Eideard

Swimming in the sky

From the Guardian Unlimited Eyewitness App

A Lord Mayor has banned the traditional Christian prayers at the start of council meetings, calling the practice “outdated, unnecessary and intrusive“.

Colin Hall, who has just taken over the mayorship in Leicester, said the “majority” of councillors and city council staff were not practising Christians therefore there was little point in having the prayers…

“I am delighted to confirm that I will be exercising my discretion as Lord Mayor to abolish the outdated, unnecessary and intrusive practice.

“I personally consider that religion, in whatever shape or form, has no role to play at all in the conduct of council business. This particularly applies in Leicester where the majority of council members, myself included, do not regularly attend any particular faith service.”

Mr Hall said he was sure his position would be “positively received” by both council colleagues and the public, but last night he faced criticism from the Leicester Christian Fellowship…

There’s a fracking surprise. Few can whine as frequently or as loud as Christians – from a position of establishment and government support.

Mr Hall declined to comment but the Deputy Lord Mayor, Robert Wann, said he was supportive, adding: “We have many faiths within Leicester and we respect all faiths accordingly.

“Equally we respect people with no faith and on this occasion the Lord Mayor has decided not to have prayers and we will abide by that…”

Can you imagine even suggesting this in Congress? Or East Jeebus, Texas? You’d be lynched.

Rock on, Colin!

The 10-year-old Human Genome Project has only just begun to bring to fruition its promise to transform medicine…

Francis Collins, who led the U.S. component of the project and is now director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, said that although it may seem that the revolution promised with the publication of the first draft in 2000 is slow in coming, many early predictions had been prematurely hyped.

Isn’t that a pundit-based specialty?

Scientists have barely scratched below the surface of the possibilities opened up by having access to the whole human gene map, he said, and when they do, their results will determine the way all people are diagnosed and treated for diseases.

“It’s fair to say that most people have not yet had the experience of having their personal medical care directly affected by the sequencing of the human genome,” Francis told a briefing in London marking the project’s 10-year anniversary.

“So while one might argue that the consequences have not come across in the first 10 years in the most dramatic form that some predictors put forward in the year 2000, I think the predictions … were probably a bit overblown.”

Mike Stratton, another of the project’s founders and now director of Britain’s influential Sanger Institute, pointed to several areas of disease where big medical advances had already come about thanks to the ability to read the map of human life.

Cancer drugs, like so-called BRAF inhibitors for malignant melanoma skin cancers — versions of which are being developed by drugmakers including Switzerland’s Roche and Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline — were examples how quickly gene sequencing had given birth to targeted treatments, he said…

The genome founders also noted that scientists had already found more than 800 genetic variants that play a role in risks of common illnesses like heart disease, cancers and diabetes…

“When a truly transformative advance occurs in science, inevitably there will be in the short term an overly optimistic set of predictions,” he said. “But in the long term…the consequences will turn out to have been underestimated. I think that will…be true of the Human Genome Project.

Couldn’t agree more. We always hope for more than just plain good news. In part, let’s face it, because of our mortality.

But, real science requires proofs and testing, peer review and more testing. There is no easy way around sound methods. And, of course, if results aren’t forthcoming quickly enough to satisfy Reality TV and beancounters – whining is the result.

The human foetus feels no pain before 24 weeks, according to a major review of scientific evidence…

The connections in the foetal brain are not fully formed in that time, nor is the foetus conscious, according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

The findings of two reports commissioned by the Department of Health strike a blow to those seeking to reduce the upper time limit for having an abortion, currently at 24 weeks.

The studies suggest that late abortions, permitted for serious abnormalities or risks to a woman’s health, do not result in foetal suffering because of increasing evidence that the chemical environment in the uterus induces “a continuous sleep-like unconsciousness or sedation”…

Even after 24 weeks, “it is difficult to say that the foetus experiences pain because this, like all other experiences, develops post-natally along with memory and other learned behaviours”…

Anti-abortion campaigners said the work did not challenge other arguments for a lower limit.

Other than the fact that anti-abortion arguments are limited almost exclusively to anti-scientific, religious humbug. And take no account of a woman’s right to choose to order her own life.

Police in Scotland had to buy emergency supplies of chocolate and water for a planeload of Ryanair passengers who were close to mutiny after spending four hours on the tarmac without any food and drink.

Strathclyde police were called to the Ryanair flight at Prestwick airport in Ayrshire yesterday after the plane was held on the runway due to delays caused by an air traffic controllers strike in France.

The flight, to Girona in Spain, had been due to leave at 2pm but by 6pm the flight’s besieged crew called the police.

The 168 passengers, many with children, became increasingly angry after the crew refused to open the refreshment trolleys, saying they were forbidden from doing so until the flight was in the air. Others wanted to get off the plane.

Officers decided to buy Mars bars, Double Deckers and water at the force’s expense and brought the supplies on board. The flight eventually left shortly before 8pm…

Sarah Toom, one of the affected passengers, told BBC Scotland: “It was quite hectic in the aircraft earlier – a lot of parents with young kids were getting quite upset and raising their voices because we weren’t allowed off the aircraft to buy food and drink.

“None was being brought on board and none was being offered by Ryanair staff, whom, I have to say, were doing their best.”

She said a loud cheer went up when the police brought supplies.

The coppers were smarted than the bureaucrats running the airport. No surprise.

Knitted from Fruit Loops

Kellogg is voluntarily recalling about 28 million boxes of Apple Jacks, Corn Pops, Froot Loops and Honey Smacks cereals because an unusual smell and flavor from the packages’ liners could make people ill…

Kellogg is trying to identify the substance on the liners that’s causing the problem and is offering consumers refunds in the meantime.

The products were distributed throughout the U.S. and began arriving in stores in late March.

Only products with the letters “KN” following the use-by date are included in the recall. Products in Canada are not affected.

Too bad they had to retrieve this crap so soon. Probably had a shelf life good for another decade or so.

They could have a tits-for-tithes promotion for new members.

On Friday, ICANN … voted to allow the application of the controversial “.xxx” top-level domain name for sites that display adult content.

The domain, which would need further approval before going live on the internet, would be applied to adult entertainment sites just as “.com” is now.

The .xxx internet suffix, which was first proposed six years ago by ICM Registry, a group that sells domain names, “will provide a place online for adult entertainment providers and their service providers who want to be part of our voluntary self regulatory community,” according to that company’s news release.

Adopting .xxx will be optional. However, some tech blogs speculate a push to make the domain mandatory for adult-only sites.

ICM Registry has already taken 110,000 pre-reservations for the domain, which could be available in early 2011, if not sooner, its news release states.

The “debate” over the xxx domain idea has been around for a long time. Its emergence probably has no implications whatsoever (but don’t expect that to stop the “debate”).

Just days after a sensationalist report by the LA Times suggested that Apple was spying on users’ location based on an incorrect understanding of the company’s revised privacy policy, two Congressmen, one a chair of the House Privacy Caucus, have demanded that the company answer a series of basic privacy questions.

The original report by David Sarno of the LA Times set off a firestorm of privacy panic three days ago after it suggested Apple was tracking iPhone users’ locations in some radical new way that other devices weren’t, and assumed that users were powerless to do anything about it…

The report has since been amended twice, once to note that users can turn off Location Services entirely or on a per-app basis, while also stating “there’s nothing to indicate that these settings prevent Apple itself from gathering and storing location data from Apple devices,” and again two days later to acknowledge that the privacy policy change is not really new at all, but rather simply a restatement of the privacy policy contained in the company’s product EULAs, which contained precise language instructing how users can withdraw their consent for system wide and per-app data collection.

What the LA Times failed to report is why the change in presenting the privacy policy was made, and how users can opt out of geographic location data used by Apple’s iAd program. Formerly, Apple and third parties used Location Services solely to power features such as locating the device in Maps, Find My Phone, GPS driving directions, and similar applications. With the company’s purchase of Quattro Wireless, it’s now in the business of display advertising, and can potentially allow third parties to collect geographic and other user information to enable ads to provide more relevant and targeted results.

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California welfare recipients using state-issued debit cards withdrew more than $1.8 million in taxpayer cash on casino floors between October 2009 and last month.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued an executive order requiring welfare recipients to promise they will use cash benefits only to “meet the basic subsistence needs” of their families. The order also gave the state Department of Social Services seven days to produce a plan to reduce other types of “waste, fraud and abuse” in the welfare program.

The moves came after The Times reported Wednesday that officials at the department failed to notice for years that welfare recipients could use the state-issued cards to withdraw taxpayer cash at more than half of the tribal casinos and state-licensed poker rooms in California. The state initiated the debit card program in 2002.

Casino withdrawals, which represented far less than 1% of total welfare spending during the eight months for which the department released data, averaged just over $227,392 a month.

Schwarzenegger has already ordered the vendor that runs the state welfare system’s ATM network to prohibit the cards from working at casino machines…

No one noticed this was going on for eight years?

As foolish and unproductive is the practice of gambling away your welfare check, the failure of bureaucrats to keep an eye on spending is an example of how useless most “government jobs” become in the United States.

If you wondered how Republicans care about workingclass families…

Senate Republicans have once again blocked legislation to reinstate long-term unemployment benefits for people who have exhausted their aid, prolonging a stalemate that has left more than a million people without federal help.

With the Senate apparently paralyzed by partisan gridlock, the fate of the aid, as well as tax breaks for businesses and $16 billion in aid for cash-strapped states, remains unclear. California and dozens of other states are hoping for federal aid to help balance their budgets.

Republican lawmakers — joined by Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska — maintained a unified front to sustain a filibuster of the $110-billion bill. The vote was 57 to 41; the majority was three short of the 60 needed to cut off debate and bring the bill to a final vote.

So much for democracy.

“If there were ever evidence that this is the party of no, this is it,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who added that several governors would be arriving in Washington next week to make the case for the bill to help states, businesses and those who have been out of work more than six months…

The unemployment extension would add about $30 billion to the national debt. Democrats say all the provisions in the bill are offset by spending cuts and tax increases except the jobless benefits, which Congress traditionally has approved as an emergency without looking for a way to pay for them. Benefits for the long-term unemployed lapsed at the end of May because of the congressional stalemate.

The Labor Department estimates that more than 1.2 million long-term unemployed will have lost their benefits by the end of this week.

Any idea how many times in my life I’ve seen the Republican Party do their utmost to impede or disable unemployment insurance? I lived and worked, been unemployed and out on the job trail through several major recessions since I started as an apprentice machinist in 1955.

Time after time, Republicans used beancounter excuses to try to halt the legislation FDR got through Congress in 1935 to aid folks out of work during the Great Depression. And here we are, now – struggling out of the Bush/Bankers Great Recession and the Party of NO continues their crusade against working people.