Cows eat grass. You wouldn’t think it’s a big deal to state this, but at Iowa State University a highly qualified job applicant who had the temerity to voice this simple biological fact was ejected from consideration for a post leading a sustainable agriculture program, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:
Among those who study sustainability, saying cows should eat grass is not a controversial statement. But saying so in Iowa—which grows more corn than any other state—is likely to attract attention.
Well, it sure did. Ricardo Salvador is a well-respected sustainable agriculture expert and a former professor at Iowa State—and a natural, many observers thought, to lead the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture as its new director. A finalist for the position, however, he didn’t get the post even when the top candidate turned it down. Apparently, his cow comment came back to haunt him:
The remark that may have sunk Mr. Salvador’s candidacy came 37 minutes into his on-campus presentation. While discussing a research project in New York State, he mentioned meat being “produced in the natural way that meat should be produced, which is on land suitable for grasses and perennial crops.”
If this were a TV game show, a loud buzzer would have gone off and Mr. Salvador would have been escorted from the stage that very moment. Because apparently he was supposed to say that cows should eat corn. Even if that’s not natural or sustainable, it’s simply how things are done in Iowa, a state built on big agriculture:
Corn allows cows to get fatter faster and be ready for slaughter sooner. But there are downsides, including the fact that cows have trouble digesting corn and must be fed antibiotics to prevent them from becoming ill. What’s more, the beef from corn-fed cows tends to have more fat.
The danger of the truth is so great that the Chronicle couldn’t even get Wendy Wintersteen, the dean of Iowa State’s agriculture school, to go anywhere near it. When asked whether cows evolved to eat grass, she replied, “I don’t have an opinion on that statement.”
Sheesh. Consider, for a moment, the man that the Leopold Center is named for, famed conservationist Aldo Leopold. In 1939, in the essay “A Biotic View of Land,” he wrote:
Each species, including ourselves, is a link in many chains. The deer eats a hundred plants other than oak, and the cow a hundred plants other than corn. Both, then, are links in a hundred chains.
Sorry, Mr. Leopold, but I’m going to cut you off right there before you say anything more inflammatory. Some university officials are not going to be happy about this.
A mind reading machine is a step closer to reality after scientists discovered a way of translating people’s thoughts into words.
Photo: GETTY IMAGES
Researchers have been able to translate brain signals into speech using sensors attached to the surface of the brain for the first time.
The breakthrough, which is up to 90 per cent accurate, offers a way to communicate for paralysed patients who cannot speak and could eventually lead to being able to read anyone thoughts.
“We were beside ourselves with excitement when it started working,” said Professor Bradley Greger, a bioengineer at Utah University who led the team of researchers.
“It was just one of the moments when everything came together.
“We have been able to decode spoken words using only signals from the brain with a device that has promise for long-term use in paralysed patients who cannot now speak.
“I would call it brain reading and we hope that in two or three years it will be available for use for paralysed patients.”
Breakthrough: The machine used to create the tractor beam which brought the art of molecular transportation closer
Scientists have invented a tractor beam which is able to move large objects longer distances than ever before by using a laser light.
A team of researchers at the Australian National University in Canberra have brought the art of molecular transportation, made famous by the catchphrase ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ from the TV series Star Trek, a fraction closer.
Using what they call tractor beams – rays of energy that can move objects – they have managed to move tiny particles up to 59 inches from one place to another.
While physicists have been able to manipulate tiny particles over minuscule distances by using lasers for years, Andrei Rhode, one of the Canberra researchers, says his team’s technique can move objects one hundred times that size over a distance of almost five feet.
The method involves shining a hollow laser beam around tiny glass particles which heats up the air around them.
Soldiers face charges over secret ‘kill team’ which allegedly murdered at random and collected fingers as trophies of war
Andrew Holmes, Michael Wagnon, Jeremy Morlock and Adam Winfield are four of the five Stryker soldiers who face murder charges. Photograph: Public Domain
Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret “kill team” that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.
Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.
In one of the most serious accusations of war crimes to emerge from the Afghan conflict, the killings are alleged to have been carried out by members of a Stryker infantry brigade based in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan.
According to investigators and legal documents, discussion of killing Afghan civilians began after the arrival of Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs at forward operating base Ramrod last November. Other soldiers told the army’s criminal investigation command that Gibbs boasted of the things he got away with while serving in Iraq and said how easy it would be to “toss a grenade at someone and kill them”.
In a 6-5 ruling issued this afternoon, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals handed the Obama administration a major victory in its efforts to shield Bush crimes from judicial review, when the court upheld the Obama DOJ’s argument that Bush’s rendition program, used to send victims to be tortured, are “state secrets” and its legality thus cannot be adjudicated by courts.
I’ve written multiple times about this case, brought by torture/rendition victim Binyam Mohamed and several others against the Boeing subsidiary which, at the behest of the Bush administration, rendered them to be tortured.
Flu permitting, I’ll have much more to say about this decision tomorrow, but for the moment, I wanted to highlight the first paragraph from The New York Times article on this ruling, written by Charlie Savage. Just marvel, in particular, at the last sentence:
“The ruling handed a major victory to the Obama administration in its effort to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy power.” That says it all.
The distorted, radical use of the state secret privilege — as a broad-based immunity weapon for compelling the dismissal of entire cases alleging Executive lawbreaking, rather than a narrow discovery tool for suppressing the use of specific classified documents — is exactly what the Bush administration did to such extreme controversy. To see how true that is, just look at this article from Talking Points Memo, from April of last year, in which Zachary Roth consulted with numerous legal experts about my argument that Obama was abusing this weapon in exactly the same way Bush did. His findings were encapsulated in the TPM headline:
Roth wrote:
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald wrote that the move “demonstrates that the Obama DOJ plans to invoke the exact radical doctrines of executive secrecy which Bush used.” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann called it “deja vu all over again”.
Not having Greenwald’s training in constitutional law (and perhaps lacking Olbermann’s all-conquering self-confidence), we wanted to get a sense from a few independent experts as to how to assess the administration’s position on the case. Does it represent a continuation of the Bushies’ obsession with putting secrecy and executive power above basic constitutional rights? Is it a sweeping power grab by the executive branch, that sets set a broad and dangerous precedent for future cases by asserting that the government has the right to get lawsuits dismissed merely by claiming that state secrets are at stake, without giving judges any discretion whatsoever?
In a word, yes.
Suffice to say — with great understatement — Obama’s doing this doesn’t trigger the same level of outrage and objection as when Bush did it, at least not in most circles. And I do so fondly recall the days back in the Spring of last year when civil libertarians who were vigorously objecting to Obama’s Bush-replicating legal positions were told by vocal Obama supporters that Obama was only doing this in order to ensure that Bush’s extremist legal theories were rejected by courts and thus we were all generously showered with the Magnanimous Gift of Good Precedent. Again with great understatement, Obama’s appealing the 9th Circuit’s rejection of the Bush/Obama “state secrets” argument to the full court — and thus securing one of the most harmful judicial endorsements ever of this radical secrecy doctrine — is not exactly consistent with that Obama-justifying rationale.
A toxic tide of acid mine water is rising steadily beneath Johannesburg which, if left unchecked, could cause earth tremors, power blackouts and even cancer among residents, experts have warned.
Particularly at risk is the central business district which is built over the central basin and is home to some of Africa?s biggest firms Photo: ALAMY
The water is currently around 600 metres below the city’s surface but is rising at a rate of between 0.4 and 0.9 metres per day, meaning it could overflow onto the streets in just under a year and a half.
Because it would take 13 months to build a pumping station to clear the water, a legacy of 120 years of mining around Johannesburg, the state has just four months to find the millions of pounds needed to fund it.
It is currently locked in negotiations with multinational mining firms who have profited from the area’s rich natural resources over who should pay and how much.
Announcing a task force of experts set up to deal with the issue yesterday, Water and Environmental Affairs Minister Buyelwa Sonjica said she was hoping that the potential dividends from tapping a new water supply for human consumption and use in industry would entice investors.
Acidic water is created when abandoned mine shafts and tunnels fill up with ground water which oxidises with heavy metals and the sulphide mineral iron pyrite, known as “fool’s gold” because of its yellowish hue.
Without effective drainage, it pours out into waterways, polluting crops and poisoning those living nearby.
According to water activist Mariette Liefferink, from the Federation for a Sustainable Environment, the water is the same acidity of lemon juice or vinegar and poses an “enormous threat” to the city and its inhabitants.
Particularly at risk is the central business district which is built over the central basin and is home to some of Africa’s biggest firms. According to Miss Liefferink, the buildings they are housed would be damaged as the mine water corrodes steel and concrete.
She added that some of the city’s poorer residents are already living on top of mine dumps filled with carcinogenic metals which, if they react with the rising mine water, will pollute the entire water system.
Researchers at the University of California at Irvine gave the human dose equivalent of 2,000 to 3,000 mg of vitamin B3 to mice with Alzheimer’s. (2) It worked. Kim Green, one of the researchers, is quoted as saying, “Cognitively, they were cured. They performed as if they’d never developed the disease.”
Yes, this may sound revolutionary, BUT you will never see a revolution unless you start it, because Big Pharma is in control.
There are ‘revolutionary’ scientific tested, healthy, natural drugs that cure cancer and there is still no revolution.
(Reuters) – Daily tablets of large doses of B vitamins can halve the rate of brain shrinkage in elderly people with memory problems and may slow their progression toward dementia, data from a British trial showed on Wednesday,
Vitamin B tablets could slow and even halt the devastating march of Alzheimer’s Disease in the elderly, a breakthrough British study suggests.
Photo: GETTY IMAGES
The research showed that large doses of the supplement could halve the rate of brain shrinkage – a physical symptom associated memory loss and dementia in the elderly.
The effects were so dramatic that the scientists behind the work believe it could revolutionise the treatment of the disease.
Brain shrinkage or atrophy is a natural part of ageing but it is known to be accelerated in people with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) – a kind of memory loss and forgetfulness – and Alzheimer’s.
Scientists at the University of Oxford conducted a trial on 168 people and found that taking high doses of three vitamin B supplements every day reduced brain shrinkage associated with dementia by up to 53 per cent.
They said the results were so strong that it should open up a debate as to whether the tablets should be prescribed to everyone with MCI – half of whom develop Alzheimer’s disease.
MCI affects 16 per cent of people over 70 – 1.5 million people in the UK.
Professor David Smith, a pharmacologist who co-authored the study, said the results were “immensely promising”.
“It is a very simple solution: you give someone some vitamins and you protect the brain,” he said.
“This is the first trial that has shown a glimmer of hope and success. It is the first one of its kind that has worked so clearly. I think it will change the whole direction of Alzheimer’s research.
“500 people a day develop Alzheimer’s in the UK. If we can cut that down by just 10 per cent it will have a big impact. I personally believe that it will.”
Science has – intentionally – not developed a real new antibiotic for many, many years now and the ‘new’ antibiotics were only mixtures of the old ones.
Alternative medicine knows hundreds very effective drugs that work very well and have no side effects and there are no drug resistant superbugs to them..
Homeopathy and acupuncture are also extremely effective in dealing with bacterial and also with viral infections.
TOKYO (AP) – Japan has confirmed the nation’s first case of a new gene in bacteria that allows the microorganisms to become drug-resistant superbugs, detected in a man who had medical treatment in India, a Health Ministry official said Tuesday.
The gene, known as NDM-1, was found in a Japanese man in his 50s, Kensuke Nakajima said.
Researchers say the gene – which appears to be circulating widely in India – alters bacteria, making them resistant to nearly all known antibiotics.
Drug-resistant bacteria are not new. Many bacteria are resistant to the world’s first antibiotic, penicillin, as well as successive generations of drugs. Excessive use and improper use of antibiotics have exacerbated the problem and led to the emergence of superbugs.
“The potential of NDM-1 to be a worldwide public health problem is great, and coordinated international surveillance is needed,” according to a widely publicized report in the British medical journal Lancet in August.
The gene has been seen largely in the deadly E. coli bacteria and on DNA structures that can be easily copied and passed onto other types of bacteria.
The man was hospitalized in April 2009 after returning from India where he had medical treatment. Nakajima declined to say what kind of treatment the man had received in India, citing the man’s privacy.
The man had a high fever while staying at a hospital in Tochigi, north of Tokyo. He was discharged in October last year.
The hospital – Dokkyo Medical University Hospital – kept a preserved sample of the suspected superbug from the man. The hospital examined the sample after the Lancet report.
(Reuters) – Russia and China called on trade partner Iran on Tuesday to cooperate with the U.N. nuclear watchdog after the Vienna-based organisation accused Tehran of making its work more difficult by barring some inspectors.
Iran, which rejects Western accusations it is seeking to build atom bombs, said it was cooperating fully with the agency and had the right to reject U.N. inspectors which gave “false” information about its nuclear programme.
An International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report, obtained by Reuters on Monday, said the Islamic Republic was pushing ahead with its nuclear work in defiance of tougher international sanctions.
Iran has passed a crucial nuclear threshold, weapons inspectors have warned, and could now go on to arm an atomic missile with relative ease.
Fuel is unloaded at the Bushehr nuclear power plant in southern Iran, August 21, 2010 Photo: GETTY IMAGES
A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Iranian nuclear scientists had made at least 22 kilograms of enriched uranium up to 20 per cent purity, a technical hurdle that is the hardest to overcome on the way to weapons-grade uranium.
Experts estimate that 20 kgs of uranium is a significant step toward arming a warhead. The uranium would still need to have its purity raised to 90 per cent, but that is a relatively easy process.
The agency’s report comes in spite of the recent imposition at the United Nations of a fresh round of sanctions against Iran and will heighten fears of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear plants. The prospect of an attack had receded only recently with American assurances that Tehran was more than a year away from acquiring a bomb.
The Vienna-based nuclear watchdog indicated Tehran had maintained its absolute defiance of international pressure to curb its programme despite the imposition of harsh sanctions in May. The IAEA has grown increasingly alarmed at Iran’s behaviour and the latest report, which will be presented to the agency’s governors at a meeting next week, lambasted Tehran on a series of fronts.
The country’s refusal to answer questions on its attempts to make a nuclear warhead that could be fitted on to its most advanced missiles was denounced as a violation of sanctions.
The agency also rebuked the regime for its repeated failure to co-operate with weapons inspections designed to ensure that material was held securely at Iranian plants.
Iran barred two weapons inspectors from the country in June after they reported undeclared nuclear activity by scientists. It has also systematically objected to other scientists on spurious grounds.
Rev. Terry Jones at the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., Monday, Aug. 30, 2010. Jones plans to burn copies of the Koran on church grounds to mark the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States that provoked the Afghan war. (AP Photo/John Raoux)
The leader of a small Florida church that espouses anti-Islam philosophy said Wednesday he was determined to burn copies of the Koran on Sept. 11, despite pressure from the White House, religious leaders and others to call it off.
Pastor Terry Jones said at a press conference that he has received a lot of encouragement, with supporters mailing copies of the Islamic holy text to his Gainesville church of about 50 followers. He proclaimed in July that he would stage “International Burn-a-Koran Day” to mark the ninth anniversary of 9/11.
“As of right now, we are not convinced that backing down is the right thing,” said Jones, who took no questions.
Jones said he has received more than 100 death threats and has started carrying a .40-caliber pistol since announcing his plan to burn the book Muslims consider the word of God and insist be treated with the utmost respect. Jones, 58, was flanked by an armed escort Wednesday.
Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Kabul, took the rare step of a military leader taking a position on a domestic matter when he warned in an e-mail to The Associated Press that “images of the burning of a Koran would undoubtedly be used by extremists in Afghanistan — and around the world — to inflame public opinion and incite violence.”
Petraeus spoke Wednesday with Afghan President Karzai about the matter, according to a military spokesman Col. Erik Gunhus. “They both agreed that burning of a Koran would undermine our effort in Afghanistan, jeopardize the safety of coalition troopers and civilians,” Gunhus said, and would “create problems for our Afghan partners … as it likely would be Afghan police and soldiers who would have to deal with any large demonstrations.”
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the pastor’s plans were outrageous, and along with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, urged Jones to cancel the event.
“It is regrettable that a pastor in Gainesville, Florida, with a church of no more than 50 people can make this outrageous and distrustful, disgraceful plan and get the world’s attention, but that’s the world we live in right now,” Clinton said in remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Jones gained some local notoriety last year when he posted signs in front of his church declaring “Islam is of the Devil.” But his Koran-burning idea attracted wider attention. It drew rebukes from Muslim nations and at home as an emotional debate was taking shape over the proposed Islamic center near the ground zero site of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York.
China is poised to sign a $2bn (£1.3bn) deal to build a railway line in Iran in the first step of a wider plan to tie the Middle East and Central Asia to Beijing.
The Chinese have already built a railway line serving Tibet, above, and now plan a modern variant on the old ‘Silk Road’ through Central Asia Photo: AP
China’s railways minister, Liu Zhijun, is expected to visit Tehran this week to seal the deal, according to his Iranian counterpart, Hamid Behbahani.
“The final document of the contract has already been signed with a Chinese company and the Chinese minister will visit Iran on September 12 to ink the agreement,” said Mr Behbahani.
The new line will run from Tehran to the town of Khosravi on the border with Iraq, around 360 miles as the crow flies, passing through Arak, Hamedan and Kermanshah.
Eventually, the Iranian government said, the route could link Iran with Iraq and even Syria as part of a Middle-Eastern corridor. That could also benefit the 5,000 Iranians who make pilgrimages each day to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq.
And the US government told you it is safe to stay or even encouraged you to plan your holidays there and BP hasn’t stopped spraying Corexit all over the place.
People who work near it are hemorrhaging internally. And that’s what dispersants are supposed to do.EPA now is taking the position that they really don’t know how dangerous it is, even though if you read the label, it tells you how dangerous it is. And, for example, in the Exxon Valdez case, people who worked with dispersants, most of them are dead now. The average death age is around fifty. It’s very dangerous, and it’s an economic-it’s an economic protector of BP, not an environmental protector of the public.
Watchdog warns of official hostility towards journalists amid loss of TV station licences and mystery over fate of investigative reporter
The erosion of press freedom in Ukraine has been linked to the disappearance of journalist Vasyl Klymentyev, above, last month. Photograph: Petro Matvienko
It was 8.55am when the investigative journalist Vasyl Klymentyev set off from his home in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city. As editor-in-chief of Kharkiv’s Novy Stil (New Style) newspaper – a small publication known for unearthing juicy scandals about corrupt local officials – Klymentyev had many enemies and was rather cautious. He set the burglar alarm.
What happened next on that morning in early August is a matter of speculation. The one fact everyone agrees on is that Klymentyev vanished. His family reported him missing the next day and Kharkiv police opened a murder inquiry. His friends are convinced he is dead, though so far there is no body. On 17 August a boy discovered his mobile phone and keys in a small rubber boat floating in a rural reservoir.
For journalists, Klymentyev is a chilling symbol of how press freedoms are being curtailed in Ukraine seven months after the election of Viktor Yanukovych, the country’s new pro-Russian president. Yanukovych, his critics say, has set about reversing the gains of the 2004-10 Orange Revolution, in which newspapers and TV flourished. Reporters talk of a new era of fear and censorship.
Last week Kiev’s district court stripped two independent opposition television stations, TVi and 5 Kanal, of their licences. TVi has fallen off the main airwaves, while 5 Kanal – which came to prominence with its coverage of the 2004 pro-democracy demonstrations – has had its audience severely reduced. The winner is Valeriy Khoroshkovsky, owner of the pro-Yanukovych Inter Media television empire – and head of Ukraine’s SBU security service.
In a report last week the watchdog Reporters Without Borders (PDF) said broadcast media pluralism in Ukraine was being “seriously eroded”, warning of a “disturbing level of hostility towards journalists on the part of the authorities”, including “physical attacks”.
Ukraine’s apparent lurch towards authoritarianism has alarmed EU leaders and MPs. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, expressed her concerns during a visit to Kiev last week.
“We are going back to the USSR,” Petro Matvienko, the deputy editor of Novy Stil, said last week. “In the USSR the [Communist] party was in charge. Now we are in the hands of a criminal totalitarian gang. It’s worse.”
Dangerous investigation
Matvienko said he was certain Klymentyev was dead, killed by someone whose interests he had crossed. Shortly before his disappearance, Klymentyev had been preparing a story about the mansions of four top officials, one from Ukraine’s security service.
Aid workers fear thousands of Roma will be left homeless
Rome’s mayor, Gianni Alemanno, a former neo-fascist, said Gypsies leaving France were now settling in Italy. Photograph: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters
Plans by Rome city officials to demolish up to 200 illegal Gypsy camps this week have raised fears by aid workers that thousands of Roma, including women and small children, will be forced on to the streets.
Rome’s mayor, Gianni Alemanno, has cited the recent death of a Romanian child during a fire in one of the camps as an incentive for their demolition. “These are the terrible risks and dramas of the illegal camps that have existed in Rome for too long,” he said.
Sveva Belviso, Alemanno’s social policy assessor, said fewer than 1,000 people people were due to be evicted. “We will offer assistance to the young, old and sick,” she said.
But the Red Cross warned that many more faced sleeping rough and losing their possessions.
“The number is in fact likely to be over 1,000 and with the city’s financial straits and overflowing accommodation I wonder where they will put up and feed these people,” said Mario Squicciarini. “What is worse is that when the bulldozers go in they often do not give you time to get your possessions out.”
“Floating Chernobyls-in-waiting” are coming to a sea near you after a major international agreement was signed last week, according to critics of nuclear power.
Russia reached a recent milestone when the hull of the Akademik Lomonosov was launched into the Baltic Sea
China and Russia agreed to expand co-operation over nuclear power, specifically on uranium exploration and safer power plants – but also on floating nuclear reactors.
“It’s a case of Homer Simpson meets the Titanic,” says Ben Ayliffe, a senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace. “The idea is just mind-boggling.”
Unsurprisingly, he is appalled by the idea.
Russia has been planning floating reactors for quite some time, but reached a recent milestone when the hull of the Akademik Lomonosov was launched into the Baltic Sea.
The reactor is not complete, but the barge that will house the plant was launched on June 30 at the Baltyskiy shipyard in St Petersburg – and China has been watching developments very closely indeed.
Sergei Kiriyenko, head of Russia’s nuclear agency Rosatom said the plant would be “absolutely safe” and predicted “big interest from foreign customers – especially in developing nations”.
Floating reactors can be used in inaccessible places where there is no electricity grid – including exploring for oil in the Arctic or Antarctic.
An ill wind is blowing over Italy’s green revolution, as the Mafia seek to capitalise on generous grants for renewable energy.
Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES
They rise up high above the sun-scorched countryside, looking out over hilltop villages, palm trees, neatly-tended vineyards and olive groves.
But for all their promises of a clean, green future, Italy’s windfarms have now acquired a somewhat dirtier whiff – as the latest industry to be infiltrated by the country’s mobsters.
Attracted by the prospect of generous grants designed to boost the use of alternative energies, the so-called “eco Mafia” has begun fraudulently creaming off millions of euros from both the Italian government and the European Union.
And nowhere has the industry’s reputation become more tarnished than Sicily, where windmills now dot the horizon in Mafia strongholds like Corleone, the town better known as the setting for the Godfather films.
“Nothing earns more than a wind farm,” said Edoardo Zanchini, an environmental campaigner who has investigated Mafia infiltration of the industry. “Anything that creates wealth interests the Mafia.”
It is not just Italian criminals, however, who have spotted the potential for corruption. Recent research by Kroll, the international corporate security firm, has discovered examples all over Europe of so-called “clean energy” schemes being used to to line criminals’ pockets rather than save the planet. Some involve windmills that stand derelict or are simply never built, while others are used to launder profits from other crime enterprises.
“Renewable energy seems like a good thing, run by saintly people saving the world,” said Jason Wright, a senior director with Kroll, which performs background checks on renewable energy schemes on behalf of legitimate investors, and which has documented a sharp rise in the number of wind farms with suspect ownership.
“But a lot of people want to jump on board a sure-fire revenue spinner. I wouldn’t say the entire sector is corrupt, but there is a small percentage of corrupt projects.”
The level of fraud has prompted calls for tighter restrictions on the use of public money in funding renewable energy, for which EU bureaucrats have grand ambitions.Brussels has ordered all 27 EU nations to ensure that one-fifth of their energy is renewable by 2020, and in recent years has given out an average of €5 billion (£4.1 billion) annually in loans and grants. The levels of subsidy allow some wind farm owners to claim generous premiums for every watt of electricity they generate.
In Italy, for example, power from wind farms is sold at a guaranteed rate of €180 per kwh – the highest rate in the world. In a country where the Mafia has years of expertise at buying corrupt politicians and intimidating rivals, the result is perhaps inevitable, creating a new breed of entrepreneur known as the “lords of the wind”.
Florida Police Still Want to Know Who Is Responsible for 170-page Book
A 170-page manual explaining step by step how to molest children which police in Orange County, Fla., believe has been circulating there for months, is not illegal. Investigators have stated that they still want to know where it came from.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. It was pretty amazing when I first saw it just because how detailed it was,” Orange County Sheriff’s Office Det. Philip Graves told ABC News Orlando, Fla., affiliate WFTV.
The manual, which was apparently written by someone who calls himself “the mule,” is a how-to of child molestation, even explaining where and how to find potential victims, the station reported.
“I was more amazed that someone would be as bold as to create an actual 170-page document that would detail how to do it,” he said.
Among the many disturbing topics covered in the book is how to convince a victimized child not to tell his or her parents.
Now expect the internet to be censored in Australia.
The dark side rules. Wake up Australia!
Labor wins backing of two independent MPs, allowing Gillard to remain as prime minister
Labor leader to remain as prime minister after winning backing from two independent MPs
Labor’s Julia Gillard will form a minority government in Australia after gaining the support of two independent MPs today.
Labor won the backing of Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, while Bob Katter came out for Tony Abbott, the Liberal leader who hoped to lead a conservative coalition.
This gave Gillard the support of 76 MPs, which will allow her to form a minority government and give Labor a second three-year term. Seventy-four MPs now back the opposition.
The closely contested 21 August federal elections failed to give any party a majority for the first time since 1940.
Gillard, who was born in Wales, became Australia’s first female prime minister in June when Labor overthrew Kevin Rudd, who had lost the support of his party.
The government is effectively bankrupt. Using GAAP accounting principles, the annual deficit is running in the range of $4 trillion to $5 trillion. That’s beyond containment. The government can’t cover it with taxes. They’d still be in deficit if they took 100% of personal income and corporate profits. They’d also still be in deficit if they cut every penny of government spending except for Social Security and Medicare. Washington lacks the will to slash its social programs severely, to change its approach to ever bigger government. The only option left going forward is for the government eventually to print the money for the obligations it cannot otherwise cover, which sets up a hyperinflation.
And, addressing the use of Snatch Land Rovers, which he deemed to be unsafe and prompted his decision to stand down, he said: “I had to resign.
“I had warned (the MoD) time and time again that there were going to be needless deaths if we were not given the right equipment, and they ignored this advice. There is blood on their hands.
“There was no other vehicle to use. The simple truth is that the protection on these vehicles is inadequate and this led to the unnecessary deaths.”
The former head of the Army accuses Tony Blair and Gordon Brown of badly letting down the Armed Forces during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a damning verdict, General Sir Richard Dannatt accuses Mr Brown of being a “malign” influence by failing to honour guarantees on defence spending during his time at the Treasury, and charges Mr Blair with lacking “moral courage” for failing to overrule his chancellor.
Gen Dannatt’s book, Leading from the Front, which begins its serialisationin The Sunday Telegraphtoday, is the first major public critique of the Blair/Brown administration by a senior outside figure who served under both men. He was Chief of the General Staff from 2006-09.
He describes his efforts to persuade Mr Blair and Mr Brown that the Army – fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan and suffering heavy casualties – was facing almost unbearable pressures as “pushing a rock up a steep hill almost all the way through”.
His book is further evidence of the cripplingly dysfunctional nature of the relationship between Mr Blair and Mr Brown, which Mr Blair spelt out in his own memoir, A Journey, published this week.
The general also reveals in his book and in interviews for this newspaper that:
-By early 2009, at a time when the Army was suffering a punishing casualty rate in Afghanistan, he had not had a face-to-face meeting with Mr Brown for six months. Eventually he was forced to “ambush” the prime minister during a chance meeting in Horse Guards Parade to get his concerns across;
-The 1997-98 Strategic Defence Review (SDR), which set out a “good framework” for future defence policy, could not cope with troops being committed to Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time and was “fatally flawed” through being underfunded;
-The intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, cited as the main reason for Britain joining the United States in the 2003 war, was “most uncompelling”. Planning for the aftermath of the conflict was, he said, an “abject failure”.
Gen Dannatt reserves his strongest criticism for Labour’s two prime ministers, accusing them of letting down the troops they sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.
He writes in his book: “History will pass judgment on these foreign adventures in due course, but in my view Gordon Brown’s malign intervention, when chancellor, on the SDR by refusing to fund what his own government had agreed, fatally flawed the en tire process from the outset.
“The seeds were sown for some of the impossible operational pressures to come.”
Mr Blair “lacked the moral courage to impose his will on his own chancellor”.
The general also admits he was “bemused” by Mr Brown’s decision to write his book, Wartime Courage, about the generation that suffered so much in winning the Second World War. He adds: “I am still not sure whether he ever realised that by denying the proper funding of his own government’s declared policy, he was condemning more young men and women to the same sacrifices he railed against in a previous generation.”
Asked why he thought Mr Blair did not overrule Mr Brown, he replied: “To me it seems extraordinary that the prime minister, the No 1 guy, cannot crack the whip sufficiently to his very close friend apparently, his next door neighbour, the chancellor.
“In the war Cabinet that Margaret Thatcher put together in 1982 [during the Falklands conflict] there was no one from the Treasury. It’s tough to criticise lack of moral courage, but moral courage is what you need. Physical courage is a wonderful thing, but moral courage is actually doing the right thing at the right time.”
Gen Dannatt warns the Coalition that carrying on with the current rate of casualties in Afghanistan – where more than 100 servicemen were killed last year – would be unacceptable. “We’ve got to have cracked it by 2014, 2015,” he said.
By Patrick Hennessy and Melissa Kite
Published: 10:00PM BST 04 Sep 2010
Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region.
Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan’s natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.
“The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan,” Murray noted.
“There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, it’s about oil, it’s not about democracy.”
“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”
“I’m not much for this war. I’m not sure it’s worth all those lives lost,” said Sergeant Christian Richardson as we walked across corn fields that will soon be ploughed up to plant a spring crop of opium poppy.
Opium production rate has soared to 6,900 tons in Afghanistan in the past 10 years ‘despite‘ the presence of 100,000 foreign troops in the country for nearly eight years.
A report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said on Wednesday that Afghanistan produces 92 percent of the world’s opium that has devastating global consequences.
The UN report also noted that Afghanistan’s illegal opium production is worth 65 billion dollars.
The heroin and opium market feeds 15 million addicts, with Europe, Russia and Iran consuming half the supply, UNODC reported.
– Top US commander in Afghanistan: The Taliban have gained the upper hand:
The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, forcing the U.S. to change its strategy in the eight-year-old conflict by increasing the number of troops in heavily populated areas like the volatile southern city of Kandahar, the insurgency’s spiritual home.Gen. Stanley McChrystal warned that means U.S. casualties, already running at record levels, will remain high for months to come.
On the flip, in record time (Image: G.Glatzmaier/Los Alamos National Laboratory/P.Roberts/UCLA/SPL)
SOME 16 million years ago, north became south in a matter of years. Such fast flips are impossible, according to models of the Earth’s core, but this is now the second time that evidence has been found.
The magnetic poles swap every 300,000 years, a process that normally takes up to 5000 years. In 1995 an ancient lava flow with an unusual magnetic pattern was discovered in Oregon. It suggested that the field at the time was moving by 6 degrees a day – at least 10,000 times faster than usual. “Not many people believed it,” says Scott Bogue of Occidental College in Los Angeles.
Now Bogue and his colleague Jonathan Glen of the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, say they have found a second example in Nevada. The lava rock suggests that in one year, Earth’s magnetic field shifted by 53 degrees (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2010GL044286). At that rate, a full flip would take less than four years, but there could be another interpretation. “It may have been a burst of rapid acceleration that punctuated the steady movement of the field,” says Bogue.
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