For Carnacki:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
– H. P. Lovecraft (1890 – 1937), “The Call of Cthulhu”, first line
For Carnacki:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
– H. P. Lovecraft (1890 – 1937), “The Call of Cthulhu”, first line
Potential transplant patients in Britain were urged Wednesday to think twice about going to China for their operation due to a real risk that they may be getting the harvested organ of a freshly executed convict. In a statement, the British Transplantation Society said there was “an accumulating body of evidence” to suggest that organs from executed Chinese prisoners were being removed — without consent — for transplantation.
British researchers have found that Antarctica’s buried lakes are connected by a network of rivers that move water far beneath the icy surface. This raises questions as to whether lakes under the ice, thought to be sealed off from the surface biosphere and thus a good model for how life might evolve on bodies such as Jupiter’s moon Europa, may not be so pristine and isolated after all.
Some long-awaited good news: Wood treated by an innovative and environmentally friendly process will soon be available to builders and consumers for decks, docks, fences, and children’s playground equipment. The wood is soaked in a silicate material that, upon heating, polymerizes to coat wood fibers with a few-molecule-thick layer of amorphous glass that renders the wood no longer a suitable food source. Environmental effects are believed to be negligible.
People have said the Bush Administration is returning us to the Dark Ages, but this is ridiculous: Health officials have issued alerts in Los Angeles parks after a woman from the city fell ill with bubonic plague. They remain uncertain about whether she contracted the disease in an urban location or in a park. It is the first human case of plague in the county since 1984. But about 10 to 15 people per year contract the disease in the US, usually in rural places, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The most primitive snake fossil ever found – over 90 million years old – has been unearthed in Argentina. The creature appears to be a transitional form between land animals and modern snakes, as it still had hips and small functional hind legs, and may have burrowed in the soil.
Your persistence has paid off – You’ve found it!! You’ve found the climate change story of the day!! Ninety top scientists in Canada pressed Prime Minister Stephen Harper to tackle climate change now or risk devastating consequences for the country. Harper is hostile to the Kyoto Protocol, and Environment Canada under the Conservatives has cut 15 climate change programs to pay for tax cuts. The letter was posted on the website of the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences. Meanwhile, a Duke University study has narrowed the uncertainty over expected levels of climate change for the coming century by expanding the amount and types of historical data evaluated – climate change will be bad, but there’s a 95% chance we’ll avoid the truly catastrophic level of change. And the insurance industry grows ever more concerned, as a new study finds that the effects of climate change have replaced inflation and population growth as the number one factor affecting the insurance industry now and in the future. The rising costs from weather damage and agricultural losses far outweigh the price of curbing emissions, economists wrote to Bush. Geoffrey Heal, an economist with the Columbia Business School, told the Financial Times, “The cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocol is about 1% of GNP. That is about two quarters of growth.”
Hospital leaders warned Tuesday that they lack the resources to properly prepare for a potential flu pandemic or other disaster while maintaining day-to-day operations. Bush administration officials have repeatedly stressed that local authorities including governments, businesses, schools and hospitals must have individual plans to deal with a pandemic like the one threatened by avian flu.
A Dutch researcher has developed mathematical models to calculate the tendency of polluted groundwater to react with the subterranean environment. This allows prediction of whether a polluted area will become larger or smaller over time. In the latter case, expensive pump-and-treat remediation methods can be avoided.
There was almost a 20% increase in natural disasters worldwide in 2005, according to the United Nations and Belgium’s Louvain research center, leading USA Today to ask “Is there anyplace safe to live?” Be sure to check out the interactive map of states and applicable hazards before accepting that next job transfer…
And finally, Science Headlines asks: Ladies, are these items news? A British study finds men with higher levels of testosterone are more likely to make irrational decisions when shown sexual images. The study split 176 heterosexual men into groups, some of whom were exposed to various sexual images, the others weren’t. Then they were put in a lab version of a communal game where with another person where they had to decide how to split $10. If they didn’t come to an agreement, neither received the money. The study found those with higher testosterone and exposed to sexual images agreed to less favorable splits than others, the BBC reports. Not to be outdone in documenting the obvious, a new study on sexual well-being, aging and health conducted in 29 countries by a University of Chicago research team found older couples who live in Western countries and who enjoy more equality between men and women are most likely to report being satisfied with their sex lives.
Shucks, I was going to use that UK study today…but like you said, it hardly seemed to be news. 🙂
Thanks for doing the bucket today! (I have deadlines to meet…)
has a Beatles theme? AFP/Yahoo
Just thought the folks going to YearlyKos might want to know…
link
Nearly 20,000 people kidnapped in Iraq in 2006
Nearly 20,000 people have been kidnapped in Iraq since the beginning of 2006 alone, according to a report Wednesday on violence in a country scarred by three years of conflict.
[snip]
The 19,548 people kidnapped includes 4,959 women and 2,350 children, according to the report prepared by a group of 125 non-governmental organisations and made public in the Shiite holy city of Karbala.
The high-profile seizure of foreigners in Iraq has numbered only a few hundred since the practice began two years ago and is usually aimed at scoring propaganda points against the US-led occupation.
In contrast, the thousands of Iraqis being kidnapped are primarily the victims of political rivals and of common criminals seeking ransom.
Iraq is one holy mess, and seems to be getting worse by the day.
link
In Sunni areas, men organize to battle what they say are Shiite-led death squads.
BAGHDAD – Some call them neighborhood watches. Others call them militias. But as sectarian violence has grown over the past two months in Iraq’s capital, men in Sunni neighborhoods have begun to band together.
They have armed themselves with Kalashnikovs, heavy machine guns, and grenades, and have blocked streets with unused cars, furniture, or palm trunks, forcing would-be intruders to take a single route in and out of a neighborhood.
On Monday and Tuesday, sustained clashes between Iraqi police and Army and residents of Adhamiya, a neighborhood in north Baghdad that has long been hostile to the US occupation and the religious Shiite government that came to power in its wake, left at least 13 dead, mostly militiamen.
[snip]
For weeks, residents say, members of the local militia have been shooting at Iraqi police when they enter the neighborhood, openly equating them with Shiite militias that have carried out extrajudicial killings and have posed as police, if not being members of the police themselves.
[snip]
Sheikh Omar al-Jumaily, the director of the human rights office of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni Arab party, defended the right of the residents to take up arms, pointing to a message from the Ministry of Defense last month urging residents not to cooperate with Iraqi security forces unless they were accompanied by US troops.
Things are not as simple as they seem in the MSM. The poor people don’t know who’s there to protect them and who’s there to murder them, so ordinary citizens are now fighting back. Iraq is one hotbed of misery and seemingly getting worse by the day.
US PsyOps: Iranian nuclear weapons for Venezuela? (pimping my diary that fell off the scroll)
Big Picture analytic reading:
The Really Real “Long War” by Chris Floyd
Jeremey Scahill on Democracy Now! (now, literally on the west coast), to talk about Blackwater & the lawsuit against them brought by families of the slain contractors in Falluja– one of our top-notch war reporters today.
UN cites humanitarian crisis in W.Bank and Gaza
It galls me when I see or read reports on the Palestinians in the MSM and they just totally ignore the humanitarian crisis going on there. The Isrealis, as ocupiers, are legally obliged to take care of humanitarian needs of the population. They withhold taxes that they are supposed to hand over to the Palestinians… they even holding back those funds.
Here’s an article about how the Patriot act allows the US gov. to shut down Muslim charities and sieze their assets in the US. They don’t have to say why and the charities, assets siezed, can’t mount a defense. Bush is making damn sure no Muslim charities in the US are able to help the Palestinians… legitimate or not.