BIG BROTHER

Microsoft patents web moderator robots

“Microsoft has just been awarded a patent for technology designed to automatically detect and remove ‘undesired words or phrases’ from all manner of digital communications, ranging from YouTube broadcasts to internet chat and songs,” writes Mark Harris.

According to Mr. Harris, Microsoft will release this technology to protect children, which is the usual explanation. “The patent describes a system that listens out for phonemes (word fragments) likely to be part of a "swearword".

If it thinks it hears a forbidden phrase, the software either fades out the offending syllables or simply replaces the "rude" word with a similar-sounding but clean alternative lifted from earlier speech without a second’s delay.”

Of course, defining “rude” will be left up to a corporate censor. It will not be limited to “explicit rap music.” It may very well include phrases such as “9/11 truth” and other political slogans at odds with the government.

BIB BROTHER

Australia to implement mandatory internet censorship

AUSTRALIA will join China in implementing mandatory censoring of the internet under plans put forward by the Federal Government.The revelations emerge as US tech giants Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and a coalition of human rights and other groups unveiled a code of conduct aimed at safeguarding online freedom of speech and privacy.
The government has declared it will not let internet users opt out of the proposed national internet filter.

The plan was first created as a way to combat child pronography and adult content, but could be extended to include controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia.

OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

It came from outer space

The telephones of neighbours and friends within a 250-kilometre radius south of Alice Springs began ringing to discuss the meteorite that had flashed through the dusk on Friday night.
"I was outside with the children when I noticed them looking up at the sky," said Nicole Buddle from Hugh River Farms.
"I looked up and saw this white magnesium flare with smoke swirling. It was hard to see against the setting sun."
She called neighbour Ross Morton 40 kilometres away. "He said he had been feeding the cats on the veranda and felt the roof shake."

Piecing together the sightings across the Northern Territory enabled Sergeant Johnsson to conclude the smoking flare across the sky was some type of meteorite. "It looks like it came in a westerly direction at great speed and came down sometime around 7pm," he said.

The meteor was spotted near where the Henbury Meteor struck 4700 years ago. That giant meteor was travelling at more than 40,000kmh when it disintegrated and hit Earth, creating 12 giant craters 145 kilometres south-west of Alice Springs.

OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

Two-metre asteroid roars over Sudan

An asteroid that slammed into the Earth’s atmosphere over northern Sudan, designated 2008TC3, had been discovered just a day earlier.
This was the first time an object had been discovered before hitting the Earth. Astronomer Richard Kowalski discovered the asteroid with the 1.5 metre telescope of the Catalina Sky Survey. The survey operates from Mt Lemmon near Tuscon, Arizona and also has a component at Siding Spring, Australia.

Soon after discovery other astronomers determined the path of the 2-metre-wide asteroid and determined that it was on a collision course with Earth.

In the 19 hours or so before 2008TC3 moved into the Earth’s shadow prior to impact 26 observatories around the globe provided an amazing 570 observations. These observations allowed the impact point to be determined to be over northern Sudan in Africa.

NORMAL FEMALE HUMAN

Cindy McCain Claims She’s ‘Just Like Any Other Female Human’

HONORABLE DISCHARGE

Woman stoned to death for adultery

THOUSANDS gathered to witness 50 Somali men stone a woman to death after an Islamic court found her guilty of adultery, witnesses say.

Aisho Ibrahim Dhuhulow, who had been found guilty of extra-marital intercourse by a court in the southern port of Kismayo, was buried in the ground up to her neck while the men pelted her head with rocks, the witnesses said.
The execution was carried out in one of the city's main squares.

The port of Kismayo was seized in August by a coalition of forces loyal to rebel leader Hassan Turki, and the Shebab, the country's main radical Islamist insurgent organisation.
The new administration began implementing a strict form of Sharia (Islamic law).

REALITY BITES

Meet the World's New Reserve Currency

"The harsh reality of the economic fallout isn't that Joe the plumber can't buy his business or that people's retirement funds are being lost or that unemployment is rising; the harsh reality is that people will die.

PRESS FREEDOM

Australian press freedom crumbling

AUSTRALIA's media freedom is slipping because of its "outrageous" anti-terror laws and lack of protection for reporters' sources, experts say. Australia is ranked 28th in the annual Press Freedom Index released this week by the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders.
Australia's ranking is the same as last year's and puts it behind New Zealand (ranked 7th), the United Kingdom (23), Canada (13) and Scandinavian countries.

Iceland, Luxembourg and Norway were jointly named the nations with the most press freedom, while Eritrea was named as the country with the least media freedom.


Rupert Murdoch and wife Wendy Deng

The Mayne Report: Rupert ducks our questions

After twice promising to take general questions following his formal address, when the time came Rupert Murdoch promptly shut down the meeting without explanation. This still this hasn’t been reported in any News Corp newspaper throughout the world.
More on the Sun King: The New York Times is reporting that Rupert Murdoch has complained to the author of his upcoming biography -- a book called The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch -- that "it contains some extremely damaging misstatements of fact.
Murdoch's main complaint is that the book suggests he "is at times embarrassed by Fox News, which he owns ... and that he often shares 'the general liberal apoplexy,' as Mr. Wolff writes in the book, toward Fox News and its perceived conservative slant". Michael Wolff actually spent some 50 hours interviewing the mogul on the record.

TURNING TIDE

Election: Scott McClellan Endorses Obama

The White House press secretary hinted he would do it in May, and now Scott McClellan has finally pulled the trigger, telling CNN's D.L. Hughley " I will be voting for Barack Obama... I am going to support the candidate that has the best chance for changing the way Washington works and getting things done."

This scenario looks familiar, and may presage more last-minute Obama endorsements to come.

OBAMA BIN LADEN

Another October surprise?

"My money is on Osama Bin Laden popping back up with a hate video, just as he did the weekend before the 2004 election.
"That tape reminded the public that the country was still at risk from this sickening terrorist and that President Bush had kept us safe for the three years since the 11 September 2001 attacks."

While sophisticated analysts could explain that bin Laden released the tape just before the election because he hoped Bush would win (Bush was a better recruiting tool for Al Qaeda than a President Kerry would have been), none of that got through.

In this year's second debate, McCain said, "I know how" to find Bin Laden.
This should have led Obama to respond that if he knows how to catch him, he should have told his friend George Bush.

ALL TERRORISTS NOW

'Jihad Jack' cleared of al-Qaida link

ACCUSED Australian terror supporter "Jihad" Jack Thomas has been found not guilty of accepting cash from the world's most infamous terror group. Thomas mouthed "thank you" to a jury after it found him not guilty of taking money from terror group al-Qaida this afternoon.
But the jury found him guilty of using a falsified passport.

Mr Thomas's family cried as the verdicts were handed down.
Joseph Terrence Thomas, 35, had pleaded not guilty to intentionally receiving funds from a terrorist organisation and using a falsified passport.

He was originally convicted on the same charges in 2006, but the Court of Appeal later quashed the conviction.
The appeal court later ruled there should be another trial based on fresh evidence contained in interviews Mr Thomas gave to the ABC's Four Corners program about his actions while in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

JANUARY SURPRISE

Biden: 'There’s going to be a crisis come along on the 21st or 22nd of January'

“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.
"The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said.
"Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

AGNOSTIC ATHEISTS

'No God' slogans for city's buses

Buses with the slogan "There's probably no God" could soon be running on the streets of London for four weeks.

The atheist posters are the idea of the British Humanist Association (BHA) and have been supported by prominent atheist Professor Richard Dawkins. The BHA planned only to raise £5,500, which was to be matched by Professor Dawkins, but it has now raised more than £36,000 of its own accord.

The slogan strangely uses the word probably: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

ADVERT YOU EYES

Ban for Horlicks and noodle ads

An advert claiming that Horlicks makes children "taller, stronger and sharper" has been banned after it mistakenly was screened on British television.
The Advertising Standards Authority  has also banned an advert for a brand of Nestle noodles which claimed to strengthen muscles and bones.

Both were meant to air in Bangladesh.

UFO DISCLOSURE

US pilot was ordered to shoot down UFO

Two US fighter planes were scrambled and ordered to shoot down a UFO over the English countryside during the Cold War, according to previously secret files which have been made public.

One pilot said he was seconds away from firing 24 rockets at the object, which moved erratically and gave a radar reading like "a flying aircraft carrier".
The pilot, Milton Torres, now 77 and living in Miami, said the UFO spent periods motionless in the sky before reaching estimated speeds of more than 12,000 kph.
After the alert, a shadowy figure told Mr Torres he must never talk about the incident and he duly kept silent for more than 30 years.

His story was among dozens of UFO sightings in defence ministry files released at the National Archives in London.

NOTHING TO SEE. MOVE ALONG

Airliner had near miss with UFO

A passenger jet bound for Heathrow Airport had a near miss with a UFO, Ministry of Defence files reveal.

The captain of the Alitalia airliner shouted "Look out" to his co-pilot at the sight of a brown missile-shaped object shooting past them overhead.
Civil Aviation Authority and military investigations could not explain the 1991 incident near Lydd in Kent.

The unsolved close encounter features in UFO-related military documents made available by the National Archives.
After ruling out the object flying past the Alitalia jet being a missile, weather balloon or space rocket, the MoD closed the inquiry.

Nineteen files covering sightings between 1986 and 1992 are being made available online.

PLAGUE PROPORTIONS

Decon^3: Deconstructing and Decontextualizing Decontamination

Foucault described how authorities once used the specter of plague to justify draconian quieting of any civil unrest.

Just the mere mention of the word "plague" could be used for quarantine or forced mass evacuations. Forced evacuation to mass delousing centers, cleansing stations, or the like, has sometimes been used to remove undesirables from a given area. Even "ethnic cleansing" could fall under the domain of decontamination ("decon").

Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government describes powers that responding agencies might desire:

• The authority to compel people to remain in one location or move to another, including temporary detention;
• The authority to use the military for domestic law enforcement, population control, and mass logistics;
• The authority to seize community or private property, such as hospitals, utilities, medicines, vehicles, or transit centers, or to compel the production of certain goods;
• The authority to compel individuals to undertake decontamination procedures, take medicines, or be quarantined;
• The authority to censor and control the media;
• The authority to liberalize standards for conducting searches and seizures;...
• The authority to waive regulatory requirements on the use of certain pharmaceuticals.

NUDE AND PRUDE

New airport body scanners spark privacy debate

The Government has defended controversial new airport body scanners as safe, but prominent civil libertarian Terry O'Gorman says the technology is an invasion of privacy.
A new millimetre wave radio frequency body scanner is being trialed at three major Australian airports. It does not use X-rays, but it does have "X-ray vision".

Using this technology, security officers can detect metal and plastic weapons and also they can see through your clothes.
The Government says it is very safe, but it is still controversial.
Mr O'Gorman, who heads the Council for Civil Liberties, says the technology is a "total invasion of privacy", allowing virtual strip searches and has overstepped the mark.

But the Government says this will not be allowed when the technology is used with the public.
"No images will be stored," the Office of Transport Security's Andrew Tongue said.
"Anybody but the person viewing the image is remote from where the person will be going through the body scanning, so they can't link in any way a person and their image.

[Not linking the image to an individual? Isn't that the whole point?]

911 LIHOP

NSA Tapped 9/11 Hijackers' Phone Calls for 2 Years

The U.S. government heard the 9/11 plans from the hijackers' own mouth. The NSA was tapping the hijackers' phone calls inside the U.S.
Specifically, hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi lived in San Diego, California, for 2 years before 9/11. Numerous phone calls between al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in San Diego and a high-level Al Qaeda operations base in Yemen were made in those 2 years.
The NSA had been tapping and eavesdropping on all calls made from that Yemen phone for years. So NSA recorded all of these phone calls.  George Washington's Blog

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Politkovskaya murder trial starts in Russia

The trial of three men charged with involvement in the murder of prominent Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya has begun in Moscow. There are calls for the trial to be open to the public.

Ms Politkovskaya was an investigative journalist with Novaya Gazeta renowned for her reports from Chechnya. She was shot dead outside her Moscow apartment just over two years ago.

Three men are now on trial for their alleged involvement in her murder. But the judge has reportedly indicated this is to be a closed trial, because of secret material involved in the case.

CREDIT CRUNCH

A £516 trillion derivatives 'time-bomb'

The derivatives market is worth more than $516 trillion, (£303 trillion), roughly 10 times the value of the entire world's output: it's been called the "ticking time-bomb".
It's a market in which the lead protagonists – typically aggressive, highly educated, and now wealthy young men – have flourished in the derivatives boom. But it's a market that is set to come to a crashing halt – the Great Unwind has begun.
The beginning of the end started for many hedge funds with the combination of diving market values and worried investors pulling out their cash for safer climes.

Not for nothing did US billionaire Warren Buffett call them the real 'weapons of mass destruction'

The complex and opaque derivatives markets in which these hedge funds played has been dubbed the world's biggest black hole because they operate outside of the grasp of governments, tax inspectors and regulators. They operate in a parallel, shadow world to the rest of the banking system. They are private contracts between two companies or institutions which can't be controlled or properly assessed.

It is also impossible to establish their worth – the $516 trillion number is actually only a notional one. In the mid-Nineties, Nick Leeson lost Barings £1.3bn trading in derivatives, and the bank went bust. In 1998 hedge fund LTCM's $5bn loss nearly brought down the entire system. In fragile times like this, another LTCM could have catastrophic results.
In the late 1990s when confidence was roaring in the midst of the dotcom boom, a small band of politicians, uncomfortable with the ease with which banks would be allowed to play in these burgeoning markets, were painted as Luddites failing to move with the times.

At the core of this market is the credit derivative swap, effectively an insurance policy against the default in the interest payment on a corporate bond. One doesn't even need to own the bond itself. It is like Joe Public buying an insurance policy on someone else's house and pocketing the full value if it burns down.
As markets slid into crisis, and banks and corporations began to default on bond payments, many of these policies have proved worthless.

UNDERCOVER POLICING

Jean Charles de Menezes, innocent, shot by police.

Menezes officer changed evidence

An investigation has begun after an officer admitted changing evidence during the inquest into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes.
The Special Branch officer, named as Owen, said he deleted a line from computer notes which quoted Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission said it would investigate.Brazilian Mr de Menezes, 27, was killed by police who mistook him for one of the failed 21 July 2005 bombers.

HUGE ERECTIONS

Saudi prince plans 1000-metre tower

Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal says he plans to build the world's tallest building in the city of Jeddah.
The tower will be more than a kilometre high at a cost of about $40 billion.

GENDER EQUALITY

Captain Hanadi Hindi, 27

First Saudi woman pilot to fly; driving still illegal

While the debate over whether Saudi women should be allowed to drive rages on, Captain Hanadi Hindi will soon become the first woman to fly a plane with the private fleet of a prince.
Hindi, 27, is preparing to take to the skies at a time when supporters and opponents of lifting the ban on women's driving in the conservative kingdom are still fighting it out in the local press.

"I never meant to be a pioneer. When I started learning to become a pilot, I did so for my father, who himself had aspired to be a pilot. I then got attached to flying," Hindi said by telephone from her home in Mecca.
Prince Al Walid Ben Talal's decision to make Hindi part of his private crew has drawn criticism from some conservative Muslim scholars, who object to any easing of constraints that bar Saudi women from mixing with men other than relatives or travelling without the authorisation of a male guardian.

Hindi said she was "not against" allowing women to drive because some women either cannot afford to employ drivers, which forces them to rely on public transport, or have no able-bodied men in their families to take them around. It would be good if women could get behind the wheel "with certain restrictions," such as granting that right only to women of middle age or more, she said.

POLICE STATE

Bush Plan For Martial Law - sheep led to slaughter

Under the heading of "civil disturbance planning," the U.S. military is training troops and police to suppress democratic opposition in America.
The master plan, Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, is code-named, "Operation Garden Plot".
Originated in 1968, the "operational plan" has been updated over the last three decades, most recently in 1991, and was activated during the Los Angeles "riots" of 1992, and more than likely during the recent anti-WTO "Battle in Seattle".

...Equipped with flexible "military operations in urban terrain" and "operations other than war" doctrine, lethal and "less-than-lethal" high-tech weaponry, US "armed forces" and "elite" militarized police units are being trained to eradicate "disorder", "disturbance" and "civil disobedience" in America.
Further, it may very well be that police/military "civil disturbance" planning is the animating force and the overarching logic behind the incredible nationwide growth of police paramilitary units, a growth which coincidentally mirrors rising levels of police violence directed at the American people, particularly "non-white" poor and working people.

Frank Morales, "U.S. Military Civil Disturbance Planning: The War at Home," in Police State America, ed. Tom Burghardt, Toronto/Montreal: Arm The Spirit/Solidarity, 2002, P. 59

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Russia test fires long-range missile

President Dmitry Medvedev oversaw the test firing of an intercontinental Topol missile on Sunday and vowed to commission new generation weapons for Russia's armed forces.
A Reuters reporter said the truck-mounted Topol was fired in drizzling rain from the Plesetsk cosmodrome, which is nestled among the taiga forests of Russia's north.
Half an hour later it hit the Kura testing site, 6000 kilometres away on the Kamchatka peninsula in the Pacific.
"I have just been told that the dummy warhead has landed in Kura," Mr Medvedev said from the Topol launch pad where acrid smoke from the missile still hung thick in the air.

“The advanced Topol missile…has three cruise engines and can develop hypersonic speed. The high thrust-to-weight ratio allows the warhead to maneuver on the trajectory and pass through a dense air defense system.”

The RT-2UTTKh Topol-M (Russian: РТ-2УТТХ) is one of the most recent intercontinental ballistic missiles to be deployed by Russia and the first to be developed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In its Russian designation РТ stands for Raketa Tverdotoplivnaya ("solid fuel rocket")
It has been assigned the NATO reporting name STALIN/DIA: SS-27. "Topol"  in Russian means "poplar".

IDENTITY HOLOCAUST

MoD computer hard drive missing

An investigation is under way into the disappearance of a computer hard drive which could contain the details of about 100,000 Armed Forces personnel.

The hard drive was being held by EDS, which is the Ministry of Defence's main IT contractor. The MoD said it was told the drive was missing on Wednesday following a priority audit carried out by EDS. It is thought to contain more than 1.5m pieces of information, including the details of 600,000 potential recruits.

There may also be some personal information including bank and driving licence details, passport numbers, addresses, dates of birth and telephone numbers.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Nature loss 'dwarfs bank crisis'

The global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis, according to an EU-commissioned study.It puts the annual cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion.The figure comes from adding the value of the various services that forests perform, such as providing clean water and absorbing carbon dioxide.The study, headed by a Deutsche Bank economist, parallels the Stern Review into the economics of climate change.

OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

Asteroid near-miss prompts calls for astronomy funding

Astronomers in Arizona reported seeing a tiny asteroid, which they described as a new but routine fast-moving object.
Scientists at the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) in Massachusetts had calculated the object was likely to pass within one Earth's radius of the centre of the planet.
That means it would have struck the surface of the Earth if had been big enough.

WORDS OF GOD

The rival to the Bible

"When people ask me if the Bible is the word of God I answer 'which Bible?'" - Professor Bart Ehrman

For those who believe the Bible is the inerrant, unaltered word of God, there will be some very uncomfortable questions to answer. For 1500 years, the Codex Sinaiticus lay undisturbed in a Sinai monastery. It shows there have been thousands of alterations to today's bible.

The Codex contains two extra books in the New Testament. One is the little-known Shepherd of Hermas, written in Rome in the 2nd Century - the other, the Epistle of Barnabas. This goes out of its way to claim that it was the Jews, not the Romans, who killed Jesus, and is full of anti-Semitic kindling ready to be lit. "His blood be upon us," Barnabas has the Jews cry.

IGNOBLE LAUREATES

Spontaneous knotting ties up physics Ig Nobel prize

Physics, the Ig Nobels turned to US academics providing mathematical proof that hair, string, or anything else of the kind, will inevitably become tangled in knots - a process termed "spontaneous knotting of an agitated string".

VOICE OF REASON

Cannabis less harmful than drinking, smoking: report

Cannabis is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, according to a report by a research charity Thursday, which called for a "serious rethink" of drug policy.

The Beckley Foundation, a charity which numbers senior experts and other academics among its advisors, said banning cannabis has no impact on supply and turns users into criminals.

"Although cannabis can have a negative impact on health, including mental health, in terms of relative harms it is considerably less harmful than alcohol or tobacco," says the report by the Foundation's Global Cannabis Commission.

The government is pressing for cannabis to be re-classified in law as a Class B drug compared with its current, less serious, Class C classification.

VOICE OR REASON

Is it time the world forgot about cannabis in its war against drugs?

A British think-tank has published a report for next year's United Nations Strategic Drug Policy Review, suggesting that a decriminalised, regulated market in cannabis would cause less harm than the prohibition of the drug currently in force across most of the world.