The Agonist - News

Hackers steal electronic data from top climate research center

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:14:41 -0800

Juliet Eilperin | November 21

Washington Post -
Scientists' e-mails deriding skeptics of warming become public

Hackers broke into the electronic files of one of the world's foremost climate research centers this week and posted an array of e-mails in which prominent scientists engaged in a blunt discussion of global warming research and disparaged climate-change skeptics.

The skeptics have seized upon e-mails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Britain as evidence that scientific data have been rigged to make it appear as if humans are causing global warming. The researchers, however, say the e-mails have been taken out of context and merely reflect an honest exchange of ideas.

University officials confirmed the data breach, which involves more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents, but said they could not say how many of the stolen items were authentic.

Researcher's labour of love leads to breakthrough in treating MS

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:03:32 -0800

André Picard and Avis Favaro | November 21

Globe & Mail - New way of thinking about debilitating disease has yielded stunning new treatments – but MS societies urge sufferers to be cautious before experimenting

Elena Ravalli was a seemingly healthy 37-year-old when she began to experience strange attacks of vertigo, numbness, temporary vision loss and crushing fatigue. They were classic signs of multiple sclerosis, a potentially debilitating neurological disease.

It was 1995 and her husband, Paolo Zamboni, a professor of medicine at the University of Ferrara in Italy, set out to help. He was determined to solve the mystery of MS – an illness that strikes people in the prime of their lives but whose causes are unknown and whose effective treatments are few.

What he learned in his medical detective work, scouring dusty old books and using ultra-modern imaging techniques, could well turn what we know about MS on its head: Dr. Zamboni's research suggests that MS is not, as widely believed, an autoimmune condition, but a vascular disease. More at the link.

Ten-year-old Arkansas girl Tasered by police

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:47:20 -0800

Ozark, Ark | November 20

Examiner - A police officer In Ozark, Arkansas could face criminal charges after he Tasered a combative ten-year-old girl last week.

According to a police report, Officer Dustin Bradshaw was responding to the girl’s home on November 11 because the girl refused to go to bed. Bradshaw reported the girl was acting violently, even hitting and kicking officers as they tried to move her.

Court respite for Blackwater guard

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 07:01:05 -0800

Associated Press | November 21

Al Jazeera -
The US justice department intends to drop manslaughter and weapons charges against one of the Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a deadly 2007 Baghdad shooting, according to court documents.

A one-paragraph notice filed on Friday says only that prosecutors have asked that the case against Nicholas Slatten be dropped.

The government's detailed request to the court was filed with the judge and with the defendant, but was not made public.

The shooting in Nisoor Square left 17 Iraqis dead and inflamed anti-American sentiment abroad.

Five cities that will rise in the New Economy

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:08:52 -0800

Ron Scherer | Fort Collins, CO | Nov 20

CSM - From Seattle to Huntsville, Ala., five cities are poised to prosper in the New Economy because of exports, innovation, clean technology, and healthcare.

In Houston, the Texas Medical Center is expanding so quickly that it will soon become the seventh largest downtown in the US. By itself. The hospital complex brims with restaurants, shops, and hotels, and employs 100,000 people – the population of Billings, Mont.

In Seattle, the erector-set cranes along the waterfront and big forklifts at the airport are loading exports into containers with the constancy of a piston: plywood to Beijing, halibut and crab to Tokyo, Granny Smith apples to Moscow. Last year, Washington was the only state to ship more goods to China than it receives.

In Fort Collins, Colo., town fathers are aggressively transforming the heart of the city into a zone that generates as much electricity as it consumes – making it a showcase for the city’s quest to become the Silicon Valley of clean energy.

As the United States emerges from the worst recession in 80 years, a new economy is taking root that will help create the next tier of powerhouse cities in America. Just as the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s and the Information Age of the past 40 years helped shift the urban and regional balance of power in the US, forces are now at work that will shape who prospers in the economy of tomorrow.

No one yet knows the exact contours of the New Economy. It is more Monet than Rembrandt. But experts say that certain characteristics are already visible on the canvas that will give cities advantages in attracting new jobs and industries.

Tamiflu-resistant strain of swine flu spreading

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:01:59 -0800

Owen Bowcott | Nov 21

The Guardian - Doctors in Wales have discovered a Tamiflu-resistant strain of swine flu that has been spreading from patient to patient in a Cardiff hospital.

The emergence of an easily transmissible, resistant strain is a worrying development for health officials and appears to be the first documented case in Europe.

Five patients at University Hospital Wales, in Cardiff, were infected and isolated for treatment. All had severe underlying conditions that left them with weakened immune systems. At least three had acquired the infection in hospital.

Dr Roland Salmon, the director of the communicable disease surveillance centre in Wales, said: "The emergence of [H1N1] viruses that are resistant to Tamiflu is not unexpected in patients with serious underlying conditions and suppressed immune systems, who still test positive for the virus despite treatment.

"In this case, the resistant strain of swine flu does not appear to be any more severe than the swine flu virus that has been circulating since April."

UK: 'No need' to keep troops in Germany

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:41:06 -0800

Nov 21

Press Association - British troops could be withdrawn from Germany for good, nearly 70 years after the end of the Second World War, if the Conservatives win the general election.

Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox said it was "no longer necessary" to maintain the presence of more than 20,000 military personnel.

Ending the commitment would free up forces to carry out vital Nato operations outside of Europe, he insisted.

And in the US Lou Dobbs want you to sign his petiton to bring home all US troops from everywhere.

Generations of squaddies and their families have passed through Germany, although the size has been scaled down over the years. The presence is now centred on Herford near Hanover, where the 1st Armoured Division is based.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Dr Fox signalled his determination to conduct a "wholesale recasting of our foreign and defence policy".

He wants new Nato member states from eastern and central Europe, particularly Poland, to take over Britain's commitments in Germany and free British troops to be deployed elsewhere.

Canadian parents win legal battle against homework

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:35:38 -0800

Nov 21

The Guardian - Usually it is the children, not the parents, who are loath to spend their evenings practising spelling and learning times tables. But a Canadian couple have just won a legal battle to exempt their offspring from homework after successfully arguing there is no clear evidence it improves academic performance.

Shelli and Tom Milley, two lawyers from Calgary, Alberta, launched their highly unusual case after years of struggling to make their three reluctant children do school work out of the classroom.

After waging a long war with their eldest son, Jay, now 18, over his homework, they decided to do things differently with their youngest two, Spencer, 11, and Brittany, 10. And being lawyers, they decided to make it official.

Sri Lanka Tamil refugee camps 'to be opened next month'

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:17:17 -0800

Nov 21

BBC - The Sri Lankan government says people living in camps since the conflict with Tamil Tiger rebels will have freedom of movement as of next month.

The camps were set up to house Tamils fleeing the final stages of the 25-year civil war which ended in May.

The special adviser to President Mahinda Rajapaksa also confirmed an earlier promise to close the camps, which still house 130,000 people.

He said all the residents would be resettled by the end of January.

UC Berkeley protest ends with 41 arrests

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:22:12 -0800

Sandra Gonzales | Berkeley, CA | November 20

San Jose Mercury News - In a striking scene of civil disobedience, dozens of students barricaded themselves inside a UC Berkeley building for more than 11 hours Friday to protest a 32 percent increase in student fees.

The dramatic display ended Friday evening with dozens of arrests, climaxing a week of civil unrest mirrored at other campuses around the state, including Davis and Santa Cruz, where hundreds marched for the third day Friday to decry one of the biggest fee hikes in UC history.

But it seemed unlikely that the protests are having any impact. Repeated budget cuts to the 10-campus system forced UC regents this week to raise the cost of an undergraduate education above $10,000 a year by next fall, triple the cost of a decade ago. The move followed a 10 percent hike earlier this year, employee furloughs and other cuts that UC leaders say are necessary because of a 20 percent drop in state funding.

Still, students continued to try to make their voices heard.

"We have tried going to Sacramento, we've tried less direct and less confrontational ways of getting our voices heard," said UC Davis student Laura Mitchell of Palo Alto, who on Thursday joined a march of hundreds of students to the campus administration building, Mrak Hall. On Wednesday, police arrested 51 protesters there.

The guru with a gift for brainwashing

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:24:52 -0800

John Litchfield & Kevin Rawlinson | Paris | Nov 21

The Independent - How did a self-styled master-spy persuade a French aristocrat family to give up their freedom and fortune and join his 'crusade against evil'?

Thierry Tilly looks like a geography teacher or a chartered accountant, or a French version of Bill Gates. He claims, variously, to be a Nato "master-spy", a confidant of presidents and prime ministers, a financial genius, a 21st-century representative of an ancient, secret order descended from the Knights Templar and a man with superhuman powers sworn to fight the forces of evil.

He is now in a French prison, refusing to answer questions on possible charges of kidnap, brutality and torture. Seven or eight of his followers, from three generations of a French aristocratic family, are living in Oxford, Tilly's base for the past nine years. One of them, formerly a gynaecologist, is working as a gardener. Others have jobs in fast-food restaurants. Until 2006, 11 members of the family had spent five years barricaded in their château at Monflanquin, 100 miles east of Bordeaux.

Their relatives say they remain under the spell of a lurid fantasy, which might have been torn from the pages of a Dan Brown thriller. They have been convinced by Tilly that their family – the De Védrines, part of the Protestant nobility of south-west France for 300 years – has been chosen to struggle against supreme evil by an ancient order called L'Equilibre du Monde (The Balance of the World). Lawyers and relatives say they refuse to accept that they have been duped and fleeced of the family fortune of up to €5m (£4.5m) by an unscrupulous, possibly deranged but mysteriously effective con-man.

Angry landlords in Oxford, owed tens of thousands of pounds by Tilly and his followers, say the De Védrines, aged from 96 to 24, are not necessarily all victims. Some members of the clan, they say, have become Tilly's willing accomplices.

Beam circles 'Big Bang' machine

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:06:08 -0800

Paul Rincon | Large Hadron Collider | November 20

BBC - Engineers have sent proton particles all the way round the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine for the first time in more than a year.

But they still do not have a stable circulating beam; this step is expected to happen after 0600 GMT on Saturday.

The LHC is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel some 100m beneath the French-Swiss border.

It will smash together beams of protons in a bid to shed light on the nature of the Universe.

Circulation of LHC Beams Could Resume in Earnest over the Weekend

The lab that operates the oft-delayed particle collider is ready to put it to work

Scientific American, By John Matson, November 20

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, is drawing near to its long-awaited reboot. More than a year after the European collider's initial start-up was quashed by a helium leak caused by a faulty electrical connection, particle beams have been injected into the collider, known as the LHC, and may guided fully through its rings in the coming hours.

"We're hoping to have beam overnight in the LHC," James Gillies, a spokesperson for CERN, the European particle physics lab that operates the LHC, said Friday. "So all being well, we will wake up tomorrow morning and there will be circulating beams." By 3:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on Friday, a beam had completed a full lap of the tunnel in the clockwise direction, with a counterclockwise beam still to come, according to CERN's Twitter feed.

Proton beams have been run through segments of the collider's 27-kilometer underground circumference near Geneva this fall, but putting the entirety of the collider ring through its paces as is now under way will be a much truer test of the machine's fortitude. In September 2008, it was just nine days after beam circulation that the LHC experienced its crippling breakdown. Since that time the LHC's minders have been dealing with the fallout from the helium leak, painstakingly repairing, upgrading and recommissioning the machine to get it back in working order and to try to forestall a repeat incident.

If all goes according to plan, the LHC's operators could break new ground with the machine in short order. "One thing we didn't do last year was use the LHC as a particle accelerator," Gillies says. "Last year we injected beams and circulated beams before we had the breakdown, but we didn't accelerate them. So once we've got a beam circulating, we'll start testing the acceleration systems of the LHC."

Although the LHC is designed to accelerate protons to a whopping 7 TeV (tera-electron-volts), CERN has long said that it plans to work the machine's energy up over time. The initial target for accelerated beams will be 1.2 TeV, which would already surpass the current top dog among particle accelerators, the Tevatron collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.

Images from the LHC Restart.

In SUSY we trust: What the LHC is really looking for

New Scientist, By Anil Ananthaswamy, November 11

AS DAMP squibs go, it was quite a spectacular one. Amid great pomp and ceremony - not to mention dark offstage rumblings that the end of the world was nigh - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's mightiest particle smasher, fired up in September last year. Nine days later a short circuit and a catastrophic leak of liquid helium ignominiously shut the machine down.

Now for take two. Any day now, if all goes to plan, proton beams will start racing all the way round the ring deep beneath CERN, the LHC's home on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland.

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg is worried. It's not that he thinks the LHC will create a black hole that will engulf the planet, or even that the restart will end in a technical debacle like last year's. No: he's actually worried that the LHC will find what some call the "God particle", the popular and embarrassingly grandiose moniker for the hitherto undetected Higgs boson.

"I'm terrified," he says. "Discovering just the Higgs would really be a crisis."

Why so? Evidence for the Higgs would be the capstone of an edifice that particle physicists have been building for half a century - the phenomenally successful theory known simply as the standard model. It describes all known particles, as well as three of the four forces that act on them: electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces.

It is also manifestly incomplete. We know from what the theory doesn't explain that it must be just part of something much bigger. So if the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing but the Higgs, the standard model will be sewn up. But then particle physics will be at a dead end, with no clues where to turn next.

Hence Weinberg's fears. However, if the theorists are right, before it ever finds the Higgs, the LHC will see the first outline of something far bigger: the grand, overarching theory known as supersymmetry. SUSY, as it is endearingly called, is a daring theory that doubles the number of particles needed to explain the world. And it could be just what particle physicists need to set them on the path to fresh enlightenment.

Philip Morris ordered to pay $300 million to smoker

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:05:33 -0800

Gina Keating & Carol Bishopric | Los Angeles | November 20

Reuters - A Florida jury on Thursday ordered cigarette maker Philip Morris USA to pay $300 million in damages to a 61-year-old ex-smoker named Cindy Naugle who is wheelchair-bound by emphysema.

The Broward Circuit Court jury assessed $56.6 million in past and future medical expenses against the company, part of Altria Group Inc, as well as $244 million in punitive damages.

The verdict is the largest of the so-called Engle progeny cases that have been tried so far, both sides said.

Philip Morris will seek further review of the verdict because of "numerous erroneous rulings by the trial judge," Philip Morris spokesman Murray Garnick said in a statement.

"We believe that the punitive damages award is grossly excessive and a clear violation of constitutional and state law," Garnick said.

House Financial Services Committee Passes Paul-Grayson Amendment to Audit the Fed

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:33:48 -0800

Michael Smallberg | Nov 20

POGO - The House Financial Services Committee voted 43-26 yesterday afternoon in favor of an amendment introduced by Reps. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Alan Grayson (D-FL) that would remove restrictions preventing the GAO from auditing the Federal Reserve. The amendment was modeled after Rep. Paul’s long-standing bill to audit the Fed, which was co-sponsored by over 300 Members in the House and supported by POGO and many other groups.

The vote on the final passage of the financial regulatory package to which the Paul-Grayson amendment is attached has been delayed until after Thanksgiving. Nonetheless, yesterday’s vote signals a defeat for Rep. Mel Watt (D-NC), who had introduced an alternative amendment that would have limited the scope of the GAO’s audits.

Kudos to FDL: FDL Statement on the Committee Passage of H.R. 1207, the Paul-Grayson Bill to Audit the Fed

Canadian diplomat alleges troops in Afghanistan were complicit in torture

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:01:08 -0800

Julian Borger | Halifax | Nov 20

The Guardian - The Canadian government was fending off calls for a public inquiry on torture today after allegations from one of its senior diplomats that Canada was complicit in the torture of Afghan detainees.

Richard Colvin, who was second in command at Canada's Kabul embassy in 2006 and 2007, said that Afghans swept up in security sweeps by Canadian troops during that time were routinely handed over to the Afghan intelligence services.

"According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured," Colvin told Canada's parliament. "For interrogators in Kandahar, it was standard operating procedure.

"In other words, we detained, and handed over for severe torture, a lot of innocent people."

Colvin said his frequent memos about the abuse were ignored and that senior officials attempted to cover up Canada's complicity until prisoner transfer procedures were changed in 2007, partly as a result of his complaints.