Eideard

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stepped up pledges to curb Jewish zealotry in Israel on Sunday after an 8-year-old girl complained of being menaced by ultra-Orthodox men who deemed her dress immodest.

While his conservative government insists such incidents are fringe phenomena in the mostly secular country, Netanyahu’s repeated announcements on the matter reflected concern about widening religious and political schisms…

Netanyahu said he had ordered law enforcement authorities to crack down on “whoever spits, whoever lifts a hand (in violence), whoever harasses” and to remove street signs segregating men from women in some ultra-Orthodox districts.

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Click on Guillaume Blanchard’s photo to enlarge

The recently discovered Comet Lovejoy has been captured in stunning photos and time-lapse video taken from ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The comet graced the southern sky after it had unexpectedly survived a close encounter with the Sun…

ESO optician Guillaume Blanchard made a marvellous wide-angle photo of Comet Lovejoy…Blanchard said: “For me this comet is a Christmas present to the people who will stay at Paranal over Christmas”.

This bright comet was also seen from the International Space Station in another stunning time-lapse sequence on 21 December as the crew filmed lightning on the Earth’s night side.

Comet Lovejoy has been the talk of the astronomy community over the past few weeks. It was discovered on 27 November by the Australian amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy and was classified as a Kreutz sungrazer, with its orbit taking it very close to the Sun. Just last week, the comet entered the Sun’s corona, a much-anticipated event, passing a mere 140 000 kilometres from the Sun’s surface. A close shave indeed…

The comet was expected to break up and vaporise, but instead it survived its steaming hot encounter with the Sun and re-emerged a few days later, much to everyone’s surprise. It is now visible from the southern hemisphere, appearing at dawn, and features a bright tail millions of kilometres long, composed of dust particles that are being blown ahead of the comet by the solar wind.

Some of the earliest recorded space phenomenon are comets. Ignorant primitives regard[ed] them as omens, demons, messengers from some invisible dude in the sky.

I’m pretty well satisfied simply appreciating their beauty, their history, their passage from birth to death.

Three U.S. citizens traveling to spend the holidays with their relatives in Mexico were among those killed in a spree of shooting attacks on buses in northern Mexico…A group of five gunmen attacked three buses in Mexico’s Gulf coast state of Veracruz on Thursday, killing a total of seven passengers in what authorities said appeared to be a violent robbery spree.

The Americans killed were a mother and her two daughters who were returning to visit relatives in the region, known as the Huasteca, said an official in the neighboring state of Hidalgo, where the mother was born.

Hidalgo state regional assistant secretary Jorge Rocha identified the dead U.S. mother as Maria Sanchez Hernandez, 39, of Fort Worth, Texas, and the daughters as Karla, 19, and Cristina, 13. Rocha said all three held dual U.S.-Mexican citizenship. A 14-year-old Mexican nephew traveling with the three was also killed…

While funeral plans were unclear, Rocha said Sanchez Hernandez’s mother wants her daughter to be buried in Mexico.

Three other Mexican citizens were killed in the Thursday attacks on the three buses. The five gunmen who allegedly carried out the attacks were later killed by soldiers.

Earlier in their spree, the gunmen shot to death three people and killed a fourth with grenade in the nearby town of El Higo, Veracruz…

The US consulate urged Americans to “exercise caution” when traveling in Veracruz, and “avoid intercity road travel at night.”

As I have advised my friends and relatives – stay the heck out of Mexico!

A debt is a debt. Even if it comes in the form of a 58-year-old parking ticket with a $1 fine.

That’s what 79-year-old Dale Crawford thought when a ticket issued on Feb. 3, 1953, made repeated appearances in his home in recent years.

“It kept popping up every couple of years, and a couple weeks ago I went in the drawer and there it was,” Crawford said. “And I said, ‘I’m going to contact the city.’”

The ticket was issued on the day Crawford was inducted into the Army after being drafted. He had driven his 1946 Nash to the induction center at 1200 Milam, where he left the car for his father to pick up after he reported for duty. Crawford didn’t see the ticket until he found a box of keepsakes after his mother died in 1995, he said.

He sent a letter to the mayor’s office about his outstanding fine and said he wanted to pay it off. Mayor Annise Parker commended Crawford at a news conference Wednesday where he handed over his payment. She praised him as an example for others to follow…

Parker was so impressed with Crawford that she waived all penalties and interest that could have added “some zeroes” to his debt, she said.

Good for you, dude. Cripes – imagine what the interest would have been if Houston decided to bag him!

Enjoy this weekend of the winter solstice and any other holiday you may be celebrating that brings family and friends together.

My family runs the gamut from Buddhist student to atheist, naturist philosophy to materialist dialectics. We all share the seasons and love.

One of PIP’s defective implants after removal

France’s health minister called on Saturday for the head of the breast implant maker accused of selling faulty prostheses to tens of thousands of women around the world to be found, calling the growing scandal a “shady business.”

Jean-Claude Mas, 72, the founder and CEO of French company Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) has not been seen or heard of in public since the scandal broke, potentially affecting 300,000 women around the world. His company is accused of using sub-standard industrial silicone in some of its implants, which were sold globally before being taken off the market in 2010.

…French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand told Europe 1 radio on Saturday. “They have to answer for their actions…”

Mas was briefly questioned by police in November 2010 but has never been summoned to court. A judicial source has told Reuters, however, that between four and six executives could be charged by a Marseilles criminal court for aggravated fraud.

Also on Saturday, France’s national health insurance agency said it planned to sue over the PIP affair, alleging dishonest practices and fraud. Defendants will be listed as “persons unknown,” a routine practice in France when the identity of an opposing party or parties is not yet determined…

France’s health ministry urged removal on Friday of the 30,000 PIP implants purchased by French women and said public health funds will be used to finance those extractions…

French health officials discovered last year that PIP was using a home-made brew of silicone, an industrial variety not approved by health authorities…

PIP was able to continue its ruse because periodic checks by regulators were pre-announced and even suppliers of the industrial oil used to make the silicone were lied to, according to the former executive.

Sounds like safety checks in France don’t vary especially from American standards. Even if distributors weren’t among the in-crowd which knew enough to specify “good ones or bad ones” the quality of the gel in the implants should have been apparent to the most basic of quality checks in the receiving departments of those supplying physicians. These were, after all, products for surgical procedures.

The motives of PIP’s corporate barons was the usual – greed. Idiots who prattle about this being a guiding light of capitalism and therefore forgivable should be required to pick up the tab for women who are faced with procedures to remove and replace the PIP implants. Maybe they should be implanted into the testicles of the management staff and compliant inspectors, distributors and physicians, who managed to rationalize away any responsibility for medical safety.

No, that ain’t Swedish. It’s ignoranush?

Sweden’s first case of congenital rubella in more 30 years has been discovered after a woman who was infected with the viral disease whilst on holiday gave birth to a child in Sweden with severe birth defects.

Since vaccination began in the 1970s rubella has all but disappeared in Sweden.

But a 22-year-old woman who lives in Halland, in southern Sweden, but was born in a country where vaccination against the disease is rare, caught the disease while visiting her home country during the early stages of her pregnancy, according to the local Hallands-Posten newspaper.

It is well known that rubella can cause birth defects. Unless you’re an ignorant religious nutball. The viral infectious disease often has mild symptoms, with a spreading rash and sometimes a fever.

However, the major issue with the disease is that those infected whilst pregnant have a high risk of suffering a miscarriage, or giving birth to a child with birth defects.

The woman’s child was born prematurely and with a number of defects, including problems with its eyes, ears, and heart.

“This case shows that we need to improve our screening of the people who come here from other countries, where the vaccination programmes aren’t as built out as ours,” said Maria Löfgren, assistant epidemiologist in Halland, to the newspaper.

Like potential immigrants from the United States – where religious beliefs are sufficient for someone to ignore vaccination. Cripes.

Here’s the Tea Party mayor on equal rights for all Americans

Officials are already doing damage control after City Council’s vote late Monday to scrap a federally funded transit center project.

Troy Chamber of Commerce President Michele Hodges says the controversial decision is causing some fallout in the business community, which was outspoken in its support for the project. The transit center would have combined train, bus, taxi and future light rail service at a three-acre site near Maple and Coolidge…

In a private email to Hodges that went viral Tuesday, Frank W. Ervin III, the manager of government affairs for Magna International Inc., thanked the chamber president for her efforts, adding it’s disappointing that Troy’s legislators are “narrow minded when it comes to the future of Troy and the future of Southeastern Michigan.”

In the email, Ervin also informed Hodges that he plans to draft a memo to all Magna group presidents and corporate executives “strongly recommending that Magna International no longer consider the City of Troy for future site considerations, expansions or new job creation.”

He added that he’ll also recommend “that where ever and when ever possible we reduce our footprint and employment level in Troy in favor of communities who act in the best interest of both the residents and business and not simply use their public position to advance their own private agenda…”

State transportation officials have said that if Troy turned down the federal funding for the transit center, it would be reallocated to another rail project, possibly in another state…

The decision to forfeit the $8.4 million in federal funds passed by a 4-3 vote after the panel listened to about 40 residents and stakeholders share their views for and against the decade-old project…

The center was to be a regional transportation hub and would be built around Birmingham’s Amtrak line and station and provide a transfer point to SMART bus service, taxis and limousines. The facility would include a bridge, elevators, four SMART bus slips and reconfiguration of 116 parking spaces behind the Midtown Square shopping center.

Construction would have required no local or state funding. Just jobs for the folks hired to buid the project – and there would have been DOT funds to aid in hiring fulltime employees after completion in 2013.

Presumably, the citizens of Troy will have sufficient sense to kick the Kool Aid Party types off the city council before then – not that it will do much good at reviving the project months down the road.

Pirates on trial in Yemen
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Somali pirates are holding 200 hostages for ransom, the European Union’s anti-piracy mission says.

The EU anti-piracy mission released a statement noting, “There are currently 199 men and one woman held hostage in Somalia following the pirating of their ships in the Indian Ocean and all are being held against their will to be used by criminal gangs as part of a ransom business.”

The EU report said the fate of kidnapped crew members, unless they are high-profile individuals, “is not often considered or reported.”

During the period January-September of this year, Somali pirates attacked 199 ships, a sharp increase from the same period in 2010, when 126 international vessels were assaulted.

Despite the increase in assaults however, the pirates have been less successful, as they only managed to commandeer 24 vessels that were hijacked by the end of October, compared with 35 for the same period in 2010…

First, many of the ships with high value cargos are now hiring trained staff who know their way around heavy calibre firearms. Pirates who have been fired upon are less courageous pirates. Always true.

Second, the time for some relevant body to decide to make a sweep through the Horn of Africa and clean house has come and gone. Most likely in my mind would be Ethiopia – previous holders of the territory a couple of times. Though predictable whines would rise to the heavens – as they have done before – most ordinary citizens of the region would breathe a sigh of relief. And, this time, I think they could stipulate a standing commission from the merchant marine of most companies to establish a permanent coast guard presence.

One of the display booths

The intelligence operative sits in a leather club chair, laptop open, one floor below the Hilton Kuala Lumpur’s convention rooms, scanning the airwaves for spies. In the salons above him, merchants of electronic interception demonstrate their gear to government agents who have descended on the Malaysian capital in early December for the Wiretapper’s Ball, as this surveillance industry trade show is called.

As he tries to detect hacker threats lurking in the wireless networks, the man who helps manage a Southeast Asian country’s Internet security says there’s reason for paranoia. The wares on offer include products that secretly access your Web cam, turn your cell phone into a location-tracking device, recognize your voice, mine your e-mail for anti-government sentiment and listen to supposedly secure Skype calls.

He isn’t alone watching his back at this cyber-arms bazaar, whose real name is ISS World.

For three days, attendees digging into dim sum fret about losing trade secrets to hackers, or falling prey to phone interception by rival spies. They also get a tiny taste of what they’ve unleashed on the outside world, where their products have become weapons in the hands of regimes that use the gear to track and torture dissidents…

Business is booming, with annual revenue of $3 billion to $5 billion growing as much as 20 percent a year, ISS organizer Jerry Lucas estimates…

Lucas, whose conference company TeleStrategies, Inc., is based in McLean, Virginia, makes the point that his marketplace serves police who conduct criminal investigations and intelligence services that prevent terror attacks. Virtually every communications network in the world includes wiretapping for prosecutors, or location tracking to rescue people in emergencies. And customers at ISS also include phone company executives…

“These guys can be your base station,” Lucas says.

RTFA. Long, detailed, the sort of complex dissection Bloomberg offers to business clients – and in the process offers the rest of the world a glance inside the dealings of a segment of the business world premised upon spying. Spying on you or me, spying wherever there is a profit to be acquired in information, cash or strategic outlook. Honesty, human rights and history have nothing to do with the process.