough to embrace the serious study of such as-yet unexplained phenomena were forced, partially for lack of any justifiable proof to the contrary, to consider whether some of the UFOs being witnessed might actually represent alien intelligence from other worlds. Probability, on the other hand, would likely favor a terrestrial origin for the majority of our unexplained aerial phenomenon that remains unaccounted for in any official capacity. After all, while the possibility of alien life does exist, the lack of any physical evidence for this forces those of us bound to the often harsh scrutiny of scientific methodology to accept that in the lack of any such evidence, this may not be the likeliest solution to the UFO problem. | |
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Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince
New Dawn Magazine 2012-02-11 00:00:00
In the 1970s, when we first became fascinated by the UFO phenomenon, opinion among researchers was divided between two views: the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) - UFOs are spacecraft from other worlds; and the 'Magonian Hypothesis' (after the 1970 book by the intelligent Ufologists' hero Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia). Pro-Magonians believe something from Earth is behind UFOs, a race of tricksters that surface from time to time as alleged angels, visions of the Virgin, demons, fairies - and now, space-travelling aliens? They've just updated their image. The theory acknowledges the close parallels between alien encounters and experiences with non-human entities that litter the annals of folklore. But it also recognises the often-reported absurdity and pointlessness - the 'high strangeness' - which challenge the simplistic notion of UFOs as technological craft crewed by biological entities. It was this Monty Pythonesque quality that led investigator John A. Keel to develop his 'ultraterrestrial' hypothesis - the aliens are visitors from another plane of existence - outlined in the 1973 classic UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse. | |
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Stasia Bliss
The Guardian Express 2013-07-01 23:28:00
Sunday, June 30, 2013 a brand new crop circle appeared in Robella, Italy. It appears to be the third in a sequence of stars which began in June of 2010 - all in Northern Italy. The star in June 2010 was six-pointed, in June of 2011 a seven pointed star appeared, and now this eight pointed star - all of them seem to contain what looks like a binary code. Near Asti, at the foot of Robella (just over 500 inhabitants) is located by Sunday morning a new and interesting crop circle. At first glance the dimensions seem relevant, and good workmanship. Very soon the community of the circles will certainly searching for the symbolic meaning of those shapes, and then we will give account - for example - of the meaning of those points within a triangle perimeter of the crop circle, the work of artists and certainly not pranksters or newbies (nor even aliens). As you can see from the video below, some have calculated out the code within the star yesterday to represent elements on the periodic chart: Potassium, Hydrogen, Deuterium and Sulfur. If this is correct, what are the implications of this code? We can look at the basic information known about these elements and then play detective - seeing what might come out of the simple act of looking. | |
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| Don't Panic! Lighten Up! |
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