Eideard

Israel will allow 200 Palestinian Christians into Bethlehem for the holiday
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Roger Waters vows to hold a concert matching the Pink Floyd concert in Berlin
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The Pope’s visit to Bethlehem Palestinians below an Israeli watchtower
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

I had a dear friend who survived the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. She was brave enough to return from Russia whence she had escaped to – to fight in the Polish underground against the Nazis.

She also told me – years later – she couldn’t be a Jew, again, watching Israel treating Palestinians the way Nazis treated Poles.

British police have appealed for information about the whereabouts of an escaped prisoner who has been telling the world via Facebook about his life as a fugitive.

Craig Lynch, 28, escaped Hollesley Bay open prison near Suffolk, eastern England, back in September, but has continued to update his Facebook status regularly — describing everything from his meals to who his next girlfriend will be…

In a…posting from earlier this week Lynch wrote “Is thinkin, which lucky girl will be my first of 2010!!.”

Police are trying to use clues left by Lynch on his Facebook to track down where the convicted burglar may be hiding…

“We have spoken to Facebook and we are trying to trace him from the information we have, but it’s one of those things that we’re also asking for help from members of the public,” Suffolk police spokesperson Anne-Marie Breach told CNN.

“Obviously we’re taking what he’s saying on Facebook with a pinch of salt because he’s now aware that people may be reading what he’s writing.”

Life on the lam apparently gets easier and easier. So much for snoops and database mining.

Federal regulators under President Barack Obama have sharply shifted course on long-standing policy toward pharmaceutical residues in the nation’s drinking water, taking a critical first step toward regulating some of the contaminants while acknowledging they could threaten human health.

Policy? What policy?

For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency has listed some pharmaceuticals as candidates for regulation in drinking water. The agency also has launched a survey to check for scores of drugs at water treatment plants across the nation…

The Associated Press reported last year that the drinking water of at least 51 million Americans contains minute concentrations of a multitude of drugs. Water utilities, replying to an AP questionnaire, acknowledged the presence of antibiotics, sedatives, sex hormones and dozens of other drugs in their supplies…

In the first move toward possible drinking-water standards, the EPA has put 13 pharmaceuticals on what it calls the Contaminant Candidate List. They are mostly sex hormones, but include the antibiotic erythromycin and three chemicals used as drugs but better known for other uses.

They join a list of 104 chemical and 12 microbial contaminants that the EPA is considering as candidates for regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. No pharmaceutical has ever reached the list in its 12-year history, but medicines now make up 13 percent of the target chemicals on the latest list “based on their potential adverse health effects and potential for occurrence in public water systems,” the EPA said.

Could it be that the political power of corporate pharma in America has restrained investigation?

How could that happen in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?

Cancer cell

How do you predict whether a given patient is likely to die from a heart attack? Conventional medical wisdom would base a risk assessment on factors such as the person’s age, whether they were smokers and/or diabetic plus the results of cardiac ultrasound and various blood tests. It may be that a better predictor is a computer program that analyses the patient’s electrocardiogram looking for subtle features within the data provided by the instrument.

A team of researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan analysed a large data-set of 24-hour electrocardiogram recordings collected at a Boston hospital as part of a clinical trial for a new drug. Employing a number of computational techniques involving algorithms for signal processing, data mining and machine learning, the researchers developed a way to analyse how the shape of the electrical waveform varies, a measure they dubbed morphological variability. At the heart of the approach are mathematical techniques used in speech recognition and genome analysis which allow researchers to compare individual beats. “We compute the differences for every pair of beats,” reported one of the researchers. “If there is lots of variability, that patient is in bad shape.”

The team then applied their algorithm to a second set of electrocardiogram recordings and found that patients with the highest morphological variability were six to eight times more likely to die from a heart attack than those with low variability. They concluded that it consistently predicted as well or better than the indicators commonly used by physicians…

Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes prosthetics don’t work

A Memphis attorney is being sued for biting off a portion of a man’s nose at a Midtown restaurant.

In a lawsuit filed this week by Greg Herbers, 48, local trial attorney Mark Lambert is accused of biting off part of Herbers’ nose during a fight last June at Dish in Cooper Young.

The dispute started when Herbers, a self-employed hairstylist, entered the restroom around 9 p.m. and noticed the one stall was occupied by two men “performing some activity other than going to the bathroom.”

Herbers said that when he told the men he needed to use the toilet, Lambert, who was standing at the urinal but appeared to know the men in the stall, became aggressive.

Lambert allegedly approached Herbers in a “menacing” fashion and jumped on him…the next thing he felt was an excruciating pain. He heard teeth crunch and noticed blood pouring from his left nostril. One of the other men in the stall screamed, “What the (expletive) are you doing?”

Lambert, who works for The Cochran Firm, and the two men then apparently fled the restroom and Herbers called police.

Herbers said Lambert bit off a large chunk of his left nostril. He also says he’s permanently disfigured and his sense of smell impaired.

You really have to be careful about bodily functions in a public restroom. And stuff.

Howard Schmidt was named as the White House’s cybersecurity coordinator, today, a job that was reportedly difficult to fill as the U.S. strengthens its computer security defense.

The appointment marks a return to government for Schmidt, who left his job as vice chairman of former President George W. Bush’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board in April 2003, saying he was retiring from government service to join the private sector…

Schmidt will be responsible for creating a U.S network security strategy that encompasses protocols for ensuring a unified response to cybersecurity incidents. He also will be in charge of strengthening partnerships between government and business, the research and development of next-generation technology and a national campaign for cybersecurity awareness.

Schmidt has a depth of experience in cybersecurity, most recently working in the U.K. for the Information Security Forum, a nonprofit that focuses on researching and evaluating cybersecurity risks. His private industry experience includes a stint as chief information security officer for auction giant eBay and chief security officer for Microsoft, where he worked on the company’s Trustworthy Computing initiative, a massive revamp of Microsoft’s security practices.

On the government side, Schmidt served in the U.S. Air Force in both active duty and civilian positions. He established the first dedicated computer forensic lab when he was a supervisory special agent and director of the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) Computer Forensic Lab and Computer Crime and Information Warfare Division. Before that position, he headed the Computer Exploitation Team with the FBI at the National Drug Intelligence Center…

Schmidt’s experience across the public and private sectors — and technical acumen — will serve him well, said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute. “He was the only one being considered who knew what it was like to secure a system. That set him apart from everybody,” Paller said.

I wish him well. Not a position I would envy.

Sato and Nixon in 1967

Documents belonging to the surviving family members of former Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato revealed that an agreement was signed between the Washington and Tokyo that allowed nuclear weapons to come on Japanese soil, according to the Daily Yomiuri newspaper.

The agreement was signed by former U.S. President Richard Nixon and Sato on Nov. 19, 1969, and was marked “top secret”.

The two-page document is currently being checked for authenticity, but could signal the first discovery of papers relating to secret pacts between Japan and the United States that the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has said it wants to make public.

Since coming to power in September, the DPJ Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada has instructed his department to search for evidence of pacts that have long been denied by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which governed Japan almost interrupted for more than half a century.

The documents are likely to have a huge impact in Japan, where the government is amid negotiations with the United States about a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed between the two nations in 2006. Under that agreement, tens of thousands of U.S. troops are set to remain in Okinawa after 2014, when 8,000 were to be moved to Guam.

On the SOFA issue, Okinawan residents have made their feelings known by protesting against the U.S. troops on their soil. If the document signed by Nixon and Sato turns out to be true, it is likely to exacerbate tensions between locals and U.S. military personnel in Japan’s southernmost prefecture.

Nice to see that Japan has acquired an administration that’s beginning to work at openness. Even though it requires admitting their government was in bed with crooks like Richard M. Nixon.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The prospect of a Hollywood-style heist at the Mint sounded intriguing, but it turns out the Case of the Missing Gold was all about accounting and poor estimates.

The Royal Canadian Mint promised to track its precious metal better after confirming that $17-million in missing gold – about 44 bars’ worth – was never the object of a theft. If it had been, it would have required pilfering from one of Canada’s most secure facilities…

Still, the more mundane lapses at the Crown corporation – including mistakenly selling gold lost in production – may prove just as embarrassing as the notion that the material was stolen.

“The good news is that there’s no theft at the Mint. The bad news is that the Mint can’t count,” said Liberal MP Bonnie Crombie.

“I don’t think this is enough to restore Canadians’ confidence. There’s gold missing at the Mint and it’s because they couldn’t count it.”

A report released yesterday found accounting errors and miscalculations during refining were responsible for the vanishing gold. Now, after a 14-month search, the Crown corporation can say it knows where its gold has gone…

The Mint admitted it underestimated the gold content in the by-product left after its refining process. As a result, millions of dollars worth of gold were miscounted or sold off to U.S. processors as slag at a fraction of its value.

At least the government will withhold bonuses from the top five honchos.

American-style, we would have fired ‘em. Given each a golden parachute and found jobs for them in Wall Street investment firms.

Congress dropped by in 1999 to advise on democracy

The European Court of Human Rights on has slammed Bosnia for barring Jews and Roma from running for high elected office…

The two plaintiffs in the case, Dervo Sejdic who is of Roma origin and Jakob Finci who is Jewish, both prominent Romanian public figures, filed suit in 2006 claiming discrimination and a breach of their human rights.

According to the ruling, Finci inquired about running for parliament or the three-part presidency and was informed by Bosnia’s central electoral commission in 2007 that he was ineligible because he was a Jew.

The decision was based on a distinction made in the Bosnian constitution between two categories of citizen: “constituent peoples” — Bosniacs, Croats and Serbs — and “others”: Jews, Roma and other minorities.

Posts in the Bosnian parliament and its three-part presidency are reserved to the three so-called constituent peoples under the rules, which were intended to prevent ethnic strife in the wake of the 1992-95 war.

The court upheld both plaintiffs’ complaints, ruling that Bosnia had violated provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights prohibiting discrimination and upholding the right to free elections…

The Strasbourg rights court acknowledged that the constitution had pursued “the legitimate aim of restoring peace” and that the time was “perhaps still not ripe” for Bosnia to move from power-sharing to majority rule.

How screwed-up and incompetent is a national government that still fears democracy?

What century have they picked out to join? The 21st – or the 14th?

Gay Rights activists celebrate outside the city assembly
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Mexico City became the first capital in Catholic, often macho Latin America to allow same-sex marriage on Monday when city legislators passed a law giving gay couples full marriage rights.

The legislation goes further than a 2006 city law allowing civil unions by giving gay couples access to the same family social security benefits and joint loans as straight couples.

In a last-minute measure, the city’s left-dominated assembly overcame conservative opposition to allow gay couples that marry to adopt children.

Activists in the chamber burst into cheers. Some gay men and women hugged, exchanged kisses and waved rainbow-colored flags that have come to symbolize gay rights.

“We are putting an end to segregation and stigmatization of a sector of society, giving access to full marriage rights,” David Razu, a legislator from the left-wing Social Democratic Party, or PSD, who promoted the law told Reuters.

The bill now goes to be signed by Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, who has backed other progressive measures like the legalization of abortion in some cases, putting the sprawling capital at the vanguard of liberal policies in Latin America…

Conservative lawmakers voted against the bill and vocal church leaders are likely to pressure Ebrard to veto it. Mexico’s Catholic archdiocese has said that legalizing gay marriage is immoral and will destroy families.

Let’s see. They’re ahead of NYC, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, Phoenix, etc.. All bastions of liberty and civil rights in the Land of the Free.

American politicians are such cowards – pulled around by the nose by priests and fear-filled pundits.