In a controversial move, Spain's Catalonia region has voted to outlaw bullfighting.

It is only the second region in the country to do so, following in the footsteps of the Canary Islands.

The bill went to the regional parliament after a petition was signed by 180,000 people.

...

The ban in Catalonia is expected to come into force in 2012, when the last remaining bullring in Barcelona will be shut down.

In an audio tape posted online Tuesday, Al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri slammed France's move to ban Islamic face veils, saying Muslim women must hold on to their veils at any cost.

"What France is doing, which is spreading across Europe and the West, should prompt us to hold on to our true religion in face of their deviant ideologies," he said in the tape posted on an Islamist website.

Today the Home Office launched a consultation to review alcohol licensing laws, deeming the `24-hour drinking' reforms brought in by the last Government a failure.

The relaxation of the law has been strongly criticised by some sections of the press for having been counter-productive in the effort to tackle alcohol-related problems in Britain.

Indeed this appears to be an interpretation shared by Home Secretary Theresa May, who this morning claimed that in the aftermath of the new law, there had been a rise in alcohol-related crime.

The race to replace Gordon Brown is warming up, with rumours Ed Balls may throw in the towel. "This is Labour at its best, out of office, and squabbling like cats in a sack," writes political analyst Peter McHugh for Channel 4 News.

General Sir Richard Dannatt came before the Chilcot folk with their gentle, leisurely questioning of various people involved in what critics describe as the UK's greatest foreign policy disaster of modern times.

Whether that is the case or not, it remains fascinating to watch the rather Earl Grey gentility of this process. Will it all be another anodyne whitewash or does there lurk, beneath the almost soporific pace and style, some kind of iron fist waiting in there, deeply hidden, to deliver the killer punch at some day long in the future?

Well, today has been very much nuts and bolts. Procurement in fact.
Critically the problem the army faced going into Iraq in having as its vital light movement vehicle the Landrover. The British army calls them Snatches (much to the amusement of their US military bosses in Iraq and Afghanistan). But leaving cheap jokes aside it has been a huge issue for the army, going into Iraq with what was basically a soft-skinned vehicle used in Northern Ireland and barely fit for that long job, now coming into the violent desert theatre of southern Iraq, in and around Al Basrah.

In his Ankara speech of 27 July, British PM David Cameron expressed anger at the slow pace of negotiations and promised to fight for Turkey's membership of the EU. Former Europe minister for the Labour party Denis MacShane initially welcomes the news in the pages of the Guardian. "David Cameron's adoption of Tony Blair's Turkophile diplomacy in Ankara today should be welcomed," he writes, reminding readers that it was the former British PM who "single-handedly moved the European council to agree a start date for EU accession negotiations for Turkey."

However, Cameron faces "a different EU political landscape", with Germany and France, formerly in favour of the Blair initiative, now downright hostile to Turkey joining the EU. MacShane points out that "Cameron's decision to walk out of the main centre-right political group where Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, plus most other ruling EU parties, confer means that Britain's voice is absent in the key EU political debate on Turkey."

David Cameron today sparked a furious diplomatic row with Islamabad after accusing elements of the Pakistani state of promoting the export of terrorism.

In the strongest British criticism of Pakistan so far, the prime minister warned Islamabad it could no longer "look both ways" by tolerating terrorism while demanding respect as a democracy.

But in an angry response, Pakistan's high commissioner to Britain accused Cameron of damaging the prospects for regional peace, and criticised him for believing allegations in the Wikileaks documents published in the Guardian earlier this week.

The stand-off between striking truck drivers and authorities in Greece intensified today hours after the government issued an emergency order to force protesters back to work.

With fuel shortages stranding thousands of tourists and disrupting supplies of food and medicines nationwide, prime minister George Papandreou resorted to emergency legislation, more usually used at times of war or great natural disaster, to end the walk-out.

But hopes of a return to normal were quickly dashed when riot police fired tear gas at thousands of truckers gathered outside the transport ministry this morning.

"The order is coming through to [drivers] but I have no idea how they are going to react to it," said Giorgos Stamos, a member of the truck drivers' union. "It is highly unusual that after just three days of going on strike we should be mobilised in this way."

George Osborne delivered a rebuke to the defence secretary, Liam Fox, when he declared that the costs of Britain's new Trident nuclear deterrent will come from the main defence budget.

In a sign of the Tory's leadership's growing impatience with Fox, who has embarked on what Downing Street sources have dubbed as "freelance" missions, the chancellor said there could be no special accountancy exemptions for the defence budget.

Speaking to Bloomberg in New Delhi, Osborne said: "The Trident costs, I have made it absolutely clear, are part of the defence budget. All budgets have pressure. I don't think there's anything particularly unique about the Ministry of Defence. I have made it very clear that Trident renewal costs must be taken as part of the defence budget."

BP said Tuesday that it plans to cut its U.S. tax bill by $9.9 billion, or about half the amount pledged to aid victims of the disaster, by deducting costs related to the oil spill

A portion of that could be refunded from taxes BP paid in earlier years.

The company disclosed its intentions as part of its second-quarter earnings report, in which it said it would record a $32.2 billion charge to reflect the costs of the spill.

Under U.S. corporate tax law, companies can take credits on up to 35 percent of their losses.

As a follow-up to point 6 of the previous posts on the 2nd half slowdown (cutbacks at the state and local level), here is a new report released today: Job losses projected to approach 500,000 (ht Brian)

The effects of the Great Recession on local budgets will be felt most deeply from 2010 to 2012. In response, local governments are cutting services and personnel. This report from the National League of Cities (NLC), National Association of Counties (NACo), and the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) reveals that local government job losses in the current and next fiscal years will approach 500,000, with public safety, public works, public health, social services and parks and recreation hardest hit by the cutbacks.
...

According to the BLS, local governments (ex-education) have cut 89,000 jobs over the last year, and this survey suggests there will be much deeper cuts ahead.

Ironically, the country's state of permanent crisis has perhaps had the effect of staving off the worst during the current crisis. It doesn't have to weather a burst real estate bubble or a construction crisis. Italy didn't have to bail out any banks, either. The government already had its hands full with its own debts.

Avoiding Others' Mistakes

While in Spain and Ireland a debt-financed construction boom and dubious deals by investment bankers were generating high growth rates, Italy was busy tinkering with its high government debt. "A more highly regulated banking system offered fewer opportunities to copy the mistakes made by other EU countries," says Alexander Kockerbeck, an analyst at the US rating agency Moody's. Italy hasn't engaged in the excesses of the past few years.

Now some concrete data is starting to emerge regarding the potential size of the problems that may be lurking on China's bank balance sheets -- in particular, the losses that may be incurred from risky stimulus loans made to development entities (known by some as LGFVs, or Local Government Financial Vehicles) sponsored and supposedly guaranteed by provincial and local governments...

According to analysts... at the end of this June, LGFV loans amounted to RMB 7.7 trillion (US$1.1 trillion), or 16.2% of all loans in the banking system.  (Rough estimates I've heard had placed LGFV loans at 40% of all of new loans made last year and this year, which may still be possible, but there is nothing in the new data to confirm it). 

Of these LGFV loans, 27% were found to have funded projects with sufficient cash flow to repay the loans.  50% must rely on "alternative sources" for loan repayment (which I take to mean either seizing collateral or invoking the public guarantee).  23% are categorized as "facing high credit risks (ie invalid qualification of borrowers, invalid guarantee by local governments, or loans misappropriated)."  According to the BoA-Merrill analysts, if those 23% "high risk" loans (totaling RMB 1.7 trillion) were downgraded to NPLs and assigned 20% provisions, "it would lead to 74bp of extra credit cost for the sector, or some 30% cut to [bank] earnings."  Or as Andrew Peaple of the Wall Street Journal points out, the roughly US$230 billion in new bad debt would amount to more than three times the US$67 billion in NPLs currently recognized by China's banks.

China's quest to transform the renminbi into an international reserve currency - and thereby challenge America's dominance of the global monetary system - may take decades, if it happens at all. But this month, for the third time this year, China took another big step in that direction.

Regulators lifted a raft of restrictions blocking the free flow of renminbi in Hong Kong, the semi-autonomous region that is open to international investors and is the designated launchpad for the renminbi's global expansion.

Any company in the world can open a renminbi bank account in Hong Kong and exchange the currency as they please, while financial institutions in the former British crown colony are free to create investment products denominated in the Chinese currency.

Contrary to a widespread view, the deficit does not impose a burden on future generations. There is no repayment burden because the government, unlike private individuals, can and normally does repay its maturing debts by borrowing again. (In the last resort, it can print money).

As for the interest burden that is said to arise when the interest is paid by taxation rather than by fresh borrowing, it is merely a transfer payment. Income is transferred from taxpayers to bond-holders. In the case of the UK, most of these bond-holders are domestic. The transfer is therefore a redistribution rather than a loss of income.

If, however, the public deficit is cut now, there will undoubtedly be a burden on both present and future generations. Income and profits will be lowered straight away; profits will fall, pension funds will be diminished, investment projects cancelled or postponed, schools not rebuilt - with the result that future generations will be worse off, having been deprived of assets they might otherwise have had.

Banks have started early-stage planning to deal with the potential fallout on the derivatives and bond markets of a European country being forced to leave the euro.

After having received queries by some banks about the impact of such an event, the body representing the swaps and derivatives industry last week contacted some of its members to form a group to consider what they may need to do if a eurozone state is ejected.

While those close to the process believe the likelihood of such an event is remote, the sovereign debt crisis of recent months has led banks and other firms to start questioning what impact it could have.

From the Sacramento Bee: Schwarzenegger orders more furloughs

[Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's] new executive order requires employees take three unpaid days off per month. But unlike that policy, it has no termination date: Furloughs will end when lawmakers pass a 2010-11 budget.
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The governor made the decision this week after Controller John Chiang said that unless lawmakers enacted a budget soon, the state's cash would go into the red by October. Chiang said he'll start issuing IOUs in August or September to conserve funds as long as possible.

And the beat goes on ...

All 152 people on board a Pakistani plane have been killed after the aircraft plunged into the Margalla Hills near the capital, Islamabad.

The interior minister said no survivors had been found as rescuers searched the site after the accident on Wednesday. 

"Nobody survived," Rehman Malik told Express TV.

The accident occurred as the plane was attempting to land in bad weather.

The search operation was complicated as the plane had plummeted into a gorge between two densely wooded hills, more than an hour by foot from the nearest road.

Georgia should seek to increase its role in the NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said on Wednesday.

There are currently some 1,000 Georgian servicemen in Afghanistan.

"Georgia has a direct interest in the success of the Afghan operation and in putting a halt to terrorism once and for all," Saakashvili said, adding that Georgia's military could learn a lot from the "school" of Afghan warfare.

At least 17 civilians have been killed in fighting between the Somali government and al-Shabab fighters in Mogadishu.

The fighting took place in the capital's Taleh district, which was hit by a number of mortars fired by both sides.

Several homes were destroyed, and scores were injured, according to reports from local officials.

"The ambulance servicemen collected 10 civilian bodies and 46 others who were injured in the clashes yesterday afternoon," Ali Musa, the head of Mogadishu's ambulance services, said.

With its sedate pace and genteel drip, drip revelations, one could be forgiven for thinking of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war as an academic exercise, delving into some distant historical event in an attempt to understand what happened. But to many Iraqis, the inquiry is something else entirely. It is an inconsequential charade, a classic case of fiddling while Baghdad burns.

Yesterday it was Hans Blix's turn to appear before the laid back and suitably emotionless inquisitors. The former chief UN weapons inspector revealed nothing we didn't know. He told Chilcot there was no justification for war, because his inspectors found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction; and he told them that he had needed a few more months to finish his task.

As an Iraqi living in Britain, and fearful for my compatriots back home, I remember waiting with baited breath for Blix to utter those undiluted words when he appeared before the UN security council in 2003, 11 days before the war of aggression was launched. Back then, he minced his words, providing enough ambiguity for Tony Blair and Jack Straw to push on with their plans to drag Britain into the US-led war.

<snip>
Chilcot inquiry: too late, Hans Blix, too late | Sami Ramadani | Comment is free | The Guardian

Meanwhile, the litany of repressive policies gets longer. It is illegal to be a member of a trade union, just as it was under Saddam. Paul Bremer, the US envoy who ruled Iraq after the invasion, revived Saddam's infamous "decree 150" in 2004, effectively banning all public sector unions. Activists are now treated as if they were terrorists. Only last week troops and police raided the offices of workers' unions across the country, following a government decree under the 2005 anti-terrorism act, to ban them and seize their assets.

Amnesty International has condemned the executions of two Japanese men in the first death sentences carried out since the country's new government came to power last year.

Convicted killers Ogata Hidenori, 33, and Shinozawa Kazuo, 59, were hanged in the Tokyo Detention Centre on Wednesday, exactly one year after the last executions took place.

"Japan continues to go against the international trend toward abolition and mete out this cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment," said Donna Guest, Deputy Director of the Asia Pacific Programme

A federal judge on Wednesday, weighing in on a clash between the federal government and a state over immigration policy, blocked the most controversial parts of Arizona's immigration enforcement law from going into effect.

In a ruling on a law that has rocked politics coast to coast and thrown a spotlight on a border state's fierce debate over immigration, Judge Susan Bolton of Federal District Court here said that some aspects of the law can go into effect as scheduled on Thursday.

But Judge Bolton took aim at the parts of the law that have generated the most controversy, issuing a preliminary injunction against sections that called for police officers to check a person's immigration status while enforcing other laws and that required immigrants to carry their papers at all times.

Judge Bolton put those sections on hold while she continued to hear the larger issues in the challenges to the law.

Israel is aiding an exiled Arab sheikh who is vying to seize control of a strategically important Gulf emirate only 40 miles from Iran.
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Khalid, who has been based in London and has hired a solicitor from Ickenham as his agent, is bidding to replace his ailing father, Sheikh Saqr, and half brother, Sheikh Saud, to take control of RAK.

Israel's involvement in what would be a bloodless coup in one of the most sensitive regions in the world, would be "extremely uncomfortable", according to Dr Christopher Davidson, an expert on the politics of the UAE at Durham University.

Khalid, who was sent into exile in 2003, claims RAK is now acting as a trafficking hub for nuclear arms parts to Iran and has spent more than £4m on an international public relations and lobbying campaign to persuade American politicians and the pro-Israel lobby in the US that it would be safer if he were in charge.

Costa Rica - The Costa Rican Supreme Court last week agreed to take a case challenging the constitutionality of a US-Costa Rican agreement that would allow for a massive US military presence. The agreement cannot go into effect until the Supreme Court rules, thus postponing the arrival of US forces.

Costa Rica - The Costa Rican government officially declined to reverse the presidential decree that declares the mining project in Las Crucitas de Curtis as being in the national interest. The decision would seem to clear any legal impediment to the open pit gold mine operation, which the nation's highest court (Sala IV) had approved in April.  The project approved by the previous administration is deeply controversial, and environmental groups had Marched on the Supreme Court to voice their opposition.

Hollman [Morris] is the noted Colombian journalist who was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to come study here at Harvard -- only to have his request for a student visa rejected by the United States government. An American official told Hollman he was being rejected under the terrorist activities section of the Patriot Act; Hollman has done much courageous reporting on ties between right-wing militias and the Colombian government, which has opened him up to criticism from those he reports on. I'm happy to say that the U.S. State Department has reversed its decision and decided to allow Hollman into the country. He'll arrive here in Cambridge within the next few weeks and will be able to study at Harvard as we'd originally hoped.

Appearing on Fox News, Thune and host Greta Van Susteren discussed the bill's call for the creation of a Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, tasked with reducing the deficit 10 percent year over year.

"It would be required to find 10% in savings -- 10% of the deficit in savings every budget cycle," Thune said.

"So in 10 years we wouldn't have a deficit?" van Sustern asked.

"Theoretically, yes," Thune replied. "10% Is a floor. Obviously -- you can go beyond that."

Beijing (AFP) July 27, 2010
A landslide in southwestern China left 21 people missing Tuesday as torrential rains forced officials to shut boat traffic through the Three Gorges Dam as they braced for a new flood crest.

China has struggled for weeks with deadly flooding that has killed at least 823 people, left 437 missing and caused at least 22 billion dollars in damage, and authorities have warned of more destruction.

The 21 villagers went missing when Tuesday's landslide struck Hanyuan county in the southwestern province of Sichuan, destroying or damaging dozens of houses, the local government said on its website.

Weeks of torrential rain across huge areas of China, mainly in the country's southern half, have caused repeated deadly landslides and triggered the nation's worst flooding in a decade.

REUTERS - The French government said state-owned electricity giant EDF and nuclear reactor maker Areva would sign a wide-ranging partnership to help the country regain its leadership in nuclear energy.   After a report on the health of France's nuclear sector was published on Tuesday, President Nicolas Sarkozy's government called for closer coordination between the companies to offset recent losses of contracts to Asian rivals.   The government will study the possibility of EDF taking a stake in Areva, according to a statement released by Sarkozy's office. The government confirmed that Areva would sell about 15 percent of itself by the end of the year, and said discussions with potential partners were underway.

PARIS, July 27 (Xinhua) -- During the process of rapid economic development, "China will need energy, and it is very legitimate," Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA), said Tuesday.

Last week, the Paris-based energy adviser published a report ranking China as the biggest energy user in the world, which sparked international concern over Beijing's influence on global energy markets.

However, Birol, the economist who presented the report, said that surprise is not the expected response to the report.

"A year ago, China was a very small margin behind the United States. It's normal because as a developed country, the U.S. energy demand is not as strong as China's," he said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.

Anne Milton said the the term fat was more likely to motivate people into losing weight, adding it was important people took ''personal responsibility'' for their lifestyles.

Stressing she was speaking in a personal capacity, she told the BBC: ''If I look in the mirror and think I am obese I think I am less worried than if I think I am fat.''

Global temperatures in the first half of the year were the hottest since records began more than a century ago, according to two of the world's leading climate research centres.

Scientists have also released what they described as the "best evidence yet" of rising long-term temperatures. The report is the first to collate 11 different indicators - from air and sea temperatures to melting ice - each one based on between three and seven data sets, dating back to between 1850 and the 1970s.

The newly released data follows months of scrutiny of climate science after sceptics claimed leaked emails from the University of East Anglia (UEA) suggested temperature records had been manipulated - a charge rejected by three inquiries.

And finally I hate buses because they are the symbol of a socialist society where people rely on the state to provide transport.

(July 26) -- Cash-register receipts from many fast-food outlets, groceries, pharmacies, big-box stores and U.S. post offices contain high levels of the endocrine-disrupting chemical bisphenol A.

A study released late today by the Environmental Working Group reported that a laboratory analysis it commissioned found the plastic component BPA on 40 percent of receipts from McDonald's, CVS, KFC, Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, Safeway and other businesses.

Drinking alcohol can not only ease the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis it appears to reduce disease severity too, research suggests.

Scientists at the University of Sheffield asked two groups of patients with and without the disease to provide details of their drinking habits.

They found that patients who had drunk alcohol most frequently experienced less joint pain and swelling.

Experts say this should not be taken as a green light for drinking more.

HELENA, Mont. -- A bear attack Wednesday in a campground near Yellowstone National Park left one person dead and two injured, Montana wildlife officials said.

A man was killed in the attack at the Soda Butte campground near Cooke City that was reported about 4 a.m., Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks spokesman Ron Aasheim said.

A woman suffered severe lacerations from bites on her arms, while another man was bitten on his calf and taken to a hospital in Cody, Wyo.

Renewable goals can be met, many in the industry insist. But if the energy source is intermittent, "you can't do that without batteries of some sort," said Peter Rosegg, a spokesman for the Hawaiian Electric Company.

His company has agreed to buy electricity from a wind farm on the northern shore of Oahu, where the Boston-based power company First Wind has just broken ground.

The spot is one of Hawaii's best wind sites, Mr. Rosegg said, but the supply is gusty and erratic. What is more, it is at the farthest point on the island from the company's main load center, Honolulu, and does not even lie on its high-voltage transmission backbone.

So the 30-megawatt wind farm, which will have enough power to run about 30 Super Wal-Marts, will have Xtreme Power of Austin, Tex., install a 15-megawatt battery.

Computers will work to keep the battery exactly half-charged most hours of the day, said Carlos J. Coe, Xtreme Power's chief executive. If the wind suddenly gets stronger or falls off, the batteries will smooth out the flow so that the grid sees only a more gradual increase or decrease, no more than one megawatt per minute at some hours of the day.

The Hawaii installation is designed to succeed at a crucial but obscure function: frequency regulation. The alternating-current power system has to run at a strict 60 cycles per second, and the battery system can give and take power on a micro scale, changing directions from charge to discharge or vice versa within that 60th of a second, to keep the pace steady.

The battery system can also be used for arbitrage, storing energy at times when prices are low and delivering it when prices are high. It can hold 10 megawatt-hours, which is as much energy as a 30-megawatt wind farm will produce in 20 minutes if it is running at full capacity. That is not much time, but it is huge in terms of storage capacity.

Neither First Wind nor Xtreme Power would say what the project cost, but publicly disclosed figures put the project in the range of $130 million, with about $10 million for the battery. The Energy Department has provided a $117 million loan guarantee.

Across the country, it is proving hard to predict the cost and the value of power storage to consumers. The electricity stored in off-peak hours could be quite low in cost, and prices at peak hours could be quite high. If the reliance on renewable energy reduces the need to burn coal and natural gas, that would yield an additional advantage.

Mr. Coe estimated the battery system's round-trip efficiency -- that is, the amount of electricity the batteries could deliver per megawatt-hour stored in them -- at over 90 percent. If that figure is borne out, it would be a significant advance from the largest form of energy storage now in general use, pumped hydropower, whose efficiency is put at 70 to 85 percent.

A group of oil companies including BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Citgo, Chevron and other polluters are using a front group called "America's WETLAND Foundation" and a Louisiana women's group called Women of the Storm to spread the message that U.S. taxpayers should pay for the damage caused by BP to Gulf Coast wetlands, and that the reckless offshore oil industry should continue drilling for the "wholesale sustainability" of the region.

Using the age-old PR trick of featuring celebrity messengers to attract public attention, America's Wetland Foundation is spreading a petition accompanied by a video starring Sandra Bullock, Dave Matthews, Lenny Kravitz, Emeril Lagassi, John Goodman, Harry Shearer, Peyton and Eli Manning, Drew Brees and others.

Moscow region chief Boris Gromov asked Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to allocate 25 billion roubles ($827 million) to fight the fires smoldering in the forests around Moscow.

Alexei Yablokov, an internationally renowned biologist who runs Russia's Green Party, said air pollution caused by the smog's high amount of carbon dioxide could kill hundreds more people than usual in the Moscow region.

"There will be at least 100 additional deaths per day this time round," Yablokov told Reuters, referring to the last such smog cloud in 2002 in which he calculated 600 people had died each week.

Read more...

President Obama has called the BP oil spill "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced," and so has just about everyone else. Green groups are sounding alarms about the "Catastrophe Along the Gulf Coast," while CBS, Fox and MSNBC slap "Disaster in the Gulf" chryons on all their spill-related news. Even BP fall guy Tony Hayward, after some early happy talk, admitted the spill was an "environmental catastrophe." The obnoxious anti-environmentalist Rush Limbaugh has been a rare voice arguing that the spill -- he calls it "the leak" -- is anything less than an ecological calamity, scoffing at the avalanche of end-is-nigh eco-hype.

After about two decades of continuous research on Intelligent Vehicles, VisLab is preparing to set a new worldwide milestone in the field of Vehicular Robotics.  Autonomous vehicles are being prepared and tested to drive with no human intervention from Parma, Italy, to Shanghai, China, along a 13,000 km and 3 months unique journey.

Not only the vehicles are unmanned, but they run on electrical power and the whole electronic pilot is powered by solar energy, making this trip unique in history: goods packed in Italy will be brought to Shanghai on an intercontinental route with no human intervention and without using traditional fuel for the first time in history.

You can discover the challenge, read about the difficulties, and follow the expedition live on  www.IntercontinentalChallenge.eu ; a blog is also available to interact with the engineers testing and following the vehicles. Live video streaming from the vehicles is available during the whole expedition, so that the world will be able to eye-witness this historical milestone.

here's the working link http://viac.vislab.it/

"Resonance is the reply from the unknown... Unleash the opera of phenomena." W.A. Mathieu

The Hague (AFP) July 27, 2010
The Netherlands is destroying more than 17 million unused doses of swine flu vaccine that were nearing their expiry date and that it could not resell, the health ministry said Tuesday.

"We have started destroying" the vaccines, health ministry spokeswoman Inge Freriksen told AFP. "In the coming months, 17.8 million doses will be destroyed because the expiry date is approaching."

The Dutch government bought 31 million doses of vaccine against the A(H1N1) virus at the height of the global swine flu outbreak last year. About 11 million were used.

Some 2,156 people infected with swine flu were hospitalised in the Netherlands between April and December last year and 53 died.

Glasgow, UK (SPX) Jul 27, 2010
When American space pioneer, Dr Robert L Forward, proposed in 1984 a way of greatly improving satellite telecommunications using a new family of orbits, some claimed it was impossible.

But now engineers at the University of Strathclyde's Advanced Space Concepts Laboratory have proved that Forward was right.

The late Dr Forward - a renowned physicist who worked in the United States and from his second home in Scotland - believed it was possible to use 'displaced orbits' to deploy more satellites to the north or south of the Earth's equator, helping to meet the growing demand for communications.

Inequality in Britain is so entrenched that "rich, thick kids" achieve more than their "poor, clever" peers even before they start school, the education secretary said today.

Michael Gove told MPs on the cross-party Commons education committee that a "yawning gap" had formed between the attainment of poor children and their richer peers.

Gove has come under criticism for using parliamentary procedures usually reserved for national emergencies to rush through his academies bill.

A month ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a dispute involving the right of public universities to enforce anti-bias rules as a requirement for recognition of student organizations. The university's rules were upheld, dealing a blow to Christian student groups who argued that they should be protected by the First Amendment to receive recognition and to bar gay people.

Now a new issue is emerging that involves a similar set of players and issues: public universities, anti-bias rules, and the rights of gay people and Christian students. On Tuesday, a federal judge upheld the right of a counseling program at Eastern Michigan University to kick out a master's student who declined to counsel gay clients in an affirming way -- as required by the university program and counseling associations. The judge found that the university was enforcing a legitimate curricular requirement -- namely that counseling students learn to work with all kinds of clients in ways that did not judge their values or orientations.

Last week I had an encounter with open justice. I was attending the Information Tribunal hearing of a friend who is trying to peel back layers of secrecy surrounding allegations that the Liverpool Women's NHS Foundation Trust had a history of silencing whistleblowing staff by offering them public money to sign confidentiality or `gagging' contracts.

I've been to the Tribunal before when I was fighting for the release of MPs' expenses and that's when I discovered the only record of proceedings of this so-called "open" people's court (the Tribunals are meant to be a less formal, more accessible form of justice) were my scribbled notes. When it came time to write a script for a dramatised version of the hearing my notes and those of other reporters were all we had to go on. I'd asked at the time if I could tape record the hearing and was told "no".

The hardening conventional wisdom on the Afghanistan "war logs" is that they are not the Pentagon Papers. Nor are they, as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange rather grandiosely claimed, the equivalent of opening the Stasi archives. Having digested to varying degrees Sunday night's breaking story--poring through what they can of the 92,000 raw documents as well as lengthy pieces based on those documents from The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian--columnists, pundits, and editorial boards emerged on Tuesday to roundly echo the line Robert Gibbs gave reporters Monday: "There weren't any new revelations in the material." So, let's move on

There's a lot of talk about politics becoming more divisive across parties, with less and less common ground, and Republicans being called and embracing the "party of no" label. But is it true? No need to speculate; we can find out with the help of the raw data in the form of Senate roll call votes (the last ~21.5 years of which are conveniently available), plus some perl scripts.

Another rad browser plugin called Google Alarm hit the Internets this week, which alerts you every time your personal info is sent to Google's servers. How? Via notifications, a running tally of dangerous sites and, naturally, a super annoying, vuvuzela-like alarm.
...
According to Wilkinson, Google makes great products and gives them all away for free, which has made them into a ubiquitous and omniscient force on the Internet (). Google Alarm and F*ck Google in general are meant to illustrate how this single unregulated company now captures more information about us than any government agency ever could. When I started developing Google Alarm I was blown away to discover that 80+% of websites I visit have some kind of Google tracking bugs on them."

There have been many functional brain-imaging studies involving language, but never before have researchers examined both the speaker's and the listener's brains while they communicate to see what is happening inside each brain. The researchers found that when the two people communicate, neural activity over wide regions of their brains becomes almost synchronous, with the listener's brain activity patterns mirroring those sweeping through the speaker's brain, albeit with a short lag of about one second. If the listener, however, fails to comprehend what the speaker is trying to communicate, their brain patterns decouple.

Personal details of 100m Facebook users have been harvested and published on the net by a security consultant.

Ron Bowles used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles, collecting data not hidden by the user's privacy settings.

The list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user's profile, their name and unique ID.

Mr Bowles said he published the data to highlight privacy issues, but Facebook said it was already public information.

The file has spread rapidly across the net.

There are more than 30 million people left without work at some point during the course of the recession; 14.6 million are currently unemployed. As many as 4 million people have exhausted the maximum weeks of federal and state unemployment benefits. In each case, Jordan is among these millions, and for an uncountable number of people like him, the experience with income insecurity has led to a political awakening.

Among the biggest sites in the unemployment netroots is LayoffList, managed by Michael Thornton, a native of Rochester, N.Y.  Thornton stared LayoffList in 2008; five months ago, he began writing articles and posting legislators' information on the Rochester Unemployment Examiner. He now receives hundreds of emails and has logged more than a million hits at the Examiner. Thornton is finding that, rather than losing interest in politics since the end of the fight for extended benefits, the unemployed are "energized and motivated" and have started looking forward to the fall.

"Even Republicans say they aren't voting Republican anymore," the soft-spoken former technical writer says. "You have millions of unemployed people out there. If even half of them voted, they could swing a nationwide election."

Leading mental health experts gave a briefing on Tuesday to warn that a new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is being revised now for publication in 2013, could devalue the seriousness of mental illness and label almost everyone as having some kind of disorder.

Citing examples of new additions like "mild anxiety depression," "psychosis risk syndrome," and "temper dysregulation disorder," they said many people previously seen as perfectly healthy could in future be told they are ill.

"It's leaking into normality. It is shrinking the pool of what is normal to a puddle," said Til Wykes of the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London.

The DSM is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and contains descriptions, symptoms, and other criteria for diagnosing mental disorders. It is seen as the global diagnostic bible for the field of mental health medicine.

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The Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has jacked up the rate it charges the administration's news clipping service by a jaw-dropping $600,000 per year -- and is steering the White House towards a direct deal with News Corp., according to an administration official....

For the past decade, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have paid a small Virginia-based media company $100,000 or more each year to prepare customized packages of excerpts from print, TV, radio and blog outlets. Bulletin News of Reston performs the labor-intensive searches, which would otherwise require the hiring of government staff, every night starting at 9 p.m., delivering a package of article extracts and Web links to the West Wing by 5 a.m. each morning.

The Journal, which sits behind a licensed pay wall, has always been part of the package -- until now....

Dow Jones, the News Corp. subsidiary that publishes the Journal, runs its own aggregation service, Factiva. A spokeswoman told POLITICO the White House could get itself a substantially better deal if they cut out the middleman -- Bulletin News -- and negotiated directly with Dow Jones's sales team.

"The prices that have been provided are being quoted by a third-party news aggregator, not the Wall Street Journal," Dow Jones spokeswoman Ashley Huston said. "They do not reflect the true cost to the end-user. We're happy to speak with any party directly to discuss accurate pricing for a subscription."...

There are, of course, ways around the logjam. Individual administration officials can subscribe to the Journal personally, and it's pretty unlikely they would be called to account [because...?] for passing stories along to fellow employees.

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based in Scotland and the largest pole school in Lanarkshire for the amount of students we teach weekly. We are based in East Kilbride, Wishaw,Cambuslang & Airdrie. Up Yer Pole have dance studio's in Wishaw & Airdrie locations.

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"you would wear shorts & vest and can keep your trainers on if you wish."

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

REUTERS - Diego Maradona's stormy spell as Argentina coach came to an end on Tuesday when the Argentine Football Association (AFA) voted unanimously not to renew his contract.

Maradona's future had been in doubt since Argentina's 4-0 thrashing by Germany in the World Cup quarter-finals in South Africa this month, less than two years since his headline-grabbing appointment.

A spectacular new image from ESO's Wide Field Imager at the La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the brilliant and unusual star WR 22 and its colourful surroundings. WR 22 is a very hot and bright star that is shedding its atmosphere into space at a rate many millions of times faster than the Sun. It lies in the outer part of the dramatic Carina Nebula from which it formed.

We have finally realized that the Internet is much more than a network of computers.
It is an endless web of people. Men and women from every corner of the globe are
connecting to one another, thanks to the biggest social interface ever known to humanity.
Digital culture has laid the foundations for a new kind of society

Anna Wintour isn't quite adding restaurateur to her résumé like many of her editorial peers, but she will be hosting the hottest table in town tonight -- the Vogue editor in chief is opening her Sullivan Street home to President Barack Obama for a fund-raiser to benefit the Democratic National Committee (clearly showing Wintour isn't just a friend during presidential campaign times). Obama, who will tape an appearance on "The View" earlier in the day, will decompress among what's rumored to be a small crowd of donors including longtime fashion liberals Calvin Klein and Donna Karan....

The guest list for this go-round seems a bit more guarded, perhaps a sign of the President's lagging approval ratings (down to 48 percent according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll Tuesday) or maybe just a nod to the entry fee, which the Washington Post pegged at $30,000 a head.

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Possibly related supper dub:


Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.