The convoluted trial of three men accused of involvement in the killing of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya took a new twist on Wednesday when a judge decided to bar the media from the proceedings, reversing a decision made two days earlier to open the courtroom to the public.

The judge, Yevgeny Zubov, told the court that jury members had refused to participate in the trial if the media were allowed to attend, said Karinna Moskalenko, a lawyer for the Politkovskaya family. Mr. Zubov said on Monday that he would close the trial if jury members were pressured.

Ms. Moskalenko said the judge had not offered convincing evidence of the need to bar the public for the safety of the jury, adding that she was disappointed, but not surprised, by the ruling.

I think Jane Hamsher is wrong when she says this;-

Asked what it would mean if Lieberman kept his chairmanship, one Senate Democratic aide said bluntly: "The left has been foiled again. They can rant and rage but they still do not put the fear into folks to actually change their votes. Their influence would be in question."

I hope this puts to rest the notion that this is all some master stroke of kumbayah, of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.

This is about telling you that you mean nothing. That democracy is a nice word, but it should never threaten the entitlement of the most exclusive club in the world.

No matter what Joe Lieberman does, the people who are protecting him hate you much more than they hate him.

but that's because I don't think there was any consideration about wider implications or messages to support groups at all. The Beltway dams are sad relics nostalgic for a golden era of clubby collegiality about the business of government that rises above narrow party concerns. Even if he's an (-I), to them he will always be one of them, somebody who looks for their lead, not from their own House majority leader, but from the most eye-swivellingly moronic of the republicans. The problem for the Democrats is not that Joe is uniquely traitrous to their cause, but that so many of the DC Democrats actually share his desire to be repugnant.


keep to the Fen Causeway

As I'm preparing for my winterbreak in Europa, I went today through a pile of old papers and lo and behold - there was the article that described the book .

"Pleasurable Kingdom" by Dr. Jonathan Balcombe. Looks exactly like the book I will look for when killing time on the airport.

So there. One piece of my mind has been brought to rest.

Anyone read it perchance?

How do you insert a poll in a diary you're writing?

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

Surgeons in Spain have carried out the world's first tissue-engineered whole organ transplant - using a windpipe made with the patient's own stem cells.

The groundbreaking technology also means for the first time tissue transplants can be carried out without the need for anti-rejection drugs.

Five months on the patient, 30-year-old mother-of-two Claudia Castillo, is in perfect health, The Lancet reports.

...

Scientists from Bristol [UK] helped grow the cells for the transplant and the European team believes such tailor-made organs could become the norm.

To make the new airway, the doctors took a donor windpipe, or trachea, from a patient who had recently died.

Then they used strong chemicals and enzymes to wash away all of the cells from the donor trachea, leaving only a tissue scaffold made of the fibrous protein collagen.

This gave them a structure to repopulate with cells from Ms Castillo herself, which could then be used in an operation to repair her damaged left bronchus - a branch of the windpipe.

The animation is here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7735696.stm

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice. Blog - Nice Experience

France to double green share of electricity market

 18/11/2008 00:00

France announces detailed plan on how it will double its share of renewable sources in the electricity market to meet the 2020 objective set by the EU.

18 November 2008

PARIS - France on Monday published details of plans to double the share of renewable sources in its electricity market to meet a 2020 EU objective.

Solar will spearhead the challenge to give renewables a 23-percent share of the electricity mix by 2020, compared with 10.3 percent in 2005, Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said, as he unveiled the 50-point plan.

"Solar is the big one," said Borloo. "In industrial terms, and in terms of lower industrial costs, it's there that we have the biggest capacity."

He contended that solar energy would be competitive with other sources "around 2020".

One measure will be to build 300 megawatts of capacity through large sun farms that will be set up in each region. The size of each facility will depend on local geography and exposure to the Sun.

Supermarkets and other installations with large roofs will be encouraged to install photovoltaic panels - power-generating solar cells - with the help of a special feed-in tariff.

Nuclear currently accounts for around 80 percent of France's electricity needs, by far the highest proportion of any country in the world.

France ranks fourth in the EU for installed solar capacity, after Germany, Spain and Italy. Capacity rose from six MW in 2006 to18 MW in mid-2008.

In wind power, the goal is to increase the amount of installed capacity by a factor of 10, from 2,500 MW in 2007 to 25,000 MW in 2020, with the backing of a new roster of laws.

I've had better weeks, especiallly since I'm half full of antibiotics and inhalers as part of my annual chest infection and asthma festival.

I'm avoiding commenting much here since my social skills are less reliable than usual at the moment . . .  

Salon: Buchanan: The Kos crowd deserves a Cabinet pick

On MSNBC's "Hardball" tonight, Pat Buchanan was not only insisting Barack Obama should pick Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, he also gave Obama advice about handling his left-wing base - and it's not what you'd expect. Buchanan suggested that with his next Cabinet pick, "he ought to give someone to the Daily Kos ... the people who supported and elected him."

This on a day when one anonymous Democratic aide bragged to Chris Cilizza that letting Joe Lieberman keep his chairmanship would mean: "The left has been foiled again. They can rant and rage but they still do not put the fear into folks to actually change their votes. Their influence would be in question." It's odd that Buchanan shows more respect for the left than leading Democrats do. The Lieberman decision is an abomination, and Obama and the Democrats may well regret it. Buchanan is no friend of the left, obviously, but he's an old-time pol who understands the importance of keeping the base happy. Too many Democrats seem to think the first thing they should do when they get power is display contempt for their base.

[...] There was, says Professor Nalini Nadkarni, an ecologist at The Evergreen State College in Washington state, "a tremendous spike of carbon-14 -- actually 100 percent more carbon-14 coming into the atmosphere than what we'd had previous to those [atom bomb] tests."

Leaving The Neighborhood

Those clouds of carbon-14 atoms didn't stay at the bomb sites. "This cloud of carbon-14 went 'round and 'round and 'round the Earth and was persistent for quite a while," Nadkarni says.

<snip>

It turns out that virtually every tree that was alive starting in 1954 has a "spike" -- an atomic bomb souvenir. Everywhere botanists have looked, "you can find studies in Thailand, studies in Mexico, studies in Brazil where when you measure for carbon-14, you see it there," Nadkarni says. All trees carry this "marker" -- northern trees, tropical trees, rainforest trees -- it is a world-wide phenomenon."

<snip>

Bottom Line: Those Atomic Bombs 50 Years Ago?

The amazing lesson of all this is that a bunch of atomic bomb blasts from 50 years ago changed the biology of the world, searing themselves into most living things, and the evidence is still there. If you were born around 1954 or shortly thereafter, those bombs made their mark -- in you!

Heh, thanks a bunch.
.

Is it fair to say that this reflects a pre-industrial viewpoint? When agriculture is where the money is, land is the important asset. When you're manufacturing stuff, the assets are the technology, the processes, the intellectual property (gag), the goodwill of customers, etc. Google and Microsoft don't have real assets, for example...