Archive for January, 2011
UFO Sighted In Scotland
Via AOL News:
Scotland. Known for medieval castles, highlands, islands, clans, kilts and one large lake where a legendary beastie, the Loch Ness Monster, allegedly resides.
But for decades, Scotland has also been home to another mystery yet to be resolved: UFOs.
The country that occupies the northernmost section of Great Britain has its share of UFO reports, including an unusual pear-shaped object reported recently by a motorist on the UK UFO Sightings website.
On the night of Jan. 2, in the East Kilbride area of Scotland, George King wrote: “I was sitting in my car, facing west, when I noticed two orange lights — one smaller than the other — flying low.
[Continues at AOL News]
Europe To Outlaw Hundreds Of Herbal Health Products
Count this one as a sweeping victory for Big Pharma: regulations set to go into effect across Europe this year will ban hundreds of herbal medicines in one fell swoop. I appreciate the EU’s effort to keep people safe from untested substances, but is it really possible that echinacea could be any more hazardous than, say, prescription antidepressants? The Independent reports:
Hundreds of herbal medicinal products will be banned from sale in Britain next year under what campaigners say is a “discriminatory and disproportionate” European law.
With four months to go before the EU-wide ban is implemented, thousands of patients face the loss of herbal remedies that have been used in the UK for decades. From May 1, 2011, traditional herbal medicinal products must be licensed or prescribed by a registered herbal practitioner to comply with an EU directive passed in 2004. The directive was introduced in response to rising concern over adverse…
Sole Thiopental Company Halts Production Over Death Penalty Use
Guess we’ll have to hold off killing a few people, or just resort to “inhumane” ways of execution. Globe and Mail reports:
Hospira Inc. HSP-N, the only U.S. manufacturer of one of the drugs used in lethal injections, is halting production of a drug over a controversy in Europe about its use in capital punishment.
Many U.S. states have already run out of sodium thiopental, and today’s decision by Hospira could see further delays in executions.
Hospira had suspended production in 2009 but planned to start up again early this year at its facility in Liscate, Italy. Italy’s government, though, ordered the company to make certain that the drug manufactured in Italy wouldn’t be used for executions.
[Continues a Globe & Mail]
MTV Series ‘Skins’ Challenged As “Child Pornography”
There’s no such thing as bad publicity. Fox News reports:
Is MTV a purveyor of kiddie porn?
The Parents Television Council wants to find out.
The media watchdog group called on lawmakers and law enforcement officials Thursday to open an investigation regarding possible child pornography and exploitation on the cable network’s new series “Skins.”
“On January 17, the Viacom-owned cable network MTV aired a teenager-based drama, ‘Skins.’ The episode included all manner of foul language, illegal drug use, illegal activity as well as thoroughly pervasive sexual content…
Earth May Get Second Sun in 2012?
Man, I always thought this would happen to Jupiter in 2010. Claire Connelly had a different sci-fi film in mind, as she writes on News.com.au:
It’s the ultimate experience for Star Wars fans — staring forlornly off into the distance as twin suns sink into the horizon.
Yet it’s not just a figment of George Lucas’s imagination — twin suns are real. And here’s the big news – they could be coming to Earth.
Yes, any day now we see a second sun light up the sky, if only for a matter of weeks.
The infamous red super-giant star in Orion’s nebula — Betelgeuse — is predicted to go gangbusters and the impending super-nova may reach Earth before 2012, and when it does, all of our wildest Star Wars dreams will come true.
The second biggest star in the Orion constellation is losing mass, a typical indication that a gravitation collapse is occurring. When that happens,…
The Gulf Of Mexico’s Blue Plate Special
Michael Edward writes about the ongoing ecological disaster that has befallen the population of the Gulf of Mexico, at blueplague.org:
There’s a new proprietary recipe being force-fed to all of us here on the Gulf of Mexico that is now becoming available worldwide. Although this recipe has been closely guarded for 8 months, we were able to break it down after examining the plentiful supply us “Gulf Coasters” have available here. The ingredients are abundantly available while both the recipe and the brewing process are not as secret as everyone had thought.
THE GULF BLUE PLATE (BP) SPECIAL
Fill a large bowl with saline ocean water, add a generous proportion of thick crude oil, then pour in a cup of liquid Correct-it (available from Nalco under the brand name Corexit) making sure you don’t spill any on yourself, stir gently, and then let it sit for a day or two. As the newly…
The Personal Is Not Political
Via The First Church of Mutterhals:
The phrase ‘the personal is political’ always bugged me, but I could never articulate why. There’s just something off about it, like conflating religious belief and science, or the mixture of church and state. I was recently reading the Christopher Hitchens autobiography and I came by this quote regarding the inception of the phrase:
“At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was — cliché is arguably forgivable here — very bad news.”
He goes on to say that now you only needed to flout your attachment to whatever arbitrary delineation (as he brilliantly puts it, “a member of a sex, or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,”) to be considered a revolutionary. This is coming from a person who wears his arrest record proudly, having been done in for…
Russian Spy Anna Chapman Reveals ‘The Secrets of the World’ On TV
Remember Anna Chapman, the sleeper spy and Internet sensation? Now that she’s safely back in Russia, in addition to becoming a Maxim Mag cover girl, appearing in movies and generally being a contemporary Moscow “It Girl,” she has, of course, garnered her own TV show, debuting tonight on Ren-TV. The producers of the show told AP that Anna will “use all her talents to solve the world’s most complicated mysteries.” Ren-TV’s website, in dodgy translation, describes the show as follows:
This is the only TV project, which has agreed to Anna Chapman. Viewers will be able to see her only on REN TV. “The mysterious woman is the most mysterious program” – so says the project director of the Documentary and journalistic program Mikhail TUKMACHEV.
The program “Secrets of the world and Anna Chapman is dedicated to the most puzzling phenomena of modern times. It is no coincidence that the leading program…
A Look Into DR Congo’s Comic Book Industry
Panel from 'Luve ya muntu' by Bruno Luya Muzuka.
Fascinating stories and art from a country which has seen incredible unrest. Thomas Hubert reports from Kinshasa for BBC News:
For comic book fans around the world, a handful of cities evoke strong images: superheroes jumping from skyscrapers in New York; Tintin running across a building in a Brussels mural; wide-eyed schoolgirls looking for romance in Tokyo.
But colourful cityscapes, designed by local artists, are finally putting an African capital city on the comic map. The place is Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and it is not difficult to see why.
Complete with dusty boulevards, monster traffic jams in blazing sunsets and so-called shegue, or street children, such comic portraits of the Congolese capital are among the main features of the style developed by home-grown talent.
Decades of shared colonial history with comic-mad Belgium certainly had an influence on the emergence of the Congolese comic…
The Market May Want You To Die
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
The Republicans who now control the U.S. House of Representatives made demolishing the Obama healthcare bill their top priority during their campaign and will fight their hardest to make that demolition a reality now that they hold office. We all know the reasons: tea partiers want the government out of their Medicaid; seasoned republicans know they just need to trumpet their hatred of “big government” to stay seated; and most in both camps believe that the “market” is gospel and should dictate who should get health coverage.
The Department of Health and Human Services released a study showing that between 50 and 129 million Americans have some kind of pre-existing health condition. As plenty of Americans know, a preexisting condition can allow insurance companies to deny some or even all coverage. Should an insurance company decide to change their criteria defining “pre-existing condition,” it’s possible for a…
Robots Coming To An Office Near You
Gives literal meaning to “office drone”:
Business Week reports:
Between the global economic downturn and stubborn unemployment, the last few years have not been kind to the workforce. Now a new menace looms. At just five feet tall and 86 pounds, the HRP-4 may be the office grunt of tomorrow. The humanoid robot, developed by Tokyo-based Kawada Industries and Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Sciences and Technology, is programmed to deliver mail, pour coffee, and recognize its co-workers’ faces. On Jan. 28, Kawada will begin selling it to research institutions and universities around the world for about $350,000…
Louis CK Learns About The Catholic Church
Louis CK’s 2007 investigative report about the religion he was raised in:
NYPD Officers’ Counter-Terrorism Trainings Feature A Muslim-Bashing Film
Via The Raw Story:
New York Police Department officers who showed up for mandatory counter-terrorism training were shown a “spectacularly offensive” anti-Muslim film claiming that American Muslims are secretly plotting to take over the country, a news report alleged Wednesday.
The news is further evidence that US law enforcement agencies are turning to extremist anti-Islamic “consultants” to provide training for terrorism investigations.
According to the Village Voice’s Tom Robbins, the NYPD used a film called “The Third Jihad” in training sessions this month. Robbins described the film as
72 minutes of gruesome footage of bombing carnage, frenzied crowds, burning American flags, flaming churches, and seething mullahs. All of this is sandwiched between a collection of somber talking heads informing us that, while we were sleeping, the international Islamist Jihad that wrought these horrors has set up shop here and is quietly going about its deadly business. This is the final drive in a 1,400-year-old bid…
Woman Solves Her Own Kidnapping
The New York Times reports:
It was an abduction that made headlines and stunned the authorities: A 3-week-old infant, taken to a Manhattan hospital in August 1987 for treatment of a fever, was snatched by a woman dressed in nurse’s clothes and never heard from again.
Two decades later, with investigators stumped and the case cold, the parents of the abducted girl refused to give up hope, believing that someday their daughter might return.
Their prayers were answered.
Carlina White, now 23 and living in Georgia, was reunited on Friday with her biological parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson, bringing an end to one of the most baffling missing persons cases in the New York Police Department’s files. The reunion brought elation to a mother and father racked by pain and anger for over two decades, and a new family for a woman who had long held suspicions about her past.
[Continues at The New York…
RNC Chair Candidates Stumped When Asked To Name Favorite Book
How do you silence a politician? Ask them to name their favorite book. Republican Party leaders are not bullish on reading, apparently, because when Tucker Carlson floated the question to the candidates for Chair of the Republican National Committee at their January 3 debate, it elicited the sound of crickets, followed by a range of awful, stammered non-answers. My favorite response is from Michael Steele, who blurts out, “War and Peace,” and then misquotes Charles Dickens.
Garbage Hotel Opens In Madrid
Photo: TresSugar
Looking for a place to stay in Madrid? Make an ec0-friendly reservation at the Beach Garbage Hotel! The Leader Post reports:
A new hotel has opened in the heart of Madrid proudly declaring that it’s complete rubbish.
More of a wooden shack than a five-star establishment, the walls of the Beach Garbage Hotel are strewn with detritus dragged up by the tide, recovered from landfills or snapped up at flea markets.
Among the wall decorations: Plastic drums, wooden frames, musical instruments, striped socks, tyres, and children’s books.
In the five rooms there are street lights, wobbly sideboards, and torn Persian rugs, ready to welcome the lucky winners of a Facebook competition whose prize was a free stay.
Out front, there is a small patch of sand and palm trees.
[Continues at Leader Post]
Scientists Control Worms’ Minds Using Lasers
Mind control via laser is a reality, but so far has been used exclusively to make tiny worms wriggle and lay eggs (which they would be doing anyway). Scientific American reports, with no word on when this will be applicable to human subjects:
Scientists have come a step closer to gaining complete control over a mind, even if that mind belongs to a creature the size of a grain of sand. A team at Harvard University has built a computerized system to manipulate worms—making them start and stop, giving them the sensation of being touched, and even prompting them to lay eggs, as seen in the video above—by stimulating their neurons individually with laser light, all while the worms swim freely in a petri dish. The technology may help neuroscientists for the first time gain a complete understanding of the workings of an animal’s nervous system.
The worm in question, Caenorhabditis elegans, is one…
