Archive for July, 2009
9/11 Conspiracy Filmmaker Sues For Defamation
An online slanging match over a 9/11 conspiracy book that quickly degenerated into a vitriolic war of words is now the subject of a $42.5-million defamation case.
The case could be a landmark case as it may set a precedent around the responsibilities of website owners to police the comments published by readers.
Greg Smith, a small Sydney film producer specialising in conspiracy theories, claims he is now millions of dollars out of pocket after he was defamed on the forums of Australian community website zGeek.com.
Smith had been contracted by a group of Eastern European investors to produce a film called Merchant Of Death, a documentary about the life and times of alleged Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who is being held in Thailand waiting for the outcome of an extradition request from the US.
But the film deal was axed after the overseas party that contracted Smith to make the film allegedly…
Richard Dawkins: Blasphemy Law A Return To Middle Ages
The new blasphemy law will send Ireland back to the middle ages, and is wretched, backward and uncivilised, Prof Richard Dawkins has said.
The scientist and critic of religion has lent his support to a campaign to repeal the law, introduced by Atheist Ireland, a group set up last December, arising from an online discussion forum. The law, which makes the publication or utterance of blasphemous matter a crime punishable by a €25,000 fine, passed through the Oireachtas last week.
In a message read out at Atheist Ireland’s first AGM on Saturday, Prof Dawkins said: “One of the world’s most beautiful and best-loved countries, Ireland has recently become one of the most respected as well: dynamic, go-ahead, modern, civilised – a green and pleasant silicon valley. This preposterous blasphemy law puts all that respect at risk.” He said it would be too kind to call the law a ridiculous anachronism.
Israeli Soldiers Speak Out On Gaza
A group of soldiers who took part in Israel’s assault in Gaza say widespread abuses were committed against civilians under “permissive” rules of engagement.
The troops said they had been urged to fire on any building or person that seemed suspicious and said civilians were sometimes used as human shields.
Breaking the Silence, a campaign group made up of Israeli soldiers, gathered anonymous accounts from 26 soldiers.
Life Magazine Goes Inside Today’s KKK
LIFE: The Department of Homeland Security recently issued a chilling report: Americans, it said, can expect an upsurge in “rightwing extremism” from White nationalists, militias, and groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan, of course, has had a hand in some of the nation’s most infamous acts of racial terror and murder. But what does the KKK look like today? Photographer Anthony Karen has documented the modern-day Klan in their homes, at rallies, and at Klan gatherings, taking us deep inside a world we would otherwise never see — a world most of us might not even want to know about.
The unnerving photos featured here, exclusively on LIFE.com, are from his new book, The Invisible Empire: Ku Klux Klan. “The majority of people I’ve come across,” Karen told LIFE, “you’d only know they were in the Klan if they decided to share that.”
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We Choose the Moon
We Choose the Moon is a site that tracks the activities of the Apollo 11 mission as it happened 40 years ago. The transmissions from the spacecraft, CAPCOM, and the lunar lander are cleverly published to and pulled in from Twitter.
That is of course, whether you believe we landed on the moon…
Could We Engineer an End to Aging?
“Aging is an “entirely chemical, non-mystical process of degradation with specific physical causes,” and a research group has now identified “the seven deadly things” which cause aging. So could scientists engineer an end to aging itself?
Biologists already believe one animal is immortal — the freshwater microscopic Hydras. (”Apparently, the challenges of indefinite tissue regeneration are simple enough for such a small organism that nature has solved them.”) Turtle organs show no sign of aging — Charles Darwin’s tortoise Harriet lived for 175 years, and Discover magazine believes it’s possible that turtles could also live forever!
It’s called “negligible senescence,” and in this article, which was featured in the fall issue of Humanity-plus magazine, the science writer reaches one final conclusion: “sign me up.
What Makes This Bastille Day Different?
Robert Marquand, The Christian Science Monitor: Bastille Day brought clear skies and unusually clear streets around Paris as the nation celebrated its famed revolution with a military parade (dating to World War I) down the Champs-Élysées. It’s traditional for French allies to be invited to participate. This year, 374 red-tufted members of India’s Maratha Army regiment marched from the Arc de Triomphe past guest of honor Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister.
July 14, France’s fête nationale, is the No. 1 state holiday — inspired by the storming of Paris prison castle Bastille in 1789 that abolished aristocratic privileges, and three years later led to the toppling of the monarchy. The holiday dates to 1880.
In much of France now it is a feel-good day: go outdoors, get together, stroll. More than most holidays, the French shut off the world. The Bastille Opera house offers a free performance. This year, it’s a work…
Monkeys Recognize When You Don’t Speak English Good
Matt Kaplan, National Geographic News: Monkeys can form sentences and speak in accents — and now a new study shows that our genetic relatives can also recognize poor grammar.
“We were really curious whether monkeys could even detect the common trend found in human language to add sounds to word edges, like adding ‘ed’ in English to create the past tense,” said lead study author Ansgar Endress, a linguist at Harvard University.
Previous research in cotton-top tamarins had shown that the animals can understand basic grammar, for instance, identifying which words logically follow other words in a sentence.
But that same study, published in the journal Science in 2004, found that monkeys did not understand complex grammar, such as when words in a sentence depend on each other but are separated.
While that study suggested monkeys were deaf to complex communication, the new research shows that tamarins can grasp at least one advanced concept:…
The Economy Is Even Worse Than You Think
By Mortimer H. Zuckerman, chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report.
The recent unemployment numbers have undermined confidence that we might be nearing the bottom of the recession. What we can see on the surface is disconcerting enough, but the inside numbers are just as bad.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics preliminary estimate for job losses for June is 467,000, which means 7.2 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the recession. The cumulative job losses over the last six months have been greater than for any other half year period since World War II, including the military demobilization after the war. The job losses are also now equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years, making this the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous expansion.
Here are 10 reasons we are in even…
Jon Stewart Mocks The Obitutainment on Television ‘News’
Matt Tobey, CCInsider: I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty disappointed in the news coverage of all the recent notable deaths. I’ve yet to see a single instance of a journalist physically reporting from inside a celebrity’s rotting corpse. Woodward and Bernstein [would be] surely rolling in their graves.
Real-Life Wall-E Recycling Robot Takes to the Streets of Italy
Ariel Schwartz, Inhabitat: It may not be as tiny or nimble as Wall-E, but this real-life DustCart robot traversing the streets of Peccioli, Italy is just as cute. The robot, part of the $3.9 million DustBot research program, collects trash and measures atmospheric pollutants like sulfur oxide, benzene, ozone, and nitrogen oxide with its on-board sensors. The robot can even be summoned with a cell phone and can go door to door, identify residents with a personal ID number, and sort their trash into organic, recyclable, or waste!
Nimble enough to navigate where conventional gas-guzzling garbage trucks cannot, the electric DustCart robot aims to clean up a dirty industry. Once garbage has been classified, the DustCart whisks it away into its belly and takes it to a waste management site. The DustCart avoids obstacles during its travels with pre-loaded maps and sensors.
The pear-shaped robot is still in the prototype stages since…
Goldman Sachs Sees Bumper Profit
The bank said it had set aside $6.65bn for pay and bonuses in the quarter — an average of $226,000 per employee.
A Savage Blow for Luddites Everywhere!
Proving that if there is a god he is indeed a republican, Barack Obama’s teleprompter crashed to the floor spectacularly during a recent speech and every republican in a 50 mile radius soiled their Ronnie Raygun skivvies.
Go Ahead and Curse! It May Ease Your Pain
It has long been a cliche: the woman in childbirth screaming curse words at her husband. Now, there’s scientific research that may explain why people in pain often use offensive language.
The cursing may actually lessen the perception of pain.
That is the finding of a new study published in NeuroReport. Researchers at Keele University’s School of Psychology recruited more than 60 undergraduates for the study. The students were asked to stick their hands in buckets of icy water twice. The first time, participants repeated a curse word over and over. The next time, they repeated an everyday, neutral word.
When they repeated the curse word, participants were able to withstand the water longer and reported a lesser pain level than when they repeated the neutral word.
“Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon,” Richard Stephens, one of the study’s authors, says in a news release. “It…
Monkey Moves Robot Using Mind Control
A monkey fitted with a hi-tech brain chip has learned to move a complex robotic arm using mind control.
The animal can operate the robot with such dexterity that it can reach out to grab, and turn a handle.
The mechanical arm has an arm, elbow, wrist and simple hand, which the monkey controls with the power of thought.
Sky News was given exclusive access to the laboratory at Pittsburgh University in the United States. The research is progressing so rapidly that scientists hope to start trials on paralysed patients within a year.
MJ Death and Jane Burgermeister Connection
FSB sources are reporting to President Medvedev today that American pop icon Michael Jackson was “most assuredly” assassinated by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after an examination of data transmitted by a Russian Military’s Kosmos 2450 satellite show “conclusively” that immediately prior to the music stars death in Los Angeles an electromagnetic pulse consistent in pattern to EMR weapons looted from the former Soviet Union by the United States was employed at the “exact coordinates” of the rock stars home.
To the type of technology being perfected by the US Military-Industrial Complex based upon former Soviet Union research used in these kinds of assassinations we can read about as reported by Cheryl Welsh, president, Citizens Against Human Rights Abuse, in her landmark 2001 report “Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) Weapons: As Powerful As The Atomic Bomb”, and which says:
“A newly declassified U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report says- extensive Soviet research into microwaves…
‘The Select Few’ Are Cashing In: Shocking Corruption at The Washington Post
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, AlterNet: If you want to know what really matters in Washington, don’t go to Capitol Hill for one of those hearings, or pay attention to those staged White House “town meetings.” They’re just for show. What really happens — the serious business of Washington — happens in the shadows, out of sight, off the record. Only occasionally — and usually only because someone high up stumbles — do we get a glimpse of just how pervasive the corruption has become.
Case in point: Katharine Weymouth, the publisher of the Washington Post — one of the most powerful people in DC — invited top officials from the White House, the Cabinet and Congress to her home for an intimate, off-the-record dinner to discuss health care reform with some of her reporters and editors covering the story.
But CEOs and lobbyists from the health care industry were invited, too, provided…
CBS Poll Finds Record Support for Legalizing Marijuana
Charles Cooper and Declan McCullagh, CBS News: Norm Stamper still remembers the day, nearly six decades ago, when a police detective visited his elementary school class to warn of the dangers of smoking the “devil weed.”
“That was the term he used — and he even brought along a bag of marijuana to show us,” said Stamper, 65, who would later become Seattle’s police chief. “I remember him saying something to the effect that, ‘If you smoke this, it will rot the membrane in your nose.’ He was an authority figure, and so I figured he could tell me something about the dangers of this drug. That was my early education about marijuana.”
By today’s standards, such a warning might sound as dated as the bug-eyed, morally-depraved pot fiends portrayed in the 1936 movie Reefer Madness. But it was in line with the prevailing view of the 1950s, which considered marijuana to…
U.S. Deficit Surges Past $1 Trillion For the First Time Ever…
Al Jazeera: The US federal deficit has ballooned past the $1 trillion mark for the first time and could grow to nearly $2 trillion by the end of the budget year.
Massive government spending to help ease the recession combined with a sharp decline in tax revenues and the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have caused the deficit to skyrocket.
The US treasury department said on Monday that the deficit in June totalled $94.3bn, pushing the nine-month total since the budget year started in October to $1.09 trillion.
The Obama administration now forecasts that the deficit for the budget year will reach $1.84 trillion by end September, intensifying fears over interest rates, inflation and the strength of the dollar.
The debt is largely financed by the sale of US treasury bonds and bills and the deficit is making Chinese and other foreign buyers of those instruments nervous about their security.
It could…
