The highest meditation practice in the Nyingma Buddhist tradition

Dzogschen means the 'Great Perfection' and has nothing to do with sex, really. The sex is only symbolic of the union of method and wisdom ro attain supreme bliss. Nyingma Buddhists and Bonpos both believe that a practitioner who masters Dzogschen can attain liberation in one lifetime, turning his body into rainbow coloured light and leaving no mortal remains.

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Is this possible ?

A baby boy with two heads was born by Caesarean section at a clinic in Keshobpur, 135 km from the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka, on Monday, according to media reports Thursday.
The boy, named Kiron, was born by Cesarean section on Aug. 25, weighing 5.5 kilogrammes. (Xinhua/AFP Photo)

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Sex Addiction can be a disease

David Duchovny has entered a rehabilitation center for sex addiction, his lawyer, Stanton "Larry" Stein, tells PEOPLE exclusively.

"I have voluntarily entered a facility for the treatment of sex addiction," the actor says in an exclusive statement. "I ask for respect and privacy for my wife and children as we deal with this situation as a family."

Duchovny, 48, has been married to actress Téa Leoni since 1997. They have two children, daughter Madelaine West, 9, and son Kyd, 6.

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Animal Olympics

A macaque riding a goat performs during an animal sports meeting at a wildlife park in Kunming, capital of southwest China's Yunnan Province, Aug. 22, 2008. Some dozen animals in the park played on Friday for "gold medals" in events as "track and field", "gymnastics", "equestrian" and "football". (Xinhua/Lin Yiguang)

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Girls Kissing Girls Evolutionary Possible

Imagine that you hear that your 18-year-old daughter was kissing another girl at a party last weekend. What races through your mind? "O my gosh, she's exploring same-sex attractions. She must be a lesbian."

Hold up, Mom and Dad. You're showing your age. Chances are, your daughter's not fixed on the pretty young blonde she's locking lips with. There may be something entirely different and unexpected going on.

"Girls making out with each other to turn on guys is the latest craze at high school and college parties," according to the online magazine Salon.com.

Still don't believe it? Listen to this summer's monster hit song, "I Kissed a Girl" by Katy Perry. It's an international phenomenon -- topping the charts all summer in America, Canada, Australia and Great Britain. A few weeks ago, Perry was a headliner at the Warped music festival at Canterbury Park in Shakopee, belting out the song's provocative lyrics:

I kissed a girl and I liked it,

The taste of her cherry chapstick,

I kissed a girl just to try it,

I hope my boyfriend don't mind it.

It felt so wrong, it felt so right.

Perry cagily maintains that her song is about drunken curiosity regarding same-sex attractions. But her music video, which features gyrating women in lingerie, is clearly designed to give the male libido a jolt.

We baby boomers like to think we invented and defined the sexual revolution. But our offspring are tossing out the categories we took for granted, including the view that "gay or straight" is preprogrammed.

Young women whom Salon.com interviewed about the girl-on-girl trend said they had initially kissed other females to get a free beer at parties or on a dare from guys. But they soon saw it as a way to signal to males that they are "sexually open and adventurous."

"It was like, look, I'm the center of attention!" recalled one 16-year-old.

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Latest Earthquakes in the World -Past 7 days

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Major Floods reported globally in 2008

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IIMA graduate selling vegetables in Bihar

This news completely amazed the big community of B school graduates in India. Kaushalendra is a 27 years old MBA graduate from IIM Ahmedabad. It is one of the prestigious B schools of world. He got exciting job offers after completing the MBA degree but he decided to hawk vegetables on the streets of Patna, capital of Bihar. He is famous in the Kankarbagh market as the “MBA sabziwalla”. He is not an ordinary vendor. He uses a self-developed handcraft for carrying vegetables. There is also a weighing machine attached to cart. There is cooling facility also available in the cart. He gives a brand name “Samridhi” - to his vegetables. His vegetable prices are lower than the normal prices in the market.


Actually he has dream to make Bihar India’s vegetable hub. Kaushalendra has already tied up with more than 250 vegetable farmers in villages of Bihar. He is now getting media attention. However he has still a big way to cover. After topping his class of IIM-A in 2007, he says he did extensive fieldwork to gauge the market, meet the local farmers and minutely study cultivation techniques before finely calibrating his unique business model. Only after he was convinced of the immense potential of his plan, did he apply for a bank loan of Rs 4 million to flag off his project. He has a dream to make Bihar a rich and prosperous state.

“I am here to do something. It was my childhood dream to contribute to the development of rural Bihar, I have opted to make vegetables the new brand of Bihar.”
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Russia not about to invade Mideast : New Prophecy

WASHINGTON – Even though Russia has advanced south into Georgia, a best-selling new Bible prophecy book says suggestions this signals an imminent march into the Middle East are mistaken.

Instead, says Bill Salus, author of "Isralestine," the world is about to be surprised by a different kind of devastating regional war involving Israel and its Arab neighbors.

"Isralestine: The Ancient Blueprints of the Future Middle East," currently rising to the top of the prophecy charts, says scholars have missed a significant piece of what the Bible reveals about the future of the region. And it has many of them reconsidering their prophetic model for the near future.

"You can set Russia's recent invasion of Georgia and Israel's concern over Iran's nuclear aspirations on the back burner, not that these topics lack importance," says Salus. "The stage is not adequately set for the highly publicized Ezekiel 38 and 39 Russian-Iranian nuclear-equipped consortia of nations to invade Israel. Psalm 83 comes first, and then Ezekiel 38 follows on its heels like a Goliath shadow. There are two distinct invasions of Israel, one building upon the other, with both occurring sequentially in the Middle East."

According to Salus, the next war in the Middle East will involve Israel's closest Arab neighbors – not faraway Iran or Russia, the re-emerging military power to the north. He says a sometimes overlooked or misinterpreted passage in Psalm 83 is the key to understand the next major prophetic development. He says it suggests Palestinians, al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas, Syrians, Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians will confederate and launch an all-out war against Israel before what has been called the "battle of Armageddon" involving another alliance of Iran, Russia and Turkey.

"Indeed something is very near, but it is not Armageddon," says Salus.

The theory has many long-time students of Bible prophecy sitting up and taking notice.

The result of this regional war will be devastation for the Arabs who launch it and startling territorial and resource gains by Israel, claims the theory. It is this unexpected development that will precipitate the final showdown involving what has been termed "the Ezekiel invasion."

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$1.5 billion Indian arms deal with Israel

The Indian Cabinet Committee on Security has given the go-ahead for two mega-deals with Israeli defense industries in India, claim sources in the know.

Local sources say that the committee approved a $1.5 billion Israel Aerospace Industries project to develop and upgrade the Barak surface-to-air missile.

The council also approved a $270 million purchase of Rafael's SpyDer defense systems. According to Indian news reports, Rafael has already inked the final agreement, and IAI is expected to renew negotiations shortly.
The deal has been held up because the Indian Central Bureau of Investigations accused India's former defense minister and president of the Samata Party George Fernandes of accepting NIS 435,000 in kickbacks from the IAI to fix a tender for anti-ship missiles in IAI's favor. The IAI and Fernandes denied the allegations, which Fernandes says were politically motivated.

The Rafael deal was also suspended, apparently under the shadow of similar allegations. Rafael denies the allegations. According to the Times of India the development project for the new generation of Barak missiles will also move forward, and the missiles will be operational by 2011.

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Society in the process of committing suicide

It's striking that the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons — arguably the most pressing issue humankind faces — has slipped so far off the political agenda it rarely merits a mention.

Apart from the annual August 6 anniversary of Hiroshima — acknowledged briefly in the media last week, including in a powerful documentary on CBC Newsworld — the issue seems to suffer the fate of subjects the media just don't consider hot enough to cover.

Of course, the issue of nuclear weapons does get a lot of attention — when it comes to keeping them out of the hands of Iran, North Korea or Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Few subjects consume more oxygen in the public arena these days than Iran's nuclear ambitions — even after the US National Intelligence Estimate, representing the consensus of all 16 US government spy agencies, reported last fall that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and hasn't revived it since.

That would be zero nuclear weapons for Iran. Meanwhile, well out of the spotlight, there are more than 20,000 nuclear weapons, including thousands on hair-trigger alert, in the hands of the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India and Pakistan. But then what possible risk could they pose?

So while there's a lot of energy for blocking the nuclear ambitions of enemies, what's fallen into virtual oblivion in the West is the goal of disarming ourselves as well.

That's a curious development. As everyone knows, a serious nuclear exchange — even one triggered accidentally — could wipe out the world. Hence no one actually argues in favour of nuclear weapons. Rather we simply ignore them, even as we go on living with them.

Peace advocates Anatol Rapoport and Leonard Johnson (a retired Canadian general) compare our society to the cells of a body in the process of committing suicide. All the cells keep operating normally, each doing its own job, even as the person writes a suicide note, puts a gun in his mouth and prepares to pull the trigger.

This public obliviousness has allowed the Bush administration, with its disdain for disarmament, to keep expanding the US nuclear arsenal, even openly defying the decades-old ban against weapons in space.

But, with a new US administration next year, this should be the time for an organized disarmament push from the rest of the world. What's needed is some leadership — something Canada used to provide.

In the late 1990s, Canada played a pivotal role in a group of middle power countries trying to break the deadlock at disarmament talks in Geneva. In 2002, Canada became the first NATO country to vote for the group's pro-disarmament resolution, despite strong opposition from the United States. Other NATO countries later followed Canada's lead.

A group of disarmament experts, led by former Canadian disarmament ambassador Douglas Roche, met in Ottawa last February in an effort to push the Harper government to resume that sort of leadership role — to no avail, or even media interest.

Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has stepped up to the plate, announcing last June the establishment of a nuclear disarmament commission, to be chaired by former Australian prime minister Gareth Evans.

Sadly, Canada lacks that sort of leadership at the moment. But is it too much to expect we could perhaps fall in line behind Australia?

Or we could just keep on doing what we're doing, even as the suicide note is being written, with the gun in the mouth and the hand on the trigger

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20 Muslim nations deny entry to religious workers

A new congressional study has found that more than 20 Muslim nations deny entry to American and other foreign religious workers, WND has learned, even as the U.S. State Department grants entry to hundreds of clerics from their countries each year.

The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and most other Middle Eastern countries still refuse to offer religious visas, they and deny entry to U.S. clergy as official policy, according to a report by the Law Library of Congress, the foreign legal research arm of the U.S. Congress. In a shocker, U.S. allies Afghanistan and Iraq also made the list of religious refuseniks.
King Abdullah's meetings – which drew about 200 representatives of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Taoism and other religions – had to be held outside of Saudi Arabia, because, as one journalist observed, "the mere fact that rabbis would be openly invited to the kingdom, a country where in principle Jews are not permitted to visit, would have constituted a turning point."


Nations not offering religious visas & denying or restricting entry to religious workers:

I. No religious visas, entry denied to foreign religious workers:

Afghanistan
Algeria
Bahrain
Bhutan
Brunei
Egypt
Iran
Iraq
Jordan
Kuwait
Libya
Maldives
Morocco
North Korea
Oman
Palestine
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Syria
Turkmenistan
United Arab Emirates
Uzbekistan
Yemen

II. No religious visas, entry allowed, but with restrictions:

Armenia
Azerbaijan
Belarus
Burma
Cambodia
China
Georgia
Indonesia
Kazakhstan
Kyrgyzstan
Russia
Serbia
Solomon Islands
Tajikistan
Tuvalu
Vietnam

Source: Library of Congress

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Christians untrue to their own religion

Approximately fifteen years ago two books appeared--Philosophers Who Believe, edited by Kelly James Clark, and God and the Philosophers, edited by Thomas V. Morris--that provided certain well-regarded Anglo-American theistic philosophers with a rare opportunity to reflect publicly and personally on their spiritual journeys. Finally, with the publication of Philosophers without Gods, edited by Louise M. Antony, an atheistic counterpart to these volumes is now available.

Philosophers without Gods, much like God and the Philosophers, features essays from twenty well-regarded philosophers, including contributions from current 'rock stars' in the field, such as Daniel Dennett and Simon Blackburn, and, rather poignantly, the late David Lewis, whose chapter was completed with the help of Philip Kitcher. Antony helpfully organizes the essays into ten "Journeys" and ten "Reflections." The former are more personal, in some instances far more personal, meditations on living without faith, while the latter address in a more general way philosophical questions about religion and theology, such as, for instance, whether morality depends upon God's existence.

The writing is not technical but it is more advanced than that which is found in the recent spate of books on philosophy and popular culture. While it is somewhat difficult to offer generalizations about the book as a whole, since it is a collection of diverse essays, it strikes me as a worthy and sturdy alternative to its theistic counterparts. Antony has a light and deft editing touch. The chapters are well-organized and the diversity of viewpoints that emerges among this group of authors appears maximized, not truncated. Furthermore, Antony provides a brief but informative introduction. In it she cites a recent survey of Americans that places atheists at the top of the list of persons viewed as problematic, even though most people who participated in the survey claim not to know any. On the heels of this data, Antony states that a main goal of the volume is "to contribute to a more just understanding of those who have rejected religious belief" (x). If the target audience mainly consists of fairly well educated readers, this can seem like a very modest goal. Nonetheless, despite concerns that a few contributors occasionally reinforce certain negative stereotypes about atheists (more on this point below) the book clearly achieves this objective.

With a few very notable exceptions, especially Elizabeth Secord Anderson's essay, "If God is Dead, is Everything Permitted?"--a highlight of the "Reflections" section--I tended to find the "Journeys" chapters more interesting and engaging. For instance, the opening essay, Stewart Shapiro's "Faith and Reason, the Perpetual War: Ruminations of a Fool," begins with Shapiro poignantly recalling the precise moment when he lost the last vestiges of his faith--a day in February of 1984 when David Vetter, otherwise known as the "bubble-boy," passed away. Shapiro then proceeds carefully, while appealing to personal experiences and an incisive reading of the biblical story of the sacrifice of Isaac, to argue that religious faith is at odds with the best impulses of philosophy--those that lead us to doubt and to question. Strategies of avoiding this fundamental conflict, which he discusses under the rubrics "rationalism" and "incommensurability," are deemed untenable. Even though some readers will not share Shapiro's background in Judaism or his broader conclusions about faith, most likely they still will feel understood and will understand clearly and perhaps even appreciate Shapiro's stance, which is no mean feat for an opening chapter in a volume defending atheism.

Joseph Levine's "From Yeshiva Bochur to Secular Humanist" continues the sketch of journeys to atheism. Levine cites his firsthand experiences of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict as an interesting and provocative reference point to illuminate crucial moments in his journey. This is one kind of experiential evidence for atheism that likely would not show up in a standard journal article on the topic, unfortunately. Levine also provides the only reference to Nietzsche in the entire volume. He notes that Nietzsche led him to think that belief in God is not only false but also "morally wrong" insofar as it "makes servility to authority the ultimate aim of human life" (29). This is about as close to delving into the thought of the great trinity of atheists, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, as the book gets.

Daniel Garber's "Religio Philosophi" follows Levine's chapter and stands out on account of the fact that Garber openly laments his lack of faith. He acknowledges that he is not a "cheerful atheist" (34). Daniel Farrell echoes this perspective to some extent in his "Life without God: Some Personal Costs," in which he bracingly concedes that the loss of clarity about what to do with his life was "by far the most serious loss" that he suffered when he lost his faith (61).

Garber also offers an extended and surprisingly sympathetic discussion of Pascal's famous wager argument for belief in God. He resists Pascal's conclusion ultimately on the grounds that while Pascal gives good reasons in favor of (the prudence of) believing in God, he does not present convincing reasons for thinking that God exists (36). This mixed reaction to Pascal contrasts sharply with the perspectives of Marvin Belzer and Jonathan Adler, both of whom heap scorn on him. Belzer argues in "Mere Stranger" that Pascal's wager is "grounded in fear and pessimism" and amounts to a "ridiculous trivialization of the basis for religious life" (99). In "Faith and Fanaticism," the concluding essay, Adler holds that Pascal commends through his argument "a long-term project of self-deception" (280).

Somewhat in spite of its title, "For the Love of Reason," I especially identified with Antony's contribution to the "Journeys" section. Antony movingly depicts the pathological guilt that often accompanies a rigorous Christian upbringing and how the loss of faith can be frightening in deeply contradictory ways. But she also brings balance to the theme of regret explicated by Farrell and Garber by insightfully conveying how, for a child, the supernatural world of religion can be terrifying. From this starting point, thoroughgoing naturalism and humanism are an exhilarating relief. Antony develops as well an important theme of several essays: fideism in religion tends to fideism in politics, which can be very dangerous.



Finally, I remain perplexed by the distinct and greater hostility to progressive forms of Christianity and Judaism that some of the authors express. For instance, Blackburn refers to those who "go in for" certain kinds of progressive theologies as "atheists in dog collars" (187). What bothers me most about this attitude is that it rests on a certain gap in understanding of the history of religious doctrine and on a tendency to treat Christianity and Judaism not as groups of living traditions of rituals, complex social practices and beliefs, but as ahistorical creedal entities. The goal of James Tappenden's "An Atheist's Fundamentalism," for instance, is "to bring out why even someone who doesn't just disbelieve the core story of Christianity but finds it literally incredible might nonetheless want to make sure we get the story right," including the crucial part about the divinity of Christ (112). But Tappenden doesn't take into account the fact that there have been diverse forms of Christianity from its very inception and that the particular traditions that hardened and congealed into Nicene orthodoxy, for instance, did so over centuries of political intrigue and wild contingency. There is no single, simple story of Christianity to get "right" that makes Christian progressives deeply untrue to their own religion. The idea that there is such a story is itself a necessary fiction of conservative Christian apologists. Atheists should have no truck with this religious propaganda.

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Atheists do not believe in God because there is death and violence in the world.
I think there is a flawed understanding of God , morality and spirituality.
Why people debate God but not the Ghost?

China considering a $58 billion pakage for its economy

HONG KONG (MarketWatch) -- China is considering a post-Olympics stimulus package of as much as $58 billion, in addition to other monetary easing measures, according to a research report by J.P. Morgan.
The measures could include tax cuts and other moves to shore up the capital markets and support the housing market, according to a research note by the brokers' head of China Research, Frank Gong.
"The top leadership is carefully considering an economic stimulus package of at least 200 billion yuan to 400 billion yuan," Gong wrote Tuesday.
Gong added that slumping inflows of hot money, the shrinking trade surplus and cooling inflation are providing a backdrop conducive to monetary easing, setting the stage for a possible easing of bank's reserve ratio requirements and lower interest rates later this year

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Scientists create O group blood from Stem Cells

Scientists have used embryonic stem cells to generate blood -- a feat that could eventually lead to endless supplies of type O-negative blood, a rare blood type prized by doctors for its versatility.

"We literally generated whole tubes in the lab, from scratch," said Robert Lanza, chief science officer at Advanced Cell Technologies.


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More Than 50% of College Students Felt Suicidal

BOSTON -- A comprehensive study of suicidal thinking among college students found more than half of the 26,000 surveyed had suicidal thoughts at some point during their lifetime. The web-based survey conducted in spring 2006 used separate samples of undergraduate and graduate students from 70 colleges and universities across the country.

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More of suicides

'Detergent Suicide': Deadly Fad Rattles Japan
A 34-year-old man tried to kill himself by drinking pesticide. He was rushed to a hospital in southern Japan, where workers feverishly pumped his stomach, trying to save his life.

The man vomited--and that released toxic fumes which sickened more than 50 people, including doctors, patients and hospital workers.

The man later died.

90 hospital personnel had to be called in to help with the emergency Wednesday night, said Tomoko Nagao, spokeswoman for the Red Cross Kumamoto Hospital in southern Japan.

The man's toxic vomit contained Chloropicrin a highly volatile pesticide with a pungent odor that can cause breathing difficulties and sometimes death when inhaled in large amounts.

Seishi Takamura, a doctor who treated the farmer, said he could not stop coughing after inhaling the fumes, which smelled like chlorine, Kyodo News agency reported.

A different kind of toxic gas suicide has made headlines recently across the country. More than 130 people have killed themselves by mixing store-bought detergent and chemicals.

Japan already has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. The number of suicides reached 30,000 in 1998 and has not gone below that number for nine consecutive years. According to a recent survey by the Cabinet Office, one in five Japanese adults has considered suicide.

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Spain sweats amid 'water wars'

Spain is experiencing its worst drought in 40 years. Climate experts warn that the country is suffering badly from the impact of climate change and that the Sahara is slowly creeping north - into the Spanish mainland.

Yet in Spain itself there is little consensus about what is to be done. Indeed, such is the disagreement that journalists and politicians alike are calling it "water wars".

A farmer and politician, Angel Carcia Udon, said: "Water arouses passions because it can be used as a weapon, a political weapon, just as oil is a political weapon."

And water in Spain has set region against region, north against south and government against opposition.

When the city of Barcelona nearly ran out of water earlier this year, the fountains were switched off and severe restrictions were introduced.

The government of Catalonia pleaded for water to be transferred from rivers like the Ebro - causing a furious row between the regions.

Instead, the city shipped in millions of litres of water from France and accelerated work on the giant desalination plant on the edge of Barcelona, which promises to provide 180,000 cubic metres of water a day.

At least Spain has produced one good thing in this, the year of drought - some of the most environmentally aware children in Europe

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25 World Record Borken At Beijing's Water Cube-II

Brendan Hansen, left, Aaron Peirsol, center, and Michael Phelps of the United States react as Jason Lezak swims the anchor leg for the United States in the men's 4x100-meter medley relay final at the Beijing 2008 Olympics, Sunday, Aug. 17, 2008. The team set a new world record of 3:29:34.

The National Aquatics Center, also known as the Water Cube, has seen 23 world records in swimming fall during the 2008 Olympic Games. The pool depth at the Water Cube is 3 meters, a meter deeper than Athens where eight world records were set.

25 world records broken at Beijing's Water Cube

LZR suit helps to set more records than last two Games combined.
BY SCOTT M. REID
The Orange County Register

BEIJING - U.S. swimmer Ben Wildman-Tobriner considered himself one of the lucky ones. Sure the 400-meter freestyle relay world record he helped Team USA set last Sunday night was shattered by lunch Monday.

"But at least I got to sleep on my world record overnight," Wildman-Tobriner said.

France sprinter Alain Bernard lost his in almost the blink of an eye.

Bernard broke the 100-meter freestyle world record in Wednesday's semifinals. He wasn't even off the National Aquatics Center pool deck when Australia's Eamon Sullivan reclaimed it in the next semi.

Bernard had held the world record for less than three minutes.

"It's normal," Bernard said shrugging at the sign of the times.

World records have been as common as knock-off designer purses here. Would you like an Aaron Peirsol? Or how about a vintage Janet Evans?

Over the past nine days, a record-shattering Olympic Games swimming competition has defied the imagination. It has dramatically altered the sport and its conventional wisdom by not only raising its standard of excellence, but in event after event, extending it well beyond what only weeks ago was assumed not humanly possible.

"This meet has been unbelievable," U.S. women's team coach Jack Bauerle said. "It's changed the lay of the land of what we think is fast."

From Irvine's Jason Lezak anchoring the U.S. to a world-record smashing victory in the 400-meter freestyle relay to Great Britain's Rebecca Adlington lowering Janet Evans' 19-year-old 800-meter freestyle mark, the so-called Water Cube pool has produced 25 world records, the most at any Olympics since Montreal in 1976.

Six world records were broken Wednesday, equaling the record for most global marks set in a single day at the Olympics. American Michael Phelps set or helped set seven world records in eight events.

"That's the theme of the meet," said Irvine's Aaron Peirsol, who set a world record in the 100 backstroke in Beijing. "You've got to break a world record to win."

The Beijing Games were so fast that 14 times in eight events an athlete or relay team swam under the existing world record and didn't win gold.

In the 400 freestyle relay, Italy and Sweden broke the world record and didn't even medal.

"This meet is a new breed of meets," said Ian Crocker of the U.S., one of the few swimmers in Beijing who didn't see his world record broken. "It's much different than anything we've seen before."

How much different?

Beijing's 25 world records were one more than the last two Games – Sydney and Athens – had combined. Lezak's dramatic anchor brought the U.S. relay in at 3 minutes, 8.24 seconds, nearly four seconds faster than the previous record and almost five seconds faster than South Africa's winning time four years earlier in Athens.

Phelps took nearly 1 1 /2 seconds off his world record in the 400 individual medley.

Adlington clipped more than two seconds off an Evans' mark that had been around since the Brit was 6 months old.

As Beijing put an exclamation mark on a year that has seen 77 world records fall since February, the world has been left to ask how swimming has shattered world records at such a blinding rate when sports such as track and field have been more stagnant.

Thirty-three of the world records in track's 49 Olympic events are five years or older. Seventeen were set in the 1990s, 14 in the 1980s.

"Man was bred to run," said U.S. national team coach Mark Schubert, a Seal Beach resident.

"Man was not bred to swim. We've always known we've had so much room to swim so much faster with improvements in technique and technology."

The record run can be simply explained, some observers said, by swimming's most controversial technological advance, Speedo's LZR Racer suit. It was designed using NASA research leading some critics to label it as "technologically doping."

All but two of the world records set here came in the LZR Racer, and the suit has been worn in 71 of the 77 global marks set since its debut Feb. 12.

But Beijing's record binge is more than just rocket science.

"It's not just the suit," said Brendan Hansen of the U.S., one of the swimmers who lost world records last week. Training methods, video stroke analysis, sponsorship and endorsement deals allowing swimmers staying in the sport longer and pool configuration have all contributed.

The pool depth at the Water Cube is 3 meters, a meter deeper than Athens where eight world records were set.
"It allows you to go out faster and hold on longer," U.S. men's coach Eddie Reese said of the 3-meter depth. "It doesn't beat you up like shallower water does."

The possible influence of doping can't be dismissed either, although no swimmer has tested positive for banned drugs.

"I don't think we will ever have a clean sport," said Michael Lohberg, Dara Torres' coach. "The testers can only find what they are looking for and there will always be people in this world for whatever reason – money, fame – will always find ways to cheat and be ahead of everyone else.

In reality it's all of the above. But, above all, Beijing was the product of the world chasing Phelps, Peirsol, Japan's Kosuke Kitajima – a generation of swimming superheroes.

"You need to have barrier breakers and everybody else will come rushing in," Reese said.

And for nine mind-boggling days the world did.

"It goes to show that nobody owns anything," said Peirsol, who lost his 200 backstroke world record and Olympic title.

As France's Bernard can attest sometimes you're not even renting very long.

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Transvestites parade in Nepal

A transvestite takes part in a gay parade during the Gaijatra festival in Kathmandu August 17, 2008.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

Obama suggest $2 billion for NASA

Sen. Barack Obama has detailed a comprehensive space plan that includes $2 billion in new funding to reinvigorate NASA and a promise to make space exploration and science a significantly higher priority if he is elected president.

Campaigning in Florida yesterday, Sen. John McCain responded by telling business leaders that Obama has changed his position on some key questions of NASA funding in recent months and should not be trusted to support the program.

While Obama's ambitious plan embraces President Bush's 2004 "vision" to send astronauts to the moon by 2020 and later to Mars -- a plan McCain co-sponsored in the Senate -- the Democratic presidential candidate said the administration's "poor planning and inadequate funding" have undermined the effort and jeopardized U.S. leadership in space.

In particular, he criticized administration policies that will lead to a five-year period after 2010 when "the United States will have to depend on foreign rockets and spacecraft to send Americans to orbit" -- even to the largely U.S.-funded $100 billion international space station.

"As president, I'll make our space program a priority again by devoting the attention and resources needed to not only inspire the world with feats of exploration but also improve life here on Earth," Obama said.

His plan also calls for reestablishing the National Aeronautics and Space Council to coordinate all civilian, commercial and military space programs; the body was in place in earlier decades but disbanded in 1992. As a signal that NASA will be a higher priority for him, Obama said the council would report directly to the president.

McCain did not directly address Obama's proposals, released on Sunday, but did emphasize that the Democrat had earlier opposed full funding for the NASA program to build a new generation of spacecraft to replace the shuttle by 2015. Obama's position has shifted since last winter, and he now says the replacement Constellation spaceship program is essential both for space exploration and for encouraging students in science and math.

"Sometimes it is difficult to know what a politician will actually do once in office, because they say different things at different times to different people," McCain said in a closed-door meeting of business leaders in Cocoa Beach. "This is a particular problem when a candidate has a short, thin record on the issues, as in the case of Senator Obama. Let me say, just in case Senator Obama does decide to return to his original plan of cutting NASA funding -- I oppose such cuts."

He also said: "I will ensure that space exploration remains a top priority and that the U.S. continues to lead the world in this field."

In a Democratic Party campaign call after McCain spoke, former NASA associate administrator Lori Garver said that while the Republican candidate now voices support for NASA, his voting record has been far less enthusiastic.

She said McCain spoke against a bill introduced last year that would give NASA $1 billion to make up for costs incurred after the Columbia disaster -- money that would have gone specifically to speeding development of the Constellation program.

"It's very interesting to see McCain now paint himself as a strong supporter of NASA," she said. "When he could have stepped up to support the program, he has not done that. He has no general respect for our community."

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Polish support for missile deal soars

Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, right, shakes hands with chief U.S. negotiator John Rood after an initial agreement on conditions for placing a U.S. missile defense base in Poland was signed, in Warsaw, Poland, Thursday, Aug.14, 2008. (AP Photo/Alik Keplicz)

A new poll, meanwhile, said Polish support for the missile defense pact with the U.S. has soared following Russia's military campaign in Georgia and its threats against Poland.

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Musharraf's turbulent 9 years in power

A poster of Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, which is hang up over his effigy, is burned by lawyers during rally in Multan, Pakistan on Monday, Aug. 18, 2008. Musharraf said he was handing in his resignation to avoid an impeachment battle that would harm the nation's interests. (AP Photo/Khalid Tanveer)

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) — Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president who took power in a high-altitude coup and later dragged a reluctant Islamic nation into the U.S.-led war on terror, submitted his resignation Monday after a turbulent nine years in office.

The former military commando's decision to side with Washington after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks earned Western plaudits and an injection of much-needed aid that helped rescue Pakistan from bankruptcy and the status of an international pariah.
But that alliance also triggered an explosion in Islamic militancy in his homeland. Combined with his fumbled efforts to stay in power as democracy returned to Pakistan, he leaves the presidency now reviled by many of his countrymen.

His demise was as tortured as his arrival was swift.

Musharraf yielded on Monday to months of immense political pressure from bitter rivals who swept February elections. Facing the humiliation of impeachment, in what would have been a first for Pakistan, Musharraf chose to go — but not without a last burst of the defiant self-confidence that marked his long domination of the country.

"They want to impeach me now. Why do they want to do it?" a downcast Musharraf said in a televised address in which he denied any wrongdoing. "Do they want to cover their failure?"

Musharraf, an urbane special forces veteran, seized power in a 1999 coup from then-prime minister, Nawaz Sharif.

Sharif had ordered Musharraf's dismissal as the army chief was flying home from a visit to Sri Lanka and denied his plane landing rights in Pakistan, even as it ran low on fuel. On the ground, the army seized control, and Musharraf took over, promising to install "true" democracy.

While few doubted he wanted a stable, religiously moderate Pakistan, his commitment to democracy was shaky. His popularity plummeted in 2007, when he declared a state of emergency and sacked independent-minded Supreme Court judges who could have barred his re-election.

He was widely credited with seeking peace with rival India. While a lasting solution to the core dispute over Kashmir remains elusive, the dialogue dramatically reduced the chance of a cataclysmic future conflict.

Musharraf, who described his military uniform as his "second skin," led Pakistan's army for nine years and only ceded control in late 2007. He often harked back to his time as a commando and was famously unruffled by two huge al-Qaida bombings against him within 11 days in December 2003 in which he escaped injury.

Born August 11, 1943, in New Delhi, India, the middle son of a diplomat, Musharraf's family joined millions of other Muslims in migrating westward when predominantly Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan split during independence from Britain in 1947. Riots and fighting left hundreds of thousands dead.

In the army, Musharraf said he was almost court-martialed for indiscipline but was saved by his bravery during Pakistan's second war with India.

He spent seven years in the elite Special Services Group and rose through the ranks, but was relatively unknown when Sharif promoted him over two other generals to army chief in 1998.

The next year, he masterminded a military operation at Kargil, the first Pakistani push into the Indian-held part of Kashmir since the 1971 war. The offensive nearly brought the nuclear neighbors to a new conflict.

Musharraf's relationship with Sharif grew tense after the prime minister agreed to withdraw the Pakistani troops.

The coup that brought Musharraf to power was bloodless and widely welcomed in Pakistan. Sharif, meanwhile, was convicted of hijacking and sentenced to life imprisonment, but agreed in 2000 to go into exile in Saudi Arabia. He only returned last year, vowing political revenge. His party is now the second-largest in the ruling coalition.

After Sept. 11, 2001, Musharraf faced a bleak choice. Pakistan had been instrumental in the rise of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.

Despite fears of a backlash in Pakistan, Musharraf threw his lot in with the United States, earning more than $10 billion in aid for the near-bankrupt country in the years that followed.

The decision enraged Islamic hard-liners, and al-Qaida called for Pakistanis to "uproot" Musharraf. He escaped at least three reported assassination attempts between 2002 and 2003.

He held flawed elections in late 2002, and only after changing the constitution to give himself sweeping powers to sack the prime minister and Parliament. He then reneged on a promise to stand down as army chief by the end of 2004.

But Musharraf could not shake off doubts about his legitimacy as president. Fearing the judiciary would block his continued rule, he fired the Supreme Court chief justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry in 2007, triggering a mass movement by lawyers against military rule.

When the chief justice was reinstated by the court and the opposition grew in strength, Musharraf declared a state of emergency and replaced Chaudhry and other independent-minded justices.

While he struggled to manage domestic political affairs, pro-Taliban and al-Qaida militants were asserting control over vast tracts of Pakistan's northwestern frontier and launching a series of shocking suicide attacks on key political figures — former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto among them.

Under pressure at home and abroad to restore civilian rule, Musharraf stepped down as army chief, but rejected repeated calls to resign the presidency, saying his rule was crucial to the country's survival during one of the most turbulent eras in its history.

Though he won another five-year term, Musharraf faced a major national crisis following Bhutto's assassination in December, with opposition supporters demanding he resign for not protecting her and taking to the streets with chants of "Musharraf, killer." Musharraf's government blamed Islamic militants.

After his opponents won the February parliamentary elections, Musharraf found himself largely sidelined. The army, his former power base, said it wanted to avoid interfering in the political scene. And as the months have worn on, the U.S. has also toed a tricky line, not disavowing Musharraf while trying to develop relations with the new civilian leaders.

In his personal life, Musharraf has a reputation for being something of a bon vivant. He likes good food, traditional Pakistani music, Urdu poetry and fine clothes. He is known to enjoy dancing to Western music at parties. He once faced criticism at home when he was photographed with his two pet dogs — animals considered impure in Islam.

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Indian Economy likely to slow down to 7.7%

Government officials in India say the country's economic growth is likely to slow to 7.7% for this fiscal year.

Authorities say the slowdown is the result of high food and oil prices and the tightening in credit and equity markets following the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis.

Growth in India's agricultural sector is projected to be at two percent, sharply lower than the 4.5% growth in the last fiscal year. The country's industry and services are also likely to slow.

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Teens' Normal Sexual Life

The girls filed into the public atrium -- a three-story, hollow, impersonal room -- to discuss some of the most intimate things in their lives: being raped, having sex with strangers, dating men a decade older than their adolescent selves. Three dozen or so brave parents sat in the seats set up behind and beside them, some braced for what they would hear, some resigned to what they already seemed to know.

The girls then broke into smaller groups and regathered in surrounding classrooms to talk privately about things that would later break my heart; things the public wouldn’t believe; things the media doesn’t have time for, particularly in Detroit, where investigations of government corruption have pre-empted everything but sunrises.

When the girls came out an hour later, a spokeswoman for each group took the stage to "report out" on their words and challenges.

Take a breath:

Many girls who were 13 to 16 years old were having sex and have had anywhere from 10 to 15 sexual partners -- most they don’t know by name.
Some girls in that same age group are "dating" men as old as 30 because the men can give them things -- love, money, presents -- that their parents cannot.

They talked about girls who are being raped and feeling powerless to do anything afterward, blocked by a sexual irrevolution that has made feelings irrelevant and intercourse the new dating. They feel that these encounters are their fault, and they are ashamed to tell anyone. They are not seeing doctors. And some are getting pregnant.

Forum for dark secrets
The revelations from the Neighborhood Service Organization’s historic summit on girls and sexual attitudes, a forum called "Sex, Lies and Older Guys," drew hundreds of preteens and teens to Wayne County Community College on Saturday, where they spent the equivalent of a school day pouring out their feelings and hearing from trained psychologists about what to do with their problems.

They also heard from Bill Cosby, who came to town at their invitation because many of them don’t have fathers in their lives. The activist and entertainer pulled no punches.

"I keep hearing it takes a village. No! No! No! That’s the problem with the village -- the ‘it’ part. Who makes up the ‘it?’ ”

Days later, my head reels from the things I heard. I have never felt more frightened for our children than while learning what passes for normal life for teenagers now. With vulgar music making objects of girls and gangsters of boys, with teen fashion being designed by seeming pedophiles -- and with standards for behavior being set by veejays on a half-dozen TV stations, a few dozen radio stations and thousands of Web sites -- it’s no wonder our children don’t know where to turn or how to act.

And sadly, increasingly for many girls, as some said Saturday, they are not turning to their families.

One of the forum’s planners was V’Lecea Hunter, an 18-year-old prep school graduate who was raped at 16 by an older guy who used to watch her through the bathroom window of her mother’s house. She never told her mother. And if she hadn’t eventually told her grandmother, she never would have received medical attention.

She spoke Saturday, brilliantly, about the fact that it is never too late to change your life:

"What do you want out of life, and what do you have to do so that you can achieve that goal? Think about all of the mistakes that you have done and how you can overcome them. Is it possible? Is it possible to make mistakes and still turn out to be a great, smart, determined, financially stable, loving, caring, and enjoyable person?


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Transgender Contestant to Compete on Top Model

One of the 14 girls who will compete on the new season of America's Next Top Model – which returns to The CW on September 3 – is transgender.

"My cards were dealt differently," Isis, a 22-year-old former receptionist, tells Us Weekly exclusively in its new issue, on newsstands now.

Hailing from Prince George's County, Maryland, Isis identifies herself as "a woman born physically male."

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Detroit Area Doctor gets Prison for Sexual Abuse

Belleville doctor has been sentenced to three to 15 years in prison for fondling a female patient.
Wayne County Circuit Court Judge James Callahan sentenced Joseph T. Paupore on one count of second-degree criminal sexual conduct on Friday. A jury found him guilty last month.
Paupore was convicted on four counts of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct in June. He was sentenced to one year in jail and five years’ probation.

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Britain's Multi Cultural Nightmare

A Muslim is to go on trial in a British legal first, accused of encouraging two boys to flog themselves during an Islamic ceremony to he held in Manchester.

Syed Mustafa Zaidi, 44, is accused of encouraging the boys, aged 15 and 13, who cannot be named for legal reasons, to beat themselves during a traditional Ashura ceremony at a community centre in Levenshulme, Manchester, on January 19.

The practice is common among Shia Muslims but allowing children to harm themselves is contrary to British law.

Ashura involves practitioners flagellating themselves using a Zanjeer Zani, an implement which has a wooden handle with chains and blades attached.

The Ashura ceremony takes place during the Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, and commemorates the martyrdom of Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed and a central figure in the Shia faith.

Zaidi, of Station Road, Eccles, Salford, denies two counts of child cruelty. Doubtless his defence will be that it is his religion.

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Tranquility at Sanchi Stupa Bihar

Know thy Nature.

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Sceintists Say We Can See Sound

Turning conventional neuroscience on its head, new research suggests the human visual system processes sound and helps us see.

Here's the basics of what was Neuroscience 101: The auditory system records sound, while the visual system focuses, well, on the visuals, and never do they meet.

Instead, a "higher cognitive" producer, like the brain's superior colliculus, uses these separate inputs to create our cinematic experiences.

The textbook rewrite: The brain can, if it must, directly use sound to see and light to hear.

The study was published last week in the journal BMC Neuroscience.
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Promiscuity can Lead to Demonic Possession

WESTMINSTER, UK, August 15, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A priest of Westminster, the leading diocese of the Catholic Church of England and Wales, has written that promiscuity, whether homosexual or heterosexual, can lead to dire spiritual consequences, in addition to the dangers to physical health.

Promiscuity, as well as homosexuality and pornography, says 73 year-old Fr. Jeremy Davies, is a form of sexual perversion and can lead to demonic possession. Offering what may be an explanation for the explosion of homosexuality in recent years, Fr. Davies said, "Among the causes of homosexuality is a contagious demonic factor."
Fr. Davies continues: "Even heterosexual promiscuity is a perversion; and intercourse, which belongs in the sanctuary of married love, can become a pathway not only for disease but also for evil spirits."

"Some very unpleasant things must be mentioned because young people, especially, are vulnerable and we must do what we can to protect and warn them," he told the Catholic Herald.

He also said that Satan is responsible for having blinded most secular humanists to the "dehumanising effects of contraception and abortion and IVF, of homosexual 'marriages', of human cloning and the vivisection of human embryos in scientific research." Extreme secular humanism, "atheist scientism", is comparable to "rational satanism" and these are leading Europe into a dangerous state of apostasy. "Only by a genuine personal decision for Christ and the Church can someone separate himself from it."

Fr. Davies' (an Oxford graduate who is also a qualified physician) comments come in conjunction with the publication of his new book, entitled, "Exorcism: Understanding Exorcism in Scripture and Practice" published earlier this year by the Catholic Truth Society (CTS).

In the Catholic Church, exorcisms can only be performed by a priest who has the "express" permission of his bishop. According to the Code of Canon Law, only experienced priests can be chosen who exhibit, "piety, knowledge, prudence, and integrity of life." Before the official rite of exorcism is used, the subject must also be examined thoroughly by doctors and psychiatrists to rule out any non-spiritual causes of his difficulties and physicians are often asked to assist during the course of an exorcism.

Fr. Davies also warns in his book against so-called New Age and occult practices, as well as trendy exercise and "spiritual healing" regimens derived from eastern religions.

"The thin end of the wedge (soft drugs, yoga for relaxation, horoscopes just for fun and so on) is more dangerous than the thick end because it is more deceptive - an evil spirit tries to make his entry as unobtrusively as possible."

"Beware of any claim to mediate beneficial energies (eg. reiki), any courses that promise the peace that Christ promises (eg. enneagrams), any alternative therapy with its roots in eastern religion (e.g. acupuncture)." Needless to say, overtly occult activities such as séances and witchcraft are "direct invitations to the Devil which he readily accepts."

Fr. Davies was appointed exorcist of the Westminster Archdiocese in 1986 after a four month training period in Rome. In 1993 he co-founded, with Italy's Father Gabriele Amorth, the International Association of Exorcists which now has hundreds of members worldwide. In 2000, Fr. Davies told the Independent newspaper that incidents of demonic possession are rising dramatically along with the increase of New Age beliefs and practices, ignorance of the Bible and a growth in spiritual confusion.

"At the centre of this is man's ever-growing pride and attempted self-reliance. Man trying to build a better world without God - another Tower of Babel," he said. In 2005, the Vatican recently made headlines around the world by publicly announcing the launch of a course on exorcism for priests

The Church's writings on exorcism and demonic possession say that a person can be influenced or even possessed by demonic forces when they are "hardened" in serious sin and the Church specifies that these include people who are involved in heavy drug use, violence and sexual perversions. It is also noted that the "heinous crime" of abortion exacerbates these. Italian exorcist Fr. Gabriel Amorth writes that it is particularly difficult to liberate a victim who is guilty of abortion, and that this can take a "very long time".

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49 babies die during clinical trials at AIIMS

NEW DELHI, Aug. 18 (Xinhua) -- As many as 49 babies, many of whom had not even celebrated their first birthday, have died at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences(AIIMS) while being subjected to clinical trials for testing new drugs and therapies over the last two and a half years.

Responding to a Right to Information (RTI) query on clinical trials on babies, the AIIMS administration admitted on Monday that of the 4,142 babies -- 2,728 of whom were below the age of one -- who were enrolled for clinical trials by the institute's department of pediatrics, 49 had died since Jan. 1, 2006. The department conducted 42 sets of trials on babies during this period.

In its reply, AIIMS said the deaths amounted to a 1.18 percent mortality rate. The RTI query was filed by Rahul Verma of Uday Foundation for Congenital Defects and Rare Blood Groups, an NGO.

Clinical trials are the final stage of research conducted to answer questions about safety and efficacy of vaccines, drugs and devices, new therapies and forms of care or new ways of using known treatments. Many of these trials are for foreign drugs.

India recently became Asia's most popular destination for conducting clinical trials. According to the Planning Commission, 139 new trials were outsourced to India recently.

AIIMS has said five foreign-manufactured medicines were tested during the trials. They were zinc tablets for treating zinc deficiency and serving as a nutritional supplement, olmesartan andvalsartan for treating blood pressure-related problems, rituximab for treating chronic focal encephalitis and gene-activated human glucocerebrosidase for treating Gaucher's disease, which affects the liver.

Verma said, "This is shocking. We decided to file the RTI when we saw parents unable to admit their seriously ill children at AIIMS while children of some other poor and illiterate families were being kept in the hospital needlessly for a long time."

He added, "AIIMS said in its reply that families of patients are given social counseling before trials are started. With most patients in AIIMS being illiterate and belonging to extremely poor families, I doubt if they even understand what a clinical trial is and what their children are being subjected to."

In reply, an AIIMS official said, "All the deaths can't be attributed to the trials. Some patients were suffering from conditions in which mortality was the normal outcome and we were trying to see whether a drug could improve the situation. Some other trials didn't even use medications. They involved behavioral methods like nursing care."

He added, "Trials in AIIMS are conducted under strict protocol and every step is scrutinized through faculty presentations and data safety management groups before ethical clearances are received."

Asked about the socio-economic status of patients on whom clinical trials were conducted, AIIMS replied, "The children eligible for trials represent a mix of patients attending the outpatient and in-patient services. The eligibility is based on the aims of respective studies. The department provides detailed information on the inclusion and exclusion criteria to the AIIMS ethics committee and sponsors."

Verma said the consent form that has to be filled by parents was read out by the treating physician for parents who were not able to read it themselves. "The question is, if the parents can’t read or write, do you really expect them to understand the implications of these trials?" Verma asked.

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Snake Charmers at Hindu Festival

A snake charmer handles a poisonous snake during Jhapan festival in Bishanupur, about 200 km (123 miles) west of Kolkata, Aug. 17, 2008.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

Do Subatomic particles have free will?

If we have free will, so do subatomic particles, mathematicians claim to prove.

“If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?”—Titus Lucretius Carus, Roman philosopher and poet, 99–55 BC.

Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably.

The finding won’t give many physicists a moment’s worry, because traditional interpretations of quantum mechanics embrace unpredictability already. The best anyone can hope to do, quantum theory says, is predict the probability that a particle will behave in a certain way.

But physicists all the way back to Einstein have been unhappy with this idea. Einstein famously grumped, “God does not play dice.” And indeed, ever since the birth of quantum mechanics, some physicists have offered alternate interpretations of its equations that aim to get rid of this indeterminism. The most famous alternative is attributed to the physicist David Bohm, who argued in the 1950s that the behavior of subatomic particles is entirely determined by “hidden variables” that cannot be observed.

Conway and Kochen say this search is hopeless, and they claim to have proven that indeterminacy is inherent in the world itself, rather than just in quantum theory. And to Bohmians and other like-minded physicists, the pair says: Give up determinism, or give up free will. Even the tiniest bit of free will.
Their argument starts with a proof Kochen created with Ernst Specker 40 years ago. Subatomic particles have a property called “spin,” which occurs around any axis. Experiments have shown that a type of subatomic particle called a “spin 1 particle” has a peculiar property: Choose three perpendicular axes, and prod the spin 1 particle to determine whether its spin around each of those axes is 0. Precisely one of those axes will have spin 0 and the other two will have non-zero spin. Conway and Kochen call this the 1-0-1 rule.

Spin is one of those properties physicists can’t predict in advance, before prodding. Still, one might imagine that the particle’s spin around any axis was set before anyone ever came along to prod it. That’s certainly what we ordinarily assume in life. We don’t imagine, say, that a fence turned white just because we looked at it — we figure it was white all along.

But Kochen and Specker showed that this assumption — that the fence was white all along — can’t hold in the bizarre world of subatomic particles. They used a pure mathematical argument to show that there is no way the particle can choose spins around every imaginable axis in a way that is consistent with the 1-0-1 rule. Indeed, there is a set of just 33 axes that are enough to force the particle into a paradox. It could choose spins around the first 32 axes that conform with the rule, but for the last, neither 0 nor non-zero would do. Choosing zero spin would create a set of three perpendicular axes with two zeroes, and choosing non-zero spin would create a different set of three perpendicular axes with three non-zeroes, breaking the 1-0-1 rule either way.

This means that the particle cannot have a definite spin in every direction before it’s measured, Kochen and Specker concluded. If it did, physicists would be able to occasionally observe it breaking the 1-0-1 rule, which never happens. Instead, it must “decide” which spin to have on the fly.

Conway compares the situation to the game “Twenty Questions.” If you play the game fairly, you decide upfront on a single object and honestly answer each of the questions, hoping your opponent won’t deduce what you chose. But a clever player could also cheat, changing the object partway through. In that case, his answers aren’t determined in advance. The particle, Kochen and Specker showed, is like a cheating player. They found it out by showing that no single object satisfies all the “questions” (or all 33 axes) at once.

But there’s another possible interpretation. Perhaps the particle’s spin is completely determined — but depends on something else about the state of the universe. That would be like a player in “Twenty Questions” who has decided his object is a donkey whenever his opponent starts a question with “Is,” and that his object a horse otherwise (or using any other arbitrary but consistent rule). For example, if his opponent asked, “Is it something with big ears?” he would say “yes,” but if his opponent asked, “Does it have big ears?” he’d say “no.” In that case, his answers are predetermined even though he has no single object in mind.
Conway and Kochen say that they have now proven that particles’ responses can’t be pre-determined, even within this possible interpretation. “We can really prove that there’s no algorithm, no way that the particle can give an answer that is unique and can be specified ahead of time,” Conway says. “I’m still amazed that we can actually manage to prove that.”

They concocted a thought experiment for their proof. It is possible to entangle two spin 1 particles so that their spins are identical along every possible axis and will remain so, even if they are separated very far apart. Entangle two particles this way, and then send a physicist named Alice with one of them to Mars and leave the other with a physicist named Bob on Earth. That will prevent information from passing between the physicists or the particles, according to relativity theory. Alice and Bob each prod their particles along some axis, which they freely choose. If Alice and Bob happen to choose the same axis, they’ll get the same answer.

Now, imagine that the particles are like the “20 questions” player whose object is sometimes a donkey and sometimes a horse, with a fixed rule deciding when to answer with which animal. Whatever the rule is, it applies to each of the entangled particles and will cause them to have the same spins. It’s as if the “20 questions” player has been cloned, and both players are forced to give answers for the same animal.

But Conway and Kochen have shown this scenario is impossible for particles that are incommunicado. They invoked the old Kochen-Specker paradox to show that if the spin 1 particle’s behavior is pre-determined so that it isn’t allowed to “change its animal,” it won’t be able to give answers that are consistent with the 1-0-1 rule. So if Alice and Bob are lucky in how they choose their axes, they should be able to force the particles either to disagree or to violate the 1-0-1 rule — contrary to experimental evidence.

Kochen and Conway say the best way out of this paradox is to accept that the particle’s spin doesn’t exist until it’s measured. But there’s one way to escape their noose: Suppose for a moment that Alice and Bob’s choice of axis to measure is not a free choice. Then Nature could be conspiring to prevent them from choosing the axes that will reveal the violation of the rule. Kochen and Conway can’t rule that possibility out entirely, but Kochen says, “A man on the street would say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ A natural feeling is, of course, that what we do, we do of our own free will. Not completely, but certainly to the point of knowing we can choose what button to push in an experiment.”
Ideally, a mathematical proof settles all uncertainty, but Kochen and Conway haven’t yet managed to convince many of the physicists they are addressing. “I’m not convinced,” says Sheldon Goldstein of Rutgers University, a Bohmian. He believes the argument implies nothing new, and he’s content with the notion that free will exists only effectively (not theoretically). He and his collaborators have spent many hours discussing these issues with the pair of mathematicians since Kochen and Conway first posted their result four years ago. Their new version, posted on Arxiv.org July 21, attempts to strengthen the result in light of criticisms. Still, mutual understanding has not yet come about. “It’s kind of depressing when people can’t communicate with each other,” Goldstein says. “We know that’s true in politics, but you’d think that wouldn’t be going on here.”

But Gerard ’t Hooft of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1999, says the pair’s conclusions are legitimate — but he chooses determinism over free will. “As a determined determinist I would say that yes, you bet, an experimenter's choice what to measure was fixed from the dawn of time, and so were the properties of the thing he decided to call a photon,” ’t Hooft says. “If you believe in determinism, you have to believe it all the way. No escape possible. Conway and Kochen have shown here in a beautiful way that a half-hearted belief in pseudo-determinism is impossible to sustain.”

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Why is Exorcism failing?

Naomi Johnson was a resident in Mercy Ministry's Sydney house for nine months.
Photo: Erin Jonasson


Exorcisms to cure mental illness and drug addiction, locking vulnerable people away from friends and family, prayer as a solution to all problems – sounds like a psych ward from last century. But actually it’s just the ‘Mercy Way’.

The once mighty ‘Mercy Ministries’, a secretive outfit that purports to treat young women with mental illness, is now in serious trouble.

Bankrolled by controversial Pentecostal group the ‘Hillsong Church’ and Hillsong-aligned Gloria Jean’s coffees the group has been the subject of a number of complaints to authorities. They’ve already closed one of their two facilities.

Women who’ve been through its programs say the main ‘treatment’ they were prescribed were exorcisms and prayer study, supervised by bible studies students. That’s whether they were dealing with anorexia, anxiety disorders or substance abuse.

And all the time being kept virtually as prisoners - cut off from the outside world with no TV or newspapers, with severely restricted access to friends and family and made to even ask permission to go to the toilet.

Nowhere was the promised phalanx of mental health professionals, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and dieticians. Just bible studies students whose answer to all questions was more prayer.

Three former residents told LIVENEWS.com.au they were left in a worse state after going to stay at Mercy Ministries – which still operates in a house in Sydney’s Glenhaven.
Meg Smith (not her real name) says she went to Mercy because of the group’s promise of free treatment for her anxiety disorder and panic attacks.

But she quickly became disheartened after “free” meant signing over her Centrelink payments to the group and “treatment” didn’t include proper access to doctors, psychologists and social workers.

“The 'counsellor' I had was not qualified to treat mental illness... nobody there was. She was in the middle of a mercy 'in-house program' to teach her how to prayer counsel,” says Smith.

“I spent months there and the only 'therapy' I had was prayer readings and an exorcism.”

She paints a disturbing picture - where a group of vulnerable girls isolated in a suburban home and forbidden to leave or form friendships on pain of being expelled – followed a punishing daily routine.

A seven o’clock wake up call and a stint of cleaning was followed by bible reading.

After that came a “praise” session where the girls would stand in a circle, eyes closed, singing along to Christian music and jumping on the spot with arms outstretched.

After locked food cupboards were opened for a piece of fruit or a few tablespoons of yoghurt it was back to class – usually taking notes from audio tapes by Joyce Meyer, an American evangelist.

After lunch, homework, letter-writing and recreation were followed by more cleaning and bible study.

Smith began to get worse.

“I was having lots of panic attacks… they seemed to be getting worse at ministry,” she said.

“I couldn’t work out why, apart from being away from friends and family and my support network.

“I was self harming – I was cutting my arm with anything I could get my hands on – scratching with anything from my nails to paper clips.

“I never really had a problem with self harm beforehand. When you tell them about self harming they said I was trying to get attention and I was taking their valuable time away from girls with real problems.”

Finally Smith was told she would have to have what she describes as an ‘exorcism’.

“The counsellor gave me a list of different demons – demon of anger, demon of unforgiveness, demon of pride, there were lots of them and I was told to go away and circle the demons I had in me or around me,” said Smith.

“I was really scared… they cast demons out of me, one by one, and they became quite excited and animated during the process, and spoke in tongues.

“It was the counsellors and myself and they put their hands on me and started praying one by one for each of the demons that were on the list to be cast out of me.

“After each demon was cast out I had to say ‘I confirm the demon of X has been cast out of me in the name of Jesus and is unwelcome to return.'

“The whole time I was there, all I heard was that I'm demonic.

“Even after the exorcism, when I had the next anxiety attack, I was told that they had already cast the demons out, so therefore I was obviously either faking it, or I had chosen to let the demons come back, in which case I was not serious about getting better.

“They kept telling us that the world can't help us, professionals with all their 'worldly qualifications' can't help us, only Mercy could because only they have God's power.

“So when I was kicked out for being 'demonic, unable to be helped, not worth a place at Mercy and because I had taken too long to pray to become a Christian... it left me worse than I had ever been before in my life.

“They told me I would never get better now because I had blown my chance. I started cutting my arms and wrists more than ever, with their voices echoing in my mind as I did it.”

Suicidal and self harming after being removed from the program, which she now thought was her only hope, she went to see a “proper psychologist to prepare me to go back to Mercy to help me fit in better.”

“The psychologist had never heard of them but told me to stay away from them… that person helped me more in the 40 minute session – really listening to me and understanding me.”

Smith, who is on the mend after a long process, is not alone.

Other women who spoke to LIVENEWS.com.au described being “literally bible bashed” and supervised during limited visits to GPs and psychiatrists.
One Patricia (not her real name) says when she approached staff with problems she was asked if she had prayed about it.

“In the end I stopped going to staff members because they just didn’t seem to help me and that’s one of the things they commented on… but how can you when they’re not actually helping you?” she said.

“I went to the psychiatrist three times in eight months I was there to get medication – and I was always accompanied in the session by a staff member.

“Once I told the psychiatrist what I was feeling and when we got back to the house I was yelled at because I hadn’t told the staff there… Now I go to the psychiatrist every two weeks – that’s the kind of care you need when you’re acutely unwell.

“Four to six weeks after I got kicked out I tried to kill myself and I almost succeeded and it was because I didn’t think I could live or get better without Mercy because it was just so ingrained into me.”

Since the former clients of Mercy Ministires began telling their stories, high profile “sponsors” listed on their website have disappeared. No longer do Rebel Sport, Bunnings Warehouse or LG electronics have anything to do with with the group.

Gloria Jean’s coffees, which once had collection boxes for the groups in all their stores, and whose former managing director, Peter Irvine, was a director at Mercy, still maintains conspicuous support.

The group have closed their Queensland centre but the Sydney facility remains open for business – still without scrutiny from government authorities.
Ready to continue to dispense their peculiar kind of care to the most vulnerable.

Nine to stand trial for Exorcism Deaths

August 11, 2008

Nine members of the extended family of 22-year-old Janet Moses are to stand trial in the High Court at Wellington, charged with her manslaughter during an alleged maketu, or curse-lifting, ceremony.

At a depositions hearing in Lower Hutt District Court today, lawyers for the nine defendants accepted there was a case to answer and they each pleaded not guilty.

Evidence in the form of 98 written statements and 40 exhibits was handed up to two Justices of the Peace.

Ms Moses is reported to have drowned during an apparent exorcism at her grandparents' home in Wainuiomata on October 12 last year while around 40 members of her family looked on.

- NZPA

Crack Pot Ideas of Physicists

Stars ablaze in other skies
By Ron Cowen
Calculations find that many universes could sustain stars

Fred Adams sees stars in the most unlikely places.

His calculations suggest that, contrary to some previous claims, stars are not only common in our cosmos but are also ablaze in myriad other universes, where the laws of physics may be drastically different. Even in a cosmos where balls of gas and dust never collapse and ignite to make conventional stars, radiation produced by black holes and clumps of invisible material called dark matter may play the same role as stars, says Adams, a theorist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.


According to inflation, a leading theory of the birth of the universe, the cosmos underwent a tremendous growth spurt in its first tiny fraction of a second, enlarging from subatomic scale to the size of a grapefruit. This rapid expansion may also have occurred in other patches of space remote from our cosmos, creating a multitude of pocket universes, or multiverses, with different physical laws.

In his analysis, Adams simulated conditions in other universes by simultaneously varying three parameters: the gravitational constant, which determines the strength of gravity; the fine structure constant, which sets the strength of the electromagnetic force; and a composite number that determines the rate of nuclear reactions, which keep stars shining.


By allowing all three of the parameters, rather than a single parameter, to vary, Adams created a simulation that may embrace a larger number of possible universes, he says. He finds that stars are stable entities in roughly one-fourth of the universes he considered. “That’s a sizable amount of real estate.”
He cautions, however, that his calculations assume that all possible values of the each parameter are equally likely. For instance, it may be more likely for a universe to have a smaller nuclear reaction rate than a larger one. “We simply do not know,” Adams says.


The findings have several intriguing implications, he adds. Had Adams found that the range of parameters that allowed for stars was very small, that would have suggested that the laws of physics in our universe have been “fine-tuned” to allow for star formation, Aguirre notes. Instead, Adams’ study shows that our universe doesn’t seem particularly special in that regard.

“The paper nicely points out that when considering whether other, different universes can sustain life, it is very important to carefully consider how the known universe could change, but also to consider all sorts of things that don't really exist here, such as black-hole-powered solar systems, or dark-matter stars,” Aguirre says. “This open-minded approach can serve, in some cases, as a counter-argument to claims that our universe is fine-tuned for life.”

Source

Another Scientist suggests that Faster than light travel is possible.
However, the Baylor physicists estimate that manipulating dark energy through the extra dimension requires energy equivalent to the converting the entire mass of Jupiter into pure energy — enough to move a ship measuring roughly 33 feet (10 meters) by 33 feet by 33 feet.

"That is an enormous amount of energy," Cleaver said. "We are still a very long ways off before we could create something to harness that type of energy."

The workaround solution may leave fans of Einstein pleased. But for now, faster-than-light travel remains, like Oz, a pleasant fantasy.

China confiscates Bibles from American Christians

BEIJING - Chinese customs officials confiscated more than 300 Bibles on Sunday from four American Christians who arrived in a southwestern city with plans to distribute them, the group's leader said.
The Bibles were taken from the group's checked luggage after they landed at the airport in the city of Kunming, said Pat Klein, head of Vision Beyond Borders. The group, based in Sheridan, Wyoming, distributes Bibles and Christian teaching materials around the world to "strengthen the persecuted church," according to its Web site.


A woman who was on duty at Kunming airport's customs office confirmed over the telephone that 315 Bibles were found in the passengers' checked baggage.

"We're not selling them; we give them free to the people," Klein said. "We didn't come to cause trouble, we just came to bring Bibles to help out the Chinese Christians."

The Bibles were printed in Chinese, he said.

Klein said the customs officers had told him that they could each have one Bible for personal use and not more than that. He said the officers had videotaped them and were insisting that they leave the airport.

"We don't want to go without taking those books. It cost us a lot of money to bring them here," Klein said. "They're saying that it's illegal to bring the Bibles in and that if we wanted to, we had to apply ahead of time for permission."

China faces routine criticism for its human rights violations and its repression of religious freedom. Religious practice is heavily regulated by the Communist Party, with worship allowed only in party-controlled churches, temples and mosques, while those gathering outside face harassment, arrest and terms in labor camps or prison.

A Chinese Christian activist was detained Aug. 10, the opening weekend of the Olympics, on his way to a church service attended by President Bush in Beijing. A rights group said later that the activist, Hua Huiqi, a leader of the unofficial Protestant church in Beijing, had escaped from police and was in hiding.

Police have denied any involvement in Hua's disappearance.

Source

Government Turns Blind Eye to Child Sex Tourism

A charity has accused the Government of turning a blind eye to paedophiles who abuse children abroad.
While Britain's laws against child abuse are tough, many sex offenders are travelling to Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Sub Continent and the Far East to take advantage of poverty, desperation and corruption.

A report by ECPAT UK claims the British Government is failing to prevent child sex tourism.

While Britain has prosecuted only five sex offenders for child sexual abuse abroad since 1997, the USA has prosecuted more than 50 - and Australia has prosecuted more than 25.

We do think there has been some progress but we do think the Government has turned a blind eye to some offences committed abroad - not following up on allegations of abuse all around the world, leaving governments to deal with it on their own.
ECPAT UK director Christine Beddoe

Many paedophiles volunteer to work in orphanages or as teachers.

In 1998, a British teacher working with children in Thailand was sentenced to 33 years for abusing boys.
His sentence was cut and he was deported back to the UK in 2001.
Since then he has taken up various teaching posts in developing countries and is now working in China teaching children as young as five.

ECPAT UK is calling for an urgent shake up in the way the UK deals with British nationals who have been prosecuted aboard for child sex offences.

The charity wants them brought back to the UK and risk assessed.

A new law came into force last month which means those who commit offences against children abroad face prosecution here - even if the offence isn't illegal in the country it was committed.

A Home Office spokesperson said: "From the autumn, we also intend to make registered sex offenders notify the police of any travel abroad.

"We also recently signed the Council of Europe's Convention on the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse which sets standards to ensure that countries criminalise the sexual exploitation and abuse of children and adopt similar standards of investigation.

"We will also take any further action that is necessary, and believe these changes that we have made will see the number of sex offenders' prosecuted increase."

When ex-pop singer and convicted child sex abuser Gary Glitter is released from jail in Vietnam, he will be flown back to Britain immediately.
On arrival, he will be questioned by police and then go on the sex offenders register.
Zoe Hilton, of NSPCC, said: "It's important he comes back to UK and that he's managed because we know how high risk he is and the risk he will just go to other countries and slip off the radar again, we can't take that risk. He needs to be managed and monitored and supervised."
Source

A Sikh,Hindu,Christian and Jew walk into a bar in Israel

here

Israel is changing.
Israel frees 200 Palestinian prisoners.

God Vs. Darwin:The debate is still alive

Next year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On The Origin Of Species. The momentous occasion will be celebrated with new books, articles, documentaries and editorials. One commentator has called for a public holiday in Britain to honour Darwin - the "humble Shrewsbury family man who changed the world forever".

In 2009, when the champagne is uncorked in celebration of Darwin's legacy, we might pause to consider the presuppositions we bring to the question of what his theory tells us about God. There are essentially only two options. Either the wonder of human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to mindless matter; or there is a creator. It remains a mystery to me why some people claim it is their intelligence that leads them to prefer the first to the second.

John Lennox is professor of mathematics and fellow in the philosophy of science at Oxford University. He is a visiting scholar of the Centre for Public Christianity. Tomorrow he will take part in an IQ2 debate on the statement "We'd be better off without religion", at 6.45pm in the City Recital Hall.

Source

A second debate titles Christian God? Jewish God? Or No God?

I noted that Christianity is the only religion that holds another religion, Judaism, to be true. That's why Christians essentially incorporated the entire Old Testament into the Christian Bible. While I believe that Christ is "the way, the truth and the life," I for one am not willing to judge anyone or expel anyone from heaven.

Hitchens on the other hand has said that he doesn't want to go to heaven, which he views as a kind of celestial North Korea. I suspect heaven is full of people who chose God and prayed to Him, "Thy will be done." Hell is reserved for those who by their own free choice refused God and to whom God eventually said, "Thy will be done."

I notice that after posting all my early debates on his website, Richard Dawkins has stopped featuring my recent debates. This is perhaps an indication of how the atheists are faring. Of late I also haven't heard any of these guys call themselves "brights."

If Hitchens can't get the job done, who can? While the pusillanimous Dawkins won't debate me, at least Hitchens keeps trying.

Italy Sells its Monuments

Silvio Berlusconi is reforming Italy's cultural landscape. The nation has since long been scoring points in culture, but now the country is broke and is rethinking the preservation of cultural monuments.

Milan native Simona Cagno is worried about churches and historical palaces that are disintegrating all over Italy right in front of her.

"I don't know what I should say about this," she said. "I can't seem to find the words."

Private leasing and selling" instead of expensive restoration is now apparently the word from Rome. In other words: getting rid of monuments instead of holding onto them. In Verona, three palaces and one former convent are about to be auctioned off so that the city can afford a new parking garage for trade show visitors.

Source

North Texas school allows teachers to carry guns

HARROLD, Texas — A tiny Texas school district may be the first in the nation to allow teachers and staff to pack guns for protection when classes begin later this month, a newspaper reported.

Trustees at the Harrold Independent School District approved a district policy change last October so employees can carry concealed firearms to deter and protect against school shootings, provided the gun-toting teachers follow certain requirements.

In order for teachers and staff to carry a pistol, they must have a Texas license to carry a concealed handgun; must be authorized to carry by the district; must receive training in crisis management and hostile situations and have to use ammunition that is designed to minimize the risk of ricochet in school halls.
Source

African countries have the lowest life expectancy

Africa has the life expectancy of only 50 years.Russia ,India, Georgia and Syria has a life expectancy of around 65 years... US ranks 12th with 78 years below Japan ,France , Canada and Iceland which has the highest life expectancy of 81.5 years.
Israel is having a life expectancy of 80 years along with China and UK.

Egyptian woman gives birth to septuplets

Egyptian nurses tend to newborn septuplets at the el-Shatbi hospital in the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria, Egypt, Saturday, Aug. 16, 2008. The newborns, four boys and three girls, were delivered by caesarian section at the end of the eighth month of 27-year-old Ghazala Khamis' pregnancy.(Photo: China Daily/Agencies)

Police arrest India bombing Mastermind

AHMADABAD, India (AP) -- Police have arrested the alleged mastermind of serial bombings last month in western India that killed 58 people and have linked him to a banned Islamic group, an official said Saturday.
Police also arrested eight other men who were described as members of the Students' Islamic Movement of India, a group that was banned in 2001 and has been blamed for a wave of bomb attacks across India in the last three years.

"We believe that the network of SIMI was behind the blasts," senior police official P.C. Pande told reporters in Ahmadabad, the capital of Gujarat state and the site of last month's bombings.

Pande said police arrested the alleged leader of the bomb plot, Mufti Abu Bashir, in the northern Indian city of Lucknow on Saturday. He declined to describe what evidence police had against Bashir and the other men.

"Today is a big day for the Gujarat police who have been able to crack the Ahmadabad blasts case," the Press Trust of India quoted him as saying.

Police nearly always blame bombings on Islamic militants who allegedly want to provoke violence between India's Hindu majority and Muslim minority, but officials rarely offer hard evidence implicating specific groups.

Earlier this month, an Indian court lifted the ban on SIMI, saying the government had been unable to supply any new evidence of illegal activities. The next day, the Supreme Court reversed the decision, saying the ban would stay in place until it could consider further evidence to be presented by the government within three weeks.

Source

Middle East sees Hypocrisy in US stance on Georgia

CAIRO, Egypt — - President Bush's condemnation of Russia as a bullying intimidator in the Georgian conflict struck a hypocritical note in a Middle East that has endured violent reverberations from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and where the sharp White House rhetoric against Moscow echoes what many Arabs feel about the U.S.

The president's swaggering style and frequent veiled threats of military force have angered and baffled a region that blames his administration for alienating Muslims and instigating turmoil in a misguided war on terrorism.

Now Bush's spirited attack on Russia's invasion of its weaker neighbor, Georgia, has raised derisive smirks among Arab commentators, who say the U.S. president is condemning the same power politics he practices.

Bush should be "too ashamed to speak about the occupation of any country; he is already occupying one," said Mohammed El-Sayed Said, editor-in-chief of the Egyptian independent daily al-Badeel. "U.S. forces have been in Iraq for five years and they still fight in an unacceptable manner that violates human rights conventions. Bush had better talk about his own occupation of Iraq."

Bitterness and suspicion toward Washington, D.C., are summoned easily from Cairo to Beirut, Lebanon, to Baghdad. The Iraq war, the sense of drift over the unresolved Palestinian question, and Washington's perceived failure to pay more than lip-service to promoting democracy and human rights have undermined American standing in the region.

It is also widely noted here that the U.S. stood by uncritically during Israel's military incursion into southern Lebanon in its 2006 war with Hezbollah.

So when Bush declared Friday that, "Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century," many people dismissed it as a double standard.

"The U.S. administration is stumbling in the Middle East without considering any horizons for the future," said Sateh Noureddine, political analyst and columnist in the Lebanese daily Assafir. "It is totally obsessed with the idea of its war against terrorism, and this makes it lose even in the simplest political sense.

"The U.S. administration has done more harm to its allies in Georgia and the Middle East than to its enemies."

Source

Heroes lift bus off pregnant woman

Donnette Sanz , 33, identified as an NYPD traffic agent, never got a chance to hold her 3-pound, 6-ounce son, who came into the world via emergency Caesarean section at nearby St. Barnabas Hospital.



NEW YORK, AP - Dozens of strangers converged from all directions to lift a five-tonne bus off the body of a pregnant woman yesterday - a heroic effort that saved the life of her child but was too late for her.

Seven months pregnant, Donnette Sanz was crossing one of the busiest intersections in the Bronx on her lunch break when she was struck by a van whose brakes failed. The impact sent the 33-year-old police department traffic agent flying into the path of a yellow school bus and pinned her underneath.

About 30 people helped lift the bus, and Sanz was rushed to a hospital, where doctors delivered her boy by Caesarean section. The 1.53 kilograms named Sean Michael, was in critical condition yesterday but showing signs of improvement.

Mourners and neighbourhood residents gathered outside the hospital to pray for Sanz and her child.

The 72-year-old van driver, Walter Walker, pleaded not guilty to criminally negligent homicide and aggravated unlicenced operation of a motor vehicle. He was being held on $100,000 bail, and his lawyer didn't immediately return a phone call.

Police said in a court filing that the brakes on Walker's van had deteriorated so badly that the vehicle was unsafe to drive. Walker told investigators he had some repairs done six months ago but knew there were still problems. Police said Walker's licence has been suspended 20 times, most recently for failure to pay parking tickets. He had previously been sentenced to probation and fines for driving offences.

Walker told the New York Post: "The light turned red, and I couldn't stop. I tried to miss her." He said he had been using his brother's van to help a friend move. Sanz, a Bronx resident, had been a civilian member of the New York Police Department for two years.

Bystanders, including Gary Burgess, came in waves to lift the mini school bus from Sanz's body.

"It was the human thing to do," said Burgess, 50.
Sanz survived the delivery in an emergency operating room at St. Barnabas Hospital but died about an hour later, spokesman Fred Winters said.

At the hospital yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg met with Sanz's husband, Rafael, to offer his condolences.

"It's a terrible poignancy that Donnette's son's birthday will now coincide with the day his mother died," the mayor said. "I hope that as this child grows up, he comes to understand that his mother gave her life in service to our city and that we are forever grateful."

Source

After Walmart Tesco ready to Enter India

The world's biggest retailer Wal-Mart may have been the first mover in noouncing the roll out its retail operations in India tie up with Indian partner Bharti Group, who had earlier been in talks with the UK's retail giant, Tesco.

However, Tesco, the world's third-larges has announced plans to beat the world's leading retailer hollow in its time to market in India.

India would be the third-largest market for the UK-based retail chain after China and Japan, and it already has an agreement with Tata group's supermarket chain Star Bazaar as its franchise partner and customer.

If Tesco's plans stay on track, it would open its first cash-and-carry store in India by December 2009, 16 months after its announcement to enter India. Rival Wal-Mart on the other hand has announced that it will open its maiden store in India in March 2009, taking 28 months to start operations after its announcement.


Source

US scientists discover new bird species

A male olive-backed forest robin is examined in the hands of Brian Schmidt, the Smithsonian ornithologist who discovered the species during a biodiversity study in Gabon in this photo taken in September 2003. A red-breasted bird discovered by accident in the forests of Gabon is a new species, U.S. scientists said on August 15, 2008. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

Olympic Fashion

Brazil Winner Cries at the Olympics

Cesar Cielo of Brazil cries after winning the men's 50m freestyle
swimming final at the National Aquatics Centre during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, August 16, 2008.(Photo: Chinadaily.com)

Jatropha: Miracle or Not?

Jatropha has been hailed as one of the best biodiesel crops in existence. Some of the more impressive features are the large yields of quality oil, and the ability to grow the plant with minimal water or fertilizer. As one of the most agriculturally gifted nations in the world, Brazil has a keen interest in all things biofuel. So it is no surprise the two were going to meet, and find a spark. Green Car Congress reports:

"Brazil’s first commercial jatropha biodiesel project goes into operation this month following the delivery of BioDiesel Technologies’ (BDT) processing unit.
BDT will deliver an additional four processing units to increase the plant's annual capacity to 40,000 tonnes (about 10 million gallons US) by the end of 2007. The President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will officially open the plant in September."

Local cooperatives and small farmers in the state of Tocantins will supply the facility with jatropha seeds from 48,000 hectares of plantations. The multi-feedstock technology provided by BDT accepts not only jatropha, but also animal tallow, allowing another possible source of needed income for local farmers.

Jatropha is known to be toxic to animals and humans, which has raised some questions about the safety of jatropha oil and handling conditions for farmers. In the rush to biofuels are we missing some unintended consequences? While there is no single solution to biofuel production, public safety measures should be considered, especially in light of research showing that there may exist non-toxic jatropha varieties. It would be a shame to plant all those acres to realize you could have not only made a safer oil, but fed your cow, and possibly your family as well.

Source:AFP

More bad homeopathic water science

More bad homeopathic water science
by Paul Wilson
More from the new issue of comedy journal Homeopathy. Homeopaths continue to pursue research on 'high dilutions' (i.e. dilutions such that there is highly unlikely to be any of the original solute remaining) in search of a vaguely plausible mechanism for homeopathy to work. Since the evidence is that homeopathy doesn't work, this is unlikely to be a fruitful endeavour, but it does provide entertainment for connoiseurs of pseudoscience.

The latest offering is a paper by one R. Assumpção , entitled "Electrical impedance and HV plasma images of high dilutions of sodium chloride" and an acccompanying editorial by Cyril Smith. Two sets of observations are presented: a set of Kirlian photographs and a set of measurements of the impedance of various homeopathic dilutions of NaCl.

What is Kirlian photography? When an object resting on a photographic plate is connected to a source of high voltage, an image is formed on the plate. Semyon Kirlian, whom the technique is named after, thought that such images might be compared to a human 'aura'. You can see how this would be attractive to various kinds of energy medicine fruitcakes. In the paper, Assumpção provides Kirlian photographs of homeopathic dilutions of an NaCl solution (6c, 12c, 24c and 30c) and of succussed (shaken) water without dilution. The images are certainly pretty, but what do they show? Not a lot, as far as I can tell. It isn't clear how such images should be interpreted, and all Assumpção really concludes is that different dilutions look different. This, in itself, is not a particularly exciting finding, in the absence of any hypothesis as to why that is and what it might mean.

What of the impedance data? Assumpção finds that impedance of the samples increases with dilution, up to about 12c (which is the point where Avogadro's constant suggests that there is unlikely to be any of the original NaCl remaining), and then decreases again slightly with further dilution. "This phenomenon is inexplicable in terms of conventional chemical theory" concludes Assumpção, a statement that really should be followed by "OMG!!!!11!1!1!!1!!!!!1".
Well, I think I have a reasonable explanation for the results that causes no problems for conventional chemical theory. As expected, dilution of the NaCl solution causes an increase in impedance as ions are removed from the solution. But there is also a competing increase in the concentration of dissolved ions caused by the succussion (agitation) process, as atmospheric gases and other impurities are dissolved in the water. So the small decrease in impedance beyond 12c could result from this process. I'm more puzzled as to why the impedance of the distilled water increases when it is shaken, suggesting a decrease in the concentration of dissolved ions. However, I suspect that there is a conventional explanation, but Assumpção doesn't seem to be particularly curious about this. Is there a change in the ionic species in the water as it is shaken? Does shaking facilitate outgassing of the dissolved gases that remain in the distilled water? We don't know. This continues the homeopathic water research tradition of publishing things without any thought as to what factors (other than the magic of water) might have led to the results.

Of course, the other thing to note is that the paper only looks at one solute, NaCl. For homeopathy, what would be really interesting is if you could show that there was a difference between two different homeopathic substances at dilutions greater than 12c. Previous attempts to do this have ended in some embarassment, as Smith acknowledges in the accompanying editorial, when he states "in the light of the controversy which has attended previous claims in this field, caution, and independent repetition of these results is required". There seems to be little sign of any such caution so far.

Finally, in Figure 5 of the paper, Assumpção had omitted to label to the impedance curves, showing which curve belongs to which dilution. The solution? Simply write the labels in, with a pen, afterwards. It is truly amateur hour.

Italian Scientists "Walk" on Water

Italian Scientists "Walk" on Water
CHEN:
Italian scientists are walking on water, for fun. But it looks like the fun soon goes away if walking on water becomes floundering in goo. Here's more.

STORY:
Here's the recipe, pour corn starch in a swimming-pool and mix thoroughly. Then try walking on it, you heard right, walk on water.

Italian scientists tried to show how anybody can do it this Wednesday.

The staff of Italian scientific magazine 'Focus' mixed about 13,000 pounds of corn starch and 1400 gallons of water for four hours before pouring the resulting mixture in a swimming pool.

Tens of people attempted the 'miracle', walking across the pool in front of hundreds of spectators in the holiday town of Riccione. Many seemed to succeed.

[Carlo Degradi, Focus Magazine Journalist]:
"We have filled a swimming pool with water and corn starch. The effect we obtained is to create a non-Newtonian liquid, meaning a liquid that reacts to forces like stamping on it with ones feet by becoming solid for a few seconds before reverting to its liquid state...the effect is that of walking on water."

The 'miracle' liquid reacts as a solid only if submitted to sufficient force.

Those who didn't stamp their feet strong enough sunk in the pool and had to struggle with the sticky mixture.

Perseid Meteor Shower

This bright and colorful meteor flashed through Tuesday's early morning skies, part of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. The lovely image is one of over 350 frames captured on August 12 from the Joshua Tree National Park, in California, USA . Dust from comet Swift-Tuttle is responsible for the Perseids, creating the northern hemisphere's regular summer sky show. The comet dust is vaporized as it enters the atmosphere at upwards of 60 kilometers per second, producing visible trails that begin at altitudes of around 100 kilometers. Of course, the trails point back to a radiant point in the constellation Perseus, giving the meteor shower its name. Recorded after moonset, the starry background features the bright star Vega on the right. Extending below the western horizon is the faint band of the northern Milky Way.
Source:NASA

Astronomers studying ways to deal with incoming near-Earth asteroids (NEA) that might be on a collision course with our planet want to know in detail what these space rocks are made of. The better they "know the enemy" the better they can come up with ways to destroy or change the course of NEAs. Since we've only studied a couple of asteroids up close with spacecraft, the best way to learn more about the composition of asteroids should be fairly easy: just look at meteorites that fall to Earth, which are small chunks of asteroids. But in doing so, researchers discovered quite a huge discrepancy. The vast majority of asteroids that whiz by Earth are of a type that matches only a tiny fraction of the meteorites that most frequently hit our planet. This difference has had astronomer scratching their heads. But a team of researchers has now found what it believes is the answer to the puzzle. The smaller rocks that most often fall to Earth, it seems, come straight in from the main asteroid belt out between Mars and Jupiter, rather than from the near-Earth asteroid population.

The researchers studied the spectral signatures of near-Earth asteroids and compared them with spectra obtained on Earth from the thousands of meteorites found on Earth. But the more they looked, the more they found that most NEAs — about two-thirds of them — match a specific type of meteorites called LL chondrites, which only represent about 8 percent of meteorites.

"Why do we see a difference between the objects hitting the ground and the big objects whizzing by?" asked Richard Binzel, a professor from MIT. "It's been a headscratcher." As the effect became gradually more and more noticeable as more asteroids were analyzed, "we finally had a big enough data set that the statistics demanded an answer. It could no longer be just a coincidence."

Way out in the main belt, the population is much more varied, and approximates the mix of types that is found among meteorites. But why would the things that most frequently hit us match this distant population better than it matches the stuff that's right in our neighborhood?

An obscure effect that was discovered long ago was recently recognized as a significant factor in moving asteroids around and putting them on a fast track towards the inner solar system, called the Yarkovsky effect.
This effect causes asteroids to change their orbits as a result of the way they absorb the sun's heat on one side and radiate it back later as they rotate around, which alters the object's path. This effect acts much more strongly on the smallest objects, and only weakly on the larger ones.

So, for smaller sized space rocks– the kinds of things that end up as typical meteorites — the Yarkovsky effect plays a major role, moving them with ease from throughout the asteroid belt on to paths that can head toward Earth. For larger asteroids a kilometer or so across, the kind that we worry about as potential threats to the Earth, the effect is so weak it can only move them small amounts.

The new study is also good news for protecting the planet. One of the biggest problems in figuring out how to deal with an approaching asteroid, if and when one is discovered on a potential collision course, is that they are so varied. The best way of dealing with one kind might not work on another.

But now that this analysis has shown that the majority of near-Earth asteroids are of this specific type — stony objects, rich in the mineral olivine and poor in iron — it's possible to concentrate most planning on dealing with that kind of object, Binzel says. "Odds are, an object we might have to deal with would be like an LL chondrite, and thanks to our samples in the laboratory, we can measure its properties in detail," he says. "It's the first step toward 'know thy enemy'."

Source:Universe Today

Religious support centers in Olympic Village

Some 665 athletes and officials from more than 50 countries and regions have visited the religious service center at the Olympic Village since it opened on July 27, a BOCOG official said Friday.

Sixty-nine professional religious service volunteers have been holding services around the clock in English, Arabic, Italian, French, Korean and Hebrew, Deng Yaping, deputy director of the Olympic Village department and spokeswoman for the village, told a press conference at the Beijing International Media Center.

On Aug 3, one foreigner visited the center and asked for a prayer ceremony to be held for his mother who had died a few days ago. A priest prayed for him, Deng said.

Last Sunday, the same priest asked his congregation to pray for the man's mother. The man said he left the center with peace of mind and was greatly moved by the love and concern he received from the people of different countries, she said.

The village provides Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist and Hindu services, she said.

Deng also briefed reporters on other services at the village.

A big draw, she said, had been the main dining hall for athletes, which on Aug 8, served the largest number of guests in Olympic history.

Between noon and 5 pm, 18,634 people dined there, which far exceeded the numbers recorded at the past two summer Games, she said.

The Beijing Olympic Village has also received the largest number of world dignitaries in Games history. As of Thursday, 62 royals, heads of state, government officials and leaders of international organizations had visited, she said.
Among them were International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge and his predecessor Juan Antonio Samaranch, she said.

Deng reiterated the Olympic Village's claim of being the "greenest ever".

It treats six tons of kitchen waste, and replaces 7,674 pieces of cotton textiles, including bed sheets and pillowcases, every day, she said.

Hot water is supplied via a solar heating system.

On favorite dishes at the canteen, Deng said Beijing roast duck was the clear winner, with an average of 600 being consumed on a daily basis.

The canteens have also set world records for the choice of food they provide, she said.

There are 460 dishes from all major international cuisines on offer around the clock in the main canteen. The menus change on an eight-day cycle, she said.

China Daily - Xinhua

Japan pressured to oppose US-India Nuclear Deal

Apart from Pakistani politicians and the Indian opposition parties there hasn't been much international outcry against the Indo-US nuclear deal. However Japan remains another exception.

TOKYO - Anti-nuclear campaigners launched a campaign Friday to press nuclear energy suppliers to stop an accord between India and the United States, saying it would shatter anti-proliferation efforts.

A loose coalition including activists and scholars focused efforts on Japan, which has been non-committal on the deal that would give India access to nuclear technology without signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). "We urge you to support measures that would avert further damage to the already beleaguered global non-proliferation and disarmament regime," said a letter signed by more than 160 people and groups from 24 countries.

Japan is a key player in the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group, which controls the transfer of nuclear material and needs to approve the India-US deal. The group is expected to meet next week in Vienna.

The letter, which will be handed to foreign ministers of all the supplier nations, was signed by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two cities that were destroyed by US atomic bombs at the end of World War II in 1945. "The Japanese foreign ministry must realise that this agreement would be the start of the collapse of the non-proliferation regime," Japanese lawyer Masayoshi Narita told a news conference. "Japan as the only nation to come under nuclear attacks must clearly argue against it," he said.

Other signatories to the letter include Leonard Weiss, the architect of US non-proliferation laws, American leftist philosopher Noam Chomsky and former UN under secretary-general Jayantha Dhanapala of Sri Lanka.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says the nuclear accord is crucial as the country seeks to meet energy needs for its fast-growing economy.

The deal has moved forward since Singh parted ways with communist party allies, who argued that the accord aligns the country too closely with the United States.

Japan, like the United States, has been seeking a closer alliance with fellow democracy India. Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura visited India earlier this month and said Tokyo was still assessing whether the nuclear deal would undermine non-proliferation efforts. But he said that Japan would never change its position that India, which tested an atom bomb in 1998, should sign the NPT.

The India-US pact received key backing this week from Australia, which has the world's largest uranium reserves.

Maoist Leader in Nepal gets firm support from US and India

India, United States, Japan and the European Union on Friday congratulated Maoist leader Prachanda on his election as the Prime Minister of Nepal and said they were looking forward to work with the new government in the Himalayan nation.

In his message to Prachanda, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that he is looking forward to work with Prachanda to "develop the bonds of good neighbourliness that unite our peoples and nations, and to deepen the friendly relations that so happily exist between our two countries."

"I look forward to meeting with you in the near future and would be happy to receive you in India as our guest at your earliest convenience," Singh said in his message, according to the Indian Embassy Kathmandu.

In a statement, the United states said that it will continue its strong support for peace, democracy, human rights and over all development in Nepal.

"We look forward to working with the new government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal and building upon the historic ties between our peoples," it said.

Japan said it always has a firm commitment to the democratisation process, for peace and prosperity in Nepal and hoped that the new leadership would be able to accomplish the major task of drafting New Constitution by forging consensus among all political parties.

The Devil's Paradise

Russia has the highest abortion rate(52%) in the world while panama has one of the lowest(0.02%).
Abortion rates are lower in US(22.6%),Canada(22.1%),Japan(21.4%) and UK(21.8%) as compared to China(31.5%).In Denmark the abortion rate is 19.3%.Denamrk is one of happiest places on earth.In India it is roughly 2.7%.
Greenland ,Romania and Hungary follow Russia at 50.3%,40.6% and 38.9% respectively.

Russia appears to be the Devil's country.

Question is why these developed countries fail to take preventive measures?
Why so much money is spent on abortions every year?
Is it morally ok to kill 1 in 2 of the babies during the pregnancies ?


In Black NY Abortion Rates are very high as compared with the national average.
In most of the United States, 24 abortions are carried out for every 100 live births. In New York, 72 abortions occur for every 100 live births, Barrons.com reports. Though Blacks make up about 24 percent of the city’s population, Black women were responsible for 45 percent of the city’s abortions in 2006.

In India the situation is similar. At some places in Punjab the Abortion rates of female are very high.

Nigeria and Vietnam have also recently reported an increase in the Abortion rates.
There are more abortions in the Ho Chi Min city than Live births.


Given the situation it appears to me that the Nature has been running on the steroids. It seems that no progress can be made without abortions which is irreligious. I wont be surprised the stituation is no better in Pakistan and Iran.
Will it be wrong to call these places of heaven as the Devil's Paradise?

However there is some good news for those who are pro-life

Thirty-five years after the Supreme Court legalized abortion in the U.S., abortion rates are at their lowest level in three decades — which gives both sides in the culture wars something to celebrate and plenty to fight over, while the rest of us try to figure out what happened.

According to the Guttmacher Institute's 2005 survey of abortion providers, the abortion rate fell 9% in five years, to 19.4 abortions for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44; the 1.2 million abortions performed in 2005 numbered 25% fewer than the high of 1.6 million in 1990. That would seem to be good news, whether you view abortion as an evil, or a necessary evil, or a routine medical procedure no more morally troubling than a tooth extraction.

Canadian's aren't fairing well at the Olympics

The head of the Canadian Olympic Committee says Canadians who are upset with their country's lack of medal production at the Beijing Games should calm down and relax.

The fact Canadians haven't won a medal in the pool has sparked a heated debate among readers of CBC.ca/olympics who are frustrated that Canada has been shut out so far in the Games that are now in Day 5.

Chris Rudge, chief executive officer of the COC, told CBC's Heather Hiscox in China that "this is the time to support the athletes who are there."

He says that after the Games are over, Aug. 24, that all aspects of the entire Canadian contingent's performance will be examined.

One CBC reader wrote "we are on the road to mediocrity," while another said "[it's] sad when you see these third world Countries at least winning a medal or two and a rich, large country like Canada has won 'squat.'"

Rudge says more money is coming into the system in the next few months. He also wishes Canadians would be more vocal about the Olympic team when the Games aren't being held. He says that would help create the atmosphere needed to generate more funds.

Before the Games, the COC predicted Canada would be in the top 16 for medals. He stands by that prediction, and says "you don't throw in the towel yet."

Silken Laumann, who won three Olympic medals in rowing for Canada, appreciates how fans feel, but she also echoed Rudge's sentiment about getting behind the Canadian athletes competing in China.

"Canadians are expecting medals, we like to know we're doing as well as countries like Australia, but I think we need to take a step back," Laumann told CBC Newsworld.

"For instance, looking at what's going on in the pool, sure we haven't won a medal yet, but there are a lot of our swimmers who have set Canadian records, who have had personal-best performances, and that's worth something, and I think we should be proud of how our athletes are doing."

China's Li Na pulls off a shocking upset

First it was James Blake beating Roger Federer, and then it was Elena Dementieva beating Serena Williams, and now we have another big story coming out of Olympic tennis: China's Li Na pulled off a shocking upset, defeating Team USA's Venus Williams, 7-5, 7-5.

Williams, who won the golds in both singles and doubles in 2000, was widely considered a favorite to win gold again this year, but Li put on an inspired performance in front of a home crowd that cheered enthusiastically when the American and defending Wimbledon champ went down to defeat.

The Williams sisters are still alive -- and widely favored -- for the doubles gold. But if the Americans are going to win a singles medal in these Games, it will have to come from James Blake. Who would have suspected that?

Teach Intelligent Design,Science

Kerry Irons' July 29 letter in opposition to intelligent design states: "Those who blithely ignore the scientific evidence are not going to distinguish themselves in a debate about science." True, but neither are those who ignore the awesome evidence for intelligent design when in a debate about science.

Consider: Scientists are supposed to stick to the facts, the evidence. So doing, they will follow the evidence wherever it leads. They will rule nothing out of bounds in the quest for truth. However, many in the scientific community remain loyal to the teachings of Charles Darwin.

Honest scientists admit that they have no proof of things having come into being by chance and that they have no evidence or facts whatsoever of any creature having evolved from another. If evolution from one species to another were fact, archeologists would find multitudinous stages of animals gradually evolving into another kind. They, on close and honest examination, find not even one.

Thus, honest and true scientists would confess that the above leaves the door wide open for intelligent design.

Is the preciseness of the universe an accident or product of nature? What of the human brain? What of the fact that each person has fingerprints that are unique, different from all others. If someone pointed to a bicycle and said to you that it had no maker, that it just came into being, you surely would not believe that. How immeasurably more complicated is even the smallest living thing to a million bicycles?

Those who oppose the Bible and religious liberties have chosen the classroom of our public schools to launch a new offensive against religion, especially against biblical Christianity. How wicked. To indoctrinate children to faith in evolution -- which actually teaches the religion of hopelessness and meaninglessness -- teaches children to view life as cheap and rather purposeless. Thus, record numbers of youth of today are troublemakers or commit suicide, with a record number of our citizens being in prisons.

How we need faith in God as creator taught alongside faith in the theory of evolution in our schools. Evolutionists want none of that, as they know such honest science would have no chance of belief when taught alongside intelligent design.

What a difference the teachings of both faiths would make.

Sam Wiederhold
Alma

In Retrospect: Gödel's proof

Andrew Hodges

In today's computer age, the implications of the discovery in formal logic that Newman and Nagel articulated in 1958 are of even broader interest, says Andrew Hodges.

BOOK REVIEWED
-Gödel's Proof
by Ernest Nagel & James R. Newman

New York University Press: 1958. 118 pp.


Fifty years ago an unusual book appeared. Its bald and unapologetic title, Gödel's Proof, must have left the casual browser wondering who or what Gödel was. Those tempted to look inside discovered a classic of scientific exposition and faced quite a challenge. The writers, Ernest Nagel and James Newman, already distinguished figures in scientific philosophy and education, gave an uncompromising presentation of their unfamiliar subject matter: mathematical logic. Kurt Gödel himself, the great logician whose breakthrough discovery of 1931 was the subject of this book, was very much alive in 1958 Princeton, but he was no popularizer or media celebrity. For Nagel and Newman to see the potential interest to a wider public was both visionary and optimistic.

I remember discovering Gödel's Proof as a student in 1968. I cannot have been the only one to find it a unique text on the college library shelf, leading to unexpected regions beyond the standard syllabus. It was not written like a textbook; neither was it a 'Gödel made easy'. Although rooted in an earlier article in Scientific American, it used copious equations; indeed it explored the very meaning of equations, a demand on the reader that would make most publishers nervous. Nagel and Newman explained difficult ideas of logical deduction from formal axioms, distinguishing formal proof from informal reasoning. They showed Gödel's crucial insight: that the rules of logic for quoting axioms, substituting variables and formulating deductions are themselves mathematical operations. And they revealed how his technical innovation exploited this observation, using numbers to code statements about numbers.

Nagel and Newman's detailed account showed how Gödel was led to the astonishing discovery of true mathematical statements that could not possibly have a formal proof. In other words, Gödel proved the formal incompleteness of mathematics. They also recorded the shock that this discovery caused to the hitherto mainstream positivist assumptions, such as those of Bertrand Russell, whose programme for deriving mathematics from purely logical axioms Gödel explicitly contradicted.

One could even argue that the underlying concept of the digital computer is owed to Gödel, via the British mathematician Alan Turing. Turing's 1936 concept of the universal machine is the basis of the computer, and Turing arrived at it by following Gödel's lead, seeing that instructions could operate on other instructions, rather as Gödel's numbers had coded formal statements about numbers.

In the 1950s there was a tendency for mathematicians to distance themselves from practical applications, and from computing in particular. Since the 1970s these divisions have become less rigid. Gödel's arguments are now more fully connected with the body of mathematics and its classical problems of 'how to solve it'. In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced seven prizes for a set of Millennium Problems. One of these, concerning computational complexity, has its root in a remark of Gödel's that might have seemed abstruse in 1958, but is now of great value to practical computing.

It therefore now seems a little odd that Nagel and Newman paid no attention to computing. They framed their closing reflections as if Turing's theory of computability was an obvious corollary. By contrast with their detailed explanation of Gödel's technical arguments, they found no difficulty in writing off, in a few sentences, the possibility of artificial intelligence (AI). This is now a huge and hotly contested area of scientific philosophy. In fact, it was already the subject of dispute in 1958. Turing himself, in 1950, argued that Gödel's proof was irrelevant to the question of achieving AI. In the 1960s, Gödel in turn made somewhat delphic remarks objecting to Turing's philosophy; he seems to have considered that his proof implied that the human mind could not be mechanized.

These arguments stimulated another famous book with Gödel in the title. Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 Gödel, Escher, Bach (Penguin), although in many ways inspired by Newman and Nagel's work, took an approach diametrically opposite to their clipped classicism. Expansive and illustrative, it also came to quite a different conclusion about AI — essentially Turing's. This disagreement remains unresolved; in fact it is heightened by another protagonist, Roger Penrose, who supports something like Gödel's position but in an entirely new way.

In a few pregnant words, Nagel and Newman referred to the brain as a machine apparently more powerful, through its capacity for informal reasoning, than computers. Penrose, since the 1980s, has asked what could possibly lend it such power, finding an answer in the ill-understood phenomenon of quantum-mechanical state reduction. His conclusions are keenly disputed: for instance the leading logician Martin Davis, himself a popularizer, has forcefully pressed Turing's original view in his book Engines of Logic (W. W. Norton, 2001).

Nagel and Newman dedicated their book to Russell, whose logical work during the opening years of the twentieth century lay behind Gödel's proof. In that same period, Planck and Einstein opened the quantum-mechanical door on reality. A hundred years have not sufficed to resolve the fundamental questions they revealed. Mathematical and physical science describe a continuous quantum universe using formal operations on discrete symbols. Neither the quantum, nor those symbols, nor the connection between them, are yet fully understood.

Israel to transfer Jerusalem property to Russia

RAMALLAH: An Israeli Foreign Ministry official said that the Israeli government plans to transfer ownership of the land on which Jerusalem's St. Sergius Church stands, to Russia in the coming weeks, the local daily Jerusalem Post reported yesterday.

The issue, which has been under negotiation since then-Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed the site in Jerusalem's Russian Compound and others nearby as property of the Russian Orthodox Church four years ago, is extremely delicate as Israel is concerned over the precedent that might be set for other churches' properties in the capital, the report said. For example, the Greek Orthodox Church owns the land on which the Knesset and the prime minister's residence are located.

"I believe that this move represents a dangerous precedent of transferring properties in the heart of Jerusalem and is in violation of the city's interest, since this is not the only property being contested by foreign sources," opposition leader and Jerusalem mayoral candidate Nir Barkat wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Tuesday.

The prime minister's office also denied yesterday a report that he offered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas the absorption of 20,000 refugees inside Israel in the next ten years as part of "shelf agreement" between the two sides.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, the secretary-general of PLO's Executive Committee, said that the Palestinians "reject this offer." "The acceptance of this offer will make it the ceiling of our demands", Abed Rabbo told the Voice of Palestine Radio. He added "this offer is not for implementation rather than lowering the ceiling of Palestinians' rights and demands."

India Pakistan Relations in Free Fall

For 22nd time this year, Pak shatters peace

Since January, Pakistani troops have violated the five-year ceasefire agreement 22 times and have provoked reactions from Indian troops.

Who is Afia Siddiqui?

The case of Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui
August 14th, 2008

Five years after she vanished from her parents’ home in Karachi along with her three children, Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui appeared in a New York court last week accused of trying to kill U.S. officers in Afghanistan
Accounts of her arrest and the shooting incident differ.
Siddiqui, 36, was arrested outside the governor’s office in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province on July 17 after police searched her handbag and found documents on making explosives, excerpts from the book “Anarchist’s Arsenal” and descriptions of New York City landmarks, federal prosecutors said in a statement.

The next day when U.S. soldiers and FBI agents went to question the U.S.-trained neuroscientist, she attacked them, the Justice Department said in a statement. She fired two shots using the rifle of one of the U.S.. army officers but nobody was hit. The officer then fired back at her, using his service pistol and at least one shot hit her, the Justice Department said.

Afghan police in Ghazni however, told a different story, according to a report filed by Reuters. Afghan police said officers searched Siddiqui after reports of her suspicious behaviour and found maps of Ghazni, including one of the governor’s house, and arrested her along with a teenage boy.

U.S. troops requested the woman be handed over to them, but the police refused, a senior Ghazni police officer said.

U.S. soldiers then proceeded to disarm the Afghan police at which point Siddiqui approached the Americans complaining of mistreatment by the police. The U.S. troops, the officer said, “thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and and took her”. The boy remained in police custody.

Whatever the circumstance, Siddiqui was then flown to New York where she appeared in a wheelchair, looking frail and, according to her lawyers, in urgent need of medical attention.

The case bears recounting, not just because Siddiqui is a MIT educated mother of three, but because it has roused strong passions especially in Pakistan.

Since the time of her disappearance in 2003 human rights groups have alleged Siddiqui had been taken into secret custody, one of thousands of Pakistanis who had disappeared in the U.S.-led war on al Qaeda and Taliban. They said they believed she was in Bagram, the U.S. air base in Afghanistan.

U.S. authorities strongly denied Siddiqui was in custody, and according to the New York Times, military and intelligence officials believed her to be in Pakistan until her arrest in Afghanistan last month.

Protests have taken place in Karachi, Lahore and even outside the court in Manhattan where Siddiqui appeared . The anger is directed as much, if not more, at the Pakistani government and its agencies who are accused of handing over Siddiqui to the United States as at Washington itself.

There are online petitions seeking Siddiqui’s release and others warning this is only the tip of the iceberg and that there are many others at risk. Comments on blogs reflect anger, shame and helplessness. to undo what many see as a terrible wrong done to her,


On Wednesday, the Pakistani Foreign Office said it had protested against the detention of Siddiqui’s three children and demanded their repatriation.

Cassini's images of Saturn's Moon

Crisp photos of the tiger stripe fractures, the best having a resolution of 10 metres per pixel .

New images from the Cassini spacecraft may help to explain the unusual geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. Mission members are now checking to see if the images match the locations of known geyser vents.
On Monday, Cassini flew by a region on the moon's south pole called the "tiger stripes," criss-crossing fractures where plumes of ice and water erupt from vents in the surface.

Science,Islam and Iran

While our scientists struggle with ethics, the Islamic world forges ahead
by Jim Al-Khalili

In recent days I have been asked on three separate occasions whether I think physicists are going to destroy the world the moment they switch on the Large Hadron Collider - the huge underground particle accelerator in Geneva - later this year. They ask if, as has been reported, the energies it will produce when beams of near light-speed subatomic particles are smashed together will create mini black holes that will swallow up the whole planet.

Add to this the more rational worries many people have about the global catastrophe of climate change if we don't act fast enough to curb our reliance on fossil fuels, or about GM crops producing Frankenstein food, hybrid embryo research producing Frankenstein babies, and nuclear power leaving future generations a legacy of toxic radioactive waste, and one is left with the impression that the average person is pretty scared about the rate of current scientific advances.

Of the above doom-laden list, the only issue I am unable to provide any sort of reassurance on is climate change, where I am just as worried as everyone else. The rest, I would argue, are based on unfounded fears arising from a misunderstanding of the science involved.

It is of course quite right that the implications - ethical or otherwise - of all manner of scientific research are high on the agenda of government decision-making and research funding. Science ethics is even being taught as part of new science curriculums in UK schools. While the issue of ethics in medical research has always been around, it can only be healthy that we are beginning to apply the same standards to other areas of science, not just so that scientists themselves think more responsibly, but to encourage them to explain what they do to the rest of society, particularly if they work in academia and are funded by public money.

For many, concerns with some scientific research are linked with the unease about living in a nanny state that they feel often passes through legislation and enacts policies without real consensual debate. So I would like to share with you what was, for me, a quite surprising example of the ultimate nanny state making some remarkably sensible decisions.

On a recent visit to Iran, I was allowed unrestricted access to the Royan Institute in Tehran where, by all accounts, world-class work in genetics, infertility treatment, stem cell research and animal cloning is carried out in an atmosphere of openness quite dramatically at odds with my expectations. Much of the work at the Royan is therapeutic and centred on infertility treatment. But their basic research in genetics was remarkably advanced, despite the restrictions on many of the researchers' travel to international meetings and the difficulties in publishing their work in the leading international journals.

What struck me most was the way the authorities overseeing the research seem to have dealt with the ethical minefields of parts of the work, in stark contrast with the howls of protest from some quarters in the UK in the run-up to the human embryo research bill that went through parliament recently.

At the Royan I spoke to one of the imams who sits on their ethics committee. He explained that every research project proposed must be justified to his committee to ensure that it does not conflict with Islamic teaching. Thus, while issues such as abortion are still restricted (it is allowed only when the mother's life is in danger), research on human embryos is allowed.

In this country the Catholic church has branded research on human embryonic stem cells immoral and says tinkering with life in this way is tantamount to playing God. So I was taken aback by the Iranian imam who pointed out, quite rightly, that all that is produced in this research is just a clump of cells and not a foetus, and so what was all the fuss about?

It is these stem cells that then differentiate into the specialist cells that are used to grow healthy tissue to replace that either damaged by trauma, or compromised by disease. Among the conditions that scientists believe may eventually be treated by stem cell therapy are Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, strokes, arthritis, diabetes, burns and spinal cord damage.

The fundamental question is whether the original single zygote (the fertilised egg) is defined as a human being. If so, then it can be argued that it is morally wrong to destroy the embryo, as is done of course once the stem cells are harvested. Many in the Catholic church do indeed believe that the moment of fertilisation is also the beginning of human life - a notion not shared in Islam.

The embryo-is-a-human argument is based on the idea that the fertilised egg contains everything that is needed to replicate and that this is sufficient. But is this "potential" of becoming a human being really enough? I mean why stop there? Surely the unfertilised egg also has the potential of becoming a human, as indeed does each and every sperm cell (a notion immortalised in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life).

But I would argue that this is more than just a metaphysical issue. An embryo just a few days old is no more than a bundle of homogeneous cells in the same membrane, which do not form a human organism because they do not function in a coordinated way to regulate and preserve a single life. So while each individual cell is "alive", it only becomes part of a human organism when there is substantial cell differentiation and coordination, which occurs around two weeks after fertilisation. Until that time, for instance, there is still the chance that the embryo can split into two, to form identical twins. If each embryo develops into an individual person, how can the undivided embryo be said to have a separate existence?

A sensible definition of the beginning of human life is that it takes place sometime during the foetus's development. For many, both religious and non-religious, this is defined as when consciousness switches on. This crucial stage lies long after that of the embryonic stem cells with their "potential", rather it is when that potential is fulfilled. But too strong a link with consciousness can lead to the absurd situation of questioning the rights to life of a newborn baby if one subscribes to the view, held by some neuroscientists, that it is not really conscious.

According to Islamic teaching, I discovered, the foetus becomes a full human being only when it is "ensouled" at 120 days from the moment of conception, and so the research at Royan on human embryonic stem cells is not seen as playing God, as it takes place at a much earlier stage. Thus, while there is much that the west finds unpalatable about life under Islamic rule, when it comes to genetics they are not held back by their religious doctrine.

Like a number of other developing Islamic countries, such as Malaysia, Iran's scientific research is moving forward in leaps and bounds. I had hoped to visit one of its nuclear research facilities, but given the current political climate and Israel's threats of military action, it was no big surprise that my film crew and I were denied access at the last minute. Nevertheless, whatever criticisms we may have of the regime in Iran, I was left in no doubt that its researchers can hold their heads high. And we in the UK might learn a lesson or two from them before we complain too quickly about our own nanny state.

The Michael Phelps Miracle

13 August 2008
Another day in the pool, another slew of records.

With five more standards falling Wednesday morning at Beijing's National Aquatics Centre, a dozen of swimming's all-time marks had been erased before the end of Day 5 of the 2008 Olympics.

And there are almost surely many more to come.

American star Michael Phelps appears to be just warming up, having already put his name on five new records through his first five events, with three more on tap.

Stephanie Rice of Australia leads the women's assault after winning gold in the 200-metre and 400-metre individual medleys in record time.

Even medal-less Canada has got in on the action, erasing 16 national-best times in Beijing.

The men's 4x200 freestyle relay squad clocked a Canadian record despite finishing fifth in Wednesday's final, while Mike Brown followed suit in his 200 breaststroke semifinal by smashing the time he set way back on Tuesday.

Four years ago in Athens, only three Canadian records were broken, all by Brown in the breaststroke.

"The swimming world is moving in leaps and bounds," Swimming Canada CEO Pierre Lafontaine told the Canadian Press. "It's moving because there is a greater opportunity to race, and there is more money in the sport. People are investing into thinking about swimming fast."

The Miracle Berry Fruit Violates Evolution

The miracle fruit berry is a natural berry that has enchanting properties.

PRLog (Press Release) – Jul 15, 2008 – The principal ingredient in the miracle fruit called miraculin laminates the taste buds changing the taste of food, the effect is that all food seems much more sweeter than it normally is, allowing the eater to experience sweet foods without the destructive effects of real sugar.

The miracle berry is fast becoming a huge success thanks to the creation of miracle berry tablets, which are now available at http://www.miracleberrypill.org/buy_now.htm.

Because the actual miracle berry fruit is fragile, then it is difficult to transport from its natural habital in Africa, and shortly after harvesting the active ingredient miraculin starts to diminish. The result is an old fruit that begins to rot and has little miraculin.

However with miracle berry tablets this is no longer a problem, The miracle berries are freeze dried very quickly, within minutes of harvesting and the extract of 3 miracle berry fruits is used to create one miracle berry tablet, ensure plenty of the active ingredient miraculin is locked in through the freeze drying process. Here at the miracle berry organisation http://www.miracleberrypill.org we sell the miracle berry tablets online as retailers and we also sell wholesale miracle berry tablets to resellers or trade.

Also we are looking to start up our own miracle berry party - http://www.miracleberrypill.org/miracle_berry_party.htm

We aim to establish many hosts throughout the UK where we can hold regular miracle berry parties. A miracle berry party is where people can take the miracle berry tablet and then enjoy the huge buffet of foods which magically change taste. They are already big in America and Japan and area great way of meeting other new people and experiencing the taste trip.

How can evolution allow the Berry Fruit to make other fruits taste better?
How can such a fruit altruism evolve ?
Why this fruit wants consumers to eat sour fruits?

Adverse Reactions to Antibiotics Sends thousands to ER

Adverse events from antibiotics cause an estimated 142,000 emergency department visits per year in the United States, according to a study published in the September 15, 2008 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases.
“This number is an important reminder for physicians and patients that antibiotics can have serious side effects and should only be taken when necessary,” said study author Daniel Budnitz, M.D., at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Prior to this study, detailed data on the scope and burden of antibiotic adverse events in the U.S. were not available. This investigation is the first to use timely, nationally representative surveillance data to estimate and compare the numbers and rates of adverse events from systemic antibiotics by class, drug, and event type.

Half of the visits were for reactions to penicillins and the other half were from reactions to other antibiotics used to treat a wide variety of bacterial infections. After accounting for how often antibiotics were prescribed, children less than one year old were found to have the highest rate of adverse drug events.

Almost 80 percent of all antibiotic adverse events in the study were allergic reactions, ranging from rash to anaphylaxis, and the remaining 20 percent were caused by errors and overdoses. Unlike errors and overdoses from other drugs, allergic reactions to antibiotics typically can only be prevented by avoiding exposure to the drug in the first place.

The study draws from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System-Cooperative Adverse Drug Event Surveillance (NEISS-CADES) project, a sample of 63 hospitals in the United States and its territories. NEISS-CADES is a joint effort of the CDC, the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration.

Previous studies have suggested that half of the estimated 100 million antibiotic prescriptions written in the community setting each year for respiratory tract infections may be unnecessary. “For conditions in which antibiotics have questionable benefit, such as many mild upper respiratory tract infections, weighing the benefits of antibiotics with the risks of a serious adverse event will be especially important,” said Budnitz. “Because antibiotics are frequently used, both appropriately and inappropriately, if doctors would reduce the number of antibiotics they prescribe to their patients by even a small percentage, we could significantly reduce the number of emergency visits for antibiotic adverse events. Physicians need to communicate to their patients that antibiotics are not harmless,” he added.

The researchers found that only 6 percent of the patients who experienced adverse events required hospitalization. The others were all treated and released. However, the study only reflected emergency department admissions. Unreported cases and visits to a physician’s office could not be taken into account.

Drug Resistant TB on the rise worldwide

Africa, US ,Europe and Asia are reporting an increase in the number of cases of drug resistant TB .Africa has suffered the maximum number of casualities. It will not be too long before the Drug Resistant TB spreads all over the world.
We must take urgent steps to solve the problem.

Among 536 cases of tuberculosis confirmed at a rural hospital in South Africa earlier this year, 41% were multi-drug resistant and of those, 24% met the exact definition of being extensively drug resistant tuberculosis (also referred to as XDR tuberculosis). Such tuberculosis is almost untreatable.

All patients in this outbreak who were tested were HIV positive and 52 of the 53 died after an average of 25 days.

Strains of extensively drug resistant tuberculosis have also been noted in Europe, Asia and North and South America. It appears that there are several strains of this tuberculosis.

Another report states that there were 18 cases of XDR TB in California alone.

In the first statewide study of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR TB) in the United States, California officials have identified 18 cases of the dangerous and difficult-to-treat disease between 1993 and 2006, and 77 cases that were one step away from XDR TB. The study appears in the August 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, now available online.

California reports almost 3,000 cases of tuberculosis annually, the largest number of TB cases of any U.S. state. California has also led the nation since 2002 in the number of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB) cases—those that are resistant to isoniazid and rifampin, the two antibiotics that form the backbone of TB treatment. XDR TB is resistant to even more classes of antibiotics, including fluoroquinolones and one of three injectable second-line drugs. The authors of the new study evaluated drug susceptibility data of MDR TB cases identified by the California TB Registry between 1993 and 2006, looking for cases that fit the XDR TB definition.

A tribute to India Pakistan Friendship Club

60 years before when lords of the territory drawn a line between a single land dividing it into 2 different countries, they never thought that detachment can’t affect the love and bond of heart. Today after 60 years when both India and Pakistan is celebrating there Independence Day, the feeling of friendship and patriotism has also touched some 1 lakh virtual friends gathered on online social networking site orkut.com, India Pakistan Friendship Club IPFC is an online community of some more than hundred thousand dedicated members from both India and Pakistan sharing, discussing and uniting themselves on there most common cultures, traditions, look and language.

IPFC started with a small bunch of common friends from both countries soon shaped up in a strong community and organization pouring charm and meekness and cleaning up detestation and animosity, its one of the most active online community in not only orkut.com but any other social networking sites. Certainly, from virtual friendship these Indo-Pak nationalists are also sharing great example of friendship “offline” they do get-together often in different parts of world where ever they are located. Though the discussion and talks are always on some serious issues but still some members are blessed to make others smile by some light jokes and humor, there talks are mainly focused in each and every issues related to both countries politics, economy, sports and current affairs with some entertainment gossips of bollywood and Indian and Pakistan’s delicacies.

In several millions of communities on different subjects on orkut, IPFC is not only popular between users of India and Pakistan but also between the users of Indian subcontinent and south East Asia. Even, one moderator among 10 is a UK based Social Worker Jennifer Gallagher known as “Angel Jen” or “Mama Jen” hails from UK who support IPFC and believes that it’s her family, a bit pretty BIG family Jen? . I am really thankful to that person who thought and introduced social networking which is today one of the most important and useful online activity making people understand other’s cultures and countries, clearing old myths and misunderstandings, making friendship and love.


IPFC is an idea of Rahul Mukherjee an Indian who went abroad for studies and got wedged by some Pakistani friends that motivated Rahul to start something like IPFC, IPFC is not only limited to online community but many other websites and newsletter has started by many members of IPFC as well. Mariam Sayed is a PhD in chemistry is now doing her MBA from UK is an active member and moderator of IPFC since 1 year has different story behind her interest and love for IPFC, as told in a forum discussion Mariam revealed that when she went to study in a university in Thailand she met and got friends with some Pakistanis and from there her view and thoughts has changed. One such person she named was late Shafiq Ahmed Khan a Pakistani who became a close friend of Mariam.

Most US Corporations Don't Pay Income Taxes

Most corporations, including the vast majority of foreign companies doing business in the United States, pay no income taxes, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday.

During the eight-year period covered by the report, 72 percent of foreign-owned corporations went at least one year without owing taxes, and the same was true for 55percent of domestic corporations.

Small companies were much more likely to pay no taxes than larger companies. Still, more than 3,500 large domestic corporations - with more than $250 million in assets or $50 million in gross receipts - did not pay taxes in 2005.

The report said about 80 percent of the companies studied paid no taxes because they didn't generate any profit after expenses. Money-losing companies can legitimately owe no tax, and others can use provisions of the tax code to lower or eliminate their liability.

But the lawmakers who sought the data seized on the report as proof of corporate gamesmanship.

"It's shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country," said Byron L. Dorgan , D-N.D., who requested the report along with Carl Levin , D-Mich. "The tax system that allows this wholesale tax avoidance is an embarrassment and unfair to hardworking Americans who pay their fair share of taxes. We need to plug these tax loopholes and put these corporations back on the tax rolls."

The report covered the period from 1998 through 2005. During that time, corporate income taxes as a share of gross domestic product dipped, from 2.2 percent in 1998 to 1.2 percent in 2003, the lowest share since 1983. But receipts jumped after that, hitting 2.7 percent in 2006 and 2007, according to the Office of Management and Budget. That was the highest share since the late 1970s.

The GAO report also found that foreign-owned corporations were somewhat more likely to report no income than domestic corporations. There are several possible reasons for that. Foreign corporations may be younger, and startups are more likely to have no net income after expenses. They may also be in industries with lower profit margins.

Another possibility could be the use of transfer pricing, which companies use to account for transactions between subsidiaries in different countries. Creative, rule-stretching use of transfer pricing can allow companies to push their profits into lower-taxed jurisdictions. The report does not attempt to examine whether illegal transfer-pricing caused the difference between foreign and domestic companies.

But companies looking for lower-taxed jurisdictions often take profits out of the United States. The country's 35 percent top rate on corporate income is among the highest in the industrialized world.

In a statement, Baucus said, "I'm committed to finding ways to improve compliance and reduce taxpayer burden so that we begin to bridge the tax gap, which accounts for $345 billion in legally owed but uncollected federal revenues each year."

He said the GAO report "shows yet again the need for full-fledged [tax] reform next year...."

India goes Mega Solar

India may be home to the Tata Nano, the infamous micro car which has had environmentalists in a tizz, but there's also some incontestably good green news coming out of the country. According to the Business Standard, an Indian broadsheet, the Clinton Foundation is thinking of funding what would be the world's largest solar farm in Gujarat.

According to the paper, the "solar city" could generate 5 gigawatts of electricity. For comparison, other large-scale projects generate several orders of magnitude less. One of the largest solar farms in the world is about to be completed later this year in Moura in Portugal - claimed to be the sunniest region of Europe. It is billed to generate 45 megawatts - 1000 times less than the Gujarat farm, yet still enough to power 30,000 European homes.

Still, the foundation will have to move fast if it wants to (briefly) hold a world record. In July, US company Ecosystem Solar Electric Corp. announced that it would have a solar park in the Mojave desert within six years capable of generating 10 gigawatts, which is enough to power 10 million US homes.

There will always be another company announcing that it's about to open "the world's largest" solar energy park. That's good news. It's even better news that some of those are in developing countries.

Scientists caught smuggling bugs

Darjeeling/Prague - Two Czech scientists who were arrested in India for what the local authorities called illegal bug collection are now awaiting charges before their trial begins. According to local laws, they could receive prison sentences of three to seven years.
Finally, after more than a month in prison, Petr Švácha and Emil Kučera were released on bail on July 25.

"Here anything can happen," the biologists replied to Aktuálně.cz´s question what sentence they expect. The general strike that has recently hit the Darjeeling region also complicates the whole situation.
Recently US scientists were caught smuggling rare fishes and insects from Malaysia.

Spanish Mocking Chinese At Olympics

Spain's Olympic basketball teams have risked upsetting their Chinese hosts by posing for a pre-Games advert making slit-eyed gestures. The advert for a courier company, which is an official sponsor of the Spanish Basketball Federation, occupied a full page in the sports daily Marca, the country's best-selling newspaper. A star member of Spain's Beijing Olympic basketball team, Toronto Raptors guard Jose Calderon, defended Tuesday a controversial advertisement where the entire squad posed while making slit-eyed gestures, saying it was an "affectionate gesture."

Aliens Exist Seriously

Ex-NASA Astronaut 'Sure' Aliens Exist

An ex-NASA astronaut says he is still totally sure life exists elsewhere in the universe and earthly governments have tried to hide the existence of aliens.

Edgar Mitchell, a 77-year-old former National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronaut who walked on the moon for nine hours in the Apollo 14 mission Feb. 9, 1971, remains strong in his stance that aliens are real, the Daily Telegraph reported Saturday.

There's not much question at all that there is life throughout the universe. I'm totally sure we are not alone, he said in an interview with Kerrang! Radio in Birmingham, England, this week.

Mitchell, who holds multiple academic degrees and has maintained his believe in extraterrestrial life for years, went on to say we have been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomenon is real -- though it's been covered up by governments for the last 60 years or so.

NASA officials have not backed the former American astronaut's beliefs.

NASA does not track UFOs. Dr. Mitchell is a great American, but we do not share his opinion on this issue, the space agency said in a statement.

A treaty to protect generations from Tobacco

Recently, the Federal Capital Territory Administration took a landmark decision when it banned tobacco smoking in all public places within the territory. A number of countries have legislation restricting tobacco advertising, and regulating who can buy and use tobacco products, and where people can smoke. These steps are being taken to safeguard public health and also, eliminate the risks second hand smokers face from a product they did not consume.
WHO states further that within 25 years, it will cause 10 million deaths a year - far more than malaria, maternal deaths, childhood infections and diarrhoea combined. At least half of the dead will be aged 30 to 69, losing about 25 years of life expectancy to the devastating product. The same addiction that became the top preventable cause of death in western countries has made big inroads in developing nations. WHO estimates that given current trends, smoking will kill about 1 billion people in the 21st century, mostly in developing countries.
A company in the British American Tobacco group in one year declared a net profit of $50 billion.
WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) is a treaty adopted by the 56th World Health Assembly on May 21, 2003. It became the first World Health Organization treaty adopted under article 19 of the WHO constitution. The treaty came into force on February 27, 2005. It had been signed by 168 countries including Nigeria and is legally binding in 157 ratifying/accessioned countries representing over 3 billion people. There are currently 38 non-parties to the treaty (15 which has not signed and 23 which have signed but not ratified).
The objective of the treaty is "to protect present and future generations from the devastating health, social, environmental and economic consequences of tobacco consumption and exposure to tobacco smoke." To this end, the treaty provides a framework of national, regional and international tobacco control measures, including the setting of broad limits on the production, sale, distribution, advertisement, taxation, and government policies towards tobacco.


But it seems ,where we agree we cant implement and where we can implement we dont agree. Are the Governments willing to loose billions of dollars in tax revenues?
No

Food Crisis in Africa and Afganistan

Recently CARE , one of the largest charities organization , rejected highly subsidized food aid worth $45 million from America.The beneficiaries created a parallel unreasonbly subsidized economy which sometimes competed with the crops of local farmers in African countries.The charity says it will phase out the practice of selling subsidized food by 2009.

But with growing food crisis in Africa and Afganistan I doubt whether they will be acually be able to do so..
There are more than 14 million people in the Horn of Africa requiring urgent food aid and other humanitarian assistance over the coming months while in Afganistan more than 6.5 million people are facing food insecurity.

In the Horn, a combination of drought conditions and rising food prices is driving the crisis. Afghanistan is also bearing the brunt of soaring food prices globally, but in addition the country has less food than usual due to a shortfall in domestic agricultural production and a decrease in imported wheat from Pakistan. Pakistan is Afghanistan’s main supplier of wheat, but Pakistan has placed limitations on food exports in an attempt to curb the impact of food price increases on its own population. Parts of Afghanistan are also under the threat of drought because of lack of rain and less snow this winter.


In Ethiopia, a joint assessment by the government and humanitarian partners shows that 4.6 million people are in need of emergency food assistance. This is an increase from 2.2 million in the period from January to March 2008. An additional 5.7 million drought-affected people will require extended support, according to the World Food Program (WFP). The Federal Ministry of Health estimates that there are 75,000 severely malnourished children in the drought-affected areas. Diseases such as acute watery diarrhea, meningitis and measles worsen the situation. At the same time, the inflation of food prices has reached 29.6 percent, according to Kenyan officials.

In Somalia, the situation is already critical due to very poor rains in the southern and central parts of the country this year and the ongoing violence, which in turn limits the ability of aid agencies to reach those who require assistance. The number of people in need has increased by 40 percent since January 2008 to 2.6 million people, representing 35 percent of the population. This new figure includes 600,000 urban poor, an increasingly vulnerable group due to record high food prices. For example, the price of imported rice has increased up to 350 percent between January 2007 and May 2008 in several markets. The situation is likely to deteriorate in the coming months, leaving 3.5 million people facing a humanitarian emergency.

In Kenya, 1.2 million people currently need food assistance and an estimated 70 percent of the overall population is affected by rising food prices. Staple food prices have gone up between 30-50 percent over the past year putting many groups at risk of hunger. At the same time, inflation has reached 26.6 percent. The country has experienced a drop in food production largely due to the displacement following post-election insecurity in early 2008 in the highly food-productive Rift Valley province. The Kenya Red Cross Society estimates that more than 68,000 displaced people still live in camps.

In Uganda, the northeastern Karamoja region is experiencing a prolonged dry spell and crop diseases in addition to conflict and under-development. A third consecutive year of widespread crop failure could afflict the region, which is fast approaching a worst-case food security scenario. WFP is distributing emergency rations to 707,000 people in Karamoja, representing 64 percent of the region's population.

In Afghanistan, CARE field staff report that people are selling off assets and livestock to buy food, something which will damage their future possibilities to quickly and fully recover and to generate income. Young men have reportedly left their homes to engage in the poppy harvest in the south and families have started migrating to neighboring countries. Stories of people attempting to sell their children in desperation have also reached the capital, Kabul.

Rising food prices limit the impact that humanitarian agencies like CARE have when providing food assistance. The increased price means that CARE will be able to purchase less food for the budgeted money, thus reaching fewer people in need or scaling down on rations.

Bush Government had held India and China responsible for the global increase in the prices.
Price increase is a more serious issue than Climate Change..
Why we do not focus on the people instead of Climate change?
Why we do not ensure sustainbility of the economies ?

CAG pushes to ban Narendra Modi

August 9, 2008

Washington D.C.: Coalition Against Genocide (CAG) which is widely campaigning on Capitol Hill has bagged support from 27 more US lawmakers in urging the State Department to continue the ban on Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi from entering the United States.

In an important rebuke to Mr. Modi, twenty seven prominent lawmakers led by Congressman Joseph Pitts (R-PA) have urged the State Department to once again reaffirm its decision to keep Mr Modi from entering the United States. It was reported earlier that the Gujarat Chief Minister might apply for a visa to attend the World Gujarati Conference in New Jersey from August 29th - 31st 2008 on the invitation of Gujarati businessmen with strong ties to extreme Hindu nationalist ideologies.

Congressman Joseph Pitts and twenty six co-signers urged the State Department, in the letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to take note of the serious human rights violations, persecution of minorities and total disregard of religious freedom practiced in direct contravention of International Human Rights norms and treaties by the BJP Government in Gujarat. They drew specific attention to the plight of the 100,000 victims of genocide unable to return to their homes, followed by the continuous attempts to obstruct a legitimate and fair trial to bring the perpetrators of the 2002 communal genocide to justice. “Mr. Modi and his administration closed the files on over 2,000 police cases where the victims filed reports of rapes, killings and destruction of their property” noted the letter.

Earlier last year, in an exposé by the investigative magazine Tehelka, the Gujarat state prosecutor appointed by Mr. Modi was captured on video confessing to protecting the perpetrators of the 2002 violence. Further, one of the accused involved in the killings, detailed the favor from Modi's office to have several court judges transferred to protect him from any convictions.

The letter also drew attention to the State Department Report on the Gujarat Government’s promotion of Nazi Ideology “The role of Chief Minister Narendra Modi and his government in promoting attitudes of racial supremacy, racial hatred and the legacy of Nazism through his government’s support of school textbooks in which Nazism is condoned. For example, in a high school social studies textbook, the “charismatic personality” of “Hitler the Supremo” and the” achievements” of Nazism are described at length. The textbook does not even acknowledge Nazi extermination policies or concentration camps except for a passing reference to a policy of opposition towards the Jewish people and [advocacy for] the supremacy of the German race”.

This letter comes close on the heels by similar letters written by Congresswoman Betty McCollum (D-MN), Congressman Joe Sestak (D-PA) and the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) urging similar action against Mr. Modi, who has been characterized as the architect of the pogroms in 2002 against the Muslim community by several Citizens' panels and Human Rights organizations in India and abroad.

The Coalition Against Genocide includes a diverse spectrum of organizations and individuals in the United States and Canada that have come together in response to the Gujarat genocide to demand accountability and justice.

In 2005 Asian American Hotel Owner Association's (AAHOA) had created a storm in US by inviting a militant,anti-minority Indian politician to its annual convention.

Human Mouth Home of Virus,Fungi,Protozoa and Bacteria

"The healthy human mouth is home to a tremendous variety of microbes including viruses, fungi, protozoa and bacteria," said Professor William Wade from King's College London Dental Institute. "The bacteria are the most numerous: there are 100 million in every millilitre of saliva and more than 600 different species in the mouth. Around half of these have yet to be named and we are trying to describe and name the new species."

Scientists studied healthy tissue as well as tumours in the mouth and found three strains of bacteria called Prevotella that could not be identified. Prevotella species are part of the normal microbial flora in humans and are also associated with various oral diseases and infections in other parts of the body. The researchers named the new species Prevotella histicola; histicola means 'inhabitant of tissue'.

"Interestingly, this species was isolated from within the oral tissues, both in oral cancers and normal, healthy tissue," said Professor Wade. "This confirms other work showing that oral bacteria can invade both tissues and individual cells."

Tooth decay and gum disease are the most common bacterial diseases of man and are caused by changes in the microbes normally present in the mouth. To understand these diseases better, scientists first need to know which bacteria are present in human mouths. Understanding the composition of the oral microbiota will also help scientists devise new prevention measures and treatments for oral diseases.

"A detailed description and name for each species of bacteria are needed so that different laboratories can recognise all of the bacterial species present in the mouth," said Professor Wade.

Closing in on the technology to create Invisible Man

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, whose work is funded by the American military, have engineered materials that can control light’s direction of travel. The world’s two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, are expected to report the results this week.
Underlying the work is the idea that bending visible light around an object will hide it.

Xiang Zhang, the leader of the researchers, said: “In the case of invisibility cloaks or shields, the material would need to curve light waves completely around the object like a river flowing around a rock.” An observer looking at the cloaked object would then see light from behind it – making it seem to disappear.

Substances capable of achieving such feats are known as “meta-materials” and have the power to “grab” electromagnetic radiation and deflect it smoothly. No such material occurs naturally and it is only in the past few years that nano-scale engineering, manipulating matter at the level of atoms and molecules, has advanced sufficiently to give scientists the chance to create them.

The tiny scale at which such researchers must operate is astonishing in itself. Zhang’s researchers had to construct a material whose elements were engineered to within about 0.00000066 of a metre.

The military funding that Zhang has won for his research shows what kind of applications it might be used for, ushering in a new age of stealth technology.

Billion people notice Olympics

NEW DELHI — India’s Olympic curse has finally been lifted, by the chief executive of a computer game company with a history of back problems.
Abhinav Bindra, 25, became the first Indian to win an individual Olympic gold medal, beating Chinese and Finnish competitors Monday in a nail-biting finish during the 10-meter air rifle competition. Bindra, a bespectacled M.B.A. from the north Indian city of Chandigarh, had shown promise as a teenage shooter but failed to win a medal in Athens, and hopes were not high before he competed in Beijing.

Until Bindra’s win, India’s population of more than a billion seemed to be collectively shrugging at all the Olympic carryings-on generated by China, its neighbor and emerging global-market superpower.

Perhaps that is not surprising. India’s performance at the Olympics has lagged behind even tiny countries whose populations and gross domestic products are a fraction the size. In Athens, India took home one medal, a silver, also in shooting. The last time India had won gold in the Olympics was more than a quarter century ago, when the men’s field hockey team came out on top in the 1980 Moscow Olympics. This year, the hockey team failed to even qualify for the Games
What, exactly, has held India back from Olympic greatness is the stuff of much debate. Logic would dictate that with more than a billion people, about half of whom are younger than 25, India should have a pool of athletic talent that rivals China, the United States and Russia.

India also has a rich history in athletic performing arts like dance and tales of fierce battles that show an appreciation for physical prowess. Games that meld strength with skill, like polo, have been played for decades in India, and India invented its own physically challenging sports, like kabbadi, a sort of team wrestling. Still, India has traditionally excelled more at games that favor intellect over brawn and mass, like chess or Scrabble.

Much of the problem with developing Olympic champions here seems to be rooted in the very same things that make India a perpetual also-ran to China in economic development: poor infrastructure, entrenched political corruption and infighting, and chaos and disorganization. Money earmarked for Olympic training is often mysteriously sidelined, facilities for training are in poor shape and equipment goes missing.

Bindra, whose company, Abhinav Futuristics, sells controllers for computer games, may have bypassed some of these problems. He is from a wealthy family and grew up with a shooting range in his home, according to local news reports.

Lightning a Natural Calamity ?

Some 960 incidents of disasters were recorded worldwide in 2007 and more than 450 incidents have already occured in the current year due to climate change. 2007 was the worst year in human history since 1980 and 2008 is becoming another year of natural disasters.Climatologists predict that the number will suprass the previous records.

In the Jharkhand area of India, Natural Calamity has taken a new dimension. More than 35 people have been killed by lightning alone. Officially Lightning is not defined as Natural disaster but the locals are demanding that it should be declared a natural disaster so that the victims can be provided governmental relief.

Atheism,Spiritualism and Sexism

Sexual Shame: An Urgent Call to Healing
by Karen A. McClintock. Published by Fortress Press.

Questions about sexuality are fundamental to the health and welfare of Christian communities - the problem is, few Christians seem to realize this. Sexuality has become the proverbial elephant sitting in the room: no one can help but see it, but no one wants to acknowledge it, either. This, however, is part of what leads to scandals, abuse and worse. How should Christians deal with this?

When an organization or community does not allow people to talk about or even admit to having sexual urges, then it is no longer possible for members to express their sexuality in healthy ways. The traditional Christian message of "Don't do it, and if you are doing it, pretend that you aren't" has never served to protect people from abuse and exploitation - on the contrary, it has only served to encourage it and keep it underground.

Because of this, Christian communities need a sort of therapy to deal with the conflicts about sexuality which afflict their members, and that is the goal which Karen A. McClintock has in mind with her recent book. It is aimed at pastors and other community leaders to help them address the questions which typically remain ignored.

She is not, as she explains, looking to find fault with anyone; instead, she is exploring the fault lines in Christian communities. Sexuality constitutes a dangerous series of fault lines between leaders and members, adults and children, men and women, and more. Such tension can never be entirely eliminated, but knowing where they are can allow people to navigate them safely and confidently.

According to McClintock, the key to dealing with sexual matters is in addressing the problem of shame, because shame is used as a means of social control by those hoping to maintain the status quo. Sexual shame is particularly problematic because sexuality is an important component of a person's identity. If we are caused to feel ashamed of such a vital aspect of how we define ourselves, then our self-esteem and sense of self-worth can be seriously undermined. McClintock, however, wants people to be able to feel confident about who they are and definitely seeks to challenge the status quo:

My conviction is that spirituality and sexuality must be integrated. This integration provides the starting place for change in the entire system of congregational life and biblical and theological teaching.

Specifically, she seeks to question Christian teachings regarding sexuality and the social roles of men, women and children:

The church has participated in perpetuating sexual abuse by theologically articulating patriarchy. We have told people that God is the ruler over man and that man is to rule over the woman and children. We have illuminated Bible verses where women and children are counted last or not at all and considered property to be used and disposed of as the man sees fit. Our participation, theologically, in family violence contributes to the shame of victims and perpetrators alike.

Now, the concept of "patriarchy" has become something of a boogeyman in cultural studies, a catch-all target which is easy to identify as the cause of all our ills. Nevertheless, McClintock is able to effectively argue that patriarchal attitudes can have palpable consequences, some of which she has experienced herself.

For example, the tradition of asceticism among men was successful in desexualizing men only insofar as it was also successful in over-sexualizing women at the same time. Once men grew to feel themselves "above" the messy business of sexual feelings, then women came to shoulder it all - including all of the guilt, even for the sexual feelings which men inadvertently experienced. This caused problems for Christian congregations in the 1970s and 1980s when women began to assume leadership positions, especially as ministers and pastors:

Women becoming Christlike leaders in the 1970s and 80s challenged the church's repression of sexuality. The old options for women of being either virgins or whores are at odds with clergywomen as leaders and preachers. Into which category does the new preacher fall?

McClintock herself experienced the consequences of this when she was asked to wear heavy robes rather than simply a modest skirt, even when the men were permitted to wear standard attire and even when they were permitted to take off their suit jackets and roll up their sleeves. Why? Because she was forced to bear the shame of whatever sexual attraction was experienced by men in the congregation. She was forced to change and become as sexually neutral as possible because others couldn't handle their feelings - and they had no way of expressing that aside from treating her in what became a more repressive manner.

It is true that this book is designed for leaders of Christian communities, but McClintock's exploration of sexuality within a Christian context should also be appealing to nonbelievers who already have an interest in the topic. The only real drawback in McClintock's book is her approach to the question of pornography. She seems to buy into the myth that all pornography is necessarily degrading to women and men, never considering (at least in the text) the possible role it might play in helping people overcome shame about their bodies and their desires.

Can a person be called Allah?

Arraigned On Drug Charges
August 9, 2008
SOUTH WINDSOR — - A 35-year-old man with the eye-catching name of Almighty Supremeborn Allah was arraigned in Manchester Superior Court on Friday.

Allah, of 119 Elmhurst St. in West Hartford, was charged with reckless driving, disobeying an officer's signal, interfering with an officer, criminal attempt to sell cocaine and criminal attempt to possess cocaine, said police, who reported that Almighty Supremeborn Allah is his real name.

Police said they began looking for Allah after receiving a tip Thursday around 8 p.m. that he would be in South Windsor for a drug transaction. An officer spotted Allah in his car on John Fitch Boulevard and tried pulling him over, police said. Allah initially refused to stop, but pulled over within a mile from where he was first seen, police said.

He was convicted in 2006 of possession of narcotics and disorderly conduct.



Allah was trying to post his bail of $80,000.

Face of Ecology Facing Drug Charges

For many, Bob Chance has been the face of ecology in Harford County.

He taught earth science during a three-decade run in the public schools - and was named to the school system's Hall of Fame. He promoted recycling long before the government got involved. He wrote a nature column for the local paper, won election to public office, and showed countless youngsters the wonders of the great outdoors as Ranger Bob.
And now he is, at 62, a defendant in a drug case.

Authorities say he has been growing marijuana at the farm where he raises and sells Christmas trees. And they say they found enough of the drug, either in plant form or packaged in freezers, to roll thousands of joints - so they are taking steps to seize his farm.

Some who know Chance think that's going too far. He is an "old hippie," but is no drug dealer, said Terence O. Hanley, a Bel Air town commissioner and former mayor who has known him for 30 years.

"Everybody, quite frankly, that I have run into thinks it's absurd that he's being charged with the intent to distribute," Hanley said. "Here's a guy who has really done a lot of great things for our town, our community, our kids. I'm shocked that he's in this predicament, and I only wish the best for him. I would hate to see this man lose his farm."

But Harford County State's Attorney Joseph I. Cassilly said police and prosecutors have a duty to treat Chance the same as everyone else.

"I don't think there's two standards in the community - that there's one standard for regular people who go around and don't do all the things this guy does and then there's another standard for people who have done all the things this guy does," Cassilly said.

Chance has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which also include allegations that he had hallucinogenic mushrooms at his farm. He declined to discuss his case, on the advice of his lawyer.

But he gave a tour of his property, Environmental Evergreens Tree Farm.

"I always try to bring nature into a place," he said.

The farm is down a rural road off Route 1 in Darlington, not far from the Susquehanna River. Plants thrive there, and ponds harbor rare species of turtles and fish. Frogs rest on lily pads, and dragonflies buzz about. His six yellow Labradors run free.

His home, which he says dates to 1888, is full of artifacts and fossils from his jaunts to Africa, the South Pacific Islands, Costa Rica and New Zealand. Walls are covered with awards and pictures of him with kids who attended his nature camps and with customers who bought their Christmas trees from him.

"He's just a great, community-minded guy," Hanley said. "His volunteerism here in Harford County has been invaluable."

An Evening Sun editorial described him in 1992 as an "ecological visionary."
Chance grew up in Carney and received bachelor's degrees in geology and geography from what is now Towson University before moving to Harford County in 1968 to teach earth science and ecology at Bel Air High School.

In 1972, he started the Susquehannock Environmental Center, believed to be one of the country's first recycling centers. In 1974, he won a spot on the Bel Air Board of Town Commissioners, serving until 1978.
In 2001, after teaching for more than 30 years at Bel Air and C. Milton Wright high schools and the Harford Glen Environmental Education Center, Chance was inducted into the Harford County Public Schools Educators Hall of Fame.

For decades, Chance has written an environmental column for local newspapers called Earth Line. In 2006, he was featured in the book Weird Maryland as "the region's Bigfoot expert."

Since retiring from teaching in 1999, Chance has run nature camps for children as Ranger Bob, a name he also used years ago in appearances on the children's television show Romper Room. He has sold evergreen trees from his farm since the early 1980s, growing out his beard and dressing as Santa each holiday season.

Four Indian students go missing at NASA

JALANDHAR: It doesn't take rocket science for Indians to disappear in the US. Or does it? In fact, such is the craze for settling abroad that they keep devising new ways to do so — from joining "bhajan mandlis" or cultural troupes to jumping into containers and even entering into fraudulent marriages.

The latest in the long list of their tricks is taking the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) route.

Four students of a school in Mahilpur village of Hoshiarpur did just that while on a trip to the American space agency.

The missing students of CBSE-affiliated Doaba Public Senior Secondary School — Sumit Sahni, Baljinder Singh, Dalbir Singh and Arshdeep Rahil — were aged between 14 and 15 years and part of a 21-member delegation, including two teachers, which left for the US on a Lufthansa flight on July 19. Three went missing in Washington the next day, saying they were going out to look for food. The fourth followed suit soon.

Interestingly, one of the teachers who accompanied them hasn't returned either. Instead, she sent a mail saying she had got married and that her leave be extended for one month.

The incident comes close on the heels of two students from a leading school in Jalandhar doing the vanishing act during an educational trip to the US.

The management of CBSE-affiliated Doaba Public Senior Secondary School in Punjab has filed a complaint with the police, saying four students went missing on an educational trip for a NASA rocket project last month. It said that Minu Sharma, the teacher who accompanied the students along with vice-principal Harpreet Kaur, has sent an email to the school authorities, seeking extension of leave.

"We've filed a complaint with the police here. Our delegation leader also informed the US homeland security and the Indian embassy about the four missing students there," said school principal Balwinder Kaur.

More than 50% American Women Prisoners are sexually abused

The United States government never tires of lecturing countries around the world on their human rights record, which is what President George W. Bush chose to do in the case of China en route to Beijing on August 8 to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. Yet the US government often turns a blind eye to gross human rights violations in its own country. A case in point is the government’s apathy towards the sexual abuse of women in US prisons, which has been rampant for years.

According to current estimates, more than 50 per cent of all female prisoners in the United States have experienced some form of sexual abuse. The number of women incarcerated in the United States is ten times more than in Western Europe, whose female population is equal to that of the United States. African-American women are eight times more likely to be incarcerated than white women; Hispanic women are four times more likely. Seventy per cent of guards in the 170 state prison facilities for women across the United States are men. In Canadian women’s prisons, 91 per cent of the guards are female.

An Amnesty International report says, “Sexual abuse is virtually a fact of life for incarcerated women in the US.” The report’s findings are reinforced by a study conducted by the US-based Human Rights Watch, which says that “being a woman prisoner in American prisons can be a terrifying experience.”

It can be examined in terms of powerlessness, humiliation, retaliation and fear. If a woman is sexually abused, she cannot escape from her abuser. Grievances or investigatory procedures, where they do exist, are often ineffectual, and correctional employees continue to engage in abuse because they believe they will rarely be held accountable, administratively or criminally.

According to Amnesty International, female prisoners often experience sexual abuse during routine searches. This includes rape, sexual extortion and groping. There are often male correctional officers watching women undressing and showering. The women are often afraid to report such incidences. Not only do the guards frequently threaten to take away visitation rights to keep them quiet, they also have complete access to each inmate’s file, which includes any reports against the guards. If a guard is reported and punished, the punishment usually only consists of his transfer to another facility.

As well as rampant sexual abuse, medical neglect is common for women in US prisons. Amnesty International lists a number of issues involving medical neglect. One such example is the failure to treat seriously ill inmates. This includes treatment for diseases ranging from diabetes to AIDS. Another example is the lack of qualified medical personnel in the prisons. This means that frequently non-medical staff is used in medical situations.

The United States has the dubious distinction of incarcerating the largest known number of prisoners of any country in the world (well over two million), of which a steadily increasing number are women. Since 1980, the number of women entering US prisons has risen by almost 400 per cent, roughly double the incarceration rate increase of males. According to Human Rights Watch, 52 per cent of these prisoners are African-American women, though African-American women constitute only 14 per cent of the US’s total female population.

The custodial sexual misconduct documented in the Human Rights Watch report takes many forms. The study found that male correctional employees have vaginally, anally and orally raped female prisoners and sexually assaulted and abused them. The study found that in the course of committing such gross misconduct, male officers have not only used actual or threatened physical force, but have also used their near total authority to provide or deny goods and privileges to female prisoners to compel them to have sex or, in other cases, to reward them for having done so.

In other cases, male officers have violated their most basic professional duty and engaged in sexual contact with female prisoners. According to Human Rights Watch, male correctional officers and staff have also engaged in regular verbal degradation and harassment of female prisoners, thus contributing to a custodial environment in the state prisons for women, which is often highly sexualised and excessively hostile.

The report says that no one group of prisoners appears to suffer sexual misconduct more than any other, although those in prison for the first time and young or mentally ill prisoners are particularly vulnerable to abuse. Lesbian and transgenedered prisoners have also been singled out for sexual misconduct by officers, as have prisoners who have in some way challenged an officer, either by informing on him for inappropriate conduct or for refusing to submit to demands for sexual relations.

In some instances, women have been impregnated as a result of sexual misconduct, and some of these prisoners have faced additional abuse in the form of inappropriate segregation, denial of adequate health care, and/or pressure to seek an abortion, says the Human Rights Watch report.

One of the clear contributing factors to sexual misconduct in US prisons for women is that the United States, despite authoritative international rules to the contrary, allows male correctional employees to hold contact positions over prisoners, that is, positions in which they serve in constant physical proximity to the prisoners of the opposite sex.

Under the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (Standard Minimum Rules), which constitute an authoritative guide to international law regarding the treatment of prisoners, male officers are precluded from holding such contact positions. However, since the passage of the US Civil Rights Act of 1964, US employers have been prohibited from denying a person a job solely on the basis of gender unless the person’s gender was reasonably necessary to the performance of the specific job.

In the absence of unusual circumstances, US federal courts have been unwilling to recognise a person’s gender as meeting this standard with respect to correctional employment. As a result, most restrictions on male officers working in women’s prisons that predated the Civil Rights Act have been removed and, by some estimates, male officers working in women’s prisons now outnumber their female counterparts by two and in some facilities, three to one.

Human Rights Watch says its investigation revealed that where state departments of correction have employed male staff or officers to guard female prisoners, they have often done so without clear prohibitions on all forms of custodial sexual misconduct and without either training officers or educating prisoners about such prohibitions.

Female officers have also sexually abused female prisoners and should, without exception, receive such training. However, in the state prisons for women that Human Rights Watch investigated, instances of same-sex misconduct were relatively rare.

Under both international and US national law, states are clearly required to prevent and punish custodial sexual misconduct. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment of Punishment (Torture Convention), both of which the United States has ratified, require state parties to prohibit torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment and to ensure that such abuse is investigated and punished.

The ICCPR further guarantees prisoners a basic right to privacy, which has been interpreted to preclude strip searches by officers of the opposite sex. These rights are further enumerated in the Standard Minimum Rules, which call on governments to prohibit custodial sexual abuse, provide prisoners with an effective right to complain of such misconduct, ensure appropriate punishment, and guarantee that these obligations are met in part through the proper training of correctional officers.

In addition, the United States Constitution expressly protects prisoners from cruel and inhuman punishments and has been interpreted to accord prisoners limited privacy rights as well as to guarantee them access to the courts.

The United States is thus clearly bound under its own Constitution to prevent and punish custodial sexual misconduct. It is equally bound by international human rights law to take these steps, although in ratifying the ICCPR and the Torture Convention, the United States attempted to limit its treaty obligations in ways that were particularly adverse to the elimination of custodial sexual misconduct.
These efforts by the United States to shirk its full international human rights obligations are legally indefensible, as well as being morally reprehensible.

Is the World War III over ?

Jul 25, 2006
Gingrich and McCain were only the highest profile voices in a flurry of discussion about whether a third world war is indeed underway. "This is like Hitler taking over Czechoslovakia. That's the stage we're at right now," former CIA officer Robert Baer told CNN Headline News last week.(Baer was the inspiration for George Clooney's character in the Oscar-winning film Syriana.)American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Ledeen told Fox News on July 10 that we are in World War IV(the third having been the Cold War)and that it began with the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979. The world war talk proliferated to the point that the liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters for America, began keeping a tally on their website.
But the discussion has not been confined to talk-show sabre-rattling. Serious players in the unfolding crisis have been talking this way since long before this latest round of violence in the Middle East. Speaking to The Economist magazine in 2004, the former head of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, Efraim Halevy, said of former CIA director George Tenet: "Mr. Tenet was in office for seven years and his many successes cannot be publicly revealed. But there is one achievement of which one can speak: the rare knack he had of pulling together a genuine international effort in this third world war against Islamic terror and the proliferation of WMD."
More recently, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, told the Security Council on May 30: "Today we must sadly and emphatically state that terrorism is indeed the third world war. This is World War Three. As this is a world war, the allies should fight this axis of terror, just as 60 years ago the Allies fought the Axis." He singled out Iran, Syria and "the terror organizations they finance, harbour, nurture and support," accusing them of targeting "innocents wherever they are." The Syrian diplomat, Ahmed Alhariri, countered that if it was a world war, Israel was to blame. "The constitution of UNESCO tells us that 'wars begin in the minds of men,' and it appears that this is what is in the mind of Israel," he said.
Even U.S. President George W. Bush, who has emphasized diplomacy over confrontation in dealing with the nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran, has himself used the phrase. In May, referring to the passenger revolt on hijacked Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001, he said, "I believe that it was the first counter-attack to World War III."(The President was commenting on a Wall Street Journal essay by David Beamer, whose son Todd died in the crash, and who called the act "our first successful counterattack in our homeland in this new global war -- World War III.")
While the WWIII discussion seems to have sprung up suddenly in the post-9/11 world of conflict and threat, the notion has a longer pedigree.

The third world war is over.
Georgia declares war on Russia

Canada creates better life than americans

The numbers are in. Compared to the U.S., Canadians work less, live longer, enjoy better health and have more sex. And get this: Canadians are wealthier too.

Maclean's compared Canadians and Americans in every facet of our lives. We scoured census reports, polls, surveys, scientific studies, policy papers and consumer databases. We looked at who lives longer, who works more, who spends more time with friends, who travels more and who has more sex. We even found out who eats more vegetables. After digging through the data, here's what we found: the staid, underpaid Canadian is dead. Believe it or not, we now have more wealth than Americans, even though we work shorter hours.
We drink more often, but we live longer and have fewer diseases. We have more sex, more sex partners and we're more adventurous in bed, but we have fewer teen pregnancies and fewer sexually transmitted diseases. We spend more time with family and friends, and more time exploring the world. Even in crime we come out ahead: we're just as prone to break the law, but when we do it, we don't get shot. Most of the time, we don't even go to jail.
The data shows that it's the Canadians who are living it up, while Americans toil away, working longer hours to pay their mounting bills.
The wealth numbers, in particular, are shocking. As of 2005, the median family in Canada was worth US$122,600, according to Statistics Canada, while the U.S. Federal Reserve pegged the median American family at US$93,100 in 2004. Those figures, the most recent available, already include an adjustment for our higher prices, and thanks to the rising loonie Canadians are likely even further ahead today. We're ahead mainly because Americans carry far more debt than we do, and it means that the median Canadian family is a full 30 per cent wealthier than the median American family. "The fact that we're now richer is a big reversal," says Jack Mintz, former president of the C.D. Howe Institute and the current Palmer Chair in public policy at the University of Calgary. "It's a huge change in the way we view the world."
Mintz points out that it wasn't all that long ago that we were much poorer than the Americans. Just think back to the 1980s when our dollar was worth 69 American cents, inflation was raging, our real wages were dropping and our productivity was . . . well it was just embarrassing. "From 1987 to 1997 in particular, we had terrible economic growth," says Mintz. "By the time we reached 1999, we were way behind the U.S. in per capita incomes and everything else." Back then, he notes, the newspapers were packed with dire warnings of brain drain. Canadian incomes were so low compared to Americans, our best and brightest were fleeing the country.
Today, it's the reverse, and families such as Eric Nay, his wife, Polly, and their son are moving the other way. Nay, who's 41 and now works as associate dean at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto, says he packed his bags and left his home in tony Monterey, Calif., for a new life in Canada two years ago. And get this: he did it for a bigger paycheque. "The academic salaries here are much higher," he says. "When I was working as an assistant professor in California, I was making $55,000, but in Canada, that magically becomes $70,000."

Third Law of Thermodynamics doesnt apply to Water

The Third Law of Thermodynamics is on the minds of John Cumings, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering, and his research group as they examine the crystal lattice structure of ice and seek to define exactly what happens when it freezes.

"Developing an accurate model of ice would help architects, civil engineers, and environmental engineers understand what happens to structures and systems exposed to freezing conditions," Cumings said. "It could also help us understand and better predict the movement of glaciers."

Understanding the freezing process is not as straightforward as it may seem. The team had to develop a type of pseudo-ice, rather than using real ice, in order to do it.

Despite being one of the most abundant materials on Earth, water, particularly how it freezes, is not completely understood. Most people learn that as temperatures fall, water molecules move more slowly, and that at temperatures below 32F/0C, they lock into position, creating a solid-ice. What's going on at a molecular level, says Cumings, is far more complicated and problematic. For one thing, it seems to be in conflict with a fundamental law of physics.

The Third Law of Thermodynamics states that as the temperature of a pure substance moves toward absolute zero (the mathematically lowest temperature possible) its entropy, or the disorderly behavior of its molecules, also approaches zero. The molecules should line up in an orderly fashion.

Ice seems to be the exception to that rule. While the oxygen atoms in ice freeze into an ordered crystalline structure, its hydrogen atoms do not.

"The hydrogen atoms stop moving," Cumings explains, "but they just stop where they happen to lie, in different configurations throughout the crystal with no correlation between them, and no single one lowers the energy enough to take over and reduce the entropy to zero."

So is the Third Law truly a law, or more of a guideline?

"It's a big fundamental question," says Cumings. "If there's an exception, it's a rule of thumb."
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Is She Miss Universe?

Half Naked Dayana Mendoza.

India's Domestic IT Growth Beats Exports

New Delhi, Aug 10 (IANS) India’s booming IT market has seen the domestic demand growth outstrip exports for the first time in over a decade, thanks to the maturing outsourcing market, says a new survey. The domestic IT demand grew 34 percent in 2007-08, compared with 27 percent for exports, which is the opposite of what happened the last fiscal, says the annual IT industry survey of Dataquest - the flagship publication of CyberMedia Group.

“Finally, the day of reckoning has come,” says the soon-to-be-released survey. “And what a convincing difference it has been - 34:27,” say the findings of its 25th annual edition.

In value terms, exports, at Rs.1,897.92 billion ($47.45 billion), still account for two-thirds of total revenues while the domestic sales were estimated at Rs.990.18 billion ($24.75 billion).

The jury is still out on the actual reasons behind the remarkable reversal, and the sceptical IT industry honchos offer several - like small base for the domestic market and the appreciation of the rupee that has slowed down export growth.

“Interestingly all this is true. But that does not take away from the creditable performance of India’s domestic IT market,” it says, while attributing the trend reversal to a 65 percent growth in business process outsourcing (BPO) industry.

“At $24.5 billion, the Indian domestic IT market is not exactly a small market. Yet, in dollar terms, it grew 50 percent. In other words, it added half of itself to it.”

The survey also finds that some interesting trends in the outsourcing industry - where the players are evolving from short-term, project-driven deals to longer-term, comprehensive outsourcing initiatives - will help the IT industry.


IBM Global Services bagged the accounts of Vodafone, Idea Cellular and IGI. HP secured Bank of India and Britannia orders. TCS clinched a huge passport-processing contract.
It says the demand for mobility drove notebook sales by 59 percent while the need to save on electricity made many users dump cathode ray tube monitors and switch to liquid crystal display (LCD) monitors - a trend that resulted in the non-bundled monitors market growing by 71 percent.

Another small segment also saw magnificent growth. Automated teller machines, or ATMs deployed by banks grew by 150 percent to emerge as the only sub segment within the domestic market to witness a three-figure growth, the survey says.

In fact, the overall hardware market including systems, peripherals, and other products expanded by 35 percent over last year.

Much of this growth can be attributed to the spread of computing to smaller towns and cities of India and, of course, the growing clout of the small and medium businesses (SMBs), the survey says.

Underground Fire Engulfing Jharia Town

According to eyewitness, the residents of the locality heard some gurgling sound from beneath the earth at around 9.30 in the morning and cracks started developing on the earth surface. Fearing major land subsidence, residents came out of their houses and started running helter-skelter.

In October 2007, the area had experienced gas leakage from beneath the earth after which the coal organization management dug many holes to control the underground fire by stowing water mixed sand through the holes. It is all due to underground mine fire which is now slowly engulfing the area.

Such is the intensity of the fires that even a mid-summer sun pales in the smoky haze that they generate. After dusk, the flames take on morbid hues. "Jharia resembles a cremation ground at night".
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World Sexual Relationship Database

As far as W.H.O.M. (World Health Optimization Management) is concerned, it’s a great idea to publish the sexual history of every human being in existence on the web for all to see.
The World Sexual Relationship Database is a user-run website that’s much easier to maintain than the crumpled-up “list” most dudes jot down on a piece of paper every few months/weeks/years.

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Chinese Man Kills Relative of U.S. Olympic Coach

A Chinese man wielding a knife attacked an American couple related to a United States Olympic volleyball coach on Saturday, killing the man and wounding his wife and their Chinese guide atop an ancient tower in central Beijing.
Violence against foreigners is extremely rare in Beijing and across China.Chinese generally do not exhibit hostility toward Americans or the United States. During the opening ceremony on Friday night, the American delegation drew thunderous applause when it marched into the Bird’s Nest, as the Olympic stadium is known, from Chinese watching inside and outside the stadium.
Xinhua identified the attacker as Tang Yongming, 47, from Hangzhouin Zhejiang Province. He was a factory worker who was divorced five years ago,Xinhua reported. He quit his job and then sold his house in 2006, and no longer had a permanent home. He came to Beijing on Aug. 1, the report said.

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Phoenix Finds A Salt Compound On Mars

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has detected a salt found on Earth on the surface of Mars. The salt, called perchlorate, is used in fireworks and rocket fuel. The news follows the recent confirmation of the presence of water on the Red Planet.

Peter Smith, principal investigator on NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission, explains what perchlorate's presence means for the possibility of life on Mars.

Half the world's monkey and apes face extinction

Officials look at four dead mountain gorillas that were illegally killed in the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the week of July 26 in this file handout photo released by International Gorilla Conservation Programme on Aug. 10, 2007. Almost half the world's monkeys and apes are facing a worsening threat of extinction because of deforestation and hunting for meat, an international report showed on Aug. 5, 2008.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

Russia has the worst rape record

148 children were raped in the year 2007. Almost all female employees working in the offices were sexually harassed. Prime Minister is being investigated for the rape charges....
Putin jokes on Rape as if such things are a matter of honor.
Sex rules in Russia there is no doubt about it and they have rationalized it as well...because if rape do not take place then women can not reproduce ?

Here's a report on child sex abuse.

Child sex abuse is a growing problem in Russia. Russia's Interior Ministry says the number of cases in 2007 tripled compared to the previous year.

It is is always good to know what has been happening in the world.
(offcourse the problem is common to all the countries like US ,UK , Sweden,ISrael , some countries do not share reliable data like India, China or UAE , Iran etc)

US and UK are the largest visitors of India

Jul 14, 2008
NEW DELHI—Keith Lotman went to New Delhi on a two-week business trip. But a quick day of sightseeing in India's capital city left him enthralled and ready to see more of the country.
"I have about a hundred different places that I'd like to visit," said Lotman, 31, a business executive from Philadelphia, as he checked out the world's largest Bahai temple in New Delhi. "A hundred different kinds of experiences."

He added: "It's very different from any place I've traveled to before. Culturally very different. I'd definitely like to go to Agra to see the Taj Mahal next."

Ever since the Beatles arrived on the banks of the Ganges river in the 1960s to study Transcendental Meditation, India has been on the life list of a certain type of traveler.

And while there are still are plenty of Westerners seeking low-budget Eastern spirituality, India has recently started attracting a different class of visitor—men and women like Lotman, who certainly wasn't spending his nights bunking in a dingy room with a bunch of backpackers.

New tourists like Lotman have helped feed a boom in travel to India, and the country is now nearly as popular a destination for Americans as Spain. Travel to India from the United States increased 10 percent between 2006 and 2007, on top of an 8 percent rise the year before. More Americans visited India last year than went to Ireland or Thailand, according to the most recent data from U.S. Department of Commerce.

The upsurge in Americans visiting India is part of broader boom in India's tourism industry. In 2007, some 5 million travelers headed to India, nearly double from 2000, according to the Tourism Ministry. Visitors from the U.S. accounted for 15.7 percent of the total.

These include a large number of business travelers, wealthy retirees out to explore India from the comfortable confines of an air-conditioned luxury bus or train, and people of Indian origin eager to see their parents'—or grandparents'—homeland.

What has made India as attractive as Europe or South America for American travelers is a combination of a booming economy, an aggressive marketing campaign and what the Tourism Ministry describes as "the diversity of our product."

Another website had this to say

The number of visitors from the US touched 7.99 lakh, out of the total 50.81 lakh foreigners who came to India last year. The UK came out second best by a wafer thin margin, for once, sending 7.96 lakh visitors in 2007.
Indiais now nearly as popular a destination for Americans as Spain, according to reports emanating from the US.

Maharastrian Production of Sugar likely to Fall Sharply

MUMBAI, Aug 5 (Reuters) - Indian sugar Sept futures hit a new high on Tuesday morning after the government-set supply figures for August came in lower than expected, analysts said.

At 10:17 a.m., the September futures NSMU8 on the National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange, rose 1.77 percent at 1,782 rupees per 100 kg. The contract had earlier hit a new high at 1,803 rupees.

India has fixed the quota for free sale sugar in the month of August at 900,000 tonnes, lower than market expectations, a source in the department of food and public distribution, said on Monday.

The move ahead of the expected festival demand later this month and bullish fundamentals like expectations of a steep fall in output in Maharashtra, country's largest producer, may push up the sugar prices in the coming days, analysts and a trader said.

Sugar output in Maharastra, country's largest producer, is likely to witness a sharp fall of over 37 percent to about 5.7 million tonnes, said Prakash Naiknavare, managing director, Maharashtra State Co-operative Sugar Factories Federation Ltd.

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Animal-rights extremism

Early Saturday morning, a Molotov-cocktail-like device set fire to the home of a developmental neurobiologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). His family escaped by climbing down a fire escape from a second-story window. Around the same time, a similar device destroyed the car of another UCSC researcher. As ScienceNOW went to press, no one had claimed responsibility for the attacks, but the university and police suspect they are the work of animal-rights extremists.
In recent years, universities and law enforcement officials in the United States have had to grapple with increasingly personal threats, harassment, and attacks on animal researchers and their families (Science, 21 December 2007, p. 1856). California has been an epicenter of such animal-rights extremism: Several biomedical researchers at UC Los Angeles have been targeted in recent years, and more recently, scientists at other University of California (UC) campuses have endured harassment and had their homes vandalized. Twenty-four UC Berkeley researchers and seven staff members have been harassed in recent months, according to a university spokesperson. In February, six masked intruders tried to force their way into the home of a UCSC researcher during a birthday party for her young daughter.

Concerns were sparked again last week in Santa Cruz by pamphlets discovered in a downtown coffee shop and turned in to police. Titled "Murderers and Torturers Alive and Well in Santa Cruz," they contained the photographs, home addresses, and phone numbers of 13 UCSC faculty members, along with "threat-laden language" condemning animal research, says Captain Steve Clark of the Santa Cruz police.

David Feldheim, the neurobiologist whose house sustained substantial damage in the fire attack, was one of those listed. Feldheim uses mice in studies of how the brain's visual system develops. The researcher whose car was destroyed was not on the list, Clark says. UCSC spokesperson Jim Burns declined to name that researcher or say whether he or she uses animals for research. A third researcher, who was named in the pamphlet, lives "almost next door," Clark says, raising the possibility that the culprits missed their intended target.

On Saturday, UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal issued a statement condemning the attacks as "criminal acts of anti-science violence." Burns says the university is working with Santa Cruz police and taking other steps to help ensure the safety of its researchers, including all of those listed on the pamphlets. He declined to comment on specific security measures.

As of today, Clark says, the Santa Cruz police are handing over the investigation to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which will investigate the incidents as acts of domestic terrorism. "We have some good leads and some helpful witnesses," Clark says, but so far no suspects

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Atheist Strategy

US employment agencies recently found that the number of cases of discrimination against the theist community has doubled in the last 10 years..
A new strategy has been adopted to attack the theists.
Anonymous atheist had this to say :

Ah, I see. By attacking their belief system from a mythological stand point would mean attacking them right at the heart. like using the bible against them.I find it difficult but it is a good choice of tactic. Attack their mythological views on a mythological stand point. I have always used science -and as we all know, They haven't a "Prayer" when it comes to evidence. Which is why their arguments are challenged and
defeated easily, But it's their refusal of the scientific needs such as evidence that they continue debating which ultimately leads to evasion of questions and responses from us. So to try a different stand point in their grounds may prove to work. Though you are to expect the fact that with you in their world of fairies that logic and reason do not exist.That you can only go by beliefs and word over word.I can see how it works though. I use scientific analysis to debate them and your using a mythological stand point.When they brought up "hell exists if god exists" I saw this as nothing more than a wall of paper. All I did was demand evidence of the existence of god which they end up facing a reinforced Titanium wall. The argument is practically over when I demand for evidence. The reason why I don't stand against them on a mythological stand point is
because now your running on the same laws as them, No science, No evidence, No logical conclusions and this will result in an endless debate. Even if it can be a good tactic since they don't seem to understand the term "Evidence". Everytime I demand evidence they point to the clouds or the ground and even animals. They have no evidence, It's like they haven't the
slightest clue on what I'm talking about. Attacking them in a mythological stand point would eliminate the demand for evidence and it just leaves you and they to battle it out without the interference of reason.

Is China Earthquake Safe?

Earthquake in May 2008 killed almost 70,000 people and left 18,000 missing and 5 millions homeless in China.
On tuesday another earthquake of 6.0 magnitude struck China's Sichuan region.

The Olympic torch was making its way through parts of Sichuan on Tuesday, three
days before the Summer Games get underway in Beijing, some 1,200 kilometers
(800
miles) away.

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Miracles do happen

Two days after praying the second MRI finds to tumour.

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And a Scientific Miracle

Asian countries cut trade barriers

India, Pakistan to Cut Trade Barriers in Wake of WTO Collapse

Pakistan, Sri Lanka and five other South Asian nations pledged to cut trade barriers to spur growth, underscoring the importance of regional groupings after the collapse of World Trade Organization talks last week.
The leaders of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, or Saarc, which also includes Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Maldives and Bhutan, agreed to slash the number
of items on the ``sensitive'' list of commodities that are banned from trading and include services in their free-trade pact.
South Asian nations, where a quarter of the world's population lives, have each kept about 800 items outside their free-trade accord -- almost double the number of goods excluded from
India's accord with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, known as Asean.
That's undermined trade within South Asia, which contributes less than 2 percent to global commerce.
``Free trade in South Asia was never implemented in the
true spirit,'' said Ameeta Sarkar, head of the South Asia division at the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry in New Delhi. ``One hopes this time the countries go beyond the rhetoric.''
Intra-Saarc trade is less than 5 percent of the countries' total, according to the Federation of Indian Chambers. By comparison, trade among Asean accounts for 30 percent of their total while intra-European Union commerce is about 55 percent. Saarc's two-day summit in Colombo ended yesterday.

The World Bank estimates about 40 percent of South Asia's 1.4 billion people live on less than $1 a day. If the region can accelerate growth to 8 percent a year from the average 6 percent since 2000 by opening up for greater trade, poverty can be wiped out in one generation, the World Bank says.
Annual trade between India and Pakistan, which make up more than four-fifths of the $1.2 trillion South Asian economy, is currently at about $1 billion. With trade liberalization, it can be as much as $9 billion, according to the Washington-based institution.

The leaders from the eight South Asian nations identified terrorism as the biggest threat to growth in South Asia, home to half the world's poor. They signed an accord to classify terrorism as a crime for the first time.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistan counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani, who met Aug. 2 on the sidelines of a Saarc regional summit in Colombo, agreed to adhere to a 2003 cease-fire plan along their border, defusing tensions between the two sides after a series of bombings last month.

Marijuana Vending Machine

LA comes up with world's first Marijuana Vending Machine

Most of your essentials are already distributed by vending machines:condoms, electronics, luscious 1-calorie Tab... But now, you can finally get what you really need: medical marijuana, from Anytime Vending Machines.
AVMs are 24/7 machines housed in standalone rooms, abutting two dispensaries and protected by round-the-clock security guards -- like ATMs for people combating psychological withdrawal with a physical one. After cinching up your doctor's consultation, hit an AVM location to get your prescription approved, fingerprint taken, and a prepaid credit card loaded with your profile: dosage (3.5 or 7 grams, up to 1oz a week) and strain preference (choice of five, including OG Cush and Granddaddy Purple, the mildly hallucinogenic forebear to Prince). Then day or night, all you do is hit a machine and walk away with enough vacuum-sealed, plastic-encapsulated cheeba to adequately treat your illness, and guarantee your car never smells like new leather again.

New Science of Paranormal

http://www.llewellynjournal.com/article/1623

Philip J. Imbrogno
Philip Imbrogno (Connecticut) is a recognized authority in the field of UFO research. He has been interviewed by the New York Times and Coast to Coast AM, has appeared on NBC¹s Today Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show, and has been featured in documentaries on the History Channel, A&E, Lifetime, and HBO. Imbrogno worked closely with many top UFO investigators, including Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Bud Hopkins.
He has been a science educator for the past 26 years with a graduate degree in Chemistry and undergraduate degrees in astronomy and Earth science.

No matter how skeptical you are, there are three things that cannot be denied: that reports of paranormal experiences exist, that they persist, and they are increasingly occurring on a global scale. The same types of reports that we receive in the United States are taking place all over the world,
including in places that are not influenced by the media of the United States and Europe. The cases are so similar that there is no doubt that people are seeing and reporting the same thing.

This "scientist" has learned new ways of mixing science , ufo's and the PARANORMAL.