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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.
Showing posts with label articles news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label articles news. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

23 November - News Notes

The RSS SnapShots were taken twice - once in Firefox and once in Google Chrome - hours ago. The posts load as and if they do.

Yahoo! News - new site


Inflation rate rises sharply to 2.4 per cent

Canada has recouped all the jobs lost during the 2008-09 recession, the U.S. has only brought back about 15 per cent of the almost nine million jobs that vanished.


Shareaholic!


Canada gets duty-free beef quota to EU


( Just a reminder : a U.S. gallon is 3.74  l or 128 fl oz - and an Imperial gal is 4.55  l or 160 fl oz 
That should mean about 124 mpg / 2.812 = 44 km/l or 2.27  l per 100km. Tentatively ? Yes indeed.  ) 
Nissan says drivers will experience “a range of ranges.”
The EPA says annual electricity costs for the Leaf will be $561.

Ex-AIPAC official threatens to uncover mass spying at Israel lobby

A former foreign policy chief for the largest Israeli lobby in the US is threatening to provide evidence members of the organization regularly trafficked in classified US government information. 

“Put the Palestinians on a Diet”

Israel has been forced to reveal what Palestinians and other observers on the ground have known for a long time: that the blockade of Gaza is state policy intended to inflict collective punishment, not to bolster Israeli “security”. An Israeli human rights group has won a legal battle to compel the Israeli government to release three important documents. These outline state policy for permitting the transfer of goods into Gaza prior to the May 31 attack on the peace flotilla in which nine people were killed by Israeli forces. 

The released documents, whose existence Israel had denied for eighteen months, reveal that the state approved “a policy of deliberate reduction” of basic goods, including food and fuel, in the Gaza Strip.

“Instead of considering security concerns, on the one hand, and the rights and needs of civilians living in Gaza, on the other, Israel banned glucose for biscuits and the fuel needed for regular supply of electricity – paralyzing normal life in Gaza and impairing the moral character of the State of Israel. I am sorry to say that major elements of this policy are still in place.” (Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, ‘Due to Gisha’s Petition: Israel Reveals Documents related to the Gaza Closure Policy’, October 21, 2010;  http://www.gisha.org/index.php?intLanguage=2&intItemId=1904&intSiteSN=113)
As Saeed Bannoura of the International Middle East Media Center reports, the Israeli government imposed a deliberate policy:
“in which the dietary needs for the population of Gaza are chillingly calculated, and the amounts of food let in by the Israeli government measured to remain just enough to keep the population alive at a near-starvation level. This documents the statement made by a number of Israeli officials that they are ‘putting the people of Gaza on a diet’.” (Saeed Bannoura, ‘Israeli government documents show deliberate policy to keep Gazans at near-starvation levels’, International Middle East Media Center, November 6, 2010 21:32;  http://www.imemc.org/article/59843)

 Small-time addicts don’t belong in jail: U.S. drug czar

Kerlikowske, whose official title is Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, pointed to a move last month to change mandatory minimum sentencing laws for possession of crack cocaine — “the first mandatory minimum to be changed in 40 years by Congress.”
It raised the bar on when a five-year mandatory sentence for crack cocaine possession would kick in, from possession of five grams to up to 28 grams. It had bipartisan support and was changed to bring the law more in line with sentences handed down for cocaine powder possession.
Canada’s Conservative government has adopted a strikingly different “tough-on-crime” approach, proposing stiffer sentences and many more mandatory minimum terms for a whole range of offences, including drug crimes.

Video Report From Afghanistan: How the U.S. Counter-insurgency Campaign Is Failing


Fmr. Marine, State Dept. Official Matthew Hoh Is First US Official to Resign over Afghan War

I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan. I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.

Rep. John Conyers and Out of Afghanistan Caucus Oppose Obama Admin’s $33B Escalation of Afghan War


Tanks to Afghanistan – Analysis

From Kabul to Kandahar, the Afghan countryside is dotted with the burned-out hulks of Soviet tanks. They are an obvious reminder of failed strategy, a nimble foe able to outfight big armored vehicles on rough terrain, and a lost war.

The news that American tanks are en route to southern Afghanistan does not come out of the blue. The deployment – which is small, at fourteen tanks – mirrors those by similar numbers of Canadian and Danish tanks to the same region since 2006.
In Helmand Province, where the American tanks are headed, a detachment of Danish tanks has supported British infantrymen since 2007. In next door Kandahar province, Canada’s twenty tanks have played a similar role for the past four years.
Operating on the roads of rural, relatively flat provinces — starkly unlike the mountains of the Afghan east — the German-built Leopards used by both countries have provided welcome firepower to infantrymen pushing through poppy and grape fields.

HIV epidemic 'halted', says UN

Koreas in border artillery clash

Why Desperate Haitians Want to Kick Out UN Troops


The crisis in Haiti follows decades of economic exploitation and gifts with chains attached – no wonder its citizens are angry.

Musical Exercise Program Cuts Falls in Elderly

Study Shows Benefits of Exercising to the Sounds of a Piano

The Fear of Sicko: CIGNA Whistleblower Wendell Potter Apologizes to Michael Moore for PR Smear Campaign; Moore Says Industry Was Afraid Film Would Cause A 'Tipping Point' for Healthcare Reform

We now have more than 51 million people who don’t have care or access to care because they’re uninsured. But even almost a worse problem, to a large extent, is the fact that a lot of people do have insurance. They’re paying premiums to insurance companies every month and they’re finding out when it is too late that the insurance is often either inadequate, or they’re told by an insurance company bureaucrat, that what they need is not going to be a covered benefit.

Pushing America Off A Cliff

Mike Tedesco's links to the Potter/Moore videos
It is not every day that one get’s to witness an historic public admission of guilt by someone who was a principle in a campaign of willful deceit that leads to the death of 45,000 Americans every year let alone see that person apologize before your eyes live on International television.  Michael Moore has much more on the topic at his blog.

Inside the race to hack the Kinect

For elite hackers, the Kinect's release was a rare opportunity to take a piece of big-name consumer tech and see what it could really do. If the device could be made to work with any computer, radical new applications were sure to follow.

 Flying Snakes, Caught on Tape



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Saturday, June 5, 2010

5 June - Quick Picks

XIAN, CHINA - NOVEMBER 20: An etiquette girl ...Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Luna Ring: A Giant Solar Power Plant on the Moon
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/06/luna-ring-solar-power-plant-on-the-moon.php
Shimizu corporation in Japan made plans to provide enough clean energy to all of humanity by turning the moon into a kind of anti-Death Star, a giant solar power station that brings life instead of death.

Operation Overreaction
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/06/mark-fiore-israeli-defense-forces?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Motherjones%2Fmojoblog+%28MotherJones.com+%7C+MoJoBlog%29&utm_content=Google+International

In Leaked Lecture, Details of China’s News Cleanups
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/world/asia/04china.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
May 15 lecture at Tianjin Foreign Studies University, has become something of a sensation in recent days, providing the Chinese a rare insight into how their news is stage-managed for mass consumption.

Titled “Understanding Journalistic Protocols for Covering Breaking News,” the speech was intended to help budding journalists understand Xinhua’s dual mission: to give Chinese leaders a fast and accurate picture of current events and to deftly manipulate that picture for the public to ensure social harmony, and by extension, the Communist Party’s hold on power.

Soldier in Iraq Loses Home Over $800 Debt
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/05/soldier-iraq-loses-home-homeowners-association-foreclose
Capt. Michael Clauer's homeowners' association foreclosed on his family's $300,000 house and sold it for $3,500.

Earth Is Cooling, Sea Levels Not Rising, Scientists Say
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/tech-mainmenu-30/environment/3583-earth-is-cooling-sea-levels-not-rising-scientists-say
Draft legislation released by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) on May 12, known as the "American Power Act," will give federal bureaucrats vastly expanded powers, drastically increase energy costs to consumers, and provide huge windfall profits to favored corporations and industries — without affecting global temperatures one iota.
Morner, a world renowned physicist and geologist (and former IPCC member) who has traveled the world for decades measuring sea levels, conducted a recent study employing measurement data from 159 sites around the globe. The real-world data do not support the frightening scenarios of global doom and submerged coastal cities presented by the computer modelers.

"Models versus real observations — there's a big difference," Morner told the attendees at the Heartland conference. "With models, you only select what you want."
If the globe-hopping, champagne-and-caviar-lifestyle, multi-millionaire, former Vice President of the United States truly believes that man-made global warming is going to cause the icecaps and glaciers to melt and flood the world's coastlines, he wouldn't be investing in California coastal real estate. However, he has purchased property in two of the most expensive locales, and (according to his own alarmist claims) areas most vulnerable to sea level rises. In 2005, Al and Tipper Gore purchased an ocean-front penthouse at San Francisco's St. Regis condo/hotel tower, one of the most expensive addresses in the world, apparently unconcerned that rising sea levels might soon deluge the hotel lobby, if not their own dining room.


Afghan Corruption Czar Is "Dead Meat" if He Pursues Top Graft
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/06/afghan-anti-corruption-chief-dead-meat-if-he-pursued-top-graft
The High Office of Oversight and its commissioner, Mohammad Yusin Osmani, are virtually powerless to confront the serious corruption that infects the senior levels of Karzai's government.

Osmani became head of this anti-corruption office in 2008, and last November he was grousing that his outfit lacked the resources and authority to pursue or prosecute cases. His High Office could only refer corruption cases to police and prosecutors, who might themselves be corrupt. At that time, the Afghan government was announcing new initiatives to crack down on graft, yet Osmani's office was only 30 percent staffed. "The HOO lacks the organizational, external, and personal independence required by international standards for an oversight institution."
(A recent UN report estimates that bribes make up one-quarter of the Afghan economy, and it notes that one out of four Afghans were forced to pay at least one bribe to a police office in the previous year.)
(Speaking to the Afghan Senate in early April, Osmani said that foreigners were responsible for 80 percent of the corruption in Afghanistan.)
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Saturday, March 6, 2010

6 Mar - Late Links


Low Levels of Vitamin D Linked to Muscle Fat, Decreased Strength in Young People

( Fresh Air & Sunshine : Too Expensive ? )




Pentagon focuses on brain trauma
http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2010-03-01-traumatic-brain-injury_N.htm?csp=34&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+usatoday-NewsTopStories+%28News+-+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+International


If The Founders Had Wanted a Supermajority Requirement for the Senate, They Could Have Put One in the Constitution


The Dubai Hit  -  Mossad's Rogue Assassins

The Story of Pvt. Hargrove

Hargrove lives in an antiseptic-six- by-10 room at Gainesville Florida’s Veterans Hospital. A survivor of the unnecessary Iraq War, he’s a forgotten victim of that terrible decision. Rich, oblivious, and partisan legislators must be held accountable for Joe.


Leading Education Scholar Diane Ravitch: No Child Left Behind Has Left US Schools with Legacy of “Institutionalized Fraud”

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Ravitch says, “The evidence says No Child Left Behind was a failure, and charter schools aren’t going to be any better.”

Water Practically Flies Off 'Near Perfect' Hydrophobic Surface That Refuses to Get Wet


Graphene Hybrid: One-Atom-Thick Sheet Offers New Microelectronic Possibilities

The technique has implications for application of graphene materials in microelectronics that scale well below the limitations of silicon determined by Moore's Law.
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