China: Disappearing Dissidents
September 3rd, 2011Via: New York Times:
Last Jan. 27, an Inner Mongolian rights activist, Govruud Huuchinhuu, suddenly vanished after leaving a hospital where she had undergone treatment for cancer. On Feb. 16, the Beijing human-rights lawyer Tang Jitian vanished after being forcibly taken away by police officers. On May 30, an ethnic Uighur, Ershidin Israel, vanished after being deported to China from Kazakhstan as a terrorism suspect. In the next two weeks, three other Uighurs vanished as well.
The Beijing artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, who vanished into police custody on April 3 and did not emerge until June 22, is but the most famous Chinese activist to suffer an “enforced disappearance,” as human rights officials call such episodes. Experts say 2011 has seen a sharp and worrisome increase inside China of a security tactic that a United Nations international convention has sought to outlaw.
The Urban Farming Guys
September 3rd, 2011Via: The Urban Farming Guys:
We took the seeds in our pockets and every square foot we owned and went about like mad scientists testing out innovative ideas from all around world and making them work in one of the most blighted neighborhoods in the US. Everything from urban fish farming to alternate energy. Now let’s pass it on… to our neighborhoods and the nations. We believe you are part of the solution.
Texas Man on Life Support After Encounter with Police Over Riding Bicycle Without a Light
September 3rd, 2011Via: KRISTV:
It’s news no one wants to hear; a family member is in the hospital on life support unable to speak and even worse there are few answers about how it all happened.
That’s exactly what one Aransas Pass family says they are going through.
Martin Garcia Ortiz is in critical condition after an incident allegedly involving Aransas Pass police back on August 10th.
The family and their attorneys say they believe a rogue police officer may be to blame for Ortiz’s severe injuries.
“We want to find out what happened to my uncle. We want him to hurry up and talk to see what he can tell us,” said Victoria Hernandez, Ortiz’s niece.
48-year-old Martin Garcia Ortiz is a life long Aransas Pass resident, though for the past few weeks he’s been at Spohn Memorial Hospital in Corpus Christi.
On August 10th, Ortiz’s family says he was riding his bicycle home and just a few blocks away something happened to put him in critical condition.
Just before midnight, the family’s attorneys say they believe police tried stopping Ortiz for not having a headlight on his bike. Then, the situation took a dramatic turn when one officers allegedly knocked Ortiz to the ground.
“Either with his vehicle or with his person pushed him over on his bicycle. He fell over to the street,” said Stephen Carriganan, attorney for the family.
Attorneys say Ortiz was knocked from his bike along Cleveland Street. The allegations are only more shocking from there.
They say, they believe when Ortiz was already on the ground bleeding the officer got out and punched or kicked him causing even more injuries.
We contacted Aransas Pass police department for comment but our calls weren’t returned.
It’s not clear if the officers involved received disciplinary action, but it appears they’re still on duty in the city.
Police are charging Ortiz with public intoxication and resisting arrest.
Biological ‘Computer’ Destroys Cancer Cells: Diagnostic Network Incorporated Into Human Cells
September 3rd, 2011This is interesting, especially if you liked the film, I Am Legend.
Via: Science Daily:
Researchers led by ETH professor Yaakov Benenson and MIT professor Ron Weiss have successfully incorporated a diagnostic biological “computer” network in human cells. This network recognizes certain cancer cells using logic combinations of five cancer-specific molecular factors, triggering cancer cells destruction.
Yaakov (Kobi) Benenson, Professor of Synthetic Biology at ETH Zurich, has spent a large part of his career developing biological computers that operate in living cells. His goal is to construct biocomputers that detect molecules carrying important information about cell wellbeing and process this information to direct appropriate therapeutic response if the cell is found to be abnormal. Now, together with MIT professor Ron Weiss and a team of scientists including post-doctoral scholars Zhen Xie and Liliana Wroblewska, and a doctoral student Laura Prochazka, they made a major step towards reaching this goal.
In a study that has just been published in Science, they describe a multi-gene synthetic “circuit” whose task is to distinguish between cancer and healthy cells and subsequently target cancer cells for destruction. This circuit works by sampling and integrating five intracellular cancer-specific molecular factors and their concentration. The circuit makes a positive identification only when all factors are present in the cell, resulting in a highly precise cancer detection. Researchers hope that it can serve a basis for very specific anti-cancer treatments.
Western Powers and the Oil Prize in Libya
September 3rd, 2011Imagine our shock.
Via: Guardian:
The starting pistol has been fired on bids by Britain and other western powers to secure a slice of the oil prize in Libya when France said it was “fair and logical” for its companies to benefit.
Alain Juppé, the French foreign minister, planted his flag in the sand as the Guardian was told that BP was already holding private talks with members of Libya’s interim government.
Libya is a vital energy producer, and BP had previously committed itself to spending more than $1bn on exploration plans under Muammar Gaddafi’s government.
Shell was also becoming active before the civil war broke out, as was Total of France, but the conflict over the past few months has brought the country’s existing oil production of 1.6m barrels a day – 2% of the world’s total – to a halt.
Rebel leaders had already made clear that countries active in supporting their insurrection – notably Britain and France – should expect to be treated favourably once the dust of war had settled.
But they were anxious to shut down any suggestion that firm promises had already been made to carve up the country’s only real wealth-providing industry with foreign powers or companies.
The new Tripoli government has denied the existence of a reported secret deal by which French companies would control more than a third of Libya’s oil production in return for Paris’s support for the revolution.
Now with More Hope and Change: Black Unemployment Highest in 27 Years
September 3rd, 2011Via: CNN:
The August jobs report was dismal for plenty of reasons, but perhaps most striking was the picture it painted of racial inequality in the job market.
Black unemployment surged to 16.7% in August, its highest level since 1984, while the unemployment rate for whites fell slightly to 8%, the Labor Department reported.
“This month’s numbers continue to bear out that longstanding pattern that minorities have a much more challenging time getting jobs,” said Bill Rodgers, chief economist with the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
Black unemployment has been roughly double that of whites since the government started tracking the figures in 1972.
And Now… Monsanto Corn Falls to Illinois Bugs
September 3rd, 2011Horror movie or silly video game? Nope, just more innovation from Monsanto.
Via: Bloomberg:
Monsanto Co. (MON)’s insect-killing corn is toppling over in northwestern Illinois fields, a sign that rootworms outside of Iowa may have developed resistance to the genetically modified crop, according to one scientist.
Michael Gray, an agricultural entomologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana, said he’s studying whether western corn rootworms collected last month in Henry and Whiteside counties are resistant to an insect-killing protein derived from Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, a natural insecticide engineered into Monsanto corn.
The insects were collected in two fields where corn had toppled after roots were eaten by rootworms, Gray said today. Planting Bt corn year after year increases the odds that the bugs will develop resistance to the insecticide, he said. While the symptoms parallel bug resistance that’s been confirmed in Iowa, analysis of the Illinois insects won’t be complete until next year, he said.
“Whatever is the cause, it is generating a lot of concern.” Gray said in a telephone interview. “I wouldn’t say at this point it’s just an isolated field here or there.”
Related: Monsanto ‘Technology’ Breeding Superweeds and Pesticide Resistant Root Worms
Research Credit: EB
Gold Filling the Gap
September 2nd, 2011Warning: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
Flashback: “There’s more to that 38.2% level than meets the eye.”
Ok, here’s the current chart:
Spot Gold, Daily Interval
Now, longside could get rough headed back into the retest of $1912. Short termers: Get ready to lock it in, hedge it, pare it down, close it out, etc. etc. going into that high.
Homeland Security: The Decade’s Biggest Scam
September 2nd, 2011Via: Salon:
The Los Angeles Times examines the staggering sums of money expended on patently absurd domestic “homeland security” projects: $75 billion per year for things such as a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar to respond to a potential attack on a lake in tiny Keith County, Nebraska, and hundreds of “9-ton BearCat armored vehicles, complete with turret” to guard against things like an attack on DreamWorks in Los Angeles. All of that — which is independent of the exponentially greater sums spent on foreign wars, occupations, bombings, and the vast array of weaponry and private contractors to support it all — is in response to this mammoth, existential, the-single-greatest-challenge-of-our-generation threat:
“The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It’s basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year,” said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.
Last year, McClatchy characterized this threat in similar terms: “undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism.” The March, 2011, Harper’s Index expressed the point this way: “Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 — Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29.” That’s the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans — even as they face massive wealth inequality — are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints.
Despite these increasing economic insecurities — actually, precisely because of them — the sprawling domestic Security State continues unabated.
Research Credit: noncompliant
WikiLeaks: Iraqi Children in U.S. Raid Handcuffed, Shot In Head, U.N. Says
September 2nd, 2011Via: McClatchy:
A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.
The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks’ website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.
But Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.
Related: WikiLeaks Makes All Its U.S. Diplomatic Cables Public
