"Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found."The study under discussion (Benson et al. 2006) is a multi-year, multi-thousand participant study that examined the effect of prayer on patients undergoing heart surgery. The study treats its subject matter with deadly seriousness; I'm not a medical doctor, but from what I can tell the methods in the study were clean, precise, and exactly what I'd look for in any study of a possible medical treatment.
The animation runs at ten frames per second - one frame for each day [of the war in Iraq] - and a single black dot indicates the geographic location that a coalition military fatality occurred. Each dot starts as a white flash and a larger red dot which fades to black over the span of 30 frames/days, and then slowly fades to grey over the span of the entire war.This goes well with the Washington Post's Faces of the Fallen project.
Accompanying the visual representation is a soft 'tic' sound for each fatality, the volume of which increases relative to the number of fatalities that occurred simultaneously that day. More deaths in a smaller area produces visually deeper reds and audibly more pronounced 'tic's.
Downtown Baghdad: We took this photo of dowtown Baghdad while we were in Iraq. Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But, each day the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it - in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism.There's only one problem: posters on DailyKos have determined that the picture was actually taken in Bakirkoy, a suburb of Istanbul, Turkey. Here's a picture of the same neighborhood taken by Faruk and posted on the wowTurkey.com website:
The bill of death appeared overnight on Thursday, addressed to "the Palestinian traitors," and the killers were specific in their intent.Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Atrocity in Baghdad - Another article in the New York Times about the current state of Iraq:
"We warn you that we will eliminate you all if you don't leave the area for good within 10 days," the leaflet said. It was signed by a group calling itself the Judgment Day Battalion, and it was scattered in front of the homes of Palestinians in Al Hurriya, a northern Baghdad neighborhood.
Mohannad al-Azawi had just finished sprinkling food in his bird cages at his pet shop in south Baghdad, when three carloads of gunmen pulled up.Bush shuns Patriot Act requirement:
In front of a crowd, he was grabbed by his shirt and driven off.
Mr. Azawi was among the few Sunni Arabs on the block, and, according to witnesses, when a Shiite friend tried to intervene, a gunman stuck a pistol to his head and said, "You want us to blow your brains out, too?"
Mr. Azawi's body was found the next morning at a sewage treatment plant. A slight man who raised nightingales, he had been hogtied, drilled with power tools and shot.
In the last month, hundreds of men have been kidnapped, tortured and executed in Baghdad. As Iraqi and American leaders struggle to avert a civil war, the bodies keep piling up. The city's homicide rate has tripled from 11 to 33 a day, military officials said.
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What frightens Iraqis most about these gangland-style killings is the impunity. According to reports filed by family members and more than a dozen interviews, many men were taken in daylight, in public, with witnesses all around. Few cases, if any, have been investigated.
When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.Memos Reveal War Crimes Warnings:
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Bush signed the bill with fanfare at a White House ceremony March 9, calling it ''a piece of legislation that's vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American people." But after the reporters and guests had left, the White House quietly issued a ''signing statement," an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.
In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would ''impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties.
The White House's top lawyer warned more than two years ago that U.S. officials could be prosecuted for "war crimes" as a result of new and unorthodox measures used by the Bush administration in the war on terrorism, according to an internal White House memo and interviews with participants in the debate over the issue.Senate hearing set on move to censure Bush - Senator Feingold's resolution to censure President Bush will be the subject of a hearing next Friday in the Senate Judiciary committee.
The concern about possible future prosecution for war crimes—and that it might even apply to Bush adminstration officials themselves— is contained in a crucial portion of an internal January 25, 2002, memo by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales obtained by NEWSWEEK. It urges President George Bush declare the war in Afghanistan, including the detention of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, exempt from the provisions of the Geneva Convention.
In the memo, the White House lawyer focused on a little known 1996 law passed by Congress, known as the War Crimes Act, that banned any Americans from committing war crimes—defined in part as "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions. Noting that the law applies to "U.S. officials" and that punishments for violators "include the death penalty," Gonzales told Bush that "it was difficult to predict with confidence" how Justice Department prosecutors might apply the law in the future. This was especially the case given that some of the language in the Geneva Conventions—such as that outlawing "outrages upon personal dignity" and "inhuman treatment" of prisoners—was "undefined."
In a mobilization that far exceeded the expectations of organizers, hundreds of thousands of people rallied in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday to protest legislation in Congress that would tighten enforcement against undocumented immigrants and erect more walls along the southern border.Online sexual material is obscene if any community in US objects:
...
The proposal that inspired the protests already has passed in the House of Representatives and is expected to be debated by the Senate this week. It includes strict measures that would make it a felony for immigrants to be in the United States without proper documentation, and it imposes criminal penalties on those who employ illegal immigrants. It would also finance the construction of tall fences along roughly one-third of the U.S.-Mexican border to try to stop illegal crossings.
The Supreme Court of the United States has declined to overturn an important case about obscenity and the Internet, leaving anyone who publishes sexual material on the Internet in uncertainty about whether they're open to federal penalties.
At stake is the obscenity section of the Communications Decency Act, which bans publishing "obscene" material on the net. The problem is that US courts use "local standards" to determine whether something is obscene -- so if in the eyes of some local community, the material is obscene, then you can't distribute it there.
...
By turning down this case, the Supremes have said that the whole country is now subject to the decency standards from its most conservative, anti-sex, anti-nudity corners; that the local standard from that place will become the national standard.
Glass of milkEven if you haven't gotten to go to one of their concerts, how could you not love a band that sings about the high metabolic rates of endotherms?
Standing in between extinction in the cold
and explosive radiating growth
So the warm blood flows
Through the large four-chambered heart
Maintaining the very high metabolism rate they have
Mammal, mammal
Their names are called
They raise a paw
The bat, the cat
Dolphin and dog
Koala bear and hog
One of us might lose his hair
But you're reminded that it once was there
From the embryonic whale to the monkey with no tail
So the warm blood flows
With the red blood cells lacking nuclei
Through the large four-chambered heart
Maintaining the very high metabolism rate they have
Mammal, mammal
Their names are called
They raise a paw
The bat, the cat
Dolphin and dog
Koala bear and hog
Placental the sister of her brother Marsupial
Their cousin called Monotreme
Dead uncle Allotheria
Mammal, mammal
Their names are called
They raise a paw
The bat, the cat
Dolphin and dog
Koala bear and hog
The fox, the ox
Giraffe and shrew
Echidna, caribou
"We've gotten more money from student government associations than we've gotten from the federal government."Shortly later he clarified that while they have received promises of funding,
"To date we've not received one federal penny."Stunning.
A cow in Alabama has tested positive for mad cow disease, the Agriculture Department said Monday, confirming the third U.S. case of the brain-wasting ailment. The cow did not enter the food supply for people or animals, officials said. The animal, unable to walk, was killed by a local veterinarian and buried on the farm.Government to Scale Back Mad Cow Testing - In a completely paradoxical move, the day after it was announced that yet another cow in the US had mad cow disease, the government announced that it would reduce the number of cows tested for the disease. One of their rationales? Focus groups determined that people felt beef was safe. We're now doing science by focus group?
...
The local vet examined the Alabama cow's teeth and said the animal was older, "quite possibly upwards of 10 years of age," Clifford said. Investigators are working to pinpoint the cow's age, he said.
The age of the cow is important because the U.S. put safeguards in place nine years ago to prevent the disease from spreading. The U.S. banned ground-up cattle remains from being added to cattle feed in 1997. Eating contaminated feed is the only way cattle are known to contract the disease.
Despite the confirmation of a third case of mad cow disease, the government intends to scale back testing for the brain-wasting disorder blamed for the deaths of more than 150 people in Europe.ACLU Releases First Concrete Evidence of FBI Spying Based Solely on Groups’ Anti-War Views:
The Agriculture Department boosted its surveillance after finding the first case of mad cow disease in the United States in 2003. About 1,000 tests are run daily, up from about 55 daily in 2003.
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Officials haven't finalized new levels, but the department's budget proposal calls for 40,000 tests annually, or about 110 daily.
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Consumer groups want every animal to be tested, said Gary Weber, head of regulatory affairs for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association in Denver.
"It's not cost-effective; it's not necessary," Weber said. "The consumers we've done focus groups with are comfortable that this is a very rare disease and we've got safeguards in place."
Two documents released today reveal that the FBI investigated gatherings of the Thomas Merton Center for Peace & Justice just because the organization opposed the war in Iraq. Although previously disclosed documents show that the FBI is retaining files on anti-war groups, these documents are the first to show conclusively that the rationale for FBI targeting is the group's opposition to the war."A Recent Surge In Violence..." - A post on Democratic Underground cataloging how many times since the invasion of Iraq the US government has said that there has been "a recent surge in violence."
Although the world is now sadly familiar with images of naked, hooded prisoners in scenes of horrifying humiliation and abuse, this is the first time that the full dossier of the Army's own photographic evidence of the scandal has been made public. Most of the photos have already been seen, but the Army's own analysis of the story behind the photos has never been fully told. It is a shocking, night-by-night record of three months inside Abu Ghraib's notorious cellblock 1A, and it tells the story, in more graphic detail than ever before, of the rampant abuse of prisoners there. The annotated archive also includes new details about the role of the CIA, military intelligence and the CID itself in abuse captured by cameras in the fall of 2003.Third Democratic senator backs censure resolution - One of my state senators has decided to back Feingold's resolution (that I posted about last week) to censure president Bush.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has become the third U.S. senator to back a move to censure President Bush over the warrantless wiretapping program. She joins Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI)Reporters covering anti-IED tech: America's enemies? - BoingBoing refutes the Bush administration's recent argument that the LA Times is "helping the terrorists" by writing about the military.
Stymied by Republican resistance, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's hope of placing the most comprehensive rebuilding project in California history on the June ballot foundered Wednesday amid recriminations among legislative leaders and the administration.And, in a week where the headlines read things like U.S.-led raid kills civilians in Iraq, U.S. launches largest Iraqi air assault since invasion, and More than 80 dead in apparent reprisals: Bodies found around Baghdad in 30-hour period, we also see this headline: Bush: Iraq turning away from 'the abyss'. Is there some disconnect here?
The California Assembly approved only a $4.1-billion borrowing plan to shore up the state's levees and $19 billion more for school construction. But late Wednesday night, the Senate declined to act on either measure, and the upper house's leaders said further negotiations would have to focus on the November ballot.
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GOP legislators, almost all of whom are more conservative than the governor, objected to the idea that the state should go deep into debt to pay for the ambitious building project.
Schwarzenegger proposed a sweeping infrastructure improvement plan in January that involved $68 billion in borrowing. The centerpiece of that proposal was the most popular, according to public opinion polls: a $12-billion investment in upgrading California's highways.
Through appreciation of "“insects in art and the art of being an insect"”, the Pestival aims to create positive PR for this 400-million-year-old, highly evolved taxon that has had thousands of years of bad press.I would so love to go to this! I do have pictures ... too bad it's on the wrong continent.
We are building up a fantastic programme of talks, demonstrations, workshops, art installations, films, music and performance, fusing art and science to reach out to a broad, interested audience of homo sapien adults and children.
Problems with the fledgling [Iraqi police] force have been exacerbated by a lack of steady oversight, some U.S. officials say. For much of the last three years, U.S. advisors to the police units have been stretched thin as the United States focused on training Iraqi army recruits. That has led to a police force that has access to modern equipment, weapons and vehicles, but no track record of keeping control of its hardware, much less its personnel, the officials say.Senate Votes to Ban Gifts and Meals of Lobbyists:
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Despite the planned overhaul, the training programs remain an exercise with extremely high stakes and little certainty of success.
The focus on the Iraqi army meant that while thousands of Iraqi and U.S. soldiers shared space at military bases and conducted joint operations throughout last year, by the end of 2005 there were only 700 U.S. police trainers for an Iraqi police force of more than 100,000.
Trainers now acknowledge that was a mistake that allowed the Interior Ministry forces to grow into an inscrutable bureaucracy of overlapping jurisdictions and tangled lines of authority.
Facing accusations that lawmakers are not serious about breaking the tight bond between Capitol Hill and K Street, the Senate voted Wednesday to bar members of Congress and their aides from accepting gifts and meals from lobbyists.Possible U.S. case of mad cow being investigated:
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The meals and gifts ban was part of a broader piece of legislation that includes provisions requiring lawmakers to disclose privately financed trips and that would double, from one year to two, the "cooling-off period" during which lawmakers who leave Capitol Hill for K Street are barred from lobbying their former colleagues.
The measure would also create a mechanism enabling lawmakers to strip so-called earmarks — the special interest projects that are sometimes inserted into bills at the behest of lobbyists — from legislation. And it would require, for the first time, the disclosure of big, paid grass-roots lobbying campaigns aimed at influencing government officials.
A routine test indicated the possible presence of mad cow disease, said John Clifford, the USDA official. The agency would not say where the animal was from.US issues biometric passports despite concerns - (via BoingBoing)
The cow did not enter the human or animal food chain, Clifford said.
The department is conducting more detailed tests at its laboratory in Ames, Iowa, and should have results in four to seven days.
The US has begun issuing passports that contain biometric information stored on remotely readable microchips, in spite of lingering security and privacy concerns.Feingold to Introduce Resolution Censuring the President - In addition to the summary (included below), the press release from Senator Feingold's office also includes a fact-sheet detailing why the president's warrantless wiretapping program is illegal, complete with quotes from Bush (before the program was made public) showing that he was likely misleading the public.
Supporters of the new passports say they enhance border security, reduce the possibility of identity fraud and impose minimal burdens on travellers – all goals the US has been working towards since the September 11 attacks.
But civil liberties and privacy groups are uneasy about the formation of biometric information databases on US citizens and concerned that identity-theft rings, foreign government agents or even terrorist groups could "skim" information from the RFID chips or "eavesdrop" on the communication between official readers and the microchips.
Last month, security concerns about the new passports arose anew after a Dutch television programme detailed how, in July 2005, the Dutch security laboratory Riscure successfully penetrated the encryption scheme planned for use in forthcoming Dutch electronic passports.
U.S. Senator Russ Feingold has announced that he will introduce a resolution in the U.S. Senate on Monday to censure the President of the United States. Feingold’s resolution condemns the President’s actions in authorizing the illegal wiretapping program and then misleading the country about the existence and legality of the program. Feingold calls the resolution an appropriate and responsible step for Congress to take in response to the President’s undermining of the separation of powers and ignoring the rule of law.
"The President must be held accountable for authorizing a program that clearly violates the law and then misleading the country about its existence and its legality," Feingold said. "The President’s actions, as well as his misleading statements to both Congress and the public about the program, demand a serious response. If Congress does not censure the President, we will be tacitly condoning his actions, and undermining both the separation of powers and the rule of law."
Moya (Farscape) | 100% | ||
Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) | 94% | ||
Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) | 94% | ||
Serenity (Firefly) | 94% | ||
Enterprise D (Star Trek) | 81% | ||
Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) | 69% | ||
Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) | 69% | ||
Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) | 69% | ||
SG-1 (Stargate) | 69% | ||
Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) | 63% | ||
Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) | 50% | ||
FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) | 50% |
The Senate Republicans completely capitulated today to the Bush Administration, sacrificing our privacy and scores of personal rights and liberties to provide approval, after the fact, to the Bush warrantless wiretapping program. A group of "moderate" Republicans have joined Senator Dewine of Ohio in support of a bill to allow warrantless wiretapping ...Apparently the Republican bill includes some provisions to strengthen the FISA court, but as Rep. Conyers says:
... if you don't get penalized for ignoring the court in the first place, where's the incentive to now begin obeying the law? This is absolutely disgraceful.Oh, and did anyone mention that the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program is almost certainly illegal?
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