World news selected by me

Tainted Cantaloupe Linked to 13 Deaths

2011-09-30T13:53:00.000-07:00

The death toll from a listeriosis outbreak linked to contaminated cantaloupes has reached 13, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday, a development a food-safety group said made it the deadliest food-borne illness outbreak in a decade.

The 13 deaths include two in Colorado, one in Kansas, one in Maryland, one in Missouri, one in Nebraska, four in New Mexico, one in Oklahoma and two in Texas, the CDC said.

Caroline Smith DeWaal, food-safety director at the consumer group Center for Science in the Public Interest, said the CDC and Food and Drug Administration continue to investigate the outbreak and the number of deaths and illnesses associated with it could rise.

Jensen Farms of Holly, Colo., announced a recall of millions of cantaloupes on Sept. 14 and the CDC confirmed the next day that the cantaloupes were connected to the listeriosis outbreak.

Jensen Farms said it shipped the recalled cantaloupes to Illinois, Wyoming, Tennessee, Utah, Texas, Colorado, Minnesota, Kansas, New Mexico, North Carolina, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

Distribution was wider though, according to an FDA spokesman who said the agency believes secondary wholesalers sent the cantaloupes to other states as well.

Listeriosis usually causes fever, muscle aches and diarrhea or other gastrointestinal problems, the CDC said. It can be fatal among high-risk groups of people, such as the elderly, those with compromised immune systems or chronic medical conditions like cancer. Listeriosis can cause miscarriage, stillbirth and serious illness or death in newborn babies.

from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204138204576598951277668500.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Macedonians, Montenegrins, Albanians Glued to Facebook

2011-09-30T13:44:00.000-07:00

Internet users in Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania simply love Facebook, with almost 90 per cent of them having Facebook accounts, according to a global statistical database maintained by the International Web Stats web page.

The other Balkan peoples are comparatively less interested in this social network, with numbers signed up as members varying between 50 and 70 percent of the internet active population.

Out of 2,1 million Macedonians, some 1, 05 million or 50,9 percent use the internet. A staggering number of them, 878, 300 have Facebook profiles, the statistics show.
Out of 1,3 million Albanians that use the internet 1,05 are subscribed to Facebook. The popularity is similar among Montenegro’s 303,000 internet users.

No data was available for the popularity of Facebook in Kosovo.

Internet access in the Balkans
The proportion of the population in the Balkans who have access to the internet varies from country to country. Slovenia tops the chart with 64,9 per cent of the population having access to the web. Serbs rank second with 56, 2 percent. Meanwhile, 50,1 percent of Croats, 47,9 percent of Bulgarians and 46, 2 percent of Greece have access to the net.

Montenegro has 45,9 percent, Albania has 43,4 percent and Romania has 35,5 percent internet penetration.
At the bottom of Balkan countries are Bosnia and Herzegovina with 31,2 percent having access and Kosovo, where only 20,7 percent of the people use the internet.

According to the data 58,3 percent of the European population has access to the world wide web.

Global access to the web
Across Europe as a whole, Germans lead the way with 79,9 percent of the country’s population browsing the net. Despite the high internet access, only 19.5 million of Germany’s 65 million internet users are Facebook subscribers.

Globally speaking, North America has the upper hand with 78,3 percent of its population using the internet. Africa has the lowest score with 11,4 percent.

According to the Internet World Stats one third of Earth’s population- 2,1 billion people- use the internet.

from http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/macedonians-montenegrins-albanians-glued-on-facebook

No, Tesla Did Not Predict Faster Than Light Neutrinos

2011-09-29T17:31:00.000-07:00

“All of my investigations seem to point to the conclusion that they are small particles, each carrying so small a charge that we are justified in calling them neutrons. They move with great velocity, exceeding that of light.” – Nikola Tesla, July 10, 1932

The Nikola Tesla quote above has been making the rounds since last week’s announcement from the OPERA research team that they had detected neutrinos that may have traveled faster than the speed of light. For the most part, this has been going under headers like “Tesla was right!”, etc.

However, a quick glance at the source of the quoteshows that Tesla was, in fact, completely wrong. See the “they” in that first part of the sentence? In context of the article, that refers to cosmic rays. And cosmic rays are not neutrinos. They’re mostly highly charged protons, atomic nuclei, and electrons (and the occasional anti-particle for fun). It also probably goes without saying that cosmic rays do not, in fact, travel faster than the speed of light.

Even if we give Tesla the benefit of the doubt and say that he was talking about neutrinos (the terminology of neutrons/neutrinos wasn’t quite set in stone yet in 1932), it’s worth noting that Tesla didn’t predict that they’d go faster than light. He said that he’d observed them going faster than light. But he never published any of his findings if that’s the case, and his statement is therefore impossible to verify.

Look, I hold Nikola Tesla in very high esteem. I wouldn’t have written an essay admiring his creative capacity for thought if I didn’t. But he was by no means right on everything. Earlier in that same year, 1932, he claimed that he could make electricity travel faster than the speed of light, too. (It can’t.)

Moreover, Tesla completely rejected the theory of relativity. He insisted that mass and energy were not equivalent and told the New York Times in 1935 that “Einstein’s relativity work is a magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king…” At this point, though, there had been several observations and experiments confirming relativity’s predictions, and subsequent decades have only strengthened it.

It’s sometimes tempting to look back on the great minds of the ages with a credulous awe. But it’s important to remember that those minds were as human as our own. And nobody on Earth was right about everything. Indeed, many of history’s great geniuses were profoundly wrong on a number of matters. Isaac Newton was positively brilliant and in many ways defined modern physics. He was also a fervent alchemist and in addition devoted years to deciphering the Book of Revelations to determine what year the world would end (the year 2060, in case you’re wondering.) Johannes Kepler was able to see past the prejudice for circular orbits laid down by Aristotle and recognized that planets moved in elliptical orbits. He also thought that taking baths led to disease and reportedly only took one in his entire life. Even Einstein took decades to accept the conclusion that his own theory of relativity implied an expanding universe, not a steady-state one.

The bottom line is that scientists are human. Their theories and suggestions may be brilliant, but they’re not Holy Writ. At the end of the day, either the data supports what they say, or it doesn’t. If neutrinos are found to go faster than the speed of light, then Tesla might indeed look acontextually prescient. But if it doesn’t, you can chalk that up with the other theories Tesla had that ended up not being supported by the data (and there were quite a few). He was a brilliant man. But he wasn’t a god.

from http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/09/26/no-tesla-did-not-predict-faster-than-light-neutrinos/

Vladimir Putin: return of the king

2011-09-29T17:20:00.000-07:00

It is virtually inevitable that Putin will next year become Russia's president again. What will that mean for Russia, the world, and indeed the man who just can't seem to give up power?

The year is 2024. The world's economic prospects have perked up a bit since the collapse of the euro. The Germans are happily spending deutchmarks again, the Greeks are back with the drachma. Almost all of the leaders in power a decade earlier have been swept away – Angela Merkel, David Cameron, and Nick Clegg (remember him?). Even Silvio Berlusconi has reluctantly accepted retirement. Italy's former premier now spends his days in his Sardinian villa with a group of showgirls.

Only one leader has defied the iron law that all politicians eventually leave office. His name? Vladimir Putin. Now 71, Putin has served two more terms as Russia's president – bringing the tally of his stints in the Kremlin up to a remarkable four – the final two lasting a total of 12 years. He is fitter and more vigorous than ever: Russian first state TV channel has recently shown him wrestling heroically with a python after it "escaped" from a Moscow zoo.

In theory, this is the moment when Putin should finally step down after a quarter of century at the apex of Russian power. He has already outlasted Leonid Brezhnev (18 years) and is closing in fast on comrade Stalin (a whopping 31).

Ridiculous predictions? Well, no. On Saturday Putin announced that he was standing for a third term as president in "elections" to be held next March. The man who has been keeping the Kremlin seat warm for him,Dmitry Medvedev, is to become Russia's prime minister. It's time to switch! At the Putin-led United Russia party conference, Medvedev endorsed Putin's triumphant return; the two men hugged, Medvedev's grin, admittedly, somewhat strained.

The news was, somehow, a bombshell and no surprise whatsoever. Over the past four years, poor Medvedev has had to live with the slur that – despite occupying the role of president – he was subservient to Putin, Russia's prime minister but pre-eminent leader. The jibes have been hurtful because they are true. It now appears that back in 2007, before he took the job, Medvedev had agreed to stand aside after one stint – in a sort of un-Granita pact.

Leaked last year, secret US cables offer an amusing portrait of the Putin/Medvedev relationship – an anomalous arrangement for Russia known as the "tandem". Traditionally, of course, Russia has always had one-man (or one-woman) authoritarian rule. Think Peter I, Catherine II, and Alexander III; Lenin, Stalin etc. The tandem was an unprecedented break with this historical tradition of conservative autocracy.

Reading through these dispatches last year, I was struck by the slightly desperate but nevertheless creative way US analysts tried to make sense of impenetrable Kremlin politics. One cable by Eric Rubin, US deputy ambassador, suggested that Medvedev played Robin to Putin's Batman. It was a good analogy; it whizzed round the world, prompting Putin to complain of US "arrogance".

Other comparisons were equally unflattering. US diplomats cabled back to Washington the widely held view that Medvedev was the "junior partner", or Putin's "capable assistant". In the words of one scathing opposition politician he was "the Lilliputian to Putin's commander-in-chief." At a reputed 5ft 2in Medvedev is one of the shortest world leaders ever. It is "Putin who is pulling the strings," I read.

Another delightful comparison likened Putin to Cardinal Richelieu, with Medvedev cast in the role of Louis XIII.

At the beginning of Medvedev's presidential term, diplomats, political observers and journalists raked over Medvedev's CV in search of clues. He was famously a fan of the superannuated British rockers Deep Purple. Did this mean that Medvedev would usher in a new, more friendly, era in London-Moscow relations? Or did it merely confirm that Medvedev was a bit of geek?

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, there was a vague optimism that Medvedev might just preside over a partial liberalisation of Russian society, after the rollback under Putin between 2000-2008 of democracy and basic rights. For starters, Mededvev had no background in Russia's sinister security services. He talked of reform and modernisation. Perhaps, then, Russia was finally moving away from its lugubrious KGB track.

By 2010, however, more or less everyone had concluded that Medvedev and his "liberal" agenda were phoney. Most correspondents stopped reporting Medvedev's speeches. They had become boring and lacking in credibility.

In some of the last dispatches released by WikiLeaks, US diplomats correctly predicted that Russia's "bicephalous ruling format" was fizzling out. "His [Putin's] return to the Kremlin is not inevitable. But should things remain stable Putin remains in a position to choose himself, Medvedev or another person to become Russia's next president," diplomat Susan Elliott wrote.

It's no shock, then, that, having carefully weighed up the options, Putin decided to choose himself to be Russia's next president. His election is a foregone conclusion: in previous polls, opposition candidates and anti-Kremlin parties fail to make it on to the ballot paper. With Russian state TV having morphed into a daily Putin/Medvedev blog, Putin can expect blanket positive coverage ahead of his coronation. No doubt there will be more macho photo-opportunities. Putin recently turned up to a convention of bikers, dressed in black and riding a Harley – merely one of a succession of stunts that has seen him ski down a volcano, pose with a polar bear and dive to the bottom of Russia's Lake Baikal in a submersible. He even appears now to have had a bit of face-work done.

So what now? The winds of change may be blowing across the Arab world, rolling from Egypt to Tripoli's Green Square. But Russians are looking at an endless Putin epoch, and a long period of political stagnation.

It's a bleak prospect. Liberals in Moscow and St Petersburg were yesterday posting a photo of Putin mocked up to look like Leonid Brezhnev – complete with military uniform, patriotic Soviet medals and a hammer and sickle. Putin even got Brezhnevian eyebrows.

Actually, the comparisons with the Brezhnev era are spot-on. Brezhnev presided over another era of political and economic stagnation, the 1970s, sustained by a commodities boom and high oil prices. He also had a war – he sent the Red Army to invade Afghanistan. In 2008 Putin did the same thing. He sent Russian tanks into Georgia, promising to hang Georgia's pro-western leader Mikheil Saakashvili "by the balls". It was a brutal lesson in neighbourhood geopolitics.

Brezhnev also presided over an Olympics – Moscow, 1980. Putin has the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi to look forward to, as well as the 2018 World Cup. (The scenario is already tantalising: an ignominious first-round exit by England after an off-form Wayne Rooney falls mysteriously ill with food poisoning. Foul play is discounted since England play so badly anyway. The Russian team sweeps to victory on the back of patriotic fervour and a curious offside decision.)

International reaction to the weekend's news has hardly been ecstatic. Putin's world view is reflexively anti-western. He doesn't believe western countries are genuine democracies. He is by temperament suspicious and prone to a belief in conspiracies. The Obama administration put out a bland statement confirming that its "reset" with the Kremlin will go on. Privately, however, the White House will certainly not be delighted at the prospect of dealing with prickly President Putin again. The US administration's attempts to make Medvedev the "primary interlocutor" in negotiations – and to boost the "more progressive" forces he supposedly represented – were, alas, a waste of time.

To be fair, US diplomats always recognised that Putin was in charge, and that he was responsible for the recent modest improvement in relations following a period of mutual acrimony during the last years of the Bush White House. One 2009 dispatch by the US ambassador John Beyrle puts it like this: "We are not advocating circumventing Putin; to the contrary we cannot imagine improved US-Russian relations with his concurrence." Beyrle also talks about "managing Putin and his ego".

Relations with Britain are unlikely to get much better either. Andrei Lugovoi – the man who allegedly slipped radioactive polonium into former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko's tea – enjoys the personal protection of Putin. When the CPS requested his extradition in 2007, Putin responded by lambasting Britain's colonial "no brains" mentality. David Cameron did manage to meet Putin in Moscow this month, the first contact for four years. But it's safe to assume that President Putin won't be visiting London anytime soon.

The main sticking point is the row with Russia's FSB spy agency – the same agency that Putin headed before he became president in 2000.

Britain is convinced that there is an FSB dimension to Litvinenko's murder. It severed contact with it in 2007. The Kremlin sees this as humiliating. It wants cooperation with the FSB to resume. And it has made this a precondition of better relations. The ball is in Cameron's court – or in someone else's court when his Conservative-led coalition shuffles off into history.

Some commentators have persuasively suggested that Putin is tired of being Russia's leader. He would like nothing better, they argue, than to relax in his new palace in Sochi, on Russia's balmy Black Sea coast. The logic, however, of Putin's corrupt vertical state, is that he is forced to carry on. Putin is the only person capable of arbitrating between the Kremlin's rival factions, who are locked in a permanent and exhausting battle for money and influence. Without him, the system would fall apart.

Most crucially, Putin faces the prospect of law enforcement investigations into his alleged secret assets, should he ever decide to step off the throne. According to US diplomats, his main motivation for carrying on is to guarantee the safety of his own assets and those of his inner circle. No one quite knows how much Putin and his friends are worth. (Several of them feature prominently on the Forbes annual list.) But the sums involved allegedly total many billions of dollars.

All this, of course, assumes that there is no revolution. With no prospect of removing Putin from power peacefully, and the Kremlin's succession politics as byzantine as ever, could it be a matter of time before Russians take things into their own hands? True, Putin is still Russia's most popular politician. But he is less popular than he was. And while his return to the Kremlin is guaranteed, his nervousness that he may one day be overthrown can only grow.

from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/26/vladimir-putin-russia-president

Amazon tablet goes head-to-head with iPad

2011-09-28T14:00:00.000-07:00

Research reconstructs brain activity

2011-09-28T03:01:00.000-07:00

Scientists could recreate dreams and memories with new brain imaging technology developed by UC Berkeley researchers.

With the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, activities created by the brain from watching YouTube videos were reconstructed, allowing scientists to view the images that the brain observed. The research was published Sept. 22 in the journal Current Biology.
The MRIs, which measure the blood flow controlled by neural activities, use changes in the blood flow to help interpret what the subject saw on the screen.
The applications of the technology could extend farther than reconstructing YouTube videos, potentially helping scientists to understand parts of the brain that have remained a mystery, including dreams and memories.
“The technology will definitely get there, the question is just when,” said Jack Gallant, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and co-author of the study.
The research focuses on visual activity, which accounts for a third of the brain’s mechanisms.
“One way to think about the brain is to build a dictionary that translates between the world and the parts of the brain,” Gallant said.
In the research, brain activity of each subject was sampled every second from a total of 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos, and each recorded second was reconstructed separately.
“Each person reconstructs a different image, and you have to work with what you manage to get,” said Yuval Benjamini, a graduate student in the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics who helped work on the statistical decoding aspect of the research.
“First you need to build individual dictionaries for individual brains,” Gallant said.
Reconstruction of the images was attained by taking the hundred YouTube videos that best produced predictive activity closest to the actual activity in the brain. However, the researchers faced a problematic limitation with the data once all of it was collected.
Even though subjects watched 18 million seconds’ worth of videos, the data displayed only a small portion of the brain activity that occurred during the research, Benjamini said.
“It’s a very small subset of the videos that people see and understand,” he said.
To solve the dilemma in data, the lab created models to predict brain activity and compared them to the actual brain activity that the subjects displayed, Gallant said.
In addition to decoding dreams and memories, this breakthrough also has the potential to improve the lives of people who have degenerative neurological diseases — an internal speech decoder would “allow people with no motor skills to go into the MRI for two hours a day and communicate with their families,” Gallant said.
Two factors are limiting the advancement of the brain imaging technology — the limitations of MRIs and the question of what kind of decoding models are necessary for translating specific brain activity, Gallant said.
In the future, the technology could have many theoretical applications in areas of creativity and artistic production.
“You could build a brain decoder that composes music and you could just think of music and then it would be composed for you,” Gallant said.

From http://www.dailycal.org/2011/09/26/research-reconstructs-brain-activity/

Particles found to break speed of light

2011-09-28T02:58:00.000-07:00

GENEVA, Sept 22 (Reuters) - An international team of scientists said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles travelling faster than light -- a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe.

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, told Reuters that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.
"We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.
That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works.
The totally unexpected finding emerged from research by a physicists working on an experiment dubbed OPERA run jointly by the CERN particle research centre near Geneva and the Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy.

A total of 15,000 beams of neutrinos -- tiny particles that pervade the cosmos -- were fired over a period of 3 years from CERN towards Gran Sasso 730 (500 miles) km away, where they were picked up by giant detectors.

Light would have covered the distance in around 2.4 thousandths of a second, but the neutrinos took 60 nanoseconds -- or 60 billionths of a second -- less than light beams would have taken.
"It is a tiny difference," said Ereditato, who also works at Berne University in Switzerland, "but conceptually it is incredibly important. The finding is so startling that, for the moment, everybody should be very prudent."
Ereditato declined to speculate on what it might mean if other physicists, who will be officially informed of the discovery at a meeting in CERN on Friday, found that OPERA's measurements were correct.
"I just don't want to think of the implications," he told Reuters. "We are scientists and work with what we know."

Much science-fiction literature is based on the idea that, if the light-speed barrier can be overcome, time travel might theoretically become possible.
The existence of the neutrino, an elementary sub-atomic particle with a tiny amount of mass created in radioactive decay or in nuclear reactions such as those in the Sun, was first confirmed in 1934, but it still mystifies researchers.

It can pass through most matter undetected, even over long distances, and without being affected. Millions pass through the human body every day, scientists say.
To reach Gran Sasso, the neutrinos pushed out from a special installation at CERN -- also home to the Large Hadron Collider probing the origins of the universe -- have to pass through water, air and rock.
The underground Italian laboratory, some 120 km (75 miles) to the south of Rome, is the largest of its type in the world for particle physics and cosmic research.

Around 750 scientists from 22 different countries work there, attracted by the possibility of staging experiments in its three massive halls, protected from cosmic rays by some 1,400 metres (4,200 feet) of rock overhead.

(Reporting by Robert Evans; Editing by Tom Miles and Kevin Liffey)
news from http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/22/science-light-idUSL5E7KM4CW20110922

Flexible Samsung phone 'to be issued in 2012'

2011-09-27T06:26:00.000-07:00

The new Samsung Galaxy Skin is set to feature a bendable AMOLED display that will allow users to roll it up like a wrist-watch

Samsung is poised to release a flexible mobile phone, according to reports in the International Business Times. The new Samsung Galaxy Skin will feature an AMOLED display that will allow the phone to bend around a cylinder with a 1-inch diameter. Brighter than the normal screen, the AMOLED display is also low-energy and almost unbreakable, according to the reports.

Using a plastic polyimide substrate instead of glass, Samsung has produced displays that are “rollable [and] bendable” and which can even “survive blows from a hammer”. The phone was developed by Prof Haeseong Jee and Jye Yeon You.

The key material of this new technology is ‘graphene’, touted as “the miracle material”. Research by scientists from Columbia University has established that ‘graphene’ is the strongest material in the world, “some 200 times stronger than structural steel”.

The Galaxy Skin will offer a high-resolution 800×480 flexible AMOLED screen, eight megapixel camera and 1Gb of RAM as well as a 1.2GHz processor. Samsung has not yet disclosed the device’s operating system, but there have been rumors about Jelly Bean – Google’s next Android release after Ice Cream Sandwich – or a new release called Android Flexy.

The new core technology also allows the phone to be used as a mouse, a clock or a wrist-watch. Samsung has not confirmed the exact date of release.

from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8790189/Flexible-Samsung-phone-to-be-issued-in-2012.html

Prostate Cancer – Have We Cracked The Code?

2011-09-27T02:51:00.000-07:00

In a medical breakthrough that is shocking the world, news comes from the Royal Marsden Hospital in London that a powerful drug has proven itself so successful in treating prostate cancer that trials which normally take years have been stopped and the treatment will be available for men around the world.

News has spread like wildfire about the treatment as it is less harmful than other radiation treatments such as those that damage the patient. This latest treatment consists of alpha particles that really give the cancer cells a beating. Literally almost a one-two punch when the cancerous cells are hit with the alpha particles unlike the beta particle radiation that takes thousands of hits. Dr. Chris Parker who led the research laid out what the treatment does. The data states that the treated patients had a death rate of 30% lower than the other group not taking the treatment and the patients survived much longer. It’s going to become part of the arsenal of tools for treating prostate cancer for sure.

This goes to show that advances in the fight against cancer are still raging on. Recently it was discovered that certain viruses were the source of such cancers as breast cancer. This also coincides with discoveries that certain viruses can be used to eradicate certain cancers. This takes treatments and cures into a whole new range of science and the breakthroughs all come in within the past few days.

On top of that, researchers also discovered that in America, the average household mouse carries a virus that scientists have concluded leads to breast cancer. The data was alarming to say the least and suggests that the furry rodents are once more responsible for a plague that has taken numerous lives over the years. It would also explain why American women suffered such high rates of the disease.

The scientists have their work cut out for them in regards to how to handle the next wave of cancer treatments. If it turns out that virus against virus is solid form of combat then so be it. It could turn out that in the not too distant future a cure or treatment for all forms of cancer might just be as easy as one taking one’s daily vitamins.
It’s certain that other researchers will follow through in labs around the world. New applications of the technology today will be applied and there’s no telling who will deliver the next series of breakthroughs. Much like the adult stem cell industry that is making major strides breaking down the walls of old medicine and showing that there are alternatives to traditional treatments that are safer and cheaper.

These medical breakthroughs in cancer over the past week have the public’s heads spinning but they’re spinning in the right direction.

read more at http://www.onlinenewsheardnow.com/prostate-cancer-have-we-cracked-the-code/904/

Social makeover of Facebook

2011-09-27T02:46:00.000-07:00

When internet giant, Google, launched its own social networking website (Google Plus) a couple of months ago, most users complained that it was too similar to Facebook to be of any consequence. But a couple of days ago, Facebook pulled out its biggest ace. And surprisingly, the site that connects over 750 million users from across the world seems to have taken cues from micro-blogging site Twitter and Google Plus too. Now, you’ll find an instant ticker that tells you in real-time what your friends are up to. There are also improved privacy settings that allow you to customise who has access to your posts and who doesn’t.

Friends’ lists
This feature existed before but Facebook’s latest update comes in the form of smart friends lists. These lists are auto-generated depending on common information you and your friends might have on your profiles such as your work place, family or city. To make the job of filling up the list with relevant people less tedious, Facebook even suggests friends it thinks ought to be in the list.

Photos
Photo albums now display more aesthetically on your timeline. Clicking on a particular photo opens it in ‘theater mode’ where the photo takes focus and the background is more faded. There’s a separate ‘photos’ app that allows you to see only the recently uploaded photos by your friends and nothing else.

Ticker
Taking inspiration from Twitter, this feature on the right side of the page shows you in real-time what your friends are up to. The information displayed includes who befriended whom, comments and wall posts between friends, likes and whether a friend updated their profile photo, and other information.

Subscribe button
As the name suggests, this feature lets you subscribe to posts by people whom you may not be friends with. This feature even extends outside of the networking site — the next time you visit your favourite blog and see a ‘subscribe’ button on it, click on it to get updates directly on your Facebook news feed. If you wish, you can unsubscribe yourself from certain friends in your list if you aren’t interested in receiving their updates.

New features coming soonTimeline is slated to be Facebook’s best and most distinguishing feature yet. To be made available in the coming weeks, this feature is visual-centric and displays your previous posts and photos as they occurred in real life. Timeline completely does away with Facebook’s relatively static profile page and instead focuses on large photos to do the storytelling. You can customise what apps you wish to include.

more at http://www.hindustantimes.com/Social-makeover--of-Facebook/Article1-750311.aspx

Bosnia may lose visa free status, EU says

2011-09-26T17:25:00.000-07:00

Bosnia and Herzegovina could again be subjected to visa requirements due to its large number of asylum seekers, according to spokesperson from the EU Home Affairs Commission.

Following reports in the local press that the EU might re-introduce visas for citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Michele Cercone, spokesperson of Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström, confirmed that the EU executive was closely monitoring the increase of asylum seekers, website EurActiv reported. Visa liberalization is one of the greatest achievements in the process of European integration for the Western Balkans countries, Cercone said. Cercone said Malmström was very concerned about the increase in the number of unfounded asylum applications to the EU from nationals of Bosnia and Herzegovina and other Western Balkan countries.

It should be clear that if some of the countries in the Western Balkans do not meet their commitments and do not properly and quickly address the concerns of EU member countries regarding the increasing number of unfounded asylum applications, the achievements of visa liberalization might be put at risk, he said.

Meanwhile, political leaders of Bosnia met Monday to form a central government. The lack of government almost a year after general elections has been the most serious post-war crisis in the country, AFP reported. After several failed attempts to form a central government in the country divided along ethnic lines into two entities – the Serbs’ Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation – the heads of the six main political parties re-launched a dialogue earlier this month.

from http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=bosnia-may-lose-visa-free-status-eu-says-2011-09-26

Palestine bid spotlights some unlikely kingmakers

2011-09-26T02:43:00.000-07:00

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — With Friday's Palestinian bid for statehood now official, the focus turns to the U.N. Security Council, and an array of unlikely kingmakers.

Gabon, Colombia, Bosnia-Herzogovina — these countries aren't usually associated with Middle East diplomacy, but they happen to be on the U.N. Security Council this year, meaning their votes would determine whether the Palestinian application wins approval.
If it does, the U.S. plans to veto it, but President Barack Obama is anxious to avoid an action likely to inflame the Arab world. The council consists of five permanent members — China, Britain, France, Russia and the U.S. — and 10 rotating, nonpermanent ones which can expect to be wooed and pressured by both sides as the vote approaches.
"It's the luck of the draw, the nature of the U.N., that these countries are sitting on the Security Council now," said J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa center at the Atlantic Council in Washington. He said internal affairs — for instance Nigeria's violence-prone Muslim-Christian divide, will play a role in how some votes are cast.
Palestinian leaders say two decades of negotiations with the Israelis have been fruitless and that a new approach is needed. The U.S., Israel and others say only negotiations, not a unilateral U.N. vote, can create a viable Palestinian state that won't jeopardize Israel's security.
The Palestinians would need nine of the 15 Security Council votes to accept their bid, and forecasts are difficult because member states have little to gain from making their intentions clear this early.
Bosnia, Colombia and Portugal have indicated they want to scrutinize the final text of the Palestinian bid. The West African countries of Gabon and Nigeria are even more reserved.
Pham expected Nigeria to side with the Palestinians and Gabon to save its decision to the last minute, although he noted that it has sought strong ties to the U.S., which would give the Obama administration some clout.
The Palestinians expect support from several rotating Security Council members, including emerging powerhouses Brazil, India, and South Africa, and from Lebanon, an Arab country with a large Palestinian refugee population.
If those votes hold, and Russia and China maintain their support, the Palestinians would have a strong base but would need backing from some of the undecideds for their audacious challenge to the Middle East status quo.
Germany says peace talks, not a U.N. "upgrade," are what's needed. The Portuguese public, preoccupied their economic crisis, haven't given the issue much thought. Bosnia's leaders told Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who visited Bosnia in August looking for support, that no decision had yet been made.
But 15 Bosnian advocacy groups have signed a petition for Palestinian statehood, and on Friday, 200 Palestinians rallied in Sarajevo, waving flags and chanting.
"We just hope one day we will also have a country, a home, just like everybody else in the world," said Afane Imad, 55, a Palestinian living in Bosnia since 1976. "Now we are the only people under occupation on this globe. If I want to visit my family down there, I have to seek approval from Israeli authorities. Why?"
But the legacy of the 1992-95 Bosnian war means the country faces a sensitive choice. Bosnia's Muslims and Catholic Croats may align themselves with the Palestinians, while Serbs are expected to support Israel.
Colombia, one of two Latin American countries on the council, has said it will likely abstain. On Wednesday its president, Juan Manuel Santos, told the General Assembly the conflict could only be resolved by direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
Colombia's case is an example of how issues entirely unrelated to the Middle East can play a role. Santos wants to improve relations with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and other Latin American nationalists, but doesn't want to join their anti-American bandwagon.
"He's made an effort to get close to Chavez and to the Latin American nationalists, but at the same time the U.S. market is vital to Colombia's economic prospects, so he doesn't want to stray too far," said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington. He said voting against Palestinian statehood "would earn great gratitude from Washington," and the Obama administration was using all the leverage it could muster.
The calendar also plays a role. Five of the rotating members — including Brazil and Lebanon, expected to favor the Palestinian resolution — complete their terms on the Security Council at the end of the year, after which the makeup of the council would be substantially different.
Aida Cerkez in Sarajevo, Barry Hatton in Lisbon and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed.

U.S. hikers released from Iran recount prison time

2011-09-26T02:40:00.000-07:00

Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal speak publicly after arriving back in the U.S., describing the screams of other prisoners and the manipulation of the jailers during their 781 days of captivity.

Reporting from New York—

In a no-holds-barred statement, two Americans who spent 781 days in an Iranian prison on spying charges called themselves hostages of sour U.S.-Iranian relations and described the screams of prisoners being beaten, the mental manipulation of their jailers, and how they lived in "a world of lies and false hope" until their sudden release last week.

Gone was the diplomacy and the words of gratitude to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that marked the statements from their fellow prisoner Sarah Shourd one year ago, when she was freed after 410 days in prison ahead of companions Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal. This time, with all three back on U.S. soil and nobody left as possible bargaining chips, the trio condemned the Iranians but also criticized U.S. practices — such as secret CIA prisons — that they said their jailers would cite if they complained about conditions in Tehran.

Shourd, at least, also expressed some regret about the trio's decision to go hiking in Kurdistan in northern Iraq — a country at war — near its virtually unmarked border with Iran in July 2009. "We regret we didn't know more about that area," she said when asked whether in retrospect the three should have done things differently.

In their first public statements after returning to the United States on Sunday, Bauer and Fattal said they had no idea whether they crossed the border during their hike, as Iranian officials claimed.

"Even if we did enter Iran, that has never been the reason the Iranian authorities kept us in prison for so long," Bauer said. "The only explanation for our prolonged detention is the 32 years of mutual hostility between America and Iran."

Fattal and Bauer, both 29, appeared at a Manhattan hotel a few hours after landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport, ending a diplomatic wrangle that reflected the grim state of U.S.-Iranian relations — as well as Ahmadinejad's domestic rifts with critics who accuse him of abusing his powers.

In a move aimed at burnishing his image, Ahmadinejad had vowed to release Bauer and Fattal before coming to New York for the Sept. 19-23 United Nations General Assembly meeting. Iranian judges rejected that plan at the last minute, saying Ahmadinejad had no right to free prisoners unilaterally. The men had been convicted of spying and illegal entry this year and sentenced to eight years in prison. They finally went free Wednesday after their defense attorney secured judicial approval for the bail — $500,000 each.

"We applaud the Iranian authorities for finally making the right decision regarding our case," said Fattal, who stood alongside Bauer and Shourd — who are engaged — at the news conference. "But we want to be clear: They do not deserve undue credit for ending what they had no right and no justification to start in the first place."

Fattal said he and Bauer were in isolation for most of their time in prison and allowed only a total of 15 minutes of phone calls with their families. "Many times, too many times, we heard the screams of other prisoners being beaten," Fattal said. Jailers played mind-games to wear them down, Fattal said, including telling them that their relatives were not writing them letters.

In fact, Fattal's mother, Laura Fattal, said later that she wrote her son 781 letters — one each day he was held.

Bauer said one irony of their imprisonment was that the three have long opposed U.S. policies toward Iran. He did not go into details, and neither he nor Fattal took questions. But for years the United States has accused Iran of seeking to build nuclear weapons, and of supplying weapons used by Shiite militias against U.S. and other forces in Iraq. Iran denies the allegations.

When they complained about conditions in Tehran's Evin Prison, Bauer said, their jailers would "immediately remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay. They would remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world."

Whatever the U.S. has done does not excuse other governments from doing the same, said Bauer, adding that he was not inclined to forgive Iran. "How can we forgive the Iranian government when it continues to imprison so many other innocent people and prisoners of conscience?" he said.

They learned of their imminent release Wednesday after their daily exercise break in an open-air room of the prison.

"On any other day we would have been blindfolded and led down the hallway to our 8-foot-by-13-foot cell," Fattal said. "But on that day, the guards took us downstairs. They fingerprinted us and gave us street clothes. They did not tell us where we were going."

They were taken to another part of the prison, he said, where an official from the Persian Gulf state of Oman said, "Let's go home." The pair's defense attorney said Oman, a U.S. ally, paid the bail.

Since her release last year, Shourd has lived in Oakland. Bauer, a freelance journalist, grew up in Onamia, Minn., and Fattal, an environmental activist, is from Elkins Park, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb. Shourd, 33, and Bauer, who were dating before the hiking trip, became engaged during their imprisonment.

read more at http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-iran-hikers-20110926,0,3831089.story

NASA to Unveil Giant New Rocket Design

2011-09-14T06:56:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON – The design for NASA's newest behemoth of a rocket harkens back to the giant workhorse liquid rockets that propelled men to the moon. But this time the destinations will be much farther and the rocket even more powerful.

The Obama administration on Wednesday will unveil its much-delayed general plans for its rocket design, called the Space Launch System, which will cost about $35 billion, according to senior administration sources and information obtained by The Associated Press. It will carry astronauts in a capsule on top and start test launching in six years.

The size, shape and heavier reliance on liquid fuel as opposed to solid rocket boosters is much closer to Apollo than the recently retired space shuttles, which were winged, reusable ships that sat on top of a giant liquid fuel tank, with twin solid rocket boosters providing most of the power. It's also a shift in emphasis from the moon-based, solid-rocket-oriented plans proposed by the George W. Bush administration.

"It's back to the future with a reliable liquid technology," said Stanford University professor Scott Hubbard, a former NASA senior manager who was on the board that investigated the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident.

NASA figures it will be building and launching about one rocket a year for about 15 years or more in the 2020s and 2030s, according to senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the announcement was not yet made.

The idea is to launch its first unmanned test flight in 2017 with the first crew flying in 2021 and astronauts heading to a nearby asteroid in 2025, the officials said. From there, NASA hopes to send the rocket and astronauts to Mars -- at first just to circle, but then later landing on the Red Planet -- in the 2030s.

At first the rockets will be able to carry into space 77 tons to 110 tons of payload, which would include the six-person Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle capsule and more. Eventually it will be able to carry 143 tons into space, maybe even 165 tons, the officials said. By comparison, the long-dormant Saturn V booster that sent men to the moon was able to lift 130 tons.

The plans dwarf the rumbling lift-off power of the space shuttle, which could haul just 27 tons. The biggest current unmanned rocket can carry about 25 tons.

The size of the plans elicited an amazed "good grief" from Hubbard, who said it would limit how often they could be built or launched. Unlike the reusable shuttle, these rockets are mostly one-and-done, with new ones built for every launch.

Some of the design elements, the deadline and the requirement for such a rocket were dictated by Congress.

While the recently retired space shuttle's main engines were fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, it was primarily powered into orbit by solid rockets. Solid rocket boosters were designed to be cheaper, but a booster flaw caused the fatal space shuttle Challenger accident in 1986. The biggest drawback was that solid rockets can't be stopped once they are lit; liquid ones can.

The new plan is to use a giant rocket powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Apollo, Gemini and Mercury flew into space on liquid rockets, and liquids fuel most of the world's unmanned commercial rockets. Russia's Soyuz rocket is liquid fueled too.

During its initial test flights the rocket will use five solid rocket boosters designed for the shuttle strapped on its outside and will have shuttle main engines powering it on the inside. But soon after that the solid rocket boosters will be replaced with new boosters that should have new technology and may be either liquid or solid, the officials said

NASA figures it will spend about $3 billion a year on the plan, officials said. The key financial part of this arrangement is that NASA hopes to save money by turning over the launching of astronauts to the International Space Station, which orbits the Earth, to private companies and just rent spaces for astronauts like a giant taxi service. NASA would then spend the money on leaving Earth's orbit and the Earth-moon system.

Hubbard worries that NASA has a history of spending way more than initially proposed -- the space shuttle cost about twice what it was supposed to -- and this new rocket system will drain money from other NASA missions.

Silverchair - Innocent Criminals

2011-09-14T00:41:00.000-07:00

Silverchair are an Australian rock band.^[1] The band formed as Innocent Criminals in Merewether, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, in 1992, with the lineup of vocalist and guitarist Daniel Johns, bass guitarist Chris Joannou, and drummer Ben Gillies. Silverchair have been highly successful in the Australian recording industry, receiving the industry's flagship awards, the ARIA Awards, a record^{[dated info]} 21 times.^[2] The band have also received six APRA Awards.^[3]^[4]

Silverchair got their big break in mid-1994 when they won a national demo competition conducted by SBS TV show Nomad and Triple J. The band were soon signed by Murmur, and were successful on the Australian and international rock stages. In 2003, following the release of Diorama, the band announced a hiatus, during which time members recorded with side projects The Dissociatives, The Mess Hall, and Tambalane. Silverchair were reunited at the 2005 Wave Aid concerts, and went on to release Young Modern and play the Across the Great Divide tour with Powderfinger.
Silverchair's sound has evolved throughout their career, differing sounds on specific albums steadily growing more ambitious over the years, from grunge on their debut to their more recent orchestral prog-infused chamber-pop. The songwriting and singing of Daniel Johns has been noted as improving steadily while the band has developed an increased element of complexity in later works. Silverchair have sold in excess of six million records to date.^{[dated info]}^[5]

^{read more}

Josipovic and Tadic destabilize Bosnia-Herzegovina

2011-09-13T15:34:00.000-07:00

Swingeing critique of the Croatian president's regional policies by a former supporter, a professor of history at the Franciscan faculty of philosophy and theology in Sarajevo

Br Petar Jelec is professor of history at the Franciscan faculty of philosophy and theology in Sarajevo. During the last presidential campaign in Croatia, he strongly supported Ivo Josipovic’s candidature, when this came under sustained attack from Church quarters. Like leading members of the Bosnian Franciscan order such as Ivan Šarcevic, also a professor at the above faculty and editor of the respected Franciscan journal Svjetlo rijeci, Luka Markešic, president of the Croat National Council, and Franjo Topic, president of the Croat cultural foundation Napredak, he rejects the idea that it is necessary to establish a third - Croat - entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In a recent comment, Andrej Nikolaidis made a number of brilliant observations which are well worth recalling. >I know that sophisticated, liberal and tolerant intellectuals are meant to have nothing but praise for Boris Tadic=s policy. That it is imbued with the spirit of reconciliation, the spirit of new cooperation, the spirit of European integration. To promote - indeed follow - the policy of this self-declared regional leader is the spirit of the new era. But the problem is that, to put it in a nutshell, Boris Tadic is the regional leader in one respect only - regional destabilisation.

Nikolaidis proceeds to argue this position by analysing Tadic=s policy towards Montenegro and Kosovo. It is very interesting, for example, to hear Tadic=s interpretation of the latest crisis in northern Kosovo, which replicates earlier insurrectionary blockades in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serbian president would like us to believe that infiltrated Albanian provocateurs might have been involved in these events, and in the torching of the border crossings - presumably embarking on the felling of trees and the barricading of roads in fraternal embrace with the local Serbs.

Tadic=s policy towards Bosnia-Herzegovina

But let us set aside the events in Kosovo, and the policy of destabilizing Montenegro which Tadic is pursuing with the aid of the Serbian Orthodox church, and concentrate instead on the consequences of his policy in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the only country where unfortunately the Greater Serbian project has largely succeeded. The policy which Boris Tadic is conducting towards our country is the one drafted in SANU=s second Memorandum, forged by his father Ljubomir Tadic together with their family friend Dobrica Cosic. Those who wish really to understand Serbian policy taken as a whole should read the books of the well-known Serbian historians Latinka Perovic, Olga Popovic-Obradovic and Dubravka Stojanovic, who have thoroughly examined the Serbian state=s policy towards its neighbours. Those who still nurture illusions regarding some constructive policy on the part of Boris Tadic will end up pretty disappointed as a result.

One must include here also several Belgrade intellectuals, such as Srpa Popovic and Sonja Biserko, as well as the whole group around Petar Lukovic=s impressive website e-novine which has become a veritable thorn in the flesh of Tadic=s regime, and which the regime is therefore trying hard to suppress. At a recent meeting in Mostar, the president of the Serbian Helsinki Committee, Sonja Biserko, and her counterparts from Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, stressed that Tadic=s Serbia is seeking to realise in peace Slobodan Miloševic=s war aims. To be sure, Tadic operates in a more refined - and to the Western ear and that of >independent intellectuals= more acceptable - mode than Miloševic did. Thus he says publicly that he supports Bosnia-Herzegovina=s integrity, when in fact the Serbian political and intellectual elite is, through Milorad Dodik, doing all it can to destabilize the country, keeping it in a state of permanent tension.

Josipovic assists Tadic

But whereas Boris Tadic=s destructive policy of furthering the Greater Serbian and Memorandum project in the region should cause no great surprise - because Tadic=s Serbia has not undergone a catharsis, and refuses to accept its responsibility for the wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo - the readiness with which Croatian president Ivo Josipovic has endorsed Tadic=s regional policy is rather worrying, to say the least. Instead of lobbying across the globe, of visiting Washington, Brussels, Moscow, Peking, etc. in order to promote his country=s interests, Josipovic's >international= policy is reduced to countless encounters with his friend Boris Tadic, who thanks to this friendship with the Croatian president now >modestly= insists that their policy is a decade ahead of everyone else=s in the region. This boast would elicit great merriment were it not so deplorable.

A never-ending past: Miloševic=s abiding supporters

In a recent interview for the >Magazin= section of [Croatian daily] Jutarnji list, Josipovic, responding to the journalist=s direct question about how Bosnia-Herzegovina can progress when the head of one of its entities negates and denigrates it day in and day out, evaded it in a manner worthy of Pontius Pilate, offering in the place of any answer empty phrases that had no connection with the question asked. Following well-argued public warnings against the baleful results of his attitude to Milorad Dodik (doubtless encouraged by their joint friend Tadic), Josipovic told [Croatian weekly] Nacional that his policy is designed to ensure that Croats return to Posavina; and he has repeated on several occasions that Milorad Dodik has fulfilled all his promises to him, without ever specifying what these promises actually were.

The law on land books completes ethnic cleansing in RS:

In the meantime, however, following all these meetings at which the improvement of conditions for Croats in RS were allegedly discussed, Dodik introduced a law designed to complete in peacetime the process of ethnic cleansing of Croats and Bosniaks from the so-called Republika Srpska. It is a law concerning land registers that the RS assembly has recently adopted, to the accompaniment of total silence on the part of domestic and international actors, including the Catholic church of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Only the Bosniak members of the assembly protested against the law, according to which the already humiliated, murdered and deported Croats and Bosniaks from Posavina and the so-called RS who have been unable to return and restore their homes will have to pay tax on the burned-out remains and on their overgrown fields and devastated woodlands. Otherwise their property - fields, forests and grazing land - will be sequestrated, all in accordance with the law!

But Ivo Josipovic is not here to protest against such a law – something that cannot be expected from the two HDZ parties that orbit around [Dodik=s] SNSD - or to ask >the man who has fulfilled all he has promised= how it was possible to adopt a law that infringes all principles of ethics and justice. In contrast to Croatia, which has rebuilt houses for returning Serbs, Dodik=s para-state not only has no intention of rebuilding the houses it has destroyed, it is seeking to take away, by means of additional regulations, also the remaining property and land from those who have not returned and are unable to pay the imposed tax. This law hides a diabolical plan to complete the ethnic cleansing of the non-Serb population of RS. For Dodik and his followers find it unacceptable that, as the land books show, most of the land in Posavina remains in Croat ownership, while the Croats - luckily! - have not yet started to sell it massively, but only sporadically. I should like to take this opportunity to call upon them never to do so; and also upon church and political leaders in Bosnia-Herzegovina to unite in protesting against this injustice that cries out to heaven. Dodik wants to encourage those who have not returned, and who have no money to pay the tax on their destroyed homes, to sell all their possessions, since being unable to pay the tax they will anyway lose the forests, fields and houses which their ancestors acquired and tended at great cost and sacrifice. Here, then, is the greatest defender of Croat interests in Bosnia-Herzegovina - according to [HDZ leaders] Covic and Ljubic - standing >bravely= alongside them on >the final line of Croatdom=s defence’!

Distorting reality

The Croatian media on both sides of the border maintain a near complete silence on the truly tragic fate of the Croats of Posavina, Krajina and Kotor Varoš, while at the same time Croatian television and the leading Croatian papers pay the greatest attention to Dragan Covic and Boño Ljubic, and to a few of their clapped-out supporters from Herzegovina, who live in Zagreb and repeat ad nauseam the same old story about the allegedly unbearable tyranny under which Croats live in the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. No one cares for the fact that the reality on the ground is quite different: that Croats in the so-called RS - in contrast to those in the Federation – have been physically, economically and institutionally fully eliminated.

The current trend in the Croatian media on both sides of the Sava is to distort reality, pretending that the Croats living in RS are doing incredibly well while the Federation is for them a prison, one in which their human and civic rights are widely trampled upon. No one seems to be interested in the truth, it is the spin that matters, reflecting a renewed alliance between Mostar and Banja Luka aimed at the destruction of this country=s institutions.

The people of Posavina: a strong barrier to the love-affair between Dodik and the so-called >legal and legitimate= Croats

The Croatian policy emanating from Zagreb and headed by Ivo Josipovic, rather than issuing strong formal protests against this seizure of property of the Croats of Posavina, Krajina and Kotor Varoš, has instead been preoccupied with the issue of who is the [Bosnian] Croats= legal representative in the current Federation government. The [Croatian] president has thus been able to meet with Dodik on several occasions, and to receive a prize from the latter’s newspaper Nezavisne novine as >personality of the year=; but he is >unable= to find time to meet the president of the Federation, ðivko Budimir, because in Dodik=s and Covic=s view (and clearly also Josipovic=s) he is not the >legally= elected Croat member of the government. Croatian politicians never bother to recall that far more people were killed in and deported from Bosnian Posavina and RS than from the whole of the former so-called Republika Srpska Krajina in Croatia.

The fate of Croatian Serb refugees is a subject of major international concern, addressed by all relevant world bodies; but the fate of Bosnian Croat refugees from Posavina and RS has been swept under the carpet, and is treated as unfit for discussion. The sad and tragic story of Posavina is to be avoided and its memory erased as much today as in 1992, when the region was betrayed and handed over to the aggressor; because it alone can produce dissonance in the harmonious cooperation between Serb and >legal and legitimate= Croat parties in this country=s destruction. Increasingly, too, Croats from the southern part of our country are voicing angry complaints that >Posavina men and women are becoming bothersome with their story about Posavina, because this is injurious to our unity with the Serbs=. I am increasingly convinced that in view of all this, Tadic=s and Josipovic=s policy is a great threat to the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Tadic=s far more so, of course). Their >vision= and >leadership= will continue to give Bosnia-Herzegovina a headache for years to come.

more on http://www.bosnia.org.uk/news/news_body.cfm?newsid=2814

Cruz in Sarajevo

2011-09-13T15:28:00.000-07:00

Sarajevo – Spanish actress Penelope Cruz continued Tuesday with the filming of "Venuto al Mondo" at Sarajevo International Airport surrounded by the tight security measures that have protected her since her arrival at the Bosnian capital last week with husband Javier Bardem and infant son Leo in tow.

The press was only permitted to observe from a great distance the shooting of the arrival in Sarajevo of Gemma, the character played by the Madrid actress in the film directed by Italy's Sergio Castellitto.

Gemma is a single mother who accompanies her teenage son to the Sarajevo of today, the hometown of his father who was killed while still a young man during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

An SUV drove Cruz to the entrance of the airport terminal, well protected by bodyguards who tried to keep her from being photographed.

Production of the film began Monday in a downtown district of Sarajevo, once the front line in the war between Serbs and Muslims.

The filming in Sarajevo is expected to end on Sept. 21 and will continue on the Croatian island of Korcula and in Rome.

Mystery of Suad Husni’s death to be revealed

2011-09-02T01:13:00.000-07:00

The upcoming days the mystery of Egyptian diva Suad Husni’s death will be revealed. Documents have been revealed that Safwat Al Shareef, who was the former secretary general of the National Democratic Party and chairman of Al Shoura Council of the former regime of ousted President Husni Mubarak, was reason behind her death and not suicide.

According to the newspaper Al Anba Al Dawlieh, the documents stated that Shareef had entered the political scenes by presenting women to Egyptian and foreign political officials and VIP persons. Shareef would also select female artists and make sexual films of them and use the films to blackmail them if they refused his demands.

Suad had before her death threatened to write a book about her life journey and sell it to one of the television station, a matter that made the news of her suicide not believable. Investigations made by the British Scotland Yard stated that the name of Shareef had come up several times and that he had come to London numerous times before Suad’s death. It was added that Shareef was completely involved in the death of Suad and that he had hired professional killers to assassinate her.

On a similar note, controversial poet Ahmad Foad Nijm stated that he was a very close friend with Suad and stressed that she was murdered and did not commit suicide, especially due to the fact that she had talked to him 48 hours before her death and told him about her desire to return to her acting career.

It was said that the book Suad was going to release would reveal secrets about a number of officials and therefore killing her was the only way to keep her quiet.

Tortured and killed: Hamza al-Khateeb, age 13

2011-08-31T02:29:00.000-07:00

The mutilation and death in custody of a 13-year-old child has sparked further furious protests in Syrian city of Daraa.

Hamza al-Khateeb used to love it when the rains came to his small corner of southern Syria, filling up the farmers' irrigation channels enough so that he and the other children could jump in and swim.
But the drought of the last few years had left the 13-year-old without the fun of his favourite pool.
Instead, he'd taken to raising homing pigeons, standing on the roof of his family's simple breeze-block home, craning his neck back to see the birds circling above the wide horizon of fields, where wheat and tomatoes were grown from the tough, scrubby soils.

Though not from a wealthy family himself, Hamza was always aware of others less fortunate than himself, said a cousin who spoke to Al Jazeera.

"He would often ask his parents for money to give to the poor. I remember once he wanted to give someone 100 Syrian Pounds ($2), and his family said it was too much. But Hamza said, 'I have a bed and food while that guy has nothing.' And so he persuaded his parents to give the poor man the 100."
In the hands of President Bashar al-Assad's security forces, however, Hamza found no such compassion, his humanity degraded to nothing more than a lump of flesh to beat, burn, torture and defile, until the screaming stopped at last.

Arrested during a protest in Saida, 10km east of Daraa, on April 29, Hamza's body was returned to his family on Tuesday 24th May, horribly mutilated.

The child had spent nearly a month in the custody of Syrian security, and when they finally returned his corpse it bore the scars of brutal torture: Lacerations, bruises and burns to his feet, elbows, face and knees, consistent with the use of electric shock devices and of being whipped with cable, both techniques of torture documented by Human Rights Watch as being used in Syrian prisons during the bloody three-month crackdown on protestors.

Hamza's eyes were swollen and black and there were identical bullet wounds where he had apparently been shot through both arms, the bullets tearing a hole in his sides and lodging in his belly.

On Hamza's chest was a deep, dark burn mark. His neck was broken and his penis cut off.

"Where are the human rights committees? Where is the International Criminal Court?" asks the voice of the man inspecting Hamza's body on a video uploaded to YouTube.

"A month had passed by with his family not knowing where he was, or if or when he would be released. He was released to his family as a corpse. Upon examining his body, the signs of torture are very clear."
The original clip has since been removed, but a version with Hamza's castrated genitals blurred is still running [Note: this video is extremely graphic].

"When Hamza's mother came to see the body she was only shown his face," said the cousin, who was present at the time.

"We tried to tell the father not to look, but he pulled the blanket back. When he saw Hamza's body he fainted. People ran to help him and some started filming - it was chaos."
'He just disappeared'

April 29 was dubbed "The Friday of Ending the siege on Deraa", the border city where the torture of children had lit the spark for the Syrian uprising and where Maher al-Assad's forces lead the assault on a civilian population that killed hundreds.

Hamza didn't burn for politics, said his cousin, "but everybody seemed to be going to the protest, so he went along as well," walking with friends and family the 12km along the road from his home town of Jeezah north-west to Saida.

The firing began almost as soon as the villagers reached the edge of Saida, said the cousin.
"People were killed and wounded, some were arrested. It was chaotic we didn't know at that point what had happened to Hamza. He just disappeared."

A second source from the region, an activist, also spoke to Al Jazeera, confirming that Hamza had been among 51 protesters detained on April 29, he said, by Airforce Intelligence, which a number of detainees have reported as using brutal torture.

"They were all arrested by the anti-terrorism branch of the Airforce Intelligence," said the activist.
"They were all alive when they went into prison, but we received 13 bodies back this week and all had been tortured. The Airforce Intelligence are notorious for torture, they're barbarians. We're expecting another dozen bodies back in the coming days."

Responding to the video of Hamza's mutilated body, Syria's only private TV station, the pro-regime Al Dunia, aired an interview (Arabic) with a forensic doctor from Damascus' Tishreen Military Hospital.
Dr. Akram al-Shaar, who claimed to have supervised the autopsy of Hamza in Tishreen, said he found no signs of torture, claiming the marks on Hamza's body had been caused by natural decomposition.
Dr Shaar's testimony, however, is also the first public admission by a Syrian official that civilians arrested or injured or killed during the military assault on the Deraa region have been collected and transported to security facilities in Damascus.

Earlier this month, the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies (DCHRS) reported that the bodies of 244 civilians killed in the military assault on Deraa had been transported to Tishreen Military hospital, consistent with an apparent systematic regime campaign, first reported by Al Jazeera, to disrupt the treatment of dead and dying protestors.

After Hamza's body was filmed so the world could see how he died, the boy was buried in Jizah after last prayers for his soul in the local mosque. Following the ceremony, children walked through the streets of Jizah holding up a photo of Hamza and a banner that said he died a martyr, 13-years-old, under the brutal torture of the security forces.

All foreign media are barred from Syria but experienced local journalists and human rights researchers found no reason to doubt the authenticity of the footage of Hamza.

'A crime against humanity'

Hamza's father, Ali al-Khateeb, wanted to press charges against the army and security forces, said Hamza's cousin. Instead, Ali and his wife were visited by the secret police and threatened.

"They said: 'Enough of what has happened because of you already. You know what would happen if we heard you had spoken to the media,'" said Hamza's mother, clearly terrified as she spoke to the local activist, refusing to give further details on the circumstances of her son's arrest or death.

Hamza's father was briefly detained late Saturday afternoon, said his wife, after the secret police demanded he tell state media that Hamza was killed by armed Salafists, Sunni Muslim extremists, which the regime has claimed are driving the popular uprising.

"The father was asked to go to the security branch for half an hour so they could tell him their point of view about Hamza," said the cousin. "He was well treated."

Torture in Syrian prisons, long known as some of the worst in the world, is now "rampant" according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

"When you have mass execution and torture it rises to the level of a crime against humanity. In Syria, it appears clear that this has become widespread and systematic," said Ricken Patel, director of Avaaz, which has been documenting human rights abuses in the country.

"This is a campaign of mass terrorism and intimidation: Horribly tortured people sent back to communities by a regime not trying to cover up its crimes, but to advertise them."

If advertising its crimes is indeed the regime's strategy then it appears to be working: Within hours of the video of Hamza's mutilated body going online a protest broke out in Daraa city by hundreds of furious residents, defying the ongoing military siege to express their outrage at Hamza's torture and killing.

"People here are really furious about what happened to Hamza and this is another sign that the secret police and the authorities are criminals who cannot be trusted to make any reforms," said the activist, who travels widely in the Deraa region.

A week after his body was returned, a Facebook page dedicated to Hamza had more than 60,000 followers, under the title, "We are all Hamza al-Khateeb", a deliberate echo of the online campaign on behalf of Khaled Saeed, the young Egyptian whose death in police custody last year proved a trigger for the revolution in Cairo.

From the other end of Syria, in the far north-east, Rezan Mustapha, spokesman of the opposition Kurdish Future Movement said he and others had also seen the horrifying footage.

"This video moved not only every single Syrian, but people worldwide. It is unacceptable and inexcusable. The horrible torture was done to terrify demonstrators and make them stop calling for their demands."
But, said Mustapha, protestors would only be spurred on by such barbarity.

"More people will now go to the street. We hold the Syrian secret police fully responsible for the torturing and killing of this child, even if they deny it."

Some reactions didn't need any words at all. Though only one among his 20 other children from two wives, Hamza's 65-year-old father Ali appeared no less devastated by Hamza's murder than if he had lost his only son.

"How would any family feel if they saw that video of their own child?" asked Hamza's cousin. "I have never seen Hamza's father cry in his entire life. Now we see only tears in his eyes."

Source: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/05/201153185927813389.html

Nanny to Gaddafi's son recounts abuse

2011-08-31T02:20:00.000-07:00

A woman who worked as a nanny for one of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's sons said boiling water was poured over her head after she refused to beat his daughter.

Shweyga Mullah's head and body remain covered in large weeping scabs after the cruel punishment was inflicted by Hannibal Gaddafi's wife, Aline Skaf.

Ms Mullah, 30, was recently found alone in a room at an abandoned seaside resort in western Tripoli which belonged to the Libyan dictator's son.

The Ethiopian immigrant said she came to Libya one year ago to work as a nanny to Hannibal Gaddafi's young daughter and son.

In another horror story to emerge since the fall of the Gaddafi regime, Ms Mullah recounted how Ms Skaf became very angry when her daughter would not stop crying and Ms Mullah refused to beat the child.
"She took me to a bathroom. She tied my hands behind my back and tied my feet. She taped my mouth and she started pouring the boiling water on my head," Ms Mullah told CNN of the incident, which happened three months ago.

Ms Mullah said the abuse did not stop after the attack.
"For three days, she wouldn't let me sleep," Ms Mullah said.
"I stood outside in the cold with no food. She would say to staff, 'If anyone gives her food, I'll do the same to you.' I had no water, nothing."

A guard at the compound finally took Ms Mullah to hospital but when Ms Skaf became aware she threatened the guard would be fired if he helped her again.

A colleague of Ms Mullah confirmed the attack had taken place and added that he had also been beaten and slashed with knives.

Source: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8291777

Eid shooting at Copenhagen mosque

2011-08-30T15:20:00.000-07:00

One man was killed and two more wounded in a shoot-out outside a mosque in central Copenhagen on Tuesday morning.

The attacks came as worshippers left morning prayers on Eid, the festival that ends the Muslim month of fasting.

Police confirmed that the man had died within minutes after he was shot three times in the head, and that a second 50-year-old man was being treated in hospital. A third person, who rushed away in a private car, was shot in the leg.

“The guy who was shot fell down on his back, and then the other guy stood over him and emptied his clip into him,” said Jibran Sarwar, 35, who was leaving the mosque as the shooting began.

“It’s as if someone shot someone at a church mass on Christmas Eve. That’s the equivalent,” he continued. “It’s a day of celebration and now this guy’s parents are siitting at home and he’s in the morgue.”

Anti-Islamic feeling has been strengthening in Denmark ever since the conservative Jyllands-Posten newspaper outraged the Muslim world by publishing cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.

The support of the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party, which is calling for re-establishing border controls and closing asylum centres, has become increasingly important for the ruling conservative coalition. The party won 13.9pc of the vote and 25 seats in the last election in 2007.

But Danish Police said that the involvement of racist far-Right groups has been ruled out.
“It was between Pakistani people and no one else. It’s not a hate crime or racism or anything like that,” said Deputy Inspector Lau Thygesen. “There was an argument before the shoot out and then one of them pulled a gun. We are sure that it’s not something that was planned.”

The shoot-out took place as a large crowd stood outside the mosque, waiting for those who had come to pray at nine in the morning to leave so they could attend the 10 o'clock.
The Muslim Cultural Institute is one of the city's biggest mosques, with a capacity of 1,200 people. It was founded in the late 1970s by Pakistani immigrants.

Zaid Malik, 40, who has recently moved to Copenhagen from Hull, said the killer had been a plump Pakistani wearing the traditional white shalwar kameez. “It’s narcotics. It’s got to with some kind of gang war,” he said. “I heard firing three weeks ago in other areas as well."

Gaddafi's girl executioner: Nisreen, 19, admits shooting 11 rebel prisoners, now she is shackled to hospital bed awaiting justice

2011-08-29T09:00:00.000-07:00

First you see her large brown eyes and rosebud lips, framed by a pink headscarf. Then you notice that her bruised feet are secured by manacles to the foot of her bed.
Nisreen Mansour al Forgani is a pretty 19-year-old. She was also a serial killer for Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

Yesterday, in a heavily guarded room at the Matiga military hospital in Tripoli, she admitted to the Mail that she had executed as many as 11 suspected rebel prisoners in the days leading up to the fall of the Libyan capital last week. Shot at point-blank range, in cold blood.

‘I killed the first one, then they would bring another one up to the room,’ Nisreen said. ‘He would see the body on the floor and look shocked. Then I would shoot him too. I did it from about a metre away.’

One of thousands of girls and young women recruited by Gaddafi’s all-female militias, Nisreen is now a prisoner of the rebels and in fear of her life. Yet despite her killings, it is impossible not to feel pity for her.
Nisreen claims – and her doctors and even some of the rebel fighters believe her – that she had to shoot under great duress. She also says that she was sexually abused by senior military figures, one of whom was the commander of the elite Tripoli brigade tasked with protecting Gaddafi himself. ‘I told them [the rebels] what I did,’ she said. ‘They are angry. I do not know what will happen to me now.’

So how did this slight young woman, who used to live with her mother in Tripoli and enjoy dance music, come to have so much blood on her hands?
Nisreen says that her family were not supporters of the Gaddafi regime, although that is hard to verify at this stage in post-liberation Tripoli.
Her parents split up when she was a child, and Nisreen did not like her father’s new wife so she went to live with her mother.
One of her mother’s friends, a woman called Fatma al Dreby, was the leader of the female branch of Gaddafi’s Popular Guards militia – and this, it seems, was the fateful factor.

Last year, Nisreen left college intending to look after her mother, who was sick with cancer. Instead, Fatma recruited her for the Popular Guards.
The family protested, but Fatma would not be swayed. Nisreen was young and pretty – just the type they wanted. ‘There were about 1,000 girls from all over Libya,’ Nisreen recalled of their training camp in Tripoli. ‘I was there with a girl called Faten, whom I knew from college.’
The recruits were instructed in the use of firearms, and Nisreen was trained as a sniper.
By the start of the uprising in February, the two girls were being housed by the militia in a mobile home near Tripoli airport. Their duties mainly involved manning checkpoints around the city.
Their unit was based at the HQ of 77 Brigade, next door to Gaddafi’s Bab Al-Azizya residential complex, but Nisreen says she saw the dictator only once, when his convoy swept past her checkpoint.
Fatma was a zealous supporter of the regime, says Nisreen. ‘She told me that if my mother said something against Gaddafi that I should immediately kill her. If I said anything about the leader that she did not like I would be beaten and locked in my room. She also told us that if the rebels came, they would rape us.’
It was a shameless piece of manipulation from the militia leader who, according to Nisreen, pimped her female recruits for the sexual gratification of her senior male colleagues.
‘Fatma had an office at the 77 Brigade base and there was a room with a bed next door. One day, she summoned me and put me in that room by myself. Mansour Dau, who was the commander of 77 Brigade, then came in and shut the door.’
He raped her.
‘After it was over Fatma told me not to tell anyone, not even my parents,’ says Nisreen.
‘Every time Mansour came to the HQ he was given another girl by Fatma. She was given presents in return.’

Nisreen said she was later raped by Mansour’s son Ibrahim, also an officer in the brigade, as well as another military relative of the commander, called Noury Saad.
It happened to many girls she knew. And as the Gaddafi regime began to crumble, the abuses increased.
Tragically, her friend Faten was killed in bizarre and brutal circumstances as the rebels closed in on Tripoli in the past month.

The two girls were on a checkpoint near the Bab Al-Azizya complex when Colonel Gaddafi’s son and heir, Saif Al-Islam, arrived with an entourage. ‘Saif was wearing a bulletproof vest, helmet and aviator sunglasses,’ Nisreen recalls. ‘Faten went to have a closer look, and Saif’s bodyguard shot her in the head. She had simply got too close.’
The spiral of horror gathered pace. There is a saying in Libya: ‘Cut my throat but do not get a girl to shoot me in the back.’ One suspects that the deployment of Nisreen as an executioner of ‘traitors’ was meant as a final insult to the condemned.
Nisreen explains that she was taken to a building in the Bosleem district of Tripoli, put in a room and armed with an AK 47 rifle. There, a black woman soldier in a blue uniform kept guard and prevented her from escaping.

‘The rebel prisoners were tied up and kept under a tree outside,’ she says. ‘Then one by one they were brought up to the room. There were three Gaddafi volunteers with guns also in the room.
‘They told me that if I didn’t kill the prisoners then they would kill me.’
She begins to cry. ‘Some of the prisoners looked like they had already been beaten. Others were beaten up in front of me in the room. They did not speak. I do not remember their faces ... most of them were about the same age as me.’
She wipes her eyes and stares at a weeping wound on her elbow.
‘I tried not to kill them ... I turned and shot without looking. But if I hesitated, one of the soldiers would flick off the safety catch of his own rifle and point it at me.
‘I killed ten, perhaps 11, over three days,’ she says, slowly and almost disbelievingly, counting the murders on her fingers. ‘I don’t know what they had done.’
She wails: ‘I never harmed anyone before the uprising began. I used to have a normal life.’

Nisreen eventually escaped by jumping from the window of the second-floor room where she carried out the killings. Despite being injured in the fall and then hit by a reversing pick-up truck, she managed to limp out of the compound.
‘I was found by some anti-Gaddafi people who took me to a mosque where I was given water,’ she said. ‘Then I was brought here.’
Two fighters are on guard outside her door at the hospital. ‘We are here to protect her as much as to prevent her escaping,’ one says.
A woman in a white coat, presumably a doctor, enters the room. She begins to talk seriously to Nisreen, who bursts into tears. In fact, the woman is a volunteer medical orderly who has come to give ‘the girl sniper’ a piece of her mind.
‘How could your conscience let you kill all these people, just for Gaddafi?’ she exclaims.

She leaves the room and a rebel fighter, no older than Nisreen and with a rifle slung over his shoulder, replaces her. He leans on the end of the bed and addresses the girl.
‘Do you pray?’ the fighter asks her. ‘I used to,’ she whispers.
‘What time of day did you kill them?’
‘In the mornings.’
Her tears begin to roll again. He turns to us and asks: ‘If a girl killed 11 people in your country, what would you do?’
The scene has become an unpleasant freak show.
We ask her if any of her family know she is here or what’s happened to her. No, she replies. She gives us the phone numbers of relatives still in Tripoli. We call them and, finally, her stepmother answers.
‘I am at the Matiga hospital,’ Nisreen pleads with her. ‘Please, please come and get me.’ She winces and struggles against her ankle restraints.

‘Keep quiet about it all. Don’t tell them anything,’ we hear the woman at the end of the line telling her stepdaughter.
The rebel fighter shrugs with disgust. ‘There were many girls who did things like this,’ he says.

Eventually the stepmother and Nisreen’s brother turn up. But they stay only briefly – and do not seem surprised to see the armed guard on the teenager’s door.
Nisreen is being looked after by Dr Rabia Gajum, a Libyan child psychologist who has volunteered to work at the Matiga hospital. She voices immense sympathy for the teenager.
‘Nisreen is a victim too,’ she says. ‘Her brother told me that the family tried to get her out of the 77 Brigade base, but were threatened by the soldiers.

‘All the girls in the Popular Guards were raped. The men sexually assault the female recruits and then train them in weapons. We have had four women in here as patients, all trained as snipers like Nisreen.
‘We give them medical treatment. After that it is a matter for the new government about what to do with them.’ She added: ‘Nisreen has pelvic injuries and severe bruising. She needs long bed-rest and psychological counselling.
‘What we shall tell her parents I don’t know. Her mother is receiving treatment for throat cancer in Tunisia. Her father is sick and in a wheelchair and has no idea what has happened. It would be too much of a shock for him.’

However much Nisreen has blurred her account through shame, fear or a desire to explain her actions, she appears to personify the corruption and brutalisation Libya has experienced under Gaddafi.
Personal documents that we found at the 77 Brigade barracks prove she was there and underpin much of the detail she gave us.
But the only evidence of the atrocities in which she took part come from her own lips, for the district of Bosleem is still not yet secured by the rebels.
Her eyes were beautiful but completely blank, whether from shock, painkillers or both. But at least she is alive.
Across the city, the hospital in the Abu Salim district was a place of horror this weekend. Scores of corpses abandoned after the fighting around the Bab Al-Azizya complex were decaying in the sun.
A pick-up truck appeared, loaded with dozens of gas masks and rubber boots, looted from a police station.
Wearing a respirator was the only way one could bear to walk among the dead.
Next to slippery, bloated and fly-infested bodies lying on trolleys by the entrance lay a litter of the dead’s ID cards.
Two of them revealed that 21-year-old Mahaamat Cherif, from Chad, and Saidou Massatchi, 31, from Niger, would not be going home.
Unlike Nisreen, they cannot even try to explain why they fought for Gaddafi.

Steve Jobs Through the Years

2011-08-26T00:43:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs has spent his career challenging conventions about personal computing. He's transformed an industry and changed the way we think about technology. A look back at the accomplishments of an American business icon.

Is Muammar Gaddafi in love with Condoleeza Rice?

2011-08-26T00:02:00.000-07:00

Apparently scrapbooking was one of Muammar Gaddafi's favorite hobbies; but not just regular scrapbooking-- creepy, weird scrapbooking with photos of Condoleeza Rice (or "Leeza," as he likes to call her) as the focal point.

Some interesting finds have come out of Gaddafi's compound, but none as odd as a photo album filled with pictures of the former Secretary of State. Take a look at the quality of this scrapbook! Plenty of lazy Sunday afternoons went into this!

Gaddafi did meet Rice in Tripoli in 2008 when he was just getting back on the good side of the international community.

In a TV interview with al-Jazeera in 2007, Gaddafi gushed, "I support my darling black African woman. I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders ... Leezza, Leezza, Leezza. ... I love her very much. I admire her and I'm proud of her because she's a black woman of African origin."

Taken from: http://www.metro.us/newyork/national/article/952386--photos-is-muammar-gaddafi-in-love-with-condoleeza-rice

Neil Armstrong urges return to the moon to train for Mars

2011-08-25T17:14:00.000-07:00

NEIL Armstrong has urged a return to the moon to train for missions to Mars as the UN contemplates the future of its space program following the end of the shuttle era.

The first man to walk on the moon is due to address the US Congress on new directions for NASA in coming weeks.

He has previously criticised US President Barack Obama for being "poorly advised" on space matters and said it was "well known to all that the American space program is in some chaos at the present time, some disarray".

"There are multiple opinions on which goals should be the most important and the most pressing," he told a function in Sydney late Wednesday.

The US shuttle program came to an end last month with the Atlantis cruising home for a final time, 42 years after Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission.

Critics have assailed NASA for lacking focus, with no next-generation human space flight mission to replace the shuttle program.
Now 81, Armstrong said the agency had become a "shuttlecock" for the "war of words" between the executive, legislative and congressional arms of US government.
"It's my belief given time and careful thought and reasoning we will eventually reach the right goal, I just hope we do it fairly quickly," he said.

The normally private and reserved space veteran said Mars should be the next frontier for exploration but urged more missions to the moon as the vital next step.
"I do favour going to Mars but I believe it is both too difficult and too expensive with the technology we have available at the current time," he said.

"I favour returning to the moon. We made six landings there and explored areas as small as a city lot and perhaps as large as a small town. That leaves us some 14 million square miles [36 million square kilometres] that we have not explored."

Armstrong said working on the moon would allow scientists to practice "a lot of the things that you need to do when you are going further out in the solar system" while maintaining relatively close contact with Mission Control.

Communication is the major problem for trips to Mars, he added, with the relay of a message between Earth and the red planet delayed by about 20 minutes, compared with 1.5 seconds between here and the moon.
"Before you get an answer to your question almost an hour's gone by, so it's hard for Mission Control to be involved in a meaningful way helping you with that situation," he said.
"That's going to make a very difficult challenge for the early Mars missions to solve these kinds of delay problems.

"I do believe that we will solve them in time, we'll contrive a way to do that safely but we can't do it right now."

Travel time is also a major concern, with the quickest journey of two months only possible when Mars is closest to Earth, when it also happens to be spinning most rapidly, meaning massive amounts of fuel are required to land.

"The best time to go to Mars is when it's on the opposite side of the sun to you, as far away as it can get, and that takes the least fuel, but it also takes about seven months one way, which is packing a lot of sandwiches," he said.

"And by the time you get there Earth has moved and it's no longer in a proper position to come back, so you have to wait around for a couple of years until Earth gets in the right position."
Armstrong said Mars was a "worthy challenge" but it was expensive, time-consuming and carried substantial risks not faced in the lunar program, predominantly to do with radiation.

Taken from: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/neil-armstrong-urges-return-to-the-moon-to-train-for-mars/story-e6frg6n6-1226122094045