Sixty Percent of Children in Detroit Live in Poverty
January 26th, 2013Via: CBS Detroit:
A new report from Data Driven Detroit reveals that in spite of the many families with kids that left Detroit between 2000 and 2010 — much of the city’s population still consists of children living in poverty.
Sixty percent of children in Detroit live in poverty, per the “State of Detroit” report. This represents a 64.7 percent increase in child poverty in the city since 1999. Children account for 194,347 of Detroit’s residents, or 27 percent of the city’s total population.
Antigua to Establish WTO Sanctioned Warez Site
January 26th, 2013Via: TorrentFreak:
The Government of Antigua is planning to launch a website selling movies, music and software, without paying U.S. copyright holders. The Caribbean island is taking the unprecedented step because the United States refuses to lift a trade “blockade” preventing the island from offering Internet gambling services, despite several WTO decisions in Antigua’s favor. The country now hopes to recoup some of the lost income through a WTO approved “warez” site.
…
Hoping to rebuild the gambling business Antigua filed a dispute at the World Trade Organization (WTO), which they won.
In 2005 the WTO ruled that the US refusal to let Antiguan gambling companies access their market violated free-trade, as domestic companies were allowed to operate freely. In 2007 the WTO went a step further and granted Antigua the right to suspend U.S. copyrights up to $21 million annually.
TorrentFreak is informed by a source close to Antigua’s Government that the country now plans to capitalize on this option. The authorities want to launch a website selling U.S. media to customers worldwide, without compensating the makers.
Britain: Triple Dip Recession
January 25th, 2013Via: Telegraph:
The UK economy shrank by 0.3pc in the final three months of last year, raising the prospect of a triple dip recession, as Britain’s manufacturers suffered their worst year since the financial crisis.
Bill Gates: The Better Than Cash Alliance
January 25th, 2013Via: Bloomberg:
Billionaires are known for not keeping a lot of spending green in their wallets. But that’s not why Bill Gates hates cash. He hates it because of its effect on people at the opposite end of the wealth spectrum—the world’s poor and unbanked. The Better Than Cash Alliance, which was founded last September and is partially financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, hosted a breakfast today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Speakers from the Philippines, Colombia, and the U.S., among other countries, made the case for why electronic transactions are better than cash payments.
Secret UK Uranium Components Plant Closed Over Safety Fears
January 25th, 2013Via: Guardian:
A top-secret plant at Aldermaston that makes enriched uranium components for Britain’s nuclear warheads and fuel for the Royal Navy’s submarines has been shut down because corrosion has been discovered in its “structural steelwork”, the Guardian can reveal.
The closure has been endorsed by safety regulators who feared the building did not conform to the appropriate standards. The nuclear safety watchdog demands that such critical buildings are capable of withstanding “extreme weather and seismic events”, and the plant at Aldermaston failed this test.
It has set a deadline of the end of the year for the problems to be fixed.
Although the closed plant has not been officially named for national security reasons, the Guardian understands it is known as A45. It makes enriched uranium components for Trident nuclear warheads and has recently been helping to make the uranium fuel for the Astute generation of nuclear-powered submarines.
Hillary Clinton’s Fresnel Prism Glasses
January 25th, 2013Some people (with zero skills of discernment) are submitting links to stupid websites talking about “Hillary Clinton’s teleprompter glasses,” etc.
Those are not teleprompter glasses, Google Glass or any technology related to digital displays.
Here’s a pic of what this is all about. Here’s a crop of that image:
Fresnel Prism
What you’re looking at above is a fresnel prism.
NYPD Will Begin Testing New Device That Scans People for Concealed Weapons
January 25th, 2013Via: New York Daily News:
Get ready for scan-and-frisk.
The NYPD will soon deploy new technology allowing police to detect guns carried by criminals without using the typical pat-down procedure, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Wednesday.
The department just received a machine that reads terahertz — the natural energy emitted by people and inanimate objects — and allows police to view concealed weapons from a distance.
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“If something is obstructing the flow of that radiation, for example a weapon, the device will highlight that object,” Kelly said.
A video image aired at a Police Foundation breakfast Wednesday showed an officer, clad in a New York Jets jersey and jeans, with the shape of a hidden gun clearly visible under his clothing when viewed through the device.
The department will begin testing the high-tech device for use on the street. The device is small enough to be placed in a police vehicle or stationed at a street corner where gunplay has occurred in the past.
Related: How Terahertz Waves Tear Apart DNA
Research Credit: cgroove69
‘Americans are as negative about the state of the country and its prospects going forward as they have been in more than three decades’
January 25th, 2013Hopenosis
Via: Gallup:
U.S. President Barack Obama begins his second term at a time when Americans are as negative about the state of the country and its prospects going forward as they have been in more than three decades. Fewer than four in 10 Americans (39%) rate the current status of the U.S. at the positive end of a zero to 10 scale. This is about the same as in 2010, but it is fewer than have said so at any point since 1979.
Bird Flu Researchers to Continue Work on Engineered Virus
January 25th, 2013Via: Guardian:
Research on lab-engineered strains of the H5N1 bird flu virus is set to restart a year after the scientists voluntarily paused it to allow for an international public debate on the safest way to proceed.
Last year, two teams of scientists in the United States and the Netherlands submitted papers for publication in Science and Nature describing how they had engineered the H5N1 bird flu virus – which kills half of the people it infects but cannot naturally transmit from person to person – to spread more easily between mammals.
The US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity said that the papers were too dangerous to publish in their original form and demanded that sections of the results be deleted to prevent the information falling into the wrong hands.
That sparked a debate on how “dual-use” research should be handled: whether the results should be published in full to help public health officials prepare for future pandemics that might emerge – in this case if the bird flu virus mutated naturally – or whether some of the details should be kept secret in order to prevent them falling into the hands of bioterrorists.
In January 2012, scientists agreed to a moratorium on research involving lab-created versions of the H5N1 flu virus while scientists, regulators and security experts worked out how best to conduct and publish the work.
A year of discussions and considerations of safety protocols later, that moratorium has now come to an end. In a letter published on Thursday in Nature, the lead researchers involved in working on the engineered flu virus said that the pause in research had been useful in that it provided time to communicate the public health benefits of the work and decide how to minimise the risks.
The letter’s signatories are Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Adolfo García-Sastre of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wisconsin, and the University of Tokyo, Japan.
The three scientists, writing on behalf of 40 co-authors, said that the past year had seen the benefits of the work on H5N1 explained clearly in publications and meetings and that measures to mitigate the possible risks of the work had been detailed. The World Health Organization (WHO) and many individual countries have also produced safety guidelines for people conducting research on lab-modified H5N1 viruses.
Related: David Attenborough – Humans Are Plague on Earth
On Cryptogon: H5N1
Most Probiotic Supplements Contain Genetically Modified Additives
January 25th, 2013Via: Natural News:
A Natural News investigation into the probiotics industry has turned up alarming information about how probiotics are formulated and labeled. We’ve found that nearly all probiotics available in the U.S. market today are secretly formulated with genetically modified ingredients that are intentionally not listed on the label. The most common such ingredient is maltodextrin, a corn-derived flow agent.
Look for yourself at the probiotics available today, and you’ll find something curious: Virtually none of them are certified USDA organic. Why is that? If you read the ingredients on the label, you might scratch your head and wonder why they can’t make those ingredients organic. But the real story is found in the “dirty little secret” that probiotics supplement manufacturers are not listing on the labels: Maltodextrin and other fillers and flow agents that are derived from GM corn.
