Eideard

Nebahat Albayrak
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The Dutch Justice Ministry plans to shut down eight prisons and cancel new prison building programs to deal with what it calls a capacity surplus, according to Dutch Justice State Secretary Nebahat Albayrak.

The move will lead to the scrapping of 1,200 jobs and is expected to save 164 million euros.

“Currently, there is detention capacity of some 14,000 cell places, while according to the estimates there is a need for about 12,000 cells. This overcapacity is expected to continue for some years,” Albayrak said in a policy document on national prison system sent to the Dutch parliament Tuesday.

The cell surplus is caused by falling crime rate, Albayrak said.

Here we are – studying a nation perpetually castigated by Law and Order nutballs for being too soft on drug users, too free and easy on sex, having too many unions and too much personal freedom in the face of a large immigrant population and the danger of terrorism – ending up with empty beds in the prison system.

What’s wrong with this picture of freedom, tolerance – absent Christian morality? Apparently, damned little.

Thanks, McCullough, a co-conspirator at DU

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Bravo – Barcelona!

Everything is nice and tidy

An elderly woman has been questioned by police after allegedly keeping her mother’s body in a freezer for up to two decades, it emerged today. Police found the body wrapped in a black bin liner in a chest freezer at a semi-detached house in Sidcup, south-east London.

Officers interviewed Daulat Irani, 83, under caution after the body was discovered and identified as that of her mother Gulbai Freedoon Murzan, who was born in 1901. Police believe she may have been dead for up to 20 years.

Metropolitan police said the death was being treated as unexplained, rather than suspicious. Postmortem results are expected later this week.

It is understood that officers were called to the property in Park Mead on 10 May after being alerted by a neighbour, and forensic officers removed the corpse.

It is unclear why the body was kept in the freezer, but neighbours of the elderly woman suggested she may have been worried that immigration authorities would discover her mother had been living illegally in the UK.

A neighbour, who did not wish to be named, said Irani was a “very private person” who kept her garden in pristine condition. “Obviously it was shocking when the police came and told me what happened. They said they believed she had been in the freezer for more than 20 years”.

Of course, in the U.S. the obvious reason always is receiving and cashing Social Security checks sent to the deceased. Direct deposit helps that whole process. Dunno how that’s handled in the U.K. nowadays.

I like the touch about the garden being pristine. The usual quote from a neighbor in the States is that she was “always friendly and got along with everyone” – especially if discussing an axe murderer.

Jorge Colombo brings a whole new meaning to finger painting. This week’s cover of The New Yorker magazine features a digital painting created by artist Jorge Colombo with his iPhone and the Brushes application.

If you saw him on the sidewalk, cradling an iPhone in his hand, you’d think he was texting a friend or e-mailing his wife. But pull in a little closer and you’ll see something else.

Lively street corners. Graceful silhouettes. New York City skyscrapers stretching past the clouds.

All captured by a fingertip dancing across an iPhone screen.

Although Colombo’s work is among the more visible pieces of iPhone art, thousands of people around the world use the $4.99 Brushes application to create digital images.

Steve Sprang, the application’s developer estimates that, since he launched Brushes in August 2008, about 40,000 people around the world have downloaded the program.

Not only brilliant and tasteful work – I knew it would have to be a New Yorker cover right from first sight.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Researchers long ago rejected the theory that vaccines cause autism, yet many parents don’t believe them. Can scientists bridge the gap between evidence and doubt?

This week, the open-access journal PLoS Biology investigates why the debunked vaccine-autism theory won’t go away. Senior science writer/editor Liza Gross talks to medical anthropologists, science historians, vaccine experts, social scientists, and pediatricians to explore the factors keeping the dangerous notion alive—and its proponents so vitriolic.

Pediatrician Paul Offit has made it his mission to set the record straight: vaccines don’t cause autism. But he won’t go on Larry King Live—where he could reach millions of viewers—or anyplace celebrity anti-vaccine crusaders like Jenny McCarthy appear. ”Every story has a hero, victim, and villain,” he explains. ”McCarthy is the hero, her child is the victim—and that leaves one role for you.”

When she read that hecklers were issuing death threats to spokespeople who simply reported studies showing that vaccines were safe, anthropologist Sharon Kaufman dropped her life’s work on aging to study the theory’s grip on public discourse. To Kaufman, a researcher with a keen eye for detecting major cultural shifts, these unsettling events signaled a deeper trend. ”What happens when the facts of bioscience are relayed to the public and there is disbelief, lack of trust?” Kaufman wondered. ”Where does that lead us?”

Read the rest of this entry »

Busload of Michoacan mayors and police chiefs arriving at a lockup in Mexico City
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Mexican troops have rounded up 10 mayors and a string of police chiefs suspected of links to drug gangs in a western state, one of the biggest single corruption sweeps in the government’s drug war.

Soldiers burst into police stations and town halls to arrest 27 public officials in Michoacan, the home state of President Felipe Calderon and the place he launched his army-led assault on drug cartels in late 2006.

The officials included a judge and a former police chief who is an aide to the state governor. The attorney general’s office said all were suspected of links to drug smugglers…

Small towns in marijuana-growing Michoacan are under siege from rival cartels who want control of rural outposts along smuggling corridors, stretching the army in sparsely inhabited mountains that hide drug plantations and laboratories.

Local officials and police are often bribed or terrorized into helping the well-armed gangs that move billions of dollars of narcotics into the United States every year.

The town of Uruapan, where the mayor was arrested on Tuesday, made headlines early in the drug war in 2006 when hitmen dumped five human heads on the dance floor of a bar.

Seems like fewer differences between Iraq and Mexico every day. I’m surprised some of the neocons haven’t yet suggested invading.

I mean some of the “official” neocons. The real nutballs suggest invading damned near everyone, everywhere, on a daily basis.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Ireland will reform its social services for children in line with the recommendations of a report cataloguing decades of abuse by priests published last week, says Prime Minister Brian Cowen.

Cowen apologized to victims for the state’s failure to intervene in what the report described as endemic sexual abuse and severe beatings in schools for much of the 20th century and he urged religious orders to pay additional compensation.

“It is deeply shameful for all Irish people that this happened in our country and that for so long it was not confronted,” he told a news conference.

Cowen welcomed Tuesday’s announcement by the Catholic order of Christian Brothers that it would review the compensation paid to victims of sexual abuse and violence.

“I believe that other individual congregations involved should now also articulate their willingness to make a further substantial voluntary contribution,” Cowen said…

Successful legal action by the Christian Brothers, the largest provider of residential care for boys in the country in the period examined by the report, led the Commission to drop its original idea of naming the people against whom the allegations were made.

Sounds to me as if Eire is as guilty as ever of kneeling before the political will of the Catholic Church instead of standing up as a free people in a free land with faith in the laws of their own nation.

Placating the worst of the lot, the Christian Brothers, makes that clear. Cowards in charge of the government. More afraid of Bishops ordering their flock how to vote than enforcing modern standards of law and order.

For the sake of diplomacy and good relations, and occasionally a political point, royals and their representatives have regularly chomped on foods not usually found in their pantries. But few have taken to the task with quite the enthusiasm of the governor general of Canada, Michaëlle Jean, as, this week, she cut out the heart of a slaughtered seal and ate it raw.

The Queen’s representative in north America was visiting an Inuit community in Nunavut, in the Arctic, when a couple of dead seals were laid out before her in ­symbolic defiance of a looming EU ban on seal products. With an ulu blade, a traditional knife, she bent over one of the freshly killed seals and cut along its body. After firmly slicing through the flesh and pulling back the skin, she turned to the woman beside her and asked for a taste. “Could I try the heart?” she said.

A chunk of the organ was duly cut out and handed to Jean, who took a few bites, chewed on it and pronounced it good.

“It’s like sushi,” she said, according to the Canadian Press news agency. “And it’s very rich in protein.”

As she wiped the blood from her mouth and fingers, she said she had done it in solidarity with the Inuit, including those in the community she was visiting, at Rankin Inlet, which is home to 2,300 people. They claim their way of life is threatened by the EU ban on seal products.

First off, in general I endorse the practice of solidarity with first nation people of any land. I may or may not snack on whatever may be historic goodies. Although – let’s face it – I love Haggis, eh?

It’s always the eyes which gets the vegetarian left. I think. But, I’ve always been able to look a cow in the eye and still eat the occasional hamburger. If I grew up in a seal-hunting-and-eating tradition, I’m certain I’d find it as tasty as some of the other sea critters I consume regularly in chowders or frutti de mare.

In the hot and arid countryside of Andhra Pradesh, T Manjula goes from house to house checking the year’s harvest. Born on the fringes of Indian society, she has fought her way up through hard work and guts.

A volunteer with the Deccan Development Society (DDS), she now tries to help other poor women, most of whom are Dalits, the lowest group in the Indian social hierarchy.

But while food distribution is a vital part of what she does, Manjula is more excited about her role as a radio journalist. And it is in this job that she thinks she can really make a difference.

The local radio station has a state-of-the-art studio in a very ordinary looking house in Pastapur, 100 kilometres (60 miles) from Hyderabad.

Its daily two-hour broadcasts are peppered with small tidbits on farming, medicine, health and music…

“It’s a great way for us to document all the local knowledge that otherwise would have just remained within families,” she explains. “Many people have benefited because of this and everyday I am learning something new as well.”

In fact the community radio concept has caught on so well that many women from the village have become regular contributors.

For many of the audience it is a bit of entertainment, for the women involved it is a lot more than that. It is a means of asserting themselves in this rural setting, of finding a voice and putting themselves in greater control of their own destiny.

Bravo!

Russia, already a large supplier of nuclear-reactor fuel to Europe and Asia, is expected today to sign its first purely commercial contract to supply low-enriched uranium to United States utilities.

With the signing, Russia’s nuclear-fuel trade with the United States will shift to a commercial footing, similar to Russia’s dealings with other consumers of fuel, like France and the Netherlands, both longtime buyers of Russian uranium.

For the United States, the change is a sign that Washington is acquiescing to the idea of a major Russian role not only in the international nuclear power market, but also in the domestic market. Russia’s outsize role in supplying uranium to American utilities had previously been justified because the fuel was a byproduct of a program to eliminate nuclear weapons. Now the Russians will be selling nuclear fuel from virgin uranium…

The policy of buying diluted, or blended-down, Russian weapons-grade uranium yielded a clear nonproliferation benefit. The new mode — of having the Russians enrich new uranium for United States markets — is not directly beneficial for nuclear security because it does not remove weapons-grade uranium from stockpiles. Yet by encouraging the commercial availability of Russian enrichment services, the United States deprives other countries of the rationale to have enrichment programs of their own.

It also diminishes the liklehood of our wonderful domestic suppliers getting back into the business. We don’t exactly miss the sleazy thugs who inflicted a couple generations of distorted and mutated genes on the poor buggers who worked their mines.