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Spencer Ackerman
The Guardian, UK 2014-04-23 16:37:00
Naveed Shinwari hasn't seen his wife in 26 months. He suspects it's because he refused to become an informant for the FBI. In February 2012 Shinwari, who has lived in the US since he was 14, flew to Afghanistan to get married. He says that before he could get home to Omaha, Nebraska, he was twice detained and questioned by FBI agents who wanted to know if he knew anything about national security threats. A third FBI visit followed when he got home. The following month, after Shinwari bought another plane ticket for a temporary job in Connecticut, he couldn't get a boarding pass. Police told him he had been placed on the US no-fly list, although he had never in his life been accused of breaking any law. Another FBI visit soon followed, with agents wanting to know about the "local Omaha community, did I know anyone who's a threat", he says. "I'm just very frustrated, [and I said] what can I do to clear my name?" recalls Shinwari, 30. "And that's where it was mentioned to me: you help us, we help you. We know you don't have a job; we'll give you money." Shinwari is one of four American Muslims in a new lawsuit who accuse the FBI of placing them on the no-fly list, either to intimidate them into becoming informants or to retaliate against them for declining. Filed on Tuesday night in the US district court for the southern district of New York, the case accuses the US attorney general, Eric Holder, the FBI director, James Comey, the homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson, and two dozen FBI agents of creating an atmosphere in which Muslims who are not accused of wrongdoing are forbidden from flying, apparently as leverage to get them snitching on their communities. | |
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End the Lie
2014-04-23 16:31:00
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department secretly used a civilian aircraft to monitor the 10-square-mile area of Compton in 2012, recording high-resolution video of all that happened n the region. "We literally watched all of Compton during the times that we were flying, so we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see people," said Ross McNutt of Persistent Surveillance Systems, according to The Atlantic. This type of surveillance, which was used to find suspected bombers in Iraq and Afghanistan, allows police to zoom into recordings Google Earth-style. The technology can stay in the air for six hours and is being marketed to police departments across the United States, allowing police to rewind recordings to watch areas they couldn't monitor in real time. Sgt. Douglas Iketani of the L.A. County Sheriff's Department openly compared the secret test to Big Brother, though apparently it didn't make him stop short of using it. "This system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public," Iketani said to the Center for Investigative Reporting. "A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so to mitigate those kinds of complaints we basically kept it pretty hush hush." | |
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Zachary Keck
The Diplomat 2014-04-22 00:00:00
On Friday Russia's parliament voted to write off roughly 90 percent of North Korea's debt as Moscow seeks to build a gas pipeline through the Hermit Kingdom. This weekend Reuters reported that Russia's Duma voted to write off roughly $10 billion worth of the debt that North Korea owes Moscow from the days of the Soviet Union. The vote ratified an agreement made in September 2012, after a meeting between then-President Dmitry Medvedev and then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in Siberia in the summer of 2011. At the time the agreement was first announced, The Guardian reported, citing Russia's Finance Minister Sergei Storchak, that Moscow would forgive "90% of the debt and reinvest $1bn as part of a debt-for-aid plan to develop energy, health care and educational projects in North Korea." Russian experts hailed the agreement as a sign that North Korea's leadership was looking to initiate market style reforms in the reclusive country. | |
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Michael T. Snyder
The Truth Wins 2014-04-23 16:22:00
Why is the federal government so obsessed with grabbing more land? After all, the federal government already owns more than 40 percent of the land in 9 different U.S. states. Why are federal bureaucrats so determined to grab even more? Well, the truth is that this all becomes much clearer once you understand that there is a very twisted philosophy behind what they are doing. It is commonly known as "Agenda 21″, although many names and labels are used for this particular philosophy. Basically, those that hold to this form of radical environmentalism believe that humanity is utterly destroying the planet, and therefore the goal should be to create a world where literally everything that we do is tightly monitored and controlled by control freak bureaucrats in the name of "sustainable development". In their vision of the future, the human population will be greatly reduced and human activity will be limited to strictly regulated urban areas and travel corridors. The rest of the planet will be left to nature. To achieve this goal, a massive transfer of land from private landowners to the federal government will be necessary. So the conflict between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the BLM is really just the tip of the iceberg. The reality is that the BLM has their eyes on much bigger prizes. | |
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RT
2014-04-23 12:55:00
The US is to blame for the events in Ukraine as it invested $5 billion in regime change in the country, taking a more radical stance that its EU allies, Vitaly Churkin, Russia's envoy to the UN, said. "It seems it was the Americans, who tried to push through the most radical scenario,"Churkin said in an interview with Rossiya 24 channel. "They didn't want any sort of compromise between [ousted President Viktor] Yanukovich and the opposition. And, I think, they came to the conclusion that it was time to cash in those $5 billion and handle the matter towards abrupt regime change, which, eventually, happened." This explains why the US, but not the European Union, took center stage when the coup resulted in legal vacuum in Kiev, he added. US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland told CNN on Monday that Washington has invested around $5 billion into supporting democracy in Ukraine since the fall of Soviet Union. But Churkin has doubts about Nuland's claims, saying that "any sane person would, at least, say that those investments didn't pay off." "If those $5 billion were spent on support of democracy, but not overthrow of the existing government and regime change, then no democracy has triumphed there [in Ukraine]," he explained. | |
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Bankers are often the driving force behind war. After all, the banking system is founded upon the counter-intuitive but indisputable fact that banks create loans first, and then create deposits later. In other words, virtually all money is actually created as debt. For example, in a hearing held on September 30, 1941 in the House Committee on Banking and Currency, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve (Mariner S. Eccles) said: That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money. And Robert H. Hemphill, Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said: Debt (from the borrower's perspective) owed to banks is profit and income from the bank's perspective. In other words, banks are in the business of creating more debt ... i.e. finding more people who want to borrow larger sums. | |
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Prof. Mujahid Kamran
Global Research 2011-06-07 08:00:00
The control of the US, and of global politics, by the wealthiest families of the planet is exercised in a powerful, profound and clandestine manner. This control began in Europe and has a continuity that can be traced back to the time when the bankers discovered it was more profitable to give loans to governments than to needy individuals. These banking families and their subservient beneficiaries have come to own most major businesses over the two centuries during which they have secretly and increasingly organised themselves as controllers of governments worldwide and as arbiters of war and peace. Unless we understand this we will be unable to understand the real reasons for the two world wars and the impending Third World War, a war that is almost certain to begin as a consequence of the US attempt to seize and control Central Asia. The only way out is for the US to back off - something the people of the US and the world want, but the elite does not. The US is a country controlled through the privately owned Federal Reserve, which in turn is controlled by the handful of banking families that established it by deception in the first place. | |
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Yahoo! News
2014-04-19 04:52:00
A drone strike Saturday killed 15 Al-Qaeda suspects and three civilians in Yemen's central Baida province, a stronghold of the extremist group, a security official said. The jihadists were travelling in a vehicle towards the southern Shabwa province, witnesses said. The three civilians were passing by in another car. The United States is the only country that operates drones in Yemen, but officials rarely discuss the covert programme. Last month, Yemen's President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi defended the use of drones against Al-Qaeda in his country, which has killed dozens of militants in a sharply intensified campaign over the past year. Drone strikes "have greatly helped in limiting Al-Qaeda activities, despite some mistakes, which we are sorry about," Hadi told the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat. | |
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Jessica Chasmar
The Washington Times 2014-04-21 20:55:00
The Internal Revenue Service has revoked the tax-exempt status of a conservative charity for making statements critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry, according to a USA Today report. The Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty, based in Manassas, Va., "has shown a pattern of deliberate and consistent intervention in political campaigns" and made "repeated statements supporting or opposing various candidates by expressing its opinion of the respective candidate's character and qualifications," according to a written determination released Friday by the IRS. The IRS said the center acted as an "action organization" by publishing alerts on its website for columns written by its president, former FBI agent Gary Aldrich, theWashington Free Beacon reported. | |
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CBS News
2014-04-22 15:55:00
Pope Francis washed the feet of 12 disabled and elderly people Thursday - women and non-Catholics among them - in a pre-Easter ritual designed to show his willingness to serve others like a "slave." Francis' decision in 2013 to perform the Holy Thursday ritual on women and Muslim inmates at a juvenile detention center helped define his rule-breaking papacy just two weeks after his election. It riled traditionalist Catholics, who pointed to the Vatican's own regulations that the ritual be performed only on men since Jesus' 12 apostles were men. But as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio frequently performed the ritual on women - a practice that he seems intent on keeping up now that he is pope. | |
Comment: 12 whole people? Wow! How nice that the Catholic church has put forward such a kind, compassionate man as their representative. Where's the list of pedophiles who are running rampant in the Church?
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| Society's Child |
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Sarah Fruchtnicht
Opposingviews.com 2014-04-22 16:19:00
A Virginia man is suing after his cell phone captured audio of doctors allegedly mocking him while he was under anesthesia for a colonoscopy. The plaintiff, D.B., says doctors joked about firing a gun up his rectum and accused him of having STDs during his medical procedure. "On April 18, 2013, during a colonoscopy, plaintiff was verbally brutalized and defamed by the very doctors to whom he entrusted his life while under anesthesia," the complaint says. | |
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Jaya Narain
Daily Mail 2014-04-23 12:22:00
A boy of ten raped a classmate in the toilets of his primary school as he 'acted out' scenes from online pornography, a court was told. The jury heard that he approached a fellow pupil during an English lesson and asked if he wanted to have sex with him. Thinking he was joking, the other boy replied: 'No way.' But after the lesson the alleged victim went to the toilets and, as he went to leave, the defendant was said to have walked in and grabbed him. The court heard the boy then pushed him over a sink and raped him. The victim, also 10, told him to stop and after about 10 seconds the alleged attacker pulled away, and apparently said: 'Oh come on, the party's just starting.' Yesterday Mold Crown Court in North Wales was told the schoolboy had carried out the rape after watching pornography online. Karl Scholz, prosecuting, said: 'It is almost certain that in this case what was being done was to act out what had been seen in pornographic material.' | |
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Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com 2014-04-22 09:45:00
The Obama administration has stated unequivocally that the debate concerning whether or not the Patient Affordable Care Act has been a success is over. They've won the argument and its evidenced by the tens of thousands of Americans who have signed up on exchanges across the country. Here's a small glimpse into just how successful Obamacare has been. In Georgia, where some 650,000 people are eligible for subsidies only about 220,000 applications have thus far been received. So, to start, we're about 70% short on the originally estimated sign up rate. Even more successful than that, however, is that of those 220,000 received applicationsGeorgia Health News reports that at least half of the applicants have failed to actually pay their monthly premiums even though most of those people are being subsidized by the government to some extent. | |
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Dareh Gregorian and Tim O'Connor
New York Daily News 2014-04-17 13:58:00
Famous Hollywood director Bryan Singer has been accused in a new federal lawsuit of sexually abusing a 15-year-old boy. The suit, filed Wednesday in federal court in Hawaii, accused the 48-year-old "X-Men" filmmaker of first preying on the 15-year-old aspiring actor at a party at a California mansion where underage boys were plied with drugs and alcohol and taken advantage of. "The stories that I've heard of what went on at the estate are truly despicable," the accuser's lawyer, Miami attorney Jeff Herman, told the Daily News Wednesday night. Herman identified the accuser as Michael Egan III. Egan, who is now in his 30s and will appear at a Thursday news conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in L.A., was forcibly sodomized by the director when he was 15 in the late-1990s, according to the suit. Singer had promised Egan a role in one of his movies and had numerous sexual encounters with the boy when he was 15 and 16, Herman told The News. Singer also allegedly brought Egan to Hawaii for multiple extended trips when he was 17. | |
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Scott Keyes
Think Progress 2014-04-21 10:34:00
A backpack. Spare clothes. A notebook. Some keepsake photos. Crackers. Though they may not have a home in which to secure their stuff, homeless people still have possessions like everyone else. Yet the city of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida is on the cusp of passing a new regulation that would make it illegal for anyone to store their personal things on public property. Specifically, it would empower police to confiscate any personal possessions stored on public property, provided they have given the homeless person 24-hours notice. If the homeless people wish to retrieve their items, they must pay the city "reasonable charges for storage and removal of the items," though that fee is waived if the person is able to demonstrate he or she cannot afford to pay. The city may dispose of any possessions not retrieved within 30 days. One of the driving factors behind the measure, according to the legislation, is the city's "interest in aesthetics." Last week, the City Commission gave unanimous preliminary approval to the measure, despite overwhelming opposition from local residents who testified. | |
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Mark Steyn
The Spectator 2014-04-19 00:00:00
These days, pretty much every story is really the same story:
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Daily Star
2014-04-22 08:53:00
Rebel gunmen in South Sudan massacred "hundreds" of civilians in ethnic killings when they captured the oil town of Bentiu last week, the UN said Monday, one of the worst reported atrocities in the war-torn nation. In the main mosque alone, "more than 200 civilians were reportedly killed and over 400 wounded," the UN mission in the country said, adding there were also massacres at a church, hospital and an abandoned UN World Food Programme (WFP) compound. Fighters took to the radio calling for rival groups to be forced from the town and for men to rape women from the opposition ethnic group. South Sudan's army has been fighting rebels loyal to sacked vice president Riek Macharafter the insurgents launched a renewed offensive targeting key oil fields. | |
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Michael Gordon
The Age 2014-04-21 05:45:00
Papua New Guinean nationals employed as security guards on Manus Island attacked asylum seekers at the detention centre more than 24 hours before Iranian Reza Barati died in a night of shocking violence, new footage shows. The footage, obtained by Fairfax Media, shows the security guards attacking a group of asylum seekers who had absconded from the centre after being told they had no prospect of being settled outside PNG if their claims for refugee status were eventually recognised. There are also images that show no action was taken to rope off the scene of Mr Barati's killing before evidence was either compromised or completely cleared away, including the rock that witnesses say made sure he was dead. The footage and images raise new questions about what was done to reduce the risk of violence at the centre and the adequacy of the subsequent investigation. The morning after the violence, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison reported that the centre would resume "normal operations" and maintained: "G4S utilised personal protection gear but no batons or other weapons were in situ and were in control of the centre for the entire period."
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Comment: See also:
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Bruce Finley
The Denver Post 2014-04-21 18:23:00
An oil and gas industry proposal to drill 19 wells within 900 feet of an elementary school in Greeley ignited such parent fury that company officials on Monday backed down. Mineral Resources Inc. officials said withdrawing their application to drill by the Frontier Academy school is an example of listening to community concerns. They made their decision as state regulators are investigating recent fires and explosions at industry storage tanks northeast of Denver - including one last week near a different elementary school. "We're grateful. Now our children are safe," said Trisha Golding, head of the Frontier Parents' Group, who pressed their case Thursday with Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission director Matt Lepore. "And we're not going to rest until this city and schools make sure this doesn't happen again behind our school or any other school," Golding said. The showdown began this month when parents found out about the project. Colorado last year made a rule requiring 1,000-foot buffer zones around schools and hospitals. But Mineral Resources had proposed drilling 19 to 67 wells as close as 478 feet from the school's playground, 828 feet from the building, before the rule. The COGCC granted initial approval in May 2013. Last week, an oil storage tank fire in Frederick, about 1,800 feet from Legacy Elementary, put teachers and students on orders to "shelter in place." | |
Comment: And, who decides what a safe distance is, and how is that determined?
New study links fracking to birth defects in heavily drilled Colorado | |
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Kristan T. Harris
Cudhay Now 2014-04-22 22:09:00
As we reported earlier, a Silicon Valley company called Knightscope has developed a prototype robot that has all the capabilities that Hollywood has projected to be available by 2050. William Santana Li, CEO of Knightscope, says the robot is, "everything that's great about Silicon Valley, its robotics, big data, predictive analytics, its sensors," and will be patrolling streets in 2014. The robot is known as the Knightscope 5 (K5). The Knightscope 5 was designed to have a more friendly look, similar to R2D2, so it is easier to interact with according toKnightscope. The Knightscope 5 will be equipped with state-of-the-art technology that will cross-reference your appearance with social media networks and use analytical data to "predict future crimes." K5 is also loaded with a 360 degree 3d mapping system, thermal imaging, facial recognition and a license plate recognition system that collects 300 license plates a minute. | ||
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Police State USA
2014-04-22 21:54:00
Denville - Parents in a New Jersey school district have been notified that visits inside their children's school will require now an electronic scan of their drivers' licenses - and soon, a full background check. A letter dated April 21, 2014, explains the new security measures, as decided by the Denville Township Board of Education. In order to keep "students and faculty safe," the school wishes to record digital information from the visitors' state-issued ID cards upon each visit beyond the main office. The letter states that each swipe will log the owner's personal data and will generate a visitor badge. Read the letter below: | |
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Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkrieg 2014-04-22 21:40:00
The following story is the latest in a series of articles I have written recently highlighting the over-prosecution and legal harassment of the poor and disenfranchised across the USA. While wealthy white collar criminals rape and pillage society with total immunity, those who have no voice are being increasingly stomped down upon by an unjust system. Some recent articles on the topic can read below: Hyper-Sensitive Illinois Mayor Orders Police Raid Over Parody Twitter AccountCharleston Man Receives $525 Federal Fine for Failing to Pay for a $0.89 Refill The Homeless in NYC Are Now Living in Tiny Spaces in the Frame of the Manhattan Bridge In some of these cases, there is a ridiculous law on the books to allow such over-prosecution or harassment, while other times, such as in the case below, the cops appear to be making shit up and are acting completely outside of the law. As someone who grew up in New York City and lived there for 28 years, I am quite familiar with street artists in America's largest metropolis. Personally, I've always enjoyed them. Some are extremely talented, others not so much, but they always added to the unique character of the city and only rarely posed any sort of threat or engaged in threatening behavior. This is why the following story and video really struck an emotional chord with me and I became overcome with sadness. In so many ways, what happened to Kalan Sherrard is what is happening to our country and culture in general. We are being collectively transformed into drugged out, bland, soulless zombies by a parasitic and incredibly corrupt financial system coupled with unrelenting corporate and government propaganda. Anyone who is interesting or stands out is shouted down by the establishment as a "conspiracy theorist," a "radical," or as Harry Reid himself recently stated, a "domestic terrorist." Make no mistake about it, what just happened to Kalan Sherrard is happening to us all. It's just that many of us don't see it yet. | |
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David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy
The New York Times 2014-04-22 00:00:00
The American middle class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction. While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades. After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada - substantially behind in 2000 - now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans. The numbers, based on surveys conducted over the past 35 years, offer some of themost detailed publicly available comparisons for different income groups in different countries over time. They suggest that most American families are paying a steep price for high and rising income inequality. Although economic growth in the United States continues to be as strong as in many other countries, or stronger, a small percentage of American households is fully benefiting from it. Median income in Canada pulled into a tie with median United States income in 2010 and has most likely surpassed it since then. Median incomes in Western European countries still trail those in the United States, but the gap in several - including Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden - is much smaller than it was a decade ago. | |
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RT
2014-04-22 19:24:00
A 19-year-old woman was shot and killed by police in Albuquerque, New Mexico early Monday after being suspected of stealing a truck. This week's death of Mary Hawkes now marks the third time in five weeks that Albuquerque cops have killed a civilian. Albuquerque Police Chief Gordon Eden told the Associated Press this week that an officer was pursuing the suspect on foot Monday morning when the woman reportedly "stopped, turned and pointed a handgun at close range." Recently retired Valencia County Magistrate Danny Hawkes identified his daughter Mary as the victim later that evening, and the Albuquerque Journal reported the next morning that the woman had two previous run-ins with police as an adult, in addition to charges lobbed at her as a youth. Reports about the Monday morning incident that have surfaced in the hours since have focused heavily not on Mary Hawkes, however, but rather on the sordid actions that has brought the Albuquerque Police Department into the national spotlight as of late and spawned a series of protests. | |
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Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com 2014-04-21 10:52:00
With China's debt now bursting at the seams and the economic outlook in the United States signaling a major recession the governments and central banks of the world are very rapidly running out of options. So much so that well respected Swiss asset manager Egon von Greyerz of Matterhorn Asset Management warns that they will have no choice but to ramp up monetary printing at an accelerated pace in 2014. Failure to do so will likely seize up the global flow of credit and lead to a massive financial collapse as liquidity gets sucked out of the system. The problem, of course, is that policy makers have backed themselves into a corner and their only remaining option will likely lead to an even more disastrous outcome; one that will have a direct impact on your long-term financial well being and quality of life. | |
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| Secret History |
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Patrick Counihan
Irish Central 2014-04-22 03:39:00
A prominent Irish archaeologist has called on the government to establish a 'rescue unit' after an axe aged 6,000 to 7,000 years old and other artefacts were washed up by the recent Atlantic seaboard storms. Michael Gibbons wants the Irish state to immediately harvest the historical items unearthed by the New Year storms all along the Western coast. He spoke as archaeologists identified yet more historic material thrown up by the storms according to the Irish Times newspaper. These include a pink granite quern, or hand mill, estimated to be several thousand years old; several Mesolithic stone axes; a late medieval harbour; and early Christian burial grounds. | |
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| Science & Technology |
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Jason Koebler
You probably thought you learned all the shapes - your circles, your squares, your triangles and rhombi - sometime in elementary school. You'd be mistaken. Using complex materials such as rubber bands, plastic cups, and paper clips, researchers at Harvard University have just observed and recreated an entirely new shape: the hemihelix.Motherboard 2014-04-23 16:00:00 It's true, you probably won't see the new shape much in nature (if at all), but, just in case, it looks like this:
In fact, it can be recreated fairly easily with some rudimentary materials, which we'll get to in a minute. Why bother doing something like this at all? Like many things in science, it was kind of an accident. The Harvard team, led by Katia Bertoldi, a professor of applied mechanics, was setting out to try to create a new type of spring. To do that, they were intertwining two different strips of rubber bands that were different lengths and widths. During one of the tests, they accidentally formed a hemihelix, which is like a corkscrew that changes its chirality, or the way it's proverbially screwing, halfway through. Think of it as a if someone put a mirror in the middle of a corkscrew. | |
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Ben Richmond
Motherboard 2014-04-23 15:27:00
Sometimes to help the body, you have to fool the body, which is why researchers from Harvard's Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering modeled their latest DNA nanodevice after those great immune-system evaders, viruses. The whole project, outlined in a new paper published at ACS Nano, is pretty bizarre and cool - back in February 2012, researchers at Wyss announced that they had developed a robotic device fashioned out of DNA. They described how one day the tiny devices could be used for targeting specific, undesirable cells within the body. The DNAbots were shaped like an open barrel whose two halves are closed by a hinge. When the barrel rolls across, say, a leukemia or lymphoma cell, the special DNA latches could recognize the cell-surface proteins, and the two halves of the barrel could swing open to deliver the DNAbot's payload, which could include molecules with encoded instructions that would interact with specific cell surface signaling receptors, all to give the cells the order to self-destruct. That's the idea, anyway. The approach was already modeled on the seek-and-destroy methods of our body's own white blood cells. However, rather than being flattered by the mimicry, the immune system reacted to the DNA bots in a pretty hostile manner when they were injected into mice. When researchers covered the bots in fluorescent dye and injected them into the rodents' bloodstreams, the bots showed up glowing in their bladders pretty quickly. They were getting caught, filtered, and marked for expulsion. | |
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Judith Curry
Climate Etc 2014-04-21 00:00:00
Science is not concerned only with things that we understand. The most exciting and creative parts of science are concerned with things that we are still struggling to understand. Wrong theories are not an impediment to the progress of science. They are a central part of the struggle. - Freeman Dyson Mario Livio has written a book entitled Brilliant Blunders. I haven't read the book, but I am intrigued by a review written by Freeman Dyson for the New York Times Review of Books The Case for Blunders. Excerpts: Science consists of facts and theories. Facts and theories are born in different ways and are judged by different standards. Facts are supposed to be true or false. They are discovered by observers or experimenters. A scientist who claims to have discovered a fact that turns out to be wrong is judged harshly. One wrong fact is enough to ruin a career. | |
Comment: Yes, most notably financial objectives, which give legs to bad science, carried out by those who have interests in believing wrong theories and twisting the facts.
Other relevant links on the fraudulent use of bad theories in the name of 'man-made climate change':
Climate Change Swindlers and the Political Agenda Video: Al Gore sued by over 30.000 Scientists for fraud Climategate: Science Is Dying While climate science is a prime example of science being milked by industry through the policy-makers in its pockets, there are countless other examples where theories and facts are tailored to produce profits to the detriment of people and planet: BigPharma (Vaccines, Statins, countless other products which profit from either manufactured or bought consensus), BigAgro (GMO, pesticides, etc), the Telecoms industry (Wi-fi technology)... | |
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Sarah C. P. Williams
Science Now 2014-04-23 13:00:00
The small, stumpy Y chromosome - possessed by male mammals but not females, and often shrugged off as doing little more than determining the sex of a developing fetus - may impact human biology in a big way. Two independent studies have concluded that the sex chromosome, which shrank millions of years ago, retains the handful of genes that it does not by chance, but because they are key to our survival. The findings may also explain differences in disease susceptibility between men and women. "The old textbook description says that once maleness is determined by a few Y chromosome genes and you have gonads, all other sex differences stem from there," says geneticist Andrew Clark of Cornell University, who was not involved in either study. "These papers open up the door to a much richer and more complex way to think about the Y chromosome." The sex chromosomes of mammals have evolved over millions of years, originating from two identical chromosomes. Now, males possess one X and one Y chromosome and females have two Xs. The presence or absence of the Y chromosome is what determines sex - the Y chromosome contains several genes key to testes formation. But while the X chromosome has remained large throughout evolution, with about 2000 genes, the Y chromosome lost most of its genetic material early in its evolution; it now retains less than 100 of those original genes. That's led some scientists to hypothesize that the chromosome is largely indispensable and could shrink away entirely. | |
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Marc Morano
Climate Depot 2014-04-16 13:28:00
According to the Boston Globe, the United Nations has issued a new climate "tipping point" by which the world must act to avoid dangerous global warming. The Boston Globe noted on April 16, 2014: "The world now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." Once again, the world is being warned of an ecological or climate "tipping point" by the UN. As early as 1982, the UN was issuing a two decade tipping point. UN official Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned on May 11, 1982, the "world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now." According to Tolba in 1982, lack of action would bring "by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust." | |
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Steve Connor
The Independent, UK 2014-04-21 23:17:00
A genetic disease has been cured in living, adult animals for the first time using a revolutionary genome-editing technique that can make the smallest changes to the vast database of the DNA molecule with pinpoint accuracy. Scientists have used the genome-editing technology to cure adult laboratory mice of an inherited liver disease by correcting a single "letter" of the genetic alphabet which had been mutated in a vital gene involved in liver metabolism. A similar mutation in the same gene causes the equivalent inherited liver disease in humans - and the successful repair of the genetic defect in laboratory mice raises hopes that the first clinical trials on patients could begin within a few years, scientists said. The success is the latest achievement in the field of genome editing. This has been transformed by the discovery of Crispr, a technology that allows scientists to make almost any DNA changes at precisely defined points on the chromosomes of animals or plants. Crispr - pronounced "crisper" - was initially discovered in 1987 as an immune defence used by bacteria against invading viruses. Its powerful genome-editing potential in higher animals, including humans, was only fully realised in 2012 and 2013 when scientists showed that it can be combined with a DNA-sniping enzyme called Cas9 and used to edit the human genome. Since then there has been an explosion of interest in the technology because it is such a simple method of changing the individual letters of the human genome - the 3 billion "base pairs" of the DNA molecule - with an accuracy equivalent to correcting a single misspelt word in a 23-volume encyclopaedia. | |
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John Deike
Eco Watch 2014-03-06 16:19:00 |
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