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WHAT TO DO WITH LEFT OVER TOILET PAPER ROLLS? JUNIOR JACQUET of France has an answer that works for him. He recycles and reuses these cardboard rolls into a legion of odd characters with contorted faces. His process is simple: Jacquet paints—then pushes and pulls the cardboard roll, slowly revealing his next character.
link: accidental mysteries: Face Sculptures
Stuart Clark writes:
EACH clear night when the moon is high in the sky, a group of astronomers in New Mexico take aim at our celestial neighbour and blast it repeatedly with pulses of light from a powerful laser. They target suitcase-sized reflectors left on the lunar surface by the Apollo 11, 14 and 15 missions, as well as by two Russian landers.
Out of every 300 quadrillion (1015) photons that are sent to the moon, about five find their way back. The rest are lost to our atmosphere, or miss the lunar reflectors altogether.
From this small catch, the team can assess the movement of the moon to an accuracy of a millimetre or two - a measurement so precise that it has the potential to show up any cracks in Einstein's general theory of relativity. If that's what it does, this lunar laser-ranging experiment will become Apollo's greatest scientific legacy.
Lunar laser ranging has a long history. "I wasn't even born when the first reflectors were left on the moon," says 39-year-old Tom Murphy from the University of California, San Diego, who heads the experiment at the Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico.
In the mid-1960s, when NASA asked for suggestions for experiments that could be carried out on the moon, laser ranging was mooted but no one really knew what to do with it. There was a suggestion to look for gradual changes in Newton's gravitational constant, but this would have meant running the experiment for over 20 years - something no one was prepared to commit to. Then a young researcher called Ken Nordtvedt had an idea.
Through a fiendish piece of mathematics, he showed that, with just a few years' worth of data, lunar laser ranging could be used to test a cornerstone of general relativity known as the equivalence principle. It starts from the idea that a body has two kinds of mass. The first, called gravitational mass, is the mass that produces and feels the pull of gravity. The second is inertial mass, which describes how hard it is to move an object out of its current state of motion - or lack of it. The equivalence principle asserts that the two are exactly equal.
The equivalence principle holds in general relativity, but in the mid-1960s, a rival theory developed by American physicists Carl Brans and Robert Dicke was gaining ground. By postulating a fifth force of nature, the Brans-Dicke theory of gravitation broke the equivalence principle and predicted a 13-metre perturbation in the moon's orbit. Nordtvedt showed that analysing light signals reflecting from the moon could prove the existence of such a disturbance.
continue at the link: Apollo special: Mirrors on the moon - space - 12 July 2009 - New Scientist
In your 1976 essay “Is Gender Necessary?,” you refer to Genly Ai as “conventional” and “stuffy.” There has been some debate in the Book Club over Ai’s stereotyping of Estraven as female when he seems frail or vulnerable. Do you consider Ai a sexist?
Oh, yes. Not a mean one. Not a misogynist. He just has accepted and identified with his society’s definition of women as weaker than men, more devious, less courageous, etc.—physically and intellectually inferior. This gender prejudice has existed for so many thousands of years in so many different societies that I had no hesitation in carrying it on into the future.
In 1968, I don’t think anybody could have imagined an Earthman feeling at home with and welcoming the alien gender situation of Gethen. I did think about sending an Earthwoman there—and she would have reacted very differently from Genly...
But science fiction in 1968 wasn’t about women. It was about men. It was a man’s world. I felt I was taking a huge risk as it was, presenting a largely male readership with these weirdly re-gendered people. I thought the guys would hate it.
I was wrong. They liked it fine. It was the feminists who gave me a hard time about it for years. They wanted me to have been braver. I guess I wish I had been. But I did the best I knew how to do. And Genly does learn a lot!
Early on, Genly Ai is casually, almost incidentally, identified as black. He appears to have come from an enlightened version of Earth, where race is no longer a source of division—although gender still is. Did you believe, while writing the book, that racial difference would be an easier barrier for society to overcome than gender? If so, four decades after the book’s publication, do you still think this is true?
In the long run, yes, I think it’s true. I’ve seen it happening, too slowly, but happening, in my lifetime.
I don’t see the very deep prejudice of male superiority lessening nearly as much; it has even been reconfirmed when fundamentalists of various religions re-enforce it.
But Genly’s skin color was not a prediction, it was a bit of deliberate activism. Most readers of science fiction (then and now) are white. Science-fictional characters, then, were white (and nothing said about it.)
So, my evil activist plot: Let your hero have a dark skin, but don’t say anything about it, until the reader is used to identifying with that person, and then suddenly realizes, Hey, I’m not white!...But what do you know?—I’m still human!
This sneaky approach has paid off recently for me personally, in some very touching letters from people of color who wanted me to know that my books (particularly the Earthsea series) were the very first s.f. or fantasy novels from which they did not feel deliberately and hatefully excluded: This World for Whites Only.
Voting has ended in Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region with the opposition complaining of irregularities.
The polls closed at 7pm (16:00GMT) on Saturday, after electoral officials extended voting by an hour to accomodate residents that had flocked to cast their ballots in the local presidential and parliamentary elections.
"We ... decided to extend voting by one hour because we received complaints from some voters because they could not find their names on voting lists," Hamdia al-Husseini, the head of the region's electoral department, said.
Final results are not expected for several days as ballots must be collected in Irbil, the regional capital, before being flown to Baghdad to be counted.
Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel Hamid, reporting from Irbil, said observers at polling stations across the region maintained that voting took place smoothly for the most part.
But just before the polls closed, the region's main opposition group told Al Jazeera that their observers had witnessed instances of fraud in some areas.
A spokesman for the Change List, the main opposition party, said fraud was especially "significant" in the extended hour of voting.
link: Al Jazeera English - Middle East - Iraqi Kurd vote ends in acrimony
March 4, 1901. "President William McKinley second inaugural parade, Pennsylvania Avenue." Brady-Handy Collection glass negative.
link: Inaugural Umbrellas: 1901 | Shorpy Photo Archive
Mr. Schrefer, author of “Hack the SAT,” occasionally takes the exam in the service of his test-prep business. On this sitting, he set out to understand how the College Board would grade an essay that was morally repugnant yet had excellent structure, language and syntax.
In thoughtful and concise language, he developed over 20 minutes the most “monstrous argument” he could imagine. He praised the intellectual courage of the Nazis — some of the “brightest thinkers” of our time. Their genius, he noted, was in recognizing that not “everyone has the right to the same opportunities, or the right to exist at all.” He concluded that only by “safeguarding racial stratification and genetic superiority can true and ambitious progress be made.”
Top scores go to the essay that “effectively and insightfully develops a point of view on the issue and demonstrates outstanding critical thinking, using clearly appropriate examples, reasons, and other evidence to support its position.” Guidelines say nothing about the quality of the point of view taken.
One of the two judges gave Mr. Schrefer a 5, and the other a perfect score of 6.
link: Blackboard - Test Prep - Just Following Orders - An Evil Essay - NYTimes.com
The ousted president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, made his second symbolic trip in two days to this remote post along the border with Honduras on Saturday, defying calls from foreign leaders to avoid any moves that might provoke violence in his politically polarized country.
Meanwhile, in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, the Honduran armed forces issued a communiqué indicating that they would not stand in the way of an agreement to return him to power.
The communiqué, posted on the Honduran Armed Forces Web site, endorsed the so-called San José Accord that was forged in Costa Rica by delegates representing President Zelaya and the man who heads the de facto Honduran government, Roberto Micheletti.
The accord, prepared by the mediator of the talks, President Óscar Arias of Costa Rica, and supported by most governments in the hemisphere, would allow Mr. Zelaya to return as president, although with significantly limited executive powers. Mr. Micheletti has steadfastly rejected Mr. Zelaya’s return as president.
link: Standoff Continues at Border of Honduras - NYTimes.com
Yet as he and other biologists are all too aware, we are also smack-dab in the middle of a great species smack down, an age of mass extinctions for which we humans are largely to blame. Estimates of annual species loss vary widely and are merely crude guesstimates anyway, but most researchers agree that, as a result of habitat destruction, climate volatility, pesticide runoff, ocean dumping, jet-setting invasive species and other “anthropogenic” effects on the environment, the extinction rate is many times above nature’s chronic winnowing. “Our best guess is that it’s hugely above baseline, a hundred times above baseline,” said John Robinson, an executive vice president at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “The problem is, we’ve only described an estimated 15 percent of all species on Earth, so most of what’s going extinct are things we didn’t even know existed.”
In sum, we have a provocatively twinned set of rising figures: on the one hand, the known knowns, that is, the number of new species that researchers are divulging by the day; and on the other, the unknown unknowns, the creatures that are fast disappearing without benefit of a Linnaean tag. To this second statistic must be added the “known no longers,” the named species that we’ve managed to directly or indirectly annihilate, like the Yangtze river dolphin, declared functionally extinct two years ago, or the dusky seaside sparrow, which tweeted its last in 1987.
Antithetical as they may seem, the two data sets are in many ways intertwined. One reason scientists are discovering more new species now than they were a couple of decades ago is that previously impenetrable places have been opened to varying degrees of development, allowing researchers to rush in and sample the abundance before it disappears. The gulp ’n’ go style of the global market can also deliver taxonomic novelty right to scientists’ door.
Inés Míriam Alemán writes:
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. media — which is now pretending to be alarmed about torture — begged for torture of alleged terrorists to be legalized; in fact, the media gave its explicit approval to the torture subsequently committed.
In the November 5 edition of Newsweek magazine of that year, its editor, Jonathan Alter, wrote an article titled "Time to think about torture," in which he said, "We cannot legalize physical torture; it’s contrary to American values. But even as we continue to speak out against human-rights abuses around the world, we need to keep an open mind about certain measures…. And we'll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies…"
That same day, The New York Times published an article titled "Media stoke debate on torture," which provided a long list of articles in the U.S. media advocating torture, including the TV networks CNN and Fox, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, and others.
The horror now being expressed by the U.S. media and government officials regarding revelations about abuses perpetrated by U.S. forces in Iraq contrasts with the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a massacre that still moves the world, the brutalities practiced by U.S. forces in Vietnam, and the development of new methods of torture.
link: granma.cu -
Computers are evolving – literally. While the tech world argues netbooks vs notebooks, synthetic biologists are leaving traditional computers behind altogether. A team of US scientists have engineered bacteria that can solve complex mathematical problems faster than anything made from silicon.
more at the link: Bacterial computers can crack mathematical problems | Science | guardian.co.uk
Nate Silver writes:
Specter's overall party loyalty score since becoming a Democrat -- counting votes both before and after the primary challenge -- is 87 percent. This contrasts with the 44 percent of the time that he broke ranks to side with the Democratic on Contentious Votes while still a member of the Republican Party. He's basically been behaving like a mainline, liberal Democrat.
Notice, however, that I did not say Specter has become a mainline, liberal Democrat. On the one hand, it makes sense that Specter might have been hedging his bets early on after becoming a Democrat, siding with the Republican on a few issues to avoid looking like too much of a craven flip-flopper. He wasn't going to come out with guns blazing the next day with bills to enact single-payer health care and to prosecute George W. Bush for war crimes. He was going to wait until the spotlight was shining a little less brightly, and then begin to vote somewhat routinely with his new party.
On the other hand, it's hard not to imagine that this process has been strengthened, accentuated, catalyzed, by Joe Sestak's primary challenge. You can draw a pretty clear line in the sand from when Specter went from sorta, kinda Democrat to OMG totally! Democrat, and it coincides with the date that Sestak announced his challenge.
The real question is how Specter will behave if and when he wins the primary challenge, and the pressure from the left is off. This is especially so now that some polling shows Republican Pat Toomey, who forced Specter from the GOP in the first place, competitive against him in the general election.
link: Google Reader (40)
1907 Johnny Hodges, Alto Sax b. Cambridge, MA, USA. d. May, 11, 1970. né: Cornelius Hodge. Member of Duke Ellington's orchestra from 1928 on. Esquire Mag. 1944-45, Gold Award for Alto sax. In 1946 he received the Silver Award. Biography ~by Scott Yanow Possessor of the most beautiful tone ever heard in jazz, altoist Johnny Hodges formed his style early on and had little reason to change it through the decades. Although he could stomp with the best swing players and was masterful on the blues, Hodges' luscious playing on ballads has never been topped. He played drums and piano early on before switching to soprano sax when he was 14. Hodges was taught and inspired by Sidney Bechet, although he soon used alto as his main ax; he would regretfully drop soprano altogether after 1940.
link: ON THIS DAY IN JAZZ AGE MUSIC!: JULY 25TH...
NeuroCulture writes:
Here you can explore a selection of the diary drawings being exhibited.
The drawings chart Bobby’s treatment in day hospitals and psychiatric wards, psychological therapies, medication and the NHS mental health ‘system’, as well as her family life, friends and work, and the joy of slowly getting better.
Some of the drawings are captioned by Bobby.
link: Image gallery | Wellcome Collection
Iranian police and pro-government militia attacked and scattered hundreds of protesters in a demonstration in Iran's capital Saturday, witnesses said.
The protests were in response to the demonstrations being held around the world calling for the Iranian government to release opposition activists, one of the witnesses told The Associated Press.
Protesters in Vanak and Mirdamad districts chanted "death to the dictator" and "we want our vote back" before they were attacked and beaten by police. Advertisement The witnesses spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
As night fell, Iranians across the city gathered on their rooftops and chanted "death to the dictator" and "courageous neighbors, thank you for your support," apparently in response to the protests around the world.
While the rooftop chanting had been common feature in the immediate aftermath of the June 12 elections, it had largely disappeared in recent weeks.
link: Witnesses: Iran police attack hundreds of protesters - Haaretz - Israel News
A Honduran man was found dead Saturday on a road leading to the border with Nicaragua, one day after ousted President Manuel Zelaya stepped back into Honduras in a symbolic act of defiance.
Zelaya supporters, who gathered at the border Saturday in hopes that the president would once again return to try and reenter his homeland, blamed Honduran police for the death.
The man, identified by friends as 23 year-old Pedro Madriel Munoz Alvarado, had knife wounds and signs he had been beaten. The body was found on the ground next to a coffee field, an AFP journalist reported.
Radio Globo reported that witnesses on Friday saw police arresting the man after he participated in pro-Zelaya demonstrations in El Paraiso, some 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from the border with Nicaragua.
Zelaya supporters were preventing police and authorities from reaching the body.
link: Honduran killed near tense border with Nicaragua - Yahoo! News
John Markoff writes:
A robot that can open doors and find electrical outlets to recharge itself. Computer viruses that no one can stop. Predator drones, which, though still controlled remotely by humans, come close to a machine that can kill autonomously.
Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.
Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.
As examples, the scientists pointed to a number of technologies as diverse as experimental medical systems that interact with patients to simulate empathy, and computer worms and viruses that defy extermination and could thus be said to have reached a “cockroach” stage of machine intelligence.
link: Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man - NYTimes.com
1. In a show of reconciliation and unity, both Prof. Gates and Officer Crowley will meet with President Obama at the White House.
2. The Cambridge police union is happy.
3. A Republican representative wants Congress to debate a political resolution slamming President Obama and reigniting the controversy.
Obviously, the only reason McCotter is pushing this attack is to try to score political points, but it's such a transparent ploy, it's almost guaranteed to blow up in his face. Does he really think that nobody will notice that while everybody else is working to come together and reduce the heat, he is stepping forward to try to crank up the flame?
link: Daily Kos: Gates arrest: GOP congressman still on political warpath
Rod Nordland writes:
When Iraqis were drafting their Constitution in 2005, the parties could not agree on who would control Kirkuk, the prized oil capital of the north. They couldn’t even agree on who lived in Kirkuk, which is claimed by the region’s Kurds, but also by its Turkmen minority and Sunni Arabs. For that matter, they couldn’t even agree on where Kirkuk was — in Tamim, Erbil, or Sulaimaniya Province.
Iraq So the Iraqis punted, inserting Article 140, a clause that called for a national census, followed by a referendum on the status of Kirkuk, all to be held by the end of 2007. What followed were a succession of delays, against a backdrop of sectarian violence and warnings that Kirkuk could blow apart the Shiite-Kurdish alliance that has governed Iraq since the Americans invaded.
link: Now It’s a Census That Could Rip Iraq Apart - NYTimes.com
For the second time this month, congressional budget analysts have dealt a blow to the Democrat's health reform efforts, this time by saying a plan touted by the White House as crucial to paying for the bill would actually save almost no money over 10 years.
A key House chairman and moderate House Democrats on Tuesday agreed to a White House-backed proposal that would give an outside panel the power to make cuts to government-financed health care programs. White House budget director Peter Orszag declared the plan "probably the most important piece that can be added" to the House's health care reform legislation.
But on Saturday, the Congressional Budget Office said the proposal to give an independent panel the power to keep Medicare spending in check would only save about $2 billion over 10 years- a drop in the bucket compared to the bill's $1 trillion price tag.
"In CBO's judgment, the probability is high that no savings would be realized ... but there is also a chance that substantial savings might be realized. Looking beyond the 10-year budget window, CBO expects that this proposal would generate larger but still modest savings on the same probabilistic basis," CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf wrote in a letter to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on Saturday.
link: CBO deals new blow to health plan - Chris Frates - POLITICO.com
Michael Massing writes:
The two bloggers most commonly recognized as the medium's pioneers, Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan, are, remarkably, still at it. Kaus, who started the blog kausfiles in 1999, is now at Slate, and Sullivan, who began The Daily Dish in 2000, now posts at The Atlantic. Both still use the style they helped popularize—short, sharp, conversational bursts of commentary and opinion built around links to articles, columns, documents, and other blogs. At first glance, this approach might seem to bear out the charge of parasitism. In early July, for instance, Sullivan, under the headline "Where the Far Right Now Is," wrote:
I watched this in Aspen [where he was attending a conference]. Michael Scheuer is actually saying that the only "hope" for the US is a major attack from Osama bin Laden. This is where they are, getting nuttier by the day.Below was a link to a clip from Fox News on which Scheuer, a former CIA analyst, indeed expressed the hope that bin Laden would attack the US so that its government would finally take the measures needed to protect the American people. Sullivan is here riffing on the journalism of others while doing no conventional reporting of his own. But, as a regular reading of his posts shows, his multiple links to a wide array of sources, processed through his idiosyncratic gay-Catholic-Thatcherite- turned-libertarian-radical mind, produces an engaging and original take on the world. A dramatic demonstration of this occurred just after the Iranian elections, when his site became an up-to-the-minute clearinghouse for e-mails, Twitter feeds, YouTube videos, photos, and e-mails from Tehran, many posted before mainstream news outlets could get hold of them. Sullivan made no pretense of being balanced— he devoutly desired the overthrow of the hard-line establishment supporting Ahmadinejad and tilted his site to that end—but at a time when Western journalists were largely muzzled, The Daily Dish served as a nerve center for news from the Iranian street. While reading his site, I was also watching CNN, and it seemed clear that Sullivan, sitting at his computer, outperformed CNN's entire global network.
link: The News About the Internet - The New York Review of Books
In the days when Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud dominated thinking about child development, small children were thought to be irrational, incoherent, and solipsistic in their thinking and both easily distractible and unfocused in their awareness of the world. Recent work in developmental psychology offers a sharply contrasted picture. "Children are unconsciously the most rational beings on earth," says Alison Gopnik, "brilliantly drawing accurate conclusions from data, performing complex statistical analyses, and doing clever experiments." And not only does empirical work reveal this about babies and small children, but what is thus revealed throws light on some of philosophy's more intriguing questions about knowledge, the self, other minds, and the basis of morality.
Such are the claims made by philosopher and developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik in this fascinating account of the growth of child minds. Gopnik's affectionate and sympathetic enjoyment of the way children think in their first five years is manifest throughout her book, but so too is her sensitivity to the deeper philosophical implications of what their way of thinking can teach us. The result is absorbing and educative. This is despite the fact that, at times, it seems as if developmental psychology provides arduous scientific confirmation for what parents and preschool teachers have always long known; but Gopnik is skilled at producing the rabbit of insight from an apparently old hat. And there is also much that is new and surprising in the field, all of it promising to change our understanding of mind in general.
link: Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby - B&N Review
One vision for the school of the future comes from the United Nations. Founded this year by the UN’s Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID), the University of the People is a not-for-profit institution that aims to offer higher education opportunities to people who generally couldn’t afford it by leveraging social media technologies and ideas.
The school is a one hundred percent online institution, and utilizes open source courseware and peer-to-peer learning to deliver information to students without charging tuition. There are some costs, however. Students must pay an application fee (though the idea is to accept everyone who applies that has a high school diploma and speaks English), and when they’re ready, students must pay to take tests, which they are required to pass in order to continue their education. All fees are set on a sliding scale based on the student’s country of origin, and never exceed $100.
link: In the Future, the Cost of Education will be Zero
Dennis Overbye writes:
Jupiter took a bullet for us last weekend.
An object, probably a comet that nobody saw coming, plowed into the giant planet’s colorful cloud tops sometime Sunday, splashing up debris and leaving a black eye the size of the Pacific Ocean. This was the second time in 15 years that this had happened. The whole world was watching when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 fell apart and its pieces crashed into Jupiter in 1994, leaving Earth-size marks that persisted up to a year.
That’s Jupiter doing its cosmic job, astronomers like to say. Better it than us. Part of what makes the Earth such a nice place to live, the story goes, is that Jupiter’s overbearing gravity acts as a gravitational shield deflecting incoming space junk, mainly comets, away from the inner solar system where it could do for us what an asteroid apparently did for the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Indeed, astronomers look for similar configurations — a giant outer planet with room for smaller planets in closer to the home stars — in other planetary systems as an indication of their hospitableness to life.
Anthony Wesley, the Australian amateur astronomer who first noticed the mark on Jupiter and sounded the alarm on Sunday, paid homage to that notion when he told The Sydney Morning Herald, “If anything like that had hit the Earth it would have been curtains for us, so we can feel very happy that Jupiter is doing its vacuum-cleaner job and hoovering up all these large pieces before they come for us.”
But is this warm and fuzzy image of the King of Planets as father-protector really true?
“I really question this idea,” said Brian G. Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, referring to Jupiter as our guardian planet. As the former director of the International Astronomical Union’s Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, he has spent his career keeping track of wayward objects, particularly comets, in the solar system. Jupiter is just as much a menace as a savior, he said.
The big planet throws a lot of comets out of the solar system, but it also throws them in.
link: Jupiter - Our Cosmic Protector? - NYTimes.com
A U.S. district court judge expressed “outrage” over the Justice Department’s admission that it does not have enough evidence to continue the detention of a teenager as an “enemy combatant” in Guantanamo Bay.
Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle said in a ruling Friday that the case against Mohammed Jawad is “gutted” because Jawad allegedly confessed under torture by Afghan officials that he had thrown a grenade at U.S. troops, according to a report by McClatchy Newspapers. Jawad was just 12 at the time, according to his lawyers, though the Pentagon says he was 16 or 17.
“Without his statements, I don’t understand your case,” the judge said, according to reporter Marisa Taylor. “Sir, the facts can only get smaller, not bigger. . . . Face it, this case is in trouble. . . . Seven years and this case is riddled with holes.”
“She then urged the lawyers to ‘let him out. Send him back to Afghanistan,’” the article continued.
link: Raw Story » US judge: Case against Gitmo inmate is ‘gutted’ over tortured ‘confession’
The governor of Texas has threatened a showdown with the Obama administration over the president’s proposals for healthcare reform, according to a published report.
Rick Perry — who is facing a reelection fight against fellow Texas Republican, Senator Kay Baily Hutchison, and 2006 gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman, who will attempt to run as a Democrat — made the remarks Thursday while speaking to Mark Davis, a conservative talk show host on Dallas station WBAP/820 AM, according to The Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
“I think you’ll hear states and governors standing up and saying ‘no’ to this type of encroachment on the states with their healthcare,” he reportedly said. “So my hope is that we never have to have that stand-up. But I’m certainly willing and ready for the fight if this administration continues to try to force their very expansive government philosophy down our collective throats.”
While the uninsured still have access to hospital emergency rooms should the need arise, but face being buried under a mountain of debt if they do.
Texas’ population has a higher percentage of uninsured citizens than any other state.
link: Raw Story » Texas Gov. threatens showdown over national healthcare
THE BBC has been plunged into a new controversy after Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson used the most offensive swear word in the English language to describe British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in front of a studio audience.
Clarkson called Mr Brown a c--t during the show's recording on Wednesday night.
Although some in the audience reportedly burst out laughing at his comments, BBC2 controller Janice Hadlow later gave Clarkson a "dressing down" in front of crew, the Daily Mail reports.
He is also understood to have made similarly offensive remarks about Mr Brown to an audience during the show's filming earlier this month.
The 49-year-old host's remarks come less than six months after he was forced to apologise for calling Mr Brown a 'one-eyed Scottish idiot' during an interview in Australia.
link: Jeremy Clarkson's swearing attack on Gordon Brown | News.com.au Top stories | News.com.au
CrookedBrains writes:
'Superficial' is the creation of Michel de Broin. It was created as an attempt to reflect on the notion of transparency, which took shape in the forest of Vosges, Alsace, France. He used a large stone that was tucked away deep in the woods; using mirror, glue and cement he made the rock disappear and in turn it reflected the natural surroundings. He is born in Montreal, lives and works in Montreal and Berlin.
link: Superficial. Honduras' deposed president has made a brief return to his country from Nicaragua, nearly four weeks after he was forced from power in a military-backed coup.
Manuel Zelaya walked from the Nicaraguan town of Los Manos to the frontier on Friday, and stepped a few metres beyond a chain marking the border, before being blocked by Honduran army troops.
Honduras' security forces had been instructed by the military-backed interim government to arrest Zelaya if he entered the country, but they did not move against him.
After speaking to journalists, Zelaya then walked back onto Nicaraguan soil, to await members of his family who are on the Honduran side of the border.
Police later fired tear gas at people supporting Zelaya who had walked to within 10km of the border, in defiance of a curfew.
link: Al Jazeera English - Americas - Zelaya makes brief Honduras return
E. Lynn Harris, whose novels about successful and glamorous black men with sexual identity conflicts (and the women and men who love them) made him one of the nation’s most popular writers, died in Los Angeles on Thursday. He was 54 and lived in Atlanta.
A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County coroner said the cause of death had not yet been determined.
Mr. Harris fell briefly ill earlier in the week on a train to Los Angeles, said Laura Gilmore, a publicist for Mr. Harris, but he had seen a doctor and everything seemed fine. She said she had spoken to him by phone at his hotel Thursday evening and had no inkling of a problem. He died shortly thereafter.
“A doctor was called and couldn’t revive him,” Ms. Gilmore said.
link: E. Lynn Harris, Who Wrote of Gay Black Men’s Lives, Dies at 54 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com
Elizabeth Rosenthal writes:
Deforestation and, some scientists contend, global climate change are making the Amazon region drier and hotter, decimating fish stocks in this area and imperiling the Kamayurá’s very existence. Like other small indigenous cultures around the world with little money or capacity to move, they are struggling to adapt to the changes.
“Us old monkeys can take the hunger, but the little ones suffer — they’re always asking for fish,” said Kotok, the tribe’s chief, who stood in front of a hut containing the tribe’s sacred flutes on a recent evening. He wore a white T-shirt over the tribe’s traditional dress, which is basically nothing.
Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.
Responsible for 3 wives, 24 children and hundreds of other tribe members, he said his once-idyllic existence had turned into a kind of bad dream.
“I’m stressed and anxious — this has all changed so quickly, and life has become very hard,” he said in Portuguese, speaking through an interpreter. “As a chief, I have to have vision and look down the road, but I don’t know what will happen to my children and grandchildren.”
link: As Trees Fall in the Amazon, Fears That Tribes Won’t Be Heard - NYTimes.com
