ATHENS, Greece -- A leftist political party that has rejected an austerity agreement that Greece struck last year in exchange for a bailout from the European Union seems likely to win parliamentary elections later this month, according to the last poll that can be published ahead of the June 17 vote.

Such an outcome almost certainly would mean more turmoil surrounding Greece's continued membership in the eurozone, the 17 countries that use the euro as their currency. European bankers and German officials have in recent weeks warned that any effort to renegotiate the bailout agreement, which requires Greece to reduce its government deficit through spending cuts and tax increases, could mean Greece's expulsion from the eurozone.

The new poll, by the respected Greek firm Public Issue, suggests, however, that a growing number of Greek voters are tired of what they believe are draconian austerity measures and prefer to anger the bankers rather than to accept additional cuts. The poll was conducted May 25-30 and included phone interviews with 1,210 people. The margin of error was 2.82 percentage points.

According to the poll, the Radical Left party, known as Syriza, has the support of 31 percent of Greek voters, while the center-right New Democracy party, which favors abiding by the bailout agreement, is backed by 27 percent. The Socialist Party, known in Greek as Pasok, which also backed the bailout agreement, has the support of 13.5 percent, and the Democratic Left party, which favors renegotiating the agreement, polled 7.5 percent.

The German government has approved the introduction of new benefits for parents. The plans are going ahead after months of bitter wrangling in Chancellor Merkel's coalition government.

Parents in Germany who opt to care for very young children at home rather than sending them to a state-sponsored nursery will receive 100 euros ($125) a month from next January.

The introduction of the benefit for parents of under-three-year-olds was a demand pushed by Angela Merkel's conservative coalition partner, the Bavarian CSU. It had been opposed by the junior coalition partner, the liberal FDP, which gave in on Wednesday.

The plans have also met with criticism from opposition quarters.

Critics fear they will encourage young women in Germany to stay at home rather than pursuing careers and earning an income.[*]

Actually, social workers and others concerned with early childhood education point out that because of German demographic change, it can no longer be expected that a child will find playmates her own age in her neighborhood as a matter of course, so that early child care is becoming increasingly important in ensuring that children become socialized. This is the potential social cost of parents keeping their children home.

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

Downing Street has brushed off the controversy over the treatment of unpaid jobseekers who provided security during the Queen's diamond jubilee celebrations.

In a rebuff to Lord Prescott, who has accused the government of "exploiting cheap labour", the prime minister's spokeswoman dismissed the treatment of the jobseekers as a "one-off" and an "isolated incident".

The spokeswoman said: "This is a one-off ... This is an isolated incident. The company has apologised."

Downing Street responded to the criticism at its weekly lobby briefing shortly after Prescott accused the government of presiding over the development of labour camps following revelations that unpaid jobseekers on the government's work programme were asked by the Close Protection UK (CPUK) security firm to sleep under London bridge before stewarding the Queen's diamond jubilee celebrations over the weekend.

The former deputy prime minister has written to the home secretary after becoming "deeply concerned" by revelations in the Guardian about the treatment of up to 30 jobseekers and another 50 people on apprentice wages who were taken to London by coach from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth on Saturday before the pageant on Sunday as part of the government's work programme.

The British government is forcibly deporting asylum seekers who are then tortured in Sri Lanka, according to the testimony of one victim who was left scarred and suicidal after a brutal two-week ordeal.

The victim told the Guardian he was tortured over the space of 17 days after being deported from the UK last year. His torturers accused him of passing on to British officials information about previous beatings at the hands of state officials and other human rights abuses, to ruin diplomatic relations between the two countries.

The revelations come as Sri Lanka's head of state, Mahinda Rajapaksa, is expected to have lunch with the Queen and other heads of Commonwealth states as part of jubilee celebrations on Wednesday. The coalition is coming under increasing pressure to revisit its policy, which suggests it is safe to return Tamils to Sri Lanka. Last week the high court halted the deportation of 40 people to the island at the last minute, citing human rights concerns.

In an in-depth interview, the former member of the rebel Tamil Tigers' intelligence service said he was tortured after the Home Office deported him and two dozen other asylum seekers in June 2011. More than 70 UK border guards accompanied girls and men on the flight from Stansted airport last summer after a last-minute judicial review and his initial claim for asylum based on previous evidence of torture, were turned down by UK authorities, he said.

Berlin doctors have described the conditions under which the Urkainian opposition leader is recovering as difficult, but said her health has improved.

The face of Annett Reisshauer darkened as she spoke of her experience as a doctor treating Julia Tymoshenko, the former Ukrainian leader who's being held prisoner at Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine. Tymoshenko's room on the 10th floor of a hospital in the city, though well equipped, has its windows sealed off from the outside world. The doctor was able to prevail in getting Tymoshenko a quarter of an hour of sunlight per day, albeit in a therapy room.

"But there, the window has been redesigned to prevent her from getting any glimpse of the landscape," said Reisshauer, who heads the rehabilitation unit of the Charite hospital in Berlin. She was one of a team of German doctors that has been treating Tymoshenko over the past several weeks.

Manchester airport is facing a fuelling crisis which means that by 6pm on Wednesday it will temporarily run out of aviation fuel. Flights to and from the airport are expected to be delayed, particularly those leaving for long-haul destinations.

It is the first time that the airport - the UK's third busiest in terms of passenger numbers - has run out of fuel in its long history.

It could lead to delays and mass cancellations of flights if aircraft are unable to refuel during a busy period that coincides with school holidays. Long-haul flights are likely to be worst affected as they do not have the capacity to carry extra fuel.

The problem arose after jet fuel supplies from the Stanlow oil refinery in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, were disrupted as a result of quality concerns. The refinery, run by Essar Energy, has a pipeline to Manchester airport that is capable of pumping 250,000 litres of aviation fuel an hour.

The Russian lower house of parliament has adopted a controversial bill that raises fines 150-fold for people taking part in unsanctioned protests, a move aimed at discouraging the opposition from challenging the Kremlin.

The bill would increase maximum fines from the current 2,000 rubles ($60) to 300,000 rubles ($9,000), and comes after a series of massive protests that have reflected growing public frustration with President Vladimir Putin's effective 12-year rule.

The bill raises the fine for organisers of illegal protests to one million rubles ($32,100)

In an unusually tense debate in the Duma, long a rubber-stamp body for the Kremlin, opposition legislators argued into the night on Tuesday proposing around 400 amendments to mark their disapproval.

But members of the Kremlin's majority United Russia party voted the amendments down one by one and used its parliamentary majority to approve the bill. The final vote was 241-147.

A post-euro Greece, a country whose economy is about the size of the U.S. state of Maryland, may face defunct banks, collapsing businesses, skyrocketing import prices, soaring national debt, food rationing and even violent demonstrations, according to a dozen economists, analysts and professors.

[...]

"A moonscape scenario, one where everything that is mobile leaves, is certainly one you can anticipate," Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics and professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, said in an interview in Milan. "The short-term scenario is one of chaos."

The June 17 Greek vote follows an inconclusive May 6 election that catapulted Syriza, a party that favors reneging on budget-cutting accords tied to 240 billion euros ($299 billion) in international aid, into second place. A Greek government that won't stick to the bailout terms may fail to qualify for quarterly emergency loans from the euro area and the International Monetary Fund and run out of cash, leaving no option except to introduce its own currency.

El Pais reports that Oliver Wyman and Roland Berger will be basing their recommendations on the assumption of an economic decline of 5% by 2013; assumption means large computed losses, as real economy effects will outweigh losses on real estate portfolio; the consultants will also be using higher capital ratios; Spanish bankers have expressed concern about the approach; FT says Spain should bail in investors, and rescue funds should take an equity stake; Angela Merkel says don't expect any concrete decision at June summit: this is about a broad-based discussion on the future of the eurozone; ECB leaves interest rate and economic outlook unchanged; Mario Draghi says investors have a point when they worry about the eurozone, but they underestimate the political commitment; also criticises European Council for a lack of policy action; Draghi also said there would be no quid-pro-quo for the Irish yes vote to the fiscal treaty; Enda Kenny came under pressure in his parliament to reveal what assurances he had received from Merkel; Reuters Breakingviews says the ECB is waiting and waiting, and is becoming as inactive as the politicians; Paul Krugman says the ECB is not cutting rates to hide its own past policy mistakes; Barrack Obama and David Cameron have joined forces to call on Merkel to accept eurobonds; Nikolaus Blome says Germany will end up paying for the eurozone crisis; Francois Hollande has made good on his promise to cut the retirement age to 60; Pierre Moscovici is planning an additional austerity programme after all to meet the 3% deficit target in 2013; a majority of French businesses distrusts Hollande, according to a poll; Samaras wants focus on corruption, extending the programme period by two years; Wolfgang Munchau, meanwhile, argues that the Germans currently have no clue what is about to hit them in the next few months.

In the end, our lot arrive but the ones who always win are their lot. Round about now sees the end of the terms of office for the people serving on the Council and as President of the "Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni" {Authority for overseeing communications} (AGCOM). AGCOM came into being to (don't roll about laughing) ensure the fair competition between the operators in the market and to protect pluralism and the fundamental freedoms of the citizens in the sector of communications and radio and TV. Who elects the 5 member council of AGCOM? The parties, in this case the party secretaries that dictate the line to be followed by the parliamentarians. In the best tradition of PDL and PDminusL mess ups with the UDC assuming unauthorised power and authority, they decide how to share out the armchairs of the new council. Up until this point everything is within the standards of the Second Republic. The whole thing has been complicated by the announcement of the candidature of Stefano Quintarelli as president. He's a computer professional who is well known and held in high esteem in that field. That was the trigger to get the parties to search for renowned trusted people to stand against Quintarelli as councillors, so that they can save face. Among these there's Posteraro, "homo novus" warmly supported by Bersani and Casini. He graduated way back in 1973 with a dissertation that is just right for AGCOM "Imputabilità e vizio parziale di mente" {imputability and partial mental incapacity}. He has been a civil servant in the Lower House of Parliament since 1979. A young scion! An expert! A guarantee! The 2012 ranking for the freedom of information by the "Freedom House" association places Italy in position number 70, in the "semi-free" countries, below, among others Tonga, Samoa, Nuaru, Cape Verde and Greece, but above Benin (how gratifying)! AGCOM is a waste of public money, a cover for the control of the media by the parties. A way to take us for a ride. It has to be closed down.

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said officials are ready to add more stimulus to the euro region's economy if necessary, while damping expectations that another round of three-year funding for banks is imminent.

"We monitor all developments closely and we stand ready to act" as the economy faces "increased downside risks," Draghi told reporters in Frankfurt today after the ECB left its benchmark rate at 1 percent. "A few" governing council members asked for a rate cut today, he said.

The ECB is under pressure to lower rates and introduce more liquidity support for banks as governments struggle to fix a crisis that's engulfing Spain and could force Greece out of the euro. While Draghi said that the ECB will extend its offerings of three-month unlimited cash into next year, he indicated that longer-term financing will have to wait.

"I don't think it would be right for the ECB to fill other institutions' lack of action," said Draghi when asked about the prospect of another offering of three-year funds for banks.

Spain has denied that it will seek any immediate banking bailouts. But with investigations into the state of its financial sector still underway, uncertainty about the future of its banks persists.

Spain's finance minister Luis De Guindos on Wednesday sought to pour cold water on speculation that his country will seek a bailout for its banks during talks in Brussels.

De Guindos denied that Spain was in talks with other eurozone members about the possibility of supplying aid to Spanish Banks, but insisted Madrid will decide how it will plug the 80-billion-euro ($100 billion) hole in the country's banking industry within the next two weeks.

Taxpayers should not have to cover the costs of failed banks, says the EU. Brussels has a plan to force banks themselves, creditors and shareholders to come to the rescue.

The European Commission on Wednesday presented a draft plan to shelter taxpayers from the risk of again having to fork out billions for failing banks. It suggested a "bail-in mechanism" that would give national regulators the power to fire management, force losses on shareholders and creditors and even order the breakup and sale of a troubled bank.

"Our proposals protect European taxpayers from the financial consequences of banks going bust," Commission Chief Jose Manuel Barroso said in a statement.

The ideas presented on Wednesday had been floated for quite some time, with EU Market Regulation Commissioner Michel Barnier first speaking of the need to make banks pay for their own crises back in 2010. Now that the banking crisis is deepening in Spain, opinion in Brussels has swung towards the merits of moving forwards on the issue.

Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta PresidentDennis Lockhart said extending Operation Twist, the program to lengthen maturities of debt on the central bank's balance sheet, is an "option on the table."

"There is capacity to do more," Lockhart said today in response to audience questions after a speech in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. "It is certainly an option. I'm not going to speculate on what the FOMC will do," he said, referring to the Federal Open Market Committee.

The policy-setting FOMC meets June 19-20 to consider whether more stimulus is needed after the economy added the fewest jobs in a year in May. Fed Vice Chairman Janet Yellen will discuss the outlook for the economy and policy tonight in Boston, and Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is due to testify before Congress tomorrow.

"What Lockhart said today is that he's certainly on board if that's what the chairman and the majority of the FOMC want to do," said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group Inc. in Pittsburgh. "He's not going to stand in the way."

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a national symbol of conservative heroism - and labor union and liberal disdain - Tuesday overcame a spirited Democratic effort to recall him from office.

Milwaukee Mayor Thomas Barrett was vying to make Walker only the third governor ever to be ousted by voters before the end of his term.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Walker has 53 percent, Barrett 46.

The race has drawn national attention for weeks and will be scrutinized in the days ahead for clues about 2012 political trends. Many experts, though, warned against reading too much into the result - the issues and personalities were often too unique to Wisconsin.

That didn't stop the two parties from trying to send national messages. Democrats had seen the recall as a chance to vividly show the country how voters reject the kind of rigid conservative ideology Walker has promoted. He's stabilized state finances with some tough measures, including curbing state government workers' bargaining rights.

Afghanistan has been rocked by two violent incidents, the first resulting in 17 apparent civilian deaths in a pre-dawn NATO air raid in Logar in the east, and the second involving at least 22 deaths in two suicide attacks in the afternoon in Kandahar in the south.

In a third fatal incident on Wednesday, NATO acknowledged the loss of two soldiers in a helicopter crash in the eastern province of Ghazni.

The NATO raid in Logar, if confirmed, may prove to be another deadly and politically damaging mistake by international forces, whose reputation in Afghanistan is already low.

NATO has denied the report, saying it knows of only two civilians who were lightly injured, but the head of the Logar provincial council has said that 17 civilians died.

At least 19 people have been killed in Nigeria, the police say, following an hours-long gunfight punctuated by explosions in the country's northeast.

The violence on Tuesday evening, which authorities blamed on the armed Islamist group Boko Haram, targeted the cities of Kano and Maiduguri, where the group once had its main mosque.

The heaviest fighting occurred in Maiduguri, with soldiers firing on suspected group members for several hours as bomb blasts echoed across the city, witnesses said.

Colonel Victor Ebhaleme, a military spokesman, said on Tuesday that all those killed were "Boko Haram terrorists" and that the military suffered no casualties on its side.

Israeli legislators have voted against a bill to retroactively legalise settler homes built on private Palestinian land, in a move which has sharply divided Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's ruling coalition.

The bill was an attempt to circumvent a Supreme Court ruling ordering the removal of five buildings from a settlement outpost known as the Ulpana neighbourhood by July 1.

The planned demolition, which would affect 142 people, has sparked fury among settlers and their supporters in parliament, with right-wing parliamentarians set to bring the two bills for debate and a vote in a Knesset session later on Wednesday.

The legislation would essentially have legalised the outpost in the eyes of the Israelis and offered compensation to the Palestinian landowners.

Colombia Reports: An estimated 700 emails from the computer of former AUC commander and drug lord Vicente Castaño reveal the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and many top Colombian politicians may have been working with the paramilitary group.

Colombia Reports: Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade union workers, according to a report from the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). The document shows that in 2011 at least 76 union workers around the world were killed, with more than half the deaths occurring in Latin America, including 29 in Colombia and ten in Guatemala.

AP, COCHABAMBA, Bolivia -- Four Latin American countries are pulling out of a regional defense treaty while pressing for changes in the Organization of American states.The foreign ministers of Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua announced their decision Tuesday at the OAS annual assembly in Bolivia.

Honduras Culture & Politics: The confrontation between MUCA-- Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguan-- and the Honduran government that has dragged on now for years, most recently focused on attempts to take control over land claimed by Miguel Facussé, appears to be reaching an awkward resolution.

Tim's El Salvador Blog: There has been another ruling in the international arbitration brought by Canadian gold mining company Pacific Rim against the government of El Salvador.  The case is pending in the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).  In its ruling, the ICSID tribunal dismissed Pacific Rim's case under the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), but will permit Pacific Rim to continue a claim brought under El Salvador's 1999 Investment Law.

Washington Post, BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- The chief executive of the newly state-controlled Argentine energy company YPF has announced an ambitious five-year plan.  CEO Miguel Galuccio says YPF will invest up to $7 billion annually to expand exploration and boost production.

GUATEMALA CITY, Jun 4, 2012 (IPS) - The poverty-stricken countries of Central America will face major challenges when the Association Agreement to be signed in late June with the European Union, including commitments on trade, political dialogue and cooperation, comes into effect. "The region could benefit if all of its products, especially fruit and vegetables, other crops and some manufactured goods, are given privileged access" to the European market, Jonathan Menkos, an expert with the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies (ICEFI), told IPS.

Cuba-trained doctors making difference around the world: To put the school's size [the Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina -- ELAM] in perspective: the University of Toronto has 850 medical students and Harvard University has 735. ELAM has twelve times more students than those two schools combined: 19,550. And, despite being a poor country, every single one of those students is on full scholarship. Nabeel Yar Khan rushes among them, his stomach growling from missing a miserable mess-hall breakfast, glasses gleaming, short hair gelled to a peak like an angry bird from the popular video game. Most locals guess from his brown skin that he is one of the 906 Pakistani students granted scholarships since the deadly 2005 earthquake.

LONDON (Reuters) - Large-scale engineering projects aimed at fighting global warming could radically reduce rainfall in Europe and North America, a team of scientists from four European countries have warned.

Geoengineering projects are controversial, even though they are largely theoretical at this point. They range from mimicking the effects of large volcanic eruptions by releasing sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, to deploying giant mirrors in space to deflect the sun's rays.

Proponents say they could be a rapid response to rising global temperatures but environmentalists argue they are a distraction from the need to reduce man-made carbon emissions.

Critics also point to a lack of solid research into unintended consequences and the absence of any international governance structure for such projects, whose effects could transcend national borders.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- This city plans to invest in wind farms, electric cars, bike paths and energy-efficient buildings in an effort to become the world's first carbon-neutral capital by 2025.

The Danish capital, its inhabitants and its businesses will spend as much as $4.7 billion in the next 13 years to reach this goal, city officials explained as they rolled out their climate plan.

"Copenhageners' daily lives will become better in a greener and healthier city," said Frank Jensen, the city's mayor. "The investments will ensure jobs now, and the new solutions will provide the foundation for a strong green sector."

Extensive retrofitting of buildings, more wind turbines and changing transport habits will lead to a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of around 1.2 million tons per year while creating economic growth and improving quality of life, city planners said

Health officials in Edinburgh expect the legionnaires' disease outbreak in Edinburgh to spread further over the next few days after the death of a man in his 50s.

Speaking after the number of confirmed and suspected cases reached 30 on Tuesday, specialists with NHS Lothian said they were anticipating more cases over the next few days before the peak of the outbreak was reached.

There were 15 people in a critical condition in hospitals around Edinburgh by Tuesday night, with a further 15 suspected cases under investigation.

Dr Duncan McCormick, the chair of NHS Lothian's incident management team, said it probably would take until the weekend before the true scale of the outbreak became clear, because the bacteria can have a long incubation period.

LinkedIn has launched an investigation into reports that its password database has been compromised with more than 6 million users' details posted online.

The business social network is examining claims by security analysts that millions of encrypted passwords have been published on a Russian hackers' website.

Graham Cluley, the cyberthreats expert, said the passwords were now likely to be in the hands of criminals. He advised the website's 160m worldwide users to immediately change their login details.

The security scare will cause fresh embarassment for LinkedIn, which is also facing privacy concerns about its mobile calendar application.

August 1942. For over a year, the Ukrainian capital Kyiv in what was then the Soviet Republic of Ukraine had been occupied by Nazi soldiers. So-called "task forces" implemented a reign of terror. Hundreds of thousands of civilians - above all communists and Jews - were murdered.

The initial excitement of part of the population, which had hoped that the Germans would liberate them from Soviet communism, was long dead.

Fear and hunger ruled the city. Kyiv's Jewish community was obliterated. Over 30,000 people had been shot during the massacre at Baby Yar in September the previous year. Local collaborators were involved in the executions. The events were unprecedented.

German humiliation

The German Wehrmacht occupied Kyiv in 1941

To raise morale - so the occupying forces let it be known - a series of soccer matches was planned in summer 1942. It was a cynically calculated act, designed to demonstrate "normality" in the shadow of occupation. A team of German soldiers played on one side, on the other the players of FC Start, reportedly a sports group from a Kyiv bread factory.

NEW YORK-It's something no one alive today will likely ever see again: The planet Venus crossing the sun--a small, black dot moving across the fiery face of our nearest star.

The transit of Venus across the sun is one of the rarest celestial sights visible from Earth, one that wowed scientists and amateur observers around the world Tuesday (June 5). The event, arguably the most anticipated skywatching display of the year, marked the last time Venus will cross the sun (as seen from Earth) for 105 years.

Only seven Venus transits have been witnessed since the invention of the telescope 400 years ago, and you'd have a long wait for the next one. It won't happen again until Dec. 11, 2117.

From Nature magazine

Mention creationism, and many scientists think of the United States, where efforts to limit the teaching of evolution have made headway in a couple of states. But the successes are modest compared with those in South Korea, where the anti-evolution sentiment seems to be winning its battle with mainstream science.

A petition to remove references to evolution from high-school textbooks claimed victory last month after the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) revealed that many of the publishers would produce revised editions that exclude examples of the evolution of the horse or of avian ancestor Archaeopteryx. The move has alarmed biologists, who say that they were not consulted. "The ministry just sent the petition out to the publishing companies and let them judge," says Dayk Jang, an evolutionary scientist at Seoul National University.

The campaign was led by the Society for Textbook Revise (STR), which aims to delete the "error" of evolution from textbooks to "correct" students' views of the world, according to the society's website. The society says that its members include professors of biology and high-school science teachers.

The STR is also campaigning to remove content about "the evolution of humans" and "the adaptation of finch beaks based on habitat and mode of sustenance", a reference to one of the most famous observations in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. To back its campaign, the group highlights recent discoveries that Archaeopteryx is one of many feathered dinosaurs, and not necessarily an ancestor of all birds². Exploiting such debates over the lineage of species "is a typical strategy of creation scientists to attack the teaching of evolution itself", says Joonghwan Jeon, an evolutionary psychologist at Kyung Hee University in Yongin.

Infidelity is easy to explain in males. By sleeping around, a guy can potentially impregnate more females and sire more offspring than if he just had one mate. But females cheat, too, even though a woman will only be able to have roughly one baby per year no matter how many male sex partners she has had.

One leading evolutionary hypothesis suggests that a female who mates with multiple males ensures the genetic diversity and quality of her offspring; having higher-quality offspring could theoretically give her more grandchildren later. A 17-year study, published in the June issue of The American Naturalist, challenges this hypothesis.

"This is one of the most careful and most robust studies to explore whether polyandry is adaptive in females," says Tommaso Pizzari, a University of Oxford biologist who was not involved in the research. "The answer is: not really."

Previous studies tested the "quality" hypothesis indirectly. In socially monogamous species, researchers would compare the legitimate and illegitimate offspring of cheating females by asking: Which offspring were larger? Which lived longer? But a better way to understand why female promiscuity evolved, says Jane Reid, a biologist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and author on the new study, is to determine whether those illegitimate offspring actually have more babies.

ScienceDaily (June 6, 2012) -- Scientists have developed a new technique to accurately measure the weight and size of dinosaurs and discovered they are not as heavy as previously thought.

University of Manchester biologists used lasers to measure the minimum amount of skin required to wrap around the skeletons of modern-day mammals, including reindeer, polar bears, giraffes and elephants.

They discovered that the animals had almost exactly 21% more body mass than the minimum skeletal 'skin and bone' wrap volume, and applied this to a giant Brachiosaur skeleton in Berlin's Museum für Naturkunde.

Previous estimates of this Brachiosaur's weight have varied, with estimates as high as 80 tonnes, but the Manchester team's calculations -- published in the journal Biology Letters -- reduced that figure to just 23 tonnes. The team says the new technique will apply to all dinosaur weight measurements.

What has changed is the bureaucratic culture. The increasing interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led everyone to adopt the language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the corporate world. Although this might have helped in creating marketable products, since that is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do, in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic.

My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide.

The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students' jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.

As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure.

There was a time when academia was society's refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers' basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet.

If all this is true in the social sciences, where research is still carried out with minimal overhead largely by individuals, one can imagine how much worse it is for astrophysicists. And, indeed, one astrophysicist, Jonathan Katz, has recently warned students pondering a career in the sciences. Even if you do emerge from the usual decade-long period languishing as someone else's flunky, he says, you can expect your best ideas to be stymied at every point:

You will spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors, you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. . . . It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal, because they have not yet been proved to work.

That pretty much answers the question of why we don't have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.

Human body parts have been discovered in packages mailed to two schools in the Canadian city of Vancouver, police say.

The gruesome findings came a week after packages containing a hand and a foot of a Chinese student were mailed to Canada's top political parties, but police could not immediately confirm if the extremities discovered on Tuesday were linked to the same murder.

Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, was arrested on Monday at a Berlin internet cafe on suspicion he murdered 33-year-old Jun Lin in Canada last month with an ice pick and hacked apart his body while filming the grisly killing. He is expected to be extradited from Germany.

Vancouver police said a package containing what appeared to be a human hand was opened by staff at False Creek Elementary School. Another package containing what appeared to be a human foot was found by staff at St George's private school for boys.

Ray Bradbury, the science fiction-fantasy master who transformed his childhood dreams and Cold War fears into telepathic Martians, lovesick sea monsters, and, in uncanny detail, the high-tech, book-burning future of Fahrenheit 451, has died. He was 91.

He died Tuesday night, his daughter said Wednesday. Alexandra Bradbury did not have additional details.

Although slowed in recent years by a stroke that meant he had to use a wheelchair, Bradbury remained active into his 90s, turning out new novels, plays, screenplays and a volume of poetry. He wrote every day in the basement office of his Cheviot Hills home and appeared from time to time at bookstores, public library fundraisers and other literary events around Los Angeles.

His writings ranged from horror and mystery to humour and sympathetic stories about the Irish, blacks and Mexican-Americans. Bradbury also scripted John Huston's 1956 film version of Moby Dick and wrote for The Twilight Zone and other television programs, including The Ray Bradbury Theater, for which he adapted dozens of his works.