cryptogon.com

“It makes salmonella look like a picnic,” is how David Kirby, an investigative journalist who has written about MRSA, a life-threatening pathogen, described it in an interview with Consumer Ally. MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is an antibiotic-resistant staph infection that kills about 20,000 Americans — more than the number of people who die from AIDS — each year.

MRSA affects livestock and ultimately supermarket meat. Previously associated mostly with infections acquired in hospitals, nursing homes or by people with compromised immune systems, for the past 15 years MRSA is increasingly being traced to industrial animal feeding operations, so-called factory farms, where much of the nation’s protein comes from.

A number of clinical and academic studies bear this out: a recent Canadian study showed nearly 14% of pork chops (about one in seven) and 6.3% of ground pork sold in supermarkets carried the contamination — taken together, 9.6% of all pork samples. Additionally, 5.6% of the beef and 1.2% of the poultry carried the bug. The bacterium was also found in veal, lamb and other meats.

The comments are the first public admission made by a senior policymaker about a practice which has become increasingly widespread since the global economic downturn.

Many countries, notably China, have been deliberately weakening their currencies by selling them on foreign exchanges or keeping interest rates artificially low to make their exports cheaper.

The gas is methane hydrate, a sherbet-like substance consisting of methane trapped in water ice – sometimes called “fire ice” or MH – that is locked deep underwater or under permafrost by the cold and under pressure 23 times that of normal atmosphere.

A consortium led by the Japanese government and the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (Jogmec) will be sinking several wells off the south-eastern coast of Japan to assess the commercial viability of extracting gas from frozen methane deep beneath local waters. Surveys suggest Japan has enough methane hydrate for 100 years at the current rate of usage.

Lying hundreds of metres below the sea and deeper still below sediments, fire ice is exceedingly difficult to extract. Japan is claiming successful tests using a method that gently depressurises the frozen gas.

Tokyo plans to start commercial output of methane hydrates by 2018. At present, Japan imports nearly all its gas – about 58.6m tonnes of liquified gas annually – and is heavily dependent on oil imports. In a desperate attempt to secure more oil, for example, Japan recently did a deal with the United Arab Emirates. In exchange for using Japan as a base for Asian oil trading, Japan now has priority to purchase rights to up to 4m barrels of immediately accessible crude.

Lucia van Geuns, an energy analyst at the international energy programme of the Clingendael Institute, said: “Methane hydrates could make Japan energy independent. Japan put a lot of R&D into this project because of course the less energy it imports the better. Whether they can commercialise methane hydrates remains to be seen.

…

At issue is whether an individual trader is using separate brokerage accounts to trade against himself, something known as a wash trade. Shares that regularly trade below $1, such as Sirius XM Radio Inc and Level 3 Communications Inc, are the typical targets, Nazarali said.

Exchanges charge fees to those that execute against standing buy and sell orders, something called a take fee, and pay rebates to those that provide standing orders that are executed against. This is known as “maker-taker” pricing.

While stocks are normally priced in penny increments, rules adopted five years ago allow exchanges to price sub-dollar stocks in one-hundredth of a cent. The fees and rebates, however, are based on penny increments for all stocks, including sub-dollar stocks — which creates a possible loophole through which traders can earn out-sized rebates.

A trader can, for example, send a “limit order” bid through one brokerage account, and a corresponding “market order” to sell that same stock in another account. After trading with himself, the trader earns the bid’s rebate and pays the smaller selling fee — which is usually fixed at retail brokers like E*Trade — and walks away with the difference.

The multi-millionaire businessman, 62, fell into the River Wharfe while inspecting the grounds of his North Yorkshire estate on a rugged country version of the Segway.

The Segway is a motorised scooter which use gyroscopes to remain upright and is controlled by the direction in which the rider leans.

A passer-by found Heselden alongside his Segway in the Boston Spa area at about 11.40am on Sunday.

A spokesman for West Yorkshire Police said today: “Police were called at 11.40am yesterday to reports of a man in the River Wharfe, apparently having fallen from the cliffs above.

“A Segway-style vehicle was recovered. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

“At this time we do not believe the death to be suspicious.”

Heselden was worth £166m and ranked 395th on the Sunday Times Rich List.

The former miner made his millions from defence contracts. He created a unique portable wire cage water containment system which when filled with earth and sand proved a major defence against bullets, missiles and suicide attacks.

His founded his first company HESCO Bastions with his redundancy pay when he was laid off from the mines.

The wire cage systems developed by Bastions have become standard military equipment for Nato as well as American and British forces.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.

James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” — including its decentralized design.

Gen. Abdolrasoul Mahmoudabadi of the elite Revolutionary Guards said the “terrorists” were killed on Saturday in a clash “beyond the border” and that his forces were still in pursuit of two men who escaped the ambush.

While Iran has said in the past it would target armed groups on Iraqi soil this is a rare case of it actually admitting to an attack.

Iraqi officials have complained in the past about Iranian artillery shelling its northern mountainous region where armed Kurdish opposition groups have taken refuge.

An explosion during a military parade in the town of Mahabad, in Iran’s northwestern Kurdish region, killed 12 women and children on Wednesday.

Iran has already blamed the attack on Kurdish separatists who have fought Iranian forces in the area for years, but most Kurdish groups condemned the attack and no one has so far claimed responsibility for it.

Iran has also blamed Israel, the U.S. and supporters of Iraq’s previous regime for supporting the Kurdish groups.

The parade was one of several held around the country to mark the 30th anniversary of the start of the Iran-Iraq war.

The city of Mahabad is home to 190,000 people — most of them Kurds and Sunni Muslims. Iran is predominantly Shiite.