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An average baby — sort of — since Yotaro is a robot. His inventors hope he will help Japan’s sagging birth rate, among the lowest in the world.

“A robot can’t be human but it’s great if this robot triggers human emotions, so humans want to have their own baby,” said Hiroki Kunimura, the project leader for the Yotaro robot.

Kunimura and his University of Tsukuba team originally built Yotaro because they wanted to create a robot that would appeal across national and cultural lines. Since a baby doesn’t have any language skills yet, they chose to build a robotic infant.

The University of Tsukuba students then started showing off Yotaro at robot competitions, and were surprised by the reactions from the public and the media.

“People asked us if this baby robot was created to tackle the low birth rate in Japan,” said Kunimura, who describes himself as Yotaro’s “daddy.”

On Thursday morning, 30 police officers swooped on the palace of the archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, sealing off buildings and removing documents.

The latest blow to the scandal-hit Roman Catholic Church disrupted a meeting of bishops taking place in the presence of the Vatican’s ambassador to Belgium, in Mechelen, just north of Brussels.

A second raid took place at the nearby home of Cardinal Godfried Danneels, 77, where police officers seized a personal computer belonging to the former head of Belgium’s Catholic Church.

A third raid took place in the city of Leuven, where police officers searched the office of the Adriaenssens committee, an independent body set up by the Church to collect and investigate abuse allegations. Over 450 files detailing abuse allegations were confiscated.

Jean-Marc Meilleur, a spokesman for the Brussels crown prosecutor’s office, said that the raids were “related to the sexual abuse of children within the Church”.

“In a recent dossier the prosecutor was informed of charges denouncing the abuse of minors by a certain number of Church people,” he said.

Hans Geybels, a spokesman for Cardinal Danneels, said that police did not interrogate him during the raid.

“They did take away his computer,” he said. “The cardinal believes justice must run its normal course. He has nothing against that.”

The investigation is thought to centre on April’s resignation of Roger Vangheluwe, Bishop of Bruges. Bishop Vangheluwe stood down after admitting to having sexually abused a young boy during the time when Cardinal Danneels was the head of the Belgian Church.

Police are now able to jail anyone who refuses to furnish identification and submit to a search while within five metres of a designated security zone in downtown Toronto.

Critics reacted furiously to the new rules, which remained unpublicized until Thursday when a 32 year-old man was arrested in Toronto for refusing to show ID to police.

New Democrat MPP Peter Kormos said Friday the provincial Liberals created a “Kafka-esque” situation where people could be arrested for violating rules they didn’t know existed.

“This is very very repugnant stuff and should be troubling to everybody,” he said.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) said it was “extremely concerned” that the new measures violate constitutional safeguards.

Nathalie Des Rosiers, general counsel for the CCLA said the changes are contrary to Canadian law.

“You don’t have any obligation to speak to Canadian police, to give your name or the reasons for your existence unless you’ve done something wrong — unless you’re being detained or arrested,” she said. “So on its face, it’s a dramatic change from what our constitution guarantees.”

On the walls were television screens, known by the special forces boys as “Kill TV”, where footage from image-intensifier cameras of the enemy being blown up by air strikes, or being gunned down by undercover hit teams was shown.

This place was “the Machine”, a state-of-the-art military command centre hidden away in an airbase in Balad, a desolate stretch of land north of Baghdad.

It was created by Major General Stanley McChrystal, the chief of United States Special Forces, the most secretive force in the American military.

Here, in the permanently darkened communications cockpit, dozens of US and British (SAS) personnel would gather around as nightly raids took place against al Qaeda and their insurgent allies.

Sometimes McChrystal would lead the raids himself, his squad of elite undercover combat troops, known as Delta Force, being told at the last minute that the commander was coming along for the ride.

No one was quite sure what the Pentagon policy was on two star generals going on such dangerous missions, but then very few people in the US Department of Defence, and even fewer outside it in Washington, were even aware of these shadowy operations going on in Iraq.

…

Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a “bleeding ulcer.” In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it’s precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn’t want.

Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it’s going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm. “It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win,” says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal. “This is going to end in an argument.”

…

After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters. He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. (McChrystal would later claim he didn’t read the recommendation closely enough – a strange excuse for a commander known for his laserlike attention to minute details.) A week later, McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman’s death. “If the circumstances of Corporal Tillman’s death become public,” he wrote, it could cause “public embarrassment” for the president.

“The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat’s true actions,” wrote Tillman’s mother, Mary, in her book Boots on the Ground by Dusk. McChrystal got away with it, she added, because he was the “golden boy” of Rumsfeld and Bush, who loved his willingness to get things done, even if it included bending the rules or skipping the chain of command. Nine days after Tillman’s death, McChrystal
was promoted to major general.

…

“They are trying to manipulate perceptions because there is no definition of victory – because victory is not even defined or recognizable,” says Celeste Ward, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who served as a political adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq in 2006. “That’s the game we’re in right now. What we need, for strategic purposes, is to create the perception that we didn’t get run off. The facts on the ground are not great, and are not going to become great in the near future.”

…

The 7-1 ruling shifts the focus of the environmental dispute to the Agriculture Department, which under today’s ruling now can consider allowing limited planting. That would be an interim measure while the USDA finishes an environmental impact statement that ultimately might clear the way for unrestricted planting.

The justices said a federal judge in San Francisco went too far when he placed a nationwide ban on so-called Roundup-ready alfalfa seeds because of the possibility they would contaminate other plants.

“An injunction is a drastic and extraordinary remedy, which should not be granted as a matter of course,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. Justice John Paul Stevens was the lone dissenter.

Today’s decision may affect a similar fight being waged over Monsanto’s Roundup-tolerant sugar beet seeds.

Alfalfa, the fourth-most-planted U.S. crop behind corn, soybeans and wheat, is worth $9 billion a year, with annual seed sales valued at $63 million, according to a USDA study. Dairy cows are the primary consumers of alfalfa hay.

Foxconn Technology Group, Nissan Motor Co.’s Chinese venture and VTech Holdings Ltd. said they are investing in factory equipment to reduce their reliance on labor. Wages in the region called the world’s factory floor increased 17 percent in the past six months, according to a survey by the government- backed Hong Kong Trade Development Council.

There has been rampant speculation about WikiLeaks’ next revelation following its recent release of a top secret military video showing an attack in Baghdad which killed more than a dozen people, including two employees of the Reuters news agency.

Bradley Manning, a US military intelligence officer based in Iraq, has been arrested on suspicion of leaking the video but it is also claimed that Manning bragged online that he had handed WikiLeaks 260,000 secret US State Department cables.

In an interview with the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent, Mr Assange said cryptically of WikiLeaks’ current project:

“I can give an analogy. If there had been mass spying that had affected many, many people and organisations and the details of that mass spying were released then that is something that would reveal that the interests of many people had been abused.”

The profile in Rolling Stone magazine, titled the “Runaway General,” is certain to increase tension between the White House and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.

It also raises fresh questions about the judgment and leadership style of the commander Obama appointed last year in an effort to turn around a worsening conflict.

McChrystal and some of his senior advisors are quoted criticizing top administration officials, at times in starkly derisive terms. An anonymous McChrystal aide is quoted calling national security adviser James Jones a “clown,” who remains “stuck in 1985.”

Referring to Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s senior envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, one McChrystal aide is quoted saying: “The Boss says he’s like a wounded animal. Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he’s going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous.”

On one occasion, McChrystal appears to react with exasperation when he receives an e-mail from Holbrooke, saying, “Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke. I don’t even want to read it.”

U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, a retired three-star general, isn’t spared. Referring to a leaked cable from Eikenberry that expressed concerns about the trustworthiness of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, McChrystal is quoted as having said: “Here’s one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, ‘I told you so.'”