The Holocaust History Project is a free archive of documents, photographs, recordings, and essays regarding the Holocaust, including direct refutation of Holocaust-denial.So, if you can, spread the word; the Holocaust History Project is a good organization that could use your help.
The new species occurs at densities of one to two individuals per 10m^2, more or less regularly spaced on the zone of pillow basalt surrounding active hydrothermal vents (Fig. 2). The species co-occurs with galatheid squat lobsters (genus Munidopsis Whiteaves, 1874), crabs (genus Bythograe Williams, 1980), vent mussels (genus Bathymodiolus Kenk & Wilson, 1985) and buccinid gastropods. Specimens of Kiwa hirsuta n. gen., n. sp. were also observed on extinct chimneys and at the base of black smokers, among vent mussels, where shimmering milky water emanates. Like other vent decapod crustaceans Kiwa hirsuta n. gen., n. sp. is probably omnivorous. Specimens were observed in situ consuming tissues of mussels damaged by submersible sampling activities.The researchers used genetic data to determine that this new crustacean is in a completely new family (Kiwaidae) contained within superfamily Galatheoidea and infraorder Anomura. The anomurans most people are likely to know are hermit crabs, which are in a different superfamily (Paguroidea) than this newly discovered species. True crabs (the kind you have likely eaten) fall into another infraorder (Brachyura), and lobsters are in yet another infraorder (Astacidea). So, in other words, this is not a new crab, lobster, or hermit crab; the closest known relatives of this new species are squat lobsters.
I have this sudden urge to email Ivan Tribble, who famously claimed in The Chronicle of Higher Education that blogging would guarantee you not getting an academic job, and tell him the news. Heh.
Homeland Security officials have said the "fog of war" blinded them early on to the magnitude of the disaster. But the video and transcripts show federal and local officials discussed threats clearly, reviewed long-made plans and understood Katrina would wreak devastation of historic proportions. "I'm sure it will be the top 10 or 15 when all is said and done," National Hurricane Center's Max Mayfield warned the day Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast."I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." - A letter to President Bush from representative Conyers based on the recently release briefing videos (linked to above):
Mr. President:Bleak deficit picture in Treasury report concerns lawmakers:
How could you look into the camera and utter those false words when you knew people were needlessly suffering and dying while you were vacationing, hamming it up with country music performer Mark Wills, strumming a guitar?
How can you look at yourself in the mirror every day knowing that, when faced with another crisis of the gravest proportions, you were again beset with uncertainty, indecision, and inaction – anything but the strong leader you purport to be?
How could you take your oath, in god's name, to protect the citizens of this country and then turn your back on a whole city, abandoning them before, during, and long after this horrible tragedy?
A little-noticed Treasury Department report sent to congressional leaders in December paints a bleaker picture of the nation's finances than is widely accepted ...It's worse than I thought - Orac reports on the cut in funding at the National Institute for Health's National Cancer Institute (NCI):
According to the 158-page report, the fiscal 2005 federal deficit on an accrual basis was $760 billion, using generally accepted accounting principles that private businesses must use to present their finances.
That is an increase of $144 billion, or 23 percent, over the previous year's deficit of $616 billion.
[T]he NCI budget for 2007 will represent not just a failure to keep up with inflation but a real cut in actual dollars [$40 million] for the second year in a row. And yet we can still manage to afford over $120 million a year to fund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.Where I Catch The NIH With Its Pantaloons Down: A Well-Timed Period post about a possible overstatement on an NIH website of the risks of emergency contraception.
Although budget experts and healthcare economists believe [Medicare] costs must be reined in, Hill's [a patient on Medicare] experience illustrates how hard that is to do without hurting elderly patients.Fire Victims Feel Burned by Lawmakers Tied to Insurers: Another article in the LA Times, this one looking at how California politicians have stymied reforms to insurance laws.
Hill has a chronic disease in which his immune system attacks the nerves in his limbs, causing weakness and loss of control. The medication he was receiving until last spring is called intravenous immune globulin, or IVIG. One treatment can cost at least $3,000.
Most IVIG patients must receive infusions every three to four weeks, therefore the annual cost can exceed $50,000. According to an industry survey, the average doctor's office would lose from $7,800 to $9,700 a month by continuing to provide treatment at the newly reduced Medicare rates.
"We warned the government," said Dr. Mark Brecher, a University of North Carolina medical school professor who until recently headed an advisory committee of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "The committee advised them a major problem was imminent, and to the best of my knowledge, I have seen no real action other than checking on the inventory [of IVIG]."
The panel Brecher headed called on the Department of Health and Human Services to declare a health emergency and override the reimbursement cutbacks. Administration officials have not done so.
Karen Reimus' San Diego house was obliterated by the 2003 wildfires, leaving nothing recognizable except a charred jogging stroller and her daughter's burned bicycle.US to extend military executions rules to Guantanamo Bay:
Yet her insurer insisted that she catalog each of her family's destroyed personal items — down to pens and tampons — if she wanted to be reimbursed.
"When insurance companies are selling peace of mind the way they do in their advertisements, nobody has any inkling of the hoops you are going to have to jump through," said Reimus, a 39-year-old lawyer and mother of two. She reached a settlement with her insurer after months of wrangling.
Dozens of similarly frustrating experiences prompted Reimus and other survivors of one of the worst wildfire seasons in California history to urge that new rules be imposed on insurers. But the most far-reaching efforts were derailed by a panel of state lawmakers that is closely aligned with the insurance industry, offering an unusually clear window on how Sacramento works and how legislation can be determined by a handful of well-placed politicians.
The US military is clearing the way for executions of condemned terror suspects to take place at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
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Previously executions could only take place at a military jail in Kansas but now death sentences can be carried out anywhere, including the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.
The army has confirmed the new rules will also apply to any Guantanamo detainee sentenced to death at a specially convened military tribunal.
The most infamous part was "Desert Bus," a "VeriSimulator" in which you drive a bus across the straight Nevada desert for eight hours in real-time. Then you drive it home. Also, I'd read the bus veers to the right, so you can't just leave the joypad propped up. The rumor was that if you won the game, you got one point.(both via BoingBoing)
The Starforce drivers are often linked to system instability and computer crashes. If these problems occur, the end-user would be unware as to the cause of the problem, and would be helpless to solve the problem.There's a list of games that use Starforce here; thankfully Civ IV isn't on the list, but I'm saddened to learn that Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich (which I bought a few months ago) uses the copy protection system.
For example, here's one of the common problems brought by Starforce: under Windows XP, if packets are lost during the reading or writing of a disk, XP interprets this as an error and steps the IDE speed down. Eventually it will revert to 16bit compatibility mode rendering a CD/DVD writer virtually unusable. In some circumstances certain drives cannot cope with this mode and it results in physical hardware failure (Most commonly in multiformat CD/DVD writer drives). A sure sign of this step down occurring is that the burn speeds will get slower and slower (no matter what speed you select to burn at). Starforce, on a regular basis, triggers this silent step down. ...
Moreover, the Starforce drivers, installed on your system, grant ring 0 (system level) privileges to any code under the ring 3 (user level) privileges. Thus, any virus or trojan can get OS privileges and totally control your system. Since Windows 2000, the Windows line security and stability got enhanced by separating those privileges, but with the Starforce drivers, the old system holes and instabilities are back and any program (or virus) can reach the core of your system by using the Starforce drivers as a backdoor.
... The 9/11 “changes everything” mantra began as an explanation of a national trauma and a plea for sympathy. It was hijacked to validate the latent authoritarianism of democratic leaders.New Documents Provide Further Evidence That Senior Officials Approved Abuse of Prisoners at Guantánamo: An ACLU press release reporting on documents they recently obtained.
America asks the world to believe itself so threatened as to require the kidnappings of foreign citizens in foreign parts, detention without legal process, the curbing of free speech and derogation from all international law. It asks the world to believe that it must disregard the Geneva conventions and employ foreign dictators to help it to torture at random. It uses the same justification for occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. The world simply refuses to agree. Only cringeing Britain appeases such actions and calls them merely “anomalous”. There are madmen aplenty, but they do not constitute a war.
Even America’s most robust champions plead that this is all grotesquely counter-productive. What is frightening is not the evil of much American foreign policy at present but its stupidity; the damage it does to its own objectives.
The May 2003 memo specifically names Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who was then Commander of Joint Task Force-Guantánamo, as having favored interrogation methods that FBI agents believed "could easily result in the elicitation of unreliable and legally inadmissible information." The memo states that FBI personnel brought their concerns to the attention of senior Defense Department personnel but that their concerns were brushed aside.Privacy Guardian Is Still a Paper Tiger: An article in the LA Times reporting on a government board created to protect civil liberties.
Other documents released by the ACLU today provide more evidence that abusive interrogation methods used at Guantánamo were endorsed by senior officials. One FBI e-mail, dated May 5, 2004, states that "hooding prisoners, threats of violence, and techniques meant to humiliate detainees" were "approved at high levels w/in DoD." Another FBI e-mail states that certain techniques alleged to be abusive by some FBI agents were "approved by the Deputy Secretary of Defense."
For Americans troubled by the prospect of federal agents eavesdropping on their phone conversations or combing through their Internet records, there is good news: A little-known board exists in the White House whose purpose is to ensure that privacy and civil liberties are protected in the fight against terrorism.U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review: A New York Times article discussing a secret program to reclassify thousands of previously declassified historical government documents.
Someday, it might actually meet.
...
Foot-dragging, debate over its budget and powers, and concern over the qualifications of some of its members — one was treasurer of Bush's first campaign for Texas governor — has kept the board from doing a single day of work.
... because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.Declassification in Reverse - The Pentagon and the U.S. Intelligence Community's Secret Historical Document Reclassification Program: A detailed report by The National Security Archive ("the world's largest non governmental library of declassified documents") discussing some of the documents that have been removed from the National Archives by the secret reclassification program discussed in the New York Times article (above). The National Security Archive article also includes scans of some of the documents that have now been reclassified.
Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."
...
National Archives officials said the program had revoked access to 9,500 documents, more than 8,000 of them since President Bush took office. About 30 reviewers — employees and contractors of the intelligence and defense agencies — are at work each weekday at the archives complex in College Park, Md., the officials said.
The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently uses sensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.And it only gets better from there - go enjoy. Biology's so damn cool.From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash.
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