Eideard

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

The authorities in six German states have ordered retailers to stop selling Red Bull Cola energy drinks after traces of cocaine were found in it.

The recall came after a sample analysis conducted in North-Rhine Westphalia found one litre of the drink contained 0.4 micrograms of the banned substance. Officials said the cocaine levels were too low to pose a health threat but were not permitted in foodstuffs…

The company said coca leaf extracts were used worldwide as a natural flavouring, and that its own tests had found no traces of cocaine…

“There is no scientific basis for this ban on Red Bull Cola because the levels of cocaine found are so small,” Fritz Soergel, the head of the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg, Bavaria, told Time magazine.

“And it’s not even cocaine itself. According to the tests we carried out, it’s a non-active degradation product with no effect on the body. If you start examining lots of other drinks and food so carefully, you’d find a lot of surprising things.”

But the authorities in North-Rhine Westphalia said the presence of coca leaf extracts meant the cola could not be classified as a foodstuff but as a narcotic, which would require a special licence.

Har! It makes for startling headlines. In fact, I have to go along with Red Bull on this one. Most likely, there are a couple of bureaucrats in Germany preparing for an election campaign.

Or are the foodies in Germany really that anal?

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

President Obama has nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as his first appointment to the court.

If confirmed by the Democratic-controlled Senate, Judge Sotomayor, 54, would replace Justice David H. Souter to become the second woman on the court and only the third female justice in the history of the Supreme Court. She also would be the first Hispanic justice to serve on the Supreme Court.

Conservative groups reacted with sharp criticism on Tuesday morning. “Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important than the law as written,” said Wendy E. Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network…

Judge Sotomayor has sat for the last 11 years on the federal appeals bench in Manhattan. As the top federal appeals court in the nation’s commercial center, the court is known in particular for its expertise in corporate and securities law. For six years before that, she was a federal district judge in New York…

Born in the Bronx on June 23, 1954, she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 8. Her father, a factory worker, died a year later. Her mother, a nurse at a methadone clinic, raised her daughter and a younger son on a modest salary.

Judge Sotomayor graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1976 and and attended Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She spent five years as a prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office before entering private practice.

But she longed to return to public service, she said, inspired by the “Perry Mason” series she watched as a child. In 1992, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended the politically centrist lawyer to President George H. W. Bush.

That appointment was made by a Republican who was a conservative – not a neocon mouthpiece.

Previously approved by two bi-partisan efforts in Congress, no doubt the Party of “NO” will waste a couple of months on preaching their ideology, trying to stop her appointment to the bench.

The point of Shila Renee Mullins’s brain surgery was to remove a malignant tumor threatening to paralyze her left side.

But Methodist University Hospital in Memphis also saw an opportunity to promote the hospital to prospective patients.

So, a video Webcast of Ms. Mullins’s awake craniotomy, in which the patient remains conscious and talking while surgeons prod and cut inside her brain, was promoted with infomercials and newspaper advertisements featuring a photograph of a beautiful model, not Ms. Mullins.

This time, Methodist did not use billboards as it has with other operations, deeming this procedure too sensitive. But its marketing department monitors how many people have watched the Webcast (2,212), seen a preview on YouTube (21,555) and requested appointments (3)…

Some ethicists and physicians say the practices raise questions about patient privacy and could paint overly-rosy medical pictures, leaving the hospitals and patients vulnerable if things go awry.

Jeffrey P. Kahn, a University of Minnesota bioethicist, sees “value in demystifying medical care,” but said this “creates an aura of sophistication and high-tech ability” that may not represent “quality of care at a hospital.”

“Do we really want to treat health care like other consumer goods?” he asked.

RTFA. If you’re affronted by all the jive commercials selling you wonder drugs every hour on television – you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

But – the doctor who is Twittering to his followers during surgery on a particularly difficult malignant kidney tumor? I don’t think my life is worth paying his membership at whichever country club he belongs to.

Seventeen British men stood trial dressed in nun’s habits on the Greek island of Crete on Monday for flashing their bottoms in public, but walked free after no one showed up to testify their behavior was offensive.

Police said they had arrested the 17 men, aged between 18 and 65, early on Sunday at the popular resort of Malia and a prosecutor charged them with exposing themselves in public and offending religious symbols.

“They were dressed like nuns, carrying crosses, but wearing thongs under their skirts and showing people their bottoms and the rest,” said a police official who declined to be named.

Apprehended in the early hours of Sunday, the men were taken into custody and appeared in court on Monday in the same clothes they were wearing at the time of their arrest.

But the court in the town of Iraklio ruled them innocent after no witness appeared to testify against them, the police official said.

Har! We’ll have to try that next year outside the Notre Dame commencement exercises.

That’s the noise it makes? “Bing”

Microsoft’s expected unveiling of a new search engine next week will be accompanied by a massive ad campaign that won’t mention Google and Yahoo by name but will ask if you’re happy with the results you get from competing services, AdAge reports.

The search engine will be named “Bing” which raises an obvious question: will an ad campaign said to be upwards of $100 million ever get anybody to say “Just ‘Bing’ it?”

Google has about 65% of the search market share, and Yahoo about 20%. Microsoft in in the single digits. But so strategic is search, and so tied is it to ad-supported services that will only grow in importance with the increased use of cloud-computing — where your data is readily available to the people whose services you are using — and so deep are Microsoft’s pockets that even $100 million to move the needle a bit would seem to be worth the effort. Indeed, the Redmond, Washington software giant was willing to spend more than $30 billion to acquire Yahoo mainly to acquire its relatively better search prowess.

I know Microsoft has jillions of dollars. You have to wonder how long they will bumble along burning up these enormous pyres of money – as an alternative to designing and marketing truly useful products?

Guardian/Bob Sacha/Corbis used by permission

The world’s store of digital content is now the equivalent of one full top-of-the-range iPod for every two people on the planet, following the explosion of social networking sites, internet-enabled mobile phones and government surveillance.

At 487bn gigabytes, if the world’s rapidly expanding digital content were printed and bound into books it would form a stack that would stretch from Earth to Pluto 10 times. As more people join the digital tribe – increasingly through internet-enabled mobile phones – the world’s digital output is increasing at such a rate that those stacks of books are rising quicker than NASA’s fastest space rocket.

The large files from digital cameras and the world’s burgeoning army of surveillance cameras account for a significant proportion of the digital universe. The rapid increase in so-called machine to machine communications – such as when an Oyster card is touched on a reader or a satellite navigation system requests information about its location – has seen the number of individual digital creation events balloon, despite the economic recession.

The digital universe is expected to double in size over the next 18 months, according to the latest research from technology consultancy IDC and sponsored by IT firm EMC, fuelled by a rise in the number of mobile phones. At the time of their first Digital Universe report in 2007, the pair reckoned the world’s total digital content was 161bn gigabytes.

How much of the load would be reduced by switching everyone off bloatware like Microsoft Office?

- if you program the phone number for the power utility company [PNM] into your cell phone. We expect power outages. We get ‘em.

Which is why my mid-afternoon post is a bit late, today. I always try to stay a few hours ahead of what we schedule; but, I didn’t expect to be without electricity for five hours, today.

Just getting back online – and offering up a quick snap of one of our favorite and most useful constrictors – the Red Racer.

This is a New Mexico variation on the coachwhip snake. I’ve even seen them with red-and-white bands like a coral snake – though much larger bands because these are much larger snakes. This fellow is about five feet long or more. And if you look along his body you’ll see where he gets a bit lumpy at the leading edge of his mid-section.

Keeping the hantavirus-carrying rodent population down.

Colin L. Powell challenged Dick Cheney on the legacy of the Bush administration and the future of the Republican Party on Sunday, declaring that Republicans should not bow to “diktats that come from the right wing.”

The remarks by Mr. Powell, a former secretary of state, amounted to a public rebuttal of Mr. Cheney, the former vice president, and Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio commentator, who have questioned Mr. Powell’s Republican credentials and suggested that he should leave the party.

“Rush will not get his wish,” Mr. Powell said Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “And Mr. Cheney was misinformed. I am still a Republican.”

Mr. Powell’s appearance underlined an extraordinary public struggle among Republicans over the future of the party and the legacy of the Bush administration, particularly on national security. Mr. Powell broke with Mr. Cheney on the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, saying that he agreed with President Obama that it should be closed and that Mr. Cheney disagreed as much with his former boss as with Mr. Obama.

“Mr. Cheney is not only disagreeing with President Obama’s policy,” Mr. Powell said. “He’s disagreeing with President Bush’s policy. President Bush stated repeatedly to international audiences and to the country that he wanted to close Guantánamo. The problem he had was he couldn’t get all the pieces together…”

Mr. Powell infuriated many in his party last fall when he endorsed Mr. Obama for president. His appearance on “Face the Nation” comes two weeks after Mr. Cheney, appearing on the same program, said he believed that Mr. Powell “had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican…”

He made clear that he thought a major threat to the party were suggestions by Republicans like Mr. Cheney and Mr. Limbaugh that there was no room for Republicans like Mr. Powell…

Though I respect the views of traditional American conservatism – goodness knows there are enough of them in my extended family – I’m glad to see the nutball Right battling to stay in charge of the party. I’m just as pleased to see proto-fascists narrow their base, affront that portion of the American populace who respect democracy and collective political freedoms.

Let them paint themselves into the corner where racists and bigots, war-lovers and chickenhawks alike, the professional haters jostle each other into uselessness. The party of “NO’ indeed.

Effective today, the iconic thoroughfare is officially closed to motor vehicles in two key sections of midtown – Herald Square and Times Square. Broadway is now a pedestrian mall from 47th to 42nd Sts. and from 35th to 33rd Sts.

Mayor Bloomberg said he believes the street shutdown will make New York more livable by reducing pollution, cutting down on pedestrian accidents and helping traffic flow more smoothly…

While pedestrians were able to experience it first, the real test of success will come tomorrow when the city reopens for business after the holiday weekend…

Shopkeepers aren’t yet sure what to expect.

Officials will decide by the end of the year whether to make the changes permanent. Other experts insist the new walking space can only have a positive impact on Broadway’s stores.

RTFA, There’s whining – in advance – from the folks you’d expect. Those who think their individual liberty wholly depends on having rubber tires and an engine to provide mobility.

Joy from the rest of the human beings in NYC.

Mike Mullen’s natural element – someplace you never saw Cheney
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The top U.S. military officer on Sunday pushed for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison despite rising resistance in Congress, saying it serves as a “recruiting symbol” for America’s enemies. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, rallied behind President Barack Obama’s move to close the detention facility at the U.S. naval base in Cuba, which is operated by the U.S. military…

“Well, I’ve advocated for a long time now that it needs to be closed. President Obama made a decision very early after his inauguration to do that by next January. And we’re all working very hard to meet that deadline,” Mullen added.

Obama has run into resistance, not only from Republicans but from his fellow Democrats who control Congress. Most of whom are paper assholes more concerned with how they get re-elected.

Obama said Guantanamo prisoners will be tried in U.S. courts and held in super-maximum-security U.S. prisons while others could be tried by in special military trials, but his speech on the issue left many questions unanswered.

I’ve touched on the history of questions like this – recently. The Red Herring dragged across the trail of torture and deceit leftover from the Cheney-Bush days isn’t worth considering except as an example of political spin vs. the truth.