Top American and British Military Staffs to Meet for First Time Since 1940s
March 25th, 2013Via: Defense News:
In what is believed to be the first time since the 1940s, the entire British defense staff will be here March 25 to discuss long-range strategy and the impact of budget cuts with their U.S. counterparts, according to U.S. and British sources.
The meeting is reminiscent of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, when British and American military leaders joined forces during World War II. Both nations are undergoing significant budgetary reductions and will continue to rely on each other in future years for support. Understanding what capabilities will survive and won’t is essential to long-term strategic planning.
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A Defence Ministry spokesman characterized the meeting as private and declined further comment.
In the U.S., spokesmen for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not respond to questions.
CYPRUS: UP TO 40% THEFT FROM BANK ACCOUNTS
March 25th, 2013Update: No Levies on Accounts with Balances Below €100,000
Via: Guardian / Liveblog:
Jeroen Dijsselbloem: “I would l like to emphasis that none of these measures will affect desposits below €100,000.”
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Confirmation and details are not out. BBC is going with the following right now.
Via: BBC:
Eurozone finance ministers have agreed a deal on a bailout for Cyprus to prevent its banking system collapsing, officials say.
Reports suggest the deal will include a levy on deposits of more than 100,000 euros in Cyprus’ two biggest banks.
The levy on accounts in Laiki Bank – the country’s second-biggest – could be as high as 40%, correspondents say.
Cyprus needs to raise 5.8bn euros (£5bn) to qualify for a 10bn-euro EU bailout and avoid bankruptcy.
An EU official told the BBC that under the draft agreement, Laiki Bank will be wound down with “a significant levy” affecting those with deposits of over 100,000 euros.
Large deposits in the country’s biggest bank, Bank of Cyprus, could also be hit by the levy, reports say.
Laiki is also likely to be split into “good” and “bad” banks.
Earlier reports said good assets would be merged into Bank of Cyprus and administrators appointed to liquidate the remaining toxic assets.
Israel Fires Into Syria
March 24th, 2013Via: Reuters:
Israel said it fired into Syria on Sunday and destroyed a machinegun position in the Golan Heights from where shots had been fired at Israeli soldiers in a further spillover of the Syrian civil war along a tense front.
It was not immediately clear whether Israel held Syrian troops or rebels responsible for what a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said had been a deliberate attack on Israeli patrols in the occupied territory.
Israeli forces “destroyed a Syrian machine gun nest that fired twice in the last 24 hours on Israeli patrols operating to safeguard the border,” the spokesman, Ofir Gendelman, said on his Twitter page.
Putin Foe, Exiled Russian Oligarch Found Dead in UK Home
March 24th, 2013Via: CNN:
Investigators are searching the London area home where the body of former Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky was found for possible chemical, radiological or biological evidence, police said in a statement released early Sunday.
Circumstances surrounding the death of Berezovsky, one of the most politically influential of Russia’s oligarchs until a bitter falling out with the Kremlin, were not immediately known, and authorities in the United Kingdom said it was being investigated.
“His death is currently being treated as unexplained and a full inquiry is under way,” Thames Valley Police said in a statement.
Officers, including specialized investigators, are conducting a number of searches “as a precaution.”
The body of Berezovsky was still at the house early Sunday after being discovered Saturday afternoon, the statement said.
Police did not detail why authorities were searching for possible chemical, nuclear, radiological or biological evidence.
Berezovsky, a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, blamed the Kremlin for the 2006 death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who died after being poisoned by the radioactive material polonium-210. In a deathbed statement, Litvinenko blamed Putin, an accusation the Kremlin strongly denied.
For years, Berezovsky bankrolled the effort of Litvinenko’s widow to push for an inquest into her husband’s death.
Berezovsky later sued a Russian broadcaster for libel after it claimed in a report that he was behind the death of Litvinenko. He won the claim against All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK), and the High Court in London awarded him £150,000 ($223,400) in damages.
More People Have Access To Cellphones Than Toilets
March 24th, 2013The failure to see human waste as anything less than a valuable resource is THE most maddening nonsense that I’m aware of.
The media would have you believe that this is some sort of expensive, complicated, pretty much unsolvable issue when the most basic solution is a 20 liter bucket (or what Americans refer to as a 5 gallon bucket) and some dried leaves, sawdust or other dry biofilter material. The resulting compost can be used to grow vegetables. The end.
As usual, don’t take my word for it, even though I’ve tried it myself and found it to work great.
I read an earlier edition of, The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, back around 2002 and it was a truly mind blowing experience.
What does it take to get people to understand this? At this late stage of the game, we definitely don’t need more old, crusty boar pigs (like me) talking about buckets and shit.
Hmm.
When all else fails, deploy pretty girls!
Via: The Sideshow:
A new United Nations study has found that more people around the world have access to a cellphone than to a working toilet.
The study’s numbers claim that of the world’s estimated 7 billion people, 6 billion have access to mobile phones. However, only 4.5 billion have access to a toilet.
At a press conference announcing the report, U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson announced the organization is launching an effort to halve the number of those without access by the end of 2015.
Research Credit: noguru
Academia Is Eating Its Young
March 24th, 2013Don’t forget the fraud:
Doubts About Johns Hopkins Research Have Gone Unanswered
Scientific Fraud: ‘Nobody Had Noticed the Whole Thing Was Rotten’
American Society for Microbiology: ‘Has Modern Science Become Dysfunctional?’
Via: Press Button, Go Boink:
It’s a difficult time for anyone in Academia. From teaching, to funding, to publishing, to translating research, to intellectual property, to collaboration, to reproducibility, to jobs, to cheating, to culture: the entire science stack today is a miserable process.
In the past, you could get away with avoiding this reality and still manage to be a productive scientist. It was simply a well-known secret that certain parts of a scientific career were expected to be inefficient. Today however, there is an entire generation of young scientists who are taught to believe that this is just how science works, and it’s doing incredible harm to us all.
The result is that academia eating its young. Over the past year, I’ve met countless brilliant inventors, passionate teachers, and genuinely curious people who care deeply about their area of research. Instead, it’s the politics, the inefficiency, and the in-bred hostility towards change has driven these incredible people out of academia.
The Lack of Dirt in Childhood and Autoimmune Diseases
March 23rd, 2013Via: Smithsonian:
“Move to a hygiene society, and it does not matter your race or ethnicity—allergy rises.”
Instead of Closing, Gitmo to Receive Major Upgrades
March 23rd, 2013Via: Antiwar:
It was supposed to be closed by now, indeed President Obama promised to have it closed four years ago. but with Guantanamo Bay still there, and still full of detainees who the administration now seems comfortable keeping forever without charges or a trial, it is facing a “overhaul.”
Pentagon officials say that a plan being pushed would spend $150 million upgrading the facility, creating a new hospital which is going to be helpful, since so many of the detainees are already in failing health and are seemingly going to stay there until they die of old age.
Iraq: Two U.S.-Led Wars Have Left Behind Hundreds of Tons of Depleted Uranium and Other Toxic Wastes
March 23rd, 2013Via: Al Jazeera:
Contamination from Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions and other military-related pollution is suspected of causing a sharp rises in congenital birth defects, cancer cases, and other illnesses throughout much of Iraq.
Many prominent doctors and scientists contend that DU contamination is also connected to the recent emergence of diseases that were not previously seen in Iraq, such as new illnesses in the kidney, lungs, and liver, as well as total immune system collapse. DU contamination may also be connected to the steep rise in leukaemia, renal, and anaemia cases, especially among children, being reported throughout many Iraqi governorates.
There has also been a dramatic jump in miscarriages and premature births among Iraqi women, particularly in areas where heavy US military operations occurred, such as Fallujah.
Official Iraqi government statistics show that, prior to the outbreak of the First Gulf War in 1991, the rate of cancer cases in Iraq was 40 out of 100,000 people. By 1995, it had increased to 800 out of 100,000 people, and, by 2005, it had doubled to at least 1,600 out of 100,000 people. Current estimates show the increasing trend continuing.
As shocking as these statistics are, due to a lack of adequate documentation, research, and reporting of cases, the actual rate of cancer and other diseases is likely to be much higher than even these figures suggest.
“Cancer statistics are hard to come by, since only 50 per cent of the healthcare in Iraq is public,” Dr Salah Haddad of the Iraqi Society for Health Administration and Promotion told Al Jazeera. “The other half of our healthcare is provided by the private sector, and that sector is deficient in their reporting of statistics. Hence, all of our statistics in Iraq must be multiplied by two. Any official numbers are likely only half of the real number.”
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In July 2010, Busby released a study that showed a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in Fallujah since the 2004 attacks. The report also showed the sex ratio had become skewed to 86 boys born to every 100 girls, together with a spread of diseases indicative of genetic damage – similar to, but of far greater incidence than Hiroshima.
Dr Alani has visited Japan where she met with Japanese doctors who study birth defect rates they believe related to radiation from the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
She was told birth defect incidence rates there are between one and two per cent. Alani’s log of cases of birth defects amounts to a rate of 14.7 per cent of all babies born in Fallujah, more than 14 times the rate in the effected areas of Japan.
In March 2013, Dr Alani informed Al Jazeera that the incident rates of congenital malformations remained around 14 percent.
As staggering as these statistics are, Dr Alani points to the same problem of under-reporting that Dr Haddad mentioned, and said that the crisis is even worse than these statistics indicate.
Research Credit: tru3magic
Poverty Hits America’s Suburbs
March 23rd, 2013Via: NBC:
The number of suburban residents living in poverty rose by nearly 64 percent between 2000 and 2011, to about 16.4 million people, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of 95 of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. That’s more than double the rate of growth for urban poverty in those areas.
“I think we have an outdated perception of where poverty is and who it is affecting,” said Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the research. “We tend to think of it as a very urban and a very rural phenomenon, but it is increasingly suburban.”
