The leader of a Paris gang has been sentenced to life in prison in France for the torture and murder of a Jewish man, Ilam Halimi, in 2006.

Youssouf Fofana, 28, the only member of the Barbarians gang facing a murder charge, will serve at least 22 years.

Mr Halimi was held by the gang for more than three weeks before being found by a railway line. He was handcuffed to a tree, naked and severely burned.

His death prompted mass protests in France against anti-Semitism.

Prosecutors had asked for the maximum sentence for Fofana - the life sentence means he must serve a minimum of 22 years.

Ministers agree reductions but budget will still be higher than in 2009.

EU governments agreed today (10 July) to cut the proposed budget for 2010 by €613 million compared to the initial draft budget presented by the European Commission in April.

Budget ministers agreed at a meeting in Brussels to set the budget for 2010 at €137.944 billion in commitments. In terms of payments, the reduction compared to the Commission's proposal is even larger. EU governments agreed to reduce the amount in payments by €1.794bn to €120.520bn.

The payments budget is the amount of money that the Commission expects to pay out in the budget year, while the commitments budget, which is a higher figure, includes money earmarked for multi-annual programmes but not necessarily paid out in that budget year.

Even with these reductions, the budget for 2010 will be 3.06% higher than the 2009 budget in terms of commitments and 3.81% higher in terms of payments. The Commission had proposed a 3.52% increase in commitments and 5.36% in payments.

The murder of an Egyptian woman in a German courtroom at the beginning of July is causing outrage among Muslims in Germany, Egypt and Iran. Muslims accuse the German government of playing down the matter.
(...)
Since the murder small protests have taken place in Cairo and within the German domestic population. Further demonstrations are planned for Sunday.

 What has surprised and angered Muslims in Germany and elsewhere is the slow response made by the German government to the incident and the apparent indifference of the German press.

The Berlin-based daily Der Tagesspiegel asked on Thursday: "Why was the death of a veiled woman, who was not the victim of an 'honor crime', only news in brief for a whole week?"

The German press buried the report of the murder on the back pages and have since focused on the issue of security in German courts rather than the racist aspect of the killing.

German government takes one week to issue response

The incident occurred on July 1 but the German government took until July 8 to issue a statement of condolence.

Recent crises have discredited political institutions. The economic crisis has raised doubts about the capacity of governments to manage the markets. The crisis in political representation - from British MPs' expenses scandal to the fuss over Berlusconi's relationship with minors - has left many people disaffected and disenchanted with their elected representatives. But these sentiments have not given birth to anything new. Anti-establishment figures will continue to emerge but only as charismatic individuals, not as embodiments of new political ideas. This was the lesson of Declan Ganley's European crusade.

There is no European lurch to the right. There is an entrenchment of populism as the new political opposition in Europe - but one that remains devoid of political ideas, unable to transform people's anger and mistrust of the establishment into a new political vision or programme.

Last year the former head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, made a quite astonishing admission. Asked if his beliefs that free markets were an "unrivalled way to organise economies" had clouded his judgement and ability to prevent the financial crisis that tipped the global economy into recession, Greenspan responded that it might have, but it was now obvious that there was a "flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works". Finding this flaw had made him "distressed".

Greenspan's confession was seen by many for precisely what it was: a crisis of faith, the faith that unrestricted free markets would always act benevolently. It revealed what a few had been arguing for some time, that the character of neoliberal economics is essentially religious. This is counter-intuitive. Surely the policy of Greenspan and others is based on an understanding of the science of economics, particularly in the mainstream neoclassical form that is most often taught in universities around the world? It is certainly the case that neoclassical economics appears scientific. This is because it deploys huge quantities of complex mathematics, giving it the veneer of being what it has long hoped to be, a kind of social physics.

This combination of long-term reforms and an immediate crisis reminds me of the last global financial meltdown I watched Summers, then deputy secretary of the Treasury, help navigate. It was 1998, the year of Asian contagion and Russia's default and devaluation. Emerging market veterans of that crash have taken a certain bitter pleasure in pointing out that this time their former rescuer and scold - the United States - is at the centre of the world's crisis, and in observing that Americans seem markedly less keen on their own unpalatable medicine now that they are the patient.

"I don't think I would quite accept the characterisation that we're in the position that the Russians were in in 1998," Summers says when I draw the comparison. "The crises that we addressed during the 1990s internationally, in almost every case, took the form of a foreign lack of confidence in a country that led to a mass withdrawal of funds and made reassuring foreigners the central priority. That's why interest rates often had to be increased. The American problem this time has more in common, at least qualitatively, with the Japanese post-bubble problem, where the issue was not reassuring foreigners but maintaining sufficient domestic demand to push the economy forward."

He does, however, concede that fire-fighting feels different when it is your own home that is alight: "There have been moments, certainly, when I understood better some of the reactions of officials in crisis countries now than one was able to from the outside at the time. It is easier to be for more radical solutions when one lives thousands of miles away than when it is one's own country."
(...)
This new American economy, Summers hopes, will be "more export-oriented" and "less consumption-oriented"; "more environmentally oriented" and "less energy-production-oriented"; "more bio- and software- and civil-engineering-oriented and less financial-engineering-oriented"; and, finally, "more middle-class-oriented" and "less oriented to income growth that is disproportionate towards a very small share of the population". Unlike many other economists, Summers does not believe that lower growth is the inevitable price of this economic paradigm shift.

The amendment passed Thursday seeks to nullify Obama's signing statement by withholding funds from any agreement involving the Treasury Department that doesn't follow the conditions set out in the supplemental bill...."Sometimes, the only way the votes can be found to provide the funds the admin wants is to provide certain limitations on the money," [David] Obey said Thursday in a floor speech criticizing Obama's signing statement.

backstory, 26 June 2009

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

I mean, shouldn't it be a great idea to buy them from ordinary people, given that ordinary Americans often take out so called "pay-day" loans at far higher interests?

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

California's taxpayers and legislators are doing the right thing digging in their heels and drawing the line at further austerity measures. California is being watched not only by the nation but by the world. We the people did not precipitate this credit crisis; the banks did. We should not have to pay for the damage with increased taxes or decreased services or our public parks and parking meters. Like the American colonists, we can replace the old model with something better. If California legislators act quickly, they can have a State-owned bank up and running before their 45-day IOUs run out. With today's new online banking possibilities, the State would not even need to invest in a "brick and mortar" building. The whole business could be done by computer. Weary legislators trying to agree on a budget could all shake hands and go home, without budging an inch from their respective platforms. They could have it all, and so could we the people.

Ms. Tippett: Before Bernard Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay were icons of a gross violation of the trust of employees, shareholders, government, and customers. But in a book he edited, Moral Markets, Paul Zak also told the lesser-known story of Cliff Baxter. Baxter was a vice chairman of Enron who protested corruption as he saw it grow internally. He resigned his position in 2001, just a few months before Enron's collapse began. In early 2002, as the human cost of Enron's excesses unfolded, he apparently committed suicide. By many accounts, Cliff Baxter had a strong moral code. His story is a contrast to generalizations fueled by high-profile coverage of out-of-control corrupt executives. But Paul Zak sees it as an exemplar of the moral inclination for which human physiology equips us, given the right circumstances.

Mr. Zak: So let's bring some science to bear in this. So I just made a bunch of perhaps interesting or outlandish claims about people having sort of a moral sense. But in the last five years, we've begun to find the chemical basis for this. And we've discovered this molecule called oxytocin that lives in the human brain, and in particular human beings, it's particularly potent at making us care about the outcomes of others. So we initially found that when someone trusts you with their money intentionally -- "I'm going to give you $20 and let you control it" -- that the more money someone entrusts to you, the more your brain releases this molecule and the more you tend to reciprocate. When the person says, "Would you like to give some of that back to me," even though you don't have to, you do. We've now found this substantiates generosity. If I have more, you have less and visa versa. When we give people, human beings, synthetic oxytocin we can induce them to be more generous towards strangers, more generous towards charities.

And we very recently found that when we watch and we show experimental subjects an emotionally compelling video, a video of a man whose four-year-old son has terminal brain cancer, that there's a big spike in the release of oxytocin, and people are subsequently much more generous towards a stranger. They're more generous towards charities. So somehow this molecule in our brain has allowed us to live in large groups of people where we have something in our heads that says, "This person safe, this person not. This person, I want to be around, this person I don't want to be around." So it's kind of a trust detector. And in a very real sense, it connects us to other people. It allows me to sort of emotionally mirror what other people are doing. And classically, oxytocin is associated with childbirth, reproduction in mammals.

excellent podcast, this is from the transcript.

imagine being able to deal with the sociopathic 2% through nontoxic brain chemistry!

If'Madness is the absence of work'(Foucault), then Sanity is the presence of play..

Ministers were bracing themselves for an increasingly bloody conflict in Afghanistan as it became clear that a further eight British soldiers have been killed in 24 hours, the worst combat death toll since the war began.

Five troops were killed in a single incident after they were caught in a bomb blast while on foot patrol. Officials confirmed that 15 troops have been killed in the last 10 days. With the government's handling of the conflict under increasing scrutiny, Gordon Brown was forced to defend the Afghan mission as he left the G8 summit in Italy. Before heading directly to a private briefing at the military's operational headquarters at Northwood, Middlesex, he warned of a "very hard summer ... It's not over".

In his first visit to Africa since taking office, Barack Obama said today that the continent of his ancestors must overcome tyranny and corruption if it is to flourish.

Speaking in Ghana's parliament, Obama said the key to Africa's future prosperity was democratic and accountable government.

"Development depends upon good governance. That is the ingredient which has been missing in far too many places, for far too long. That is the change that can unlock Africa's potential," he said.

In an tough speech aimed at politicians across the continent, he gave an unsentimental account of squandered opportunities since the end of colonial rule. "No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or police can be bought off by drug traffickers," he said.

Developing nations are prepared to make concessions on climate change targets if the G8 fulfils its side of the bargain in the run-up to the climate change talks in Copenhagen in December, a key negotiator told the Guardian today.

The developing countries want the G8 nations to sign up to a 40% cut by 2020, but that figure is off the radar of the EU and, given the unwieldy legislation laboriously passing through the senate, not a possibility for the US.

In important forward steps this week, the G8 agreed to cut its emissions by 80% by 2050 and said worldwide emissions should fall 50% by the same date.

However, the value of this pledge has been reduced by the lack of an agreed start date from which the emission cuts should be measured, making it a distant promise.

South Korea has obtained intelligence that North Korea ordered a military institute of computer hackers known as Lab 110 to "destroy" its neighbour's communications networks last month, news reports said.

The National Intelligence Service told parliament of its finding on Friday, the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported, citing evidence the north was behind cyber attacks that paralysed major South Korean and US websites in recent days.

The newspaper, citing unidentified members of the parliament's intelligence committee, said Lab 110, which is affiliated with the north's defence ministry, received an order to "destroy the South Korean puppet communications networks in an instant".

The JoongAng Ilbo said Lab 110 specialised in hacking and spreading malicious programmes.

Hundreds of passengers have been evacuated from a British Airways jet after smoke filled the cabin just before take-off.

The Boeing 747 had been preparing to depart for Heathrow from Phoenix Airport in Arizona this morning when passengers reported an acrid smell. All on board escaped down the plane's emergency slides.

A passenger on flight BA288, Corinne Casazza, said: "There was this really strong smell of fuel and I could hear people panicking behind me. They were upset and finding it hard to breathe because of the smell.

"People were coughing and choking and those with children were very worried and so they brought them to the front where they could breathe.

The first death from swine flu of an otherwise healthy individual was announced last night by NHS authorities in Essex.

At the wishes of the family, no details were given of the patient who died at Basildon and Thurrock University hospital. But the case will cause widespread concern. Until now, every adult and child who has died has had serious underlying health problems that made them particularly vulnerable to infections.

But the chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has warned that a few apparently healthy people have succumbed to swine flu and become seriously ill abroad. In one case last month, a healthy 15-year-old teenager called Matthew Davis from Buffalo in New York state, fell ill with swine flu and died, apparently because of co-infection with the superbug MRSA, which he may have contracted in the community rather than in hospital.

A car bomb has killed four people and injured 40 at a market on the outskirts of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, police sources told the BBC.

All of those killed or injured in the blast in Kukchali, a mixed Sunni-Shia area to the east of Mosul, are believed to be civilians.

Mosul, with its volatile ethnic and religious mix, has seen numerous attacks by insurgents.

The blast comes less than two weeks after US troops left Iraqi cities.

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran is preparing a new package of "political, security and international" issues to put to the West, its foreign minister said on Saturday.

"The package can be a good basis for talks with the West. The package will contain Iran's stances on political, security and international issues," Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told a news conference.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Wednesday that the Group of Eight major powers would give Iran until September to accept negotiations over its nuclear ambitions or face tougher sanctions.

The grim toll of soldiers coming home from Afghanistan in coffins is testimony to the brutal contest being waged in the poppy fields of Helmand. For three years, British troops have been massively undermanned, underequipped and overstretched as they have tried to convince a deeply cynical population that they are safe from the Taliban.

Most of the province was beyond the reach of British forces. When the troops did come, they rarely stayed. Far from feeling safe, the people watched as the Taliban grew stronger. But the arrival of 8,000 US Marines in Barack Obama's surge is threatening to change the balance - and the Taliban are fighting back.

10 July 2009: After their closed-door meeting, Obama introduced the pope to his wife, Michelle, their daughters, Malia and Sasha, and Michelle Obama's mother, Marian Robinson. There was private exchange of gifts and moment for photographs. The pope gave each of the girls a silver key chain with a bas-relief image of the pope, and Michelle Obama and Robinson each received a papal medal....

In addition to the encyclical and Vatican bioethics document, Pope Benedict gave Obama a mosaic showing St. Peter's Basilica and Square and a medal marking the fifth year of his pontificate. --AmericanCatholic.org

DailyLife.com, gallery

Is Obama More Catholic Than the Pope? | Townsend | 9 July 2009

Politics requires the ability to listen to different points of view, to step into others' shoes. Obama might call it empathy. While the pope preaches love, listening to the other has been a particular stumbling block for the Catholic hierarchy (as it is for many in power). The hierarchy ignores women's equality and gays' cry for justice because to heed them would require that it admit error and acknowledge that the self-satisfied edifice constructed around sex and gender has been grievously wrong. Before he became John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla had a telling all-or-nothing formulation: "If it should be decided that contraception is not an evil in itself then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit is on the side of the Protestant Churches."

Is Obama More Catholic Than the Pope? | Reuters | 10 July 2009

In a surprise move, the pontiff gave Obama a booklet explaining Vatican opposition to practices such as abortion and embryonic stem cell research, which Obama supports. "Obama told the pope of his commitment to reduce the number of abortions and of his attention and respect for the positions of the Catholic Church," Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi told reporters after he was briefed by the pope.

Obama supports abortion rights and says his policy is to change economic and social conditions so as to put more women in situations where they do not feel they have to have an abortion....

The pope also gave the president a copy of his latest encyclical, "Charity in Truth," which called for a "world political authority" to manage the global economy and for more government regulation of national economies to pull the world out of the current crisis and avoid a repeat. Obama, who was going to the airport from the Vatican, joked to the pope when he gave him the two documents: "I'll have something to read on the plane." [emphasis added]

punk

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

It's the morning after Independence Day, and Eric Holder Jr. is feeling the weight of history. The night before, he'd stood on the roof of the White House alongside the president of the United States, leaning over a railing to watch fireworks burst over the Mall, the monuments to Lincoln and Washington aglow at either end. "I was so struck by the fact that for the first time in history an African-American was presiding over this celebration of what our nation is all about," he says. Now, sitting at his kitchen table in jeans and a gray polo shirt, as his 11-year-old son, Buddy, dashes in and out of the room, Holder is reflecting on his own role. He doesn't dwell on the fact that he's the country's first black attorney general. He is focused instead on the tension that the best of his predecessors have confronted: how does one faithfully serve both the law and the president?

Alone among cabinet officers, attorneys general are partisan appointees expected to rise above partisanship. All struggle to find a happy medium between loyalty and independence. Few succeed. At one extreme looms Alberto Gonzales, who allowed the Justice Department to be run like Tammany Hall. At the other is Janet Reno, whose righteousness and folksy eccentricities marginalized her within the Clinton administration. Lean too far one way and you corrupt the office, too far the other way and you render yourself impotent. Mindful of history, Holder is trying to get the balance right. "You have the responsibility of enforcing the nation's laws, and you have to be seen as neutral, detached, and nonpartisan in that effort," Holder says. "But the reality of being A.G. is that I'm also part of the president's team. I want the president to succeed; I campaigned for him. I share his world view and values."

These are not just the philosophical musings of a new attorney general. Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama's domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president's agenda," he says. "But that can't be a part of my decision."

Ruh-roh.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!

After Dubya Dubya Two, America transformed from a largely agricultural economy to a raging industrial furnace. The stoppage of tank and airplane and bullet manufacturing took a couple of hard years to unwind, but it soon led to a very consciously constructed consumer/manufacturing society. All stops were removed.

The movers and shakers of that era purposely set out to hold up the Joneses as the American Dream, and whip everyone along to constantly try to keep up with them -- house in the suburbs, TV, car, kids in college, annual vacations, and all the latest and brightest products America could churn out. And jobs, jobs, jobs making all this stuff.

It went on for six decades, and then Dubya Dubya Bush (who cost us multiple times what Dubya Dubya Two ever did) presided over the burnout phase of that manic consumer economy that was actually based on debt-fueled growth.

Debt is a virus, you see, and it kills its host.

An economy that had originally provided good jobs for every man jack so he could buy all the shiny things America manufactured slowly morphed over the decades into the outsourcing of jobs to coolies overseas who would make the same product for a lot less. That eventually included everyone up the economic scale, including engineers, doctors, and rocket scientists.

All that money saved accrued to Wall Street, and moved into international circles. Offshore more and more. Interwoven and interconnected with debt-fueled money-making projects worldwide. If American taxes wanted a taste, well the whole scheme was moved offshore so no taxes needed to be paid.

The American economy increasingly became Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) after Reagan, and this increasingly became an international arena, not fundamentally connected to the day to day American economy.

During Dubya Dubya Bush's two terms, he presided over the looting of the Treasury and the earnings of the next generation or two as well. He took that treasure and firmly bet America's future -- it's economic survival -- overseas. He wagered everything on America winning at globalizing the world economy under its thumb, and winning some tasty resource wars over yonder, in lands where swarthy people live. Those wars were to be highly lucrative ventures from the get go.

After sixty years of chasing the Joneses, manufacturing is long gone, and mad consumption eventually burned itself out, burned right to the core about mid-2007, and it is never coming back. We have entered the post-consumption stage of empire's collapse. People are paying down debts, and saving about 7% on top of that, according to the recent news. They know its over. So does Wall Street.

So do the Feds.

At this point, the Federal Government has no reason to do much of anything for Americans except keep them in line, and keep them from costing Wall Street any progress on its international agenda, the agenda that America's survival depends on.

At this point, America's actual citizens, the point 3 billion of us walking around, are just a labor pool to Wall Street and the Government they own. And they need we, the people like they need a threesome with a pair of porcupines. Having taken our jobs, they now intend to take any equity we built up while we had jobs so they can use that equity on their globalization and war agenda.

They simply have to win that thing. The alternative . . .

At this point, there's no need for Americans to do any work except serve one another drinks and fast food and refinance one another's mortgages. Manufacturing is an overseas arena. Finance is an overseas arena. Empire is an overseas arena. America's future rides on what America accomplished overseas, not at home.

America's government is an overseas government, because that's where America's future has been wagered. The only measure of success for Wall Street and its Washington subsidiary is to push America's FIRE economy to the tippy top of a thoroughly globalized economy. They've got to win at that. Failing at that will be the most indescribable disaster of a financial collapse the human mind is capable of imagining.

So America's had its run, a good run, between the Dubya Dubyas. Sixty years of being the biggest, richest, baddest, mofo of an economy this planet has ever witnessed.

But it is really most seriously and sincerely over. The very forces set in motion back in the post-WWII decade proceeded to flourish, feed on themselves, and finally burn out, go up in credit-driven flames right down to the last phony mortgage-backed security. Since mid-2007, everyone's just standing around licking the icing bowl, but it's becoming very apparent that we had our cake, and we ate it, too.

... Xinjiang has always been a great melting pot, a former hub on the Silk Road that today has 13 sizeable ethnic minority groups and borders eight countries. The concept of homeland is at the heart of the conflict. Uighurs shy away from openly framing the issue as one of independence and national sovereignty, but they ask: Who is the guest here? And whose culture and way of life should take precedence?

Though many Uighurs claim to be the indigenous people of the region, foreign historians say the Uighurs did not migrate from the Mongolian steppes to what is now Xinjiang until the 10th century. They eventually built tribal societies here, mostly around oasis towns along the southern edge of the large desert depression called the Tarim Basin. <...>

The race of first settlers, the Tocharians, herders who spoke an Indo-European language, died out long ago, Mr. Mair said, and there are no descendants to make historical claims on the land.

As for signs of the Chinese empire, the most prominent Chinese gravesites were discovered at a place called Astana, believed to be a former military garrison. The findings there date from the 3rd to the 10th centuries, ending with the Tang Dynasty, when trade along the Silk Road was at its height. But for that period and for centuries afterward, ethnicities, tribes and power centers in the region remained in flux, with no one culture exerting long-term rule.

The Chinese empire did not exercise full political control over the territory in its current shape until the Qing Dynasty, ruled by ethnic Manchus, annexed the region in 1760 and later gave it the name Xinjiang, according to the scholars James A. Millward and Peter C. Perdue.

"By first establishing military and civil administrations and then promoting immigration and agricultural settlements, it went far toward ensuring the continued presence of China-based power in the region," the two professors wrote in a 2004 volume of essays by 16 scholars, "Xinjiang: China's Muslim Borderland." ...

Mayor Gavin Newsom issued an executive directive Wednesday ordering all departments to survey the land under their control in order to create an inventory of land that can support community gardens. All city-purchased food for city meetings, schools, jails or homeless shelters must be grown locally with sustainable farming practices. Food vendors with city permits must also meet these requirements.

"The stark reality is that hunger, food insecurity, and poor nutrition are pressing health issues, even in a city as rich and vibrant as San Francisco," said Mayor Newsom in a prepared statement Wednesday.

KABUL, Afghanistan, July 8, 2009 (ENS) - The inefficient management of Afghanistan's water resources is linked to both the country's widespread poverty and deadly tribal conflicts over territory, a United Nations envoy said Tuesday, calling for better management to help foster stability and build prosperity.

Kai Eide, the UN secretary-general's special representative, told a conference on water resources development in Kabul that donors and nongovernmental organizations should focus more on enhancing the management of water resources.

"Whether we look at poverty, food security, health or economic development, there is no issue more important for this country at this time than the development of Afghanistan's water resources," he said.

Afghanistan's economy remains dominated by agriculture, which employs two-thirds of the national workforce and accounts for more than half of gross domestic product. But decades of conflict and misrule have destroyed irrigation systems, stunting economic growth.

Eide said that trans-boundary issues with other Central Asian countries should also be resolved.

"Afghanistan needs agreements with its neighbors that can provide equitable sharing and cooperative management of water resources in accordance with principles of international law," he said.

"Afghanistan has a right to its share of its resources. Today they are unused. The United Nations is committed to helping to effectively manage the world's trans-boundary waters and will continue to support such efforts," Eide said.

In a Tuesday afternoon press release, the FDA announced that Michael Taylor, a former Monsanto executive, had joined the agency as "senior advisor to the commissioner." If the title is vague, the portfolio (pasted from the press release) is substantial--a kind of food czar of the Food and Drug Administration:

* Assess current food program challenges and opportunities
* Identify capacity needs and regulatory priorities
* Develop plans for allocating fiscal year 2010 resources
* Develop the FDA's budget request for fiscal year 2011
* Plan implementation of new food safety legislation

Taylor's new position isn't his first in government. He's a veteran apparatchik who has made an art of the role-swapping dance between the food industry and the agencies that regulate it. (The FDA's press release highlights his government service while delicately omitting his Monsanto daliances.) In her 2002 book Food Politics, the nutritionist and food-industry critic Marion Nestle describes him like this (quote courtesy of La Vida Locavore):

Mr. Taylor is a lawyer who began his revolving door adventures as counsel to FDA. He then moved to King & Spalding, a private-sector law firm representing Monsanto, a leading agricultural biotechnology company. In 1991 he returned to the FDA as Deputy Commissioner for Policy, where he was part of the team that issued the agency's decidedly industry-friendly policy on food biotechnology and that approved the use of Monsanto's genetically engineered growth hormone in dairy cows. His questionable role in these decisions led to an investigation by...

There is a well-known dictum in the Talmud, "the law of the land is the law". It laid down that, on civil matters, Jews should obey the law of the countries of their dispersion. For modern-day Jews in the UK, this has never been a problem, for they have enjoyed the freedom to practise their religion as they wish. But now an appeal court ruling has touched a raw nerve in the Jewish community, leading the chief rabbi to go so far as to say that it has, in effect, branded Judaism as racist.

Two years ago a boy, known as M in the legal papers, was turned down for a place by JFS, a state-aided comprehensive in London, which is under the religious jurisdiction of the chief rabbi. According to traditional Jewish law, a child is Jewish if his mother is Jewish. But M is the son of a mother who was converted to Judaism by a non-Orthodox rabbi, and hence neither she nor her son is Jewish in the eyes of the Orthodox establishment.

KAMPALA, Jul 10 (IPS) - A year ago, a mother in Kashari County took the law into her own hands and castrated a man she caught raping her seven-year-old daughter.

Malita Kyomugisha returned from her farm and found her neighbor Tito Mugarura sexually assaulting her youngest daughter behind her house in Rugyerera village.

"I think he deserved it then and I would do it to him today if I found him," Kyomugisha said.

"When I reached the bush behind my house, I could not believe my eyes when I saw that old man on top of my youngest child. I was lucky that he was still naked. I used the knife I had in my garden basket to cut of his organ," she said.

The story was widely reported in the media, and many children's and women's rights activists, including Uganda's former ethics and integrity minister, Miria Matembe, applauded Kyomugisha's action. Matembe had gained notoriety for agitating that men who rape minors be castrated as a deterrent.

Child abuse is rampant in Uganda. In the war-affected north, soldiers and rebels alike have been responsible for numerous rapes. But even where conflict cannot be blamed for destroying the social fabric, girls are vulnerable to assault by their relatives at home and by teachers at school.

Physics for the longest time equaled mechanics. By the late 19th century this discipline was developed to perfection. I don't use this term lightly. In the Lagragian and Hamiltonian reformulation of classical mechanics everything can be derived from 3 simple and intuitively understood first principles:

Nature follows the same laws ...

1. ... now as in the past.
2. ... here as at a different position and/or orientation in space.
3. ... on the path of least resistance i.e. getting form one state to the next with the least amount of energy exhibited (D'Alembert's principle).

This formulation of classical mechanics is so stunningly and intoxicatingly beautiful that a young Max Planck was asked by one of his teachers why he would ever contemplate going into the field of physics. After all physics was completed. He was told there was nothing left to be done (other than maybe some minor third degree issues on the fringes). Fortunately he did not believe this teacher.

I think what motivated Einstein was to get back to a theory that recaptured this kind of beauty that was threatened by Maxwell's equations - an aether that doesn't adhere to the equivalence of frames of reference just wouldn't do.

In this sense Einstein was a reconstructist who inadvertently triggered the greatest revolution in physics due to his uncompromising rigor and an otherworldly unconventionalism.

 Migeru special!

If'Madness is the absence of work'(Foucault), then Sanity is the presence of play..

The number of women offering to carry a baby for another woman has jumped by 25% - with Sarah Jessica Parker being seen as a key factor in the rise.

Sarah Jessica Parker had twins through a surrogate mother

The Childless Overcome Through Surrogacy group says it is the first time in its history that the number of would-be surrogates registering their interest matches the number of people wanting to have a child through surrogacy.

And it is putting the rise in interest down to the media coverage of Sarah Jessica Parker's new family.

The Sex And The City star and her husband, Matthew Broderick, spent several years trying to conceive before electing to use a surrogate.

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Drug lord Pablo Escobar's hippo died the same way he did, hunted down and shot by the authorities for posing a danger to the public.

The African-born hippopotamus that escaped three years ago from a ranch once owned by Escobar was killed on orders of the government, authorities said on Friday.

Cocaine king Escobar, who was gunned down by police on a rooftop in the city of Medellin in 1993, was so flush with cash that he flew in hundreds of exotic animals, including kangaroos, flamingos, elephants, rhinos, and nine hippos.

The News of the World yesterday accused The Guardian newspaper of being irresponsible and misleading in its reporting of phone hacking allegations.

Rebekah Wade, who is soon to start as chief executive at News International, the owner of the Sunday tabloid, accused The Guardian of substantially misleading the public and suggested that it had done so deliberately. In a statement issued last night after two days of silence she came out fighting and denounced a series of The Guardian's claims as untrue. She promised that executives from News International will, when they appear before a Parliamentary committee, refute allegations that hacking into the phones of celebrities, sporting figures and politicians was common.

Doing what they've been doing, once a year, in the moonlight, for millions of years.

Same old, same old. Makes you wonder.... ;-)

You can't be me, I'm taken

Despite our high expectations, Vice President Joe Biden's first months in office were disappointing. This, remember, is the man who opened the more recent of his two futile runs for the presidency by saying of Obama that he was "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."

Yes, that Joe Biden. The one who hollered at wheel-bound Missouri State Sen. Chuck Graham, to "stand up." The one who plagiarized a speech by Neil Kinnock. In other words a man who has flung himself into one rhetorical pratfall after another with the unswerving momentum of a blind rhino.

heheh

If'Madness is the absence of work'(Foucault), then Sanity is the presence of play..

It would be nice to look at June's national newspaper ABC circulation figures, released this weekend, and find sanctity rewarded by sweeter sales. And you can make a good start along that track. Take the five biggest blaggers denounced by the Information Commission: the Mail is down 1.35% year-on-year, the People 8.3%, the Mirror 9.54%, the Mail on Sunday a startling 6.58% and the hackless News of the World 4.79%

But even holy crystal balls become clouded as the Sun and Star, head to head at 20p throughout most of the land, go up 1.48% and 3.45% respectively on May's figures, and the Express, also playing a price-lopping game, adds 1.36%.

Though the Telegraph soldiered on with its expenses scoop, sales only bobbed up 0.12% (and are 3.46% down on June 2008). And as for the utterly blameless Independent on Sunday, down 2.98% in a month and 22.47% in a year, what is there left to do except pray? Sanctity matters, but it doesn't always pay the rent.

Interesting information.

You can't be me, I'm taken