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The surveillance — detailed in e-mails and memos unearthed by six of the scientists and doctors, who filed a lawsuit against the FDA in U.S. District Court in Washington last week — took place over two years as the plaintiffs accessed their personal Gmail accounts from government computers.

Patients will no longer have to wait weeks to know if they have cancer and their doctors will know immediately what kind of disease they have, allowing them to target therapies precisely and to avoid harmful delays or mistakes.

Health officials confronted by superbug outbreaks will be able to identify the bug’s strain and begin planning treatment within hours rather than days or weeks, potentially saving thousands of lives.

Soon, researchers in the developing world will take portable DNA sequencers into the field to identify new viruses and verify water quality.

And police investigators will be able to develop a suspect’s DNA profile as quickly as their fictional counterparts do in glossy television dramas, while commandos on the battlefield will identify the bodies of friend and foe.

“Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred — whether it’s a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics — is a distinct cognitive process,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.

Berns headed a team that included economists and information scientists from Emory University, a psychologist from the New School for Social Research and anthropologists from the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris, France. The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

In Holland, where I’ll be for a few more days, there’s a “rogue” right-wing party named PVV (Party for Freedom). It has no cabinet ministers, but the minority moderate right-wing government needs its support to stay in the saddle. The PVV, like other European right-wingers, is, among many other things, against much of what the European Union stands for. It’s certainly against the Euro, and the bailouts with Dutch taxpayer money of countries like Greece and Portugal.

A few months ago, the PVV announced they had commissioned a report from British financial consultancy firm Lombard Street Research on the economic consequences of staying in the Eurozone versus returning to the guilder.

That report is about to be published “within days”. It will prove to be highly explosive material. And the PVV will do all it possibly can to make sure it receives a lot of media attention. It may tear down the incumbent government, which is a heavy advocate of all things Europe, and which will have to quit once the PVV support dies, but for that party that’s not the no. 1 concern.

And if and when Holland has a large scale discussion on the report and the issues it raises, Germany won’t be able to ignore it and stay behind. And then, neither will France.

Max Julius of Citywire.uk did a piece on the report, without mentioning it directly, 10 days ago:

Why Germans and Dutch will exit ‘suicide pact’ eurozone

Germany and the Netherlands are likely to quit the eurozone rather than swallow an indefinite number of ‘unrequited transfers’ to the union’s crisis-stricken nations, according to Charles Dumas, chief economist at Lombard Street Research.

Speaking at an event in central London, he said that before joining the single currency, German incomes had stayed level but their purchasing power had increased as the Deutschmark appreciated. With the weaker euro, the economist said, they have seen ‘tremendous’ wage restraint, leading to huge growth in German firms’ market share but ‘no serious growth of the economy’ and a squeeze on disposable incomes. Meanwhile, consumption rose elsewhere in the eurozone, he said.

‘So what you’re actually dealing with here… is a German population which has had a rotten deal – and that’s why they’re all so angry’ noted Dumas, who is also chairman of the macroeconomic forecasting consultancy. Branding the monetary union a ‘suicide pact’, he continued: ‘So what this exercise in uniting Europe has achieved is to divide Europe.’

Dumas [noted that] the ‘Club Med’ nations needed about 5% of gross domestic product in annual debt refinancing ‘more or less indefinitely’.

This would amount to €150 billion a year, of which Germany would have to stump up just over €60 billion, France a little under €50 billion and €15 billion from the Netherlands, he said. And this would be on top of the shortfall in consumer spending, in addition to the fact that wages and consumption may have to be held down in the future, Dumas warned.

Ilargi: This morning, Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad cited Dumas as saying these numbers are “cautious estimates”. They are valid only if Greece and Portugal would leave the Eurozone in 2012 – which Dumas expects will happen -. If they don’t, the payments will be even higher.

He predicts the costs of a return to the guilder will be much less than for instance the Dutch government’s Central Planning Bureau claims, which warns of huge losses if Holland were to leave the Euro.

Hundreds of soldiers from 3rd battalion The Parachute Regiment spent last week learning how to contain and arrest “rioters” in a series of exercises mirroring last summers violence.

Defence sources have confirmed that if violence were to return to British cities, especially during the Olympic Games, the Paras would be “ideally placed” to provide “short-term” support to police forces around the UK.

censoredIt’s no secret that the entertainment industries believe search engines are not delivering enough when it comes to protecting copyright works. Just last month, the RIAA and IFPI accused Google of massively profiting from piracy, while putting up barriers to make life difficult for rightsholders.

If the copyright industry had their way, Google and other search engines would no longer link to sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. In a detailed proposal handed out during a meeting with Google, Yahoo and Bing, various copyright holders made their demands clear.

But these days, we see a different kind of fear in the eyes of America’s entrepreneurs and professionals. It’s a fear of the arbitrary edict, of the brute exercise of power. And the origins of this fear lie precisely in the fact that many if not most Americans can no longer count on open markets for their ideas and their work. Because of the overthrow of our antimonopoly laws a generation ago, we instead find ourselves subject to the ever more autocratic whims of the individuals who run our giant business corporations.

So security researcher Brendan O’Connor is trying a different approach to spy hardware: building a sensor-equipped surveillance-capable computer that’s so cheap it can be sacrificed after one use, with off-the-shelf parts that anyone can buy and assemble for less than fifty dollars.

At the Shmoocon security conference Friday in Washington D.C., O’Connor plans to present the F-BOMB, or Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors. Built from just the hardware in a commercially-available PogoPlug mini-computer, a few tiny antennae, eight gigabytes of flash memory and some 3D-printed plastic casing, the F-BOMB serves as 3.5 by 4 by 1 inch spy computer. And O’Connor has designed the cheap gadgets to dropped from a drone, plugged inconspicuously into a wall socket, thrown over a barrier, or otherwise put into irretrievable positions to quietly collect data and send it back to the owner over any available Wifi network. With PogoPlugs currently on sale at Amazon for $25, O’Connor built his prototypes with gear that added up to just $46 each.

“If some target is surrounded by bad men with guns, you don’t want to have to retrieve this, but you also don’t want to have to pay four or five hundred dollars for every use,” says O’Connor. “The idea is that it’s as close to free as possible. So you can throw a bunch of these sensors at a target and get away with losing a couple nodes in the process.”

Homemade as it may look, the F-BOMB is more than a hacker hobby. O’Connor says his one-man security consultancy Malice Afterthought received a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contract earlier this month to develop the devices as part of the Cyber Fast Track program, which awards small sums to inventors.

…

“They are the masters of bluffing,” one Mediterranean crude oil trader said of remarks by Iranian lawmakers on Friday. “And they aren’t very reliable when they threaten extreme measures,” he said, noting the serious practical difficulties for tankers and storage plants of diverting 700,000 barrels of oil per day.

“That said, we are living in strange and difficult times,” he added, as Brent crude futures gained 0.8 percent to $111.64 on the threat, while disappointing U.S. GDP data pushed prices back.

In Tehran, Hossein Ibrahimi, vice-chairman of parliament’s national security committee, was quoted by the semi-official Fars news agency as saying: “On Sunday, parliament will have to approve a ‘double emergency’ bill calling for a halt in the export of Iranian oil to Europe starting next week.”

Moayed Hosseini-Sadr, a member of the energy committee in the legislature, said there would be no delay of the kind the EU allowed to its members on Monday when it imposed a ban on oil imports from Iran that would take full effect only on July 1.