Greek police fired tear gas at demonstrators in central Athens at the start of a 48-hour strike to protest austerity measures demanded by international lenders as the price for more financial aid.
By Roddy Thomson, AFP [Industry Week]
From the interview by Maud Newton for The Awl: If Robert Graves were still around, he'd say that's impossible: "Woman is not a poet: she is either muse or she is nothing." Don't worry, though! It's not that women—sorry, woman—can't write, just that when a woman writes "she is herself the Muse, a Goddess without an external power to guide or comfort her." Why do you think there's been so much resistance historically to the idea that a woman might be creatively inspired by love and lust and longing for a man? This makes no sense to me at all. Women need men to get pregnant, among other important things. So why can’t we need men to fuel our work? My first muse was a chubby, bespectacled, brown-eyed, sharply intelligent 13-year-old boy in Phoenix, Arizona in 1975. When he laughed at and loved my writing, I felt the erotic surge of my own power. Since then, I’ve written for and about and to and because of men. Writing with this “external power to guide and comfort me” has inspired me to write in first-person male voices—it’s inspired my sex scenes—and it’s caused me to work very, very hard, in a disciplined, sustained way, as if I were a man, as if I were entitled to seize all that time for something as dubious as novel-writing. My male muses are crucial to my work, inseparable from it. They’re the oil that lights the lamp. ~ more... ~
Dubai: Special Prosecutor John Durham has taken on the Gambino mafia family in New York, the Irish mob in Boston and he's put dozens of gangsters behind bars. Now he's facing his toughest assignment to date: Investigate the Central Intelligence Agency itself for war crimes committed against Iraqi detainees. Right now, in a government building in Alexandria, Virginia, the respected US Attorney has started calling witnesses before a secret federal grand jury looking into abuses allegedly committed by CIA interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. One of the deaths being examined is that of Manadel Al Jamadi, more commonly known as "the iceman", who died in custody on November 3, 2003 at Abu Ghraib following repeated interrogation sessions. In an attempt to make his body look less abused, CIA agents packed it in ice to reduce decomposition and to throw investigators off the actual time of death. Al Jamadi's body was later removed from the infamous prison with an intravenous tube attached to one arm — in an apparent attempt to show he was still alive. [ ... ] The torture probe, however, is hampered by a lack of evidence from Abu Ghraib caused, in part, when Al Jamadi's blood was washed from a cell on the orders of a military officer. In addition, a bloody hood which covered Al Jamadi's head was destroyed on the orders of a CIA officer. After Al Jamadi died, military and CIA personnel argued over who was to blame, and his body was covered in ice and taken to a shower room overnight to allow them time to get their story straight. ~ more... ~
Seven years after the release of shocking images of tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the Supreme Court has turned back the appeal of 26 inmates from that infamous facility who wanted to sue two military contractors for damages.
Terry Macalister reports for the Guardian:
The government was warned by its own civil servants two years ago that there could be "significant negative economic consequences" to the UK posed by near-term "peak oil" energy shortages.
Ministers were told it was impossible to know exactly when production might fail to meet supply but when it did there could be global consequences, including "civil unrest".
Yet ministers consistently played down the threat with the contemporaneous Wicks review into energy security (PDF) effectively dismissing peak oil as alarmist and irrelevant.
The report on the risks and impacts of a potential future decline in oil production has just been published – but only after the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) was repeatedly threatened under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act with forced disclosure.
The information is revealed at a critical time when oil prices have soared to historic highs of around $115 (£71) a barrel hitting motorists through higher petrol costs and helping to drive up household gas bills. The price of oil and gas tend to be linked due under the terms of many wholesale gas contracts.
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There is a category of inventions called disruptive technology. Funding streams allotted to this sector award designers who innovate based on radical departures from incremental change. A cursory search of disruptive technology will yield many examples, most of which are IT-oriented, such as breakthroughs in social networking, cloud computing, and cyber security. You will find little to no mention of the most disruptive technology of all, cold fusion, even as the first commercial device is poised to be installed later this year. Defkalion Green Technologies based in Athens, Greece holds the world rights, excepting the Americas, for Andrea A. Rossi’sEnergy Catalyzer, or ECat, a new energy reactor based on cold fusion technology, which Mr. Rossi prefers to be called low-energy nuclear reactions. A factory located in Xanthi, Greece plans to use an array of smaller models of the publicly demonstrated 12 Kw ECat, linked together, to generate 1Mw power for the purpose of manufacturing more ECats. [ ... ] Whatever the veracity of the report by Der Speigel Online that Greece would like to “exit’ from the Euro Zone, if a factory in Greece has the rights to manufacture the biggest breakthrough energy technology since the burning of wood, and the government has confidence that it’s ready to be commercialized, these events would influence any decision to leave the Euro behind, and speculate on perhaps creating their own currency backed by profits of ECat manufacturing and licensing, estimated in the hundreds of trillions of dollars? [5] Separated from the European Central Bank, the people of Greece could be able to keep this wealth derived from energy, close to its shores. Where over two-thousand years ago, the roots of modern science, math, and democracy first emerged, we may now see a next-generation energy technology that will extend globally, for the first time in history, the opportunity for all humans to be equally self-sufficient. ~ more... ~
. . . "The U.N. authorization had three components: blockade, no fly zone, and civil protection. And Admiral Locklear explained that the scope of civil protection was being interpreted to permit the removal of the chain of command of Qaddafi's military, which includes Qaddafi," Turner said. "He said that currently is the mission as NATO has defined." "I believed that we were [targeting Qaddafi] but that confirmed it," Turner said. "I believe the scope that NATO is pursuing is beyond what is contemplated in civil protection, so they're exceeding the mission." . . . ~ more... ~
From Alexander Higgins' blog:
By Jay Janson, Countercurrents.org What is unfolding in Syria is an armed insurrection supported covertly by foreign powers including the US, Turkey and Israel. Armed insurgents belonging to Islamist organizations have crossed the border from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. The US State Department has confirmed that it is supporting the insurgency. A monolithic unified slant media cartelrestricts reports to indiscriminate killing of civilian protesters by Syrian government Now that the West’s war on Gaddafi is going well, American news commentators can in rare moments proudly admit that the CIA is heavily involved. No so, when if comes to Syria. It's too early. The public has not been yet been properly taught to hate Syria's President Assad sufficiently. The imperialist media cartel that controls what news is selected and how and with what intention it shall be broadcasted has done its best to demonize Assad. How? Simple! They just keep repeating day in day out that Syrian government forces are shooting and massacring protesters, period. They don’t say anything else. That’s it. There is nothing else happening. When it is necessary to admit that police and soldiers are being ambushed and killed, a cover story comes with it, like, ‘it is suspected that they were killed by defecting police and military.’ This amazing great cartel of Pentagon/CIA fed media conglomerates, which seems to have the great majority of the basically indifferent population of the West in tow, is effortlessly running its usual cascade of disinformation, half-truths and propaganda preparing justification for military intervention as previously in the cases of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and Iran. However, "The plan to destabilize Syria is not working all that well. It succeeded in persuading public opinion that the country is in the grips of a brutal dictatorship, but it also welded the vast majority of the Syrian population firmly behind its government. Ultimately, the plan could backfire on those who masterminded it, notably Tel Aviv" surmises Thierry Meyssan in "The Plan to Destabilize Syria", Voltaire Network, Lebanon, 6/13/11. ~ more... ~
Already 24-37 million people worldwide live with the incurable form of dementia, and that number is projected to reach 115 million by 2050, a panel of Alzheimer's disease experts told the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs. As women bear fewer children and the population ages, the world will become increasingly ill-prepared to cope with large numbers of dependent elderly people and must begin investing more in research to prevent the disease, they said. Places like Russia, Europe, the United States and parts of Asia are experiencing "declining populations, fewer workers and more people dependent upon public health systems for their support," said George Vradenburg, founder of anadvocacy group called USAgainstAlzheimer's. "That is producing fiscal stress on our health systems around the world and it is producing the risk that the developed world -- particularly the Asian rim and particularly western Europe -- are going to be declining in their economic growth and prosperity in the coming years." According to the London-based Alzheimer's Disease International, the total estimated worldwide cost of the disease in 2010 was 604 billion dollars, or nearly one percent of global GDP. "If Alzheimer's were a country, it would be the 18th largest economy based on GDP," said Daisy Acosta, the chair of ADI, describing Alzheimer's as "the single most important health and social crisis of the 21st century." "The impact of this disease today is massive and will accelerate with the years to come," she said. ~ more... ~
