Archive for January, 2012
TSA to Test Airport Scanner Operators for Radiation Exposure
January 16th, 2012Via: Los Angeles Times: After years of rebuffing health concerns over airport scanners, the Transportation Security Administration plans to conduct new tests on the potential radiation exposure from the machines at more than 100 airports nationwide. But the TSA does not plan to retest the machines or passengers. Instead, the agency plans to test its […]
UCSF Professor: “Society Will Pay a Huge Price in Cancer” Because of DHS Full Vehicle X-Ray Machines
January 16th, 2012Via: Cnet: Internal Homeland Security documents describing specifications for border-crossing scanners, which emit gamma or X-ray radiation to probe vehicles and their occupants, are raising new health and privacy concerns, CNET has learned. Even though a public outcry has prompted Homeland Security to move away from adding X-ray machines to airports–it purchased 300 body scanners […]
Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
January 16th, 2012Update: Apple’s Chinese iPhone Plants Employ Forced Interns, Claim Campaigners Via: Guardian: Apple’s factories in China are employing tens of thousands of students, some of them on forced internships, according to campaigners lobbying for better labour conditions at Foxconn plants, which assemble iPhones. Some students could be as young as 16. The Foxconn chairman, Terry […]
UN Soldiers Brought Superbug Strain of Cholera to Western Hemisphere
January 15th, 2012Via: ABC News: Compelling new scientific evidence suggests United Nations peacekeepers have carried a virulent strain of cholera — a super bug — into the Western Hemisphere for the first time. The vicious form of cholera has already killed 7,000 people in Haiti, where it surfaced in a remote village in October 2010. Leading researchers […]
TT3D: Closer to the Edge
January 15th, 2012Note: This has absolutely nothing to do with Cryptogon-related topics. My brother in law gave me TT3D: Closer to the Edge, but when I realized that it was about motorcycle racing, I almost didn’t watch it. I have no interest in motorcycle racing. I had never heard about the Isle of Man TT race before […]
Russia Says NATO, Persian Gulf Nations Plan to Seek No-Fly Zone for Syria
January 15th, 2012Via: Bloomberg: Russia received information that members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and some Persian Gulf countries are preparing military intervention in Syria, the head of the Russian Security Council said. Turkey, a NATO member, may play a key role, Nikolai Patrushev, who used to head the country’s intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, […]
The Rise of the New Groupthink
January 15th, 2012Via: New York Times: SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people […]
China’s Skyscraper Craze May Herald Economic Crash
January 15th, 2012Via: Guardian: China could be the next country to go bust, if its headlong rush to build ever-taller skyscrapers is a guide to its future economic health. According to a study by Barclays Capital, the mania for skyscrapers over the last 140 years is a sure indicator of an imminent crash. It points out that […]
Children in New York Contract Mysterious Illness, Federal Government Preventing Disclosure of Disease
January 14th, 2012Update: Mystery Teen Illness Grows in Upstate NY, More Cases Reported Via: MSNBC: The mystery illness now producing Tourette’s-like symptoms in a more than a dozen girls from upstate New York is also affecting a 36-year-old who is experiencing the same tics as the teens. Nurse practitioner Marge Fitzsimmons, who has spent her whole life […]
German Priest Admits 280 Counts of Sexual Abuse, Thought He Was Doing No Harm
January 14th, 2012Via: BBC: A German Catholic priest has admitted 280 counts of sexual abuse involving three boys in the past decade, saying he did not think he was doing harm. Named only as Andreas L, the priest told a court in Braunschweig that he had first abused the nine-year-old son of a widowed woman parishioner. After […]
