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In this Aug. 26, 2010 file photo, Farmers’ Almanac managing editor Sandi Duncan, left, and editor Peter Geiger pose with a copy of the 2011 almanac in Lewiston, Maine. The 219-year-old ‘Old Farmer’s Almanac’ and its longtime New England competitor, the Maine-based ‘Farmer’s Almanac,’ still draw droves of fans despite the age of the Internet and mobile phone apps. The books, which use their own ‘secret formula’ to predict weather based on sunspots, planetary positions and other information, are popular at farmers markets and bookstores and have maintained a fan base that sometimes goes back generations in families. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)

Associated Press | Sep 8, 2010

by Russell Contreras

DUBLIN, N.H. – Most of the country will see a colder-than-usual winter while summer and spring will be relatively cool and dry, according to the time-honored, complex calculations of the “Old Farmer’s Almanac.”

The 2011 issue of the almanac, which claims to be the nation’s oldest continuously published periodical, was released Tuesday. It predicts that in the coming months, the Earth will continue to see a “gradual cooling of the atmosphere … offset by any warming caused by increased greenhouse gases.”

The “Old Farmer’s Almanac” also is forecasting a weak La Nina — a climate phenomenon marked by an unusual cooling of the sea surface in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Janice Stillman, editor of the almanac, said that means much of the eastern half of the United States will experience lower-than-normal temperatures with less snow while Mid-Atlantic states will see more snowfall than usual. The West will see a mild winter with average precipitation, she said.

Meanwhile, the South will experience a cold and wet summer and the Rockies should see a mild and dry winter, according to the New Hampshire-based “Old Farmer’s Almanac.”

“It’ll be cold. There will be no mistaking winter,” Stillman said. “But it may be a little shorter or we may see some small warm spells in places like the East Coast.”

The 219-year-old “Old Farmer’s Almanac” and its longtime competitor, the Maine-based “Farmers’ Almanac,” still draw droves of fans despite it being the age of the Internet and mobile phone apps. The books, which use secret formulas to predict weather based on sunspots, planetary positions and other information, are popular at farmers markets and bookstores and have maintained a fan base that sometimes spans generations of families.

Both books have a circulation of around 3.2 million and feature a mix of helpful hints, recipes, gardening tips, jokes and inspirational messages. Their websites are full of videos, blogs, podcasts, Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages.

In general, the almanacs’ weather predictions are similar. The “Farmers’ Almanac” predicts that it’ll be cold but nothing like last winter.

“Overall, it looks like it’s going to be a kinder and gentler winter, especially in the areas that had a rough winter last year,” said managing editor Sandi Duncan.

But the almanacs’ forecasts are at odds with the National Weather Service’s long-range outlook for the meteorological winter, which runs from December through February.

NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center anticipates a warmer-than-normal winter for the mid-Atlantic and Southeast and colder-than-normal weather in the Northwest. That puts it at odds with the almanac.

Ed O’Lenic from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center said the scientific community doesn’t accept tides, planetary alignment and sunspots as effective predictors of temperature or precipitation, but he stopped short of being critical of the almanac’s meteorological methods.

Stillman said, however, she’s confident about the weather predictions in the “Old Farmer’s Almanac” because they tend to be 80 to 85 percent accurate — the same accuracy rate boasted by the Maine almanac.

The dueling almanacs have enjoyed a long, mostly friendly rivalry that dates back nearly 200 years, said Judson Hale, the semiretired chairman and longtime pitchman for the “Old Farmer’s Almanac.” He said any time one of the almanac gets publicity, it helps the other.

But Hale is quick to say his publication is older and has more history: “We’re the one in the Smithsonian. We’re the one that Abraham Lincoln used in a murder trial. We’re the one George Washington read. We are THE one.”

Still, Hale said, both almanacs survive because they’ve maintained strong relationships with their readers for generations.

“I think it’s very comforting for people to see that there’s a constant in this world,” he said. “There’s something that, although brand-new every year, isn’t changing. It is the same.”

Time | Sep 7, 2010

By William Lee Adams

Every fall local organizations in Germany assemble goodie bags to give to children on their first day of elementary school—a tradition that usually results in chocolate-stained fingers and pencil fights. But following a mix-up involving Germany’s Communist Party, six-year olds have been left grasping pens that project erotic images.

The incident, which occurred at the Adolf Reichwein School in Essen, northwest Germany, has left the Commies red in the face.

“The German Communist Party deeply regrets what has happened and is outraged that this kind of thing, which borders on pornography, can be purchased in normal shops,” the party said in a statement. They claim to have purchased the pens from a discount shop under the impression the pens would light up at the push of a button. That’s true, of course. But the illumination also displays women in suggestive poses when aimed at a wall.

The party has offered to exchange the pens for more age appropriate gifts.

“We found a software anomaly that allowed aircraft not to follow its preprogrammed flight procedures…”

The Register | Aug 26, 2010

By Lewis Page

La la la, I'm not listening Mr Fleshy

A software error, combined with an unfortunate user action, led to a US military robot helicopter – developed from a manned version and capable of carrying a fearsome arsenal of weapons – straying into restricted airspace near Washington DC, according to reports.

US Navy captain Tim Dunigan told Aviation Week that an MQ-8 “Fire Scout” robochopper, carrying out a test flight from the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, “lost link and proceeded 23 miles north/northwest into restricted airspace,” on August 2.

The statement from Dunigan continues to add that “the operator team shifted to another ground control station, restoring link and successfully commanding the vehicle to recover at Webster Field”.

Av Week also quotes Rear Admiral William Shannon as attributing the problem to a “software logic flaw”.

Losses of communications between unmanned aircraft and ground operators are a routine event, but seldom have serious consequences. Robot planes and choppers lacking instructions from their human masters will normally circle where they are when comms go down, and control is almost always restored shortly thereafter – as in fact happened with the rogue Fire Scout.

The difference here is that the MQ-8 failed to follow its built-in failure protocol, instead continuing on course. Unmanned aircraft are generally restricted to operations in special military-controlled airspace and are forbidden to enter areas governed by normal civil rules.

“We found a software anomaly that allowed aircraft not to follow its preprogrammed flight procedures,” Dunigan tells Av Week. “We have identified the issue and have aircraft operating restrictions that will prevent this from happening again.”

It appears that the ground operators were implicated in the problem, though blame doesn’t attach to them. A command apparently reached the Fire Scout just as it was about to go into its comms-failure routine, which caused the robocopter to abandon that plan and instead head off the reservation.

No major panic resulted from the incident, as Navy controllers remained in touch with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) throughout and the Fire Scout did at least manage to “squawk”* that it was experiencing lost comms to air-traffic controllers, alerting them to the situation.

The Fire Scout is expected to return to flight ops, software rectified, in early September. The Navy has plans to deploy it aboard frigates and destroyers, which could carry two MQ-8s in the space taken up by a single manned chopper. The robocopter is also being eyed by the US Coast Guard for seagoing service, and the US Army has also considered it.

In some variants, the Fire Scout would be able to carry 70mm Hydra rocket pods or Hellfire tankbuster missiles, as well as a variety of sensors or other payloads. It is based on the Schweizer 333 manned helicopter, with the cockpit removed and enhancements to the rotors.

Though this month’s MQ-8 departure from designated airspace is unusual, it is not unique. Operator error combined with communications loss led to a Predator-B unmanned aircraft operated by the US border authorities crashing near Nogales, Arizona four years ago.

In another incident, ground operators failed to regain control over a rogue MQ-9 Reaper “hunter killer” roboplane above Afghanistan, which had again failed to follow safety protocols. In that case, the errant droidcraft had to be shot down by a manned US fighter to prevent it crossing the border and violating a neighbouring country’s airspace.

*Secondary-radar transponders, carried by the great majority of aircraft nowadays, not only make a plane or copter show up better on an air-traffic display but transmit or “squawk” a numerical code to help with identification. This code can also be used to notify emergencies such as hijack, lost comms etc.

New results ‘deviate sharply’ from established wisdom

Register | Sep 7, 2010

By Lewis Page

'Deviates rather sharply from general assumptions' - Yes.

The rate at which ice is disappearing from Greenland and Western Antarctica has been seriously overestimated, according to new research.

Measuring a disappearing ice cap is actually quite difficult to do, as the areas in question are remote, hostile environments and the exact depth of ice is often unknown. This has caused a lot of argument among climate scientists regarding how much ice is melting and running into the sea, as this affects predictions of sea-level rise and other aspects of climate modelling. (Floating sea ice, like that which makes up most of the Arctic cap apart from Greenland, is less of an issue as its melting doesn’t affect the sea level.)

Thus it is that since 2002, NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite data has been used to make an estimate of ice melt from Greenland and Western Antarctica. (The rest of Antarctica doesn’t seem to be melting at all – indeed Antarctica as a whole is actually gaining ice area rather than losing it – but some regions in the West are melting. The reasons for this are under investigation.)

The original GRACE-based estimates indicated as much as 1,500 billion tonnes ice loss just from Greenland in the period 2003-2009 – equivalent to a global sea-level rise of over 4mm on its own. However it has since become clear that these numbers weren’t properly corrected for the phenomenon of “rebound”, where the Earth’s crust rises as ice is removed. GPS precise-location devices fixed to bedrock outcrops in Antarctica showed this last year, but nobody was sure how bad the errors were.

Now a team of researchers based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and in the Netherlands say they have the answer.

“The corrections for deformations of the Earth’s crust have a considerable effect on the amount of ice that is estimated to be melting each year,” explains Dr Bert Vermeersen. “We have concluded that the Greenland and West Antarctica ice caps are melting at approximately half the speed originally predicted.”

Vermeersen and his colleagues’ calculations show that as little as 500 gigatonnes of ice or even less could have melted from Greenland during 2003-2009, translating into less than 2mm of sea-level rise. In the case of Greenland, it could be that the current estimates are triple what they should be.

“For Greenland in particular, we have found a glacial isostatic adjustment model that deviates rather sharply from general assumptions,” says Vermeersen.

Both the JPL/Dutch team and other boffins examining the work caution that more GPS locators need to be attached to the bedrock in order to refine the results.

For those who’d like to know more, a statement issued yesterday by Vermeersen’s university is here. The new research can be read here by subscribers to Nature Geoscience, and analysis of it by independent expert boffins likewise here.

The American Civil Liberties Union is questioning Contra Costa County, Calif. on their implementation of a microchip-tracking program in their preschool centers, according to the California Watch.

Contra Costa’s tracking initiative called Child Location, Observation and Utilization Data System, or CLOUDS for short, assigns students a shirt that has a small locator chip sewn into the chest area. Parents can digitally sign in students after being dropped off at the beginning of the day, at which point the tracking device sends a signal to a computer in the administrative office.

Each child is seen in real time as a moving dot on the screen, and if a child strays out of its assigned area, an alert is sent to the teacher.

The ACLU is asking the county to provide more information about their program, the technical specifications of the microchips and how the program came into being.

A spokesperson for Contra Costa County said, “The program does not intend to harm or put any child at risk. It is meant to enable teachers to focus more on classroom instruction by freeing them from filing attendance reports.”

To read the full story click here

‘There is a long-held policy not to discuss how it breaks down…’

Daily Mail | Sep 7, 2010

Britain’s largest police force spends more than £350,000 every 24 hours protecting royals, VIPs and diplomats, its assistant commissioner said today.

John Yates, head of specialist operations for the Metropolitan Police, said the London-based force takes the ‘lion’s share’ of diplomatic and royal protection duties, leading to a £128million bill this year.

The figure was more than the £113.6million figure included in internal budget papers filed by accountants at the end of the financial year.

Mr Yates repeatedly refused to discuss details of how the amount that could be spent protecting each individual was calculated, telling MPs that he could only say that the risk was balanced against the threat.

Mr Yates, who gave evidence to the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, said a committee consisting of representatives from the police, the Home Office and the Royal household, as well as ‘other individuals from other organisations’, made the decisions.

‘All I can say is that it’s done through that process, along the lines of the threat and the risk posed,’ he said.

But he denied that the force came under any ‘improper pressure’ to offer minor Royals protection.

Refusing to discuss any breakdown of the £128million bill, citing security reasons, Mr Yates would only reveal that ‘over a dozen’ individuals received police protection, which can include armed bodyguards.

‘There is a long-held policy not to discuss how it breaks down,’ he said.

Asked how many people received protection, he said: ‘We have never discussed that before and I don’t want to discuss it now.’

Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson has complained to successive home secretaries that the Whitehall funding is not enough to adequately protect those at risk.

As a result London residents are contributing to international protection duties through their council tax.

Sir Paul has indicated that the protection bill must be slimmed down and suggested he is impatient for an ongoing review to be completed.

Unfit men who work long hours double their risk of dying from heart disease, experts have warned.

Those who do not take enough exercise and work beyond 45 hours a week are more than twice as likely to die from heart disease as unfit men who work shorter hours.

Exercise seems to be the key to health, with fit men who work long hours having no increased risk of dying from heart disease.

The study, published in the journal Heart, examined data for almost 5,000 men aged 40 to 59, from 14 different companies, whose and fitness levels were tracked over 30 years.

The men completed cycling exercise tests to assess their fitness and provided details on the average number of hours they worked every week.

Around 70 per cent of men worked between 41 and 45 hours a week, while around 20 per cent worked longer hours.

Over the course of the study, there were 587 deaths from heart disease caused by narrowing and hardening of the arteries.

Experts found that men who were unfit were at the greatest risk of dying from heart disease, particularly if they worked long hours.

Those who were both unfit and worked more than 45 hours a week were more than twice as likely to die from the disease as men working fewer than 40 hours.

And men who worked 41 to 45 hours a week had a 59 per cent higher risk of dying from heart disease as those working under 40 hours.

But physically fit men working longer hours were 45 per cent less likely to die of heart disease and 38 per cent less likely to die of other causes than those who were unfit.

Even men who were moderately fit and worked long hours had a significantly lower risk of dying than the unfit.

The findings, by a team from the National Research Centre for the Working Environment in Denmark, held true despite factors likely to influence the results, such as work stress and living conditions.

The authors said it seems that work – irrespective of whether it is physically demanding – leads to a rise in heart rate and blood pressure.

But a high level of fitness cuts the negative effect on the body and speeds up recovery time, leaving people less tired and irritable and sleeping better.

British employees are among the hardest working in Europe, with only Romanians and Bulgarians putting in longer hours.

EU figures show that UK workers in full-time jobs put in an average of 41.4 hours a week – one and a half hours more than the EU average.

At the same time the UK has one of the worst heart attack rates in the world.
It is estimated that someone has a heart attack every two minutes in Britain.

More than 1.4million people have angina and each year about 275,000 have a heart attack. Of these, more than 120,000 are fatal.

By David Derbyshire

Gender bender: Bisphenol A (BPA) is found in many common household products like baby bottles and plastic products. Prof David Melzer has called for an urgent review of its safety

A ‘gender-bending’ chemical used in food containers, baby bottles and baked beans tins should be put through the same rigorous safety trials as new drugs, a leading scientist has declared.

Professor David Melzer called for an urgent review into the safety of bisphenol A (BPA ) – a man-made chemical linked to heart disease, breast cancer and birth defects.

The Exeter University academic also urged manufacturers to cut down on BPA in food packaging and containers.

BPA is used to harden plastics and is found in baby bottles, CD cases, plastic knives and forks and the lining of food and drink cans.

Because the chemical mimics the female sex hormone oestrogen, many scientists believe it interferes with the way hormones are processed by the body.

Although some animal studies have indicated it is safe, others have linked injections of BPA to breast cancer, liver damage, obesity, diabetes and fertility problems.

Experts estimate that BPA is detectable in more than 90 per cent of people. Earlier this year, Denmark banned the chemical in food and drink containers for the under-threes.

A study by Professor Melzer, an epidemiologist, found changes in sex hormones associated with exposure to BPA in men.

He told a briefing at the Royal Institution in London: ‘Millions of pounds of this compound are being produced every day, but we still don’t know how it gets into humans.

‘I think small effects for large numbers of people matter and it’s reasonable that a tiny proportion of the costs of BPA should be put to human drug trial-type assessments to settle once and for all whether this compound is bio-active in humans.

Daily Mail | Sep 7, 2010

By Sophie Borland

Country-dwellers often say the constant noise, traffic and crowds of the city would drive them mad.

Well, they might be right, according to the latest research.

City residents are more likely to develop mental illnesses such as schizophrenia than those who live in rural areas, a study has found.

Researchers from Cardiff University examined the lifestyles of more 200,000 people in Sweden and found that those who lived in urban areas were more at risk from psychosis than people who lived in villages.

The experts don’t know exactly why this is but they suggest that town and city residents are more likely to be ostracised by those around them.

They are more likely to experience discrimination if they do not fit in, which can lead to them feeling anxious and even developing mental illnesses.

Dr Stanley Zammit, who lead the research published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, said: ‘The clearest geographic pattern within this distribution of rates is that urban areas have a higher incidence of schizophrenia than rural areas.’

He also added that people living in towns and cities were more likely to develop other mental illnesses that result in personality changes – a condition known as non-affective psychosis. It is not the first time statistics have shown that country life is healthier.

Earlier this year an official report found that village dwellers lived an average of two years longer than those living in towns and cities.

According to figures from the Office of National Statistics, men who live in the country are likely to live for between 78 and 79 years, while those in towns can expect to survive to an age of 76.

Women on average survive to their 81st birthday in towns, but live to between 82 and 83 in the country.

The small market town of Wimborne Minster in rural Dorset was named the healthiest place to live.

Daily Mail | Sep 5, 2010

By Sean Poulter

Genetically modified salmon, which grows at a superfast rate, is safe to be farmed and eaten, American scientists have declared.

The move by experts advising U.S. watchdogs will clear the way for the first GM creature to be sold as food.

The first GM salmon could be on American dinner tables within two to three years, and possibly on British plates soon after that, paving the way for the genetic modification of other fish and food animals into what critics are calling ‘Frankenfood’.

Shares in the company behind the technology leapt by 26 per cent on the London Stock Exchange on Friday, providing evidence that analysts see GM as the future of fish production.

However, the science is highly controversial and consumers will have questions about the impact on human health and the environment.

Critics of GM food fear the technology leads to the creation of mutant misshapen fish and could harm wild fish populations if they escape.

Research on GM trout in Canada found that while they grew faster and were much bigger, a number developed misshapen heads and bloated bodies.

The firm behind the GM Atlantic Salmon, Aqua Bounty, says its fish are normal but for the fact they grow up to three times more quickly.

As a result, the AquAdvantage Salmon reach a market weight of around 3kg (6.6lb) in 16-18 months instead of the three years for farmed fish. In theory, they would reach around 6kg after three years, which would be double the size of most natural salmon of the same age.

The growth is speeded up by the insertion of two genes, one linked to the production of growth hormone and a second to ensure growth continues even in very cold temperatures.

The technology allows fish farmers to produce many more salmon at much lower cost, so boosting output and profits.

The scientists behind the salmon have created safeguards to prevent any danger of them escaping and breeding with the wild population. These include ensuring all the fish involved are female and sterile.

Now, two expert reports commissioned by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration have concluded it is safe for GM salmon to go into production.

On health, the scientists on the Veterinary Medicines Advisory Committee said there are ‘no material differences’ between GM and conventional salmon. They say the fish contains the expected amounts of nutritionally important omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids.

They concluded: ‘Food from AquAdvantage Salmon is as safe to eat as food from other Atlantic salmon.’ And they added ‘there is a reasonable certainty of no harm from consumption’.

However, they admitted there are gaps in the research looking at whether some types of GM fish  -  not those currently planned for dinner tables  -  might cause an allergic reaction.

On the environment, a second team of scientists concluded the safeguards put in place by Aqua Bounty would be sufficient to allow production to go ahead.

Initially, the eggs would be produced in Canada, then shipped to Panama to be grown and then killed. Over time the technology would be extended worldwide.

The FDA is due to make a final decision this month on whether to approve the GM salmon.

But a coalition of 31 U.S. consumer, animal welfare, environmental and fisheries groups is opposing approval.

They claim tests used to show the safety of the GM salmon were based on very small samples and point out that some of the fish had higher levels of growth hormone in their bloodstream, which is claimed to create a cancer risk.

While the GM fish are supposed to be sterile, critics said up to 5 per cent might be able to conceive and breed if they got into the wild.

Pete Riley, director of campaign group GM Freeze, said: ‘We are extremely concerned about the potential for these fish to escape.’

‘Putin Youth’ groups marches in support of their leader.

Mr. Putin — former KGB agent and current de facto ruler, though President Dmitry Medvedev occupies the Kremlin — has made clear that constitutional protections do not extend to his political opponents.

Washington Post | Sep 4, 2010

By Tom Heneghan

PARIS (Reuters) – Leaked tapes of Belgium’s Cardinal Godfried Danneels urging a victim not to reveal he was sexually abused by a bishop are some of the most damaging documents to emerge in the scandal rocking the Roman Catholic Church.

The tapes, made secretly by the victim and published in two Belgian newspapers on Saturday, show the former primate of Belgium exhorting him to accept a private apology or wait one year until the bishop retired before making his case public.

Their meeting took place on April 8, at a time when the Vatican was under fire for allegedly covering up similar abuse cases by priests in other countries and shocking abuse claims dominated the news in several European states.

A spokesman for Danneels denied the once popular archbishop of Brussels wanted to cover up the case, which led to the sudden resignation of Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, 73, later that month, but the tapes show him arguing firmly for silence.

Belgian Church spokesman Jurgen Mettepenningen confirmed to Reuters that the transcripts in the Flemish dailies De Standaard and Het Nieuwsblad were genuine.

Related

Cardinal urged Catholic sex abuse victim to keep quiet, new tapes reveal

“From everything he says, it’s clear that his only aim is to avoid having the case made public so many years after the facts. It is containment, nothing more,” De Standaard wrote in a commentary accusing Danneels of lacking any compassion.

The Church has been hit over the past year by two detailed government reports on sexual abuse in Ireland and waves of abuse allegations in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands. Five bishops have quit because of the scandals.

Church and legal documents published in the United States this spring showed how American bishops and the Vatican dealt with predator priests without informing police of their crimes.

RARE VERBATIM RECORD

The Belgian tapes stand out as a rare verbatim record of how a leading Catholic prelate tried to persuade the victim, a 42-year-old nephew of Vangheluwe, to keep the case quiet.

They emerged as a judicial probe into the scandal teetered on the edge of collapse after reports that a June 24 police raid on Church offices and Danneels’s apartment to seize files and computers was illegal and the documents could not be used.

In their one-on-one meeting, the victim says he feels a duty to report the case to the Church hierarchy and asks Danneels to help. The cardinal responds by urging him not to go public.

“The bishop will resign next year, so actually it would be better for you to wait,” the cardinal says. “I don’t think you’d do yourself or him a favor by shouting this from the rooftops.”

The man pleads for help but Danneels, 77, who had stepped down as Brussels archbishop in January, says he cannot discipline Vangheluwe or inform higher authorities, including Pope Benedict. The bishop should turn himself in, he says.

Danneels warns the victim against trying to blackmail the Church and urges him to seek forgiveness, accept a private apology from the bishop and not drag “his name through the mud.”

“He has dragged my whole life through the mud, from 5 until 18 years old,” says the victim, who denies he wants to blackmail anyone. “Why do you feel so sorry for him and not for me?”

SECOND TAPE

In a second tape, Danneels and Vangheluwe meet the victim and one of his relatives. The bishop apologizes and says he has searched for years for a way to make up for his misdeeds.

“This is unsolvable,” the relative replies. “You’ve torn our family completely apart.”

Vangheluwe resigned on April 23, admitting he had sexually abused “a boy in my entourage” about 20 years earlier. According to De Standaard, he did this after a relative of the victim emailed all Belgian bishops demanding he quit by late May.

The newspaper said the victim decided to publish the tapes to counter allegations he had tried to blackmail Vangheluwe into paying hush money.

In his defense, Danneels’s spokesman Toon Osaer said the cardinal never meant to cover up the case and had spoken about it at an April 24 news conference.

Belgian media stressed that Danneels had told journalists his role at the April 8 meeting was to listen to the victim’s case and did not mention his bid to persuade him to keep quiet.

The Pope in his Hitler Youth uniform

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI offered a rare glimpse into his youth, recalling the ambitions of his generation in Nazi Germany and his vocation in a message ahead of the 2011 World Youth Day in Madrid.

“During the Nazi dictatorship and the war, we were, so to speak, ‘hemmed in’ by the dominant power structure. So we wanted to break out into the open, to experience the whole range of human possibilities,” the pope said.

Born in 1927 in the German region of Bavaria, Joseph Ratzinger was conscripted into Adolf Hitler’s army in the last few months of World War II.

“We were not willing to settle for a conventional middle-class life,” Pope Benedict said, comparing his own generation’s ambitions with those of today’s youth.

“Naturally, part of that was due to the times we lived in,” he added.

The pope also discussed his vocation as a priest and his doubts about it after the war.

“I was somehow aware quite early on that the Lord wanted me to be a priest,” the pope said.

“Then later, after the war, when I was in the seminary and at university on the way towards that goal, I had to recapture that certainty. I had to ask myself: is this really the path I was meant to take?” the pope said.

Pope Benedict said he then found certainty that priesthood was the right path for him.

World Youth Day, launched by Benedict XVI’s predecessor John Paul II, is held in a different city every two or three years.

The last occasion was in 2008 in Sydney, Australia.

If this keeps up, no one’s going to trust any scientists.

NY Post | Sep 1, 2010

By MATT PATTERSON

The global-warming establishment took a body blow this week, as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change received a stunning rebuke from a top-notch independent investigation.

For two decades, the IPCC has spearheaded efforts to convince the world’s governments that man-made carbon emissions pose a threat to the global temperature equilibrium — and to civilization itself. IPCC reports, collated from the work of hundreds of climate scientists and bureaucrats, are widely cited as evidence for the urgent need for drastic action to “save the planet.”

But the prestigious InterAcademy Council, an independent association of “the best scientists and engineers worldwide” (as the group’s own Web site puts it) formed in 2000 to give “high-quality advice to international bodies,” has finished a thorough review of IPCC practices — and found them badly wanting.

For example, the IPCC’s much-vaunted Fourth Assessment Report claimed in 2007 that Himalayan glaciers were rapidly melting, and would possibly be gone by the year 2035. The claim was actually false — yet the IPCC cited it as proof of man-made global warming.

Then there’s the IPCC’s earlier prediction in 2007 — which it claimed to have “high confidence” in — that global warming could lead to a 50 percent reduction in the rain-fed agricultural capacity of Africa.

Such a dramatic decrease in food production in an already poor continent would be a terrifying prospect, and undoubtedly lead to the starvation of millions. But the InterAcademy Council investigation found that this IPCC claim was also based on weak evidence.

Overall, the IAC slammed the IPCC for reporting “high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence. Furthermore, by making vague statements that were difficult to refute, authors were able to attach ‘high confidence’ to the statements.” The critics note “many such statements that are not supported sufficiently in the literature, not put into perspective or not expressed clearly.

Some IPCC practices can only be called shoddy. As The Wall Street Journal reported, “Some scientists invited by the IPCC to review the 2007 report before it was published questioned the Himalayan claim. But those challenges ‘were not adequately considered,’ the InterAcademy Council’s investigation said, and the projection was included in the final report.”

Yet the Himalayan claim wasn’t based on peer-reviewed scientific data, or on any data — but on spec ulation in a phone interview by a single scientist.

Was science even a real concern for the IPCC? In January, the Sunday Times of London reported that, based in large part on the fraudulent glacier story, “[IPCC Chairman] Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute, based in New Delhi, was awarded up to 310,000 pounds by the Carnegie Corp. . . . and the lion’s share of a 2.5 million pound EU grant funded by European taxpayers.”

Thus, the Times concluded, “EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognize as bogus.”

All this comes on top of last year’s revelation of the “Climategate” e-mails, which revealed equally shoddy practices (and efforts to suppress criticism) by scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia — perhaps the single most important source of data that supposedly proved the most alarming claims of global warming.

Al Gore and many other warming alarmists have insisted that “the debate is over” — that the science was “settled.” That claim is now in shreds — though the grants are still flowing, and advocates still hope Congress will pass some version of the economically ruinous “cap and trade” anti-warming bill.

What does the best evidence now tell us? That man-made global warming is a mere hypothesis that has been inflated by both exaggeration and downright malfeasance, fueled by the awarding of fat grants and salaries to any scientist who’ll produce the “right” results.

The warming “scientific” community, the Climategate emails reveal, is a tight clique of like-minded scientists and bureaucrats who give each other jobs, publish each other’s papers — and conspire to shut out any point of view that threatens to derail their gravy train.

Such behavior is perhaps to be expected from politicians and government functionaries. From scientists, it’s a travesty.

In the end, grievous harm will have been done not just to individual scientists’ reputations, but to the once-sterling reputation of science itself. For that, we will all suffer.

Matt Patterson is editor of Green Watch, a publication of the Capital Research Center .

AFP | Sep 2, 2010

KABUL — Ten Afghan civilians were killed Thursday in a NATO air strike on three vehicles carrying election campaign workers in northern Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai said in a statement.

Karzai strongly condemned the incident in his statement, confirming earlier reports of an air strike that killed election workers in Takhar province.

“Three vehicles carrying the members of a parliamentary election candidate’s team was targeted by NATO aircraft twice while travelling towards the Kiwan area in Rustaq district of Takhar province this morning, during which 10 campaign members were martyred (killed) and two others injured,” the statement from the presidential palace said.

“In the war on terror, pro-democracy people should be distinguished from those who fight against democracy,” the statement quoted Karzai as saying.

“President Karzai once again emphasised that air strikes over Afghan villages will achieve nothing in the war on terrorism but the killing of Afghan civilians,” it said.

Officials said earlier that 10 election campaigners had been killed in an air strike by international forces in the relatively peaceful north of the country.

In an initial reaction to reports of the strike, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the international counter-insurgency mission in Afghanistan, said it was “aware of the allegations”.

“We’re investigating to find out if it’s true or not,” an ISAF spokesman said.

Major General David Garza, deputy chief of staff for joint operations at ISAF’s joint command, said in a later statement that the operation had targeted vehicles carrying a member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU).

The IMU is based in Uzebkistan’s Ferghana Valley and is known to be affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

“These vehicles were nowhere near a populated area and we’re confident this strike hit only the targeted vehicle after days of tracking the occupants’ activity,” Garza said.

The IMU member was believed to be the “deputy shadow governor” of Takhar, the ISAF statement said, referring to the parallel administration that the Taliban has set up in many areas of Afghanistan.

Two other people, including a candidate in the September 18 parliamentary elections, were injured in the alleged air raid in Rustaq district, Takhar provincial government spokesman Faiz Mohammad Tawhedi told AFP.

The men were travelling in a “caravan” of vehicles when they were attacked by “aircraft and helicopter gunships,” he said.

The election campaigners were working for parliamentary candidate Abdul Wahed Khurasani, who had survived the bombing with injuries, he said.

NATO has around 150,000 troops in Afghanistan to fight a Taliban-led insurgency.

The international force has been responsible for scores of civilian deaths, many of them killed during air raids aimed against insurgents.

A recent UN report said about 20 percent of the more than 1,300 civilians killed in the first half of the year lost their lives in NATO and other pro-government troops’ actions, with most of the rest killed by militants.

finance.yahoo.com | Aug 20, 2010

by Aaron Task

There’s a lot of talk these days about America being an empire in decline. Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute, goes a step further, arguing America is following a similar path as the former Soviet Union.

“While the many glaring differences between the two political systems have been exhaustively publicized – especially in the U.S. – the glaring similarities [go] unnoticed,” Celente writes in The Trends Journal, which he publishes.

In the accompanying video, Celente describes some of these similarities, including:

A rotten political system: He compares politicians (Democrats and Republicans alike) to “Mafioso” and says campaign contributions are really thinly disguised “bribes and payoffs.”

Related

And Now We’re Headed For The GREATEST Depression, Says Gerald Celente

Crony capitalism: Like in the USSR of old, Celente laments that so much of America’s wealth (93%) is controlled by such a small group small portion of its population (10%). Owing to that concentration of wealth, the government makes policies designed to reward “the bigs” at the expense of average citizens (see: Bailouts, banks).

Military-industrial complex: The USSR went bankrupt fighting the cold war and Celente fears the U.S. is “squandering its greater but still finite resources on a gargantuan defense budget, fighting unwinnable hot wars and feeding an insatiable military stationed on hundreds of bases worldwide.”

As with many observers, Celente thinks America will suffer the same fate in Afghanistan as the USSR, the British Empire, Alexander the Great and all others who’ve ventured into the “graveyard of empires.”

The irony, of course, is that while America defeated Soviet Communism and won the Cold War, perhaps our greatest threat today comes from China and its booming state-controlled economy.

dailyrecord.co.uk | Aug  28,  2010

by Craig McDonald

AN innocent man was thrown in jail for three months – because he was carrying a rose.

Cops viewing CCTV thought the single rose Stephen McAleer had in his hand as he walked home was a knife.

He was arrested and sent to Barlinnie Jail on remand. And 28-year-old Stephen’s prison ordeal only ended when he was cleared at a two-day trial this week.

A CCTV expert enhanced the images and testified that the item he was carrying was a rose in a plastic sleeve, which tapers to a knife-like point at the end of the stem.

Stephen admits he has served a jail sentence for a previous knife offence but says he has been trying to “move on” since his release in December 2008.

He said yesterday: “Jail was torture – although the other prisoners who heard what I was in for were laughing at me.

“I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. The police were saying I had a knife and they had pictures to prove it.”

Stephen, from Newmilns, Ayrshire, was quizzed over the “blade” after he went to speak to police about traffic offences.

He said: “All of a sudden the police started asking me about a knife, saying they had CCTV pictures of me with one.

“It was from a few weeks previously, when I was walking home with my fianc›e from her mum’s house.

“I was trying to rack my brain to think what it could have been I was carrying. It eventually dawned on me that it had been the rose in its plastic wrapper. But I was still kept in prison until my case came to court.”

Stephen added: “You couldn’t make it up. I am sure no one else has ever spent three months in prison for having a rose.

“When I was being taken from jail to court for the start of my trial one of the other prisoners actually said to me, ‘Don’t worry, Stephen, you’ll come up smelling of roses.

“It would have been funny if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was facing being sent to jail for even longer.”

Stephen, who admits he has convictions for drugs and assault, insisted: “I am ashamed about my past and would never get involved with knives again.

“I am not sure what the answer to the problem of knife crime is. But it certainly isn’t locking up someone for carrying a rose. for their girlfriend just because they have offended before.

“I lost three months of my life.”

Stephen was cleared of carrying a knife by a jury at Kilmarnock Sheriff Court.

The court heard he and fianc›e Rochel le had been celebrating her birthday with her mum Joanne Ewing, who bought the rose for her because it was her favourite purple.

As they walked home, he was carrying it for her.

Joanne said yesterday: “I saw the rose and bought it because it it was purple, which is Rochelle’s favourite colour.

“Who would have thought it would have led to what has happened. I think what Stephen has been put through is totally ridiculous.”

Stephen said: “I am utterly relieved at the jury’s verdict and very thankful that my lawyer got the CCTV pictures enhanced. The question is why didn’t the police or the fiscal do that?”

Stephen’s lawyer, Andy Phillips, of Liam O’Donnell and Co, said: “It is extremely unfortunate that Stephen was remanded when, if the police or Crown had had the evidence analysed by someone with the requisite expertise, this could have been avoided.”

Human rights lawyer John Scott, former chairman of the Scottish Human Rights Centre, said last night: “It appears that police officers thought they saw what they wanted to see.

“There are significant lessons here for the police and for the Crown, who could have done what the defence did and had the pictures enhanced.”