FIRST DROPS

Man Says He Was Nearly Hit by Meteorite

A Nebrasks man was watering his yard last week when he had a very rare and close encounter with a possible meteorite.
Brad Kinzie was out watering his yard in the wee hours of the morning Saturday - trying to avoid the hottest period of the day - when an object whizzed by his head and landed.
“It came over my head, probably, about a foot and a half. I could feel the breeze,” Kinzie said. “It was silver and it kind of had red and black on the back of it and smoke.”
The object landed about 65 feet from where Kinzie was watering.
"I stood ... here looking at it, ‘cause it was still glowing. I says, ‘Wow,’” Kinzie said.

OGLE GOOGLE

Call to 'shut down' Street View

A formal complaint about Google's Street View has been sent to the UK's Information Commissioner (ICO).

Since Street View launched in the UK on 19 March, PI has been contacted by many people identifiable via the service. Among them were a woman who had moved house to escape a violent partner but who was recognisable outside her new home on Street View.

Also complaining were two colleagues pictured in an apparently compromising position who suffered embarrassment when the image was circulated at their workplace.

The ICO said it had received the complaint from PI and would respond "shortly". It added: "It is Google's responsibility to ensure all vehicle registration marks and faces are satisfactorily blurred.

STASI STATE

Britain trains civilian anti-terror force

Britain has launched a clandestine alliance that recruits citizens and trains them to act as undercover agents against terror suspects.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the initiative is vital for safety in the UK. According to him, tens of thousands of civilians have already been trained for the purpose.

CLEAN SKIN

Internet filter blacklist leaked on web

"Now that we have seen the list, it is clearly not the perfect weapon against child-abuse it has been made out to be," said Jacobs.

"Many of the sites clearly contain only run-of-the-mill adult material, poker tips, or nothing controversial at all. Even if some of these sites may have been defaced at the time they were added to the list, how would the operators get their sites removed if the list is secret and no appeal is possible?"

The ABC has been unable to contact Broadband and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, but he is quoted by Fairfax as saying any Australians involved in the leak could face criminal charges.

"No-one interested in cyber safety would condone the leaking of this list," he said.

As well as child pornography, the list of 2395 pages also includes online gambling sites, YouTube links, regular porn and fetish sites, and websites of a tour operator, Queensland boarding kennel and a Queensland dentist. It also includes the Wikileaks website.

[The filter is designed to protect children from accessing child pornography and other criminal content.]

DOMAIN MASTER

Creative Commons Zeroes in on public domain

New “licence” waives all rights to created content.

Creative Commons has introduced a new licence that allows content creators to waive all their rights over their material.
CC0—pronounced “CC Zero”—is a universal waiver that may be used by anyone wishing to permanently surrender the copyright and database rights they may have in a work, thereby placing it as nearly as possible into the public domain.
“Our copyright licenses empower creators to manage their copyright on terms they choose,” said Diane Peters, Creative Commons’ general counsel.

DOPE BUSH

Obama Administration Likely To Review UMass Scientist's Bid To Grow Marijuana

Days before President Bush left office in January, his administration fired a parting shot at Professor Lyle Craker's eight-year quest to cultivate marijuana for medical research by abruptly denying him a federal license despite a nearly two-year old Drug Enforcement Administration law judge's recommendation that he receive one.
But the new administration led by President Obama, who has publicly backed the use of marijuana for medical purposes to stave off pain, might reverse the decision and keep Craker's license application from going up in smoke.

GITMO OUTTA HERE

Some Truths About Guantanamo Bay

There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed and, thus, of which the American people are almost completely unaware. For that matter, few within the government who were not directly involved are aware either.

The first of these is the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the U.S. operations there.

The second dimension that is largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.

The third basically unknown dimension is how hard Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage labored to ameliorate the GITMO situation from almost day one. Ambassador Pierre Prosper, the U.S. envoy for war crimes issues, was under a barrage of questions and directions almost daily from Powell or Armitage to repatriate every detainee who could be repatriated. Standing resolutely in Ambassador Prosper's path was Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who would have none of it. Rumsfeld was staunchly backed by the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney. Moreover, the fact that among the detainees was a 13 year-old boy and a man over 90, did not seem to faze either man.

by Lawrence Wilkerson

GENETIC WITNESS

Man's murder verdict quashed after 27 years in jail

A man who spent 27 years in jail for a murder he did not commit said he was "ecstatic" as he walked free from the Court of Appeal.Sean Hodgson, now 57, saw his "unsafe" conviction for killing Teresa De Simone, 22, in her car in Southampton 30 years ago quashed by senior judges.
Tests prove DNA from the scene was not his and police have reopened the case.

Mr Hodgson is one of the longest-serving victims of a miscarriage of justice in the UK.

POLICE STATE

Grand Valley State University student Derek Copp

Analysis and discussion about the world we live in

Student, Derek Copp, shot in chest by police for smoking marijuana:
Executing children in the "War on Drugs"

According to his page on Facebook, Copp identifies himself as "a left-wing hippie peace-keeping liberal," who is seeking a film and video degree.
He plays the guitar and often volunteers at music festivals to see favorite bands for free, the social networking page states.

LIFE CYCLES

Josef Fritzl pleads guilty to incest and rape

JOSEF Fritzl, the Austrian man accused of locking his daughter Elisabeth in the cellar for 24 years, raping her and forcing her to have seven children, has told a court that he too was abused as a child.

"I had a very difficult childhood," Fritzl said in a trembling voice. "My mother didn't want me. She was 42 when she had me," the 73-year-old retired electrical engineer told the three judges and eight jurors hearing his case.
At the age of 12, when he made it clear that he would not tolerate being beaten any longer and would defend himself, Fritzl says he was then "Satan personified for her".
His relationship with his mother was never close, even though they shared the same house until her death in 1980. She never showed him any affection and his father appeared only "rarely and sporadically". Fritzl attributed his mother's coldness to her own childhood.
"Her life wasn't the best, either," he said.

BIG BROTHER

SA police begin using number plate recognition cameras

BIKIES, pedophiles and unregistered drivers will be targeted by a new "Big Brother" style camera being trialled by SA Police.

Police will soon start using four Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras that are already being used by UK police.

Speaking from London, Police Minister Michael Wright said the cameras were "a powerful crime fighting tool."

 Tripod-mounted ANPR cameras have been used by Operation Nomad police since 2004 to monitor vehicles of suspected firebugs on days of extreme fire danger.

The new generation of ANPR cameras can be used inside and out of police cars, giving officers more scope to detect suspicious vehicles.

 The cameras instantly scan number plates and match them against information stored in databases.

NUDE AND PRUDE

Web censor lifts Wikipedia ban

The IWF ran into a storm of protest when it decided to add the article on German heavy rock band The Scorpions' Virgin Killer record to the list of URLs blocked by the vast majority of Britain's ISPs.

The filtering employed by the ISPs left millions of Britons unable to make edits on the Wikipedia site and drove thousands more to seek out the banned image.

The IWF now admits the ban was counter-productive.

"IWF's overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect," the watchdog said in a statement.

THE BARD

Original Shakespeare portrait unveiled

A portrait of William Shakespeare - believed to be the only surviving picture of the English playwright painted during his lifetime - has been unveiled in London.

The painting dates from 1610, when the Bard was 46.

It has been owned by the same family for centuries, but was only recently identified.

Art restorer Alec Cobbe says his family took possession of it when a cousin married the great granddaughter of Shakespeare's only literary patron, Henry Wriothesley.

FILTHY LUCRE

India seeks Rupee status symbol

It has billionaires and big ambitions. Now India wants something that no global economic powerhouse should be without: an international symbol for its currency.

The hope is that the Rupee sign will become as ubiquitous as the US dollar ($), or that instant emblem of the digital age, the @ symbol.

But how easy is it to launch a symbol on the international stage and land a coveted place on keyboards the world over?

JUBILEE, NOT

China turned Tibet into hell on earth: Dalai Lama

On the 50th anniversary of his flight into exile, the Dalai Lama has attacked China for the way it has ruled in Tibet.

The Dalai Lama has said that the Chinese Government has made his homeland a "hell on earth".

In a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of a failed uprising in the Himalayan region, the Tibetan spiritual leader said Chinese rule had brought "untold suffering and destruction".

NEAR MISS

Earth in near miss asteroid encounter

While most of the world nonchalantly went about its business on Monday, March 02, a few twitchy stargazers were intently following the path of a near-Earth asteroid carrying the potential to create significant damage to the planet’s surface.

Although the snappily named DD45 2009 narrowly avoided a collision with Earth, passing by harmlessly at a distance of around 40,000 miles, space rock experts believe the 200ft asteroid was a significant event and something of a fanfare-free near miss.

Speaking with Canadian publication the Ontario Citizen, astronomer Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario said DD45 2009 was equivalent in size to the Tunguska asteroid that exploded above Siberia in 1908 and obliterated thousands of square miles of remote forestry.

According to Brown, “the last rock as large or larger than this to come this close was in 1973 and the next time will be in 2029 when Apophis makes its close approach.”

ABOUT FACEBOOK

Please don't leave, says Facebook

FACEBOOK is begging users not to delete their accounts after a contentious change to the website's terms of use that has since been withdrawn.

Earlier this month Facebook had updated the policy to extend control over content uploaded by users such as photos, messages and personal details.
A clause in the policy that said Facebook's control over content would expire when the user deleted it was removed, The Consumerist reported.
"Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later," the report said.
The change sparked outrage among users, with more than 100,000 joining a group called People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS).

STAZI = NAZI

Ministry for State Security (East Germany)

The Ministry for State Security, (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, commonly known as the Stasi [ˈʃtazi] (abbreviation German: Staatssicherheit, literally State Security), was the official secret police of East Germany. The MfS was headquartered in East Berlin, with an extensive complex in Berlin-Lichtenberg and several smaller facilities throughout the city. It was widely regarded as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world. The MfS motto was "Schild und Schwert der Partei" (Shield and Sword of the Party), showing its connections to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), the equivalent to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Another term used in earlier years to refer to the MfS was Staatssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service or SSD).

The MfS infiltrated almost every aspect of GDR life. In the mid-1980s, a network of civilian informants, Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs, Unofficial Collaborators), began growing in both German states; by the time East Germany collapsed in 1989, the MfS employed an estimated 91,000 employees and 300,000 informants.
About one of every 50 East Germans collaborated with the MfS – one of the most extensive police infiltrations of a society in history.
In 2007 an article in BBC stated that "Some calculations have concluded that in East Germany there was one informer to every seven citizens."[2]

NEW DAWN

Emotions run high as Obama takes office

With a huge grin on his face and his left hand on Abraham Lincoln's Bible, the 47-year-old delivered the words, with a few stumbles, that made him the nation's fourth youngest president. He is also the first African-American to hold the position.

IDLE CHATTER

Celebrating lack of achievement

This year, with the great and the good having presided over what might be one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression, we thought it might more suitable to celebrate lack of achievement.

"There are advantages to sitting around and doing nothing," says Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler magazine, which has been promoting the cause of idleness since it first went to press in 1993.

"All the great creative breakthroughs come when people are sitting around, or lying in bed in the morning half awake.

"Idleness is a wellspring of creativity, is enjoyable for its own sake and there are health benefits as well."

He blames the Puritans of the 16th and 17th Century for ruining Europe's old loafing culture and replacing it with a high-achievement lifestyle best epitomized by the "bossy, active, do-more culture" of the US.

NEWS EXTRA

Sensational news driving paranoid thoughts

Dr Daniel Freeman from the psychiatry institute of King's College London says almost a quarter of the population experience regular paranoid thoughts, driven by an avalanche of sensational stories in the media.
And if paranoia continues to spreads through society, he warns of unexpected consequences like a spike in the levels of childhood obesity.

MY POSSE COMITATUS

More than 10,000 troops to guard Obama's inaugaration

Thousands of US troops will patrol Washington to help protect against a potential terrorist attack during the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama next month.
The US military plans to mobilise 7,500 active duty troops and 4,000 National Guard members in Washington on inauguration day.
They will fly combat air patrols and help police provide security in the capital. There will be surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft missiles on stand-by.

Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act substantially limit the powers of the federal government to use the military for civil law enforcement.

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".

POLICE STATE

Latest police weapon: a secret search

NEW powers to secretly search homes and computers of people suspected of crimes ranging from murder to organised theft are wider than those now used against suspected terrorists.

The new covert search warrants would give NSW police up to three years to delay informing targets they had carried out a raid on their property.

Standard search warrants, routinely issued by magistrates in closed hearings, require police to inform the target at the start of the raid. Last financial year lower courts issued about 6600 search warrants to NSW police and other law enforcement agencies - an average of 18 a day. Only about 300 applications were refused.

The proposed covert laws became necessary after the Supreme Court found in 2007 that three covert searches on a children's author suspected of drug offences had been unlawful.

The Council for Civil Liberties and the Law Society warned that the new laws could lead to an abuse of police powers and restrict the rights of citizens.

But the Premier, Nathan Rees, said: "If you are a serious criminal you should be very anxious. We now will have the power to enter your home without you knowing and collect evidence for subsequent prosecutions."

BLIND JUSTICE

Blinded woman seeks eye-for-eye justice

An Iranian woman said she welcomed a Tehran court ruling that awards her eye-for-an-eye justice against a suitor who blinded both her eyes with acid.

Late last year an Iranian court ruled that the man, Majid, who blinded Bahrami in 2004 after she spurned him, should also be blinded with acid based on the Islamic law system of "qisas", or eye for an eye retribution, according to Iranian newspaper reports from November.

But Bahrami, who moved to Spain after the attack to get medical treatment, said that under Iranian law, she is entitled to blind him in only one eye, unless she pays E20,000 ($A39,223), because in Iran women are not considered equal to men.

"They have told us that my two eyes are equal to one of his because in my country each man is worth two women. They are not the same," she told Cadena SER.

OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

Mars had 'recent' running water

Mars researchers say the discovery of a gully system, even an isolated one, that supported running water as recently as 1.25 million years ago greatly extends the time that liquid water could have been active on the Red Planet.

It also adds to evidence that Mars experienced a recent ice age in which polar ice is thought to have been transported toward the planet's equator, where it settled in mid-latitude deposits.

A study of images from Nasa's Mars Reconaissance Orbiter (MRO) shows there were four intervals in which water-borne sediments were carried down the steep slopes of nearby features called alcoves and laid down in a deposit called an alluvial fan.

The team considered other possibilities, such as groundwater bubbling up to the surface, but said the most likely mode of formation for the gullies was the melting of snow and ice deposits that created "modest" flows of water.

CLOAK AND DAGGER

CIA destroys 92 'torture' tapes

The CIA destroyed 92 controversial interrogation videos, US Justice Department documents showed overnight, in a new twist in the tape scandal which may fuel more allegations of Bush-era abuses.
"The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed," Acting US Attorney Lev Dassin wrote in his letter dated March 2 to New York Judge Alvin Hellerstein.

"Ninety-two videotapes were destroyed."