To interrupt the utility of bridges, tunnels, highways, railroads, Switzerland has established three thousand points of demolition. That is the number officially printed. It has been suggested to me that to approximate a true figure a reader ought to multiply by two. Where a highway bridge crosses a railroad, a segment of the bridge is programmed to drop on the railroad. Primacord fuses are built into the bridge. Hidden artillery is in place on either side, set to prevent the enemy from clearing or repairing the damage.]]>
Near the German border of Switzerland, every railroad and highway tunnel has been prepared to pinch shut explosively. Nearby mountains have been made so porous that whole divisions can fit inside them. There are weapons and soldiers under barns. There are cannons inside pretty houses. Where Swiss highways happen to run on narrow ground between the edges of lakes and to the bottoms of cliffs, man-made rockslides are ready to slide.
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A court in Germany has ruled that circumcising young boys for religious reasons amounts to bodily harm.]]>
In a decision that has caused outrage among Jewish and Muslim groups, the court said that a child's right to physical integrity trumps religious and parental rights.
The case involved a doctor who carried out a circumcision on a four year-old that led to medical complications.
Although male circumcision - unlike female circumcision - is not illegal in Germany, the court's judgement said the "fundamental right of the child to bodily integrity outweighed the fundamental rights of the parents".
Circumcision, it decided, contravenes "interests of the child to decide later in life on his religious beliefs".
The doctor involved in the case was acquitted and the ruling is not binding, but correspondents say it sets a precedent that would be taken into account by other German courts.
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The Kansas State Board of Healing Arts, the governing body that regulates the practice of medicine in the state, stripped the medical license of a woman who refused to force a mentally-ill 10 year old to give birth.
As Robin Marty reports, Dr. Ann Neuhaus became the target of domestic terror group Operation Rescue after her colleague, Dr. George Tiller, was murdered. Neuhaus assisted Tiller by providing second opinions for mental health exceptions for late-term abortions.
Operation Rescue filed a negligence complaint against Neuhaus alleging that her exams were not thorough enough to support her medical conclusions and her follow-up care was inadequate because she did not recommend counseling or hospitalization after each procedure.
Neuhaus offered a rebuttal of her own. “To even claim that isn’t medically necessary qualifies as gross incompetence,” said Neuhaus. “Someone’s 10 years old, and they were raped by their uncle and they understand that they’ve got a baby growing in their stomach and they don’t want that. You’re going to send this girl for a brain scan and some blood work and put her in a hospital?”
Like other states Kansas has made recent attempts to stack their medical review board with anti-choice advocates like former Operation Rescue attorney Richard Macias. When hearing the case against Dr. Neuhaus, the board offered up their own expert to determine if any breach of the standard of care occurred. Not surprisingly, the witnessed insisted that in no cases is abortion a treatment that could be seen as beneficial to a patient’s mental health, further clouding the waters as to the kind of care girls and women can expect in the state of Kansas.
Nuehaus will appeal the ruling. If she loses she will have her license permanently revoked.
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An eerie "red crucifix" seen in Britain's evening sky in ad 774 may be a previously unrecognized supernova explosion — and could explain a mysterious spike in carbon-14 levels in that year's growth rings in Japanese cedar trees. The link is suggested today in a Nature Correspondence by a US undergraduate student with a broad interdisciplinary background and a curious mind]]>
The Laser-Induced Plasma Channel (LIPC) is designed to hit targets that conduct electricity better than the air or ground that surrounds them.
The weapon went through extensive testing in January.
American researchers took control of a flying drone by hacking into its GPS system - acting on a $1,000 (£640) dare from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).]]>
UTC TIME STEP]]>
on the 1st of July 2012
A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2012.
The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be:
2012 June 30, 23h 59m 59s
2012 June 30, 23h 59m 60s
2012 July 1, 0h 0m 0s
The difference between UTC and the International Atomic Time TAI is:
from 2009 January 1, 0h UTC, to 2012 July 1 0h UTC : UTC-TAI = - 34s
from 2012 July 1, 0h UTC, until further notice : UTC-TAI = - 35s
Leap seconds can be introduced in UTC at the end of the months of December
or June, depending on the evolution of UT1-TAI. Bulletin C is mailed every
six months, either to announce a time step in UTC or to confirm that there
will be no time step at the next possible date.
Daniel GAMBIS
Head
Earth Orientation Center of IERS
Observatoire de Paris, France
Grinning and waving, 14 women who survived the horrors of World War II have paraded in an unusual pageant, vying for the honour of being crowned Israel's first "Miss Holocaust Survivor".
"They are armed and have surrounded the sites with pick-up trucks. The population is just looking on helplessly," said a local journalist, Yeya Tandina.
Tandina and other witnesses said Ansar Dine had already destroyed the mausoleums of three local saints – Sidi Mahmoud, Sidi el-Mokhtar and Alfa Moya – and at least seven tombs.
"The mausoleum doesn't exist any more and the cemetery is as bare as a soccer pitch," a local teacher, Abdoulaye Boulahi, said of the Mahmoud burial place.
BAMAKO — Islamist rebels in northern Mali took hoes and chisels to the tombs of ancient Muslim saints in the city of Timbuktu for a second day, ignoring international pleas to halt their campaign of destruction.]]>
After smashing three ancient tombs on Saturday, the Islamist militants who consider the World Heritage shrines idolatrous, set about wrecking four mausoleums at the cemetery of Djingareyber, a local journalist told AFP.
Mali's government and the international community have expressed horror and outrage at the destruction of cultural treasures in the fabled city, an ancient desert crossroads and centre of learning known as the "City of 333 Saints".
On Saturday the Islamists destroyed the tombs of Sidi Mahmoud, Sidi Moctar and Alpha Moya, and on Sunday attacked Cheikh el-Kebir's mausoleum as residents stood by helplessly.
Crying "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great), the men circled the cemetery clasping tools such as chisels and hoes, but did not have construction vehicles that were used in Saturday's rampage.
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This may seem like something out of a science fiction movie: researchers have designed microparticles that can be injected directly into the bloodstream to quickly oxygenate your body, even if you can't breathe anymore. It's one of the best medical breakthroughs in recent years, and one that could save millions of lives every year.]]>
The invention, developed by a team at Boston Children's Hospital, will allow medical teams to keep patients alive and well for 15 to 30 minutes despite major respiratory failure. This is enough time for doctors and emergency personnel to act without risking a heart attack or permanent brain injuries in the patient.
The solution has already been successfully tested on animals under critical lung failure. When the doctors injected this liquid into the patient's veins, it restored oxygen in their blood to near-normal levels, granting them those precious additional minutes of life.
As a mental health law scholar and writer, Elyn Saks speaks for the rights of mentally ill people. It's a gray area: Too often, society's first impulse is to make decisions on their behalf. But it's a slippery slope from in loco parentis to a denial of basic human rights. Saks has brilliantly argued for more autonomy -- and in many cases for a restoral of basic human dignity.]]>
In 2007, deep into her career, she dropped a bombshell--her autobiography, The Center Cannot Hold. In it, she reveals the depth of her own schizophrenia, now controlled by drugs and therapy. Clear-eyed and honest about her own condition, the book lent her new ammunition in the quest to protect the rights and dignity of the mentally ill.
The European Parliament has voted to reject the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta).]]>
The proposed agreement sought to curb piracy, but internet campaigners said it posed a threat to online freedoms.
The rejection vote followed a failed attempt to postpone the decision because of ongoing investigations into Acta by the European Court of Justice.
Obscene images, hate sites and a game where people are invited to beat you up have been inflicted on Anita Sarkeesian.
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Rep. Valarie Hodges, R-Watson, says she had no idea that Gov. Bobby Jindal’s overhaul of the state’s educational system might mean taxpayer support of Muslim schools.]]>
“I actually support funding for teaching the fundamentals of America’s Founding Fathers’ religion, which is Christianity, in public schools or private schools,” the District 64 Representative said Monday.
…
“Unfortunately it will not be limited to the Founders’ religion,” Hodges said. “We need to insure that it does not open the door to fund radical Islam schools. There are a thousand Muslim schools that have sprung up recently. I do not support using public funds for teaching Islam anywhere here in Louisiana.”
The Bible Map of the World, 1893, by “Professor” Orlando Ferguson of Hot Springs, South Dakota.
Orlando was a geocentrist who created the map based on 400 passages in the Bible that supposedly describe what the Earth is like, and none of them supports the idea of a spherical Earth, or one that revolves around the Sun.
In a recent expose by Truthout, a female prisoner at Arizona's state prison Perryville unit described her day working as a laborer for a private company called Martori Farms.And then:
Martori Farms just happens to be one of the leading suppliers of agricultural produce to that beacon of corporate responsibility known as Walmart. Private companies and corporations have always found ways to exploit prison labor, but this tidy set-up, and the hypocrisy around it, is beyond the pale.
I asked an NCIA spokesperson, Wil Helsop, how Martori Farms and other private companies can get away with what could reasonably be described as forced labor. He explained that the PIE program classifies certain work functions as a "service" rather than an actual "job", and therefore is not subject to the criteria. Conveniently, then, the backbreaking work of picking crops in the blistering sun counts as a "service", so prisoners can be paid even less than the immigrants who have traditionally performed this work.That's right. Kick those job-stealing immigrants out of this country! We need those jobs for Americans! American prisoners who we can pay somewhere around $0.50/hr!]]>
Much of the 30km exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear plant is pine forest, and some of it so badly contaminated that a forest fire could create a devastating radioactive smoke cloud.]]>
Firefighters in Chernobyl have one of the least enviable jobs in the world.
Their equipment is very basic. They believe they know when they are fighting a radioactive fire - they experience a tingling, metallic sensation in their skin - but they do not fully understand the serious dangers of being exposed to superheated radioactive particles.
Because after all, Obamacare is all about improving the health of the American people,” the radio host explained. “We know that going to church is good for you, it’s good for your health. So we are going to mandate that you go to church for your own health and we are going to tax the atheists who don’t go to church.”]]>
Direct measurement of a dark-matter ‘filament’ confirms its existence in a galaxy supercluster.]]>
A ‘finger’ of the Universe’s dark-matter skeleton, which ultimately dictates where galaxies form, has been observed for the first time. Researchers have directly detected a slim bridge of dark matter joining two clusters of galaxies, using a technique that could eventually help astrophysicists to understand the structure of the Universe and identify what makes up the mysterious invisible substance known as dark matter.
Pakistan's only Nobel laureate helped develop the theoretical framework that led to the apparent discovery of the subatomic "God particle" last week, yet his legacy has been largely scorned in his homeland because of his religious affiliation.]]>
Adbus Salam, who died in 1996, was once hailed as a national hero for his pioneering work in physics and work that guided the early stages of Pakistan's nuclear program. Now his name is even stricken from school textbooks because he was a member of the Ahmadi sect that has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants, who view them as heretics.
- Our research proved that, during the occurrence of the northern lights, people can hear natural auroral sounds related to what they see. In the past, researchers thought that the aurora borealis was too far away for people to hear the sounds it made. This is true. However, our research proves that the source of the sounds that are associated with the aurora borealis we see is likely caused by the same energetic particles from the sun that create the northern lights far away in the sky. These particles or the geomagnetic disturbance produced by them seem to create sound much closer to the ground, said Professor Unto K. Laine from Aalto University.]]>
An unprecedented new report has detailed how the destruction of Napster chilled a decade’s worth of innovation in the music industry. Through interviews with 31 CEOs, company founders, and VPs who operated in digital music during the period, we hear how Big Music collapsed startups, turned down ‘blank check’ deals, and personally threatened innovators with ruination for both them and their families.]]>
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"The elections, in my opinion, were a very well planned 'circus', just a show," said Maricela J. Becerra, a Administrative Support Coordinator and Graduate Assistant for the California State University of Long Beach who was born in Jalisco, "There is a meme going around online that says "No me pidas que respete los resultados de un proceso que no respetaste" [Don't ask me to respect the results of a process that you didn't respect] and I think that phrase pretty much sums up the sentimiento of the people marching…My hope for Mexico is that one day we will have a real and clean democracy …and more importantly, my hope is that my compatriotas mexicanos continue to speak up, que no se conformen! Many people say that Mexicans do not care, that we are used to living in a corrupt country… it’s time we get the control of our country back, it’s time the government works for everyone and not just those with money."]]>
I do mind that they're exploiting something that is suppose to help fund people who don't have the clout or the financial backing that Penny Arcade already has [...] don't start exploiting Kickstarter and their audience.
But it seems like a retreat from business maturity to me.
More probably, the post at PA will drive a certain fraction of their (gargantuan) audience to Kickstarter to donate. I don't know if many of those people will look around and find other projects they're interested in funding, but it is evident: Popular and successful campaigns are what make Kickstarter work. They are also free advertising for Kickstarter.
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Millions of people suffering from Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson's, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injuries or amputees could soon interact with their computers and surroundings using just their eyes, thanks to a new device that costs less than £40.
Composed from off-the-shelf materials, the new device can work out exactly where a person is looking by tracking their eye movements, allowing them to control a cursor on a screen just like a normal computer mouse. The technology comprises an eye-tracking device and "smart" software that have been presented today in the Journal of Neural Engineering. Researchers from Imperial College London demonstrated its functionality by getting a group of people to play the classic computer game Pong without any kind of handset. In addition users were able to browse the web and write emails "hands-off".
On Wednesday, an Egyptian journalist died on live TV while defending Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime. The bizarre moment occurred on an Iraqi TV station during a heated on-air phone debate between the Egyptian 56-year-old, Adel Al-Gogary, and Brigadier-General Hossama, a member of the Free Syrian Army, who Al-Gogari called a "fugitive soldier" and a paid mercenary for Israel shortly before he died. According to the UAE's daily newspaper al-Bayan, he suffered from a blood clot Wednesday night and was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital in Cairo.]]>
A drop in file-sharing following a court ordered block of the Pirate Bay was short-lived, data seen by the BBC suggests.]]>
A major UK internet service provider (ISP) said peer-to-peer (P2P) activity on its network returned to just below normal only a week after the measures were enforced earlier this year.
A new type of malware is attacking computers in Iran, Israel, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia. The delivery device? An emailed attachment of my story!]]>
Discussion among eurozone leaders about the future of their single currency has become an increasingly divisive affair. On the surface, religion has nothing to do with it - but could Protestant and Catholic leaders have deep-seated instincts that lead them to pull the eurozone in different directions, until it breaks?]]>
Following the last European summit in Brussels there was much talk of defeat for Chancellor Merkel by what was described as a "new Latin Alliance" of Italy and Spain backed by France.
Many Germans protested that too much had been conceded by their government - and it might not be too far-fetched to see this as just the latest Protestant criticism of the Latin approach to matters monetary, which has deep roots in German culture, shaped by religious belief.
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In the category of no good deed goes unpunished comes the tale of Paul Gaylord, the Prineville, Ore., man who tried to save a cat choking on a mouse and is now painfully recovering from a case of the plague.
Oregon health officials have said there is no public health emergency — the disease that wiped out a third of Europe during the Middle Ages does not appear to have spread — but Gaylord just barely survived, and is likely to lose the better part of his fingers and toes to the disease.
State health officials say they believe the cat was likely infected with the plague by a flea, often carried on rodents such as mice.]]>
Oregon state public health veterinarian Emilio DeBess said authorities immediately began some detailed detective work.
“We went out and talked to the family to clarify the story as to what happened, and also to take a look at the area and look for either dead rodents or any other dead wildlife that could give us any information at all as to the possibility of there being a bigger problem in that area,” DeBess said in an interview.
“We also went to the local humane society and collected blood from cats that had been picked up in the area,” he said.
All the blood samples came back negative, which suggested there was no widespread problem to worry about.
“Is it here? Yes. Is it present at a low level? Yes, it is. There are obviously prevention tips we give individuals to try to minimize the likelihood of contact with an animal infected with plague or fleas,” he said.