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Leica faces extinction as digitals snap up business

It has been behind some of the 20th century's most famous images: the young Vietnamese girl running naked down a street, the American soldiers storming Omaha beach in the Normandy landings, and the point-blank execution of a Vietcong prisoner. Leica cameras have also been used by the world's most famous photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and the AP photographer Nick Ut. But now the German product is on the brink of disappearing. Next week its manufacturer is holding an extraordinary general meeting following a disastrous year which saw a record €15.5m (£10.7m) loss for the company. Amid a sales slump, Leica will ask its shareholders to approve a €22m recapitalisation plan to turn around its fortunes. But if the plan fails the company, which single-handedly revolutionised photography in the 1920s and 1930s with its pioneering 35mm camera, is likely to go under. "We are in deep financial difficulties," Gero Furchheim, a spokesman for the firm Leica Camera AG, said yesterday. Analysts say the company's woes are largely due to its failure to enter the digital camera market while demand for its expensive high-quality analogue equipment stagnated. Sales of Leicas, which can cost as much as €10,000, have also suffered from the high euro and from the depressed economies of Germany and France. Founded in 1849 by Ernst Leitz in the German town of Wetzlar, the firm first spe cialised in making microscopes and optical equipment. In 1925, however, it produced its first 35mm camera. The development freed users from the cumbersome large-format cameras and tripods. Photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, who acquired his first Leica in 1932 and called the camera "anextension of my eye", were able to exploit photography's new-found mobility. Many of Cartier-Bresson's most famous images were taken with a Leica. They include the moustached, bowler hatted man caught peeping through the canvas surround at a sports event in Brussels in 1932; the female prisoner denouncing a Gestapo informer in 1945; a boyish Truman Capote in 1947; and children playing on the Berlin wall in 1962. Small, lightweight and unobtrusive, the Leica made it possible to capture the gritty realism of modern warfare. When Capa took his grainy shots of allied troops landing on Omaha beach he did so with a Leica. After the war, the Leica remained the camera of choice for Cartier-Bresson and Capa, two of the co-founders of the world's most celebrated picture agency, Magnum. Yesterday the German firm insisted that its products still had appeal, despite ferocious competition from cheaper Japanese and Chinese rivals. "We can't be a market leader. But we are optimistic we can still be a successful niche player," Mr Furchheim told the Guardian, speaking from the factory in Solms, near Frankfurt, where most Leicas are still made. He added: "If someone just wants to show a young boy throwing a stone in Ramallah they will use a digital camera. If they want to shoot a whole story, explaining what is happening there and why the boy is doing it, they will use a Leica. It's a more intimate tool. With a Leica you can develop your own style, your own handwriting. The fact that we have been linked to reportage across the world is our great strength." The company, which has replaced its chief executive, appears to be pinning its hopes on its pioneering digital camera, the digital module R, which allows photographers to use the same camera body for digital and film pictures. It is due to appear on the market "in the next few weeks or months".

Judge clarifies Google AdWords ruling in the US

A district court judge this week clarified her decision of last December to dismiss important parts of a trade mark case against Google brought by car insurance firm GEICO over the search engine's AdWords service. Car insurance firm GEICO sued both Google and Yahoo! subsidiary Overture in May 2004 over the sale of its registered trade marks as sponsored search terms in the keyword advertising services of both search engines. These services work by allowing advertisers to sponsor particular search terms so that, for a fee, whenever that term is searched the advertiser's link will appear next to the search results. Google’s AdWords underwent a policy change in April 2004. Until then Google had respected requests from companies that asked it to prevent their marks from being available for sponsorship. Conversely, Google has always allowed trade mark holders to request that their trade marks do not appear in the headings or text of sponsored links. But the policy change – allowing a trade marked term to trigger a third party's ad – sparked lawsuits against Google, including the action filed by GEICO. Overture settled in late November, but Google continued its fight. In December, Judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court of the Eastern District of Virginia, announced her decision. This week, she issued a formal opinion explaining in more detail her reasons for that decision, albeit parts of the case are still due to continue to trial unless the parties reach a settlement. The upshot: Google's sale of GEICO trade marks as keywords was not unlawful. But GEICO established a likelihood of confusion with regard to those sponsored links that use GEICO's trade marks in their headings or text. So the sale of GEICO as a keyword was lawful; but ads that included GEICO's marks in their text, however triggered, were not. If the keyword GEICO triggered an ad without GEICO's marks in its text, there would be no infringement. GEICO had presented survey evidence of user confusion, based on a study carried out by a university; but Judge Brinkema expressed "serious doubts about the accuracy of the survey results' reflection of actual users' experiences with and reactions to the Sponsored Links." She wrote that GEICO "has failed to establish a likelihood of confusion stemming from Google's use of GEICO's trademark as a keyword and has not produced sufficient evidence to proceed on the question of whether the Sponsored Links that do not reference GEICO's marks in their headings or text create a sufficient likelihood of confusion to violate either the Lanham Act or Virginia common law." Had GEICO's survey methodology been better, the result may have been different. And mindful of the importance of the issues before her "to the ongoing evolution of internet business practices and to the application of traditional trademark principles to this new medium," Judge Brinkema was careful to emphasise that her ruling "applies only to the specific facts of this case". When the survey participants were shown a page bearing sponsored ads for Nike alongside organic listings in response to a search for GEICO, there was no confusion. Judge Brinkema said this "refutes the allegation that the use of the trademark as a keyword, without more, causes a likelihood of confusion." Notwithstanding the flaws, she acknowledged that GEICO had produced survey evidence "sufficient to establish a likelihood of confusion regarding those Sponsored Links in which the trademark GEICO appears either in the heading or text of the ad." She continued: "Based on this finding, Google may be liable for trademark infringement for the time period before it began blocking such usage or for such ads that have slipped or continue to slip through Google's system for blocking the appearance of GEICO's mark in Sponsored Links." Whether Google or its advertisers should be liable for the use of GEICO's trade marks in the headings and text of Google's sponsored links is a question that has still to be answered. GEICO's General Counsel, Charles Davies, responded to the written opinion, saying, "GEICO will continue to aggressively enforce its trade mark rights against purchasers of its trade marks on search engines and against search engines that sell GEICO's trade marks to advertisers." He continued: "We continue to believe that the sale of GEICO's trade marks to its competitors is wrong and a violation of federal and state law and look forward to litigating that issue in future cases." Google's Litigation Counsel, Michael Kwun, described the ruling as "an extraordinary victory for Google." He explained to SearchEngineWatch.com: "Google is extremely pleased with the outcome in this case. The important issue for us in it – which is the use of trademarks as keyword triggers – was decided decisively in our favor." [This story has been changed since it first appeared. OUT-LAW.com's explanation can be found here.] © Pinsent Masons 2000 - 2005

Articles & Political Commentary

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner and resident fellow at American Enterprise Institute. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Opinion | What You Can't Say Will Hurt You

Chicago - ON Aug. 5, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain announced his intention to carry out a series of new antiterrorism measures, including deporting foreign nationals who justify the use of "violence to further a person's beliefs"; authorizing the denaturalization of British citizens who engage in "extremism"; and legislating a new "offense of condoning or glorifying terrorism." After the July 7 bombings in London, it is understandable that the Mr. Blair would want to deal firmly with those who incite violence. Although the loss of life and property caused by the Sept. 11 attacks far exceeded that in London, the United States was at least spared the constitutional dilemma of having to deal with a situation in which people in the United States encouraged American citizens to take part in the violence. But suppose that had been the case on Sept. 11, or suppose such a situation were to arise in the future. Would we respond any differently than the British? The United States has a long and unfortunate history of overreacting to the fears and anxieties of wartime and excessively restricting the freedom of speech. This was so, for example, in 1798, when the United States was on the verge of war with France, and during the First World War. In both instances, the United States made it unlawful for any person to criticize the president, Congress or the government. Of course, Mr. Blair is not calling for such a far-reaching ban on seditious utterance. Rather, he is targeting only speech that glorifies or justifies acts of terrorism. On its face, this seems sensible. But as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter noted in 1951, speech that extols political violence is often "coupled" with sharp "criticism of defects in our society." For that reason, Justice Frankfurter said, there is an important public interest "in granting freedom to speak their minds" even to those who advocate the use of force to bring about political change. A democratic society must protect itself against violent attack, but it cannot do so by preventing its citizens from hearing even sinister criticism that defends the use of violence.

Preying fields

After a couple of minutes, two young boys approach the tourist. Then two more appear, an older boy holding on to another of no more than four or five. He is carrying a bundle of possessions in a plastic bag. The meeting has obviously been prearranged. The tourist calmly takes the hands of two of the younger boys, one of whom is wearing the tourist's motorcycle helmet. The older boy walks slightly in front of them. Few words are exchanged and the group moves off. The children look happy, skipping along the pavement to keep up. Cambodia is a country that has gained a reputation as a haven for sex tourists. Phnom Penh is described by some as "one giant brothel". As in other countries, there is a spectrum here. At one end are women who have decided - in the absence of other choices - to engage in sex work. At the other are children who are used against their will for the sexual gratification of adults. We follow the group through a maze of back streets, then lose them as they enter a fairground. Perhaps the tourist's intentions are honourable, perhaps he is not a paedophile. Later, we show photographs of the group to Stephanie Remion, director of Action Pour Les Enfants, an NGO (non-governmental organisation) that tracks tourists who come to Cambodia to sexually abuse children. "Yes, I think I recognise these children as ones who have been exploited by paedophiles before," she says. She doesn't recognise the man. In a country ranked among the 20 poorest in the world, dollar income from prostitution is highly valued, particularly by the pimps and brothel owners. A virgin of 12 or 13 can be sold to a brothel for $500 (£280). A foreign tourist who wants to hire her for several days can expect to pay around $1,000 (£560). The money paid to street boys and their fixers varies, but is far more than the children earn from months of begging and scavenging. So lucrative is the trade that many who should be policing or prosecuting this kind of activity accept bribes to cast a blind eye. The average salary of a police officer is around $25 (£14) per month. Those in pursuit of girls can usually find them in brothels; those who want boys tend to recruit them directly on the street. Phnom Penh alone has an estimated 24,000 street children; many live with their parents, but 2,000 have little or no contact with their families and are willing to do almost anything to earn their next meal. The boys picked up by paedophiles tend to combine this "part-time" work with shoe-shining and scavenging for recyclable rubbish. Sex for sale, and Aids, became established here in 1992 when Untac (UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia) arrived to stabilise the country following the devastation of the Pol Pot era and the subsequent Vietnamese occupation. Nowadays, a guesstimate puts 2.6% of the 13m Cambodian population as infected with HIV - although the real figure is likely to be higher - and at least a third are thought to be children under 18. Bopha found herself in a brothel two years ago, at the age of 15. By that time, Untac had gone and the soldier sex buyers had been replaced by Cambodian men and foreign tourists. It all started for Bopha when she was 14 and fell in with a bad crowd at school who encouraged her to play truant, ride motorcycles around Phnom Penh and sing in karaoke bars. She comes from a poor family, but her new friends always had money available. She is 17 now, and thin and frail. She looks too weak even to cry as her mother, Nuch, strokes her hair. She and her mother have moved into the home of her sister in a village on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. The dirt track is lined with small, ramshackle houses, most without electricity or running water. Bopha recalls how she ignored her mother's pleas to concentrate on her studies. One day her friends proposed a trip to the coastal town of Kampong Som, instead of going to school. She readily agreed, and she and three companions, two boys and a girl, spent the day lying on the beach and exploring the town. Her friends found a guesthouse for the night and told her they'd be back shortly with some dinner. But they never returned. She discovered that the guesthouse was a brothel - her so-called friends had sold her for $400 (£224). The brothel owner told Bopha she'd have to work off her "debt". The woman was married to a policeman, but he was rarely seen at the brothel. Bopha was paralysed with horror - she barely knew what sex was. "The first night a large man came into my room and raped me. After that I was forced to receive between five and 10 customers a day. Some of the men said they felt sorry for me because I was so young, but it didn't stop them having sex with me and none of them helped me to escape." Cambodian men had sex with her at the brothel, while western men preferred to take her to their hotel rooms. "The brothel owner's nephew used to accompany me with a translator to the hotels of the white men. Sometimes they put pornographic films in the video machine and tried to make me copy what was going on. If I didn't do what a customer wanted, he would go out of the hotel room and tell the translator ... Then the nephew would beat me. The western men always asked for the youngest girls with the darkest skin, and they didn't want to use condoms." At the brothel she became sick with fever and diarrhoea. A doctor diagnosed typhoid and prescribed medication, which didn't help at all. Bopha made various unsuccessful attempts to escape, but one day, when she was outside washing clothes, a taxi driver offered to take her to the bus station and gave her money to get home. Her mother was delighted to be reunited, but shocked by how ill Bopha was and took her to hospital. HIV was diagnosed. A social worker from World Vision, the largest NGO in Cambodia, approached her while she was in hospital and offered the family a lifeline. They were given a sewing machine and now make a modest income from sewing sarongs. But Bopha has little hope for the future. "Before I was diagnosed with HIV, I didn't know what it was. Now it has made me so weak that the next time I have diarrhoea, I'm scared I'll never get out of bed again." Poverty is the immediate impetus for the sex trade, but the legacy of Khmer Rouge rule in the late 1970s, which resulted in the genocide of between 1.7m and 2.2m Cambodians, has also played a huge role. Under Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge outlawed family life, most possessions, education and intellectuals. Forced labour became mandatory and children as young as five were separated from their families and put to work. Cambodia today is eerily empty of older people. Sixty per cent of the population is now under 24 and more than half the population is believed still to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Such is the fear of a coup by another Pol Pot that some have moved close to the borders so they can quickly escape. In this still-shattered country, tourism is a vital source of income. Cambodia has obvious appeal to visitors - an "undiscovered" destination with stunning temples and beautiful beaches. There is also its macabre recent history, documented at the genocide museum and at the Killing Fields. Above all, there is Cambodia's growing reputation as a sex tourism destination. This is a country where those who exploit children can get away with it. The governments of Thailand and the Philippines, traditional hunting grounds for foreign paedophiles, have strengthened laws to protect children; the Cambodian government, too, has pledged to take a tough line but, in practice, widespread corruption allows many to escape justice. Stephanie Remion says that the going rate to escape punishment for paedophile crimes is $20,000 (£11,200). One foreigner living in Cambodia was arrested then released without charge, despite police finding thousands of sadistic pornographic images of Cambodian children in his possession. In another case, a tourist was caught in his hotel room with a group of young boys, his camera loaded with incriminating pictures. The case went to court but a judge cleared him. Subsequently, human rights activists lodged an appeal and the man was convicted of debauchery and sentenced to 10 years. Now he is appealing. According to researchers Julia O'Connell Davidson and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor, who specialise in the study of sex tourism, not all the sex tourists who visit the bars are hardened paedophiles. Some are opportunists who delude themselves about the child's true age or the nature of the child's consent. O'Connell Davidson and Sanchez Taylor have identified three categories of sex tourists: Macho Man is often young, semi-skilled, travels in groups and is likely to visit prostitutes in the UK; Mr Average is usually older and interested in simulating a relationship; and Cosmopolitan Man views himself as a worldly-wise traveller visiting offbeat locations who would not buy sex elsewhere in the world. One reason these men end up with children under 18 may be because they're so highly represented in the sector. The underage girls who work in brothels are often illiterate. They usually move from countryside to town to find work to support their families, begin with a legitimate job at a restaurant or market, maybe, then get tricked into the brothels with inducements of earning much greater sums of money. Because they have been sold for several hundred dollars, and have to "repay" the purchase price, they rarely see the money they earn. Neang was 14 and her sister 16 when their mother remarried. Her new husband stopped working and took up drinking, and the girls collected firewood to sell locally to help feed the family. One day a neighbour told them there were jobs going in a soup restaurant in a town some distance away where they could earn far more. The girls left without telling their mother, intending to send home their earnings. Both got jobs, Neang with a salary of $10 (£5.50) a month, her sister $12 (£6.50). At first the work went well, but after some weeks the restaurant owner forced Neang's sister to go off with a customer in his car. "She was gone for five days and when she came back she was holding her stomach and complaining she felt sick. She told me the man was a customs officer who kept her captive in a hotel room for five days." Neang discovered that all the girls who worked at the restaurant were forced to have sex with customers, and after three months she, too, despite her screams of protest, found herself bundled into a customer's car. "The man drove me to Phnom Penh and took me to a room on the top floor of a guesthouse. He went out and came back with a fruit shake for me, which I drank. Then I felt very sleepy. For part of the time I lost consciousness, and when I was awake I felt too drowsy to focus properly. I was awake enough to know the man was raping me, though." After a few days, the man drove Neang back to the restaurant. There, another customer promised her a job in a clothing factory in Phnom Penh. Such jobs, supplying high-street chainstores across Europe and north America, are well-paid and highly prized - Neang agreed. "I was taken to an area where I could see lots of girls all wearing nice clothes. I said to one of them: 'Where's the garment factory?' She replied: 'This is a factory, but it's not for clothes.' She told me that I had been sold to a brothel." When Neang refused customers, men she describes as "gangsters" who policed the brothel beat her with electric flex. "The brothel owner told me I had to receive 10 customers a day. He injected me with a white powder, which he mixed with water. I don't know what it was, but it made me feel happier and more willing to receive customers." It was probably methamphetamine, a drug whose use has exploded in Cambodia in the past few years. Neang, the youngest in the brothel, still resisted and eventually she was sold on to another brothel. Here she was expected to service 30 customers a day. Her punishment for refusing customers was food deprivation. By now she was addicted to the drugs she had been injected with. "The drug made my body no longer feel part of me. It blocked everything out. I didn't think of my sister or my mother or anything." Three times Neang tried to escape and three times the brothel gangsters caught her. After two years she was rescued during a police raid and was placed in a shelter. There she came off drugs, with difficulty, and was referred to Neavear Thmey, a trauma recovery project run by World Vision. For Neang, stepping through the high gates, which shield the girls from prying outsiders, was like entering a new world. From the swings and climbing frames to the pretty garden and murals on the walls, the centre - where girls spend between six months and a year - is intended to embody the innocence of childhood. The girls sleep in small groups, each with a house parent, in an environment as much like family life as possible. The centre has taken in girls as young as six. All arrive at the shelter malnourished, and 12% are infected with HIV. "The girls sometimes cut themselves and we have to put netting on the roof to prevent them from attempting suicide by jumping off," says Sovandara Somchan, manager of Neaver Thmey. Learning a skill is a priority. Girls may also be given a cow to take back to their families to allow them to become self-sufficient, or a bicycle so that they can attend school. Neang was given an HIV test at the centre. "When I heard the test was positive, I wanted to go out on to the road, get hit by a car and die," she says. Now she is beginning to come to terms with her diagnosis and hopes that, in due course, she will be eligible for one of the free places for anti-retroviral treatment offered by the government. She has been reunited with her mother and is back in her village, gathering firewood again. "My mother was so happy to see me. We were hugging and kissing and crying. After my sister and I disappeared, my mother consulted a fortune-teller, who told her I was dead. She says that having me back is like having her daughter reborn." Neang's future is uncertain, but at least for now she feels safe. She has no idea what happened to her sister. Back at one of the bars not far from Sisowath Quay, the tourists are at play. As usual, there are three times as many Cambodian and Vietnamese sex workers as white, male visitors, and plentiful beer and football games on a big screen close by. For ordinary Cambodian women, it would be dishonourable to set foot in one of these places; for Cambodian men, it would be culturally alien and very expensive. Many of the girls for sale look no more than 15. Bob, a thin, white-haired American man in his 60s, says that he is self-employed and spends part of the year in the US and part here. Like many of the men in the bars, he is a regular. He tells me proudly that he has "had" half the girls at the bar and that, while some men end up paying $10 for them, he can get them for as little as $5. "All the men at this bar are here for one reason and one reason only." He winks. "Most of the girls are doing this for their families. They send a lot of the money they earn home." Does it bother him that so many of the girls look no more than 15? "Well, they're supposed to be 18 to work here, but who knows?" he says, shrugging. At another bar, a large group of Scottish men in their 40s and 50s stand laughing and playing pool. One by one they pair off with the girls who approach them. An American man shakes my hand. He, too, is happy to explain how things work. While he chats, the Vietnamese girl he has selected to spend the night with sits patiently on her bar stool, a smile soldered to her face. He is a regular visitor. His business on the US east coast is seasonal and in winter he heads for the 90 degree-plus (32C) temperatures of Cambodia. He is travelling with a friend who is wealthy enough to take a couple of months off for an annual visit to Cambodia. The pair visit brothels together. He makes a moral distinction between himself and his preference for "a mature woman who understands what sex is all about" and his fellow tourists who seek out eight- and nine-year-old children. "Those guys who come here for the girls and boys of that age should be taken out and shot." Christian Guth, a former French senior police officer, now an adviser to the ministry of interior in Cambodia, believes there has been an improvement - the government is doing more than it once did to clamp down on foreign abusers. "Five years ago, the police laughed when we expressed concern about men having sex with 14-year-old girls, because it was something they did themselves. The first obstacle to change was their mindset. We haven't got 100% commitment, but we have identified a few officers in each area of the country who are really committed." In 2002 an anti-human trafficking and juvenile protection department was established. It is, however, hard to find evidence of a crackdown. The number of arrests of men for sexually abusing children was 401 last year, but only 18 of them were foreigners. The men come from a variety of European countries, from New Zealand, Australia, North America and Japan. The youngest was 28, the oldest 69. Many are professionals, including two retired military officers, several teachers of English in Cambodia and a chemistry professor. The ages of the children abused range from seven to 15. The vast majority of charges are dropped even when the men are caught in a sex act with a child. There are currently fewer than half a dozen convicted foreign paedophiles in Cambodian jails, while three US citizens have been extradited to their own country to stand trial. A handful of other men are in jail in their own countries, including two in the UK. Guth acknowledges the pervasive corruption. "A lawyer might say to the family of a child who lodges a complaint against a paedophile that if they drop the complaint, the offender will give them anything from a few hundred dollars to $2,000." He wants to be optimistic, but admits that the number of sexually exploited children is increasing. Not only are there more tourists, there's also a new category of Khmer middle-class man who now has the money to pay for sex. Another problem is that the government seems less determined to stamp out child prostitution than the NGOs are. "The penalties here are much less harsh than in Thailand, and the sex is less expensive." Some girls who were forced into prostitution do manage to put the rapes and beatings behind them and start a new life. Sovandara Somchan proudly points to photographs on his office wall of girls who have launched successful careers as hairdressers or seamstresses after a period at Neavear Thmey. Pov, 17, hoped that she, too, could make a new start. She was tricked into a brothel at the age of 14 while selling lotus flowers on the riverfront in Phnom Penh. Like Neang, she was distraught when she became sick and diagnosed with HIV. "I knew that somehow I had to run away," she says. She succeeded by climbing out of a window and running to the local market. A porridge-seller helped her hide and gave her money to get a bus home to her mother. Pov's priority now, as it was before she went into the brothel, is to earn enough to eat for whatever time she has left to live. "Because I have Aids, getting married and having children is no longer an option for me." She has, she says, one simple dream. "If I knew I had just one week left to live, what I'd like to do most of all is go into town and buy all the fruits I adore and eat them - fruits like apples, which don't grow on the trees in my village." Some names have been changed.

Hiring is Obsolete

Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. May 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA.) The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads? Like everything else in technology, the cost of starting a startup has decreased dramatically. Now it's so low that it has disappeared into the noise. The main cost of starting a Web-based startup is food and rent. Which means it doesn't cost much more to start a company than to be a total slacker. You can probably start a startup on ten thousand dollars of seed funding, if you're prepared to live on ramen. The less it costs to start a company, the less you need the permission of investors to do it. So a lot of people will be able to start companies now who never could have before. The most interesting subset may be those in their early twenties. I'm not so excited about founders who have everything investors want except intelligence, or everything except energy. The most promising group to be liberated by the new, lower threshold are those who have everything investors want except experience. Market Rate I once claimed that nerds were unpopular in secondary school mainly because they had better things to do than work full-time at being popular. Some said I was just telling people what they wanted to hear. Well, I'm now about to do that in a spectacular way: I think undergraduates are undervalued. Or more precisely, I think few realize the huge spread in the value of 20 year olds. Some, it's true, are not very capable. But others are more capable than all but a handful of 30 year olds. [ 1 ] Till now the problem has always been that it's difficult to pick them out. Every VC in the world, if they could go back in time, would try to invest in Microsoft. But which would have then? How many would have understood that this particular 19 year old was Bill Gates? It's hard to judge the young because (a) they change rapidly, (b) there is great variation between them, and (c) they're individually inconsistent. That last one is a big problem. When you're young, you occasionally say and do stupid things even when you're smart. So if the algorithm is to filter out people who say stupid things, as many investors and employers unconsciously do, you're going to get a lot of false positives. Most organizations who hire people right out of college are only aware of the average value of 22 year olds, which is not that high. And so the idea for most of the twentieth century was that everyone had to begin as a trainee in some entry-level job. Organizations realized there was a lot of variation in the incoming stream, but instead of pursuing this thought they tended to suppress it, in the belief that it was good for even the most promising kids to start at the bottom, so they didn't get swelled heads. The most productive young people will always be undervalued by large organizations, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean. What's an especially productive 22 year old to do? One thing you can do is go over the heads of organizations, directly to the users. Any company that hires you is, economically, acting as a proxy for the customer. The rate at which they value you (though they may not consciously realize it) is an attempt to guess your value to the user. But there's a way to appeal their judgement. If you want, you can opt to be valued directly by users, by starting your own company. The market is a lot more discerning than any employer. And it is completely non-discriminatory. On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. And more to the point, nobody knows you're 22. All users care about is whether your site or software gives them what they want. They don't care if the person behind it is a high school kid. If you're really productive, why not make employers pay market rate for you? Why go work as an ordinary employee for a big company, when you could start a startup and make them buy it to get you? When most people hear the word "startup," they think of the famous ones that have gone public. But most startups that succeed do it by getting bought. And usually the acquirer doesn't just want the technology, but the people who created it as well. Often big companies buy startups before they're profitable. Obviously in such cases they're not after revenues. What they want is the development team and the software they've built so far. When a startup gets bought for 2 or 3 million six months in, it's really more of a hiring bonus than an acquisition. I think this sort of thing will happen more and more, and that it will be better for everyone. It's obviously better for the people who start the startup, because they get a big chunk of money up front. But I think it will be better for the acquirers too. The central problem in big companies, and the main reason they're so much less productive than small companies, is the difficulty of valuing each person's work. Buying larval startups solves that problem for them: the acquirer doesn't pay till the developers have proven themselves. Acquirers are protected on the downside, but still get most of the upside. Product Development Buying startups also solves another problem afflicting big companies: they can't do product development. Big companies are good at extracting the value from existing products, but bad at creating new ones. Why? It's worth studying this phenomenon in detail, because this is the raison d'etre of startups. To start with, most big companies have some kind of turf to protect, and this tends to warp their development decisions. For example, Web-based applications are hot now, but within Microsoft there must be a lot of ambivalence about them, because the very idea of Web-based software threatens the desktop. So any Web-based application that Microsoft ends up with, will probably, like Hotmail, be something developed outside the company. Another reason big companies are bad at developing new products is that the kind of people who do that tend not to have much power in big companies (unless they happen to be the CEO). Disruptive technologies are developed by disruptive people. And they either don't work for the big company, or have been outmaneuvered by yes-men and have comparatively little influence. Big companies also lose because they usually only build one of each thing. When you only have one Web browser, you can't do anything really risky with it. If ten different startups design ten different Web browsers and you take the best, you'll probably get something better. The more general version of this problem is that there are too many new ideas for companies to explore them all. There might be 500 startups right now who think they're making something Microsoft might buy. Even Microsoft probably couldn't manage 500 development projects in-house. Big companies also don't pay people the right way. People developing a new product at a big company get paid roughly the same whether it succeeds or fails. People at a startup expect to get rich if the product succeeds, and get nothing if it fails. [ 2 ] So naturally the people at the startup work a lot harder. The mere bigness of big companies is an obstacle. In startups, developers are often forced to talk directly to users, whether they want to or not, because there is no one else to do sales and support. It's painful doing sales, but you learn much more from trying to sell people something than reading what they said in focus groups. And then of course, big companies are bad at product development because they're bad at everything. Everything happens slower in big companies than small ones, and product development is something that has to happen fast, because you have to go through a lot of iterations to get something good. Trend I think the trend of big companies buying startups will only accelerate. One of the biggest remaining obstacles is pride. Most companies, at least unconsciously, feel they ought to be able to develop stuff in house, and that buying startups is to some degree an admission of failure. And so, as people generally do with admissions of failure, they put it off for as long as possible. That makes the acquisition very expensive when it finally happens. What companies should do is go out and discover startups when they're young, before VCs have puffed them up into something that costs hundreds of millions to acquire. Much of what VCs add, the acquirer doesn't need anyway. Why don't acquirers try to predict the companies they're going to have to buy for hundreds of millions, and grab them early for a tenth or a twentieth of that? Because they can't predict the winners in advance? If they're only paying a twentieth as much, they only have to predict a twentieth as well. Surely they can manage that. I think companies that acquire technology will gradually learn to go after earlier stage startups. They won't necessarily buy them outright. The solution may be some hybrid of investment and acquisition: for example, to buy a chunk of the company and get an option to buy the rest later. When companies buy startups, they're effectively fusing recruiting and product development. And I think that's more efficient than doing the two separately, because you always get people who are really committed to what they're working on. Plus this method yields teams of developers who already work well together. Any conflicts between them have been ironed out under the very hot iron of running a startup. By the time the acquirer gets them, they're finishing one another's sentences. That's valuable in software, because so many bugs occur at the boundaries between different people's code. Investors The increasing cheapness of starting a company doesn't just give hackers more power relative to employers. It also gives them more power relative to investors. The conventional wisdom among VCs is that hackers shouldn't be allowed to run their own companies. The founders are supposed to accept MBAs as their bosses, and themselves take on some title like Chief Technical Officer. There may be cases where this is a good idea. But I think founders will increasingly be able to push back in the matter of control, because they just don't need the investors' money as much as they used to. Startups are a comparatively new phenomenon. Fairchild Semiconductor is considered the first VC-backed startup, and they were founded in 1959, less than fifty years ago. Measured on the time scale of social change, what we have now is pre-beta. So we shouldn't assume the way startups work now is the way they have to work. Fairchild needed a lot of money to get started. They had to build actual factories. What does the first round of venture funding for a Web-based startup get spent on today? More money can't get software written faster; it isn't needed for facilities, because those can now be quite cheap; all money can really buy you is sales and marketing. A sales force is worth something, I'll admit. But marketing is increasingly irrelevant. On the Internet, anything genuinely good will spread by word of mouth. Investors' power comes from money. When startups need less money, investors have less power over them. So future founders may not have to accept new CEOs if they don't want them. The VCs will have to be dragged kicking and screaming down this road, but like many things people have to be dragged kicking and screaming toward, it may actually be good for them. Google is a sign of the way things are going. As a condition of funding, their investors insisted they hire someone old and experienced as CEO. But from what I've heard the founders didn't just give in and take whoever the VCs wanted. They delayed for an entire year, and when they did finally take a CEO, they chose a guy with a PhD in computer science. It sounds to me as if the founders are still the most powerful people in the company, and judging by Google's performance, their youth and inexperience doesn't seem to have hurt them. Indeed, I suspect Google has done better than they would have if the founders had given the VCs what they wanted, when they wanted it, and let some MBA take over as soon as they got their first round of funding. I'm not claiming the business guys installed by VCs have no value. Certainly they have. But they don't need to become the founders' bosses, which is what that title CEO means. I predict that in the future the executives installed by VCs will increasingly be COOs rather than CEOs. The founders will run engineering directly, and the rest of the company through the COO. The Open Cage With both employers and investors, the balance of power is slowly shifting towards the young. And yet they seem the last to realize it. Only the most ambitious undergrads even consider starting their own company when they graduate. Most just want to get a job. Maybe this is as it should be. Maybe if the idea of starting a startup is intimidating, you filter out the uncommitted. But I suspect the filter is set a little too high. I think there are people who could, if they tried, start successful startups, and who instead let themselves be swept into the intake ducts of big companies. Have you ever noticed that when animals are let out of cages, they don't always realize at first that the door's open? Often they have to be poked with a stick to get them out. Something similar happened with blogs. People could have been publishing online in 1995, and yet blogging has only really taken off in the last couple years. In 1995 we thought only professional writers were entitled to publish their ideas, and that anyone else who did was a crank. Now publishing online is becoming so popular that everyone wants to do it, even print journalists. But blogging has not taken off recently because of any technical innovation; it just took eight years for everyone to realize the cage was open. I think most undergrads don't realize yet that the economic cage is open. A lot have been told by their parents that the route to success is to get a good job. This was true when their parents were in college, but it's less true now. The route to success is to build something valuable, and you don't have to be working for an existing company to do that. Indeed, you can often do it better if you're not. When I talk to undergrads, what surprises me most about them is how conservative they are. Not politically, of course. I mean they don't seem to want to take risks. This is a mistake, because the younger you are, the more risk you can take. Risk Risk and reward are always proportionate. For example, stocks are riskier than bonds, and over time always have greater returns. So why does anyone invest in bonds? The catch is that phrase "over time." Stocks will generate greater returns over thirty years, but they might lose value from year to year. So what you should invest in depends on how soon you need the money. If you're young, you should take the riskiest investments you can find. All this talk about investing may seem very theoretical. Most undergrads probably have more debts than assets. They may feel they have nothing to invest. But that's not true: they have their time to invest, and the same rule about risk applies there. Your early twenties are exactly the time to take insane career risks. The reason risk is always proportionate to reward is that market forces make it so. People will pay extra for stability. So if you choose stability-- by buying bonds, or by going to work for a big company-- it's going to cost you. Riskier career moves pay better on average, because there is less demand for them. Extreme choices like starting a startup are so frightening that most people won't even try. So you don't end up having as much competition as you might expect, considering the prizes at stake. The math is brutal. While perhaps 9 out of 10 startups fail, the one that succeeds will pay the founders more than 10 times what they would have made in an ordinary job. [ 3 ] That's the sense in which startups pay better "on average." Remember that. If you start a startup, you'll probably fail. Most startups fail. It's the nature of the business. But it's not necessarily a mistake to try something that has a 90% chance of failing, if you can afford the risk. Failing at 40, when you have a family to support, could be serious. But if you fail at 22, so what? If you try to start a startup right out of college and it tanks, you'll end up at 23 broke and a lot smarter. Which, if you think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate program. Even if your startup does tank, you won't harm your prospects with employers. To make sure I asked some friends who work for big companies. I asked managers at Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Cisco and Microsoft how they'd feel about two candidates, both 24, with equal ability, one who'd tried to start a startup that tanked, and another who'd spent the two years since college working as a developer at a big company. Every one responded that they'd prefer the guy who'd tried to start his own company. Zod Nazem, who's in charge of engineering at Yahoo, said: I actually put more value on the guy with the failed startup. And you can quote me! So there you have it. Want to get hired by Yahoo? Start your own company. The Man is the Customer If even big employers think highly of young hackers who start companies, why don't more do it? Why are undergrads so conservative? I think it's because they've spent so much time in institutions. The first twenty years of everyone's life consists of being piped from one institution to another. You probably didn't have much choice about the secondary schools you went to. And after high school it was probably understood that you were supposed to go to college. You may have had a few different colleges to choose between, but they were probably pretty similar. So by this point you've been riding on a subway line for twenty years, and the next stop seems to be a job. Actually college is where the line ends. Superficially, going to work for a company may feel like just the next in a series of institutions, but underneath, everything is different. The end of school is the fulcrum of your life, the point where you go from net consumer to net producer. The other big change is that now, you're steering. You can go anywhere you want. So it may be worth standing back and understanding what's going on, instead of just doing the default thing. All through college, and probably long before that, most undergrads have been thinking about what employers want. But what really matters is what customers want, because they're the ones who give employers the money to pay you. So instead of thinking about what employers want, you're probably better off thinking directly about what users want. To the extent there's any difference between the two, you can even use that to your advantage if you start a company of your own. For example, big companies like docile conformists. But this is merely an artifact of their bigness, not something customers need. Grad School I didn't consciously realize all this when I was graduating from college-- partly because I went straight to grad school. Grad school can be a pretty good deal, even if you think of one day starting a startup. You can start one when you're done, or even pull the ripcord part way through, like the founders of Yahoo and Google. Grad school makes a good launch pad for startups, because you're collected together with a lot of smart people, and you have bigger chunks of time to work on your own projects than an undergrad or corporate employee would. As long as you have a fairly tolerant advisor, you can take your time developing an idea before turning it into a company. David Filo and Jerry Yang started the Yahoo directory in February 1994 and were getting a million hits a day by the fall, but they didn't actually drop out of grad school and start a company till March 1995. You could also try the startup first, and if it doesn't work, then go to grad school. When startups tank they usually do it fairly quickly. Within a year you'll know if you're wasting your time. If it fails, that is. If it succeeds, you may have to delay grad school a little longer. But you'll have a much more enjoyable life once there than you would on a regular grad student stipend. Experience Another reason people in their early twenties don't start startups is that they feel they don't have enough experience. Most investors feel the same. I remember hearing a lot of that word "experience" when I was in college. What do people really mean by it? Obviously it's not the experience itself that's valuable, but something it changes in your brain. What's different about your brain after you have "experience," and can you make that change happen faster? I now have some data on this, and I can tell you what tends to be missing when people lack experience. I've said that every startup needs three things: to start with good people, to make something users want, and not to spend too much money. It's the middle one you get wrong when you're inexperienced. There are plenty of undergrads with enough technical skill to write good software, and undergrads are not especially prone to waste money. If they get something wrong, it's usually not realizing they have to make something people want. This is not exclusively a failing of the young. It's common for startup founders of all ages to build things no one wants. Fortunately, this flaw should be easy to fix. If undergrads were all bad programmers, the problem would be a lot harder. It can take years to learn how to program. But I don't think it takes years to learn how to make things people want. My hypothesis is that all you have to do is smack hackers on the side of the head and tell them: Wake up. Don't sit here making up a priori theories about what users need. Go find some users and see what they need. Most successful startups not only do something very specific, but solve a problem people already know they have. The big change that "experience" causes in your brain is learning that you need to solve people's problems. Once you grasp that, you advance quickly to the next step, which is figuring out what those problems are. And that takes some effort, because the way software actually gets used, especially by the people who pay the most for it, is not at all what you might expect. For example, the stated purpose of Powerpoint is to present ideas. Its real role is to overcome people's fear of public speaking. It allows you to give an impressive-looking talk about nothing, and it causes the audience to sit in a dark room looking at slides, instead of a bright one looking at you. This kind of thing is out there for anyone to see. The key is to know to look for it-- to realize that having an idea for a startup is not like having an idea for a class project. The goal in a startup is not to write a cool piece of software. It's to make something people want. And to do that you have to look at users-- forget about hacking, and just look at users. This can be quite a mental adjustment, because little if any of the software you write in school even has users. A few steps before a Rubik's Cube is solved, it still looks like a mess. I think there are a lot of undergrads whose brains are in a similar position: they're only a few steps away from being able to start successful startups, if they wanted to, but they don't realize it. They have more than enough technical skill. They just haven't realized yet that the way to create wealth is to make what users want, and that employers are just proxies for users in which risk is pooled. If you're young and smart, you don't need either of those. You don't need someone else to tell you what users want, because you can figure it out yourself. And you don't want to pool risk, because the younger you are, the more risk you should take. A Public Service Message I'd like to conclude with a joint message from me and your parents. Don't drop out of college to start a startup. There's no rush. There will be plenty of time to start companies after you graduate. In fact, it may be just as well to go work for an existing company for a couple years after you graduate, to learn how companies work. And yet, when I think about it, I can't imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. He'd have told me to get lost. And could I have honestly claimed that he was harming his future-- that he was learning less by working at ground zero of the microcomputer revolution than he would have if he'd been taking classes back at Harvard? No, probably not. And yes, while it is probably true that you'll learn some valuable things by going to work for an existing company for a couple years before starting your own, you'd learn a thing or two running your own company during that time too. The advice about going to work for someone else would get an even colder reception from the 19 year old Bill Gates. So I'm supposed to finish college, then go work for another company for two years, and then I can start my own? I have to wait till I'm 23? That's four years. That's more than twenty percent of my life so far. Plus in four years it will be way too late to make money writing a Basic interpreter for the Altair. And he'd be right. The Apple II was launched just two years later. In fact, if Bill had finished college and gone to work for another company as we're suggesting, he might well have gone to work for Apple. And while that would probably have been better for all of us, it wouldn't have been better for him. So while I stand by our responsible advice to finish college and then go work for a while before starting a startup, I have to admit it's one of those things the old tell the young, but don't expect them to listen to. We say this sort of thing mainly so we can claim we warned you. So don't say I didn't warn you. Notes [ 1 ] The average B-17 pilot in World War II was in his early twenties. (Thanks to Tad Marko for pointing this out.) [ 2 ] If a company tried to pay employees this way, they'd be called unfair. And yet when they buy some startups and not others, no one thinks of calling that unfair. [ 3 ] The 1/10 success rate for startups is a bit of an urban legend. It's suspiciously neat. My guess is the odds are slightly worse. Thanks to Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this, to the friends I promised anonymity to for their opinions about hiring, and to Karen Nguyen and the Berkeley CSUA for organizing this talk. Russian Translation Romanian Translation Japanese Translation If you liked this, you may also like Hackers & Painters.

Web trade threat to rare species

Ifaw says one site offered two-week-old tiger cubs for $1,500 An International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw) probe found 9,000 live animals or products for sale in one week on trading sites like eBay. Ifaw claims many traders are taking advantage of the internet's anonymity. The UK Government says it takes wildlife crime seriously, but Ifaw urged it to act urgently. During a three month investigation, Ifaw found some of the world's most endangered species for sale online - almost all being traded illegally. Animal parts These included a live gorilla for sale in London and a Siberian tiger and four baby chimps on US websites. Animal body parts included hawksbill turtle shells, shahtoosh shawls from the Tibetan antelope and taxidermy specimens of lions, and peregrine falcons - protected by British law. Ivory items and traditional Asian remedies containing parts of endangered tigers and rhinos were common place. The result is a cyber black market where the future of the world's rarest animals is being traded away. Phyllis Campbell-McRae Director IFAW UK The report, Caught in the Web: Wildlife Trade on the Internet, said many animals were being targeted by poachers to meet the demands of wealthy consumers. Ifaw UK director Phyllis Campbell-McRae said unscrupulous traders and sophisticated criminal gangs took advantage of the anonymity afforded by the internet. "The result is a cyber black market where the future of the world's rarest animals is being traded away. "This situation must be tackled immediately by governments and website owners." 'Laws exist' Of the 9,000 animals and animal parts found for sale by the probe in its first week alone, 70% were from species protected by international law. Ifaw wants the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to ensure that bans are enforced. IFAW is warning the public not to purchase any endangered species Professor William Dutton, director of the Oxford Internet Institute, said: "Laws exist to stop the unlawful use of any communication medium, but governments and agencies need to communicate in order to address activities that span the globe." Endangered animals are protected under international law by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), but there are not enough resources to enforce it, the report said. British native wildlife law prohibits the trade all wild birds and mammals found in the UK. But researchers found there was a lack of understanding of the legislation. They wants Defra to provide user-friendly information on its own website. The report urged the department to set up a hotline for easy reporting of suspicious trade. Unlimited fines Defra welcomed the report. Biodiversity minister Jim Knight said: "The National Wildlife Crime Intelligence Unit is working closely with internet service providers to raise awareness of wildlife controls and to enhance intelligence-gathering on wildlife crime. "Last month, we introduced tough new penalties for people convicted of trading in endangered species, meaning they now face up to five years in prison or an unlimited fine." He said the penalties give police stronger powers of arrest, entry, search and seizure. Ifaw says this spider monkey was for sale The government was also consulting on plans to use powers under EC regulations to cut wildlife crime at home and abroad. Website owners are being urged to let users report their suspicions and work more closely with government and enforcement agencies. A spokesman for eBay said its animals policy goes beyond the law in prohibiting the sale of native and endangered species and it was working closely with the Ifaw to ensure the site remained free from illegal items. "If we are made aware of any listing that breaks this policy, we will end the listing and may, where appropriate, forward it to the relevant law enforcement agency for action. "We strongly encourage users to report illegal items to customer support."

Tech Quotes: Combobulate.com

TOP 25 TECHNOLOGY QUOTES Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. -Albert Einstein "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." -Albert Einstein Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. -Albert Einstein Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. -Aldous Huxley "The perfect computer has been developed. You just feed in your problems and they never come out again." -AL Goodman The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. -B. F. Skinner Contingencies of Reinforcement, 1969 It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are. -Clive James One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man. -Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923 If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. -Isaac Newton Hardware: the parts of a computer that can be kicked. -Jeff Pesis Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all. -John F. Kennedy The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people. -Karl Marx "Beware of computer programmers that carry screwdrivers." -Leonard Brandwein All of the biggest technological inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness. -Mark Kennedy Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor. -NASA in 1965 "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." -Pablo Picasso "To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." -Paul Ehrlich Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. -Rich Cook Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork. -Sam Ewing “Technology has the shelf life of a banana.” -Scott McNealy Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window. -Steve Wozniak The most important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them -Sir William Bragg Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless. -Thomas Alva Edison Anyone who puts a small gloss on a fundamental technology, calls it proprietary, and then tries to keep others from building on it, is a thief. -Tim O'Reilly

Chavez makes US oil export threat

Chavez's speech talked about the need to defeat imperialism He described recent US government actions as "aggressive" in a speech at a youth festival in Caracas. As a result, Venezuelan oil "instead of going to the United States, could go elsewhere," he said. Venezuela exports about 1.3 million barrels a day to the US and is the world's fifth largest oil producer. Tensions between the two countries have escalated since President Chavez accused the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) of spying on his government. Washington denies the charge and has accused Caracas of failing to co-operate in the fight against drug-trafficking. On Friday the Venezuelan government withdrew diplomatic immunity from DEA agents working in the country in response to a US decision to revoke the visas of six Venezuelan officials based in Washington. Venezuela is an important transport route for cocaine from neighbouring Colombia, which produces 80% of the world's supply.

Scientists make nerve stem cells

Stem cells can be programmed to become many kinds of tissue It is hoped the newly-created cells will eventually help scientists find new treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh said the cells should help researchers test the effectiveness of new drugs. Stem cells are "master" cells that can become many kinds of tissue. Nerve stem cells are those which help build the brain and central nervous system. STEM CELL MILESTONES 1960s: Research begins on stem cells taken from adult tissue 1968: Adult stem cells used to treat immunodeficient patient 1998: US scientists grow stem cells from human embryos and germ cells, establishing cell lines still in use today 2001: Embryonic stem cell turned into a blood cell 2004: South Korean scientists clone 30 human embryos and develop them over several days 2005: Korean team develops stem cells tailored to match individual patients The university's Dr Steven Pollard said: "This is incredibly exciting in terms of curing disease. "We may be able to create the disease in a dish. If we do that, we'll be able to better understand the disease and also to test drugs." Our correspondent said the long-term aim of the Edinburgh research is for cells to be used to build replacement neural tissue for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's sufferers. But he said the more immediate use for the artificially-created cells is to test out the effectiveness of new drugs. Professor Austin Smith, who led the research at the University of Edinburgh, told the BBC: "We're already talking with the bio-technology and bio-pharmaceutical companies about taking these cells into screening systems for new drugs. Hopefully that will come to pass within two to three years. "In terms of the possibility of using the cells for transplantation, that's a much more difficult and longer term thing and I think there we're talking more of the five to ten year range." However, critics say it is unethical to use human embryos in scientific research. Previous attempts at creating the nerve cells have produced contaminated samples that have not been scientifically useful. Robert Meadowcroft, of the Parkinson's Disease Society, welcomed the news: "The purity of these cells should prove particularly valuable in studying the possibilities for transplantation and replacement of damaged tissue." The Alzheimer's Society echoed this view, saying that the inability to grow nerve cells from human embryonic stem cells had previously been a major obstacle to progress in this area. The breakthrough comes three months after scientists at Newcastle University announced they had successfully produced a cloned embryo using donated eggs and genetic material from stem cells. It was the first time a human cloned embryo had been created in Britain.

Want women in IT? Make maths mandatory

A new study of 21 different nations has found that the male dominance of computer science at university level is pandemic. At first glance the study looks to be yet more confirmation of what we already know. However, it gets more interesting. Differences between the countries indicate that women might not be genetically predisposed to shun all things high tech, and that there might be other factors at work. The study, co-authored by Maria Charles, professor of sociology at the University of California and Karen Bradley of Western Washington University, found that men are over-represented among computer science graduates everywhere, but the degree of over-representation varies by as much as a factor of three. So what is behind the variation? Turns out, it is not what you might expect. Girls' higher achievement in maths or science did not seem to be related to the number of graduates, nor was cultural support for equal opportunities a good predictor of which countries had the most women Comp Sci graduates. In Turkey, for instance, for every woman Comp Sci graduate there are 1.79 men, while at the other end of the scale, in the Czech republic men graduates outnumber women by 6.42 to one [perhaps they're all working as super-models and will return to their computing education at a later stage - Ed]. South Korea and Ireland also have more relatively high numbers of women graduating from computer science courses, but, like Turkey, neither of these nations is especially renowned for taking a hard line on sex equality. Instead, it seems that restricting the choices available to adolescents, and making it mandatory for all pupils to study maths and science subjects throughout their secondary education, correlates with a higher proportion of women going on to study computer science at university. "The principle of being free to pursue your preferences is compatible and coexists quite comfortably with a belief in essential gender differences. This essentialist notion, which helps to create what it seeks to explain, affects girls’ views of what they're good at and can shape what they like," said Charles. She goes on to say that the implications for policy are clear: rather that letting kids discard subjects too soon, governments should insist on more maths and science for everyone, for longer. "As other research has repeatedly shown, choices made during adolescence are more likely to be made on the basis of gender stereotypes, so we should push off choice until later," she concludes. ®

Researchers find great value in gossip / Spreading tales of others' misdeeds helps arrest offensive behaviors

Researchers find great value in gossip / Spreading tales of others' misdeeds helps arrest offensive behaviors Juicy gossip moves so quickly -- He did what? She has pictures? -- that few people have time to cover their ears, even if they want to. "I heard a lot in the hallway, on the way to class," said Mady Miraglia, 35, a high school history teacher in Los Gatos, speaking about a previous job where she got a running commentary from fellow teachers on the sexual peccadilloes and classroom struggles of her colleagues. "To be honest, it made me feel better as a teacher to hear others being put down," she said. "I was out there on my own, I had no sense of how I was doing in class, and the gossip gave me some connection. And I felt like it gave me status, knowing information, being on the inside." Gossip has long been dismissed by researchers as little more than background noise, self-serving blather that serves no useful function. But some investigators now say it belongs front and center in any study of group interaction. People find gossip irresistible for good reason: It not only helps clarify and enforce the rules that keep people working well together, studies suggest, but it circulates crucial information about the behavior of others that cannot be published in an office manual. As often as it sullies reputations, psychologists say, gossip offers a foothold for newcomers in a group and a safety net for group members who feel in danger of falling out. "There has been a tendency to denigrate gossip as sloppy and unreliable" and unworthy of serious study, said David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology and anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. "But gossip appears to be a very sophisticated, multifunctional interaction which is important in policing behaviors in a group and defining group membership." When two or more people huddle to share inside information about another person who is absent, they are often spreading important news and enacting a mutually protective ritual that may have evolved from early grooming behaviors, some biologists argue. Long-term studies of Pacific Islanders, American middle-school children and residents of rural Newfoundland and Mexico, among others, have confirmed that the content and frequency of gossip are universal: People devote anywhere from a fifth to two-thirds or more of their daily conversation to gossip, and men appear to be just as eager for the skinny as women. Sneaking, lying and cheating among friends or acquaintances make for the most savory material, of course, and most people pass on their best nuggets to at least two other people, surveys find. This grapevine branches out through almost every social group, and it functions, in part, to keep people from straying too far outside the group's rules, written and unwritten, social scientists find. In one recent experiment, Wilson led a team of researchers who asked a group of 195 men and women to rate their approval or disapproval of several situations in which people talked behind the back of a neighbor. In one, a rancher complained to other ranchers that his neighbor had neglected to fix a fence, allowing cattle to wander and freeload. The report was accurate, and the students did not disapprove of the gossip. But men in particular, the researchers found, strongly objected if the rancher chose to keep mum about the fence incident. "Plain and simple, he should have told about the problem to warn other ranchers," wrote one study participant, expressing a common sentiment that, in this case, a failure to gossip put the group at risk. "We're told we're not supposed to gossip, that our reputation plummets, but in this context there may be an expectation that you should gossip: You're obligated to tell, like an informal version of the honor code at military academies," Wilson said. Given this protective group function, gossiping too little may be at least as risky as gossiping too much, some psychologists say. Knowing that your boss is cheating on his wife, or that a sister-in-law has a drinking problem or a rival has benefited from a secret trust fund may be enormously important, and in many cases change a person's behavior for the better. "We all know people who are not calibrated to the social world at all, who if they participated in gossip sessions would learn a whole lot of stuff they need to know and can't learn anywhere else, like how reliable people are, how trustworthy," said Sarah Wert, a psychologist at Yale. "Not participating in gossip at some level can be unhealthy, and abnormal."

Bush makes history - a five-year streak without saying 'no'

Like pardons and executive orders, vetoes are among the cherished privileges of the Oval Office. Ike liked them. So did presidents Truman and Cleveland - and both Roosevelts. But apparently not George W. Bush. In fact, well into the fifth year of his presidency, he has yet to issue a single veto. It's a streak unmatched in modern American history, one that throws into question traditional notions of checks and balances. Although the streak could end next month - Mr. Bush is threatening a veto if Congress eases his restrictions on federal funding for stem-cell research - the Bush era thus far underscores a historically high-water mark of collegial cooperation between Congress and the White House, experts say. "We're pretty close to a parliamentary government," says G. Calvin Mackenzie, professor of government at Colby College in Watervillle, Maine, referring to Congress's close alignment with the executive branch. "We don't have much recent history with that." Other presidents have enjoyed majority support in Congress. But few, if any, have gotten the level of disciplined backing that Mr. Bush gets from House and Senate Republicans. "There is unusual coherence between Republicans in Congress and the president," Professor Mackenzie adds. "So there's very little getting to his desk that hasn't been pre-approved by the Republican leadership." On many major bills that Bush has signed - No Child Left Behind and tax relief, for example - the veto was never a consideration because the White House itself had proposed the legislation. Yet on dozens of other bills, the president has become a rubber stamp for a spendthrift Congress, betraying his campaign image as a fiscal conservative, critics say. "The notion of limited government and frugal government has been shattered by this administration, which cares far less about limited government than it does in building conservative government - a government with huge payoffs to corporate America," says Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University in Washington. The last time a president's party dominated Capitol Hill was in 1993 and 1994, the first two years of President Clinton's term. That period was also marked by zero vetoes, but for a very different reason. Unruly House and Senate Democrats failed to toe the line on Clinton's big-ticket proposals, such as nationalized healthcare, leaving him with few major bills to sign. Lack of party discipline nearly scuttled the North American Free Trade Agreement and his budget. By the end of his second term, Mr. Clinton had issued 37 vetoes. By contrast, when passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement was in doubt last week, Bush personally made the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to help bring reluctant Republicans into line. CAFTA's passage, however, was a result due as much to increased party polarization as Bush's arm-twisting, experts say. The veto, of course, is far better at stopping legislation than at advancing it. But the threat of a veto can steer a bill closer to a president's goals. The transportation bill Bush signed last Wednesday is a case in point. In 2004, he threatened to veto any highway bill that exceeded $256 billion. This year, he redrew the line at $284 billion. The version originally proposed in the House was well over $350 billion. But the continuing threat of veto eventually brought the final price tag to $286.5 billion, a figure Bush could tolerate. "For fiscal conservatives, it's frustrating to watch," says David Keating, executive director at the Club for Growth, a Washington group that advocates fiscal responsibility and lower taxes. "He's beginning to lose all credibility with these veto threats." The word "veto" does not actually appear in the text of the Constitution, but its function is implied in Article I. Significantly, the first presidents used the veto sparingly, reserving its use for legislation they deemed unconstitutional. By the 20th century, vetoes were being issued more frequently, and being used more often as a political tactic than as a constitutional filter. President Franklin Roosevelt issued more than 600 vetoes - and that occurred even with huge Demo-cratic majorities. Bush, however, hasn't even used the veto on legislation he deemed unconstitutional, such as the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform he signed in 2002. That can be read as a sign of weakness, says Matthew Spalding, an expert on American political history at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. "Veto power has withered away from disuse." Others take the opposite view. "Presidents who use the veto a lot are weak," says Bruce Altschuler, a professor of political science at Oswego State University of New York, noting Gerald Ford's time in office. "More-successful presidents use it as a negotiation tool. When Bush has gone to Congress with [veto] threats, he has been effective," he notes. Still, Bush may have to rely on the veto in years ahead because presidential power typically wanes in a second term. "A president's second term is like an hour glass with the sand running out," says Stephen Hess, professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University in Washington. Already, Bush has struggled to marshal his party troops behind plans to partially privatize Social Security. A test of GOP unity could come next month, when Congress will consider a move to relax Bush's limits on federal funding for stem-cell research. Senate majority leader Bill Frist - who is believed to be eyeing a presidential run in 2008 - announced a break with the president just before the August recess last week, a sign that fissures in the Republican bedrock are already appearing. "The veto is always there; it's the paddle on the wall," says Jack Pitney, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif. "Everybody knows it's there. That gives the president a lot of power, no matter the alignment."

It's good to talk, but we've lost the art of conversation

That Robin wrote well is something of which no reader of these pages will need any persuading. That he made fine public speeches is something that has also been much and rightly recalled since his death. But when I think about him now, I think of something else. I think of his ability, whether over a meal table, in a corner of a bar or just sitting in his office, as a talker. Robin was fun to listen to, fun to talk to and, above all, fun to talk with. He possessed all the essential attributes of the good talker. He savoured the language, and he enjoyed his own facility with it. He drew on a wide range of literary and historical knowledge. But he also had perhaps the most important quality of all in a talker. Though his talk was not without the competitive aspect that is always part of the best conversation, he also possessed the enthusiasm to make talk a collaborative activity too. He had the instinctive ability to listen to the other person and to respond, not just on his own terms, but on yours too. I had been thinking about this ability as a talker ever since the announcement that his funeral was to take place in St Giles' Cathedral. For the thing I distinctly remember about the cathedral from my previous visit, long ago, is the brass relief memorial there by Augustus St Gaudens of the bed-ridden Robert Louis Stevenson, pen in hand. Though this mention of Stevenson may appear a non sequitur, it is anything but. For if ever the world produced a prince and paragon of talkers, it was Stevenson. We know this from his friends. Stevenson's talk was almost incessant, they recalled. As a student, he was already celebrated for his sparkling conversation. Later, visitors remarked that when he was on form he talked and laughed all the time. On the day of his death in Samoa in 1894, his biographer Jenni Calder writes, Stevenson was "bright with talk". But the best evidence of Stevenson the talker comes from Stevenson the writer. Stevenson's essay Talk and Talkers, written in 1882, is a piece that makes one glad to be alive. When you read it, and though its author is a hundred years and more dead, it is as though a new friend, bursting with life and wit, has suddenly settled himself in a neighbouring armchair to delight you with a string of dazzling observations on the joys and rewards of good conversation. To excel in talk, Stevenson says, is simply the best ambition we can have. It is both a private and a public accomplishment. Talk does not merely make us good company to our friends and family, he says, it also enables us to "bear our part in that great international congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right". Yet talk must not be dismissed as an inferior, preparatory stage of human communication before an idea reaches its supposedly higher, written form. On the contrary, says Stevenson - and what an astonishing thing this is for a great writer to say - literature is but "the shadow of good talk", an imitation that falls "far short of the original in life, freedom and effect". While talk is always fluid and tentative and involves giving and taking, written words are fixed and dogmatic, as well as constrained by form and tradition. "In short," argues Stevenson, "the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his chief business in the world; and talk, which is the harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of our pleasures. It costs nothing in money. It is all profit. It completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health." It is tempting for me to sit back and let Stevenson simply take over here, to piggy-back on his brilliance by summarising and quoting further large parts of this wonderful humanistic credo. But I have other points I wish to make, and you will have to read for yourself how sensitively he grasps that conversation advances on the basis of trust and tact, that it not only tolerates but encourages a certain ostentation, digression and allusion - "the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass" - and that the profit of talk is not in being proved neatly right or wrong, but from the exercise itself and the unpredictable enlightenment that comes from the congress of minds. Few of us can hope to talk like a Stevenson. Yet even to read his essay is to recognise that it is a guiding light. We develop and are educated partly by direct experience and partly by focused study, but particularly also by talking to others and by learning with and from them. Unless we talk, albeit mostly not with the fluency of a Stevenson or a Cook, we will never be truly educated - drawn out - or even, as the Victorians might have put it, improved. And a precondition of such talk, as Stevenson says, is that we must be prepared to "lay ourselves open", to be prepared to listen as well as to speak, to acknowledge that we do not know the answers before we pose the questions. Bill Clinton used to see himself as a politician at the heart of what he called "the conversation". His was a conversation about many things - the role of government, the failure of world socialism, the persistence of inequality and much more - but at its heart was a recognition that wooden dogmatisms (Stevenson's phrase) provided no solutions, and that neither he nor we knew the answers to the questions that the conversation continually posed. Some of my best friends work on the Today programme. Yet it seems to me that our public talk in this country is now being relentlessly drained of the elements that make such talk rewarding. Politicians, indeed, are now trained specifically not to answer interviewers' questions. Instead they are told to remain focused on making the predetermined points in the party "line to take". Their interrogators are no better, seeking little more than to hector, embarrass and oversimplify. The consensual creativity and freedom of true talkers, trusting and trusted, is wholly absent, almost wholly subordinated to egotism, adversarialism and melodrama. Little or nothing now remains of the "great international congress, always sitting" of which Stevenson wrote so exhilaratingly and of which Robin Cook was one of the last exponents. The art of talking, the thing that makes human beings what they are, has become a refuge for recusants. Our public discourse has become unworthy of the name and will remain so unless and until we decide to change it. Maybe it is time we talked about it. m.kettle@theguardian.com

Last Chapter Opens For Space Shuttle Born Of Compromise

Space Shuttle Discovery's return-to-flight mission marks the beginning of the end for a program whose design evolution exemplifies the pitfalls NASA is seeking to avoid as it embarks on a new direction in space exploration. Thirty-five years ago, when NASA was struggling to make the case for a new space transportation system, it promised to build a reusable vehicle that would haul all of the nation's civil, military and even commercial satellites into orbit and eventually help construct a space station. The melding of civil and military requirements--coupled with the budgetary and political pressures that affect all large aerospace programs--produced the engineering compromises that haunt the space shuttle program to this day. These include the use of an external fuel tank whose foam-shedding problems doomed Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003 and cast a cloud over Discovery's mission. "The decision in 1972 to build the future of the space program around the shuttle has had consequences that still constrain NASA a third of a century later," said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University here and a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. "[NASA Administrator] Mike Griffin and his associates are working hard to make sure that the choices they are making now enable a productive exploration program, not limit their successors' flexibility." The beginning of the end The February 2003 loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia set in motion a change in U.S. space policy that few would have predicted in the immediate aftermath of NASA's second shuttle disaster in about 17 years. By going beyond simply finding the technical root cause of the accident and recommending engineering remedies, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board laid important groundwork for the White House to announce the following year a new space exploration vision that called for replacing the shuttle and returning to the Moon. While NASA continues to struggle with the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's top return-to-flight recommendation--modify the space shuttle external tank to prevent it from shedding insulating foam--the agency has taken to heart the board's advice that the shuttle be replaced. NASA now plans to retire its shuttle fleet in 2010 or earlier and build a replacement system that, in accordance with the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's advice, will be based on existing technology and designed to launch crew and cargo separately. Today, even as it celebrates the space shuttle's return to flight after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, NASA is once again trying to sell a wary public on a new space transportation system. In the world of aerospace engineering, tradeoffs and compromises are inevitable. And the budgetary and political pressures that attended the birth of the shuttle remain on hand today. This time, however, NASA is not proposing a vehicle that will be all things to all people, but rather a set of vehicles to suit its own unique needs. Mistakes of the past Before Project Apollo had achieved its first lunar landing, NASA began charting a future that included orbital outposts--space stations--stretching from low Earth orbit to the Moon. The massive Saturn 5 rocket was to launch the space stations, and a reusable space plane was to transport the astronauts back and forth. NASA's early space shuttle concepts envisioned a two-stage fully reusable vehicle capable of taking off and landing like an airplane. "That's a far cry from what we got," Logsdon said. By 1970, the White House had lost its appetite for large space programs, Logsdon said. Production of the Saturn 5 was ended, and NASA was told to forget about a space station for the time being. That forced NASA to seek allies to justify building the shuttle. "The key ally was the national security community," Logsdon said. The Pentagon agreed to get behind the shuttle provided it had certain characteristics, Logsdon said. "One of those characteristics was the ability to launch classified payloads that could be up to 60 feet (18 meters) in length" and weigh up to 18,200 kilograms, Logsdon said. "The width of the payload bay was driven by NASA's desire to eventually build a space station." Another Defense Department-driven requirement, Logsdon said, was the ability to take off and return to a West Coast launch site after a single polar orbit. Because of the Earth's rotation, a single polar orbit would not bring the shuttle back directly over its launch site, meaning it would have to glide farther through the atmosphere to land than otherwise would be the case. That drove NASA to add large delta-shaped wings and a more robust--not to mention heavier-- thermal protection system to its space shuttle design. The space shuttle had evolved from a dedicated crew transport to a brawny, all-purpose vehicle that would be so busy hauling the nation's civil, military and commercial payloads that it would have to fly some 50 times a year. At the start of 1971, NASA told the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that it could build such a fully reusable two-stage workhorse for $10 billion. OMB told NASA it could have $5 billion. Thus began a six-month effort to find design alternatives that could be built for the available budget. The first cost-cutting design change, Logsdon said, was to move the fuel tanks to the outside of the vehicle. The second was to augment the liquid-fueled main engines with solid-propellant strap-on boosters, which generally are cheaper to develop but more expensive to operate. NASA ended up with a shuttle design that fit within the $5 billion ceiling for development, but would prove far more costly to operate and entail greater risks than initially promised. Logsdon said the White House made a policy mistake in 1972 by "putting NASA in a position where it had to promise more than it could achieve" in order to sell the space shuttle program and ensure a post-Apollo future for human space flight. "The consequences of that mistake, Logsdon said, "still constrain today's NASA leaders." Rather than repeat the mistakes of the past, Logsdon said NASA today appears "determined to propose an approach to the next-generation system for carrying people to space that learns from shuttle's history." Lessons learned NASA has yet to formally unveil plans for its next space transportation system, but the agency has said it intends to build a Crew Exploration Vehicle for transporting astronauts to and from orbit and a second unmanned system for launching cargo. In addition, NASA and the Pentagon have no plans to meld their requirements into a single system, a point made clear in an Aug. 5 letter the two agencies sent to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. That letter, signed by Griffin and U.S. Air Force Undersecretary Ronald Sega, the Pentagon's top space official, says the "[Defense Department] and NASA believe that separating human-rated space exploration from unmanned payload launch will best achieve reliable and affordable assured access to space while maintaining our industrial base in both liquid and solid propulsion systems." The letter goes on to say that while the Defense Department would consider using the 100-metric-ton-class heavy-lift launcher that NASA says it needs to hurl cargo toward the Moon, it has no interest in the smaller rocket the agency intends to use to launch the Crew Exploration Vehicle. NASA's intends to use the space shuttle's major components for both vehicles. Three decades ago, NASA envisioned a shuttle so robust and cheap to operate it would eventually launch 50 times a year. In reality, the shuttle has proven costly and difficult to operate, and took more than 10 years to mark its 50th launch in September 1992. Griffin, in a television interview several days after Discovery's less-than-perfect liftoff, acknowledged the shuttle's unfulfilled promise. "The shuttle has been a step along the road to allowing humans routine access to space, but it did not reach that goal," he said. "We need to keep at it."

Beheadings are Out, But Watching Executions is in Vogue

A 1950 photo of the electric chair is shown at the Raiford Prison in Raiford, Fla. When introduced in 1922, the electric chair was seen as a humane means of execution. (AP Photo/Florida Photographic Collection) From crucifixions and beheadings to firing squads and lethal injections, public executions have long been a part of the justice system. Now, one sociologist suggests that the audience has helped shape the recent evolution of these executions. Relatives of the victim may want a swift execution to bring closure to a tragic chapter of their lives. Parties concerned with the convicted criminal's pain call for quick and painless executions. In a study by University of Cincinnati sociologist Annulla Linders, evidence indicates that execution witnesses have affected the method, procedure, and publicity of executions. "Viewed as a mirror held up to the execution, the audience is a constitutive element of the execution and, in this sense, not only carries the potential to grant (or deny) legitimacy to the execution event, but also provides capital punishment with a set of cultural meanings that reaches far beyond any particular execution," Linders writes. Most recently, the practice of allowing the victim's family to witness the execution has resulted in the personalization of capital punishment. This contradicts the efforts made in the 19th century to prevent executions from becoming a public spectacle. Early results from Linders' study suggest that there are three large cultural issues that are currently affecting public executions – pressure from the victim's rights movement, associating the death of the convict with the worth of the victim, and modern society's general intolerance of premature and unnatural deaths. In her paper "The Return of the Spectacle? The Modern Execution in the United States," Linder details four general ways that the execution audiences have influenced contemporary executions: Pain and technology: In the United States, most states have turned to more humane and painless forms of execution. While a few states still approve of execution by hanging, the electric chair, firing squads, and gas chambers, public outrage over these methods of execution has made lethal injection – by comparison quicker and less painful – the most common form of execution today. Witness and psychological closure: Involving relatives of the victim to witness the execution is relatively new – it began in the 1990's. Linders writes that the call for emotional closure has influenced the execution to be quick and efficient. Publicity and public Access: Although public viewings of executions came to an end in the 19th Century, demand for publicized executions is on the rise. Linders says this issue has cropped up several times over the last few decades, particularly when high publicity convicts – such as Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for the Oklahoma City bombing – are put to death. Procedures and professionals: Involving an audience and meeting the emotional demands of victim family members has complicated the precision and efficiency of executions that prison officials prefer. Linders presented her reserach today at the 100th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in Philadelphia.

Unseen Hendrix footage released

Only part of Hendrix's performance is in the Woodstock film Only part of Hendrix's performance was included in the original Oscar-winning 1970 Woodstock documentary film. The DVD features uninterrupted footage of Hendrix's infamous set, which was performed in front of 40,000 people. Woodstock - billed as "three days of peace and music" - featured some of the biggest names in 1960s rock, including Janis Joplin and The Who. Iconic event Hendrix's set list contained favourites from the Jimi Hendrix Experience - such as Purple Haze, Foxy Lady, Spanish Castle Magic - and the then-unheard songs Jam Back at the House, Izabella and Message to Love. But it was his surprise rendition of The Star Spangled Banner that became synonymous with the iconic event. Longtime Hendrix studio album sound engineer Eddie Kramer was brought in to remaster the video footage. Jimi Hendrix: Live At Woodstock will be released in the UK on 12 September.

Cells made to haul tiny cargoes

Carrying the beads did not slow the cells down Harvard University experts say, in future, cells could be harnessed to perform micro-scale mechanical work. The researchers attached a cargo of polystyrene beads to the backs of green algae cells and used light to guide them up and down the chambers. Details of the work appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). We harness their motors to make them perform unconventional tasks Douglas Weibel, Harvard University "We have basically developed the system of moving objects with micro-organisms," co-author Douglas Weibel, of Harvard University told the BBC News website. "We harness their motors to make them perform unconventional tasks." The team have coined the term "microoxen" for the load-bearing microbes. Nice motor The Harvard researchers, led by Professor George Whitesides, used the single-celled photosynthetic algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. The algae are about 10 microns long and propel themselves by beating their two whip-like tails, or flagella, in an action similar to the breaststroke. This action is driven by a type of molecular motor. The researchers used chemical bonds to attach a cargo load of specially coated polystyrene beads to individual algal cells. Then they used light of different intensities to guide them up and down the chamber. High-intensity light repels the organisms while low-intensity light attracts them. Load bearers Attaching the cargoes seemed to have little or no effect on the speeds at which the cells moved. The loads were unhitched by exposing the algae to ultraviolet light, which broke apart molecules in the coating on the beads. Dr Weibel said the technique had many potential uses in areas such as molecular medicine. "You could have a bead that picks up a toxin. So you send them to swim off into a sample of liquid, and when they return, you can carry out analysis on the bead," he said. There is considerable interest in harnessing biological motors to perform micro-scale mechanical work. However, most research in this area has focused on isolating the motors within cells and rebuilding them elsewhere, rather than using the living organism to perform the tasks required.

Space record broken by Russian

The Russian is serving aboard the International Space Station He beat a previous record of 747 days, 14 hours, 14 minutes and 11 seconds held by fellow Russian Sergei Avdeyev. Krikalev is the current commander of the International Space Station (ISS) and is scheduled to stay on board the orbiting platform until October. He has also stayed aboard the Mir space station during his 20-year career. The cosmonaut is serving out a stint on the ISS that began on 14 April. Together with Nasa astronaut John Phillips, he hosted the crew of space shuttle Discovery when they arrived at the station in July. Long duration Sergei Krikalev was born in Leningrad (now St Petersburg), Russia, in 1958. Krikalev served aboard the first US-Russian shuttle mission The 46-year-old was selected as a cosmonaut in 1985 and completed his basic training in 1986. He made his first long-duration mission to the Russian Mir space station in 1988. The cosmonaut flew aboard space shuttle Discovery on STS-60, the first joint US/Russian shuttle mission in 1994. He was also part of the first crew to stay aboard the International Space Station. Krikalev and Phillips are due to return to Earth on 7 October. But they are currently preparing for two spacewalks, the first of which takes place on Thursday. They will replace experiments, install a television camera, and move equipment during the scheduled six-hour extra-vehicular activity (EVA).

What the Nazis didn't want you to see

Adolf Hitler didn't do many favours for German culture. Goethe, Beethoven and Dürer will never be enough to lift the curse he put on it - not least because he praised them all. And that's before we start on Wagner. How many people go on holiday to see the art treasures of Nuremberg? There's as much artistic greatness in Germany as anywhere. But we don't want to know. Now there's a small exhibition of German art at Tate Modern that offers a way to recognise what we're missing. And, bizarrely, our excellent guide is the führer. I've got to admit, I hadn't ever paid much attention to Karl Schmidt-Rottluff - he painted the kind of lozenge-eyed portraits and angular nudes that have always tended to blur into my vague image of "German expressionism". Schmidt-Rottluff's Frau mit Tasche (Woman with Bag), in the Tate show, looks innocent enough, if a little distorted. Then you see it - her face is hard and elongated, jutting in space, awkwardly placed on her body. There's something foreign here, and then you realise: this woman's head is an African mask. To many spectators today, this might seem a comparatively gentle modernist work. But try to see its disorder, eroticism and racial impurity through Hitler's eyes. In 1937 Schmidt-Rottluff, one of the founder-members of the Dresden avant-garde group the Brücke - the Bridge - had more than 50 of his works exhibited in the most notorious art event of the 20th century. The Entartete Kunst - Degenerate Art - exhibition opened in Munich in July of that year. It was the most successful modern art exhibition of all time. In six weeks it had a million visitors, and a million more caught it on tour. This is what all the hep people would be doing if the Nazis had won the war, said Hunter S Thompson of Las Vegas. What all the hep people were doing in Nazi Germany in 1937's summer of unlove was sneering at Schmidt-Rottluff's paintings - not to mention those of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Lyonel Feininger and Marc Chagall. It was shameful, and the Tate documents it as such. All the artists in this room had works in the Degenerate Art exhibition. Nolde's 1930 painting The Sea B is so German - a morbid, romantic landscape, echoing Caspar David Friedrich, or a Wagner prelude - and yet Nolde had no fewer than 1,052 works of his removed from German museums in 1937. His prominent inclusion in the Entartete Kunst exhibition baffled him all the more in that he was a Nazi. The Tate show presents this story as tragedy; and of course it is. One great painter, Kirchner, committed suicide within a year of the Degenerate Art exhibition. The fascinating archive documents build up a picture of misery; the spiritual-minded Wassily Kandinsky writes of his confusion, as an apolitical person, about what is going on. It's a story of defeat - but it could be told differently. It would be great to see a full-scale exhibition. In fact, it would be worth reconstructing the entire Degenerate Art exhibition. The restaging would, I suspect, profoundly alter our view of modern art. We would see how German it is. There's a crucial aspect of the Degenerate Art exhibition I had never understood before. I always pictured it as a global denunciation of modernism. At the 1933 Nuremberg Rally Hitler lambasted futurism (despite its fascist affiliations) and dada. So I pictured the Nazi art connoisseurs marching contemptuously through rooms filled with Picassos and Duchamps . . . but that is not what it was like at all. The degenerates on view were mostly homegrown. When Nazi art experts ransacked German public collections for anything modernist to put in the show, of course they grabbed plenty of treasures by Picasso and Van Gogh, to be sold abroad or destroyed. But Hitler had other views. He wanted to abolish German modern art. Hitler's decree of June 30 1937, authorising Goebbels to ransack museums, specified "German degenerate art since 1910". Talk about knowing your enemy. Like a lot of failed artists, Hitler fancied himself an art critic - and in picking 1910 as the year when all the good old-fashioned values of realism and beauty had been brutally overturned in German art, he was right. That was the year German expressionists founded the New Secession in Berlin. Newspapers in that year were full of scornful attacks on the sensationalism of these young German artists - perhaps the would-be artist Hitler read the reviews. The Degenerate Art show was not just an attack on modernism, it was an attack on a version of Germany. It was German artists Hitler denounced as sick: "In the name of the German people it is my duty to prevent these pitiable unfortunates, who plainly suffer from defects of vision, from attempting to persuade others by their chatter that these faults of observation are indeed realities and present them as 'art'." And so, if we could put this exhibition back together again - which is impossible because it would mean resurrecting destroyed masterpieces such as Marc's Tower of Blue Horses - it would not be some disgusting exercise in Nazi kitsch. Despite its loathing and violence - because of its loathing and violence - Degenerate Art was the most revealing exhibition ever staged about German modernism. The fact this art was hated and even feared by Hitler is high praise. And what the Munich show catalogued was the subversive energy and revolutionary brilliance of the Germany killed by Hitler. From now on, the world would not think of Germany as the nation of George Grosz and John Heartfield, of Hannah Höch's dada collages, but as a small-minded country of beer-swigging Bavarian mediocrity. Hitler won - in most people's perceptions, he has still won. The Tate Modern exhibit isn't big or bold enough to change that. But the Degenerate Art show had the power to change how we see Germany. Look how Hitler hated what Berlin really was - look at it his way. German modern art was incredible. Schmidt-Rottluff is a perfect example - that disjunctive quality, a certain intellectual toughness, connects the icy fire of the expressionist palette with the dadaists who rebelled against expressionism itself. More than anywhere else, this art was confrontational - and there's the rub. You might even say German artists were asking for it. French modernism, by and large, inhabits a world of its own, confident in its own significance. German artists could not draw on the Paris tradition of bohemia and knew they were a radical youthful minority in a nation of - as Otto Dix and Grosz depict it - crippled nationalist war veterans and drunken Prussians. German modern art wasn't accidentally fragmentary and disturbing; it set out to fragment and disturb. As the Nazi party fought for a new order, artists aggressively created disorder. In fact, if you want a word to unify all the currents in German modern art in the first three decades of the 20th century, then "degenerate" is quite good. But instead of abuse, this is a term of praise. Modern art has never looked as degenerate as it did in Germany before Hitler imposed his vision of banal beauty. Ugliness is life and beauty is death, might be our conclusion, if we could really revive the Degenerate Art exhibition. Modern art is ugly - and alive. Hitler praised quiet landscapes and classical nudes, and he was death. · Degenerate Art is at Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8008), until October 30.

The Scorpion and the Frog

The Scorpion and the Frog The river was wide and swift, and the scorpion stopped to reconsider the situation. He couldn't see any way across. So he ran upriver and then checked downriver, all the while thinking that he might have to turn back. Suddenly, he saw a frog sitting in the rushes by the bank of the stream on the other side of the river. He decided to ask the frog for help getting across the stream. "Hellooo Mr. Frog!" called the scorpion across the water, "Would you be so kind as to give me a ride on your back across the river?" "Well now, Mr. Scorpion! How do I know that if I try to help you, you wont try to kill me?" asked the frog hesitantly. "Because," the scorpion replied, "If I try to kill you, then I would die too, for you see I cannot swim!" Now this seemed to make sense to the frog. But he asked. "What about when I get close to the bank? You could still try to kill me and get back to the shore!" "This is true," agreed the scorpion, "But then I wouldn't be able to get to the other side of the river!" "Alright then...how do I know you wont just wait till we get to the other side and THEN kill me?" said the frog. "Ahh...," crooned the scorpion, "Because you see, once you've taken me to the other side of this river, I will be so grateful for your help, that it would hardly be fair to reward you with death, now would it?!" So the frog agreed to take the scorpion across the river. He swam over to the bank and settled himself near the mud to pick up his passenger. The scorpion crawled onto the frog's back, his sharp claws prickling into the frog's soft hide, and the frog slid into the river. The muddy water swirled around them, but the frog stayed near the surface so the scorpion would not drown. He kicked strongly through the first half of the stream, his flippers paddling wildly against the current. Halfway across the river, the frog suddenly felt a sharp sting in his back and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the scorpion remove his stinger from the frog's back. A deadening numbness began to creep into his limbs. "You fool!" croaked the frog, "Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?" The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drownings frog's back. "I could not help myself. It is my nature." Then they both sank into the muddy waters of the swiftly flowing river. Self destruction - "Its my Nature", said the Scorpion... An Interesting article regarding this fable

Researchers develop technique to use dirty silicon, could pave way for cheaper solar energy

UC Berkeley Press Release Researchers develop technique to use dirty silicon, could pave way for cheaper solar energy – A research team led by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a new technique to handle metal defects in low-grade silicon, an advance that could dramatically reduce the cost of solar cells. Nearly 90 percent of solar, or photovoltaic, cells in the world are made from a refined, highly purified form of silicon, the same material used to make integrated circuits. The growth of the semiconductor and solar cell industries has put increasing pressure on relatively limited supplies of this high-quality silicon, consequently driving up the price of the material. (Image courtesy Tonio Buonassisi/UC Berkeley) Attempts to use the far more abundant and cheaper form of silicon - one that is laden with metal impurities and defects - have failed because solar cells made from this material do not perform as well. In addition, manufacturing techniques used to remove impurities are expensive, negating the cost benefits of using the cheaper material. "We have proposed a new approach to the use of dirty silicon," said Eicke Weber, UC Berkeley professor of materials science and engineering, principal investigator of the Center for Advanced Materials at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and principal investigator of this research project. "Instead of taking the impurities out, we can leave them in but manipulate them in a way that reduces their detrimental impact on the solar cell efficiency." Other UC Berkeley researchers on the project are Tonio Buonassisi, a Ph.D. student in the Graduate Group in Applied Science and Technology, and Andrei Istratov, assistant research engineer, both of whom are also affiliated with LBNL. Also on the team are Matthew Marcus at LBNL's Advanced Light Source, Barry Lai and Zhonghou Cai at Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source, and Steven Heald at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The researchers say the findings, published Aug. 14 in the journal Nature Materials, could dramatically reduce the cost of solar cells by making the use of cheaper materials feasible. "Solar energy is often touted as the most promising and secure alternative energy source, capable of reducing our dependence on foreign fuels while reducing the emission of dangerous gases that harm world climate," said Weber. "The current worldwide growth rate of photovoltaics is 30 to 45 percent per year, which is nothing short of amazing. However, the solar energy industry could grow much faster if researchers and manufacturers could further reduce the cost of solar cells." The team analyzed how metal contaminants in silicon respond to different types of processing using highly sensitive synchrotron X-Ray microprobes capable of detecting metal clusters as small as 30 nanometers. The researchers found that the nano-sized defects scattered throughout the silicon limited the average distance electrons were able to travel before losing their energy. The longer the distance, known as the minority carrier diffusion length, the greater the energy conversion efficiency of the material. "We found that one way of managing these nano-sized metal defects is to round them up into large groups so that they are less disruptive to the electrons," said Buonassisi. "Compare the metal particles to having hundreds of horses scattered loose on the streets of Berkeley. They would be very disruptive to traffic. But if we corralled the horses together in one pen, people and traffic could move around them more freely." The researchers found that they were able to manipulate the distribution of the metal impurities by varying the cooling rate of the silicon. When the material is cooled quickly, the metal defects are quickly locked in a scattered distribution. By simply slowing down the cooling rate, the metal impurities diffused into large clusters. "Using this cooling technique, we were able to improve the distance electrons could travel by a factor of four compared with dirty silicon that had been left unaltered," said Buonassisi. "Although this is still not as efficient as ultrapure silicon, it is the proof of principle that poor-quality silicon can be easily improved. We are now looking at other techniques that could further enhance the efficiency of dirty silicon." The researchers point out that techniques such as varying the cooling rate of silicon is an easy, cost-effective adjustment to current manufacturing procedures. "We're targeting mainstream technology," said Weber. "The approach we are proposing could lead to substantial progress in making solar energy more widely available with just a few tweaks in the manufacturing process." The researchers say that by 2006, the photovoltaic industry is projected to use more silicon than the microelectronic industry, and that keeping solar energy cost-effective may depend upon finding ways to utilize the dirtier, cheaper silicon material. "As solar electricity moves into mainstream power generation, the production of high-quality silicon has not kept pace with demand," said Istratov of UC Berkeley. "The resulting shortage in supplies of high-grade silicon has caused its price to increase by up to 800 percent on the spot market. Since the solar cell wafer comprises more than half of the cost of the solar cell device, this has translated into recent price increases for solar cells. We believe that our engineering concept has the potential to help the photovoltaic industry remain competitive as an alternative energy source." The research is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory and its University Crystalline Silicon Research Project.

Scientists Crack 40-year-old DNA Puzzle And Point To 'Hot Soup' At The Origin Of Life

A new theory that explains why the language of our genes is more complex than it needs to be also suggests that the primordial soup where life began on earth was hot and not cold, as many scientists believe. In a paper published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution this week, researchers from the University of Bath describe a new theory which they believe could solve a puzzle that has baffled scientists since they first deciphered the language of DNA almost 40 years ago. In 1968, Marshall Nirenberg, Har Gobind Khorana and Robert Holley received a Nobel Prize for working out how proteins are produced from the genetic code. They discovered that three letter ‘words’ - known as codons - are read from the DNA code and then translated into one of 20 amino acids. These amino acids are then strung together in the order dictated by the DNA code and folded into complex shapes to form a specific protein. As the DNA ‘alphabet’ contains four letters - called bases - there are as many as 64 three-letter words available in the DNA dictionary. This is because it is mathematically possible to produce 64 three-letter words from any combination of four letters. But why there should be 64 words in the DNA dictionary which translate into just 20 amino acids, and why a process that is more complex than it needs to be should have evolved in the first place, has puzzled scientists for the last 40 years. Dozens of scientists have suggested theories to solve the puzzle, but these have been quickly discounted or failed to explain some of the other quirks in protein synthesis. advertisement “Why there are so many more codons than amino acids has puzzled scientists ever since it was discovered how the genetic code works,” said Dr Jean van den Elsen from the Department of Biology and Biochemistry. “It meant the genetic code did not have the mathematical brilliance you would expect from something so fundamental to life on earth.” One of quirks of the genetic code is that there are groups of codons which all translate to the same amino acid. For example, the amino acid leucine can be translated from six different codons whilst some amino acids, which have equally important functions and are translated in the same amount, have just one. The new theory builds on an original idea suggested by Francis Crick - one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA - that the three-letter code evolved from a simpler two-letter code, although Crick thought the difference in number was simply an accident “frozen in time”. The University of Bath researchers suggest that the primordial ‘doublet’ code was read in threes - but with only either the first two ‘prefix’ or last two ‘suffix’ pairs of bases being actively read. advertisement By combining arrangements of these doublet codes together, the scientists can replicate the table of amino acids - explaining why some amino acids can be translated from groups of 2, 4 or 6 codons. They can also show how the groups of water loving (hydrophilic) and water-hating (hydrophobic) amino acids emerge naturally in the table, evolving from overlapping ‘prefix’ and ‘suffix’ codons. “When you evolve our theory for a doublet system into a triplet system, you get an exact match up with the number and range of amino acids we see today,” said Dr van den Elsen, who has worked with Dr Stefan Babgy and Huan-Lin Wu on the theory. “This simple theory explains many unresolved features of the current genetic code. No one has ever been able to do this before, so we are very excited.” The theory also explains how the structure of the genetic code maximises error tolerance. For instance, ‘slippage’ in the translation process tends to produce another amino acid with the same characteristics, and explains why the DNA code is so good at maintaining its integrity. “This is important because these kinds of mistakes can be fatal for an organism,” said Dr van den Elsen. “None of the older theories can explain how this error tolerant structure might have arisen.” The new theory also highlights two amino acids that can be excluded from the doublet system and are likely to be relatively recent ‘acquisitions’ by the genetic code. As these amino acids - glutamine and asparagine - are unable to hold their shape in high temperatures, this suggests that heat prevented them from being acquired by the code at some point in the past. One possible reason for this is that the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), which evolved into all life on earth, lived in a hot sulphurous pool or thermal vent. As it moved into cooler conditions, it was able to take up these two additional amino acids and evolve into more complex organisms. This provides further evidence for the debate on whether life emerged from a hot or cold primordial soup. “There are still relics of a very old simple code hidden away in our DNA and in the structures of our cells,” said Dr van den Elsen, who points to several aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases - molecules involved in protein synthesis - which only look at pairs of bases in triplet codons, as well as other physical evidence in support of the theory. “As the code evolved it has been possible for it to adapt and take on new amino acids. Whether we could eventually reach a full complement of 64 amino acids I don’t know, a compromise between amino acid vocabulary and its error minimising efficiency may have fixed the genetic code in its current format. “

NASA Scientists Closer to Timely Space Weather Forecasts

Erica Hupp Headquarters, Washington (Phone: 202/358-1237) Bill Steigerwald Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. (Phone: 301/286-5017) Buddy Nelson Lockheed Martin, Palo Alto, Calif. (Phone: 510/797-0349) RELEASE : 05-226 NASA Scientists Closer to Timely Space Weather Forecasts Scientists funded by NASA have made big strides in learning how to forecast "all clear" periods, when severe space weather is unlikely. The forecasts are important because radiation from particles from the sun associated with large solar flares can be hazardous to unprotected astronauts, airplane occupants and satellites."We have a much better insight into what causes the strongest, most dangerous solar flares, and how to develop forecasts that can predict an 'all clear' for significant space weather, for longer periods," said Dr. Karel Schrijver of the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center (ATC), Palo Alto, Calif. He is lead author of a paper about the research published in the Astrophysical Journal.Solar flares are violent explosions in the atmosphere of the sun caused by the sudden release of magnetic energy. Like a rubber band twisted too tightly, stressed magnetic fields in the sun’s atmosphere (corona) can suddenly snap to a new shape. They can release as much energy as one, 10 billion megaton nuclear bomb.Predicting space weather is a complicated problem. Solar forecasters focus principally on the complexity of solar magnetic field patterns to predict solar storms. This method is not always reliable, because solar storms require additional ingredients to occur. It has long been known large electrical currents must be present to power flares.Insight into the causes of the largest solar flares came in two steps. "First, we discovered characteristic patterns of magnetic field evolution associated with strong electrical currents in the solar atmosphere," said ATC's Dr. Marc DeRosa, co-author of the paper. "It is these strong electrical currents that drive solar flares."Subsequently, the authors discovered the regions most likely to flare had new magnetic fields merge into them that were clearly out of alignment with the existing field. This emerging field from the solar interior appears to induce even more current as it interacts with the existing field.The team also found flares do not necessarily occur immediately upon the emergence of a new magnetic field. Apparently the electrical currents must build up over several hours before the fireworks start. Predicting exactly when a flare will happen is like studying avalanches. They occur only after enough snow built up. Once the threshold is reached, the avalanche can happen anytime by processes not yet completely understood."We found the current-carrying regions flare two to three times more often than the regions without large currents," Schrijver said. "Also, the average flare magnitude is three times greater for the group of active regions with large current systems than for the other group."The researchers made the discovery by comparing data about magnetic fields on the sun’s surface to the sharpest extreme-ultraviolet images of the solar corona. The magnetic maps were from the Michelson Doppler Imager (MDI) instrument on board Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft. SOHO is operated under a cooperative mission between the European Space Agency and NASA.The corona images were from the NASA Transition Region and Coronal Explorer spacecraft (TRACE). The team also used computer models of a three-dimensional solar magnetic field without electrical currents based on SOHO images. Differences between images and models indicated the presence of large electrical currents."This is a result that is more than the sum of two individual missions," said Dr. Dick Fisher, Director of NASA's Sun-Solar System Connection Division. "It's not only interesting scientifically, but has broad implications for society."For imagery about the research on the Web, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/clear_weather.html For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html - end - text-only version of this release NASA press releases and other information are available automatically by sending a blank e-mail message to hqnews-subscribe@mediaservices.nasa.gov. To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send a blank e-mail message to hqnews-unsubscribe@mediaservices.nasa.gov. Back to NASA Newsroom | Back to NASA Homepage

Oral Histories From Sept. 11 Compiled by the New York Fire Department

The Sept. 11 Records A rich vein of city records from Sept. 11, including more than 12,000 pages of oral histories rendered in the voices of 503 firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians, were made public on Aug. 12. The New York Times has published all of them. The oral histories of dispatch transmissions are transcribed verbatim. They have have not been edited to omit coarse language. NAME TITLE DATE OF INTERVIEW NOTES Basile, James (pdf file) Division Commander (E.M.S.) 10/17/01 Blaich, Charles (pdf file) Deputy Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 10/23/01 Was home on medical leave on 9/11 Browne, Robert (pdf file) Deputy Chief (E.M.S.) 10/24/01 Butler, Michael (pdf file) Assistant Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 12/21/01 Byrnes, Robert (pdf file) Fire Marshall (F.D.N.Y.) 11/14/01 Cain, Michael (pdf file) Fire Marshall (F.D.N.Y.) 12/20/01 Callan, Joseph (pdf file) Citywide Tour Commander (F.D.N.Y.) 11/2/01 Relieved Chief Donald Burns as the Citywide Tour Commander Carlock, Owen (pdf file) Firefighter (F.D.N.Y.) 12/5/01 Detailed on the day of the incident to Engine 220 Carrasquillo, Pedro (pdf file) EMS command (E.M.S.) 10/16/01 Cassano, Salvatore (pdf file) Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 10/4/01 Was citywide tour commander on 9/11 Chyriwski, Robert (pdf file) Firefighter (F.D.N.Y.) 12/14/01 Responded with Engine 3 and the high-rise unit Claes, Marcel (pdf file) Firefighter (F.D.N.Y.) 10/9/01 Was on the stairs in the north tower Congiusta, Frank (pdf file) Battalion Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 1/8/02 Coyle, John (pdf file) Fire Marshall (F.D.N.Y.) 12/28/01 Culley, John Kevin (pdf file) Captain (F.D.N.Y.) 10/17/01 Was going to work area on 23rd floor at 7 World Trade Center on 9/11 Curran, Paul (pdf file) Fire Patrolman (F.D.N.Y.) 12/18/01 Derubbio, Dominick (pdf file) Battalion Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 10/12/01 Dixon, Brian (pdf file) Battalion Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 10/25/01 Drury, James (pdf file) Assistant Commissioner (F.D.N.Y.) 10/16/01 Fitzpatrick, Thomas (pdf file) Deputy Commissioner for Administration (F.D.N.Y.) 10/1/01 Galvin, Thomas (pdf file) Deputy Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 11/7/01 Garcia, Marshal Louis (pdf file) Chief Fire Marshall (F.D.N.Y.) 10/2/01 Goldfarb, Zachary (pdf file) Division Chief (E.M.S.) 10/23/01 Gombo, Jerry (pdf file) Assistant Chief (E.M.S.) 10/17/01 Grant, Ulysses (pdf file) Division Commander (E.M.S.) 10/12/01 Gregory, Stephen (pdf file) Assistant Commissioner (F.D.N.Y.) 10/3/01 Gribbon, Frank (pdf file) Deputy Fire Commissioner (F.D.N.Y.) 10/25/01 Grogan, Brian (pdf file) Supervisor Fire Marshall (F.D.N.Y.) 10/31/01 Guttenberg, Michael (pdf file) Doctor (Office of Medical Affairs) 10/2/01 Heavey, Stephen (pdf file) Fire Marshall (F.D.N.Y.) 12/28/01 Henry, Edward (pdf file) Battalion Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 12/19/01 Hill, Howard (pdf file) Deputy Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 12/10/01 Hirth, Randall (pdf file) Division Chief (E.M.S.) 10/24/01 Ingram, Robert (pdf file) Battalion Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 12/7/01 Kelly, Kerry (pdf file) Chief Medical Officer (F.D.N.Y.) 11/15/01 King, Stephen (pdf file) Battalion Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 11/21/01 Kowalczyk, Walter (pdf file) Chief (E.M.S.) 10/16/01 Ranking EMS officer responsible for E.M.S. activities on 9/11 Mancuso, Anthony (pdf file) Firefighter Lieutenant (F.D.N.Y.) 12/7/01 Martin, James (pdf file) Division Chief (E.M.S.) 10/22/01 McCahey, Rich (pdf file) Assistant Chief Fire Marshal (F.D.N.Y.) 11/2/01 McCurry, Richard (pdf file) Fire Marshall (F.D.N.Y.) 12/18/01 McDonald, Thomas (pdf file) Assistant Commissioner (F.D.N.Y.) 10/24/01 McNally, Patrick (pdf file) Deputy Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 11/8/01 Meyers, Harold (pdf file) Deputy Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 12/21/01 Moriarty, Edward (pdf file) Battalion Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 12/19/01 Mosiello, Steven (pdf file) Fire Marshall (F.D.N.Y.) 10/23/01 Murray, John (pdf file) Fire Marshall (F.D.N.Y.) 12/28/01 Nigro, Daniel (pdf file) Chief of Department (F.D.N.Y.) 10/24/01 Was chief of operations on 9/11 O'Flaherty, Brian (pdf file) Battalion Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 1/9/02 Pascale, Fran (pdf file) Division Commander (E.M.S.) 10/17/01 Pfeifer, Joseph (pdf file) Battalion Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 10/23/01 Saw first plane hit WTC Picciotto, Richard (pdf file) Battalion Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 11/27/01 Prezant, Dr. David (pdf file) Deputy Chief Medical officer (F.D.N.Y.) 11/27/01 Raynis, Stephen (pdf file) Battalion Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 12/21/01 Rignola, Salvatore (pdf file) Fire Marshall (F.D.N.Y.) 11/7/01 Schroeck, Michael (pdf file) Firefighter (F.D.N.Y.) 10/11/01 In house watch and saw the first plane hit on 9/11 Steffens, Mark (pdf file) Division Chief (E.M.S.) 10/3/01 Sudnik, John (pdf file) Battalion Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 11/7/01 Tierney, Lynn (pdf file) Deputy Commissioner (F.D.N.Y.) 10/29/01 Traverso, John (pdf file) Field Commander (F.D.N.Y.) 10/12/01 Turi, Albert (pdf file) Deputy Assistant Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 10/23/01 Vallebuona, Tom (pdf file) Battalion Chief (F.D.N.Y.) 1/1/02 Walker, Dan (pdf file) Firefighter First Grade (F.D.N.Y.) 12/12/01 Wells, Charles (pdf file) Division Chief (E.M.S.) 10/25/01

Why Cindy Sheehan is Right!

Why Cindy Sheehan is Right! By David Duke Cindy Sheehan, a mother who lost a son in the Iraq War, is determined to prevent other mothers and fathers from experiencing the same loss. Courageously she has gone to Texas near the ranch of President Bush and braved the elements and a hostile Jewish supremacist media to demand a meeting with him and a good explanation why her son and other’s sons and daughters must die and be disfigured in a war for Israel rather than for America. Recently, she had the courage to state the obvious that her son signed up in the military to protect America not to die for Israel. In a recent letter to “Nightline,” she wrote the following hard-hitting words: Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full-well that my son, my family, this nation, and this world were betrayed by George [W.] Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agenda after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy…not for the real reason, because the Arab-Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy. That hasn’t changed since America invaded and occupied Iraq…in fact it has gotten worse. </> Now, a gauntlet of personal attacks has been let out against her. A recent article on David Horowitz’s FrontPage and repeated by many pro-Israel zealots dares to compare her with that incorrigible American, me. Here is a FrontPage reader’s commentary published in the Lonestar Times. …(Sheehan) voiced vaguely anti-Semitic rhetoric when she alleged that the Iraq War was all about protecting Israel, i.e. a Jewish conspiracy (a similar opinion is frequently expressed by David Duke and his ilk).” — From the Lonestar Times August, 13, 2005 In truth, Cindy Sheehan is absolutely right. Her son signed up in the military to defend America, not Israel, and to safeguard our own democracy, not the democracy of some foreign nation that neither wants nor needs it. In advancing this war for Israel, government and media advocates obviously couldn’t get Americans behind the war by saying it was a war for Israel. They had to make up bogus reasons for the war, such as saying that Iraq was an imminent threat to America and that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Now that these lies have been exposed, they have changed the rationale for the war to “fighting for democracy” and “fighting against terrorism.” Here’s a short list showing why Cindy Sheehan is right! 1) It was criminal for Cindy Sheehan’s son to die for Israel rather than for the true interests of America. From the beginning, this war was orchestrated from top to bottom by Jewish Neocons that saw the war as one for Israel’s strategic objectives. They ramped up the war through Jews such as Perle and Wolfowitz, the false intelligence through CIA analyst Stuart Cohen and by Israel’s Mossad, and had a compliant Jewish-dominated media to cheer on the war. The truth is the Iraq War has inflicted incredible damage on America and the American people. It is war against America rather than in defense of America. 2) It was criminal to send her son to die for a lie. There were no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, no uranium from Niger, no links with Al Qaeda, no imminent threat to the American people. Every reason the American people were given for going to war has turned out to be a lie. 3) It is criminal for her son to be forced to die for democracy in other ountries. If Americans were sent to die for democracy or justice in all the countries of the world we deem unjust or undemocratic, then we must be ready to send millions of our sons and daughters to war all over the globe. 4) The lie that her son died for the good of the Iraqi People is false on its face. Hundreds of thousands of Iraq men women and children have been killed, injured, made homeless and suffered from this war. You don’t save people by destroying their homes and hospitals, and throwing their country in chaos. 5) The Iraq war and her son’s death did not defend American from hatred or terrorism. In fact, the war is massively increasing hatred and terrorism. For every one terrorist killed in Iraq, we are creating thousands more who hate and want to hurt America and Americans. This is the surest way to lose the war on terror not win it. 6) Cindy Sheehan’s son died for no true interest for the American people. It has secured us no new or cheaper oil, it has cost a national treasure of hundreds of billions of dollars, it has alienated friends and allies, it has hurt American business around the world, it has separated and caused hardship upon millions of American military and National Guard families. It has killed almost 2000 and maimed tens of thousands of loyal and brave Americans who do their duty in Iraq. Again, this is war against every true interest of the America. The only nation that benefits from it is Israel! Cindy Sheehan has a lot to be angry about. Her son was betrayed and his life lost by government officials who treasonably created and continue a war for Israel and the Jewish supremacist agenda rather than that of the United States. We stand with Cindy Sheehan and the memory of her son which should spur all truly patriotic Americans to demand an end to this war for Israel, this war against America, the Iraq War. It is not Iraq’s borders that need protecting, it is the American border with Mexico! Support our troops…bring them home! Let them protect America and not die for Israel. Sincerely, David Duke

Opinion | Biking Toward Nowhere

Pressed about how he could ride his bike while refusing to see a grieving mom of a dead soldier who's camped outside his ranch, he added: "So I'm mindful of what goes on around me. On the other hand, I'm also mindful that I've got a life to live and will do so." Ah, the insensitivity of reporters who ask the President Bushes how they can expect to deal with Middle East fighting while they're off fishing. The first President Bush told us that he kept a telephone in his golf cart and his cigarette boat so he could easily stay on top of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. But at least he seemed worried that he was sending the wrong signal, as his boating and golfing was juxtaposed on the news with footage of the frightened families of troops leaving for the Middle East. "I just don't like taking questions on serious matters on my vacation," the usually good-natured Bush senior barked at reporters on the golf course. "So I hope you'll understand if I, when I'm recreating, will recreate." His hot-tempered oldest son, who was golfing with his father that day, was even more irritated. "Hey! Hey!" W. snapped at reporters asking questions on the first tee. "Can't you wait until we finish hitting, at least?" Junior always had his priorities straight. As W.'s neighbors get in scraps with the antiwar forces coalescing around the ranch; as the Pentagon tries to rustle up updated armor for our soldiers, who are still sitting ducks in the third year of the war; as the Iraqi police we train keep getting blown up by terrorists, who come right back every time U.S. troops beat them up; as Shiites working on the Iraqi constitution conspire with Iran about turning Iraq into an Islamic state that represses women; and as Iraq hurtles toward a possible civil war, W. seems far more oblivious than his father was with his Persian Gulf crisis.

Whew! Your DNA Isn't Your Destiny

The more we learn about the human genome, the less DNA looks like destiny. As scientists discover more about the "epigenome," a layer of biochemical reactions that turns genes on and off, they're finding that it plays a big part in health and heredity. By mapping the epigenome and linking it with genomic and health information, scientists believe they can develop better ways to predict, diagnose and treat disease. "A new world is opening up, one that is so much more complex than the genomic world," said Moshe Szyf, an epigeneticist at Canada's McGill University. The epigenome can change according to an individual's environment, and is passed from generation to generation. It's part of the reason why "identical" twins can be so different, and it's also why not only the children but the grandchildren of women who suffered malnutrition during pregnancy are likely to weigh less at birth. "Now we're even talking about how to see if socioeconomic status has an impact on the epigenome," Szyf said. Researchers have already linked some human cancers with epigenetic changes. In a few years, scientists hope that doctors, by looking at an individual's epigenome, will be able to detect cancer early and determine what treatments to use. The same might be done for other diseases – and as the effect of the environment on epigenetic change is better understood, people will be able to address the environmental aspects of health. The field, though still embryonic, won't be that way for long. "Epigenetics is one of the fastest-moving areas of science, period," said Melanie Ehrlich, a Tulane University epigeneticist whose lab linked human cancer to epigenomic changes in 1983. Back then, Ehrlich's discipline was largely ignored. Walter Gilbert, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, famously said that since fruit flies had no epigenomes, people could hardly need them. But in the past two decades – and especially the last couple of years – studies have linked the epigenome to disease and development, showing that it changes in response to the environment and can be passed from parents to children. While predicted treatments run from diabetes and heart disease to substance abuse and schizophrenia, the most promising applications are in cancer. Research shows that some cancers follow from the deactivation of tumor-suppression genes. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first epigenetic drug, azacitidine, which treats a form of leukemia by reactivating those genes. However, using drugs to target specific parts of the epigenome, which runs in tandem with our 6 billion base pairs of DNA, is extremely complicated. Ehrlich believes epigenetic researchers are better off trying to predict and diagnose cancer and other diseases. To do that, scientists need a large-scale map that shows how epigenetic patterns relate to disease, said Steve Baylin, an epigeneticist at Johns Hopkins. "If we knew those patterns," Baylin said, "you could predict which individuals are more at risk – change their diets, change their exposures, use prevention. We could detect disease early and predict how people respond to drugs." Making that map won't be easy. Not only does the epigenome change over time, it also differs in every major cell type, of which there are a couple hundred. Epigeneticists say this will be time-consuming but possible. In Europe, a consortium of public and private institutions is collaborating on the Human Epigenome Project, while mapping in the United States is scattered among a handful of companies and government-funded scientists. "We don't have the funding to do a comprehensive, large-scale epigenetics project," said Elise Feingold, a director of the National Human Genome Research Institute's ENCODE Project. The lack of investment is somewhat reminiscent of the Human Genome Project's early struggles, when James Watson fought for government money. But at least the epigenomic mapping effort seems to have learned something from the gene-patenting frenzy that loomed over the Human Genome Project. "That was a lesson in how intellectual property should not be handled," said John Stamatoyannopoulos, founder of biopharmaceutical company Regulome. "Everybody patented everything left and right, the lawyers got rich, the patent office was flooded, and at the end of the day the patents just weren't valuable." The absence of patent sniping might diminish some of the urgency, but the upside is that the epigenomic map is free and available to anyone – although only a tiny fraction has thus far been made. "We are well under 1 percent finished; 1 percent would be a massive overstatement," Stamatoyannopoulos said. "But, ultimately, this type of knowledge will revolutionize the way we diagnose and treat disease." Giving Genetic Disease the Finger Stem-Cell Finesse Too Grotesque Bioscientists: Gods or Monsters? MicroRNA Is a Big Topic in Bio Check yourself into Med-Tech

Who Moved My Ability to Reason?

The 24/7 Happy Hour. Be positive, upbeat and perky at all times. Once, the job of corporate functionaries was to make things happen. Today, their mission is apparently to keep their colleagues company in the office. As "How Full Is Your Bucket?" asserts, "Ninety-nine out of every 100 people report that they want to be around more positive people." Every book in the genre enjoins a relentless positivity of outlook. In the "Tuesdays With Morrie"-like fable of "The Present," the anonymous "young man" chirps to the wise "old man," "So, if what I believe and do today is positive, I help create a better tomorrow!" In fact, negative thoughts -- as toward the boss who laid you off or passed you over for a promotion -- will not only be visible to your comrades, they "can be harmful to your health and might even shorten your life span." If you happen to be downsized, right-sized or outsourced again, just grin and bear your smiley face to the next potential employer, as the happy folks in "We Got Fired! . . . And It's the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us" advise. Avoid Victimism and Anyone Who Indulges in It. People who fail at being positive -- and dwell morbidly on their last demotion or downsizing, for example -- easily fall into what "The 8th Habit" diagnoses as "the mind-set of victimism and culture of blame." Avoid them, even though "it's very easy to hang out and share suffering with people who are committed to lose." Poor people, we discover in "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind," are that way because they "choose to play the role of the victim." Avoid them too. Masters of the Universe. Being positive and upbeat not only improves your health and popularity, it actually changes the world. Yes, your thoughts can alter the physical universe, which, according to "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind," "is akin to a big mail-order department," in which you " 'order' what you get by sending energetic messages out to the universe." The author ascribes this wisdom to the "Law of Attraction," which was explained scientifically in the 2001 book "The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want." Thoughts exert a gravitational-type force on the world, so that "whenever you think something, the thought immediately attracts its physical equivalent." If you think money -- in a totally urgent, focused and positive way, of course -- it will come flying into your pockets. The Mice Come Out Ahead. Although the plot of "Who Moved My Cheese?" centers on two tiny, maze-dwelling, cheese-dependent people named Hem and Haw, there are also two subsidiary characters, both mice. When the cheese is moved, the tiny people waste time ranting and raving "at the injustice of it all," as the book's title suggests. But the mice just scurry off to locate an alternative cheese source. They prevail, we learn, because they "kept life simple. They didn't overanalyze or overcomplicate things." In the mysteriously titled "QBQ! The Question Behind the Question," we are told that questions beginning with "who" or "why" are symptoms of "victim thinking." Happily, rodents are less prone to it than humans. That may be why we never learn the identity of the Cheese Mover; the who-question reveals a dangerous human tendency to "overanalyze," which could lead you to look upward, resentfully, toward the C-suites where the true Masters of the Universe dwell.

Strange fossil defies grouping

By Julianna Kettlewell BBC News science reporter The animal, from the early Cambrian Period, might have belonged to a now extinct mollusc-like phylum, academics from America and China say. Other researchers have suggested the creature could represent an early annelid or arthropod. Details are published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It is another strange thing from the Cambrian Jonathan Todd, Natural History Museum, London The trouble is the animal, named Vetustovermis planus, did not possess a set of features, or characters, which placed it clearly within any known group. When it was first described in 1979, Vetustovermis was included in the annelid category. Later researchers argued against this classification, saying it was, in fact, either an arthropod or a mollusc. Flat foot According to the latest study, the weird creature seems closest to molluscs, primarily because it had a snail or slug-like flat foot. However, the researchers say, it does not sit happily in this group. "Phyla are defined by an organism having a set of features called characters, and currently there are no animals that we know of which contain the set of characters that Vetustovermis has," co-author David Bottjer, of the University of Southern California, US, told the BBC News website. Vetustodermis planus does not fit comfortably within any known phylum Since Vetustovermis requires some "pushing and pulling" to force it into any known phylum, Professor Bottjer and his colleagues are tempted to speculate it belonged to a different group entirely; one which flourished and faded within the Cambrian. "We have always been intrigued by the many molluscan features of these fossils, but in the great menagerie of organisms that have inhabited Earth through life's long history, we may come to conclude that Vetustovermis indeed represents a new phylum," he said. Jonathan Todd, a palaeontologist from the Natural History Museum, London, UK, is also mystified by the baffling animal. "It is an intriguing beast," he told the BBC News website. "It is another strange thing from the Cambrian. It doesn't look much like an arthropod and I don't find its molluscan affinities particularly convincing." Evolutionary tree However, Dr Todd is reluctant to create a whole new phylum to accommodate Vetustovermis; that, he thinks, would be premature. "Some scientists have thought that there were so many distinct phyla in the Cambrian," he said. "They came to that conclusion because they were not thinking in the phylogenetic sense, they were thinking 'hey, that is a unique set of features - it must be a distinct phylum'." So rather than creating new phyla every time something doesn't fit an existing one, the really interesting exercise, Dr Todd thinks, is to establish just how Vetustovermis slotted into the greater evolutionary tree. If, indeed, it did belong to a different phylum, how did that group connect to the molluscs, annelids and arthropods? "We don't really know the phylo-genetic relationships between the extant phyla," he said. "Molecular genetics has only gone so far. But recent phyla have got to connect somehow. These fossils really offer the opportunity to tie together recent phyla."

London Inquiry Refutes Police in Their Killing of a Suspect

LONDON, Aug. 16 - An official investigation was reported Tuesday to have directly contradicted the police account of the killing of a young Brazilian man after the bombing attempts in London on July 21, including the assertion that he had been fleeing officers when he was shot. The man, Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old electrician, was shot several times in front of horrified passengers on July 22 on a subway train at Stockwell station, in South London. The killing came a day after four attackers failed to detonate bombs in what seemed to be a copy of the deadly bombings two weeks earlier, and it intensified an already emotional debate over the introduction of armed police units. At the time, the police said Mr. Menezes wore a bulky jacket on a hot day, began running from officers despite commands to halt, vaulted the ticket turnstile and ran stumbling onto the subway train. On Tuesday, however, a news report on British television said an inquiry led by the Independent Police Complaints Commission had contradicted every one of those points. The report said that the officers had misidentified Mr. Menezes as one of the failed July 21 attackers and that he was killed even though he walked into the subway station wearing a light denim jacket, did not vault the turnstile and was sitting on the train when the officers moved in.

Black Hole Forges Invisible Bubble

The cross marks the location of the black hole Cygnus X-1 in this radio image. The bright region to the left (east) of the black hole is a dense cloud of gas existing in the space between the stars, the interstellar medium. A huge invisible bubble surrounds a well-studied black hole, scientists have just learned. The cavity is carved from space by the activity of the black hole itself and was detected with a radio telescope. Other space bubbles have been spotted, excavated by exploded stars and by supermassive black holes that anchor entire galaxies. The most recent discovery is unique because it involves a stellar black hole, one that resulted from the collapse of a dead star here in our Milky Way. The bubble is formed by a jet of material streaming from the black hole at very high speeds. Since this type of black hole is common, the finding suggests scientists have been "severely underestimating how much power black holes pump back into the universe," said the astronomers who announced the finding last week in the journal Nature. "We already knew that supermassive black holes at the centers of other galaxies produce enormous amounts of energy," said study leader Elena Gallo of the University of Amsterdam. "But this finding proves that something similar is happening in our backyard." Vast impact The jet of energetic particles moves at a significant fraction of light-speed. "This jet travels up to more than 15 light-years from the black hole, at which point its pressure is balanced by the pressure of the surrounding interstellar gas," Gallo told SPACE.com. "There the jet starts to inflate a bubble with energy and particles. As the bubble expands sideways it creates a shock-compressed "hollow sphere" which gives rise to the observed emission." Those observations involve a ring of radio emissions around a two-object system known as Cygnus X-1, in which a black hole 10 times the mass of our Sun is orbited by another star. The setup is about 6,000 light-years away. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). Black holes can't be seen because they swallow light and everything else that gets too close. But matter and energy in the black hole's vicinity can escape in dramatic fashion. Material orbits the black hole and is lured inward by gravity. But as with all black holes, mealtime is messy. Some of the matter is kicked outward instead by intense magnetic fields. And some is converted to energy, emitted as X-rays and other wavelengths. Scientists are still trying to understand the exact mechanisms behind all this output. Powerful finding The newfound bubble is about 10 light-years across and is expanding at about 225,000 mph (100 kilometers per second). Its creation has been ongoing for a million years or so. Astronomers are excited about the disovery because it is impossible to measure directly the power of jets like this one. By noting the interaction at the bubble, however, the researchers were able to calculate the jet's power. The jet packs about 100,000 times more energy than our Sun. "Remarkably, it also means that, after a massive star dies and turns into a black hole, it is still capable of energizing its surroundings, by means of completely different mechanisms," Gallo said. Astronomers suspect there are millions of black holes similar to Cygnus X-1. "We knew about jets from black holes and expected to discover some interaction of the jet's energy with the gas in our Milky Way, but the size and energy content of this bubble came as a surprise," said study co-author Christian Kaiser of the University of Southampton in the UK. The observations were made with the Dutch Westerbork radio telescope.

Summit in Sight for Mars Rover Spirit

Spirit Mars rover is within camera-sight of summit. The seeing from high up in the Columbia Hills is already picturesque. Note the walls of Gusev crater in view off in the distance. Image At its Gusev crater exploration site, the Spirit Mars rover is wheeling to the summit of Husband Hill and likely to complete its climb this week. "I think we're going to make it," said the Mars Exploration Rover program's lead scientist, Steve Squyres of Cornell University. New imagery from the robot shows a feature that is either the summit or something very close to it, he noted in a newly issued rover update on a Cornell University-based website. Spirit has wrapped up work in what's called the Voltaire region, including a thorough sweep of a rock called "Assemblee" using science gear attached to the rover's robotic arm. Assemblee has turned out to have "a crazy composition," Squyres noted. The rock has the highest levels of chromium that the Mars rover team has ever seen on Mars. "A weird one," he added. Big event Spirit's drive to the summit within the Columbia Hills is eagerly awaited by Mars rover scientists. Not only should observations from the vantagepoint be impressive, rover team members hope to inspect a basin to the south and possibly layered terrain on the basin's eastside. Reaching the summit is a big event for Spirit, said Larry Crumpler, a member of the Mars rover science team. He is also research curator in volcanology and space sciences at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque. Crumpler told SPACE.com that unless the next drives of Spirit have troubles with terrain or the like, there is a "good probability" of being at or very close to the summit by the end of this week. Spirit touched down on Mars at Gusev crater in early January 2004. Opportunity: puzzling features Spirit's robot companion--the Opportunity rover--touched down a few weeks after Spirit and is scouting out Meridiani Planum on the other side of Mars. In his Cornell rover update, Squyres also spotlighted new findings by the Opportunity Mars rover. A puzzler is further investigation of "blueberries", the tiny gray spheres of hematite that provide evidence that water once infused the Meridiani Planum area. "One of the things we've been wondering about for awhile was whether the blueberries are the same everywhere, or whether they change from place to place if you travel far enough." The answer: the blueberries at Opportunity's current locale are indeed different compared to those found earlier and several miles away. "The berries are more numerous here, and some seem to be smaller than any we've ever seen. And interestingly, some don't appear to be round. We're still debating what this means, but clearly the hematite is distributed a bit differently here than it has been in any other rocks we've seen at Meridiani," Squyres reported. Cobbles and rinds And there are a couple of other mysteries that Opportunity has encountered. "One mystery we've been dealing with for a long time is the origin of the little dark 'cobbles' that we occasionally see out on the plains," Squyres said. There are two theories for these features: One is that they are pieces of ejecta - stuff that has been tossed out of nearby craters by impacts. The other theory is that they are meteorites. "That'd be interesting too, though [it would] tell us less about Mars than if they're martian rocks," Squyres said. Yet another puzzle: mysterious "rinds" that are sometimes spotted on rocks at Meridiani, Squyres said. "These look like hard outer shells on some parts of some outcrops, and they're darker and a little redder than the rock that they encrust," Squyres said. Opportunity has wheeled up to such an outcrop that has some rinds on it, "among the best we've ever seen," Squyres added. "So once we nail the cobble problem, we may go after the rinds next."

Bombs explode across Bangladesh

The bombs were crude, homemade devices Officials say more than 300 explosions took place simultaneously in 50 cities and towns across the country including the capital Dhaka. An outlawed Islamic group, Jamatul Mujahideen Bangladesh, says it carried out the attacks. Police say that more than 50 people have been arrested in connection with the blasts. Prime Minister Khaleda Zia condemned the attacks as "cowardly". "The attackers are enemies of the country, people, peace, humanity and democracy," she said. Reports say many of the injured have been admitted to local hospitals, although most of the injuries are not life-threatening. The blasts caused panic across many cities leading to massive traffic jams. Reports say parents rushed to bring their children home from school. It was a horrible experience. In the name of humanity, I ask all the extremist groups to please think twice before attempting this kind of coordinated crime Jesin Zahir, Dhaka Fear of concerted campaign "It's an organised attack," said Home Minister Lutfozzaman Babor, adding that 58 of the country's 64 districts were affected. In each incident, bombs were set off in crowded spots, mainly at government offices, journalists' clubs and courts, between 1030 and 1130 local time. Mr Babor said timing devices were found at the scenes of blasts but most of the bombs were small, homemade devices - wrapped in tape or paper. One of the deaths was a young boy in Savar, near Dhaka, who was killed when he picked up a device. The other confirmed death was in the western town of Rajshahi, where doctors say a businessman died from wounds in an explosion. Dhaka resident Jesin Zahir witnessed a blast near Jahangir Nagar university. "It was a horrible experience. In the name of humanity, I ask all the extremist groups to please think twice before attempting this kind of coordinated crime." Unexplained Leaflets from the Jamatul Mujahideen Bangladesh have appeared at the site of some of the blasts. "It is time to implement Islamic law in Bangladesh" and "Bush and Blair be warned and get out of Muslim countries", the leaflets say. Early this year the Bangladesh government banned Jamatul Mujahideen and another group, Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh Security has been stepped up across the country They were accused of being behind a series of bomb blasts, including those at two local aid agencies - Grameen and Brac. The BBC's Roland Buerk in Dhaka said the banning was a major change in policy as the government had long insisted there was no threat from Islamic militancy. Police and security forces were quickly deployed on Wednesday and were seen checking vehicles at Dhaka's main intersections. Several unexplained bombs have exploded across Bangladesh in recent years. On Saturday, one person was killed and 50 others injured after several bombs were thrown at a Muslim shrine in eastern Bangladesh. In May last year, the British High Commissioner in Bangladesh was hurt in a grenade explosion at a Muslim shrine in the north-eastern town of Sylhet. Three people were killed and more than 50 wounded in that attack.

The Ultra Gleeper: Gleep!

There's a lot of interesting stuff on the web. Since the beginning, the hard part has been finding it. In the old days the only tools available were random browsing and directory sites like Yahoo!. These days it's more efficient to subscribe to weblogs that you've found are reliable sources of good links. But the web keeps growing; now it's hard to find the new interesting weblogs, much less all the other interesting pages. The Ultra Gleeper takes your weblog subscription list and starts from there. It crawls the web for things you haven't seen and shows you the pages it thinks you'll like. Your feedback improves its ability to give accurate ratings. With the Ultra Gleeper can find new pages and new weblogs to read. And if you have your own weblog or use del.icio.us, the links you post there will be automatically turned into ratings. The Ultra Gleeper solves or avoids the problems that give recommendation engines a bad reputation. It won't give you a lot of links you've already seen, because it knows about your subscriptions and what they've posted. It won't just recap the most popular links of the day, because its indie rock algorithm distrusts excessive popularity. It won't ask you for a lot of calibration ratings up front: you already gave those ratings by telling it what you subscribe to and pointing it to your weblog and/or bookmark page. The Ultra Gleeper runs on your server and shows up in your web browser or RSS reader. It's free software, so you're free to use and modify it. More details The secrets of the Ultra Gleeper are laid bare in its eponymous paper. I presented the Ultra Gleeper at CodeCon 2005, using the paper as my model and these slides. Download Ultra Gleeper 1.0.4 was released on February 13, 2005. It is made available under a 3-clause Berkeley license. You can read the INSTALL document online Note: The Ultra Gleeper requires version 0.5.3 of SQLObject (available here). Status The Ultra Gleeper was intended as a proof of concept. I stopped development once I satisfied my curiosity. Anyone is welcome to build on the ideas mentioned in the paper, or even on the code, if you can get it to work on a modern system. The recommendation screen The control panel In an RSS reader

WHY TUESDAY?

WHY DO WE VOTE ON TUESDAYS? THE ANSWER? NO GOOD REASON.

What is Mathematics: Gödel's Theorem and Around. Incompleteness. By K. Podnieks

What is Mathematics: Gödel's Theorem and Around Open / download PDF Hyper-textbook for students by Karlis Podnieks, Professor University of Latvia Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science

Loss of a gene called p63 accelerates aging in mice

Researchers have discovered that the loss of a gene called p63 accelerates aging in mice. Similar versions of the gene are present in many organisms, including humans. Therefore, the p63 gene is likely to play a fundamental biological role in aging-related processes. "To study how the p63 gene works, we devised a system for eliminating it from adult mouse tissues. What struck us right away was that these p63 deficient mice were aging prematurely," says Alea Mills of Cold Spring Harbor laboratory, who led the research. Mice that are born without the p63 gene do not survive. Therefore, Mills had previously conducted extensive studies of mice that are born with only one copy of the gene. Still, these animals die at a young age. So to study p63 function in adults, Mills and her colleagues devised a sophisticated molecular genetic technique that enabled them to eliminate both copies of the gene from particular tissues--including skin and other multi-layered epithelial tissues--after the animals reached maturity. The effects of premature aging observed in these p63 deficient mice (image available on request) were hair loss, reduced fitness and body weight, progressive curvature of the spine, and a shortened lifespan. "Aging and cancer are two sides of the same coin. In one case, cells stop dividing and in the other, they can't stop dividing. We suspect that having the right amount of the p63 protein in the right cells at the right time creates a balance that enables organisms to live relatively cancer-free for a reasonably long time," says Mills, who adds that this is the first time the p63 gene has been implicated in aging. "I first presented these results at a meeting in Tuscany. I don't want to sound flippant, but if you have to grow old somewhere, that's about as good a place as any to do it," says Mills. The study is published in the September issue of the journal Genes & Development (advance online publication August 17). The other researchers involved in the study were Scott Lowe, Ying Wu, Xuecui Guo, and first author William Keyes of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and Hannes Vogel of Stanford University. Researchers who did not participate in the study but are familiar with its findings include: Carol Prives (Columbia University); Judith Campisi (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory); David Lane (University of Dundee); Lawrence Donehower (Baylor College of Medicine).

Ex-AOL man jailed for e-mail scam

The US CAN-Spam law is designed to smother unsolicited e-mail American Jason Smathers, 25, said he turned into a "cyberspace outlaw" after selling the database of 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses. As a result of his actions in 2003, about seven billion unsolicited spam e-mails flooded inboxes of AOL members. Prosecutors said Mr Smathers had violated recent Can-Spam laws, which aim to clamp down on unsolicited mail. He was also accused of breaking US interstate transportation of stolen property laws. Mr Smathers admitted accepting $28,000 (£15,515) from an individual for the list of AOL member details. The details are still thought to be circulating amongst spammer rings. The public at large has an interest in making sure people respect the same values that apply in everyday life, on the internet Assistant US Attorney David Siegal "Cyberspace is a new and strange place," Mr Smathers wrote. "I was good at navigating in that frontier and I became an outlaw." Assistant US Attorney David Siegal concluded that the case had shown that the net was "not lawless" anymore. "The public at large has an interest in making sure people respect the same values that apply in everyday life, on the internet," he said. Mr Smathers' lawyer added that the theft had been a "dumb, stupid, insane act". AOL said Mr Smathers' act had cost the company at least $300,000 (£166,240), although the judge said that figure was speculative. The judge ordered Mr Smathers to pay $84,000 (£46,560) in restitution, but he delayed the order so that AOL could prove whether the damages were higher. Mr Smathers was fired by AOL in June 2004. He was said to have used another employee's access code to steal the list of AOL customers in 2003 from its headquarters in Dulles, Virginia. Spam laws The US CAN-Spam legislation (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) was introduced in the US in January 2004. The US and UK laws to control spam have been criticised as ineffective. Some legal action in the US has had to be brought against individuals or groups using local state laws instead. Spammer Jeremy Jaynes was recently sentenced in Virginia, where there are tough anti-spam laws, to nine years in prison for sending 10 million junk e-mails daily. But unsolicited e-mails in the US rose by 10% after the introduction of its anti-spam laws. The majority of spam originates outside of Europe, from the Americas in particular. UK spammers account for less than two percent of all junk e-mails sent. The anti-spam campaign group, Spamhaus, estimates that by summer 2006 spam will account for 95% of all e-mails sent. It said that spam would not stop until the US acts to toughen its laws. Last week, software giant Microsoft has won a $7m (£3.9m) court settlement from a businessman considered to be one of the world's biggest senders of spam e-mail. Scott Richter agreed to pay the sum after Microsoft filed a lawsuit against his net firm Opt In Real Big. Loopholes in UK law mean legislation is ineffective in the fight against spammers, according to Spamhaus. Since UK anti-spam laws came into force more than a year ago no UK spammers have been fined or prosecuted.

Worm War II

Separate groups of hackers are releasing a barrage of worms in a battle to seize control of Windows PCs that remain vulnerable to the now infamous Windows Plug-and-Play vulnerability. The Bozori worm attempts to remove infections by earlier versions of the Zotob worm and other malware, so it can take control of a compromised computer for itself. A family of IRC bots that exploit the same Microsoft (MS05-039) Plug and Play vulnerability likewise try to remove competing PnP bots, as explained in a diagram by Finnish anti-virus firm F-Secure here. It reckons 11 different types of malware are exploiting the vulnerability. The upswing in malware creation - and competition between various PnP worms - echoes the competition between NetSky and Bagle worms for control of vulnerable Windows PCs that first flared up in March 2004. Then, as now, it's all about turning Windows PCs in zombie spam bots. "Once one of these worms has control over your computer, it can use your PC for sending spam, launching an extortion denial-of-service attack against a website, stealing confidential information or blasting out new versions of malware to other unsuspecting computer users," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "Organised criminal gangs are behind attacks like these and their motive is to make money. Owning a large network of compromised computers is a valuable asset to these criminals, and every business needs to take steps to ensure they are not the next victim on their list." The worms are affecting computers which are not properly patched against Microsoft security holes such as the MS05-039 Plug and Play vulnerability, disclosed by Microsoft last week. Windows 2000 systems are particularly at risk of exploit. Many organisations have already been hit including CNN, ABC, The Financial Times, and the New York Times. General Electric, United Parcel Service, Caterpillar and the US Congress have also been affected by PnP worm infestation. Security firms at odds over seriousness of outbreak This sounds bad but according to Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky Labs the seriousness of the outbreak has been exaggerated by the media. "There has not been any noticeable increase in network activity which could be ascribed to this worm [outbreak]. During the Sasser epidemic in May 2004, which some publications are using as a comparison for Bozori-A, Sasser caused an increase in network traffic of approximately 20 per cent to 40 per cent. At the moment, there are no signs of a similar increase," it said. Kaspersky's argument has been bolstered by a lowering of the alert status at Internet Storm Centre (ISC), which runs a well respected vendor-independent syber threat monitoring and alert system. However security firm Arbor Networks takes the opposite line and said that, if anything, the Zotob Worm is being underestimated. "Arbor Networks has received calls from a number of large companies that have been devastated by Zotob. Because there have been an additional seven variants of the worm released and the most recent one is through email, this has the potential to become a much bigger problem for companies," it said. "This worm is picking up new tricks along the way, leveraging old exploits and has become a multi-vector, blended threat. This is an indication of the amount of code sharing that takes place among worm and malware authors." Although vendors differ over the scope of the attack there's general agreement over remedial actions: block traffic on port 445 at least at the internet perimeter, patch systems quickly, apply anti-virus signature updates. Tin-foil hats may not go amiss either. ®

Giant Space Blasts a Two-step Process

An artist's impression of merging neutron stars, one of the theoretical progenitors of gamma-ray bursts. Scientists have taken another step closer toexplaining mysterious gamma ray bursts, some of the most energetic and brightexplosions in the sky. Gamma ray bursts (GRBs)- the harbingers of death for some massive stars - are intense blasts of energyand radiation that eject from massive dying stars. Now, scientists at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) in Italy have used NASA's Swiftsatellite - specially designed to automatically detect GRBs- to determine that GRBs are a two-step explosion. "The first burst of energy, lasting lessthan a few minutes, is produced by shockwaves within the collapsing star,"study author Sergio Campana told SPACE.com in an email. "Whereas the longer, less energeticafterglow is produced by collisions between ejected matter and the materialaround the star, witnessing the X-ray light curves in the transition period fromprompt emission to afterglow." This research isdetailed in the Aug. 18 issue of the journal Nature. The soft X-rayafterglow following the initial GRB can last for periods ranging from hours toweeks. This afterglow was initially thought to be the slow fading of theinitial burst. But after closelyobserving five GRBs and measuring the patterns ofX-ray emission, the INAF scientists determined that the afterglow was insteadcaused by violent shock interactions caused by the initial high-intensity blast. "The duration of GRBs, together with their spectral properties, suggest aclassification into short and long bursts," Clemson University physicist DieterHartmann wrote in an accompanying 'News and Views' piece to the Nature article. Short GRBs are believed to be caused by the merging of compactbinary stars, such as two neutron stars. However, scientists are not yetpositive this explanation is definite and plan to continue to use the Swiftsatellite to investigate the nature of these bursts. When explaininglong GRBs, scientists favor the "collapsar"model. In this model, a rapidly rotating massive star has undergone extremegravitational collapse and created a black hole. A disk of material from thecollapsed star forms around the outer rim of the black hole. Through complexprocesses, a jet of high-energy radiation shoots from this disk, burstingthrough the surface of the star at almost the speed of light. Intense bursts ofhigh-frequency gamma ray and X-ray radiation from exploding stars werediscovered nearly four decades ago. Since NASA launched the Swift satellite inNov. 2004, its detectors have picked up a burst every couple of days. The Swift satelliteis the most autonomous spacecraft NASA has designed, using its three telescopesto detect and observe GRBs all on its own,automatically detecting the first stage of the explosion and targeting itselfon the event in about one minute.

Competition to reveal Britain's favourite gay novel

Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx's sparely written story of the tragic love between two tough Wyoming ranch hands went straight to the hearts of thousands of readers, gay and straight, when it was first published in 1998. Newly made into a film, it was an obvious choice for a list of books chosen as a starting point for a project to find Britain's favourite lesbian/gay novel. It will be launched in Manchester next week to coincide with the opening of the city's annual Pride celebrations. The Big Gay Read, a follow-up to the BBC's Big Read, is intended to cross the sexuality divide and prompt a debate in reading groups, in internet chatrooms, in bars and over dinner tables, anywhere where people like talking about books. Submissions for the winner, which need not be one of the volumes on the list, have to be in by February, with the top book announced at Manchester's Queer Up North festival in May. The plan was hatched during discussions between librarians in Manchester and Salford and Cathy Bolton, a development worker with Commonword, a Manchester-based literature development and community publishing agency. "We had decided to set up a reading group for lesbian and gay literature and they came up with the idea of the Big Gay Read," she said. "The original idea was to confine it to Manchester or the north-west. Then we decided to go national. "Lesbian/gay literature is an important part of the lives of many people, especially in the coming out process. The first time a woman or man finds a reflection of what they are going through can often be in a book or a film. But until recently, there were very few books that could speak to them of their own experience." The list, compiled mainly from recent fiction readily available, includes familiar and less well-known titles. Alan Hollinghurst's The Line Of Beauty, winner of last year's Man Booker prize, is among the 21, as is Jeanette Winterson's Oranges are not the Only Fruit (set just 20 miles north of Manchester) and Jackie Kay's Trumpet, her first novel which told of a female jazz musician who led a professional life as a man. Sarah Walters' Tipping The Velvet, made into a successful and sometimes controversial television series, and Armistead Maupin's celebrated Tales of the City are also present. Books which may be less familiar include Stella Duffy's Calendar Girl featuring private investigator Saz Martin, who runs her business on a business enterprise scheme, and, one of Ms Bolton's favourites, The Monkey's Mask by Dorothy Porter. "It's in verse but very approachable," she said. "I think the Big Gay Read is a fantastic idea," said John Malpass, chief executive of Queer Up North. "People are already discussing the list even though it is not officially out yet. "It seems to have caught everyone's imagination. "We don't want to confine ourselves to one group. This is about promoting lesbian and gay fiction to the public in general and about encouraging the reading habit across the board. Many books have already crossed over into the mainstream." He hopes the website will feature discussion and interviews with authors and book nominations from celebrities. "If the winner is available, we will invite him or her to the official announcement at the Queer Up North festival," he said. Pushed to nominate a book not on the list, Mr Malpass suggested Tom Spanbauer's The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon, the story of a boy growing up in Idaho who believes he has a native American mother who is a member of a third sex. "I'm gutted it's not in print," he said. Ms Bolton suggested Ruby Mae Brown's semi-autobiographical novel Rubyfruit Jungle, first published in 1973, which she said "made the prospect of being a lesbian quite a good idea". Up for discussion The Long Firm Jake Arnott Around the Houses Amanda Boulter A Home at the End of the World Michael Cunningham Crocodile Soup Julia Darling Calendar Girl Stella Duffy Hallucinating Foucault Patricia Duncker Middlesex Jeffrey Eugenides Rough Music Patrick Gale Carol Patricia Highsmith The Line of Beauty Alan Hollingworth Trumpet Jackie Kay Tales of the City Armistead Maupin At Swim, Two Boys Jamie O'Neill The Monkey's Mask Dorothy Porter Brokeback Mountain Annie Proulx Desert of the Heart Jane Rule Funny Boy Shyam Selvadurai Story of the Night Colm Tobin Tipping the Velvet Sarah Waters Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Jeannette Winterson

Boy who started 'Columbine syndrome' freed at 21

What happened in Jonesboro that day in 1998 awakened America to the terror of school shootings and left an indelible mark on the northeast Arkansas town that was yesterday trying to come to terms with the fact that one of the convicted murderers, Johnson, is due to walk free from prison. Golden is scheduled to be freed in 2007. A now-closed legal loophole means the killers can only be held until their 21st birthdays, and with Johnson's birthday falling yesterday his expected release from a federal penitentiary in Memphis has re-opened old wounds in the town, with many residents questioning whether justice has been served in the case. It has also drawn a sharp reaction from gun control campaigners, who criticised the fact that because Johnson was convicted as a minor his criminal record will be wiped clean and he will be allowed to buy a gun. Whitney Irving, a student at Westside Middle School, was shot in the back but survived the attack. Although she has since graduated from high school, married and had a child, the attack remains a part of her everyday life. "A lot of people are really scared to this very day and we have not forgotten anything," she told the Associated Press. Mitchell Wright, whose wife Shannon was the teacher who was killed, said he has tried to explain Johnson's release to his son, who was two at the time of his mother's death. "He's told me, 'I don't think it's right he gets to go home to his momma and I only get to see my momma on videos'," Mr Wright said. The Jonesboro shooting was the first major schoolyard assault in which teenagers attacked their classmates. Less than a year later 13 died, along with two young gunmen, at Columbine High School, Colorado, while in March this year 10 people were killed when a student opened fire at a school on a native American reservation in northern Minnesota before turning the gun on himself. Dale Haas, the sheriff at the time of the shootings and now a judge in the town, believes Johnson and his accomplice are getting off too lightly. "We forget what they had done," he told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. "They killed somebody with malice ... Would you really want them as your neighbours?" Kenneth Heard, a reporter who covered the shooting and the trial, said: "This town is hurting. It is bringing back a whole load of bad memories for a lot of people." Johnson's mother, Gretchen Woodard, said her son would not be moving back to Arkansas; instead he would enrol in college - possibly a seminary - at least a day's drive away. Jonesboro's sheriff, Jack McCann, told CNN yesterday that if Johnson returned to the town "we cannot guarantee his safety".

Nasa blasted over shuttle efforts

Some of the same problems plagued this flight, panellists say Their views are included in a report by the Return to Flight task group, overseeing how Nasa responds to recommendations following Columbia. They said leadership shortfalls made the shuttle effort costlier, longer and more complex than it needed to be. Space shuttle Discovery launched successfully from Florida on 26 July. The task group's final report was released on Wednesday. The views of the more critical seven panellists are individual observations only. Nasa's administrator Michael Griffin requested that all individual comments, including the 20-page critique from the seven panel members, be included in the official task force report. It was the first flight since shuttle Columbia broke up over the US in 2003, killing seven astronauts. Failed recommendations "We expected that Nasa leadership would set high standards for post-Columbia work...we were, overall, disappointed," the panellists wrote in the report. "It is difficult to be objective based on hindsight, but it appears to us that lessons that should have been learned have not been." The seven critics included a former shuttle astronaut, former undersecretary of the Navy, a former congressional budget office director, former moon rocket engineer, a retired nuclear engineer and two university professors. They were part of the 26-member Return to Flight task group appointed to evaluate how the US space agency meets the recommendations by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (Caib). The task group concluded in an advance summary in late June - just a month before Discovery's launch - that Nasa had failed to satisfy three of the 15 return to flight recommendations. Those three failed recommendations were: an inability to prevent dangerous pieces of foam and ice from breaking off the fuel tank during launch; no capability to fix damage to the shuttle in orbit; and a failure to make the shuttle less vulnerable to debris strikes. But during launch on 26 July, a 1lb (450g) chunk of foam debris peeled away from the external fuel tank, though, fortunately, the foam did not hit Discovery. Nevertheless, Nasa has since grounded the entire shuttle fleet until the problem has been fixed.

Tsunami clue to 'Atlantis' found

Spartel Island now lies 60m under the sea in the Straits of Gibraltar, but some think it once lay above water. The finding adds weight to a hypothesis that the island could have inspired the legend recounted by the philosopher Plato more than 2,000 years ago. Evidence comes from a seafloor survey published in the journal Geology. Marc-André Gutscher of the University of Western Brittany in Plouzané, France, found a coarse-grained sedimentary deposit that is 50-120cm thick and could have been left behind after a tsunami. Shaken sediments Dr Gutscher said that the destruction described by Plato is consistent with a great earthquake and tsunami similar to the one that devastated the city of Lisbon in Portugal in 1755, generating waves with heights of up to 10m. Some think the Atlantis legend was inspired by real events It was found to date to around 12,000 years ago - roughly the age indicated by Plato for the destruction of Atlantis, Dr Gutscher reports in Geology. Spartel Island, in the Gulf of Cadiz, was proposed as a candidate for the origin of the Atlantis legend in 2001 by French geologist Jacques Collina-Girard. It is "in front of the Pillars of Hercules", or the Straits of Gibraltar, as Plato described. The philosopher said the fabled island civilisation had been destroyed in a single day and night, disappearing below the sea. Sedimentary records reveal that events like the 1755 Lisbon earthquake occur every 1,500 to 2,000 years in the Gulf of Cadiz. But the mapping of the island carried out by Dr Gutscher failed to turn up any manmade structures and also showed that the island was much smaller than previously believed. This could make it less likely that the island was inhabited by a civilisation.

US shuttles grounded until March

The next shuttle flight will not be until at least next March Engineers need to find a solution to the foam debris problem which re-emerged during Discovery's launch. Seven members of an oversight panel also say Nasa's latest shuttle efforts were tainted by some of the problems that caused the Columbia disaster. The official heading the team looking at the issue said it would take until early next year at least to find a fix. Nasa didn't look in detail at foam shedding from the tank for 113 flights - and shame on us Dr Mike Griffin, Nasa administrator "From an overall standpoint we think really March 4th is the time frame we are looking at," said Bill Gerstenmaier, Nasa's new head of space operations and the official overseeing the foam fix. "The teams are making very good progress. But we're still not complete by any stretch of the imagination." Tank changes Nasa chief Michael Griffin told journalists at a press briefing in Washington that there had been complacency in the agency in the past. But that there was now a new culture at Nasa. "For good or ill - and obviously, it was for ill, a poor choice of words on my part - we in Nasa didn't look in detail at foam shedding from the tank for 113 flights - and shame on us," Dr Griffin said. Shuttle Atlantis will have to wait for its moment in the limelight A 1lb (450g) chunk of insulation foam peeled off the Pal ramp area of the tank during launch on 26 July. The issue is important because it was just such a piece of insulation that was shed from space shuttle Columbia's tank in during its launch in 2003. The foam punched a hole in Columbia's left wing, allowing super-heated gases to enter the vehicle as it attempted re-entry into Earth's atmosphere 16 days later. The shuttle broke up, killing seven astronauts. Minority report Seven members of an oversight panel said Nasa had not learned key lessons that had emerged from the Columbia disaster. Their "minority report" was contained within the final report by the 26-member Return to Flight task group appointed to evaluate how the US space agency meets the recommendations by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (Caib). So much emphasis was placed on trying to meet unrealistic launch dates that some safety improvements were skipped, said the seven members. "We expected that Nasa leadership would set high standards for post-Columbia work...we were, overall, disappointed," the panellists wrote in the report. The seven critics included a former shuttle astronaut, former undersecretary of the Navy, a former congressional budget office director, former moon rocket engineer, a retired nuclear engineer and two university professors. Dr Griffin said that he was "changing the game" on thinking regarding the shuttle's useage by Nasa ahead of its September 2010 retirement. It was originally calculated that about 28 further shuttle flights would be needed to complete the International Space Station. That prediction was later reduced to about 15. Now, Dr Griffin said, Nasa was "not trying to get a specific number of flights out of the shuttle system". He added: "The United States has a commitment to its partners to complete the station. We believe that, absent of major problems, we...can essentially complete assembly of the station with the shuttle fleet in the time that we have remaining." Space shuttle Discovery blasted off from Kennedy Space Center, near Cape Canaveral in Florida, on 26 July.

LIFESTRAW TM

LifeStraw TM : body Click on the images to study them How did this design improve life?: So far the product is not marketed yet, but after intensive laboratory tests we are now conducting field tests to observe where the filter could be improved for users. Users or consumers are defined as most people in the 3rd world, and they will benefit by having the possibility of clean water with this pipe filter. The worlds greatest killer is diarrhoeal diseases from bacteria like typhoid, cholera, e. coli, salmonella etc. With LifeStrawTM, which lasts for one persons annual needs of clean water, nobody needs to die from these diseases. This design is made with special emphasize on avoiding any moving parts, to disregard spare parts, and to avoid the use of electricity, which does not exist in many areas in the 3rd world. But as you need force to implement the filtering, we have chosen to use the natural source of sucking, that even babies are able to perform. We have managed to produce this product at a price that people in this business find hard to believe, but we have found it essential to be able to present a price to the consumer in the 3rd world that they find affordable. When fully used in the 3rd world this will indeed be a LifeSaver. Name of Designer(s): The original idea was created by Torben Vestergaard Frandsen, but over the years 2 additional persons have been involved in this, Rob Fleuren from Holland and Moshe Frommer from Israel. Designers professional status: Professional Status of realization: Realized Kind of design: Tangible Produced by: The design is produced by Vestergaard Frandsen in China Year of production, realization or publishing: 2005 Designed in country: Denmark Used on continents: Africa, Asia, South America Short description of design: The LifeStraw is a 25 cm long straw/pipe filter, 29 mm wide diameter in plastic. Functionallity and use of design: When water is sucked up it is met by ever finer textile filters in order to filter out dirt and sediments, as well as clusters of bacteria. In the centre of the pipe several medias, including iodine, will kill and withhold remaining bacteria, viruses and parasites, as well as improve the taste of the water. The main goal, to kill bacteria, is done up to log 7 – log 8, according to laboratory tests. Better than municipal tap water in many developed countries. Drawbacks of life improvement: If we were not able to control the output of iodine there could have been a draw back there, but with the existing iodine deficiency in most 3rd world communities, WHO would have appreciated if we had had a higher release of iodine. We have, however, chosen to put in so much granulated active carbon, that no consumer shall discard the filter due to chemical taste. Research and need: Being a textile company we tried originally for many years to reach this design only by using textiles, but eventually we realised that textiles could only be part of the solution and that additional media, especially killing media had to be applied. For about a year we also tried to combine textiles with only carbon, but realised then, that bacteria and viruses were building up in the carbon. Only when combining it with the iodine did we realise we were on the right track. Then a lot of time was spent searching globally for the best of the various products we needed, and when they were at hand, a long and tedious way had to be followed to find the right position, quantity and size of each component.

Opinion | Blood Runs Red, Not Blue

You have to wonder whether reality ever comes knocking on George W. Bush's door. If it did, would the president with the unsettling demeanor of a boy king even bother to answer? Mr. Bush is the commander in chief who launched a savage war in Iraq and now spends his days happily riding his bicycle in Texas. This is eerie. Scary. Surreal. The war is going badly and lives have been lost by the thousands, but there is no real sense, either at the highest levels of government or in the nation at large, that anything momentous is at stake. The announcement on Sunday that five more American soldiers had been blown to eternity by roadside bombs was treated by the press as a yawner. It got very little attention. You can turn on the television any evening and tune in to the bizarre extended coverage of the search for Natalee Holloway, the Alabama teenager who disappeared in Aruba in May. But we hear very little about the men and women who have given up their lives in Iraq, or are living with horrific injuries suffered in that conflict. If only the war were more entertaining. Less of a downer. Perhaps then we could meet the people who are suffering and dying in it.

Amazon.com creates a buzz with adult toys

All is not lost. This is the good news. All is not dire and hopeless and warmongering and sexless and Bush. I know, it's amazing, but it's true. You see, bright spots exist. Radiant spots. Glimmers of possibility and progress, deep pools of hope and moan and yum. We have but to look. And yearn. Like, right here. Here is a mini-phenomenon, happening right before our eyes. It is this: Amazon.com is selling sex toys. A lot of sex toys. More than you knew it would ever dare sell and more than you even knew were being manufactured in the world today and a more advanced and varied selection than you probably imagined they could ever get away with. And what's more, Amazon has added this array of delicious adult goods quietly, effortlessly, with zero fanfare and zero marketing and zero apparent intolerant outcry (so far as I know) from the right-wing Christian sex tormenters, and with absolutely no children anywhere in the nation spontaneously combusting or being struck by lightning and/or converting to wanton paganism (yet) by viewing any of these items (which they easily can) -- which, as we all know, is just fabulously encouraging and good. Have you seen? Did you know? Let us look closer. Because it is not a small selection. This is no trifling thing. Amazon's sex-toy department is simply a huge portion of the site's Health and Personal Care area. The "Sex and Sensuality" section of the site contains a staggering 37,000 items, with the Sexual Enhancers (that's the toys, baby) subsection alone offering up a whopping 4,863 items -- enough to satisfy an entire repressed evangelical congregation and terrify Alabama and make Lynne Cheney swoon and still have plenty left over for a long weekend with the entire cast of "Hot Teen Slut Nurses IV." This is no cheapy side venture, no Amazon trying to score a few bucks by secretly selling a few glorious Hitachi Magic Wands and those overrated (but still cute) pink-rabbit pearl vibes and some tubes of K-Y jelly and Trojan condoms and a handful of cheapy plastic Chinese-made vibrators. No sirree. Amazon has not held back. Amazon has committed completely to the cause. This is America's favorite online bookstore, all grown up and happily kinky and winking in your general direction. And while I would normally recommend against buying such fabulous goods from Amazon and instead urge you to purchase from the indie shops that started it all, places such as Good Vibrations and Blowfish, all of which carry many better-quality toys than some of Amazon's brands and have been fearlessly illuminating the path to sexual satisfaction for years and decades, often against a staggeringly high wall of sexual ignorance from the government and the Christian right, it appears that Amazon has partnered with at least one of these fabulous stores (Seattle's Babeland), so you really can't go too wrong. Of course, Amazon doesn't actually carry most of these items in its own warehouses. It is the mere reseller, the great middleman offering its distribution channel to specialty sex-toy companies such as ForePlay and Frolics Superstore and Boston Pump (go ahead, guess what it makes), Swedish Erotica and the venerable Doc Johnson and Hidden Flower and Sensua Organics and well over 300 others. This makes them, interestingly, the great bringer of sex-toy awareness, the unwitting spreader of lubricious good news, the well-oiled and highly pleasurable anti-Wal-Mart. It also makes them, I imagine, the biggest sex-toy store in the world. And for much of America, for those too timid or too uncertain to shop for such delightful goods in the specialty sex stores, this is a divine development indeed. There are no cheesy porny product shots. There is no explicit nudity or raunchy descriptions, except for the wonderful and silly product titles. There is no age-verification system and no insulting adult warning and no purchase restrictions. Amazon has done the perfectly natural thing of merely folding the toys into its array of general offerings as if nothing's unusual, no pornographic shock value, nothing to worry about. It's as if these items were perfectly commonplace and acceptable and everyone should have them. Imagine. This, then, is the most glorious upshot. Sex toys, like much of the porn biz in general, have gone mainstream. They have been normalized. There is no more guilt. There is no more fear and uptight sexual dread and nonsensical, ignorant cries of who, pray who, will save the children. There is only titillation and tingling skin and the big, wide grins of satisfied customers. What a wonderful message this sends. What a desperately needed notion for a sex-starved and deeply misinformed, orgasmically uncertain nation. It is this: Sex and the heavenly toys that enhance and enliven it need not be some secret ugly thing, hidden, hesitant, embarrassing, separate from your "regular" life. Do not shield your eyes and quiver in fear. Do not back away and think this sort of thing is not for you. Go ahead, just toss into your Amazon shopping cart a few things to go along with the latest Christopher Moore novel and a digital camera and an iPod sleeve and a beach umbrella and a camping stove and the new Brazilian Girls CD. See? Nothing to it. It's just ... normal. It's just right. It's just healthy and affirmative and might actually go a long way toward alleviating a tiny bit of the nasty karmic tension currently racking the American body like a deep muscle knot, a coiled spring, a painfully repressed orgasm. Imagine.

Swazi king drops sex-ban tassels

The ban was very unpopular with young Swazis The girls have had to wear large woollen tassels as a sign of their chastity since 2001. The sex ban was imposed to fight the spread of HIV/Aids. About 40% of the population are HIV positive. In 2001, the king fined himself a cow for breaking the ban by marrying again, but he could choose another wife at the annual reed dance this weekend. In the two-day ceremony bare-breasted girls will dance before the monarch. King Mswati transgressed the ban when he took a 17-year-old girl as his ninth wife just two months after imposing the sex ban in September 2001, sparking unprecedented protests by Swazi women outside the royal palace. Meanwhile, the health ministry has released new figures which show that 29% of Swazis aged 15-19 are HIV positive. For pregnant women, the figures were 42%. Ban enforced "We are happy that we are through with this and I am very proud that I have been faithful to this rite," said Ntombi Dlamini, 19, as she threw away her tassels. No official reason has been given about why the sex ban was ended a year early. The BBC's Thulani Mthethwa in Swaziland says the ban was very unpopular with young Swazis. King Mswati has been criticised for his lavish lifestyle If propositioned by a man, the girls were supposed to throw the tassels outside his house and his family would have to pay a fine of a cow. But many Swazis were unhappy that King Mswati's daughters were rarely seen wearing the tassels. But our correspondent says that in rural areas, the tassels were common because the ban was enforced by local chiefs and some schools insisted that girls wore them to get a place. King Mswati now has 12 wives and another fiancee. His late father, King Sobhuza II, who led the country to independence in 1968, had more than 70 wives when he died in 1982.

Daisy has all the digital answers to life on Earth

Scientists have unveiled plans to create a digital library of all life on Earth. They say that the Digital Automated Identification System (Daisy), which harnesses the latest advances in artificial intelligence and computer vision, will have an enormous impact on research into biodiversity and evolution. Daisy will also give Britain's army of amateur naturalists unprecedented access to the world's taxonomic expertise: send Daisy a camera-phone picture of a plant or animal and, within seconds, you will get detailed information about what you are looking at. Norman MacLeod, the Natural History Museum's keeper of palaeontology, has spent several years developing the new technology. He said that Daisy will make the identification of plants and animals more objective and directly comparable. "Right now, taxonomy is as much of an art form as it is a science," Prof MacLeod said. He will present his vision for Daisy to an international meeting of taxonomists at the museum today. Taxonomists normally identify specimens through a painstaking process in which the features of an unknown plant or animal are compared with identified specimens in the museum's collections. If it is sufficiently different, the unknown specimen is confirmed as a new species. However, there is plenty of room for error - the museum's collection might be incomplete or the person making the identification could make a mistake. If scientists did not have to make routine identifications and teach others how to do it, argues Prof MacLeod, they could get on with the business of learning more about biodiversity and evolution. "Say you saw a butterfly, you might take a digital image of it, connect up to the world wide web and access a Daisy internet portal," said Prof MacLeod. "The portal would accept the picture and farm it out to the servers in individual institutions, such as the Natural History Museum." Using pattern-recognition software, Daisy would try to match the picture with images in its archives. "The portal would route the answer back as a web page that had the confidence level of the identification and the institution that made the identification," said Prof MacLeod. Daisy can also identify sounds and scans of DNA barcodes. For something so useful, it is perhaps a surprise that no one has thought of such a system before. According to Prof MacLeod , the hold-up has been the lack of neural network software - programmes that learn - required by Daisy. "New developments in artificial intelligence and computer algorithms have taken neural nets to where they act more like human intelligence," he said. "When we see something new, we don't have to re-compute our understanding of everything else we've ever seen, we just add it to the mix. That's pretty much what we're doing with Daisy." The other limitation with Daisy is that the system will only be as good as the quality and quantity of its reference images. "Museums are only just starting to get into that type of work," said Prof MacLeod. "That has its own technological and storage and manpower barriers. "Now there's a tool that we can use to justify making the investment in getting these collections of images together and building the software structures that are necessary to make the neural net able to access the images, then there's a reason to do it." There is also a role for Britain's army of amateur naturalists in improving the library. "One of the neat things about Daisy is that, if you submit an image and it's identified with a high level of certainty, that can then be added to the library of images, which makes Daisy more powerful," said Prof MacLeod. "That information can keep growing. The more people that use [the system], the better it gets." He said that the first images and sounds have already been used to test that everything works. But filling Daisy with data from all the museums will take several years. The Natural History Museum has 70 million specimens that would need to be entered into the database. Daisy is part of a series of projects set up by the museum to identify and catalogue life on Earth. In February, the museum announced plans to record the genetic fingerprints for the species, to begin the process of providing a kind of biometric identity card for millions of species by 2010.

Discovery's return home delayed

Discovery's homecoming has been delayed yet again The orbiter is riding piggyback on a modified jumbo jet, more than a week after it landed in the Mojave desert. The pair arrived in Louisana on Friday for an overnight stop, but bad weather has delayed departure until Sunday. The 3,591km (2,232 mile) trip is expected to cost the US space agency a hefty $1m (£560,000). Discovery and its seven member crew touched down on 9 August at the Edwards Air Force Base after a 14-day mission to service the International Space Station. Nasa diverted the landing to California after poor weather prevented the shuttle from returning to Florida. After landing, Discovery underwent maintenance and crews worked around the clock to prepare the shuttle for departure by purging it of hazardous substances and removing fuel from the on-board tanks. Technicians attached an aluminium tail cone to the shuttle to reduce drag during the flight, and coupled Discovery to the 747 jet just hours before takeoff. Uncertain homecoming Discovery's homecoming has been tempered by uncertainties about the future of the shuttle programme. DISCOVERY FLIGHT TIMELINE 26 July: Lift-off 30 July: First spacewalk to check repair techniques 1 August: Second spacewalk to fix faulty gear 3 August: Makeshift repairs completed 9 August: Touch-down In pictures: Ride home The fleet was grounded after a large piece of foam was shed from Discovery's external fuel tank during lift-off on 26 July. A similar problem caused the shuttle Columbia to break up on re-entry to the atmosphere in 2003, killing all seven astronauts on board. "From an overall standpoint we think really 4 March is the time frame we are looking at," said Bill Gerstenmaier, Nasa's new head of space operations and the official overseeing the foam fix. "The teams are making very good progress. But we are still not complete by any stretch of the imagination." Nasa chief Michael Griffin told journalists in Washington that there had been complacency in the past but that there was now a new culture at Nasa. Technicians attached an aluminium tail cone to the shuttle to reduce drag Space shuttle Atlantis had been due to blast off in September. But Nasa engineers will now have to make modifications to the shuttle's external fuel tank, particularly to an area known as the Protuberance Air Load (Pal) ramp. Minority report Seven members of an oversight panel said Nasa had not learned key lessons from the Columbia disaster. Their "minority report" was contained within the final report by the 26-member Return to Flight task group appointed to evaluate how the US space agency meets the recommendations by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (Caib). So much emphasis was placed on trying to meet unrealistic launch dates that some safety improvements were skipped, said the seven members. "We expected that Nasa leadership would set high standards for post-Columbia work... we were, overall, disappointed," the panellists wrote in the report. The seven critics included a former shuttle astronaut, former undersecretary of the Navy, a former congressional budget office director, former moon rocket engineer, a retired nuclear engineer and two university professors. Dr Griffin said he was "changing the game" on thinking regarding the shuttle's usage by Nasa ahead of its September 2010 retirement. It was originally calculated that about 28 further shuttle flights would be needed to complete the International Space Station. That prediction was later reduced to about 15. Now, Dr Griffin said, Nasa was "not trying to get a specific number of flights out of the shuttle system". He added: "The United States has a commitment to its partners to complete the station. We believe that, absent of major problems, we...can essentially complete assembly of the station with the shuttle fleet in the time that we have remaining."

Hitler sister footage to be shown

Hitler's sister and associates feature in the documentary Paula Wolf was filmed talking about her brother for hour-long ITV documentary Tyranny: The Years of Adolf Hitler, which also interviewed his chauffeur. It was rediscovered in ITN's archives as part an ongoing search for footage by the British Film Institute (BFI). It will be screened from November by the BFI to mark ITV's 50th anniversary. International search Paula Wolf, Hitler's youngest sister who died in 1960 aged 64, was asked to share personal stories about her brother in the documentary. Directed by Peter Morley, it also included interviews with Hitler's associates and fellow employees. The documentary was discovered by TV historian Dick Fiddy, who traced footage to Germany and the US before finding the full show in London. Potter's 1968 drama Shaggy Dog will also be screened by the BFI It will be shown alongside Shaggy Dog, an ITV drama by playwright Dennis Potter that was rediscovered by TV enthusiast group Kaleidoscope. Previously thought destroyed after its only broadcast in 1968, the 51-minute show was found earlier this year in the LWT archive at London's South Bank. No copies were made of numerous vintage broadcasts due to the expense of making early TV recordings. The BFI conducts an ongoing search for "lost" footage entitled Missing Believed Wiped. "We archive as much footage as we can, but we do not have everything," said BFI spokesman Nick Pearson. "If people do have original old TV footage dating back a long way, we are always interested to hear from them."

Jury: Merck negligent

QUICK VOTE Was the jury's $253 million award against Merck in the Vioxx case... Too high Too low Just right Merck shouldn't have to pay anything. View results Video More video Mark Lanier plaintiff's attorney and plaintiff Carol Ernst give their reaction to the verdict. (August 19) Play video Video More video The Texas jury awards $253 million in damages. CNN's Allan Chernoff reports on the first lawsuit involving Vioxx. (August 19) Play video NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Merck has been held liable by a Texas jury in the first lawsuit involving its former blockbuster drug Vioxx, in a case that could have a profound effect on thousands of other cases filed against the company. Plaintiff Carol Ernst has won her lawsuit in Texas Superior Court in Angleton, which blames Vioxx for the 2001 death of her husband, Robert Ernst, a 59-year-old marathon runner and Wal-Mart worker who was taking the arthritis painkiller at the time of his death. Ernst died of a heart attack. The verdict held Merck liable for the death. Jurors voted 10-2 in favor of Ernst. The jury awarded more than $250 million in total damages -- $24 million to Carol Ernst for mental anguish and loss of companionship, and $229 million in punitive damages. Ernst's Houston-based lawyer, Mark Lanier, said the punitive-damages figure was based on "the money Merck made and saved by putting off their product label changes." Lanier had been seeking $40.4 million in damages, and after the verdict, Lanier said that he expected the punitive-damages award to be reduced according to Texas law. "Justice is a beautiful thing, isn't it?" Lanier told reporters following the verdict. Merck said it would appeal the decision. "We believe that the plaintiff did not meet the standard set by Texas law to prove Vioxx caused Mr. Ernst's death," said Jonathan Skidmore, a member of Merck's legal defense team, according to a statement released by Merck. Merck (Research) shares closed down nearly 8 percent on Friday. Deutsche Bank analyst Barbara Ryan said that Merck's appeal "could delay a resolution for several years, and will likely reduce the financial damages signficantly." Ryan lowered her price target for the stock to $31 from $35 but said the dividend "remains secure." But David Moskowitz, analyst for Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co., said that if Merck continues to lose cases it will have to settle in order to save the company. "The squeeze is coming," said Moskowitz. "With this number of cases and these types of awards, the stability of the company is at risk." Merck has vowed not to settle. Analyst Christ Shibutani of J.P. Morgan Chase has estimated that Merck's liabilities could range from $8 billion to $25 billion. An emotional trial; more to come Lanier argued that Merck had concealed information about the health risks associated with the drug in order to protect sales. Lanier has used colorful analogies in his portrayal of Merck, which he has compared to Saddam Hussein and the three monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Carol Ernst, who had divorced her first husband in the early 1980s and raised four children as a single mother, delivered emotional testimony about the death of her second husband, Robert, and said she was taking antidepressants to cope with the loss. Merck's defense team had insisted that Vioxx did not cause Ernst's death, asserting that arrhythmia had not been linked Vioxx in studies. Merck's legal battle began after Sept. 30, 2004, when the company pulled Vioxx, a arthritis painkiller worth $2.5 billion in annual sales and about one-tenth of total company revenue, triggering a one-third slide in the company's stock value. Merck pulled the drug after participants in a Vioxx study experienced "adverse cardiovascular events" compared to those taking a placebo. Nonetheless, Merck never actually conceded there were health risks. Some 20 million people have used Vioxx. Since the recall, about 4,200 product liability lawsuits representing about 7,500 plaintiff groups have been filed against Merck. The battle continues on Sept. 12, when jury selection begins in the next case in New Jersey Superior Court in Atlantic City under Judge Carol Higbee. Plaintiffs from all over the country have sued Merck in New Jersey because the company is based in Whitehouse Station. While the Ernst case was a wrongful death suit, the next plaintiff is a heart attack survivor. The company will face plaintiff Frederick Humeston of Boise, Idaho, a postal carrier and twice-wounded Vietnam veteran who blames Vioxx for his 2001 heart attack. Merck's lawyers say that Vioxx did not cause Humeston's heart attack and his case presents "little more than guilt by temporal association." The outcome of the Humeston case will impact how the rest of the New Jersey cases are organized, in groups or individually. Merck has vowed to fight them all, one at a time, if necessary. That could take a while. Judge Eldon Fallon, who is presiding over all federal cases in New Orleans district court, told reporters in May that lawsuits could ultimately reach 100,000. The first federal case begins on Nov. 28, with a pre-trial conference on Aug. 25. Moskowitz does not own Merck stock and his firm does not do business with them.

Stimulant drug 'dulls the brain'

The drug appeared to change brain volume Methamphetamine users had bigger brain areas involved in attention, motivation and the control of movement. They also fared worse in tests of brain function, the University of California, San Diego team found. If the individual was HIV-positive the impairment was even worse, the American Journal of Psychiatry study found. Abusers of the drug have impaired decision-making abilities Lead researcher Dr Terry Jernigan However, in those individuals, the volume of certain areas of the brain appeared to shrink, rather than increase. The brain regions affected by HIV are those that help with higher thought, reasoning, memory and learning. The researchers studied 103 adults - some who were HIV positive and some who were HIV negative, and who did or did not use methamphetamine, also known as "meth" or "crystal". The drug is a powerful central nervous system stimulant which increases energy and alertness and decreases appetite. Brain volume change Each volunteer had a brain scan taken and completed a battery of tests that examined cognitive skills such as learning and recall, verbal fluency, information processing and motor functioning. The meth users had increased volumes of the parietal cortex and the basal ganglia in the brain, while those with HIV had smaller than normal volumes of the cerebral cortex, basal ganglia and hippocampus. I'm not surprised by the findings given the way the drug acts in the brain Professor Trevor Smart, head of pharmacology at University College London All of the abnormalities were linked to poorer performance on the cognitive tests. The researchers said these alterations and impairments could cause problems in every day life for the individual. Head of the team Dr Terry Jernigan said: "In HIV-infected people, the cognitive impairments are associated with decreased employment and vocational abilities, difficulties with medication management, impaired driving performance and problems with general activities of daily living, such as managing money. Emerging problem "The impact of methamphetamine on daily functioning is less well studied, although it is known that abusers of the drug have impaired decision-making abilities. "These could potentially affect treatment and relapse prevention efforts, as well as things like money management and driving performance," he said. It's important that people with HIV are made aware of the potential dangers of crystal Will Nutland from the Terrence Higgins Trust He recommended more research to find out why both HIV and methamphetamine appeared to be damaging to the brain, particularly as the number of people who use the drug and are also HIV positive is growing. He said it might be linked to brain inflammation. Professor Trevor Smart, head of pharmacology at University College London, said: "I'm not surprised by the findings given the way the drug acts in the brain. "It is relatively well known if you take methamphetamine for a long time, instead of causing an increase in dopamine - which is thought to give the euphoric effect - it causes a decrease with time. "The basal ganglia is an area where you get a lot of dopamine." This controls movement and you sometimes see methamphetamine users who get tremors similar to those seen in Parkinson's disease, he said. Will Nutland from the Terrence Higgins Trust said: "This research adds to the body of evidence that methamphetamine can have long term effects on the health of people with HIV. "It's important that people with HIV are made aware of the potential dangers."

Australian ban on mate wins few friends

To Australians, it is the linguistic equivalent of beer and barbecues - but for a short time yesterday the ubiquitous greeting of "mate" was in danger of being banned at the nation's centre of government. In an edict from a senior civil servant, security staff at Australia's national parliament in Canberra were told not to use the greeting "G'day mate" when admitting visitors and politicians in case they caused offence. News of the ban sparked national outrage and ridicule, not least from the prime minister John Howard, who uses the term often, especially when addressing George Bush. With the media also in uproar - the front page of yesterday's Sydney's Daily Telegraph newspaper declared: "Mate: It's an Insult" - Mr Howard said the ban should be revoked immediately. "It's all about context, I think we should be both courteous and gregarious," said the prime minister, who in 1999 wanted to include a reference to mateship in the preamble to Australia's constitution. "We have a treasured informality in this country and that's something we should hold on to." The issue, however, has been a national talking point. The opposition Labor party said the ban reflected the "elitist culture fostered under Howard's nine-year-old conservative government." "This is John Howard's Australia. It's about masters and servants," said Kim Beazley, the opposition leader. "It is a great part of Australian culture that we call each other mate." Former Australian Labor prime minister Bob Hawke said the ban signalled an erosion of Australia's egalitarian ways. "It's pomposity gone mad," Mr Hawke told ABC Radio. "It's not surprising. In a sense we're living in an age where the concept of mateship has been damaged to a fairly large extent by a lot of the approaches of this government." Mr Hawke, a former union leader famous for his down-to-earth approach, said the term had been useful to him at official functions."It doesn't imply any intimacy, it shows a reasonable level of respect. I think it's one of our great words." According to Sue Butler, the editor of Australia's Macquarie dictionary, the word has its origins in Australia's colonial past. It originally referred to someone's working partner, but has evolved into a term of affection. "Now it has an iconic status in Australian vernacular and by no stretch of the imagination is it offensive," she said.

Q&A: Oil

How much does a barrel of oil cost? Oil prices went above $65 (£36) a barrel for the first time yesterday, notching up yet another record. Prices have jumped by more than 100% in the past year and a half and are now well over the $22-$28 target range set by the Opec oil cartel. What are US light and Brent crude? There are the two benchmarks for world oil prices. One is the futures contract - an agreement for future delivery at a specified time, place and price - for US light crude. The contract is widely used as the benchmark for determining crude oil and refined product prices in the US and abroad. Brent crude oil is a North Sea crude widely used to determine crude oil prices in Europe as well as other parts of the world. Together, the light crude oil futures contract and Brent crude are used as the basis for virtually every physical crude oil transaction. Why have oil prices risen? Strong economic growth in the US - which consumes a quarter of the world's petrol - and Asia, particularly in China, has been putting pressure on prices. World oil demand grew at its strongest pace in 30 years last year. Opec is pumping oil pretty much at full capacity. What about political factors? With oil suppliers at full stretch, any hint of political instability in the Middle East easily unsettles the market. The latest worry is Iran, Opec's second biggest producer after Saudi Arabia. Traders worry that the row between the west and Iran over its determination to restart nuclear processes could lead to sanctions that might disrupt oil supplies. Tension in Saudi Arabia, where Britain and Australia this week warned of attacks from militants, is another political worry. Are there any other big problems? Refining capacity has been one of the biggest pressures on oil prices. Oil from the ground has to be refined before it can be used, but there is a shortage of refineries. To make matters worse, US refineries have been plagued by stoppages or accidents. An explosion at the BP plant in Texas City, near Houston, in March killed 15 people. Some traders blame such problems on ageing plants that are having difficulty maintaining output at high levels. Industry officials say these snags are common for this time of year, when plants run hard to meet peak gasoline demand. What has been the economic impact? Advanced economies have soaked up high oil prices remarkably well, with inflation well under wraps. Britain's inflation is running at 2%, whereas it jumped to more than 20% during the oil price shocks in the 70s. Why the minimal impact? This is partly because western economies use oil less intensively and more efficiently than in the past and so are better able to absorb higher oil prices. Also important is that the current rise in oil prices is driven by strong demand rather than an interruption to Middle East oil supplies, as happened in 1974 and 1979. Oil prices in 1979 hit $80 a barrel in the equivalent of today's money, well above the $65 a barrel level. Does this mean we can relax? Not quite. The rule of thumb is that a $5 increase in the price of oil sustained over a one-year period lops 0.3% off global growth, according to the International Monetary Fund. Moreover, the three global recessions in the past 30 years were all preceded by a sharp rise in oil prices. How high will prices go? Back in April, the investment bank Goldman Sachs made waves when it warned that the oil market was in the early stages of a "super spike" that could push prices as high as $105 a barrel. But Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman and a former economist at Shell, dismissed talk of $100 a barrel as alarmist. He says high oil prices will lead to increased production and exploration, thereby improving supply, and to falling demand, as consuming economies slow in the face of higher energy costs. Market estimates suggest that oil prices will remain at current levels for the next few years, although some oil experts believe there is roughly a one in 20 chance that oil prices will be $100 or higher in a year's time. How much is the price of petrol? Motorists in the UK are now paying 90p a litre on average. In the US, they have also reached record but are still at prices Europeans can only dream of - $2.35 a gallon, equivalent to about 34p a litre. Is the world running out of oil? Major oil reserves are becoming harder to find and more expensive to exploit. Many of the fields outside Opec countries are mature, which means that finds are now smaller. They need more costly technology to develop and they fall faster from peak production. Some experts though, such as Professor Peter Odell of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, think there are plenty of reserves left and that the world is running into oil rather than out of it.

SHA-1 compromised further

Crypto researchers have discovered a new, much faster, attack against the widely-used SHA-1 hashing algorithm. Xiaoyun Wang, one of the team of Chinese cryptographers that demonstrated earlier attacks against SHA-0 and SHA-1, along with Andrew Yao and Frances Yao, have discovered a way to produce a collision in SHA-1 over just 263 hash operations compared to 269 hash operations previously. A brute force attack should take 280 operations. One-way hashing is used in many applications such as creating checksums used to validate files, creating digital certificates, authentication schemes and in VPN security hardware. Collisions occur when two different inputs produce the same output hash. In theory this might be used to forge digital certificates but it shouldn't be possible to find collisions except by blind chance. Wang and her team have discovered an algorithm for finding collisions much faster than brute force. The researchers released a paper (PDF) on their finding at the Crypto 2005 conference in Santa Barbara, California earlier this week. "The SHA-1 collision search is squarely in the realm of feasibility," writes noted cryptographer Bruce Schneier in a posting to his web log. "Some research group will try to implement it. Writing working software will both uncover hidden problems with the attack, and illuminate hidden improvements. And while a paper describing an attack against SHA-1 is damaging, software that produces actual collisions is even more so." The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently advised the US government to phase out SHA-1 in favor of SHA-256 and SHA-512. NIST is holding a workshop on the subject in late October. ®

Mob Pirates: Menace or Myth?

In the latest public relations strike in the war on copyright infringement, the music and film industries are sowing fears that content piracy, like drug trafficking before it, is being taken over by organized crime syndicates. The problem is that the evidence – so far, at least – is lacking. The mob-piracy meme began spreading in earnest last month, when the Recording Industry Association of America announced in a press release that piracy and organized crime were so intertwined that the entire counterfeit CD production business in the eastern half of the United States "is now dominated by organized criminal syndicates intent on monopolizing the illicit market." Organized crime's entree into the content business was inevitable given the economics, says Warner Music spokesman Craig Hoffman. "The markup for a kilo of heroin is 200 percent," Hoffman says. "The markup for pirated CDs and DVDs is 800 percent." "The business model is similar to dealing drugs," says Chuck Hausman, deputy director of anti-piracy for the Motion Picture Association of America. "The technology makes it easier – cheap burners, color laser printers and scanners (for high-quality disc art and packaging). It's low cost to entry and they're (CDs, DVDs) easy to hide." This line of reasoning helped fuel an exponential increase in the federal government's efforts against intellectual-property violations last fall. In October, the Department of Justice established the Intellectual Property Task Force and published an 80-page report (.pdf) detailing the agency's plans to combat piracy domestically and globally. The report noted the potential for large criminal groups to cash in on the illicit content business. "While the harmful consequences of intellectual-property theft may seem frightening, it is also disturbing to learn who is benefiting from many of these crimes," the report reads. "Intellectual-property theft has been linked to organized crime and, potentially, may fund terrorist organizations attracted by the profitability of these offenses." In fact, links between large gangs and piracy are well-documented in China and Russia, along with other developing countries. But U.S. cases invariably target more run-of-the-mill outlaws, like download site operators and theater camcorder pirates. Asked to cite actual U.S. convictions involving organized crime, the RIAA and MPAA instead presented a handful of pending piracy cases against warez networks, commercial replicators, a few members of street gangs and a smattering of individual drug dealers – but no John Gotti or Tony Soprano. "It's not organized crime families, as in 'the mob,'" admits Bradley Buckles, head of the RIAA's anti-piracy unit and former director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "But large groups engaged in organized criminal activity are involved." "Each link in the chain is organized – the manufacturers or burners, the distributors who collect the discs from the burners and the peddlers who get the discs from the distributors," says Bill Shannon, the MPAA's anti-piracy director on the East Coast. In one case, an Oakland, California-based convicted drug dealer and pimp named Ali Rizwaan – aka "Cuban Tony" – was arrested in April for piracy. Police executed search warrants at three locations operated by Rizwaan, and allegedly uncovered pirated movies and DVD-R burners, according to Hausman. In another raid in San Antonio in early July, police arrested repeat offender Michael Portillo for piracy and found 47 burners, two unloaded handguns, two loaded automatic weapons, a bulletproof vest, some methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine and marijuana. Two other men on the scene were arrested on drug-related charges. And last month an individual member of one of Los Angeles' notorious 18th Street gangs was arrested for peddling CDs and DVDs in Santee Alley in Los Angeles, where counterfeit handbags, clothing and other knockoff items are also for sale on the street. The MPAA claims that Los Angeles street gangs, including Crazy Riders, the 18th Street gangs and 42nd Street Little Gangsters, are actively burning, distributing and selling pirated CDs and DVDs. "We see more weapons on raids," Shannon says. "There's a rise in violence because it's a big cash business. Some gangs are also extorting protection money from peddlers and distributors and others involved in selling pirated content and carrying around lots of cash." But do a handful of piracy cases with violent suspects add up to organized crime? Skeptics say no. "A few gang members get arrested and all of the sudden there are reports that gangs are pigeonholed as being big into piracy," says Alejandro Alfonso, who routinely testifies as an expert witness on Los Angeles gangs. "But if anything, it's small-scale stuff.... Gangs might be involved on the fringes." "In the U.S., piracy tends to be small-time players," says Mike Goodman, a senior analyst at the Yankee Group. "I've not seen any cases of organized crime.... It's four, five, six guys who (burn discs and) sell them on the street." To doubters, MPAA's Hausman and the Los Angeles district attorney's office say stay tuned: Several large-scale, for-profit piracy operations are currently under investigation. "There are a number of pending piracy cases I can't talk about," says Jeff McGrath, district attorney at the high-tech crimes unit in Los Angeles. "We're also investigating the distribution of CDs and DVDs into stores, the mixing of illegitimate and legitimate product. The quality of artwork can make it hard to tell them apart," McGrath says. For now, no convictions have been made, and neither the industry associations nor police are able to provide convincing detail, something they attribute to the early stage of their investigations. "Building cases against groups who run burner labs can be tricky, because there are often not a lot of pirated discs on hand at one time," Hausman says. "It's a just-in-time business."

What do books do for your brain?

Posh Spice, who claims she has never read a book, is about to find out (if she can be bothered to read this). We all learn to read but what happens in adult life when we fail to keep this up? Does the brain shrink like a withered prune? Studies in America found that continued intellectual activity from age 20 to 60 may protect against dementia in later life. One study found that continuing intellectual pursuits reduced the risk of Alzheimer's disease by a third. In another study, relatively inactive patients were 250% more likely to develop Alzheimer's. Damaged brains can adapt and learn. Researchers who have used brain scanners have found that other parts of the brain can compensate. But exercising the brain, in much the same way one would exercise a damaged muscle, perhaps by repeating a list of items, does not help regrowth. Are you going to benefit more by reading Shakespeare than Vogue? It probably doesn't matter as long as the brain is exposed to new information that stimulates your cells. Luckily for Posh (author, as is her husband, of an autobiography) physical activity also counts. Whether physical exercise is as beneficial as intellectual activity remains unknown.

Work until you drop: how the long-hours culture is killing us

This week, an American survey concluded that long working hours increased an individual's chances of illness and injury. It noted that for those doing 12 hours a day, there was a 37% increase in risk compared to those working fewer hours. Ronald Reagan was wrong, it seems, when he said: "Hard work never killed anyone." Death from overwork is not a new phenomenon in Britain but it is largely unremarked upon. In 2003, Sid Watkins, a paediatrician who was exhausted after working up to 100 hours a week, died after injecting himself with anaesthetic in an attempt to cope with his workload. The coroner at Dr Watkins' inquest described the hours he had to work as "crazy". In 1994, the parents of Alan Massie, a junior doctor who collapsed and died after working an 86-hour week at a Cheshire hospital, claimed that their 27-year-old son was worked to death. He had worked seven days and three nights, including two unbroken periods of 27 hours and one of 24 hours. In the same year, British Airways pilot David Robertson, 52, died while flying. Work stress and long working hours were implicated. The American study, published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, points out that overtime and extended work schedules are associated with an increased risk of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, fatigue, stress, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, chronic infections, diabetes and other general health complaints. In Japan, most karoshi victims succumb to brain aneurisms, strokes and heart attack. Professor Cary Cooper, a stress expert at Lancaster University Management School, says the risk is not just confined to those who work more than 60 hours but hits those that put in more than 45. "If you work consistently long hours, over 45 a week every week, it will damage your health, physically and psychologically. In the UK we have the second-longest working hours in the developed world, just behind the States and we now have longer hours than Japan," he says. Prof Cooper advocates "working smarter", not longer, and introducing flexibility into the workplace. He acknowledges that the Department of Trade and Industry is trying to encourage business to adopt such practices, but it is a slow process. Derek Simpson, the general secretary of Amicus, the manufacturing, technical and skilled persons' union, agrees with Prof Cooper. "UK employees work the longest hours in Europe, yet all the evidence shows that long working hours are bad for our health, equality, our families and for society. People's jobs are by far the biggest single cause of stress, and stress-related illness is the silent killer in our workplaces, impacting on workers' physical and mental health. "As well as being bad for individuals, our long-hours culture is also bad for business because lower working hours relate directly to higher productivity. It is no coincidence that the UK has the least-regulated economy in Europe and is the least productive in the industrialised world. "Yet while other European governments are aiming to reduce weekly working hours below the working-time directive limit of 48 hours, our government is still desperately trying to keep the opt-out." In a survey, Amicus found that almost one in five workers was put off sex because of long hours. The union found a third of people said they didn't have enough time to spend with partners or children. Community work, socialising, personal fitness and hobbies all lost out to excessive working hours. Earlier this month, the law firm Peninsula published a survey of 1,800 employers. It found that four out of five of them worked more than 60 hours a week and revealed that seven out of 10 got only four hours' sleep a night. In her recent book Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives, the Guardian writer Madeleine Bunting points out that Britain's full-time workers put in the longest hours in Europe at 43.6 a week compared with the EU average of 40.3. The number of people working over 48 hours has more than doubled since 1998, from 10% to 26%. And one in six of all workers is doing more than 60 hours. Roger Vincent, a spokesman for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, says that overwork inevitably leads to lapses in concentration and therefore accidents. "Between a third and a quarter of all road accidents are in some way work-related. That means that somewhere between 800 and 1,000 deaths each year on Britain's roads are to do with somebody driving or being on the road as a result of their jobs." In 1987, the Japanese ministry of labour acknowledged that it had a problem with death from overwork and began to publish statistics on karoshi. In 2001, the numbers reached a record level with 143 workers dying. Now, death-by-overwork lawsuits are common, with the victims' families demanding compensation payments. In 2002-03, 160 out of 819 claimants received compensation. The health and safety magazine Hazards has continually warned that karoshi does exist in the UK. It said: "In July 2003 the government proposed abolishing the mandatory retirement of 65 years. The old notion that "we work to live, not live to work" could soon be superseded by "we work until we drop". Nose to the grindstone in Europe's sweatshop · The UK's long-hours culture means that on average many of us are now working a 43.6-hour week. Our counterparts in the rest of Europe do 40.3 hours · The last seven years have seen a significant rise in the number of employees working in excess of 48 hours a week, rising from 10% in the late 90s to 26% now · Women in the workforce have also experienced changes to their work pattern. Since 1992 there has been a leap of 52% in the number of women expected to do 48 hours a week · The number of people working a long week has also jumped. Estimates from 2000 -2002 suggest that those clocking up 60 hours a week have increased by a third, which equates to one sixth of the UK labour force. · We may be working more hours but many of us waste the opportunity to take time off. Recent surveys estimate that only 44% of workers use up their full entitlement to annual leave. Reasons cited for not taking paid holiday often include a heavy workload or fear of upsetting the boss · The right to take a full hour for lunch seems at odds with our modern workplaces, with 65% of UK workers not using the full 60 minutes.The average time for a break is now 27 minutes, and more of us remain at our workstation Source: Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives, by Madeleine Bunting Links: Occupational and Environmental Medicine Amicus on work hours

The Daily Pick

Friday, August 19, 2005 Congratulations President Bush: You Broke the Record!!! Heartfelt congratulations to President Bush, who on Friday August 19th breaks Ronald Reagan's all-time record for most vacation days. The old record was 335 days, though Reagan took his sweet time of eight years to accomplish this feat. President Bush did it in nearly half the time. And with another two weeks of vaction on tap, he's obviously not content with simply breaking the record, he's going to smoke that record right out of the hole. Great going, President Bush! We knew you could do it! Article of August 3rd, when the outcome was still in doubt. More from Heartfelt congratulations to President Bush, who on Friday August 19th breaks Ronald Reagan's all-time record for most vacation days. The old record was 335 days, though Reagan took his sweet time of eight years to accomplish this feat. President Bush did it in nearly half the time. And with another two weeks of vaction on tap, he's obviously not content with simply breaking the record, he's going to smoke that record right out of the hole.Great going, President Bush! We knew you could do it! Washington Post Article of August 3rd, when the outcome was still in doubt.More from The Daily Pick posted by The Daily Pick at 12:33 AM Don't Forget--Reagan was 25 years older (a genuine senior citizen) and--wait for it--was shot within 100 days of taking office, so his vacation time naturally had to be high. Maybe then we should have called it sick leave? And you know what, this frosts my balls because I've been working here for 10 years and like most Americans I don't get either vacation pay or sick leave. Well since he doesn't, hasn't, and never will do a damn thing right, it is probably for the best interest of our country that he is on vacation. I mean with the empty space that is between his ears, one could conclude he is/has always been on vacation. I wish he were in Iraq fighting for what his father started instead of here in the U.S.. I am sure our soldiers would be proud to watch him actually serve his country in the best interest of his fellow man kind. Did somebody say GW was high? ;-) http://virtualmatter.blogspot.com/2005/07/audio-george-bush-because-i-got-high.html This is a post-9/11 world. The world has changed. You cannot compare the past with today's political climate. This guy has worked ALOT harder than Reagan (R.I.P.) with the War On Terror. Regan had the 'cold war'- this is a REAL war. In addition to feeling bad for you, Anonymous 2, for having to go without vacation or sick leave, I also sympathize about your frosted balls. That's something no man should have to live through. No wonder you need sick leave. ;-) A REAL patriot should know that were it not for questioning the sensibilites of spoiled-rich leaders, we wouldn't have a country. Let me ask you this - if your boss took approximately 1.5 years vacation over the course of 4.5 years, would you respect him? Why do you feel the need to keep defending this man? He's a black mark on your party and he's a black mark in our nation's history. Worst. President. Ever. Really. Real Patriot. Gimme me a break with the post 9/11 world BS. FDR worked himself to death fighting WWII. A war the Democrats won in less time than Bush has had fighting the war on terror. Bush is a disgrace and his excessive vacationing is a national embarassment. He is scared to leave because the mothers movement may want some answers.That would mean telling the truth when they ask him why thier children are dead because of his lies. Ant to the "real patriot"....GET OFF THE CRACK!!!If you had listened to Nancy you would have been able to see the liar for what he really is.Ignorance is bliss, not a license to be wrong without penalty. Sigh. I really want to know why more people are truly pissed off with what Bushy is doing/has done... I'm interested to see all the backlash that will come in the next few years as more and more Americans start to see the similarities between Iraq and a certain country in South East Asia... Hmm... typical rich guy, sit on his laurels while "his Children of America" are being asked to work triple time in Afghan and Iraq. Way to go "W", you set such a great standard.....one of underachieving and futility(Bring em On)!! ... So, he basically took a day off EVERY WEEK?! Like taking every Friday off since he took office in 2000? jesus, we are at war, aren't we? ... That's really rich ... Bush is on vacation so much -because- we're in a tougher war than the country has ever faced? *laugh* Stop for just a moment and consider what you're saying. Can you honestly repeat that with a straight face? REAL Dork says: This is a post-9/11 world. The world has changed. You cannot compare the past with today's political climate. I want to second what others have pointed out -- to say that Bush should be taking more vacation because we're at war is probably the most laughably dumb thing I've heard all week. excellent! Sorry if I really got anyone angry.. Maybe my sarcasm was too subtle... But, honestly, the greatest part about it: I made the most asinine comment that I could think of, and it sounded like the typical con troll... I don't know about you, but I find THAT funny... it's been a long week.. needed to entertain myself... He could leave the ranch except that sleep-deprived mothers of dead soldiers might jsut have had enough and attack him like zombies looking to eat brains (not that they'll find any in that head.) Don't forget what we learned from the presidental debate. It's hard work. Perhaps next time the one that gets elected will be able to actually handle all the hard work without having to vacation like the French... (I've got nothing against the French btw) wre A tip of the old Ten Gallon to Dubya... the "Hardliest Workin' Man in Politics" (with apologies to James Brown)... In the real world, we call it "detoxing". No Bush has ever worked a day in their lives. Why start now? He's too busy dodging mothers of dead soldiers just like he dodged Vietnam. The psycho is a true traitor. Not to rain on anyone's parade here but it looks like Reagan didn't hold the all time record. Bush's father has him beat in this one. from: http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20031001.html "George Bush Sr. took all or part of 543 vacation days at Camp David and in Kennebunkport. Ronald Reagan spent 335 days at or en route to his Santa Barbara, California, ranch during his eight years in office. Of recent presidents, Jimmy Carter took the least days off -- only 79 days, which he usually spent at his home in Georgia. " Thanks to bernstein for the above note. There's a glitch though... Yes, the article says that George Bush the Senior took over 500 days in office, but it also says he took them during his two terms in office. Problem is, he only had one term in office. Unless you count the vice presidency, and then it's three terms. Considering Bush was a coke-sniffing, alcoholic, neer-do-well, deserter the first 40 years of his pathetic life, America is lucky to get any honest work out of this failed criminal This guy has worked ALOT harder than Reagan (R.I.P.) with the War On Terror. Regan had the 'cold war'- this is a REAL war. Is that right? All this time I thought it was "Mission Accomplished". But hey, it's OK. Your man's credibility is in its last throes. This criminal President Bush should be spending more vacation time in Leavenworth Prison . If one never actually works, it's all a vacation. Bush is noble, ah, that is nobility. Until we, the people, begin to actually choose leadership by joining or establishing political parties of our own making, not beholding to corporate interest, we'll keep getting what we've been getting. Begin now by reviewing the rules and laws of your state about how to establish a party of the people. Want one already there? Use Reform. The Reform National Committee won a little know court case in the Florida Supreme Court in Nove 04, to be recognized as a political party despite it's lack of a big big central office, a DC legal team, political consultants, massive corporate donations or elected congressional members. Reformers see it like this, the only part of the list we wish to change is having congressional members. People are not human resources, nor is our party a resource for corporate gain. I do political visions, freelance editorial cartoons. For the latest, see www.cafepress.com/whitehousecrazy Does that include Clinton? Everyday he spent in the White House was a vacation. I really don't want to argue here because I think that Bush is a liar, a criminal , and possibly guilty of treason but I don't see where in the article I sited above that it states that the figure of 500+ days off for GHW Bush includes his Vice Presidency. I'm all for seeing GW Bush and his gang behind bars, but we must make our case with logic, reason, and evidence. To rely on anything not only risks discrediting our side but corrupts our position as well. The last sentence in the above post should have begun, "To rely on anything ELSE..." You're right Bernstein. I misread "during his eight years in office" relating to the first president Bush, when instead it related to Reagan. Did G. Bush the Senior really spent 500+ days of vacation in four years? I'll look into it, and would welcome if anyone else would too. I'd like to have more than one source before I update The Pick. Thanks Bernstein. War on terror my ass! He did it for the oil plain and simple. How many other countries like Iraq do people get killed and tortured, yet the world does nothing? I think President Mugabe is a much worse threat to innocent people's lives than Saddam ever was. "George Bush Sr. took all or part of 543 vacation days at Camp David and in Kennebunkport. Must..not...let...Daddy...win... Given that a president is on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (the world doesn't take weekends, after all, and isn't all in our time zone), and that most "vacations" they take are, in fact, working vacations (which means they are still basically doing all the same things, just not in DC), I think it is hard for any of us to understand their lives to properly be able to criticize them for "vacations." The other side always finds anything to harp on, though. I remember the republicans making noise about Clinton, too, when he took a break. Sheesh. It's a pretty stressful job and it doesnt exactly pay that great for what is required; I wonder how many of us would be willing to do it? If you don't like Bush's politics, fine, attack that, but this is a really stupid issue, for either party to attack on. After two years and thousands of casualties, the only Weapon of Mass Destruction ever found in Iraq was Donald Rumsfeld...What will it take for my fellow Americans to see the contempt these pious frauds have for our nation, our flag, and our citizens. Personally, I think the presidency should be like any other job in America: 2 weeks vacation for the first five years (but none until after 6 months on the job), and three weeks after five years of service. DONT YOU GUYS HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO ALL DAY THAN BASH PRES. BUSH...IF AMERICA THOUGHT THAT KERRY COULD HAVE DONE A BETTER JOB THEN BUSH WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN RE-ELECTED....THE COUNTRY IS OBVIOUSLY DIVIDED ON THIS ISSUE. HOWEVER, YOUR CONSTANT ANGER AND BASHING WILL NOT SOLVE THE PROBLEM, NOR WILL IT SWERVE ANYONE ELSES OPINION....THE BEST THING THAT YOU DEMS CAN DO IS FIND A CANDIDATE THAT CAN STEP UP AND WIN IN '08...UNTIL THEN, YOU ARE ACCOMPLISHING NOTHING BY SPEWING ALL OF THIS NEGATIVE ENERGY...IF FACT, IF YOU SPENT MORE TIME ON YOUR PERSONAL BUSINESS AND LESS TIME ON HOW MUCH TIME OFF THE PRES IS TAKING (WHICH BY THE WAY HAS NOT BEEN VERIFIED) YOU WOULD ALL BE MUCH BETTER OFF... dO poStS tHaT UsE fuNNy cApiTaLIzaTioN gEt yOUr pOinT aCroSS bEttEr? CaN't yOu jUSt aDmIt tHaT tHe iDiOt iS awol? REALPATRIOT was being sarcastic (I hope). Bush deserves to break the record. He simply does not know the difference between "vacation" and "AWOL". maybe we should have Star look into it.. you know spend another couple million to see what ole Bush is up to on his days off GIVE ME A BREAK MISTER ALL CAPS do you have eyes and ears the repubs are no better... money wasting vacation taking tards... the lot of them! you were here like the rest of us WASTING time. That is the problem you don't lead by example you lead with your ever dwindling pocketbook and talk out your..... I got to this site because I was wondering if George W. Bush can now claim to have the MOST Americans die on American soil during a Presidential vacation. Having already looked up the most American deaths in America, I was looking for stats on which president took the longest vaca. So, "anonymous" who posted at 4:42 PM, here's my answer to your comment, "If you don't like Bush's politics, fine, attack that, but this is a really stupid issue, for either party to attack on." No, now that uncounted numbers of Gulf Coast residents have DIED it's not STUPID. Between the last few days and the vacation Bush took in August 2001 (while memos were going around about Bin Laden), it's no longer about who took the most vacation. I believe unequivocally that this IDIOT has killed the largest number of Americans while on Presidential vacations. Refute that, Mr. ALL CAPS ANONYMOUS who posted at 9:34 AM. Bush was not elected -- he STOLE another election (ask the voters who were still in line in Ohio at 4:30 a.m. after Fox announced Bush won the previous evening!). Yes, if John Kerry were President now, people would have been airlifted out of New Orleans days ago (not after the tragedy) -- especially those who were too poor to own a car or buy gasoline for it. If Katrina had hit Dallas and the oil billionaires instead of poor black New Orleans do you think there would have been a lot more immediate planning, action and concern out of the Bush mob? Now they are talking $10 Billion in aid. This is disgusting and reprehensible considering this disaster will make 9-11 look like a car accident by comparison in terms of human suffering and damage. 9-11 was a horrible tragedy but it has mainly served as a stupid excuse to go to war in Iraq and make George W a "war" president. How many hundred BILLION has the Iraq "war on terror" (quagmire) cost? And do you feel any safer? THAT ******** told Diane Sawyer when she asked about the forign response to Katrina that we have not asked others for help??????????? What the hell we give but we can't receive due to the complete arrogance of our Pres. PLEASE!!! TAKE A LONGER VACATION AND LET SOMEONE, ANYONE ELSE TAKE OVER AND HELP THESE PEOPLE. Amazing what the left dwells on, vacation days ha. Although, thanks for the humour guys, at least we have another two years of you children crying about Bush. I'll just sit back enjoy the comments and thank god Al Gore lost! see, theres your problem.... "thank GOD..." ever heard of separation of Church and State? apparently not. Why does the man that has killed more people in his presidency get ANY support whatsoever??? Because you religious, redneck, buck-toothed morons have NO BRAIN IN YOUR HEADS! Don't support the man just because he's a white christian... clue us in on your reasoning for agreeing with his demonic powers, and lust for dictatorship. If you cannot tell that Bush is an evil man, then you need to open your eyes, and step foot on the real world. Slightly off the topic of whether president X (regardless of party) should be taking vacations of this extent... Now, I am not at all for forcing my religion down anyone's throats. I don't mind, however, correcting this certain issue without taking EITHER side (if we're going by data and logic and all...): Constitution for the United States, Amendment 1: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" We have NO right to tell someone that their declaration of religious sayings are wrong or even inappropriate by citing the constitution; The constitution holds no power over what a person can and cannot say. Come on. Don't cite a government document when things like "there’s your problem" are clearly your opinion. Let me also word the first part of the amendment in a different way: The way I would translate it (my opinion) is that the government (that would be congress) can make no law respecting an establishment of religion. But wait – that’s what’s there. No laws saying to practice a religion. No laws saying that a religion cannot spread to the extent that the (or any) religion requires. I believe that this means if we want to push a religion or religious party back, we must do it on our own terms, not involving the government (or its founding documents) at all. Religion cannot be shut up by the government just as journalists cannot be shut up by the government. It's just that way. If it were the other way around, movie stars and the like would have a field day mopping Hollywood with every paparazzi who annoyed them in the least. Yes, I understand that religious zealots are annoying and angering. But in America, it's their right to be that way (don't get me wrong, if they commit a CRIME while being "religiously inspired", certainly punish 'em for it). On the note about clinging tenaciously to every word the constitution says, has anyone taken a clear look at what Amendment 13 says (right after the first five words)? Please comment on this; The way I read it states that slavery is NOT illegal in every form. That's disturbing. Glad someone has not taken THAT to court (shudder). In the meantime, perhaps it would be smarter to listen to what the public thinks (hooRAY for politically biased opinions, but still) and push Americans to decide how much vacation should be appropriate within one term (or at least what the max should be). Please excuse me for being lengthy, but I like when people debate about things; it's a constitutional right. ;) -Aiden (I KNOW I'll receive responses from this one...can't just leave it 'Anonymous') :) AMENDMENT XIII Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865. Note: A portion of Article IV, section 2, of the Constitution was superseded by the 13th amendment. Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. This clearly says that slavery and involuntary servitude are illegal, except if one considers penal servitude as a form of slavery or involuntary servitude. Considering the prison industrial complex, penal servitude certainly is akin to involuntary servitude. Also, I am a liberal and I feel that if there is a God, he is certainly on my side. I mean all of the teachings of Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, et al. favor helping the poor, treating others as one wishes to be treated, not casting the first stone, etc. Just a thought... Thanking God is not the problem. If you truly are a child of God you cannot put this on or take it off like a coat, it is a part of who you are. GW has passed no laws about his religion or forced it down anyone's throat. It is apart of his being. I think he is a wonderful president a much needed breath of fresh air. Our country was founded on religious beliefs and blessed for it. It becomes very tiring hearing the whining of the liberals everytime something doesn't go their way.ie:vacations If the election were stolen(ha)..due to fox news announcing Bush the winner...( how many liberals watch fox news anyway.. if they did they would not be liberals.) Thank God! Ok OK back to the origional issue. The president should get the same vacation as the majority of Americans...18 days a year. This guy has outdone the French they get on average 39 days a year. certinally wish he was their President they could and Would fire his a** and start over. If Bush needs vacations so badly because being President is too much “hard work” maybe he should consider his other career options. I’m pretty sure that someone must have told Bush that North Korea started shooting long-range test missiles last week. I don’t think this is a good time for our “President and Chief” to take a vacation. Not that he can really do anything like negotiate or enact any type of foreign policy – he’ll just declare war on Korea to solve his problem. Don’t worry about the troops – this will be good for the country by giving Haliburton one more country to work in and this can drive oil prices even higher, so his oil exec friends can earn ever higher profits. I am an Australian. I see all the constant arguments along lines of Democrats vs Republicans and wonder can't you all just stop and think objectively. Bush is a criminal...but I don't think the other side were going to be any better. Its the same in Australia,,,our Prime Minister is a proven liar but the alternative is just as useless. History will look back at these 'leaders' - they will be remembered but none will be considered great. No leader solved the Middle East conflict, no leader brought prosperity, no leader helped the dying in Africa, no leader has improved standards at home let alone in the third world. They just achieve a continuation of the status quo. Sorry to get on my soap box but once I was proud to be an Australian but now everyone just wants to attack everyone. Wouldn't you think with today's technology and our world view leaders could do more. Imagine if instead of invading countries the army went into a third world country and built roads and irrigation systems and farms and schools and asked nothing in return....what would the terrorists attack. All won over and for no deaths! OK so I am anidealist and a bleeding heart...your turn to attack me. Robert so out of the total number of days president (2 terms) howmany of them have been vacation days? Impeach G W before its too late In time of war, The united States only has a part time President? 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Secret film of Zimbabwe 'squalor'

Some 2,000 people were believed to be living at the makeshift camp The clearances have left about 700,000 people without their homes or livelihoods, according to UN estimates. The human rights group said its film showed people made homeless and then dumped at an informal site. The images, shot in August, depict a makeshift camp and people queuing up for water at the site near Harare. Amnesty said people there had to cope with shortages of food and clean water. The site may have housed up to 2,000 people, it said. But the organisation said it feared the problem could be widespread, urging the government to say whether other areas like the site shown on the film existed in other parts of the country. The government in Zimbabwe describes its drive as an urban renewal campaign designed to cut crime and curb illegal development. It says last month's UN report - which said a total of 2.4m people had been affected in some way - is biased and exaggerated. 'Secretly dumped' Amnesty said the film was shot at Hopley Farm on the outskirts of Harare on 4 August and then smuggled out of the country. It said the images showed people who lost their homes during Operation Murambatsvina (Drive Out Trash) and who were initially taken to the so-called transit camps. But the organisation said that such camps in Harare and also Bulawayo were closed following the damning UN report. The government of Zimbabwe is compounding suffering and human rights violations by attempting to hid the most visible signs of internal displacement Audrey Gaughran Amnesty International "The people who had been in those transit camps were taken under cover of darkness and dumped at various rural areas in the country," Amnesty International researcher Audrey Gaughran said. "They were left in most cases with no shelter, no food, no access to sanitation and little or no access to clean water. "Rather than confront the massive humanitarian crisis that its actions have created, the government of Zimbabwe is compounding suffering and human rights violations by attempting to hide the most visible signs of internal displacement," she added. Ms Gaughran said that since the footage was shot, aid groups had been able to persuade the government to grant them access to the Hopley Farm site.

What Watergate could teach the White House

Somebody is lying. So wrote Terry Neal, a political reporter for the Washington Post reporter, on July 25 2005. He was writing about one of the strangest stories to engulf the White House since the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001. It is the story of an official investigation into who leaked the name of a CIA operative to the media. According to a 1982 law, that kind of leak would be illegal. Two prominent names have emerged in the investigation of the leak as possibilities – Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, and Lewis Libby, vice-president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. The investigation appears now to be heading towards a rapid conclusion. If the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, finds that either Mr Rove or Mr Libby or both violated the law, they would face criminal charges, and the Bush administration would quickly find itself enmeshed in a scandal of such dimensions that are it is already being compared to the Nixon-era Watergate scandal. of the Nixon era. According to recent public recent opinion polls, including an August 7 poll in one Newsweek magazine, the American people are are increasingly of the view that Mr Rove, whom the resident Mr Bush described as the “architect” of his 2004 re-election, may be guilty of unethical or illegal behaviour in connection with the leak. For example, on August 7, 2005, Newsweek Newsweek magazine said that 45 per cent of those polled “believe he is guilty of a serious crime.” Much is still not known about Mr Fitzgerald’s this investigation – Mr Fitzgerald he has insisted on absolute secrecy – but what is known strongly suggests that the Bush administration is engaged in a two-front war: one to cover up its blunders in the lead-up build-up to the Iraq war based and the a build-up based on the on the mistaken assumption that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed “weapons of mass destruction”, and the other to protect the leaker. and the other two to . The two fronts wars are now unmistakeably linked. Even though President Mr Bush asserted on May 29, 2003, after the war, that “we found the weapons of mass destruction,” it soon It became painfully clear in the war’s aftermath of the that that Iraq had no such weapons and that Mr Bush’s the President’s justification for war was stunningly wrong. Therefore, it was “no accident”, as the Soviets used to say, no accident” that when Joseph Wilson, a former US ambassador, Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed a comment article in the New York Times on July 6 2003 accusing the administration of “twisting” the intelligence to justify the war, the White House fussed and fumed – and struck back. Within days stories began to appear to appear in the media criticising and belittling Mr Wilson, which was bad enough, but and then, oddly, outing Valerie Plame, his CIA wife, by name. a leak that which proved to be a big mistake. In addition, The White House later vigorously denied that Mr Rove was “involved” in any way. In Washington the outing of a CIA operative is no trifling matter, no ­partisan matter either, and within a few short months, the justice department was pressured into appointing appointed a public prosecutor. Mr ­Fitzgerald, a hard-nosed ambitious prosecutor from Chicago, plunged into a series of interviews with senior officials, including the president and vice-president. Mr Rove and Mr Libby were also ­interviewed. In fact, in a sequence described as most unusual by that lawyers saw as highly unusual, Mr Rove was summoned to testify three times before the grand jury. Most unusualunexpected, reporters suggested, wondered, for for someone uninvolvedthree times? . Mr Rove was also questioned twice by the FBI. In recent weeks, speculation has grown rumours have swept through Washington that Mr Fitzgerald was investigating not just the identity of the leaker but also more serious charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. What had been, up to then, kept so quiet so hush-hush suddenly surfaced as front page news and cocktail chatter, deeply embarrassing and potentially damaging to the administration. and politically damaging to the President.For It turned out that Mr Rove and Mr Libby were “involved” in the leaking and the outing, White House denials notwithstanding, and and public opinion polls began to reflecting growing doubts about the honesty of the Bush president’s (and his administration. s) honesty and candor. An obvious link was being drawn between a security breach, which would have been a problem, and the war in Iraq, which is proving to be a disaster. Making matters worse, Complicating the matter, In a show Mr Fitzgerald’s spooky show of legalistic machismo, Mr Fitzgerald pursued jailed Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter, for refusing to disclose her sources for a story that she never wrote did not end up writing about the Wilson-Plame affair, resulting in led to Ms Miller’s imprisonment. never wrote. One A key lesson from the Watergate scandal is that sometimes the a cover-up can be worse than the crime. In this case, a usually media-savvy White House, stung by criticism of its justification for war, lashed out at one critic and then took the inexplicable and foolish step of orchestrating the outing of his CIA wife, unintentionally triggering leading to a chain of events. totally unintended. It would have been so much better if the White House had simply acknowledged its blunder – and apologised. The American people would almost surely have “understood”. The writer, co-author of The Media and the War on Terrorism, is senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government

The Old Negro Space Program

What is The Old Negro Space Program? It’s a short film I made in 2003. I had the title first. It made me laugh. Then I made the movie, slowly. I figured if it sucked I wouldn’t show it to anyone. It did not suck, so here it is. This was shown at the HBO Comedy Festival in 2004 (back when it was the Aspen Comedy Festival). And even before that, it helped me get my first tv writing job on Malcolm in the Middle. Also it was one of the first shorts to “go viral,” and I’m very proud of it. The Old Negro Space Program has been good to me. I hope you enjoy it. Want to help me out? Sure I’m a big-time tv writer now. But not that big-time yet. Tell you what. If you really loved the movie, why not get yourself a sweet remembrance of our time together: Beautiful, right? Okay, so you love the movie and you want to help me pay for the cost of hosting this site, but you don’t want a t-shirt or mousepad. How about a donation through Paypal? Or how about this? You want to donate, but you don’t want me to have any piece of it? Please give to the Negro League Players Association, or the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. You’ll feel good. I’ll feel less guilty for satirizing this treasured part of American history. And you’ll be helping to keep this treasure alive.

Diesel vs. hybrid: From Detroit to D.C., and back

RELATED STORIES Testing gas mileage claims Drivers upset as hybrids fall short on fuel economy Diesel vs. hybrid: From Detroit to D.C., and back Diesel vs. hybrid: Gas mileage diary E-Mail Newsletters Sign up to receive our free Cars e-newsletter and get the latest auto reviews & news in your inbox. E-mail: Select one: HTML Text Diesel vs. hybrid: From Detroit to D.C., and back Gasoline prices that have been averaging more than $2 a gallon have boosted interest in fuel-efficient gas-electric hybrid and diesel-powered vehicles. To see if the technologies live up to their fuel-economy promise, USA TODAY reporter David Kiley drove a Volkswagen Jetta TDI diesel from suburban Detroit to suburban Washington, D.C., last month. He drove a Toyota Prius hybrid back from Washington to Detroit. Here's his report. Testing a diesel Jetta and hybrid Prius on a drive between Detroit and Washington seemed a natural. Volkswagen and Toyota each said I should be able to make the 500-mile-plus one-way trip on one tank of gas. Volkswagen's Jetta GLS 2.0, top, and Toyota Prius Volkswagen, Toyota The route seemed appropriate because decisions that determine the future of hybrids and diesels will be made largely in corporate Detroit and political Washington. The verdict: Prius is comfortable, a festival of technology and unquestionably cleaner-burning than the VW can be today with only high-sulfur diesel fuel available. But the real-world mileage of pleasant-driving Jetta was better than that of Prius, and diesel fuel typically was 16% to 20% cheaper than unleaded gas. Jetta lived up to its one-tank billing. Prius did not. The details: Setting out from my home in Ann Arbor, Mich., in the Jetta, I wanted to top off the tank. I went to three stations before finding diesel fuel. But that was the only time I had to hunt for it. FUEL ECONOMY Find official fuel economy figures for late model cars, SUVs, pickup trucks and minivans. The diesel pump was grimier than the others and offered plastic mittens for holding the nozzle. I skipped the mittens but didn't get dirty or smelly. The Jetta handled well, making the drive pleasant. Its diesel had more of a pulsating and vaguely clattering sound than the steady growl of a gas engine, but it wasn't objectionable. The odometer said 535 miles when I arrived at USA TODAY headquarters in McLean, Va. The Jetta used 12.2 gallons of diesel fuel. That's 44 miles a gallon, on the nose for the car's highway fuel economy rating. The fuel cost $21.35. The trip from McLean back to Ann Arbor in the Prius using a slightly different route was 549 miles. While in stop-and-go traffic, the Prius often ran on battery power, driving home the point that it is most efficient in crawling, urban traffic. The gas-tank warning light flashed after 422 miles. I drove 10 miles to the next gas station and filled up, putting 11.1 gallons into the 11.9-gallon tank. That would indicate 38 mpg, far short of the 51 mpg government rating. The car's trip computer told me it had been getting 51.7 mpg. Irv Miller, Toyota vice president for corporate communication, says the mileage shortfall probably had to do with speed. "The government test that puts the Prius' highway mileage at 51 mpg is based on ideal driving conditions and going 55 mph," he says. I averaged 72 miles an hour on highways. The company also says the computer is nearly 100% accurate. But how much gas its flexible bladder takes at the pump varies from less than 10 gallons to the full 11.9 gallons. Toyota said I probably began the trip with less gas than I thought. Toyota spokesman Mike Michels says the gas-tank variability is confusing to owners, and the company is working on a fix. Possibly reflecting frustration with the problem, Prius owners' biggest complaint was "fuel gauge not working" in the J.D. Power and Associates 2004 Initial Quality Study, which measures problems the first 90 days of ownership. Gas bill for the trip home was $28.62. While the fuel price advantage on this trip goes to the diesel, the environmental advantage goes to the hybrid. The Jetta spews out six times more sulfur particulates than Prius, which can run almost emission-free when using low-sulfur gasoline available in California but almost nowhere else. Federal regulations require phasing in of low-sulfur gas and diesel the next few years, which will improve the emission performance of both gas and diesel vehicles. The advantage in premium paid for the technology goes to diesel. The premium for a hybrid version of a vehicle is about $3,000. The Jetta diesel is $1,200 more than a gas-powered Jetta. VW's Passat TDI diesel, which just went on sale, is only $205 more than the similar gas model. And the VW Touareg TDI diesel, also just now on sale, is priced about the same as a similarly accessory-laden gasoline V-8. The future: Both technologies are in demand. Toyota can't keep up on Prius. Some dealers won't take more 2004 orders until production is increased, although Toyota discourages that, Michels says. Toyota plans to make 48,000 to 50,000 a year available in the USA, up from 36,000 now. Ford Motor, which launches a hybrid version of the Ford Escape small sport-utility vehicle in August, said recently it had 30,000 potential customers for what is expected to be production of 20,000. Ford is investigating whether it can get enough batteries to build more than that. Meanwhile, VW says it gets a limited number of diesels from Germany and sells all the TDI vehicles it has. More hybrids and diesels are coming. In addition to Civic and Insight hybrids, Honda will sell an Accord hybrid in the fall. Toyota's Lexus luxury brand will offer an RX 400h SUV later this year, and Toyota will have a hybrid version of Highlander SUV early next year. Mercedes-Benz has brought its E Class diesel back to the USA. Chrysler plans a Jeep Liberty diesel later this year.

Muslim leaders 'in denial' claim

Sir Iqbal Sacranie's organisation represents 400 groups The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) pledged to tackle extremism "head on" after the 7 July attacks in London. But in a BBC Panorama special, Mehbood Kantharia and other prominent British Muslims question the MCB's commitment to meeting this challenge. The MCB has branded the programme "deeply unfair" and a "witch-hunt". Secretary general Sir Iqbal Sacranie said Panorama had used "deliberately garbled quotes in an attempt to malign the Muslim Council of Britain". He said it had "the barely concealed goal of drawing British Muslims away from being inspired in their political beliefs and actions by the faith of Islam". "It is unfortunate that just when Britain's 1.6 million Muslims are beginning to make progress in terms of their political participation in the mainstream, there are those who are purposefully trying to sabotage that process," he added. Task force Mehbood Kantharia was a member of the MCB's central working committee between 1997 and 2004, but has since left the organisation. He told Panorama: "It is my personal view that because they are in a state of denial they cannot become real, you know, sort of like, forthright, really forthright about wanting to do something about the kind of extremism that prevails." We are confident the programme will be a timely contribution to the present debate Mike Robinson, Panorama producer Editor tackles Panorama 'slur' The MCB, an umbrella organisation of about 400 mosques and other Islamic groups, is seen as representing mainstream Muslim opinion in the UK. On Saturday the council said Mr Kantharia had informed it that his remarks were not referring to the MCB. But Mr Kantharia later said that while he had not mentioned the MCB specifically, his comments could have been interpreted as applying to individuals within it. "I think the MCB is overreacting in this matter," he added. MCB secretary general Sir Iqbal Sacranie was asked after the 7 July attacks to help set up a task force to root out extremism in Britain's Muslim communities. After meeting Tony Blair in Downing Street on 19 July he said: "The community is determined to deal with this issue head on." But an investigation by Panorama reporter John Ware found groups affiliated to the MCB promoting anti-Semitic views, the belief that Islam is a superior ideology to secular British values and the view that Christians and Jews are conspiring to undermine Islam. In an interview with Mr Ware, Sir Iqbal refused to disown a group known as Al-e-Hadith, which says the ways of Christians and Jews "are based on sick or deviant views" and that "imitating the Kuffar [non-Muslims] leads to a permanent abode in hellfire". Suicide bombers Commenting on the group, Sir Iqbal said "we must accept the reality" of the diversity within the Muslim community in the UK. He also praised the work of the Islamic Foundation, which promotes the teachings of Jamaa'at Islami founder Sayid Mawdudi. Mr Mawdudi wrote Islam was a "revolutionary ideology which seeks to alter the social order of the entire world". In a wide ranging interview, Mr Ware also tackled Sir Iqbal on his decision not to attend the Holocaust Day Memorial and his attendance of a memorial service for Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who supported suicide bombers in Israel. Asked what kind of signal his presence at Sheikh Yassin's memorial service sent to young British Muslims, Sir Iqbal said: "If your whole question is based upon one aspect of that person's belief in terms of supporting it, we look into the wider picture. The suicide bombing that you're referring to is one aspect of the whole struggle." But Sir Iqbal condemned suicide bombings by British Muslims anywhere and said there was no difference between the life of a Palestinian and the life of a Jew and that all life was sacred. In a separate interview, a senior spokesman for one of the MCB's main affiliates, the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), appeared to condone the glorification of suicide bombers. 'Witch hunt' Asked if describing martyrdom in Israel as "divine bliss" meant he was an "apologist for terrorism", Dr Azzam Tamini replied: "If you want to consider me so that's up to you." London mayor Ken Livingstone earlier this week accused the BBC and other media organisations of conducting a "witch-hunt" against the MCB, which he described as the "mainstream representative body of British Muslims". The MCB has made a formal complaint to the BBC accusing it of "blatant pro-Israeli bias" and "undermining community relations in the UK". In his letter of complaint, written before he had viewed the programme, Sir Iqbal said: "It appears the BBC is more interested in furthering a pro-Israeli agenda than assessing the work of Muslim organisations in the UK." He added: "The BBC should not allow itself to be used by the highly placed supporters of Israel in the British media to make political capital out of the 7 July atrocities in London." 'Timely contribution' In his response, Panorama editor Mike Robinson, said the programme examined questions "being raised by the Muslim community itself". "Despite some critical comments to the contrary, it is certainly not the case that nearly all the questioning of Sir Iqbal Sacranie was about Israel." He added that the BBC "rejects completely any allegation of institutional or programme bias" and he was "confident" the programme would be "a timely contribution to the present debate". The Panorama special A Question of Leadership is on BBC One at 2220BST on Sunday, 21 August.

Police knew Brazilian was 'not bomb risk'

Senior sources in the Metropolitan Police have told The Observer that members of the surveillance team who followed de Menezes into Stockwell underground station in London felt that he was not about to detonate a bomb, was not armed and was not acting suspiciously. It was only when they were joined by armed officers that his threat was deemed so great that he was shot seven times. Sources said that the surveillance officers wanted to detain de Menezes, but were told to hand over the operation to the firearms team. The two teams have fallen out over the circumstances surrounding the incident, raising fresh questions about how the operation was handled. A police source said: 'There is no way those three guys would have been on the train carriage with him [de Menezes] if they believed he was carrying a bomb. Nothing he did gave the surveillance team the impression that he was carrying a device.' Last night, Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair admitted he was told that shooting created 'a difficulty'. In an interview with the News of the World, Blair said that an officer came to him the day after the shooting and said the equivalent of 'Houston, we have a problem'. 'He didn't use those words but he said "We have some difficulty here, there is a lack of connection". 'I thought "That's dreadful, what are we going to do about that?".' The Observer can also reveal that the de Menezes family was offered £15,000 after the shooting. The ex gratia payment, which does not affect legal action by the family or compensation, is a fraction of the $1 million (£560,000) reported to have been offered the family. Police yesterday denied they had made the offer, which the family has described as 'offensive'. Members of the firearms unit are said to be furious that de Menezes was not properly identified when he left his flat, the first problem in the chain of events that led to the Brazilian's death. Specialist officers with the firearms team active that day had received training in how to deal with suicide bombers. A key element was advice that a potential bomber will detonate at the first inkling he has been identified. They are trained to react at the first sign of any action. The Observer now understands that seconds before the firearms team entered the tube train carriage, a member of the surveillance squad using the codename Hotel 3 moved to the doorway and shouted: 'He's in here.' De Menezes, in all likelihood alarmed by the activity, stood and moved towards the doorway. He was grabbed and pushed back to his seat. The first shots were then fired while Hotel 3 was holding him. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) is to investigate if the firearms officers, with only seconds to decide whether to shoot, mistakenly interpreted de Menezes's movement as an aggressive act. For the firearms officers involved in the death to avoid any legal action, they will have to state that they believed their lives and those of the passengers were in immediate danger. Such a view is unlikely to be supported by members of the surveillance unit. For reasons as yet unclear, members of the firearms team have yet to submit their own account of the events to the IPCC. The two members of the team believed to have fired the fatal shots are known to have gone on holiday immediately after the shooting. In one case, the holiday had been pre-booked, in the other the leave was authorised by Blair, who yesterday received the backing of the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke: 'I am very happy with the conduct, not only of Sir Ian Blair, but the whole Metropolitan Police in relation to this inquiry.' Meanwhile, questions have been raised about the accuracy of the police intelligence that led to the raid on the block of flats occupied by de Menezes. It was initially suggested that the flat was connected to the man known as Hussein Osman, who was arrested in Italy. On the Saturday after the shooting, officers raided the flat in a high-profile operation watched by the world's media. As a result, a man, identified only as 'C', was arrested 'on suspicion of the commission, instigation or preparation of acts of terrorism'. But he was released on 30 July with no charge, raising the possibility that the flats had no connection with the bombings. The IPCC is also expected to look into selective briefings to the media over the days following the shootings. The parents of de Menezes said they have rejected all financial offers made by the police. 'I feel hurt and offended,' Jean's mother, Maria Otoni de Menezes, told The Observer this weekend. 'I didn't think it was right to talk about money so soon after my son's death.' One document seen by The Observer and handed to the family on 1 August by the Met's assistant deputy commissioner, John Yates, sets out a final settlement, on top of an agreement to pay repatriation and legal fees. 'The MPS offers £15,000 by way of compensation to you for the death of Jean Charles,' says the document, dated 27 July. 'This ... extra gratia paymen ... means it is paid without any consideration of legal liability or responsibility.'

The man who would be king

We think of Bobby Fischer, the paranoid anti-Semite raging at imagined enemies, or Paul Morphy, the 19th-century champion, found dead in his bath surrounded by women's shoes. We recall Wilhelm Steinitz, the Austrian who thought he was in electrical communication with God. Even 'normal' professionals, like our own Nigel Short and Jonathan Speelman, tend to betray curious eccentricities. Short speaks English as though it were a foreign language and Speelman looks, in his clothes and grooming, like a mad professor plotting to blow up the world. It should be said in his defence that Kasparov, though a genius at the game, has never particularly looked the part. Whereas Anatoly Karpov, the man he beat to take the world title back in 1985, possessed the cadaverous pallor and puny physique of someone who had spent his life in airless rooms lifting nothing heavier than a wooden chess piece, Kasparov by contrast was all simian movements and saturnine stares. His opponents spoke of his physical presence as if he were an athlete or a boxer rather than what they were, chess nerds. He trained for big matches with a fitness regime and careful diet. Short referred to his 'weightlifter's energy' and that was before Kasparov crushed him in their 1993 World Championship match. And while chess players tend by nature to be self-absorbed, distracted, reclusive, Kasparov was an extrovert with no interest in concealing his high opinion of himself. As he put it in his 1987 autobiography, Child of Change, he was 'not one to hide my light under a bushel'. In the book he described his triumphs with an undisguised pride bordering on glee. He quoted praise at length and gave short shrift to criticism. Dubbed by his rivals the 'Beast of Baku', he later outlined his relationship with his fellow chess professionals. 'Most of the other players hate me because I beat them regularly,' he explained. 'Most of them have a devastatingly bad record against me.' Everything about Kasparov, including his impenetrably thick hair, seemed to speak of the indomitable. He produced moves that teams of grandmasters would take days to unravel. And for 20 years, give or take the occasional blip, he could not be beaten. Then, earlier this year, having won the prestigious Linares tournament in Spain, he announced his retirement. Not for him the obscurity or notoriety that his predecessors encountered after chess, not for him the struggle against dwindling powers and memory. Instead, Kasparov informed the world that he was ready for a whole new challenge. He was going into politics. It was a decision that underwhelmed many Russian observers. A column in the Moscow Times outlined some of the doubts about Kasparov's political abilities. 'The country's media, political analysts and even some of his fellow liberals see him more as a dilettante who does not understand the rules of the game and who has more than one failed political venture to his name, from the Democratic Party of Russia, to the Liberal-Conservative Union, and now to the risky Committee 2008: Free Choice. Critics and even friends of Kasparov have noted an inability to commit to any one project for a sustained period. In short, everyone seems to be telling Kasparov: "Don't dabble with the real world, go back to the safe confines of the 64 squares on the chessboard." ' Kasparov once quoted his countryman, Vladimir Nabokov's appraisal of the talents required to excel at his chosen game. 'Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterise all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity - and splendid insincerity.' It's safe to say that in the art of politics you can do without all of those talents except, of course, the last. And not even his fiercest critics would accuse Kasparov of insincerity, splendid or otherwise. In an interview two years ago, he seemed to acknowledge that his need to voice unpalatable truths might be a weakness in the political arena. 'With strong views and very little flexibility, you don't make a good politician,' he said, before adding a tantalising rider. 'Except in some crucial moments.' It just so happens that Kasparov believes that now is one such crucial moment. 'In Russia,' he told me, 'there is no more politics in terms of campaigning, promoting your views, debating your points. The regime has destroyed democratic institutions. In such circumstances what you need is to raise your voice, stand firm and fight the regime. I don't think flexibility helps you very much. It's about fighting.' Kasparov was probably the most aggressive player in modern chess. Though nearly all chess players like to talk about 'destroying' or 'crushing' their opponent, very often the way they play can appear more like boring their opponent to a standstill. Not Kasparov. He relished a fight. He moved his pieces as if they were weapons. He once said that he learned about politics through chess, and if that's the case then Kasparov's current tactics make a kind of chess sense. He has decided to target the King. He wants to take out the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. But to succeed he will have to play the game of his life against an opponent loaded with almost every advantage. When he was a small boy, he once recalled, he saw a chess game 'in which small pawns were victorious over what looked like a more powerful enemy. This captivated me, and I have loved to attack ever since childhood.' But for Kasparov to defeat the Putin regime would be more like the equivalent of a solitary white knight vanquishing a near full set of black pieces. I met Kasparov back in June, in a small hotel discreetly tucked away between Knightsbridge and Chelsea. He was wearing a light-green checked suit and a cravat that made it appear as if his wardrobe selection was the fruit of judicious reference to the works of PG Wodehouse. He sat on the edge of his seat as he talked, just as he used to when playing chess. There's a physical impatience about the man that suggests he's already three steps ahead of you and he may not care to wait. I went out to put some coins in the parking meter just before he was about to be photographed and when I returned a couple of minutes later the photo session had been completed. Kasparov has always appeared in a rush, which may explain why he used to look so precociously middle aged. Born Garik Weinstein in Baku - what was then part of the Soviet Union but is now the independent state of Azerbaijan - Kasparov lost his father when he was seven. 'I had to rely on myself,' he told me, though he also acknowledged the vital role of his mother. 'From an early age she decided to dedicate her life [to me], which made a very strong bond which affected my life - for good or bad, that's another story.' There is a wealth of Freudian literature on the meaning of the Queen in chess, and many chess players, including Fischer (whose mother was called Regina) have had intense and often difficult relationships with their mothers. Similarly, in keeping with the Oedipal theme (the aim of chess is to kill the King), they have also, again like Fischer, often had absent fathers. It has been written that Kasparov's father, who was Jewish, perished in a car accident. But along with the widely disseminated idea that Kasparov speaks 15 languages (he speaks two) this story lacks only the quality of truth. 'He died from leukaemia,' Kasparov said. 'We never had any money to buy a car.' At the age of 10 he was taken under the wing of Mikhail Botvinnik, the Soviet former world chess champion. At 12 he was identified as a future world champion. By the age of 22, when he became world champion, Kasparov displayed the self-possession of a man of double those years. Photographs from the time show him dressed in a jacket and tie, with the kind of facial hair that requires shaving on the hour, and they make him seem almost eligible for a midlife crisis. Now, at 42, his chronological age has at last caught up with his physical self. He has been married twice and has two children, he has travelled the globe and lived under both communism and capitalism and whatever system it is that now operates in Russia. But whatever world weariness he's accumulated is more than offset by his natural energy if not, perhaps, what you would call ebullience. On the desk to his side there sat two books. One published by the Federation Internationale des Echecs (Fide) and the other titled Speak Like Churchill. Chess and politics, his twin passions. His great political hero is Winston Churchill. 'He came up with his ideas, he fought for them and his ideas were right,' he says. Kasparov may have some of Churchill's resolve, but he certainly lacks his oratory skill, at least in English. He talks politics in a dry analytical style that may, one hopes, have lost something in translation. It's only when he conveys a sense of moral outrage that his words achieve a heroic flourish. Halfway through our conversation, which lasted for a couple of hours, he said: 'Recently I've been contemplating my future steps and I realised my choice is very simple. Either I leave my country or stay, and if I stay I have to fight. To ignore what has been done by KGB rulers would be damaging my sense of honour. Leaving my country would also be damaging because, why should I leave? Why me, why not Putin?' His dislike of Putin is genuine. A dismissive sneer contorts his face each time he mentions his name. 'I think simply that the man doesn't fit his position,' is his opinion of the Russian president. And when I ask what he thinks is Putin's estimation of him, his response is withering. 'Frankly speaking, I don't care. I've met too many KGB colonels in my life to pay attention to their opinions even if they turn out by accident to be presidents of my country.' The fact remains, however, that Putin's various moves against democracy and free speech have had little effect on his international reputation and even less on his domestic support. He may have closed down or bought up the overwhelming majority of critical media. He may have overseen a ruthless, in many ways disastrous, and arguably genocidal campaign in Chechnya. He may do favourable business with the oligarchs who back his regime and hound those - like the recently imprisoned Mikhail Khodorkovsky - who protest against it. But none of that overly concerns the mass of Russians for whom a strong authoritarian leader appears to remain a preferable path to the uncertainties of democracy and the free market. A serious opposition movement has simply not taken shape, partly because of Putin's grip on the media and partly because the high price of oil has buoyed a fragile economy. And in any case Putin is bound by law to step down in 2008. Nevertheless, Kasparov is focusing on Putin because he believes that if he can expose him as a self-serving autocrat and bring him down, he can also strike a blow against the venal bureaucrats and billionaires who form a crony state. 'More and more Russians are realising that Putin is creating unique conditions for oligarchs to plunder the country and take money outside, providing they pay their dues to the regime. [Ramon] Abramovich,' he continues, citing the oil magnate and owner of Chelsea football club, 'is for Russians a symbol a corruption.' So what, as another Russian once asked, is to be done? 'Travel across the country, meet people, tell them what's right, what's wrong. People like me are not allowed on Russian TV. The only solution, the partial solution is to go round and talk to people. In many regions there is still an open window of opportunity because local TV stations are still in private hands. I had 14 appearances in Siberia in two days.' Kasparov told me that he was shortly off to the North Caucasus, where the Beslan atrocity took place. If he did not know before, then he was to see on that trip just what he was up against. He was prevented by the authorities from attending various meetings. He had eggs and ketchup thrown at him. In three cities his plane was refused permission to land. Hotels were mysteriously booked up or closed and venues were suddenly cancelled. It was clearly a concerted effort to stop Kasparov from spreading his message. I asked Maria Lipman, a political specialist at Moscow's Carnegie Centre, how Kasparov is seen in Russia. The fact that he was half-Armenian and half-Jewish would not play well with Russian nationalists, she said, 'but it's really that he's so radical in being a westerniser and so clearly wants Russia as part of the globalised world that is of limited appeal to most Russians.' She was impressed by the way that Kasparov had taken to travelling across the country. 'He seems to be really enjoying it. I don't think other liberal politicians have the energy or cash. They got disillusioned early on.' All the same, she did not think that Kasparov's standing as a chess hero did much for his image in Russia. 'Chess has lost its popularity from Soviet days,' she explained. 'It's not longer promoted at the highest levels. And also even when he was world champion Kasparov was always seen as too anti-state, too cosmopolitan.' This view of Kasparov as somehow an outsider goes right back to the days of his greatest triumph. In 1984 he challenged Anatoly Karpov, the world champion who inherited the title when Bobby Fischer retreated into a religious cult and refused to play him. Karpov was the darling of the Soviet establishment. A dedicated communist (he has since become a hard-core nationalist), he was treated like the official Soviet candidate. Kasparov, too, was a communist, or at least a member of the Communist Party. 'Without making that step,' he told me, 'I wouldn't have got the support that was absolutely crucial for me to survive in that environment.' He later became an advocate of Mikhail Gorbachev, then an opponent, when he became frustrated at the slow pace of reform. It was not until January 1990, however, that he handed in his membership of the Communist Party. Back in 1984, Kasparov showed no such deliberation. He tore into Karpov, launching a series of fearless attacks. As a result he lost three of the first seven games. Then two of the next 20 games. He was 0-5 down. Karpov had only to win one more game to retain his title. But Kasparov made an amazing and gruelling comeback, drawing game after game, and then winning three. After five months of play, Karpov was a nervous wreck and looked close to exhaustion. His friend, Florencio Campomanes, the president of Fide, controversially decided to end the match just when Kasparov, for the first time in the event, looked to be the favourite to win. Typically, Kasparov does not undersell his achievement. 'If you look at the odds of surviving in such a situation against Karpov, I don't think there's anything comparable in the history of any sport.' When I asked him the daunting size of the political task he has now undertaken, he replied: 'After saving that match against Karpov I believe anything can be done.' Despite his anger with Fide, Kasparov won the rematch and so began his 20 years of dominance. It's true that he lost his title in London in 2000 to Vladimir Kramnik, but by then the chess World Championship had begun to resemble boxing, with competing governing bodies. In any case, Kasparov now says the defeat did him a favour 'because I could reinvent myself playing new, highly sophisticated chess and that gave me five years on top'. When he retired he was still rated number one in the world. Kasparov, who writes a column for the Wall Street Journal and is busy with a series of books, will survive without chess (he restricts himself nowadays to anonymous games on the internet), but it's much less clear how well chess will do without Kasparov. There are no household names. He was the one player with global appeal and the professional game is unlikely to emerge from his considerable shadow for some time. Equally uncertain is how Kasparov will fare in politics. He was renowned for his bold openings on the chessboard and so far, with his Russian roadshow, he has not disappointed. But does he have a middle game, much less an endgame? His various attempts to form a liberal coalition have failed, his critics claim, because of his unwillingness to compromise and his need to control decisions. And many observers expect his latest venture, the United Civil Front, which aims to combine all anti-Putin forces from left to right, to go the same way. There is also the matter of financing. Kasparov is a wealthy man but not so wealthy that he can maintain a political movement without proper backing. 'We've got very little money,' he conceded, 'but the good thing is that there are quite a few rich people who are now ready to finance us anonymously. Funding us is a death warrant for any Russian businessman.' So far, he has confined his stated ambitions to a negative - getting rid of the Putin regime. What he has refused to do is confirm his own interest in becoming president. I asked him about his long-term aim. 'Well, it might be that I find myself very useful,' he said with an expression of unironic sincerity. 'It might be that I offer my vision to the country, whether it's accepted or not. I think Russia virtually has to be rewritten from scratch.' As things stand, it seems implausible that Kasparov should ever land the job of doing the rewrite. But it would be foolish to underestimate the boy from Baku. After all, he used to come up with ploys and gambits and moves that no one else in the world could see. And this particular game has only just started.

Steal This Book. Or at Least Download It Free.

There was no money in it at first -- but Mr. Adler was no stranger to making do with little. As a child growing up in Brooklyn, he lived with his parents, his two brothers and assorted relatives in his grandparents' house. At one point, 11 people shared a bathroom, "but it seemed a glorious childhood," he said. He was a so-so student -- "I read voraciously but I hated studying" -- but still made it through New York University, majoring in English. He took a job as a copy boy at The Daily News, "because it was the closest I could get to the printed word." One day, on a Long Island beach, he struck up a conversation with Sonia Kline. They married in May 1951 and have three sons. After a stint in the Army and a briefer stint in public relations, Mr. Adler started his own ad agency. By then, he had written three novels. Publishers were monumentally uninterested -- until 1973, when he struck a deal with Whitman Publishing: he publicized John David Garcia's "The Moral Society" free, and Whitman published "Options," Mr. Adler's third book. "Options" bombed -- but he was finally a published author. That made it easier to get G.P. Putnam's Sons to publish "Banquet Before Dawn" in 1974. The advance was just $4,000, "but it felt like I'd won the lottery," Mr. Adler said. "It was the defining moment of my life." Putnam published six more of his novels. Then it was bought by Universal Pictures, and "they dumped me," Mr. Adler said. Warner Books picked him up and published "War of the Roses." He has learned from the many business mistakes he made along the way. In the 70's he sold the movie rights to "Trans-Siberian Express" for $250,000; the movie was never made, but he could not get the rights back. When he sold movie rights to "Private Lies" several years later, he made sure the rights reverted to him after 10 years. Still, the writing life has been good to him. He lived in Hollywood, working on movie scripts. And he lived in Washington for years, hobnobbing with politicos. For the last 15 years, the Adlers have lived in Jackson Hole, Wyo., most of the time, and on Manhattan's Sutton Place some of the time.

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Saddam's prison letter published

The letter was brought from Saddam Hussein's jail to Jordan The letter was delivered by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which says it is genuine. Saddam Hussein is in jail at a secret location as he awaits trial. "I and my family offer ourselves as a sacrifice for this nation, including dear Palestine and our steadfast, beloved, and wretched Iraq," he writes. The ICRC collected the message... It was censored by the detaining authorities before being handed over to the ICRC for distribution Rana Sidani ICRC spokeswoman "Life without faith, love and the inherited traditions of our nation is destruction. "He who sacrifices his property and soul for his nation is but doing a little because this nation deserves much to be done." He ends the letter: "Long live Palestine. Love your nation." The letter was taken first to a friend of the former president - who does not want to be identified - before being published in Ad-Dustour and al-Arab al-Yawm newspapers. Saddam Hussein could be facing the death penalty "The ICRC has confirmed the authenticity of the message published in the Jordanian media," said Rana Sidani, spokeswoman for the ICRC's Iraq delegation in Amman. "The ICRC collected the message. It was censored by the detaining authorities before being handed over to the ICRC for distribution." The letter is believed to be the first sent by the former president to someone outside his family since he was captured by US forces 18 months ago. Saddam Hussein is facing trial before a special tribunal set up for the purpose. He could face the death penalty. He is accused over a 1982 massacre of Shia Muslims, although other charges are expected to follow.

Hide and seek: Researchers discover a new way for infectious bacteria to enter cells

French scientists have learned howwhich causes a major food-borne illness, commandeers cellular transport machinery to invade cells and hide from the body's immune system. They believe that other infectious organisms may use the same mechanism. The Listeria bacterium, found in soil and water, can be transmitted to humans via undercooked and unpasteurized food, causing flu-like symptoms or gastrointestinal distress. For individuals with weakened immune systems, listeriosis can be fatal, and infections during pregnancy can lead to miscarriage, stillbirth, premature delivery, or infection of the newborn. The research was conducted by Pascale Cossart, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute international research scholar, and her colleague Esteban Veiga at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, and will be published in the August 21, 2005, issue of Nature Cell Biology. Cossart and Veiga detailed how Listeria invades cells by activating cellular machinery that transports viruses, small molecules, and proteins. Once it has safely entered a cell, the microbe can replicate and continue the process of infection. The body usually deals with bacteria and other large, foreign microbes through a process called phagocytosis. Specialized cells engulf the invading microbe and destroy it. Scientists long believed that cells use a second process, called endocytosis, to deal with smaller molecules or viruses. In endocytsosis, a cell's outer membrane pinches inward around the target to form a pocket that's brought inside the cell, creating a structure called a vesicle. "Phagocytosis and endocytosis may, in fact, be more similar than past research suggests. This is a totally new concept," Cossart says. Cossart's lab had observed that Listeria - which is 20 times the size of the largest particle scientists believed a cell could take in by endocytosis - could invade non-phagocytic cells. Other labs had made similar observations with other bacteria. Cossart and Veiga investigated the underlying machinery behind this uncommon invasion strategy, which they knew depended on an interaction between a protein on the surface of the bacteria, known as InlB, and a protein called Met on the surface of the cell it was invading. They discovered that when InlB interacts with Met, the cell responds by adding a chemical tag to Met that flags it for protein recycling or degradation. Since Met is on the outside surface of the cell and the recycling and degradation machineries are inside, the cell must bring Met inside through endocytosis in order to dispose of it. As the cell creates the vesicle that will transport tagged Met, Listeria stows away and invades the cell. By manipulating the gene expression of the cells Listeria was invading, the researchers showed that specific molecules known to be involved in endocytosis were essential for successful invasion by Listeria. Similarly, they found that an enzyme that tags proteins for recycling was also required. Listeria's use of receptor-mediated endocytosis to infect hosts, according to Cossart, suggests that other bacteria may exploit the same mechanism to gain entry into non-phagocytic cells. "This mechanism of cell entry may be used by several different kinds of bacteria, which is a major deviation from the belief that endocytosis is strictly for importing small molecules into cells," she says. ###

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Ormai il “ tempo delle chiacchiere” sta venendo meno:i dati che emergono sul gioco -peraltro rilasciati dalla Guardia di Finanza- rappresentano quello che il gioco legale è arrivato ad essere nell’ultimo biennio. Non vi è dubbio che il gioco è divenuto un settore importante ed è arrivato il momento di affrontarlo -una volta per tutte- in modo assolutamente serio e razionale. E non vi è neppure il dubbio che una buona parte delle situazioni che si sono create sui territorio derivino da una poco attenta valutazione ed attenzione sulle conseguenze che il divulgarsi dell’offerta di gioco avrebbe potuto causare. In pratica il “gioco è sfuggito di mano” come non si è potuto mai concretizzare, in pratica, un coordinamento nazionale ed un dettagliato confronto messo sempre a disposizione degli operatori della filiera del gioco. Il “tempo delle chiacchiere” è proprio finito poiché è sempre più significativo che la carenza di gioco in alcune regioni non significa che i cittadini di quei territori non giochino, ma che invece si rivolgono all’illegalità che continua ad approfittare delle carenze del nostro Stato per insinuarsi pericolosamente sul territorio prendendo sempre più piede e rendendo sempre meno sicuro e tutelato il gioco dei consumatori. La presa di coscienza di questa “ingombrante” presenza va assolutamente indirizzata verso una regolarizzazione, razionalizzazione ed ordinamento del settore con urgenza, sperando che la Delega Fiscale venga approvata a breve poiché sarebbe senz’altro un notevole passo avanti che convoglierebbe ad un tavolo di coordinamento tra Stato e Regioni assolutamente urgente e necessario.

Scientists hope to ease GM fears

By Richard Black BBC News website environment correspondent Public distrust of GM crops is partly over fears of antibiotic resistance Most GM plants contain a gene for antibiotic resistance, but there are fears this could transfer to bacteria, making them immune to common drugs. Researchers from Tennessee say their new method carries no such risk. Environmental groups say the work does not make the approval of new GM crops any more likely. Genetically modifying plants usually has a rather low success rate - and researchers need to be able to select plants which have successfully taken up the introduced gene from those that have not. Traditionally, this has been done by giving, alongside the desired gene, a gene which makes the plants resistant to an antibiotic. EASING REGULATION? This could do something to mitigate the regulation and public perception hurdles. Professor Neal Stewart But the genes used have traditionally come from bacteria - and this has led to concerns that they could find their way back into bacteria, making them resistant to antibiotics used by doctors to treat human disease. "If you go back to the years 2000 to 2002, around 60-70% of all GM plants reported in the scientific literature were made using markers which make them resistant to the antibiotic kanamycin," Professor Neal Stewart told the BBC News website. QUICK GUIDE GM Food They use instead a gene which comes from a plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, perhaps the most widely investigated plant in science; and they have inserted it into tobacco. The gene increases production of a protein called an ATP binding cassette (ABC), and - by a mechanism which is not fully understood - makes the plants kanamycin-resistant. "I would like to see a science-based approach to the regulation of GM crops," said Professor Stewart, "and this could do something to mitigate the regulation and public perception hurdles. "We have been trying to simulate what would happen if this gene was transferred to microbes; and we can show that if this ABC gene is inserted into E. coli, for example, it does not make them kanamycin-resistant." Industry enthusiasm The Agricultural Biotechnology Council, the lobby group for GM crop companies in Britain, described the work as "an interesting development". "But," argued the council's deputy chairman Tony Combes, "it should be noted that existing marker systems that have helped scientists in their research have a proven safety record. "The so-called 'horizontal transfer' of these genes presents a very small risk." Dr Huw Jones, research group leader at Rothamsted Research, one of the leading UK institutions in the field of GM crops, agreed. "This discovery represents a significant advance because it avoids the need for cross-kingdom gene transfer," he said, noting that many other scientists are working towards the total removal of selection markers. The reaction from environmental groups was less enthusiastic. "Products on the market now may well have antibiotic-resistant marker genes in them," Clare Oxborrow, GM campaigner with Friends of the Earth, told the BBC News website, "so this won't have any importance when it comes to the approval process. "Also, the researchers point out that they aren't clear on the function of the inserted gene; so although it does carry this potential benefit, they don't know what else it might do to the plant, and there doesn't seem to have been any serious investigation of the type which would be required by food safety assessment authorities." The Tennessee team is now working with food crops as well as tobacco, and to extend its studies on gene transfer.

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Opposites Attract? Not According to Gene Researchers

Aug. 10, 2005 — -- The reason our friends seem a bit kooky, and our mates may seem strange compared to ourselves, is that opposites attract. Right? Nope. A large body of research suggests that we pick our friends, as well as our mates, because underneath it all they are very much like us. So if our friends are kooky, and our mates a bit strange, chances are we are too. And the latest study in this ongoing research takes it a little further. We can blame it at least partly on our genes. People tend to like others who have the same inheritable traits, so we often choose friends and mates who are genetically similar to ourselves. "People prefer their own kind," says J. Philippe Rushton, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. "Extroverts favor extroverts; traditionalists, traditionalists." That may not jibe with your own experience, but Rushton notes that genes are not the only players. We're not a bunch of robots that are being led around by genes that even pick our friends. Other factors, according to the researchers, play a significant role. Rushton says our friends and our mates may also be a product of the "unique environmental effects such as being in the right place at the right time." You can't link up with an ideal mate if the two of you never meet. Our genes, Rushton says, probably account for about a third of the reason why we pick someone else as a friend or a mate. "But that's still pretty strong," he says. "Let's say it's a strong whisper from the genes." This is a very different line of research from work by Rushton that has been very controversial. He claims that his research shows distinct differences between the races in intelligence (based on brain size), fertility, personality, and dozens of other variables. According to Rushton, Asians rank at the top in intelligence, with Caucasians in the middle and Africans at the bottom. Many other researchers strongly disagree. Genes Influence Choices Rushton, who has been researching the subject of friendship for 20 years, says clear patterns emerged from a study of hundreds of identical and fraternal twins, as well as their spouses and friends. It's no surprise that identical twins, who share 100 percent of the same genes, picked friends and mates who were very similar to those picked by their twins. But here's the twist. Fraternal twins, who share only 50 percent of their genes, picked friends and spouses who are so much like themselves they could be their brothers and sisters. And, Rushton says, so do the rest of us. "It's almost as similar as siblings," he says. "Not quite, but almost." That "was not previously recognized," Rushton and a colleague, Trudy Ann Bons, report in the July issue of Psychological Science. The researchers looked at a wide range of variables, including characteristics that are mostly inheritable, and those that are less so, to determine the role genes play in our social behavior. They found that "people are genetically inclined to choose as social partners those who resemble themselves on a genetic level." In this and previous studies, Rushton found that we tend to select spouses on the basis of inheritable characteristics, even if we don't know those features are inheritable. For example, he says, the middle-finger length is primarily inheritable, whereas the upper-arm circumference is less so. And spouses who have participated in his studies tended to marry someone with a similarity in the length of the middle finger, but not in the upper-arm circumference. The role of genetics is not limited to physical characteristics. To a lesser extent, genes also play a role in the formation of personality, and even personal likes and dislikes. The enjoyment of reading, for example, is believed to be more inheritable than having many hobbies. Swimming In the Same Gene Pool But why would we prefer someone who is more genetically similar, especially if we don't even know the genetic nature of some of our peculiarities? Most likely, the researchers say, it's because of a subconscious desire to perpetuate our own genes. "If you like, become friends with, come to the aid of, and mate with those people who are genetically most similar to yourself, you are simply trying to ensure that your own segment of the gene pool will be safely maintained and eventually transmitted to future generations," they write. In the end, by the way, that strategy seems to pay good dividends. Some studies show that spouses who share inheritable traits seem to be the most satisfied with their marriage. But this research is full of twists and turns. Apparently we don't really want to marry ourselves. One study looked at personal odors and olfactory preferences, which are inherited from the father. Women, according to that study, prefer the scents of men with genes somewhat similar to their own, but not those who are nearly identical or those who are very different. "The optimal amount of similarity is not 100 percent," the researchers say. Several other studies show that we're probably going to like someone better if he or she looks like us. In one study, men and women were shown pictures of themselves morphed into an image of someone of the opposite sex. They overwhelmingly preferred the faces of themselves over others. And that's not just because of familiarity, the researchers say. It didn't work if the morphed image was of a movie star or some other celebrity. The participants liked those who looked like themselves more than they liked the luminaries. In their latest study, Rushton and Bons sent questionnaires to 1,529 participants, including identical and fraternal twins, spouses and friends. Ages ranged from 18 to 75 years, with a mean of 32 years. The questionnaires assessed physical characteristics, demographic background, such as educational level, social attitudes, and personality types. Measures were taken to keep the participants from collaborating on the answers. Each questionnaire was returned in a separate, self-addressed envelope. Opposites Attract? The results, according to the researchers, show that genes do indeed play a significant role in who we pick to be our friends and mates, but not the dominant role. Our "unique environment," as they put it, may be the most important factor. "Similarity, of course, is only one of many criteria people use in choosing social partners," the researchers conclude. "Physical appearance, status, control of resources, reciprocity, location and family situation all provide constraints and exert influence as well." But that old claim that opposites attract still persists, despite decades of research showing that "it just ain't so," Rushton says. "Research has been clear, over and over again, that you can be opposite on one or two dimensions, but overall it's similarity that rules," he says. The husband may love steak, and the wife may hate it. But too much of that can kill a relationship. "Just think if you were married to somebody and you had the exact opposite political attitude," he says. "You wouldn't be able to greet each other over the breakfast table. It would just be awful." Lee Dye's column appears weekly on ABCNEWS.com. A former science writer for the Los Angeles Times, he now lives in Juneau, Alaska.

The Tragic Tale of a Genius

Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman Basic Books, 423 pp., $27.50 Norbert Wiener was famous at the beginning of his life and at the end. For thirty years in the middle during which he did his best work, he was comparatively unknown. He was famous at the beginning as a child prodigy. His father, Leo Wiener, the first Jew to be appointed a professor at Harvard, was a specialist in Slavic languages. Leo was also an extreme example of a pushy parent. He drove Norbert unmercifully, schooling him at home in Greek, Latin, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Fifty years later Norbert described, in his autobiography, Ex-prodigy: My Childhood and Youth,1 how the prodigy was nurtured: He would begin the discussion in an easy, conversational tone. This lasted exactly until I made the first mathematical mistake. Then the gentle and loving father was replaced by the avenger of the blood…. Father was raging, I was weeping, and my mother did her best to defend me, although hers was a losing battle. At age eleven, Leo enrolled Norbert as a student at Tufts University, where he graduated with a degree in mathematics at age fourteen. Norbert then moved to Harvard as a graduate student and emerged with a Ph.D. in mathematical logic at age eighteen. While he was growing up and trying to escape from his notoriety as a prodigy at Tufts and Harvard, Leo was making matters worse by trumpeting Norbert’s accomplishments in newspapers and popular magazines. Leo was emphatic in claiming that his son was not unusually gifted, that any advantage that Norbert had gained over other children was due to his better training. “When this was written down in ineffaceable printer’s ink,” said Norbert in his autobiography, Ex-prodigy, “it declared to the public that my failures were my own but my successes were my father’s.” Miraculously, after ten years of Leo’s training and seven years of tortured adolescence, Norbert settled down to adult life as an instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and became a productive mathematician. He climbed the academic ladder at MIT until he was a full professor, and stayed there for the rest of his life. For thirty years, roughly from age twenty to age fifty, he faded from public view. He remained famous in the MIT community for his personal eccentricities. He liked to think aloud and needed listeners to hear what he was thinking. He made a habit of wandering around the campus and talking at great length to any colleague or student that he encountered. Most of the time, the listeners had only a vague idea of what he was talking about. Colleagues and students who valued their time learned to hide when they saw him coming. At the same time, they respected him for his achievements and for his encyclopedic knowledge of many subjects. Wiener was unusual among mathematicians in being equally at home in pure and applied mathematics. He made…

Vietnam medic makes DIY endoscope

By Hai Le BBC Go Digital The homemade endoscope was cheaper than professional ones In Vietnam, there is a shortage of endoscopes, with normally only one in each province. Endoscopy is a minimally invasive diagnostic procedure used to evaluate the interior surfaces of an organ by inserting a small scope in the body. Through the scope, doctors are able to see lesions. Dr Nguyen Phuoc Huy said his hospital could never afford to buy one as the endoscope costs around $30,000. Instead he spent two years developing a DIY endoscope to peer inside the bodies of patients without the need for surgery. Low cost system The scope captures images from the body of a patient, which are then passed through a webcam to an analysis machine. Dr Huy spent two years building the system "In total I had to buy only the scope, which is about $800," Dr Huy told the BBC World Service programme Go Digital. "A Pentium 4 computer with a colour printer is all that is needed for image processing. "Using the Windows operating system, we have programs to record the images and put them in a database of patients." "I can now make a complete endoscope system in just one week." So far he has built one for himself and two for colleagues. Technology novice Nguyen Phuoc Huy started out as a medical doctor. Whilst he knew all about the human body, he was no technology expert. So he taught himself the basics of computing, optics and mathematics in his own time. Three homemade systems have so far been built "I also got advice on optics from physics teachers and I could design the optical apparatus in the lenses of my endoscope. I even had to revisit my physics notebooks from high school, revise my mathematics." Dr Huy is set to make similar systems for other poor hospitals in Vietnam and even for medical centres in other countries. But he says people still do not know much about his product. Having learnt all about the technology, the next step for Dr Huy is getting to grip with the marketing techniques he will need to spread the word even further. You can hear more about the DIY endoscope on the BBC World Service programme Go Digital

Google tool watches as you work

Google is going head-to-head with rival Yahoo The move is likely to intensify competition between Google and rivals Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. The revamped software will suggest web links, personal documents and images that might be relevant to whatever someone is doing with their computer. The tool also automatically subscribes to feeds from weblogs and news sites that a user visits. Competition time The update expands the abilities of Google's desktop search system that was first released in October 2004. The first version let people search through all kinds of documents and e-mail messages they had stored on their home computer just like they did on the web. The revamped desktop search system is much more active and keeps an eye on what users do and instantly displays relevant webpages, blog entries, documents, messages and photos in a hovering, on-screen panel. US ONLINE SEARCH Google: 36.5% Yahoo: 30.5% Microsoft: 15.5% Time Warner (AOL): 9.9% Ask Jeeves: 6.1% Infospace: 0.9% Others: 0.9% Source: ComScore The panel can also monitor different e-mail accounts and show incoming messages as they appear. It also lets users generate a list of the most-used documents and files so they can launch them as soon as they are needed. The update brings Google into line with rivals. Some of the abilities of the panel, such as presenting information about local documents as a user types, have been available in programs such as Blinkx for more than a year. Yahoo's desktop search system and Apple's Spotlight also returns real time results in the same way. Others, such as the ability to get at frequently used files and newly arrived e-mail messages, pitch Google into more direct competition with Microsoft as it directly replaces some of the features of the Windows operating system. Toolbar battle Desktop and toolbar search software have been heavily pushed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Ask Jeeves and many others over the last year as these rivals look for an edge in the battle for users. Yahoo is currently winning the battle to make people convert to its toolbar according to audience monitoring outfit ComScore Media Metrix. In its latest audience figures, ComScore reveals that in July 2005 11% of all US searches were carried out via toolbars and 51% of all those queries were launched from users of Yahoo's toolbar. But Google still rules when it comes to searching via browser. ComScore found that 36.5% of all US searches were conducted via Google in July 2005. Yahoo had a 30.5% share and MSN a 15.5% slice. The new test or beta version of Google desktop is available to download and works with Windows XP and 2000.

Chimpanzee culture 'confirmed'

By Helen Briggs BBC News science reporter Tool use in wild chimpanzees (Image: David Bygott) By training captive chimps to use tools in different ways, they have shown experimentally that primates develop cultural traditions through imitation. This has long been suspected from observations in the wild, but has not been shown directly. It suggests that culture has ancient origins, scientists write in Nature. The study was carried out by a team at the University of St Andrews in the UK and the National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta, US. They presented two different groups of chimps with a problem relevant to their wild cousins: how to retrieve an item of food stuck behind a blockage in a system of tubes. One chimpanzee from each group was secretly taught a novel way to solve the problem. Ericka was taught how to use a stick to lift the blockage up so that the food fell out. A chimpanzee watches her mother retrieve food (Drawing by Amy Whiten) Another female chimp, Georgia, was shown how to poke at the blockage so that the ball of food rolled out of the back of the pipes. Each chimp was then reunited with its group, and the scientists watched how they behaved. They found that the chimps gathered around Ericka or Georgia and soon copied their behaviour. By the end of two months, the two different groups were still using their own way of getting at the food and two distinct cultural traditions had been established. "This is the first time that any scientist has experimentally created two different traditions in any primate," Professor Andrew Whiten of the University of St Andrews told the BBC News website. "Moreover, it is the first time anyone has ever done this with tool use in any animal." Ancient origins The research adds weight to decades of field studies on wild primates suggesting that they have rich cultural traditions unmatched in species other than our own. Chimpanzees in West Africa, for example, use stones and pieces of wood to crack open nuts for food; but this has never been observed in chimps living in East Africa. It suggests that the common ancestor of chimps and humans, living some four to six million years ago, probably also had a desire to conform - the hallmark of human culture. "If both species have elements of culture, it is highly likely the ancient ancestor had too," said co-author Dr Victoria Horner, "so culture probably has a deep-rooted ancient origin." The research is published in the online edition of the journal Nature.

Leaderless on the left

"She was a victim of both the forces of history and the forces of destiny," said King. "She had been tracked down by the zeitgeist - the spirit of the times." The reality was somewhat different. Parks was no victim. The zeitgeist did not track her down; she embodied it. She had a long history of anti-racist activism and had often been thrown off buses for resisting segregation. Far from being a meek lady in need of a foot massage she was a keen supporter of Malcolm X, who never fully embraced King's strategy of non-violence. "To call Rosa Parks a poor, tired seamstress and not talk about her role as a community leader and civil rights activist as well, is to turn an organised struggle for freedom into a personal act of frustration," writes Herbert Kohl in his book She Would Not Be Moved. The story of collective struggles is all too often filtered through the experience of an individual. In a bid to render the account more palatable and popular, the personal takes precedence over the political. As a result the story may reach a wider audience; but by the time they receive it, the agendas and the issues involved have often become distorted - to the detriment of both the individual and the movement. The story of Cindy Sheehan, the 48-year-old woman whose son Casey was killed in Iraq in April 2004, is one such example. Until late last week, Sheehan was camping outside President George Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, demanding to see the president. "I want to ask him, why did my son die?" she told the Guardian. "What was this noble cause you talk about? And if the cause is so noble, when are you going to send your daughters over there and let somebody else's son come home?" Sheehan, who has met the president once before and was not impressed, had planned to stay at what became known as Camp Casey for the whole of August but had to leave on Thursday because her mother became sick. With the help of PR consultants she was packaged as a grieving Everymother who wanted answers. Capturing the public imagination, over the past two weeks she has been a regular feature on US cable and network news, the letters pages and newspaper editorials. In turn, she has re-energised the anti-war movement. On Wednesday, thousands of people across the country attended 1,627 vigils in solidarity with her cause. Her popularity has made her a prime target for the right. One commentator on Rupert Murdoch's Fox channel branded her a "crackpot"; Christopher Hitchens derided her for "spouting piffle" and lambasted her protest as "dreary, sentimental nonsense". Talk-radio king Rush Limbaugh said her story "is nothing more than forged documents - there's nothing about it that's real". The backlash continued this weekend with the launch of a "You Don't Speak for Me Cindy" tour heading for Crawford with the support of rightwing talk radio hosts, to set up a pro-war camp. The focus on Sheehan's personal loss is indeed problematic. Bereavement, in and of itself, confers neither knowledge nor insight - only a particular sensibility that might lead to both and a compelling personal narrative through which to articulate them. To define her as a mournful mother, while ignoring that she is a politically conscious, media-savvy campaigner, which she has been for quite some time, does neither her nor her cause any favours. Indeed, those who focus on Sheehan's woes, whether they support or attack her, miss the point entirely. Had she come to Crawford at Easter, she would most likely have gone unnoticed. The reason she has struck a chord is not because of the sorrow that is personal to her but because of the frustration she shares with the rest of the country over Iraq. That is also why the right have attacked her so ferociously and so personally. But unlike the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in his swift boat, Sheehan will not be blown off course quite so easily. The public mood in America is shifting consistently and decisively against the war and Bush's handling of it. Gallup has commissioned eight polls asking whether it was worth going to war since the beginning of the year: every time at least half have said no. For the first time, most people believe the invasion of Iraq has made the US more vulnerable to further attacks. The number of those who want all the troops withdrawn remains a minority at 33% - but that is double what it was two years ago, and still growing. The reason Sheehan has become such a lightning rod is because that mood has found only inadequate and inconsistent expression in Congress. It has been left to her to articulate an escalating political demand that is in desperate need of political representation. This marks not only a profound dislocation between the political class and political culture but a short circuit in the democratic process. The mainstream has effectively been marginalised. This is not particular to the US. In Britain, the view that there was a link between Iraq and the London bombings was shared by two-thirds of the population, but the handful of politicians who dared to mention it were shouted down in parliament and vilified in the press. In Germany, all the main parties support the labour market reforms that will cut welfare entitlements and reduce social protection, even though most of the population do not. But what many "centre-left" politicians regard as electoral expediency is actually becoming an electoral liability. Evidence exists that support for more radical stances is there if only they had the backbone to campaign for it. In Germany, a new leftwing party combining ex-communists and disaffected Social Democrats is attracting 12% in polls and could yet rob the right of an outright victory next month. This month, in a congressional byelection in southern Ohio, Paul Hackett, a marine reservist who recently served in Iraq, stood for the Democrats on an anti-war platform. In a constituency where the Republicans won with 72% of the vote nine months ago, Hackett branded Bush a "chicken hawk". He won 48%, turning a safe seat into a marginal. Sadly, such examples are all too rare. Sheehan has revealed both the strength and the weakness of the left. We have a political agenda that can command considerable mainstream support; yet we do not have a political leadership willing or able to articulate those agendas. We wield political influence; we lack legislative power. g.younge@theguardian.com

Document reveals U.S., Taliban discussed bin Laden assassination

Saturday, August 20, 2005 According to documents recently declassified by the U.S. State Department, top U.S. and Taliban officials discussed the potential assassination of Osama bin Laden after the bombings of U.S. embassies in 1998. The documents were released on Thursday by the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act. They show that the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan, Alan Eastham Jr., met with Wakil Ahmed, a close aide to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, on November 28 1998 at the Taliban embassy in Islamabad. In that meeting Wakil Ahmed told Eastham Jr. that the Taliban would understand the U.S. desire to have bin Laden expelled from Afghanistan. He said that one possibility to "resolve" the "bin Laden Situation" would be if the U.S. were to "kill him, or arrange for bin Laden to be assassinated". Wakil said the Taliban wanted to resolve the "bin Laden problem" as quickly as possible because a failure to do so would result in American bombing of Afghanistan and the Taliban's "termination". This audio file was created from the text revision dated 2005-08-20 and may not reflect subsequent text edits to this report. ( audio help Audio Wikinews Sources Public domain Public domain false false

Under US noses, brutal insurgents rule Sunni citadel

The executions are carried out at dawn on Haqlania bridge, the entrance to Haditha. A small crowd usually turns up to watch even though the killings are filmed and made available on DVD in the market the same afternoon. One of last week's victims was a young man in a black tracksuit. Like the others he was left on his belly by the blue iron railings at the bridge's southern end. His severed head rested on his back, facing Baghdad. Children cheered when they heard that the next day's spectacle would be a double bill: two decapitations. A man named Watban and his brother had been found guilty of spying. With so many alleged American agents dying here Haqlania bridge was renamed Agents' bridge. Then a local wag dubbed it Agents' fridge, evoking a mortuary, and that name has stuck. A three-day visit by a reporter working for the Guardian last week established what neither the Iraqi government nor the US military has admitted: Haditha, a farming town of 90,000 people by the Euphrates river, is an insurgent citadel. That Islamist guerrillas were active in the area was no secret but only now has the extent of their control been revealed. They are the sole authority, running the town's security, administration and communications. A three-hour drive north from Baghdad, under the nose of an American base, it is a miniature Taliban-like state. Insurgents decide who lives and dies, which salaries get paid, what people wear, what they watch and listen to. Haditha exposes the limitations of the Iraqi state and US power on the day when the political process is supposed to make a great leap - a draft constitution finalised and approved by midnight tonight. For politicians and diplomats in Baghdad's fortified green zone the constitution is a means to stabilise Iraq and woo Sunni Arabs away from the rebellion. For Haditha, 140 miles north-west of the capital, whether a draft is agreed is irrelevant. Residents already have a set of laws and rules promulgated by insurgents. Within minutes of driving into town the Guardian was stopped by a group of men and informed about rule number one: announce yourself. The mujahideen, as they are known locally, must know who comes and goes. The Guardian reporter did not say he worked for a British newspaper. For their own protection interviewees cannot be named. There is no fighting here because there is no one to challenge the Islamists. The police station and municipal offices were destroyed last year and US marines make only fleeting visits every few months. Two groups share power. Ansar al-Sunna is a largely homegrown organisation, though its leader in Haditha is said to be foreign. Al-Qaida in Iraq, known locally by its old name Tawhid al-Jihad, is led by the Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. There was a rumour that Zarqawi, Washington's most wanted militant after Osama bin Laden, visited early last week. True or not, residents wanted to believe they had hosted such a celebrity. A year ago Haditha was just another sleepy town in western Anbar province, deep in the Sunni triangle and suspicious of the Shia-led government in Baghdad but no insurgent hotbed. Then, say residents, arrived mostly Shia police with heavyhanded behaviour. "That's how it began," said one man. Attacks against the police escalated until they fled, creating a vacuum filled by insurgents. Alcohol and music deemed unIslamic were banned, women were told to wear headscarves and relations between the sexes were closely monitored. The mobile phone network was shut down but insurgents retained their walkie-talkies and satellite phones. Right-hand lanes are reserved for their vehicles. From attacks on US and Iraqi forces it is clear that other Anbar towns, such as Qaim, Rawa, Anna and Ramadi, are to varying degrees under the sway of rebels. In Haditha hospital staff and teachers are allowed to collect government salaries in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar, but other civil servants have had to quit. Last year the US trumpeted its rehabilitation of a nearby power plant: "The incredible progress at Haditha is just one example of the huge strides made by the US army corps of engineers." Now insurgents earn praise from residents for allegedly pressuring managers to supply electricity almost 24 hours a day, a luxury denied the rest of Iraq. The court caters solely for divorces and marriages. Alleged criminals are punished in the market. The Guardian witnessed a headmaster accused of adultery whipped 190 times with cables. Children laughed as he sobbed and his robe turned crimson. Two men who robbed a foreign exchange shop were splayed on the ground. Masked men stood on their hands while others broke their arms with rocks. The shopkeeper offered the insurgents a reward but they declined. DVDs of beheadings on the bridge are distributed free in the souk. Children prefer them to cartoons. "They should not watch such things," said one grandfather, but parents appeared not to object. One DVD features a young, blond muscular man who had been disembowelled. He was said to have been a member of a six-strong US sniper team ambushed and killed on August 1. Residents said he had been paraded in town before being executed. The US military denied that, saying six bodies were recovered and that all appeared to have died in combat. Shortly after the ambush three landmines killed 14 marines in a convoy which ventured from their base outside the town. Twice in recent months marines backed by aircraft and armour swept into Haditha to flush out the rebels. In a pattern repeated across Anbar there were skirmishes, a few suspects killed or detained, and success was declared. In reality, said residents, the insurgents withdrew for a few days and returned when the Americans left. They have learned from last November's battle in Falluja, when hundreds died fighting the marines and still lost the city. Now their strategy appears to be to wait out the Americans, calculating they will leave within a few years, and then escalate what some consider the real war against a government led by Shias, a rival sect which Sunni extremists consider apostasy. The US military declined to respond to questions detailing the extent of insurgent control in the town. There was evidence of growing cooperation between rebels. A group in Falluja, where the resistance is said to be regrouping, wrote to Haditha requesting background checks on two volunteers from the town. One local man in his 40s told the Guardian he wanted to be a suicide bomber to atone for sins and secure a place in heaven. "But the mujahideen will not let me. They said I had eight children and it was my duty to look after them." Tribal elders said they feared but respected insurgents for keeping order and not turning the town into a battleground. They appear to have been radicalised, and condemned Sunni groups, such as the Iraqi Islamic party and the Muslim Scholars' Association, for engaging in the political process. The constitution talks, the referendum due in October, the election due in December: all are deemed collaboration punishable by death. The task now is to bleed the Americans and destabilise the government. Some call that nihilism. Haditha calls it the future. · Omer Mahdi was in Haditha for a Guardian Films project before security precautions forced it to be suspended.

The demise of the geek bloggers

Duncan Riley> I’m never one to mince words, so I’m getting straight to it: the geek bloggers are in decline and there is very little they can do about it. But before the flames start let me explain further because I’ve been tossing up the title of this post for about 24 hours, some of the other titles included: time for the geek bloggers to get a reality check, and 3G the new blogging generation. All 3 titles sum it up. Geek blogging is in decline. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the Feedster 500 or Technorati 100 today and compare it to the Technorati Top 100 over the last few years. Take a look back in time to the top 10 in the Techorati Top 100 on November 26, 2002 and you’ll see the generation of founding geek bloggers dominating the list: Doc Searls, Dave Winer…fast forward a year and things have started to change. Take a look at the list today… The Three Generations Blogging has essentially developed in waves or generations, each of which was notable for the backgrounds of the majority of people entering the blogosphere at each point. 1G: the geek generation (1998-2002) The 1st generation in the blogosphere was the geek generation. The founding pioneers that staked their claims in cyberspace and coded and talked about tech, blogging and other geeky related stuff. Notable amongst their brethren was Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Doc Searls….and a lot of the people attending “Foocamp” and “Basecamp” and other strange gatherings the weekend just gone. I’d dont agree with the BlogHer crowd on a lot but I will on this point: the geek bloggers tend to be insular and link to each other. Take a look at how many times Dave Winer has mentioned and linked to Robert Scoble in the last week for example. Where we do diverge however is that the BlogHer crowd think that the geek bloggers are the A-List, but they aren’t exclusively any more. Sure, they’re the older statesman on the blogosphere, but they no longer dominate the so-called A-List the way they once did. 2G: the extrovert generation (2002-2004) Labels are always hard to apply but I can think of no other tag for the second generation of bloggers, because in 2002 its was a damn site harder to set up a blog than it is now, and only those determined to join the blogosphere because they wanted their voices to be heard did. 2G bloggers are extroverts. They may have marketing or management backgrounds (like me), strong political backgrounds or beliefs (2002-2004 really saw the explosion of the political blogosphere in particular), journalism or artistic backgrounds…dig deep enough into the vast majority of people who got into blogging during this time and you’re going to find some level of extroversion: a desire to speak out and be heard and a desire and need to be listened to (or more correctly read by). The champions of the 2G generation are difficult to pinpoint because unlike 1G there are sooooooo many more people influencing and leading at different levels. Although some may have been blogging prior to this period, they don’t represent the first generation because although some may occasionally display geek tendencies (I’m pointing at you Calacanis!) they write for a large audience. In politics Kos and Michelle Malkin, Denton and Calacanis, and for that matter any number of Weblogs Inc’s writers. 3G: the consumer bloggers (2005+) You know I chuckle when I see articles discussing whether blogging has gone mainstream or not because its as though the people writing such nonsense must be so insular as to not see a thing that’s going on around them, because blogging has gone mainstream, and 3G bloggers are flooding into the blogosphere at the rate of millions per week. This generation of bloggers is different to the past two generation of bloggers because the geek companionship of the 1st generation and the extroversion that drove the 2nd generation has been replaced by a sense of normality. Most new bloggers blog because they can, because others are, and because to many people (perhaps more so amongst younger people, and in particular amongst teens) having a blog is now regarded as a normal behaviour, just like having an email address and mobile phone are normal as well. For me the dawning of the consumer generation was MSN Spaces, because (perhaps much to the delight, or even credit of Mike Torres) Spaces works, and despite the initial limitations on launch I’d noted at the time Microsoft once again displayed an amazing ability to get inside the head of the average person and deliver a product they would use. The insularity problem As I’ve mentioned earlier 1G bloggers are insular, and its their own insularity that has lead to their current decline, and will continue to do so. I suppose the whole issue of insularity struck me last week when I wrote in support of Microsoft’s stance on RSS. There wasn’t a lot of user feedback but what was left was generally in support on my argument. Perhaps of note outside of the Blog Herald fellow 2G blogger and search engine afficianado Nick W (yes Nick I know you’re going to hate the tag) over at Threadwatch agreed. So a Pom and an Aussie agreeing on something may be a rare occurrence some days, but there’s truth in this, because Nick sees it from the same way as I see it, and that’s without the geek glasses that are clouding the views of the 1G bloggers. And the biggest set of geek glasses is currently resting on the heads of Robert Scoble and Dave Winer. I suspect that Dave’s understanding of the real world outside of his little car trips and regular meetups with other geeks means that he has long since lost touch with the reality of ordinary people, but I expected better from Scoble. But unfortunately his masters apprentice is starting to show all the signs of being engulfed by the same blind, geek coloured view of the world that his former employer has. He might have recently taken some time off, but since his return its gotten worse. Geek dinners, camps…if you want to understand real people and real markets you’ve got to meet a variety of people from different backgrounds and in different realities, where as Scoble is immersing himself seemingly within the same safety zone of geek culture from which he originally emerged and gained his fame years ago when the blogosphere was but young. I could talk about this all day, but when I eventually get around to organising a Blogging Conference here in Australia next year I still want Scoble as a guest speaker, so I’ll stop now, but you get my point. Although not everyone is a huge fan of Steve Rubel (I’d note that I am, although I can sympathise with some of the gripes at Threadwatch over the using of marketing speak) Steve’s a great representative of the 2nd generation of bloggers having become less insular because as somebody in PR and marketing it’s literally his job to understand the minds of other people, because he’s literally paid to sell to them, and selling involves understanding your market. Calacanis, despite his occasional geek indulgences, gets this to, because the majority of the Weblogs Inc., network, particularly after the first dozen or so blogs, have been primarily aimed at a more universal audience. Why is Engadget so popular? because it brings tech and gadgets to the masses and it doesn’t aim directly at geeks only (sure, geeks can and do like Engadget, but I’d argue the format and language delivers a more diverse audience then say even Slashdot). Can the geek bloggers be saved? Saving is probably not the right word, because there is always going to be a market place for the Dave Winer’s of this world, its just that their audience will continue to shrink in relation to market share in comparison to other existing, and yet to be written blogs. 3G bloggers aren’t going to be interested in Winer driving a car and finding free internet access, nor Scoble playing with alpha technologies with other geeks whilst seemingly camped out in someone’s office. They are going to be reading Weblogs Inc., sites and Gawker Media sites, and hopefully Weblog Empire sites as well. They will be looking at more general, non geek culture blogs, like Shai Coggins amazing array of topics on the About Weblogs Network, topics that couldn’t be further from geek culture if they tried. They are going to read Jay Brewer’s Blogpire Blogs, and Shiny Media’s blogs, and they are going to read millions of other blogs as well, blogs that talk in the same language as they do and aren’t obsessed with geek culture, geek terminology and a insular geek viewpoint of the world. End note: Some people may think I’m bagging geek culture, but I’d like to note that I’m not. Geek culture never had a strong basis in popular culture here in Australia as it did in say the United States so perhaps I’m considering this from a different perspective, but I suspect if I’d grown up in the States I’d probably be a geek as well, I read Slashdot, I put together computers and play with Linux Distro’s for fun, and my wife keeps yelling at me because my home grown PVR wont play VCD’s from within Media Portal (and if none of this makes any sense then its point taken). From a marketing perspective though I understand that what I write about, particularly here at the Blog Herald, has got to aim to be as universal as possible. Sometimes I can tend to be a little insular, but I recognise it and I look to challenge this, the 100 blogs in 100 days is part of this process as well. It’s sensible advice. If you want to sell to as many people as possible you need to be able to empathize with them, and empathy is best learnt through interaction and experience.

Iraqi Shia say constitution ready

The sharing of Iraq's oil revenues is still under discussion But minutes ahead of the deadline for an agreement, Sunni politicians said there was no consensus. The original deadline last week was shifted to midnight on Monday (2000 GMT) when no agreement was reached. MPs have gathered in the chamber to receive the text but it is not clear what decision they will make. Shia and Kurdish political groups have enough of a majority in parliament to push through a draft constitution without the support of Sunni members of parliament. Correspondents say this would be a politically damaging move, possibly further alienating Sunni Iraqis from the political process. US officials say a delay risks playing into the hands of the insurgents, who killed 10 people in Baghdad on Monday. Eight policemen were among those killed as their mini-van was riddled with bullets north of the capital. Stumbling blocks Shia, Sunni and Kurdish teams have had difficulties agreeing on key issues including federalism, oil and the role of Islam. "Thank God we have finished all the details related to the agreement," Shia negotiator Jawad Maliki told reporters. He acknowledged differences with Sunni Arabs over the key issue federalism - which they oppose for all but Iraq's northern Kurdish area. There are still major points of disagreement Saleh Mutlaq Sunni committee member Constitutional issues The Sunnis oppose greater autonomy for the Kurdish north and Shia south, fearing its share of revenues from those oil-rich regions could eventually be compromised. And Sunni negotiator Saleh Mutlaq said "major points of disagreement" remained and the plan to submit the text to parliament was unlawful. "There is still no agreement and if they want to hand the draft today they will be violating the law," Mr Mutlaq told the Associated Press news agency. One prominent Kurdish negotiator, Mahmoud Othman, said earlier the Shia insistence on submitting the draft had created a lot of bad feeling. He said it was important to have the Sunnis on board. The prime minister's spokesman has said the government may ask for another one-week extension or "the national assembly would be dissolved" paving the way for fresh elections. Correspondents say there appears to be little appetite for new elections, so an extension appears the more likely outcome if the deadline is not met for the second time. The United States has led the way in urging the completion of the constitution, seeing it as a step towards stabilising Iraq. 'Sidelined' The BBC's Mike Wooldridge in Baghdad says Sunni politicians complain of being sidelined and have urged the international community to prevent the pushing through of a constitution lacking consensus. He says the most optimistic participants believe a final text at this stage would still leave some details unresolved. Officials say the communities have edged closer on some issues, but not close enough to come up with a draft form of words for the constitution. A draft constitution agreed by the committee would be put to a referendum due in October. If it was approved, fresh elections would follow to elect a fully-mandated parliament under its terms, probably in December.

Brits happy to ditch civil liberties

Three out of four Brits would happily hand over their civil liberties in exchange for better security against terrorist attacks, according figures from pollsters ICM. It is interesting to note that this is the same general public that rails against any attempts to make them drive more slowly, or with more care. This is in spite of the fact that in 2004, 671 pedestrians were killed in traffic accidents, and a further 2,550 people died in other road accidents. The ICM/Guardian-backed survey found that 73 per cent of Brits overall support a trade-off between liberty and security. Tory voters are even keener than average to do so, with 79 per cent of respond ants backing the idea. Labour voters and Lib Dems came in at 72 per cent and 70 per cent in favour, respectively. Further, 62 per cent of respondents were in favour of deporting foreign radical Islamists, even if that deportation was to a country that used torture. Only 19 per cent directly opposed this idea. Similarly only 19 per cent opposed calls for terror suspects to be held for three months without charge, with 62 per cent welcoming the proposal. Currently, the upper limit is 14 days. However, the poll also revealed that a sizeable minority was still in favour of having an independent judiciary. Although 52 per cent of those polled said judges should not be able to rule against government measures, 40 per cent said they agreed that judges should "protect our civil liberty and continue to overturn anti-terrorist measures if they feel it is right to do so". A spokesman for Liberty told The Guardian that the results of the poll were a cause for concern, but cautioned against knee jerk legislation. He added that people would realise that defending our basic values would be a better way to protect our society, rather than passing "counterproductive" and "superficially attractive" security measures. ®

Music file sharing to be offered legally

Online music fans will for the first time be able to legally share tracks by big names such as Oasis, Beyonce, David Bowie and Elvis Presley after the artists' record label signed a ground-breaking deal with a new internet service provider. In what some see as signalling a dramatic shift in the way consumers buy music, the provider, Playlouder, has licensed acts from SonyBMG, the world's second largest record label, and is confident that the other two big record labels, Universal and EMI, will follow suit. Illegal file sharing, which allows users of software such as Kazaa, Grokster and eDonkey to swap pirated tracks over the internet, has been blamed by the record industry for largely contributing to a 25% slump in global sales since 1999, worth around £1.3bn a year. The record industry has pursued a "carrot and stick" approach, taking legal action against the worst offenders while encouraging the use of legal download sites such as Napster and iTunes. In June, Sylvia Price, 53, of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, was forced to pay £2,500 compensation for around 1,400 songs downloaded by her daughter, Emily, 14, on the family's home computer; and in March, 23 file sharers agreed to pay £2,200 each in compensation for uploading their music libraries on to the internet for others to copy. Playlouder is offering the first legal alternative with a comparable experience to the "peer to peer" file sharing sites often used to swap pirated tracks. Subscribers will be charged £26 a month for a high speed broadband internet connection, similar to the price charged by BT, with the added attraction of being able to share as much music as they want with other subscribers at no extra cost. Because there will be no restrictions on the format in which the traded music is encoded, users will be free to transfer songs to any type of digital music player, including the market leading Apple iPod, or burn them to CD. However, not only will consumers have to pay for music which they currently acquire free, albeit illegally, but they will also have to change their internet provider. After signing the UK licensing deal with SonyBMG, whose acts also include George Michael, Bruce Springsteen and Dido, Playlouder's chief executive, Paul Hitchman, is confident that its big rivals will follow suit. It has already signed deals with dozens of independent labels affiliated to the Association of Independent Music, representing artists such as the White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand and Dizzee Rascal. AIM's chief executive, Alison Wenham, said the idea was a "simple but radically different solution to the means of accessing music on the internet". Because all Playlouder subscribers will share tracks over its own network Mr Hitchman said that the company could track the files and, through digital fingerprinting technology, make sure that record companies were remunerated accordingly from money set aside from Playlouder's revenues each month. He said he believed that the service, to be launched next month, "could well be the most important development in digital distribution since the invention of the MP3 format". Some record company executives have been wary of such deals because they fear it could reduce their ability to market big selling acts on a global basis. But conversely, it could also increase their revenues from back catalogue tracks. Playlouder claims that if all ISPs adopted its model, the record industry would make an additional £300m a year in the UK alone. Other companies, including one set up by the former Grokster president Wayne Rosso, have been working on legal versions of peer to peer file sharing. But Mr Hitchens claimed that while they would allow sharing, if customers wanted a high quality version, they would have to pay extra. The British Phonographic Industry, which has imposed fines of up to £6,500 each on 60 file sharers found to be making thousands of pirated tracks available to others and is taking five more to court, welcomed the development. "Ensuring record companies are adequately and reliably compensated for the use of their copyrights on the internet is the number one issue for our business," said the BPI's chairman, Peter Jamieson.

Online librarian is 'overwhelmed'

The My Book Your Book website goes live on Monday at 2200 BST The My Book Your Book website does not go live until Monday evening, but has already received 750 applications. All of its "founder members" will be able to access thousands of paperback novels - provided they donate 10 books each to the co-operative scheme. "I always thought it would work, but I'm surprised how quickly it's taken off," Peter Baillie told BBC News. "The response has been remarkable." The website asks its members to add a list of 10 books they own to its online catalogue. The listed books can then be exchanged between members for the cost of postage and packing. Sister schemes "Our community of readers can save money, have a bigger library and help the environment by saving a few more trees," said Mr Baillie. "Instead of spending £4 to £8 on each novel they desire, members could join and never buy a book again." Members who join once the site is active, from 2200 BST on Monday, will be asked to pay an annual subscription of £8.95. However, those who sign up beforehand will receive free membership for one year. Mr Baillie told the BBC news website he had received backing from Friends of the Earth, the Arts Council and the Literary Trust. He said he had also been in touch with readers in South Africa, France and New Zealand eager to set up sister schemes.

Once a Booming Market, Educational Software for the PC Takes a Nose Dive

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 21 - Edward Vazquez Jr., 6, has numerous educational tools at his disposal. He learns math from flashcards and the alphabet from a popular electronic gadget called the LeapPad. But when it comes to instruction, the family's personal computer sits dormant. "He has a lot of toys for learning -- not the computer," said his father, Edward Vazquez, 28, a waiter in San Francisco. One reason, Mr. Vazquez said, is "you don't see a lot of that software." That statement would have been unthinkable a few years ago. In 2000, sales of educational software for home computers reached $498 million, and it was conventional wisdom among investors and educators that learning programs for PC's would be a booming growth market. Yet in less than five years, that entire market has come undone. By 2004, sales of educational software -- a category that includes programs teaching math, reading and other subjects as well as reference works like encyclopedias -- had plummeted to $152 million, according to the NPD Group, a market research concern.

Moral authority on a slippery slope

WE ARE LIVING in an age of moral authority. It’s not the strength of the argument that matters, it’s the strength of the arguer. Nobody has exploited this more effectively than Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a fallen Iraq war soldier, who took command of the national agenda by camping outside President Bush’s ranch and demanding to meet with him. Everybody, of course, ought to feel horrible for Sheehan, and to honor her son’s bravery. But Sheehan’s supporters don’t just want us to sympathize with her. They believe that her loss gives her views on the Iraq war more sway than the views of the rest of us. As Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times, “the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.” The right’s response is equally telling. For the most part, conservatives are not arguing that Sheehan’s tragedy tells us nothing about the merits of her views on Iraq. Instead they are trying to discredit her as inauthentic, a Michael Moore pal who left her 2004 meeting with Bush pleased and grateful. As Rush Limbaugh declared, “Her story is nothing more than forged documents.” The conservative counterattack is pathetic. (The family did not voice its objections to the handling of the war in its meeting with Bush in deference to the occasion, according to a news article.) But aside from the dark comedy of the conservative machine going negative on a grieving mother, the mere fact of the response suggests that the right has bought into the premise peddled by Sheehan and her supporters: If Sheehan is a genuine war mother radicalized by her son’s death, then that is somehow an indictment of Bush and his policies. Advertisement One of the important ideas of a democratic culture is that we all have equal standing in the public square. That doesn’t mean stupid ideas should be taken as seriously as smart ones. It means that the content of an argument should be judged on its own merits. The left seems to be embracing the notion of moral authority in part as a tactical response to the right. For years, conservatives have said or implied that if you criticize a war, you hate the soldiers. During the Clinton years, conservatives insisted that the president lacked “moral authority” to send troops into battle because he had avoided the draft as a youth or, later, because he lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. So adopting veterans or their mourning parents as spokesmen is an understandable counter-tactic. It was a major part of the rationale behind John Kerry’s candidacy. The trouble is, plenty of liberals have come to believe their own bleatings about moral authority. Liberal blogs are filled with attacks on “chicken hawk” conservatives who support the war but never served in the military. A recent story in the antiwar magazine Nation attacked my New Republic editor, Peter Beinart, a supporter of the Iraq war, for having “no national security experience,” as if Nation editors routinely served in the Marine Corps. The silliness of this argument is obvious. There are parents of dead soldiers on both sides. Conservatives have begun trotting out their own this week. What does this tell us about the virtues or flaws of the war? Nothing. Advertisement Or maybe liberals think that having served in war, or losing a loved one in war, gives you standing to oppose wars but not to support them. The trouble is, any war, no matter how justified, has a war hero or relative who opposes it. Sheehan also criticizes the Afghanistan war. One of the most common (and strongest) liberal indictments of the Iraq war is that it diverted troops that could have been deployed against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Are liberals who make that case, yet failed to enlist themselves, chicken hawks too?

persistent.info: Gmail Conversation Preview Bubbles

Update on 12/23/2005: The script has been updated to be compatible with Firefox 1.5. See this entry for more information. Update on 8/28/2005: A bug that prevented the bubble from working correctly once a a conversation had been archived or trashed has been fixed. Please reinstall the script to use this updated version. Short Version Want preview bubbles for conversations in Gmail, as shown in the screenshot on the left? Then install the Gmail Conversation Preview Greasemonkey script. You can then right-click on any conversation to see its recent messages in a preview bubble. Greasemonkey 0.5 is required. Should work in Greasemonkey 0.3.5 or 0.5 (neither one has the security issues that plagued earlier versions). Full Story One of the things touted by the upcoming Yahoo Mail and Hotmail releases is that they will have a preview/reading pane which will let you see message contents at a glance without having to navigate to an entirely new view. Gmail offers a lightweight version of this already, by showing the first hundred or so characters of each message as a snippet next to the subject. While this is handy for one-liner emails, a full-blown preview pane is often more appropriate. Given my past experiences with Gmail and Greasemonkey, I figured that adding a preview area to Gmail may just be possible. Ignoring the technical aspects, the first issue was deciding what it should look like. My main issue with traditional preview panes is that they take up a lot of room, even when they aren't needed. Eventually, I was inspired by Google Map's bubbles and decided to try that approach. I initially triggered the bubbles on mouse hovering, but that was not a good fit: fetching the entire conversation is a heavy-weight operation with some latency while data that appears on hover should be light-weight and display instantaneously. I then tried inserting a small magnifying glass icon within each conversation row that when clicked showed the bubble. However, the icon was too small and hard to click on (Fitts' law and all that). I then considered a keyboard modifier plus mouse click as a trigger, but that seemed like too much effort on the part of the user. In the end, attaching it to right-click seemed like the best choice. Since Gmail doesn't use real links, the contextual menu triggered by the right mouse button is mostly useless, thus overriding it seemed like an acceptable tradeoff. Furthermore, this trigger means that the user does not have to take his/her hand off the mouse. To also facilitate those who use Gmail's many keyboard shortcuts, the V key was made to toggle the preview bubble for the current conversation. Integrating the preview bubble as smoothly as possible with the rest of the Gmail interface was also a challenge. Given a message ID, it's reasonably easy to fetch its contents (making a GET request for URLs of the form &view=cv&search=all&th=message-id&lvp=-1&cvp=2&qt= ). However, message IDs are not stored in the DOM directly. Instead, it turns out we can leverage Gmail's communication scheme in order to get this information. As others have documented, Gmail receives data from the server in form of JavaScript snippets. Looking at the top of any conversation list's source, we can see that the D() function that receives data in turns calls a function P() in the frame where all the JavaScript resides. Since all data must pass through this global P() function, we can use Greasemonkey to hook into it. This is similar to the trap patching way of extending Classic Mac OS. Specifically, the Greasemonkey script gets a hold of the current P() function and replaces it with a version that first records relevant data in an internal array, and then calls the original function (so that Gmail operations are not affected). Once we have the list of conversations (including IDs) in hand, we can easily map it to its corresponding DOM nodes (each conversation's row has the ID w_message-id ) and show the appropriate bubble. The script also tries to do clever things by resizing the bubble so that it best fits the displayed messages. Since fetching a conversation implicitly marks it as read, a "Leave Unread" option is provided that actually does a POST request to the server with the appropriate mark as unread command (LiveHTTPHeaders is indispensable for figuring this out). To parse data from a fetched conversation, we grab the appropriate JavaScript text and eval() it while defining the appropriate D() function that extracts the data. In general, the script code is architected the script reasonably cleanly, with a PreviewBubble object with appropriate methods and comments for non-intuitive places, thus it should be ready to hacked on by other people. There are still some rough edges, as well as some drawing bugs in Deer Park that may or may not be my fault. However, I have been using it for the past few weeks and it's very handy when going through lots of email quickly that needs to be read but not necessarily replied to. (the usual) Disclaimer: I happen to work for Google. This script was produced without any internal knowledge of Gmail, and is not endorsed by Google in any way. If you have any problems with it, please contact only me.

Gene Therapy Advance Treats Hemophilia in Mouse Models

Newswise — A virus that typically infects insects could help with the development of gene therapy treatment for Hemophilia A, a condition in which even a bump on the knee can cause serious internal bleeding in people. Researchers at the University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine improved a vector -- a vehicle that delivers gene therapy to cells -- in two ways to create a sustained, partial correction to bleeding problems in mice engineered to have Hemophilia A, which is also known as factor VIII deficiency. The findings appear in the Sept. 1 issue of the journal Blood (published Aug. 19 online). The team adapted the outer layer, or "coat," from a baculovirus, a virus that infects butterflies and moths, onto another modified virus. This hybrid vehicle could more easily attach to certain liver cells and allow the genes within the vehicle to enter the cells. The genes then caused the liver cells to make the protein that prevents bleeding. The researchers also modified the vehicle so that it would express these therapeutic genes only in liver cells, thus reducing the likelihood of negative side effects. The laboratory findings have significant potential for developing improved treatment for hemophilia but are not yet applicable to people, cautioned Paul McCray, UI professor of pediatrics and the study's corresponding author. "It's an exciting finding, but we are still many steps away from a possible gene therapy for people with hemophilia," he said. Hemophilia A is the leading sex-linked bleeding disorder, affecting one in 5,000 to 10,000 males. People with the condition have a genetic mutation that leaves them with little to no factor VIII protein to prevent uncontrolled bleeding. Individuals with the severe form of the disease have less than 1 percent of the normal amount of protein. However, only a relatively small amount of the normal protein level is needed to make the problem milder and, thus, less life threatening. "Hemophilia is considered an ideal candidate for correction with gene therapy because if you could just raise the factor VIII activity from less than 1 percent of normal to within 5 to 10 percent of normal, the tendency for spontaneous bleeding and need for hospitalization would diminish dramatically," McCray said. "In the mouse model in our study, we were able to achieve levels of gene expression that converted the hemophilia A in the mouse from a severe to a mild form. The correction lasted 30 weeks -- the duration of the study," he added. One of the current treatments for hemophilia involves intravenously delivering recombinant (genetically engineered) human factor VIII protein to prevent bleeding episodes. However, the weekly to bi-weekly preventive treatments are extremely expensive, costing up to $500,000 per year. In addition, over time some patients may develop antibodies to the protein, making the treatments less effective. In earlier studies, McCray's team, which includes Yubin Kang, M.D., at the time a UI assistant research scientist in pediatrics (now a UI resident in internal medicine), targeted the liver because its main functional cells, called hepatocytes, can make the factor VIII protein and secrete it into the bloodstream. However, the investigators recognized the need to target the liver more effectively. "It has been difficult to conclusively identify the cells that normally make factor VIII," McCray said. "Hepatocytes may not be the main source of this protein, but they are relatively easy to target. So we aimed to find a way to get these cells to make more of it. In effect, we're using the hepatocytes as a factory to make this protein and secrete it into the bloodstream." To better target the hepatocytes in the mice, the team took the disabled protein coat from the baculovirus Autographa californica and put it on to a modified type of lentivirus called feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV). FIV causes leukemia in cats but no disease in humans. The hybrid vehicle efficiently bound to receptors on the liver cells because the modified baculovirus coat serves as a "key" that fits into the "lock," or receptor. The percentage of liver cells that took up the virus increased from approximately 5 percent to 20 percent. The team also modified the part of the FIV that expresses the therapeutic gene so that its promoter that causes gene expression worked only when it was in a liver cell. "Even if this FIV modified virus goes to other organs of the body, it won't express well because its promoter is liver-specific," McCray said. "This modification helps prevent negative side effects. For example, if the gene were expressed in immune cells instead of liver cells, it could lead to a damaging immune response." McCray said the team now is studying additional ways to make the hybrid vector express the protein even better. The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Hemophilia Foundation and the Hemophilia Association of New York, and by a pilot and feasibility grant from the Center for Gene Therapy for Cystic Fibrosis. The UI Gene Transfer Vector Core and UI Cell Morphology Core also provided assistance. For more information on hemophilia, visit the UI Health Care Web site http://www.uihealthcare.com/depts/hemophilia. University of Iowa Health Care describes the partnership between the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine and UI Hospitals and Clinics and the patient care, medical education and research programs and services they provide. Visit UI Health Care online at http://www.uihealthcare.com. JOURNAL CITATION: Blood, 1 September 2005, Vol. 106, No. 5, pp. 1552-1558."Persistent expression of factor VIII in vivo following nonprimate lentiviral gene transfer" Yubin Kang, Litao Xie, Diane Thi Tran, Colleen S. Stein, Melissa Hickey, Beverly L. Davidson, and Paul B. McCray, Jr. ABSTRACT: http://www.bloodjournal.org/cgi/content/abstract/106/5/1552

Productivity Is Up. Or Down. Pick Your Statistic.

EVERY day, economy watchers are bombarded with seemingly contradictory indicators. Inflation is either contained, or it's about to explode. The price of oil is poised to drop, or to spiral higher. Lately, we've received seemingly contradictory figures on a crucial statistic: productivity. When the growth rate of productivity -- the amount of output an hour the economy can produce -- falls sharply, it's frequently a sign that dreaded inflation could be on the rise. When productivity growth rises smartly, it may indicate that companies are figuring out how to make more goods and services while keeping costs under control. That's why Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, closely watches the productivity figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over his 18-year tenure, Mr. Greenspan has managed to puzzle most observers with Fedspeak -- a monotone patois that conveys small amounts of information in convoluted, carefully hedged sentences. But when he appeared before Congress in July, Mr. Greenspan acknowledged that he was a little puzzled by the recent productivity figures. "The traditional measure of the growth in output per hour," he said, "has slowed sharply in recent quarters." (Translation: productivity growth is way down, look out for inflation.) "But," he continued, "a conceptually equivalent measure that uses output measured from the income side has slowed far less." (Translation: maybe not.) The "traditional measure" to which Mr. Greenspan referred is nonfarm business productivity. This broad measure of the economy calculates productivity based on examining the output and production of the vast American corporate sector. And as Mr. Greenspan noted, that figure had fallen sharply in recent quarters. The year-over-year growth rate of nonfarm business productivity fell from an impressive 4.2 percent in the second quarter of 2004 to a less impressive 2.3 percent in the second quarter of 2005.

War of the Future

For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter. A war of the future is being waged right now in the sprawling desert region of northeastern Africa known as Sudan. The weapons themselves are not futuristic. None of the ray-guns, force-fields, or robotic storm troopers that are the stuff of science fiction; nor, for that matter, the satellite-guided Predator drones or other high-tech weapon systems at the cutting edge of today’s arsenal. No, this war is being fought with Kalashnikovs, clubs and knives. In the western region of Sudan known as Darfur, the preferred tactics are burning and pillaging, castration and rape — carried out by Arab militias riding on camels and horses. The most sophisticated technologies deployed are, on the one hand, the helicopters used by the Sudanese government to support the militias when they attack black African villages, and on the other hand, quite a different weapon: the seismographs used by foreign oil companies to map oil deposits hundreds of feet below the surface. This is what makes it a war of the future: not the slick PowerPoint presentations you can imagine in boardrooms in Dallas and Beijing showing proven reserves in one color, estimated reserves in another, vast subterranean puddles that stretch west into Chad, and south to Nigeria and Uganda; not the technology; just the simple fact of the oil. This is a resource war, fought by surrogates, involving great powers whose economies are predicated on growth, contending for a finite pool of resources. It is a war straight out of the pages of Michael Klare’s book, Blood and Oil; and it would be a glaring example of the consequences of our addiction to oil, if it were not also an invisible war. Invisible? Invisible because it is happening in Africa. Invisible because our mainstream media are subsidized by the petroleum industry. Think of all the car ads you see on television, in newspapers and magazines. Think of the narcissism implicit in our automobile culture, our suburban sprawl, our obsessive focus on the rich and famous, the giddy assumption that all this can continue indefinitely when we know it can’t — and you see why Darfur slips into darkness. And Darfur is only the tip of the sprawling, scarred state known as Sudan. Nicholas Kristof pointed out in a New York Times column that ABC News had a total of 18 minutes of Darfur coverage in its nightly newscasts all last year, and that was to the credit of Peter Jennings; NBC had only 5 minutes, CBS only 3 minutes. This is, of course, a micro-fraction of the time devoted to Michael Jackson. Why is it, I wonder, that when a genocide takes place in Africa, our attention is always riveted on some black American miscreant superstar? During the genocide in Rwanda ten years ago, when 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in 100 days, it was the trial of O.J. Simpson that had our attention. Yes, racism enters into our refusal to even try to understand Africa, let alone value African lives. And yes, surely we’re witnessing the kind of denial that Samantha Power documents in A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide; the sheer difficulty we have acknowledging genocide. Once we acknowledge it, she observes, we pay lip-service to humanitarian ideals, but stand idly by. And yes, turmoil in Africa may evoke our experience in Somalia, with its graphic images of American soldiers being dragged through the streets by their heels. But all of this is trumped, I believe, by something just as deep: an unwritten conspiracy of silence that prevents the media from making the connections that would threaten our petroleum-dependent lifestyle, that would lead us to acknowledge the fact that the industrial world’s addiction to oil is laying waste to Africa. When Darfur does occasionally make the news — photographs of burned villages, charred corpses, malnourished children — it is presented without context. In truth, Darfur is part of a broader oil-driven crisis in northern Africa. An estimated 300 to 400 Darfurians are dying every day. Yet the message from our media is that we Americans are “helpless” to prevent this humanitarian tragedy, even as we gas up our SUVs with these people’s lives. Even Kristof — whose efforts as a mainstream journalist to keep Darfur in the spotlight are worthy of a Pulitzer — fails to make the connection to oil; and yet oil was the driving force behind Sudan’s civil war. Oil is driving the genocide in Darfur. Oil drives the Bush administration’s policy toward Sudan and the rest of Africa. And oil is likely to topple Sudan and its neighbors into chaos. The Context for Genocide I will support these assertions with fact. But first, let’s give Sudanese government officials in Khartoum their due. They prefer to explain the slaughter in Darfur as an ancient rivalry between nomadic herding tribes in the north and black African farmers in the south. They deny responsibility for the militias and claim they can’t control them, even as they continue to train the militias, arm them, and pay them. They play down their Islamist ideology, which supported Osama bin Laden and seeks to impose Islamic fundamentalism in Sudan and elsewhere. Instead, they portray themselves as pragmatists struggling to hold together an impoverished and backwards country; all they need is more economic aid from the West, and an end to the trade sanctions imposed by the U.S. in 1997, when President Clinton added Sudan to the list of states sponsoring terrorism. Darfur, from their perspective, is an inconvenient anomaly that will go away, in time. It is true that ethnic rivalries and racism play a part in today’s conflict in Darfur. Seen in the larger context of Sudan’s civil war, however, Darfur is not an anomaly; it is an extension of that conflict. The real driving force behind the North-South conflict became clear after Chevron discovered oil in southern Sudan in 1978. The traditional competition for water at the fringes of the Sahara was transformed into quite a different struggle. The Arab-dominated government in Khartoum redrew Sudan’s jurisdictional boundaries to exclude the oil reserves from southern jurisdiction. Thus began Sudan’s 21-year-old North-South civil war. The conflict then moved south, deep into Sudan, into wetter lands that form the headwaters of the Nile and lie far from the historical competition for water. Oil pipelines, pumping stations, well-heads, and other key infrastructure became targets for the rebels from the South, who wanted a share in the country’s new mineral wealth, much of which was on lands they had long occupied. John Garang, leader of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), declared these installations to be legitimate targets of war. For a time, the oil companies fled from the conflict, but in the 1990s they began to return. Chinese and Indian companies were particularly aggressive, doing much of their drilling behind perimeters of bermed earth guarded by troops to protect against rebel attacks. It was a Chinese pipeline to the Red Sea that first brought Sudanese oil to the international market. Prior to the discovery of oil, this dusty terrain had little to offer in the way of exports. Most of the arable land was given over to subsistence farming: sorghum and food staples; cattle and camels. Some cotton was grown for export. Sudan, sometimes still called The Sudan, is the largest country in Africa and one of the poorest. Nearly a million square miles in area, roughly the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, it is more region than nation. Embracing some 570 distinct peoples and dozens of languages and historically ungovernable, its boundaries had been drawn for the convenience of colonial powers. Its nominal leaders in the north, living in urban Khartoum, were eager to join the global economy — and oil was to become their country’s first high-value export. South Sudan is overwhelmingly rural and black. Less accessible from the north, marginalized under the reign of the Ottoman Turks in the nineteenth century, again under the British overlords during much of the twentieth, and now by Khartoum in the north, South Sudan today is almost devoid of schools, hospitals, and modern infrastructure. Racism figures heavily in all this. Arabs refer to darker Africans as “abeed,” a word that means something close to “slave.” During the civil war, African boys were kidnapped from the south and enslaved; many were pressed into military service by the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum. Racism continues to find expression in the brutal rapes now taking place in Darfur. Khartoum recruits the militias, called Janjaweed — itself a derogatory term — from the poorest and least educated members of nomadic Arab society. In short, the Islamist regime has manipulated ethnic, racial, and economic tensions, as part of a strategic drive to commandeer the country’s oil wealth. The war has claimed about two million lives, mostly in the south — many by starvation, when government forces prevented humanitarian agencies from gaining access to camps. Another four million Sudanese remain homeless. The regime originally sought to impose shariah, or Islamic, law on the predominantly Christian and animist South. Khartoum dropped this demand, however, under terms of the Comprehensive Peace Treaty signed last January. The South was to be allowed to operate under its own civil law, which included rights for women; and in six years, southerners could choose by plebiscite whether to separate or remain part of a unified Sudan. The all-important oil revenues would be divided between Khartoum and the SPLA-held territory. Under a power-sharing agreement, SPLA commander John Garang would be installed as vice president of Sudan, alongside President Omar al-Bashir. Darfur, to the west, was left out of this treaty. In a sense, the treaty — brokered with the help of the U.S. — was signed at the expense of Darfur, a parched area the size of France, sparsely populated but oil rich. It has an ancient history of separate existence as a kingdom lapping into Chad, separate from the area known today as Sudan. Darfur’s population is proportionately more Muslim and less Christian than southern Sudan’s, but is mostly black African, and identifies itself by tribe, such as the Fur. (Darfur, in fact, means “land of the Fur.”) The Darfurian practice of Islam was too lax to suit the Islamists who control Khartoum. And so Darfurian villages have been burned to clear the way for drilling and pipelines, and to remove any possible sanctuaries for rebels. Some of the land seized from black farmers is reportedly being given to Arabs brought in from neighboring Chad. Oil and Turmoil With the signing of the treaty last January, and the prospect of stability for most of war-torn Sudan, new seismographic studies were undertaken by foreign oil companies in April. These studies had the effect of doubling Sudan’s estimated oil reserves, bringing them to at least 563 million barrels. They could yield substantially more. Khartoum claims the amount could total as much as 5 billion barrels. That’s still a pittance compared to the 674 billion barrels of proven oil reserves possessed by the six Persian Gulf countries — Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iran, and Qatar. The very modesty of Sudan’s reserves speaks volumes to the desperation with which industrial nations are grasping for alternative sources of oil. The rush for oil is wreaking havoc on Sudan. Oil revenues to Khartoum have been about $1 million a day, exactly the amount which the government funnels into arms — helicopters and bombers from Russia, tanks from Poland and China, missiles from Iran. Thus, oil is fueling the genocide in Darfur at every level. This is the context in which Darfur must be understood — and, with it, the whole of Africa. The same Africa whose vast tapestry of indigenous cultures, wealth of forests and savannas was torn apart by three centuries of theft by European colonial powers — seeking slaves, ivory, gold, and diamonds — is being devastated anew by the 21st century quest for oil. Sudan is now the seventh biggest oil producer in Africa after Nigeria, Libya, Algeria, Angola, Egypt, and Equatorial Guinea. Oil has brought corruption and turmoil in its wake virtually wherever it has been discovered in the developing world. Second only perhaps to the arms industry, its lack of transparency and concentration of wealth invites kickbacks and bribery, as well as distortions to regional economies. “There is no other commodity that produces such great profit,” said Terry Karl in an interview with Miren Gutierrez, for the International Press Service, “and this is generally in the context of highly concentrated power, very weak bureaucracies, and weak rule of law.” Karl is co-author of a Catholic Relief Services report on the impact of oil in Africa, entitled Bottom of the Barrel. He cites the examples of Gabon, Angola and Nigeria, which began exploiting oil several decades ago and suffer from intense corruption. In Nigeria, as in Angola, an overvalued exchange rate has destroyed the non-oil economy. Local revolts over control of oil revenues also have triggered sweeping military repression in the Niger delta. Oil companies and exploration companies like Halliburton wield political and sometimes military power. In Sudan, roads and bridges built by oil firms have been used to attack otherwise remote villages. Canada’s largest oil company, Talisman, is now in court for allegedly aiding Sudan government forces in blowing up a church and killing church leaders, in order to clear the land for pipelines and drilling. Under public pressure in Canada, Talisman has sold its holdings in Sudan. Lundin Oil AB, a Swedish company, withdrew under similar pressure from human rights groups. Michael Klare suggests that oil production is intrinsically destabilizing: “When countries with few other resources of national wealth exploit their petroleum reserves, the ruling elites typically monopolize the distribution of oil revenues, enriching themselves and their cronies while leaving the rest of the population mired in poverty — and the well-equipped and often privileged security forces of these ‘petro-states’ can be counted on to support them.” Compound these antidemocratic tendencies with the ravenous thirst of the rapidly growing Chinese and Indian economies, and you have a recipe for destabilization in Africa. China’s oil imports climbed by 33% in 2004, India’s by 11%. The International Energy Agency expects them to use 11.3 million barrels a day by 2010, which will be more than one-fifth of global demand. Keith Bradsher, in a New York Times article, 2 Big Appetites Take Seats at the Oil Table, observes: “As Chinese and Indian companies venture into countries like Sudan, where risk-aversive multinationals have hesitated to enter, questions are being raised in the industry about whether state-owned companies are accurately judging the risks to their own investments, or whether they are just more willing to gamble with taxpayers’ money than multinationals are willing to gamble with shareholders’ investments.” The geopolitical implications of this tolerance for instability are borne out in Sudan, where Chinese state-owned companies exploited oil in the thick of fighting. As China and India seek strategic access to oil — much as Britain, Japan, and the United States jockeyed for access to oil fields in the years leading up to World War II — the likelihood of destabilizing countries like Sudan rises exponentially. Last June, following the new seismographic exploration in Sudan and with the new power-sharing peace treaty about to be implemented, Khartoum and the SPLA signed a flurry of oil deals with Chinese, Indian, British, Malaysian, and other oil companies. Desolate Sudan, Desolate World This feeding frenzy may help explain the Bush administration’s schizophrenic stance toward Sudan. On the one hand, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared in September 2004 that his government had determined that what was happening in Darfur was “genocide” — which appears to have been a pre-election sop to conservative Christians, many with missions in Africa. On the other hand, not only did the President fall silent on Darfur after the election, but his administration has lobbied quietly against the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act in Congress. That bill, how in committee, calls for beefing up the African Union peacekeeping force and imposing new sanctions on Khartoum, including referring individual officials to the International Criminal Court (much hated by the administration). The White House, undercutting Congressional efforts to stop the genocide, is seeking closer relations with Khartoum on grounds that the regime was “cooperating in the war on terror.” Nothing could end the slaughter faster than the President of the United States standing up for Darfur and making a strong case before the United Nations. Ours is the only country with such clout. This is unimaginable, of course, for various reasons. It seems clear that Bush, and the oil companies that contributed so heavily to his 2000 presidential campaign, would like to see the existing trade sanctions on Sudan removed, so U.S. companies can get a piece of the action. Instead of standing up, the President has kept mum — leaving it to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to put the best face she can on his policy of appeasing Khartoum. On July 8, SPLA leader John Garang was sworn in as vice president of Sudan, before a throng of 6 million cheering Sudanese. President Oman Bashir spoke in Arabic. Garang spoke in English, the preferred language among educated southerners, because of the country’s language diversity. Sudan’s future had never looked brighter. Garang was a charismatic and forceful leader who wanted a united Sudan. Three weeks later, Garang was killed in a helicopter crash. When word of his death emerged, angry riots broke out in Khartoum, and in Juba, the capital of South Sudan. Men with guns and clubs roamed the streets, setting fire to cars and office buildings. One hundred and thirty people were killed, thousands wounded. No evidence of foul play in his death has been uncovered, as of this writing. The helicopter went down in rain and fog over mountainous terrain. Nevertheless, suspicions are rampant. SPLA and government officials are calling for calm, until the crash can be investigated by an international team of experts. All too ominously, the disaster recalls the 1994 airplane crash that killed Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, who was trying to implement a power-sharing agreement between Hutus and Tutsis. That crash touched off the explosive Rwandan genocide. What Garang’s death will mean for Sudan is unclear. The new peace was already precarious. His chosen successor, Salva Kiir Mayardit, appears less committed to a united Sudan Nowhere is the potential impact of renewed war more threatening than in the camps of refugees — the 4 million Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), driven from their homes during the North-South civil war, several hundred thousand encamped at the fringes of Khartoum as squatters or crowded into sprawling ghetto neighborhoods. Further west, in Darfur and Chad, another 2.5 million IDPs live in the precarious limbo of makeshift camps, in shelters cobbled together from plastic and sticks — prevented by the Janjaweed from returning to their villages, wholly dependent on outside aid. In short, Sudan embodies a collision between a failed state and a failed energy policy. Increasingly, ours is a planet whose human population is devoted to extracting what it can, regardless of the human and environmental cost. The Bush energy policy, crafted by oil companies, is predicated on a far different future from the one any sane person would want his or her children to inherit — a desolate world that few Americans, cocooned by the media’s silence, are willing to imagine. David Morse is an independent journalist and political analyst whose articles and essays have appeared in Dissent, Esquire, Friends Journal, the Nation, the New York Times Magazine, the Progressive Populist, Salon, and elsewhere. His novel, The Iron Bridge (Harcourt Brace, 1998), predicted a series of petroleum wars in the first two decades of the 21st century. Morse may be reached at his website: dmorse@david-morse.com. Copyright 2005 David Morse This piece first appeared, with an introduction by Tom Engelhardt, at Tomdispatch.com.

The Breaking Point

"The Saudis are very happy with oil at $55 per barrel, but they're also nervous," a Western diplomat in Riyadh told me in May, referring to the price that prevailed then. (Like all the diplomats I spoke to, he insisted on speaking anonymously because of the sensitivities of relations with Saudi Arabia.) "They don't know where this magic line has moved to. Is it now $65? Is it $75? Is it $80? They don't want to find out, because if you did have oil move that far north . . . the chain reaction can come back to a price collapse again." High prices can have another unfortunate effect for producers. When crude costs $10 a barrel or even $30 a barrel, alternative fuels are prohibitively expensive. For example, Canada has vast amounts of tar sands that can be rendered into heavy oil, but the cost of doing so is quite high. Yet those tar sands and other alternatives, like bioethanol, hydrogen fuel cells and liquid fuel from natural gas or coal, become economically viable as the going rate for a barrel rises past, say, $40 or more, especially if consuming governments choose to offer their own incentives or subsidies. So even if high prices don't cause a recession, the Saudis risk losing market share to rivals into whose nonfundamentalist hands Americans would much prefer to channel their energy dollars. A concerted push for greater energy conservation in the United States, which consumes one-quarter of the world's oil (mostly to fuel our cars, as gasoline), would hurt producing nations, too. Basically, any significant reduction in the demand for oil would be ruinous for OPEC members, who have little to offer the world but oil; if a substitute can be found, their future is bleak. Another Western diplomat explained the problem facing the Saudis: "You want to have the price as high as possible without sending the consuming nations into a recession and at the same time not have the price so high that it encourages alternative technologies." From the American standpoint, one argument in favor of conservation and a switch to alternative fuels is that by limiting oil imports, the United States and its Western allies would reduce their dependence on a potentially unstable region. (In fact, in an effort to offset the risks of relying on the Saudis, America's top oil suppliers are Canada and Mexico.) In addition, sending less money to Saudi Arabia would mean less money in the hands of a regime that has spent the past few decades doling out huge amounts of its oil revenue to mosques, madrassas and other institutions that have fanned the fires of Islamic radicalism. The oil money has been dispensed not just by the Saudi royal family but by private individuals who benefited from the oil boom -- like Osama bin Laden, whose ample funds, probably eroded now, came from his father, a construction magnate. Without its oil windfall, Saudi Arabia would have had a hard time financing radical Islamists across the globe. For the Saudis, the political ramifications of reduced demand for its oil would not be negligible. The royal family has amassed vast personal wealth from the country's oil revenues. If, suddenly, Saudis became aware that the royal family had also failed to protect the value of the country's treasured resource, the response could be severe. The mere admission that Saudi reserves are not as impressively inexhaustible as the royal family has claimed could lead to hard questions about why the country, and the world, had been misled. With the death earlier this month of the long-ailing King Fahd, the royal family is undergoing another period of scrutiny; the new king, Abdullah, is in his 80's, and the crown prince, his half-brother Sultan, is in his 70's, so the issue of generational change remains to be settled. As long as the country is swimming in petro-dollars -- even as it is paying off debt accrued during its lean years -- everyone is relatively happy, but that can change. One diplomat I spoke to recalled a comment from Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the larger-than-life Saudi oil minister during the 1970's: "The Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil." Until now, the Saudis had an excess of production capacity that allowed them, when necessary, to flood the market to drive prices down. They did that in 1990, when the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait eliminated not only Kuwait's supply of oil but also Iraq's. The Saudis functioned, as they always had, as the central bank of oil, releasing supply to the market when it was needed and withdrawing supply to keep prices from going lower than the cartel would have liked. In other words, they controlled not only the price of oil but their own destiny as well. "That is what the world has called on them to do before -- turn on the taps to produce more and get prices down," a senior Western diplomat in Riyadh told me recently. "Decreasing prices used to keep out alternative fuels. I don't see how they're able to do that anymore. This is a huge change, and it is a big step in the move to whatever is coming next. That's what's really happening." Without the ability to flood the markets with oil, the Saudis are resorting to flooding the market with promises; it is a sort of petro-jawboning. That's why Ali al-Naimi, the oil minister, told his Washington audience that Saudi Arabia has embarked on a crash program to raise its capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day by 2009 and even higher in the years after that. Naimi is not unlike a factory manager who needs to promise the moon to his valuable clients, for fear of losing or alarming them. He has no choice. The moment he says anything bracing, the touchy energy markets will probably panic, pushing prices even higher and thereby hastening the onset of recession, a switch to alternative fuels or new conservation efforts -- or all three. Just a few words of honest caution could move the markets; Naimi's speeches are followed nearly as closely in the financial world as those of Alan Greenspan. I journeyed to Saudi Arabia to interview Naimi and other senior officials, to get as far beyond their prepared remarks as might be possible. Although I was allowed to see Ras Tanura, my interview requests were denied. I was invited to visit Aramco's oil museum in Dhahran, but that is something a Saudi schoolchild can do on a field trip. It was a "show but don't tell" policy. I was able to speak about production issues only with Ibrahim al-Muhanna, the oil ministry spokesman, who reluctantly met me over coffee in the lobby of my hotel in Riyadh. He defended Saudi Arabia's refusal to share more data, noting that the Saudis are no different from most oil producers.

ID theft spyware scam uncovered

By Mark Ward Technology Correspondent, BBC News website Accounts at 50 banks are in danger of being plundered Security firm Sunbelt Software said it stumbled across a US-based server storing megabytes of data stolen from compromised computers while researching spyware infections. The server held passwords for online accounts from 50 banks, Ebay and Paypal logins, hundreds of credit card numbers and reams of personal data. The FBI has reportedly now started investigating the ring of ID thieves. Hidden data The bug that has stolen all the data is thought to be a variant of a family of trojans known as Dumaru or Nibu that exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. The trojan, a malicious piece of code, automatically downloaded itself on computers when people visited sites harbouring the program. The way the data is laid out, the quality of it, it's very easy to go through and use it for nefarious purposes Eric Sites, Sunbelt Software What made this bug so effective was its ability to grab text stored on the clipboard and by Internet Explorer, said Eric Sites, vice president of research and development at Sunbelt Software. Microsoft's browser has a feature, called AutoComplete, that automatically populates boxes on web forms where people typically fill in names, addresses, e-mail addresses, credit card numbers and other biographical details. The feature is supposed to make filling in forms on websites less of a chore. In this case, said Mr Sites, it helped the ID thieves get hold of enormously valuable data. Typically a keylogger produces a file containing an unbroken string of characters, said Mr Sites. "It's usually very hard to take that and do anything with it," he told the BBC News website. By contrast, AutoComplete data is already labelled and sorted because the browser has to know where to put each item. "The way the data is laid out, the quality of it, it's very easy to go through and use it for nefarious purposes," he said. "This is about getting money and stealing." Megabytes of data The BBC News website was shown the server and some of the files containing personal data that it was storing. Each file was full of login names, e-mail addresses, credit card details and everything needed to steal someone's identity or simply empty their bank account. Analysis of information in the files revealed login details for online services at 50 banks as well as user details for many Ebay and Paypal accounts. One bank account had more than $380,000 in it. Sunbelt has contacted some of the people identified in the files to warn them that they have fallen victim to the bug. Banks, credit card firms, Ebay and Paypal have been told about compromised accounts. The server at the centre of the ID theft ring had many multi-megabyte sized files on it, said Mr Sites. The server, which was based in the US, was regularly cleaned out by the thieves who created the trojan. Infected machines sent files back hourly or when the logs of data they were collecting had reached a certain size. Browser danger Mr Sites said that, so far, the trojan had been found on porn sites and websites offering cracks for pirated software. But, he said, the trojan was likely to be on many other websites as it had managed to infect so many users. Sunbelt believes the trojan has been circulating for about three weeks and in that time has probably infected thousands of victims. The vulnerability it exploits means that all a user has to do to fall victim is to visit the wrong site. "Type in a web link and your machine is infected," said Mr Sites. "You do not have to click on anything, the website forces the installation." Many victims may have no idea that they have been infected. "This version of the trojan was very successful," he said. "It was very small, hard to detect, the file had a very innocuous name and did not cause any problems to the machine. The size and sophistication of the ID theft ring led anti-virus and security companies to quickly produce tools that can spot if a machine has been compromised by the server and clean up infected machines. The trojan was tricky to spot because the files being sent back to the server were disguised as data traffic generated by a user's browser. The US-based security company has alerted the FBI to the online scam and it is reportedly investigating the matter.

Canada sends navy to Arctic north

By Lee Carter BBC News, Toronto The two boats are marking a 30-year first The visit by two warships to the area is the latest move to challenge rival claims in the Arctic triggered by the threat of melting ice. The move follows a spat between Canada and Denmark, over an uninhabited rock called Hans Island in the eastern Arctic region. A visit there by Canada's defence minister last month angered the Danes. Now two Canadian warships, the Shawinigan and the Glace Bay, are on a mission to display what Canada calls its territorial sovereignty over parts of the Arctic it believes are within its borders. The dispute seems rather odd, when scientists say the region around the island is unlikely to be rich in oil or other natural resources. But Canada is deeply worried that it has taken what it considers as its Arctic territory for granted. The islands were not included in border discussions between Denmark and Canada more than 30 years ago. Warming concern It is also believed that global warming is causing the rapid melting of the ice across the Arctic, and that could make the legendary North-West Passage linking the Atlantic and the Pacific passable for ships for the first time. The US has already said it regards the passage as an international strait, not Canadian waters. Russia, Norway and Denmark also have competing claims to the continental shelf and the natural resources such as gas and oil that may lie beneath the sea bed. If this all alarms the Canadian government, it upsets environmentalists even more. They say the Arctic is one of the last of the earth's relatively untouched pristine frontiers and that a rush to exploit it will have a devastating impact on marine mammals and the rest of the fragile eco-system there.

How Rainbow Warrior was played down

Thatcher refused to sanction criticism of French over sinking of Greenpeace ship, archives showRead the documents here Margaret Thatcher refused to sanction official criticism of the French over the blowing up of the British-registered Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior even after Paris had admitted being behind the bombing, newly released documents show. The then prime minister sided with the foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, who did not want to "rub salt in French wounds", despite calls from cabinet colleagues who thought the government should take a firmer line. The then transport secretary, Nicholas Ridley, described the incident as "an outrageous act of terrorism". The papers also show that the Thatcher government refused to hold an inquiry into the sinking, as it had the power to do, but kept this decision secret until the public outcry had faded. French secret agents blew up the Rainbow Warrior to prevent Greenpeace protesting against the testing of nuclear weapons at Mururoa in the South Pacific. The bombing of the ship when it was moored in Auckland harbour, New Zealand, in July 1985 killed one of the crew and brought protests from around the world. Greenpeace's campaigns director, Blake Lee Harwood, said yesterday: "The Thatcher administration was famously unsympathetic to Greenpeace and so their action in downplaying an act of state terrorism and murder was entirely in character. However, 20 years on, remaining mute in the face of the blowing up of a peaceful ship in the harbour of a Commonwealth country seems strangely at odds with Tony Blair's war on terror." The documents, released to Greenpeace under the Freedom of Information Act, show that when the French admitted after two months that they were responsible for the bombing, Mr Howe wrote: "We have no wish to rub salt in French wounds, nor do we wish to appear more aggrieved than Greenpeace. We took care to avoid impugning France prior to the official French admission of responsibility." The documents also show that Mr Howe intervened to tone down criticism of the French. John Prescott, then an opposition MP sponsored by the National Union of Seamen, had written to Mr Ridley calling on the government to condemn this "act of war" and launch an inquiry. The Rainbow Warrior was registered in Aberdeen. Under maritime law, the British government had the right to investigate the loss of any British-registered ship, but was not obliged to do so. According to a transport department memo, Mr Ridley at first told his officials of "the need he saw for a robust attitude by the government to the sinking". "The two key points he felt should be included in the reply to Mr Prescott were the government's condemnation of this act and the government's readiness if appropriate (ie, essentially, in relation to any French government involvement) to seek compensation as a manifestation of diplomatic protection of British interests." Mr Ridley's officials drafted a reply to Mr Prescott saying: "This was an outrageous act of terrorism against a British vessel with tragic loss of life, which the government utterly condemn." It refers to Fernando Pereira, the photographer who was killed, as a "murdered man." Three days later, a Foreign Office official wrote to the transport department, saying that Mr Howe had seen the draft and suggested a softer response, which was eventually sent to Mr Prescott: "This was a lamentable event. The government deeply regret the death of a member of the crew. We hope the culprits can be brought to justice." Davey Edwards, the engineer of the Rainbow Warrior and the only British crew member, told the Guardian this year that he remained angry that he had not received any diplomatic support from the government, any financial help, or even a new passport, and that no public protest had been made about an act of terrorism and murder. The documents also show that British diplomats agreed that it was in Britain's interest for the French and the New Zealand government, which was furious at the bombing in its waters and was trying to prosecute the perpetrators, to patch up their differences and seek a way of ending the controversy. One wrote: "I share the view that it is in our own and the general western interest for France and New Zealand to seek an accommodation now that [the French prime minister] Fabius's frank if tardy admission of French guilt has terminated the lies and evasion and opened the way for more constructive moves."

How the G8 lied to the world on aid

The G8 agreed to increase aid from rich countries by $48bn a year by 2010. When Tony Blair announced this to parliament, he said that "in addition ... we agreed to cancel 100% of the multilateral debts" of the most indebted countries. He also stated that aid would come with no conditions attached. These were big claims, all of which can now be shown to be false. First, in recent evidence to the Treasury committee, Gordon Brown made the astonishing admission that the aid increase includes money put aside for debt relief. So the funds rich countries devote to writing off poor countries' debts will be counted as aid. Russia's increase in "aid" will consist entirely of write-offs. A third of France's aid budget consists of money for debt relief; much of this will be simply a book-keeping exercise worth nothing on the ground since many debts are not being serviced. The debt deal is not "in addition" to the aid increase, as Blair claimed, but part of it. Far from representing a "100%" debt write-off, the deal applies initially to only 18 countries, which will save just $1bn a year in debt-service payments. The 62 countries that need full debt cancellation to reach UN poverty targets are paying 10 times more in debt service. And recently leaked World Bank documents show that the G8 agreed only three years' worth of debt relief for these 18 countries. They state that "countries will have no benefit from the initiative" unless there is "full donor financing". The deal also involves debts only to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the African Development Bank, whereas many countries have debts to other organisations. It is a kick in the teeth for the African Union, whose recent summit called for "full debt cancellation for all African nations". The government's claim that debt relief will free up resources for health and education is also a deception. The deal explicitly says that those countries receiving debt relief will have their aid cut by the same amount. If, say, Senegal is forgiven $100m a year in debt service, World Bank lending will be slashed by the same amount. That sum will be retained in the World Bank pot for lending across all poor countries, but only when they sign up to World Bank/IMF economic policy conditions. And this leads to the third false claim. Blair's assertion that aid will come with no conditions is contradicted by Hilary Benn, his development secretary, who told a parliamentary committee on July 19 that "around half" of World Bank aid programmes have privatisation conditions. Recent research by the NGO network Eurodad shows that conditions attached to World Bank aid are rising. Benin, for example, now has to meet 130 conditions to qualify for aid, compared with 58 in the previous agreement. Eleven of 13 countries analysed have to promote privatisation to receive World Bank loans, the two exceptions having already undergone extensive privatisation programmes. Yet in the G8 press conference Blair refuted the suggestion that privatisation would be a condition for aid. According to recently leaked documents, four rich-country representatives to the IMF board want to add yet more conditions to debt relief. This will be a key topic for discussion at the IMF's annual meeting the week after the millennium summit. The British government opposes new conditions but continues to support overall conditionality. This makes a mockery of Brown and Blair's claim that poor countries are now free to decide their own policies. It is true that the G8 communique stated that "developing countries ... need to decide, plan and sequence their economic policies to fit with their own development strategies". Yet it also stated that "African countries need to build a much stronger investment climate" and increase "integration into the global economy" - code for promoting free trade - and that aid resources would be focused on countries meeting these objectives. Poor countries are free to do what rich countries tell them. The cost is huge. Christian Aid estimates that Africa has lost $272bn in the past 20 years from being forced to promote trade liberalisation as the price for receiving World Bank loans and debt relief. The draft outcome of the millennium summit says nothing about abolishing these conditions and contains little to address Africa's poverty. With only a few weeks to go, massive pressure needs to be brought to bear. · Mark Curtis is the author of Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses www.markcurtis.info