Eideard

A group of schoolgirls claims to have discovered exactly what makes the perfect egg-and-soldiers breakfast.

The young eggheads from Sherborne Girls School in Dorset say Delia Smith was right all along…the perfect boiled egg does take six minutes.

The team of twelve science students took part in an experiment commissioned by the Royal Society of Chemistry and led by Professor Hal Sosabowski, principal lecturer in Chemistry at Brighton University. Setting out to test one of the nation’s all-time favourite breakfasts, the boffins confirmed not only the optimum time for boiling an egg but also the key variables that make up the perfect dipping soldier.

Their finds included:

*Margarine makes a stronger dunking soldier than butter
*White bread makes more effective soldiers
*Optimum toasting time is 2.5 minutes
*The perfect soldier dimension is 1.5cm in width
*The perfect boiled egg takes six minutes…

Sixth-form student Rosanna Younger, 17, came forward with the hypothesis that “applying margarine to toast will produce stronger soldiers than applying butter”.

She said “It has been really interesting to identify a strong trend in such a short time. We kept the experiment simple, focusing on one aspect of boiled eggs and soldiers. “I love butter on my toast but I might just have to swap over to margarine in future to ensure strong soldiers..!”

The school’s aim is “to provide a rich, all-round education enabling girls to enjoy fulfilling and active lives, have open and enquiring minds and develop the character and courage to make a valuable contribution to a changing world”.

I would suggest an additional variable in their consideration of butter vs. margarine coating the soldier in this recipe. What was the butterfat percentage in the butter they were using? I imagine that a higher bf-rating than the usual OTC stuff might make a difference.

[And who would be silly enough to challenge Delia over boiled eggs]

A senior minister has accidentally revealed a UK government briefing document “welcoming” the departure of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell was photographed clutching the note as he left No 10. It said the UK should “publicly and privately” approve Mr Karzai’s decision not to seek a third term in 2014.

In response, Foreign Secretary William Hague said the memo was “pretty low level”, adding “these things happen”.

These things happen – like clicking a link in a phishing email or giving your credit card info to someone who just rang you up from Nigeria.

Mr Mitchell was photographed leaving Downing Street following a meeting of the National Security Council – in which ministers discussed Libya, Afghanistan and a range of other issues.

The document says: “Note that Karzai has publicly stated his intention to step down at the end of his second term as per the constitution. This is very important. It improves Afghanistan’s political prospects very significantly. We should welcome Karzai’s announcement in private and in public…”

It goes on to say: “Afghan perceptions of violence are very important for their confidence in their future, and for their readiness to work for the Afghan government.

“Have we got the strategic communications on levels of violence right?…”

“They would have had a national security level marking of ‘restricted’ or ‘confidential’ if they contained anything of significant sensitivity,” a spokesman said.

Not that the Brits have the market cornered on incompetent security. Still, they should add another level of secure classification. In addition to Top Secret, Restricted or Confidential, they might consider Don’t Do Anything Stupid!

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Thousands of protesters crammed Egypt’s Tahrir Square on Tuesday, hoping to catch a glimpse of a Google executive whose detention by secret police has made him a figurehead for anti-government demonstrators.

Wael Ghonim’s arrival in the downtown Cairo square was met with loud cheers from the massive crowd, according to the CBC’s David Common…

Ghonim, 30, who heads Google’s Middle East and North Africa marketing divisions, was released Monday after nearly two weeks in custody, during which he was blindfolded and interrogated.

“When you don’t see anything but a black scene for 12 days, you keep praying that those outside still remember you,” Ghonim tweeted Tuesday. “Thanks everyone.”

In an interview following his release, he acknowledged he had helped set up a Facebook page that set off the massive protests that have gripped Egypt since Jan. 25.

He called the protests “the revolution of the youth of the internet and now the revolution of all Egyptians.”

Ghonim went missing on Jan. 27, when he was snatched from the streets of Cairo by three plainclothes officers. His whereabouts were not known until Sunday, when a prominent Egyptian political figure confirmed he was under arrest and would soon be released.

Ghonim dismissed accusations of treason by security officials.

“Anyone with good intentions is the traitor because being evil is the norm,” he said Monday.

“If I was a traitor, I would have stayed in my villa in the Emirates and made good money and said like others, ‘Let this country go to hell.’ But we are not traitors.”

Bravo!

Part of having a conscience is acting upon the guidance of that guidance. One of the earliest existential dichos I try to respect is that recognizing evil, a crime, a need, a solution – requires you to act upon that recognition. Those who sit back and whine – and do nothing constructive – provide no value to their own life or the lives of those they affect.

What – me worry?

A man who has been representing Taliban senior leadership in secret talks with the Afghan government appears to have been an impostor.

The man, calling himself Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the Taliban’s second-ranking official, was exposed after another man who knows Mansour did not recognise him during a negotiation session…

The secret talks with the impostor had been going on for months and were used by senior US officials to claim progress on the diplomatic front in the Afghan war.

NATO and Afghan officials told the New York Times they held three meetings with the man, who allegedly received large sums of money to take part in the negotiations.

The fake Taliban leader, who travelled from across the border in Pakistan, even met with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, in the presidential palace in Kabul, the capital. He was flown to the capital on NATO aircraft…

I’ll bet the TSA would have caught him, right?

Al Jazeera’s Sue Turton, reporting from Kabul, said US officials always held suspicions about the identity of the man.

“Americans here admit that they don’t often know what these people look like; that they can only go on who they say they are because these people have been hiding and fighting this insurgency for so long,” she said.

“So they have to go on trust to a certain extent, and it seems that this particular man has managed to get away with it.”

Har!

We condemned the Nazis for the same kind of medical experiments

U.S. government medical researchers intentionally infected hundreds of people in Guatemala, including institutionalized mental patients, with gonorrhea and syphilis without their knowledge or permission more than 60 years ago.

Many of those infected were encouraged to pass the infection onto others as part of the study.

About one third of those who were infected never got adequate treatment.

On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius are expected to offer extensive apologies for actions taken by the U.S. Public Health Service…

The episode raises inevitable comparisons to the infamous Tuskegee experiment, the Alabama study where hundreds of African-American men were told they were being treated for syphilis, but in fact were denied treatment. That U.S. government study lasted from 1932 until press reports revealed it in 1972.

The Guatemala experiments…were discovered by Susan Reverby, a professor of women’s studies at Wellesley College, and was posted on her website [.pdf].

According to Reverby’s report, the Guatemalan project was co-sponsored by the U.S. Public Health Service, the NIH, the Pan-American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the Pan American Health Organization) and the Guatemalan government.

Reverby, who has written extensively about the Tuskegee experiments, found the evidence while conducting further research on the Alabama syphilis study.

The policies of the United States government have always been founded on the arrogant presumption that if our government feels something is beneficial to their corporate bosses, then they have the right to do whatever they wish. International law, the laws of our own land, ethics and decency are out of the equation.

My first thought on these revelations? What will be exposed, say, in 2070 about what our politicians are doing to exploit ordinary folks today?

Audi keeps on growing its e-tron family. The automaker pulled a fast one by unveiling yet another electrified monster at the 2010 Paris Motor Show, only this time, the low-slung hybrid came sans-top. The concept is powered by two electric motors and a 300-horsepower twin-turbo TDI V6 that comes to the fight with 479 pound-feet of torque. Audi says that despite the hefty 9.1 kilowatt-hour battery mounted up front, it managed to keep the weight low and distribute the pounds evenly across the chassis. As a result, this e-tron should be plenty flingable if it ever makes it off of the stage and onto a public road.

Audi says the e-tron Spyder hits the scales at 3,196 pounds and that the drivetrain can be driver-controlled to operate on electric power only at speeds up to 37 mph for a total of 31 miles. The manufacturer says that in city driving, the capability is more than enough to hang with traffic. If not, there’s always that juicy diesel V6 to play with…

That’s a twin-turbo V6 diesel that gets up to 102 mpg. Plus – you add in the electric drive.

A team of amateur sky watchers has pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the debut flight of the nation’s first robotic spaceplane, finding clues that suggest the military craft is engaged in the development of spy satellites rather than space weapons, which some experts have suspected but the Pentagon strongly denies.

Last month, the unmanned successor to the space shuttle blasted off from Florida on its debut mission but attracted little public notice because no one knew where it was going or what it was doing. The spaceship, known as the X-37B, was shrouded in operational secrecy, even as civilian specialists reported that it might go on mysterious errands for as long as nine months before zooming back to earth and touching down on a California runway…

Now, the amateur sky watchers have succeeded in tracking the stealthy object for the first time and uncovering clues that could back up the surveillance theory. Ted Molczan, a team member in Toronto, said the military spacecraft was passing over the same region on the ground once every four days, a pattern he called “a common feature of U.S. imaging reconnaissance satellites.”

In six sightings, the team has found that the craft orbits as far north as 40 degrees latitude, just below New York City. In theory, on a clear night, an observer in the suburbs might see the X-37B as a bright star moving across the southern sky…

Mr. Molczan said team members in Canada and South Africa made independent observations of the X-37B on Thursday and, as it turned out, caught an earlier glimpse of the orbiting spaceship late last month from the United States. Weeks of sky surveys paid off when the team members Kevin Fetter and Greg Roberts managed to observe the craft from Brockville, Ontario, and Cape Town.

Mr. Molczan said the X-37B was orbiting about 255 miles up — standard for a space shuttle — and circling the planet once every 90 minutes or so…

The Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office leads the X-37B program for what it calls the “development and fielding of select Defense Department combat support and weapons systems…”

Brian Weedon of the Secure World Foundation…questioned the current mission’s secrecy.

“If a bunch of amateurs can find it,” Mr. Weedon said, “so can our adversaries.”

Har!

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.

A pair of useless self-serving political gits

Tony Blair was aware of the existence of a secret interrogation policy which effectively led to British citizens, and others, being ­tortured during counter-terrorism investigations, the Guardian can reveal.

The policy, devised in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, offered guidance to MI5 and MI6 officers questioning detainees in Afghanistan whom they knew were being mistreated by the US military.

British intelligence officers were given written instructions that they could not “be seen to condone” torture and that they must not “engage in any activity yourself that involves inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners”.

But they were also told they were not under any obligation to intervene to prevent detainees from being mistreated.

“Given that they are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to prevent this,” the policy said.

Read the rest of this entry »

Police in the US have uncovered cocaine with a street value of $400,000 – in a police car.

An undercover officer in Dallas discovered nearly 50lb of the drug as he was cleaning the car his squad had been using for two months. The cocaine was hidden in hydraulically controlled secret compartments.

The vehicle was seized at a crime scene earlier this year. It was put into police service after a search by the narcotics squad found nothing unusual…

I suppose if he wasn’t a tidy copper, the car eventually would have ended up being sold.

Thanks, K B