Eideard

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Barclays Bank has been forced to admit it paid just £113m in UK corporation tax in 2009 – a year when it rang up a record £11.6bn of profits.

The admission stunned politicians and tax campaigners. It was revealed on the eve of a day of protests planned against the high street banks by activists from UK Uncut, a group set up five months ago to oppose government cuts and corporate tax avoidance.

The Labour MP Chuka Umunna, who lobbied Barclays’ chief executive, Bob Diamond, to reveal the tax paid by the bank, described the figure – just 1% of its 2009 profits – as “shocking”.

The current rate of corporation tax in the UK is 28%, although global banks such as Barclays – which has hundreds of overseas subsidiaries, including many in tax havens – do not generate all of their profits in their domestic market.

Max Lawson, of the Robin Hood Tax Campaign, said: “This is proof that banks live in a parallel universe to the rest of us, paying billions in bonuses and unhampered by the inconvenience of paying tax.

“If banks paid their fair share we could avoid the worst of the cuts and help those hit hardest by the financial crisis they did nothing to cause.”

Just to give you an idea of how “tough” the Blair Labour government was on big corporations.

Sounds like home to an American.

Israeli settlements built on land stolen by force of arms

The United States vetoed Friday a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have declared Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said that while the United States agrees about “the folly and illegitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity, we think it unwise for this council to attempt to resolve the core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians.”

Excuse me while I get me Wellies. This much bullshit demands rubber boots.

The veto is the first to be used under the Obama administration.

Ambassador Riyad Mansour, the permanent observer of Palestine to the United Nations, objected to the veto in a statement following the vote.

“The proper message that should have been sent by the Security Council to Israel, the occupying power, is that its contempt of international law and the international community will no longer be tolerated,” he said. “We fear, however, that the message sent today may be one that only encourages further Israeli intransigence and impunity. This must be remedied.”

Israel praised the veto…

I used a major American media source – CNN – so our regular readers outside the United States could have a look at mainstream American media proving why we don’t need an official US news agency. The Voice of America is still out there being the parrot it always has been; but, the point is they’re not needed for internal consumption.

Hardly any significant American news source would offend traditional US foreign policy by being critical of Israel.

Last night, the only place to be was at king-of-all-venture-capitalists John Doerr’s house in Woodside, California, where President Barack Obama sat down with none other than Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz and a handful of other billionaire tech titans.

The White House Flickr feed shared the above image, taken by Pete Souza, identifying these people only as “Technology Business Leaders,” though bloggers made small work of attaching names to faces. According to the the New York Times political blog, The Caucus, the remaining folks in the shot are: Cisco’s John Chambers, Twitter’s Dick Costolo, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, Stanford University president John Hennessy, Genentech’s Art Levinson and “cleantech” entrepreneur Steve Westly.

And a good time was had by all.

A Spanish nun has been kicked out of the religious order where she lived the last 35 years in seclusion after spending too much time on the social networking site Facebook. María Jesús Galán, dubbed “Sister Internet” by her fellow nuns, announced on her Facebook page that she had been asked to leave the convent after disagreements over her online activities.

The 54-year old, who lists her hobbies as “reading, music, art, and making friends” had almost 600 Facebook “friends”at the time of her eviction and now has fan pages with thousands of supporters from around the globe calling for her to be allowed back into the order.

A computer was first brought onto the premises of the 14th century Santo Domingo el Real convent in Toledo, central Spain 10 years ago after the Mother Superior was persuaded it would lessen the need for nuns to enter the outside world.

“It enabled us do things such as banking online and saved us having to make trips into the city,” explained Sister Maria, who entered as a novice at the age of 21.

However, the nun quickly saw the possibilities and soon began digitising the archives contained within the convent’s ancient walls and making them accessible to the world.

In 2008, she won a local government prize for her painstaking work scanning the pages of precious texts held in the convent’s library. The award made headlines and she soon had scores of friends worldwide connecting through her Facebook page.

But despite admitting that her dedication to her vocation was as strong as ever she said she was driven from the convent by her fellow nuns who disapproved of her cyber activity and “made life impossible”.

I think regular readers here know I differentiate between those who are “religious” in the traditional sense of being dedicated to good works for humanity – and the range of useless nutballs in sectarian cults dedicated to hating fellow human because of one or another revelation.

Mean-spirited behavior, closeting your brain and demanding equally demeaning shutters over your peers is not what I believe to be the purpose of collective religious philosophy. The aristocracy of most major religions continues to practice exactly the opposite of their teaching. As we witness in this example.

Rotenone fish kill

New research shows a link between use of two pesticides, rotenone and paraquat, and Parkinson’s disease. People who used either pesticide developed Parkinson’s disease approximately 2.5 times more often than non-users…

“Rotenone directly inhibits the function of the mitochondria, the structure responsible for making energy in the cell,” said Freya Kamel, Ph.D…”Paraquat increases production of certain oxygen derivatives that may harm cellular structures. People who used these pesticides or others with a similar mechanism of action were more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease.”

The authors studied 110 people with Parkinson’s disease and 358 matched controls from the Farming and Movement Evaluation (FAME) Study to investigate the relationship between Parkinson’s disease and exposure to pesticides or other agents that are toxic to nervous tissue. FAME is a case-control study that is part of the larger Agricultural Health Study, a study of farming and health in approximately 90,000 licensed pesticide applicators and their spouses. The investigators diagnosed Parkinson’s disease by agreement of movement disorder specialists and assessed the lifelong use of pesticides using detailed interviews.

There are no home garden or residential uses for either paraquat or rotenone currently registered. Paraquat use has long been restricted to certified applicators, largely due to concerns based on studies of animal models of Parkinson’s disease. Use of rotenone as a pesticide to kill invasive fish species is currently the only allowable use of this pesticide.

Unfortunately, the operative factors is that these pesticides aren’t currently certified for consumer use. They used to be common. One of those examples where and when caution at accepting strong chemicals into ordinary use and human contact should have been the watchword.

Micra’s momma was a Nissan Versa who had sex with a Ford Fiesta

While electric, hybrid and diesel power trains having been grabbing the headlines of recent times, work continues unabated on the good ol’ gasoline internal combustion engine and some significant headway has been realized with the news of a new Nissan Micra which will run a supercharged, direct injection 1.2 litre power-plant. The lightweight, low-friction, three-cylinder engine emits just 95g/km, produces 72kW and 142Nm, and delivers combined cycle fuel economy figures of a staggering 55mpg [US].

The car will debut in Geneva, will be available in both manual and CVT transmissions and will have a healthy top speed of 112mph. Technical innovation has been packed into the engine. The DIG-S uses the Miller cycle and direct petrol injection to raise the compression ratio to 13 to 1 for greater combustion efficiency and a supercharger for instant throttle response and added power.

By minimising heat, friction and pumping losses as much a possible, Nissan’s engineers have created an engine that sets the standard for the rest of the industry. Its three-cylinder configuration gives many benefits including less weight and further reductions in friction loss, thanks to having fewer moving parts. Further gains are made thanks to the adoption of advanced engine management systems with Start/Stop and energy regeneration…

The DIG-S will be given its European debut at the Geneva Motor Show (March 3-13) with sales starting mid-year.

As for a US debut? Who knows?

AeroVironment, the California-based company behind the largest, highest and longest flying unmanned aircraft system, the Global Observer, has now achieved a remarkable technical milestone with a much smaller aircraft. With its “Nano Hummingbird” the company has for the first time achieved controlled precision hovering and fast-forward flight of a two-wing, flapping wing aircraft that carries its own energy source and relies only on its flapping wings for propulsion and control.

The hand-made final concept demonstrator Nano Hummingbird has a wingspan of 16 cm (6.5 in) and weighs just 19 g (2/3 oz), which is less than the weight of a AA battery. Into this tiny and lightweight package the AeroVironment UAS team has managed to cram all the systems required for flight, including batteries, motors, communications systems and even a video camera.

The aircraft can climb and descend vertically, fly sideways left and right, fly forward and backward, as well as rotating clockwise and counter-clockwise – all under remote control and while carrying a video camera payload. It is even capable of doing a 360-degree loop.

The Nano Hummingbird can be fitted with a removable body fairing, which is shaped to have the appearance of a real hummingbird and, although it is larger and heavier than an average hummingbird, the aircraft is actually smaller and lighter than the largest hummingbird found in nature.

Development bucks came from taxpayers via DARPA. Maybe the rest of us will get to play with it after the spooks are through using it as a mini-spyplane.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Germany’s former foreign minister Joschka Fischer has accused the former head of the CIA George Tenet of making implausible claims about the handling of the Curveball case by the US.

On Wednesday Tenet, the director of central intelligence between 1997 and 2004, issued a statement on his website saying he discovered “too damn late” that Curveball – the Iraqi defector who became a key source for the CIA and the German secret service (BND) – might be a fabricator…

Asked by the Guardian whether Tenet’s claims were plausible, Fischer said: “No. I don’t think so.”

Germany’s former foreign minister Joschka Fischer has accused the former head of the CIA George Tenet of making implausible claims about the handling of the Curveball case by the US.

On Wednesday Tenet, the director of central intelligence between 1997 and 2004, issued a statement on his website saying he discovered “too damn late” that Curveball – the Iraqi defector who became a key source for the CIA and the German secret service (BND) – might be a fabricator…

Any of you see this interchange on your favorite network TV news show?

Fischer said the BND realised some time before the war that Curveball was not a watertight source, and passed on his testimony to the CIA with warnings attached.

“Our position was always: [Curveball] might be right, but he might not be right. He could be a liar but he could be telling the truth,” said Fischer at a press conference in Berlin to promote his memoir about the Iraq war.

Fischer said Germany was put in a “very difficult position” when the CIA asked whether they could “have” Curveball, or at least use his evidence to justify a war in Iraq. Germany’s official position was that it would not join the coalition of the willing. Fischer himself famously told Donald Rumsfeld in February 2003 that he was “not convinced” about the case for war.

“On the one hand we didn’t want to withhold from the US any bit of relevant information we had about possible WMD in Iraq. On the other hand, we did not want to take part in any propagandistic exploitation of material, which was far from proven, to justify a war,” Fischer writes in his new autobiography, I Am Not Convinced.

Propaganda, xenophobia, bigotry and lies composed all the stuff of satisfaction for what inquiry came from Congress and most Americans. We are one of those nations who prates endless criticism of politicians and corruption – and as soon as one of them stands up and waves the flag we roll over and stick all four feet into the air.

Most Americans. The rest of us are a subversive lot – who consider truth to be a more valuable quality than obedience.

Baghdad municipal workers remove US blast walls
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Iraq’s capital wants the United States to apologize and pay $1 billion for the damage done to the city not by bombs but by blast walls and Humvees since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The city’s government issued its demands in a statement on Wednesday that said Baghdad’s infrastructure and aesthetics have been seriously damaged by the American military. “The U.S. forces changed this beautiful city to a camp in an ugly and destructive way, which reflected deliberate ignorance and carelessness about the simplest forms of public taste,” the statement said.

“Due to the huge damage, leading to a loss the Baghdad municipality cannot afford…we demand the American side apologize to Baghdad’s people and pay back these expenses…”

Baghdad’s neighborhoods have been sealed off by miles of concrete blast walls, transforming the city into a tangled maze that contributes to massive traffic jams. Despite a sharp reduction in overall violence in recent years only 5 percent of the walls have been removed, officials said.

The heavy blast walls have damaged sewer and water systems, pavement and parks, said Hakeem Abdul Zahra, the city spokesman.

If you know the least amount of history you’d already be aware that we helped rebuild cities we destroyed in just about all of our wars since 1941. The big one, of course, being a war where we were attacked.

Staying up-to-date, we should at least declare a special war tax on everyone who voted George W. back into a second term in office.

FBI Asst Director Shawn Henry, Eric Holder and Kathleen Sebelius behind him
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The U.S. government on Thursday charged 111 doctors, nurses and other defendants with Medicare crime schemes that exceeded $225 million in false billings, the largest health care fraud crackdown so far.

Attorney General Eric Holder and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the charges in the latest of a series of cases brought by the Obama administration…

Medicare reform represented a key part of the sweeping year-old health care law championed by Democratic President Barack Obama, but opposed by many Republicans in Congress.

The latest charges covered defendants in nine cities. In addition to arrests, law enforcement agents also executed 16 search warrants.

The defendants were charged with various crimes, including conspiracy to defraud the Medicare program, false claims, kickbacks and money laundering, administration officials said.

They said the alleged schemes involved various medical treatments, tests and services, such as home health care, physical and occupational therapy and medical equipment…

A top FBI official, Shawn Henry, said 2,600 health care fraud cases were under investigation and that organized crime groups have been increasingly linked to the alleged schemes.

Sebelius said $4 billion was recovered last year, and the government’s Medicare Fraud Strike Force was recently expanded to nine cities, with the addition of Dallas and Chicago.

Go get ‘em! Throw a couple of insurance companies into the meatgrinder while you’re at it.

They deserve to be sorted out for their role in inflating healthcare costs. They could care less about phony costs when they know American taxpayers get stuck with the bill regardless of legitimacy.