Spy v Spy: - The Australian-born James Bond, George Lazenby, passed up a lucrative seven-movie contract to join the peaceniks. Now, on the 50th anniversary of the movie franchise, he's still talking like a hippy and the movie execs are wondering if he should get a ticket to all the parties they're planning.
Ry Cooder: 'Mitt Romney is a dangerous man, a cruel man'
Romney is as bad as anyone can be. He's a dangerous man. He's a cruel man. He's a perfect creation for what the Republican party is all about. And that is to say, a rapacious capitalist. Anyone who ran Bain Capital is not your friend. All they're going to do is rape and pillage the land.
The veteran guitarist on his new album of protest songs, Election Special, and how the Republican party is out to destroy America and Barack Obama's presidency.
Arrests in Critical Mass bike ride near Olympic Park
Joel Benjamin, who has been on several Critical Mass bike rides previously, said: "Usually there is a light police presence.
"[On Friday, the day of the London Olympics opening ceremony,] there were far more police than I've seen before."
He and Mr White said police used a sound system to tell cyclists there were restrictions placed on the ride but not what it meant.
Mr Benjamin, who was not arrested, said: "Basically, they didn't want us to go north of the river. I saw several cases of the police being aggressive and physical, dragging people off their bikes to the ground.
"I guess there were people there who are against the Olympics, but Critical Mass is really a celebration of cycling, there was no need to get so heavy handed."
Mass shootings in the US since 1990
The recent massacre at a movie theatre in Colorado was the latest in a long series of mass shootings in the United States.
The map shows the locations of some of America's worst shooting attacks since 1990.
Capitalism's "Sacrifice Zones": Communities Destroyed for Profit
"It's the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings... And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from creating essentially a corporate oligarchic state."
Greenland ice sheet melts at unprecedented rate
Scientists at Nasa admitted they thought satellite readings were a mistake after images showed 97% surface melt over four days
The Greenland ice sheet melted at a faster rate this month than at any other time in recorded history, with virtually the entire ice sheet showing signs of thaw.
The rapid melting over just four days was captured by three satellites. It has stunned and alarmed scientists, and deepened fears about the pace and future consequences of climate change.
Researchers were able to twist together eight different beams of visible light using OAM resulting in 320GB/s data transmission. Roughly seven Blu-ray movies per second.
Twisting light signals into a vortex for fast wireless connection
By twisting radio waves into a threaded vortex, an international team of researchers has beamed data through the air at 2.5 terabits per second, creating what has to be the fastest wireless network ever created. Moreover, the technique used to create this effect has no real theoretical ceiling, ExtremeTech reports. That means - in theory - that an infinite number of these vortex beams could be threaded together to add infinite capacity to conventional transmission protocols.
These new, high-capacity vortex beams tap a characteristic known as orbital angular momentum (OAM). Right now, conventional transmission protocols like Wi-Fi or LTE modulate the spin angular momentum (SAM) but not the OAM. You can think of SAM as the spin of a signal, like a bullet (or a tightly spiraling football) twisting as it carves a direct path through the air. So to borrow ExtremeTech's analogy, if SAM is the earth rotating on its axis, then OAM is its movement around the sun - not just rotation, but actual movement in space.
Radioactive polonium found in Arafat's clothes
New radiation tests on the clothes and belongings of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat have led to speculation he died from poisoning by polonium.
Dr Francois Bochud, the head of the Institute of Radiation Physics at Lausanne in Switzerland says his team measured an unexplained, elevated level of unsupported polonium-210.
"The conclusion was that we did find some significant polonium that was present in these samples," he told Al Jazeera.
Mr Arafat's death at the age of 75 in a French hospital was surrounded by mystery and allegations he had been poisoned.
Litvinenko
Polonium was used to kill Russian former spy turned Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko, who died in 2006 after drinking tea laced with the radioactive substance at a London hotel.
"If we take the scenario of Mr Litvinenko, one gigabecquerel at the beginning would come to about 10 millibecquerel," Dr Bochud told Al Jazeera. "What was astonishing in our case was that we found values in the samples of Mr Arafat that were in the same order of magnitude."
Al Jazeera's documentary claims unsupported polonium is the kind made in a nuclear reactor and even the tiniest amount, not even visible to the naked eye, is enough to kill.
Unusually large asteroid to race by Earth
An 'unusually large' asteroid - size of a city block - will zoom past Earth but poses no risk of a collision.
Once in awhile one will come out of nowhere like this one, which is actually pretty big.
NASA Says There May Really be a Planet X
Planet X" may be real: A planet four times the size of Earth may be lurking at the outer edges of our solar system, too far away to be seen by Earth-based telescopes. Astronomers think it's there because they've noticed that something is tugging at small icy objects past Neptune, helping to explain the mystery of those objects' peculiar orbits.
Is 'Planet X 2.0' Lurking Beyond Pluto's Orbit?
Before the doomsayers hijacked "Planet X" and used it as a phantom (a.k.a. "Nibiru") to scare people into believing the 2012 doomsday hype, the hunt for Planet X was an exciting astronomical quest to find a hypothetical world in the outermost reaches of the solar system in the early 20th century.
7 Ways To Get Yourself Detained Indefinitely
Debate continued to rage over a short, loosely worded segment of the new 565-page 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that critics, lawmakers and now a federal judge say makes permanent a controversial, post-9/11 loophole that opened a dangerous door to approving the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without a trial.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest found Section 1021 unconstitutional in a lawsuit brought by a group of journalists and activists. The measure had a "chilling impact on first amendment rights," she wrote in her ruling, deconstructing arguments from the president's lawyers several times.
That didn't sway House lawmakers, however, who shortly thereafter voted against a bill to guarantee civilian trials for any terrorism suspect arrested in the United States.
Mayan people join action to keep honey GE free
Recently members of the Mayan people living on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico joined Greenpeace activists and said no to genetically engineered crops. Using their own bodies to form the message ‘MA OGM’ or ‘No to GE’, 2000 activists gathered at eight different Mayan archaeological sites to draw attention to the risks of contamination of honey production by Monsanto’s genetically engineered (GE) soy.
Canadian security geek jailed for taunting G20 security theatre
Canadian judicial system's response is so insanely paranoid that it makes Sonne look extremely reasonable by comparison.
Sonne's story is the sad tale of a geek who lost everything -- his marriage, his home, his livelihood -- because he couldn't figure out how to contain or express his disgust with the state's increasing encroachment on personal liberty. If the authorities wanted to make an object lesson to scare activists into quietly accepting "security" measures, the response to the Toronto G20 (including the arrest and jailing of Sonne for almost a year) is absolutely fit for purpose.
Smartphone-based cash transfer system makes the card redundant at MasterCard
AUSTRALIAN consumers will soon be able to ditch their plastic and use their smartphone or tablet to pay for goods.
MasterCard's Head of Market Development and Innovation Matt Barr says the new PayPass Wallet will allow customers to make quicker, faster payments online and in-store.
``It will become a mainstream electronic wallet across multi channels...it's a very exciting step into a world beyond plastic,'' he says.
``You are not typing in 16-digit numbers, you are not typing in your home address, it's all being securely stored for you in the PayPass Wallet Service.
PayPass services will be phased in from the third quarter of 2012 in Australia, the UK, Canada and the US.
Starlite, the nuclear blast-defying plastic that could change the world
Two decades ago amateur scientist Maurice Ward invented a material that could resist the force of 75 Hiroshimas. So why haven't we all heard about it?
Egypt plans 'farewell intercourse law' so husbands can have sex up to six hours after wife's death
Egyptian husbands could soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives for up to six hours after their death, local media is claiming. The controversial new law is claimed to be part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament. It will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women's rights of getting education and employment.
Just as her husband denies her an orgasm, the call to prayer interrupts his, and the man leaves. After washing up, she loses herself in prayer -- so much more satisfying that she can't wait until the next prayer -- and looks out onto the street from her balcony. She interrupts her reverie to make coffee dutifully for her husband to drink after his nap. Taking it to their bedroom to pour it in front of him as he prefers, she notices he is dead. She instructs their son to go and get a doctor. "She returned to the living room and poured out the coffee for herself. She was surprised at how calm she was,"
Roxon to face grilling on Assange lawyer
London-based human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson said on Thursday Heathrow airport authorities had informed her she was on an "inhibited travel list" and needed special permission to return to Australia.
She said on Twitter security guards had told her "you must have done something controversial" because we have to phone the embassy.
There are many evils in the world, but extinguishing people’s lives with targeted, extra-judicial killings, when you don’t even know their names, based on “patterns” of behavior judged from thousands of miles away, definitely ranks high on the list.
Although the Obama White House has not approved of this request from CIA Director David Petraeus, these so-called “signature strikes” that “allow the agency to hit targets based solely on intelligence indicating patterns of suspicious behavior” are already robustly used in Pakistan — having been started by George Bush in 2008 and aggressively escalated by Barack Obama.
There is much to say on this new report, but in order for me to focus on three discrete points, permit me to highly recommend two superb articles that highlight other vital aspects of this policy: (1) this article from my Salon colleague Jefferson Morley this morning on why this form of drone-targeting is pure American Terrorism, and (2) this essay from Chris Floyd about a recently published Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings on Obama’s love of drones and secret wars and how the military’s slang for drone victims — “bug splat” — reflects the sociopathic mindset that drive them.
How the US uses sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses
By Naomi Wolf - Our surveillance state shown considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually. There's the sexual abuse of prisoners at Bagram – der Spiegel reports that "former inmates report incidents of … various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex". There was the stripping of Bradley Manning is solitary confinement. And there's the policy set up after the story of the "underwear bomber" to grope US travelers genitally or else force them to go through a machine – made by a company, Rapiscan, owned by terror profiteer and former DHA czar Michael Chertoff – with images so vivid that it has been called the "pornoscanner".
U.S. soldiers wait for air deliveries of fuel by a C-17 Globemaster III to Forward Operating Base Waza K'wah in Paktika province, Afghanistan, Jan. 30, 2011. (Photo: The U.S. Army)
Who benefits from the organized violence of war?
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny. -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has nothing to gain and all to lose - especially their lives. -Eugene Victor Debs
Germs in your wallet can make you sick - tests prove it
GERMS on money may be making unwary Aussies sick - some notes are more than six times filthier than a public lavatory.
But don't think swapping it for plastic will magically make the germs disappear. A Public Defender investigation of 10 Melbourne shoppers' wallets found cash and credit cards could be potential hotbeds for bacteria.
Smith: Theory of Moral Sentiments
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.
Human user verification helping to digitize old books
About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.
Each word of an old scanned book, or rather only the words that cannot be read correctly by Optical Character Recognition (OCR), is used as a CAPTCHA. The system uses an aggregated response to determine what the OCR couldn't read
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle?
Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Goldman Sachs director quits 'morally bankrupt' Wall Street bank
Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs has suffered a severe blow to its reputation after one of its bankers announced his resignation in the New York Times by declaring his employer "morally bankrupt".
The departing employee, Greg Smith, said the firm's superior staff described the firm's clients as "muppets" and he made reference to the Tourre affair of two years ago in which London-based banker, Fabrice Tourre, said Goldman Sachs was creating "Frankenstein" products that showed scant regard for the needs of clients.
Smith's public resignation letter also made reference to the infamous description of Goldman in Rolling Stone magazine as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity".
A UFO (bottom of frame) stalks formation of jets at a Chilean air force base
In the video - recorded near El Bosque Air Base in Santiago, Chile - a UFO flies in and out of the frame a number of times as air-force jets in formation fly by the photographer.
The object is difficult to see because it's moving so fast. It was flying at velocities estimated to be at least 5000kmh. Clearly under intelligent control, it zoomed toward each set of jets at about their altitude, circled around and zoomed out of frame.
Close up images show it as a dome-shaped, flat-bottomed object. The rounded top reflects the sun and appears metallic; the bottom is darker and flat. It appears to emit something which is visible in photo analysis. Infrared studies show the entire object is radiating heat.
For those of you living under a social media rock you may not be aware of the latest video conscious-raising video making the rounds. For you here’s the link (It is 30 minutes long, but it is important to see) http://vimeo.com/37119711. For those of you who have seen the video, you’ve also undoubtedly seen the debate around it as well and whether this form of awareness is useful, harmful, neither or both.
Another draft mental health bill, this time in Australia is mirroring global efforts in what is now an international and deliberate surge by government officials to remove parental consent. If passed, the shocking new law will allow children who are considered sufficiently mature, to be subjected to horrifying procedures including sterilization and electroshock.
Amnesty International Urges Stricter Limits on Police Taser Use as U.S. Death Toll Reaches 500
Two days after the death of a Georgia man who was shocked with a police Taser -- raising the known death toll from tasers to 500 in the United States -- Amnesty International today repeated its call for tighter limits on police use of the weapons.
According to data collected by Amnesty International, at least 500 people in the United States have died since 2001 after being shocked with Tasers either during their arrest or while in jail.
Facebook spies on phone users' text messages, report says
Facebook admitted reading text messages belonging to smartphone users who downloaded the social-networking app and said that it was accessing the data as part of a trial to launch its own messaging service, The (London) Sunday Times reported.
Other well-known companies accessing smartphone users' personal data - such as text messages - include photo-sharing site Flickr, dating site Badoo and Yahoo Messenger, the paper said.
It claimed that some apps even allow companies to intercept phone calls - while others, such as YouTube, are capable of remotely accessing and operating users' smartphone cameras to take photographs or videos at any time.
Our food is under threat. It is felt by every family farmer who has lost their land and livelihood, every parent who can't find affordable or healthy ingredients in their neighborhood, every person worried about foodborne illnesses thanks to lobbyist-weakened food safety laws, every farmworker who faces toxic pesticides in the fields as part of a day's work.
When our food is at risk we are all at risk.
Over the last thirty years, we have witnessed a massive consolidation of our food system. Never have so few corporations been responsible for more of our food chain.
Normal grieving is ‘not depression’
the new DSM-5 suggests that depression could co-occur with grief. Critics see the changes as suggesting the DSM is trying to “medicalize” normal grieving. Anyone who experiences grief after a tragic or significant loss will now be at risk for receiving — heaven forbid — mental health treatment and a diagnosis.
Sex education: far from decent
In one presentation for Year 8 and 9 students, one middle-aged couple declared actor Scarlett Johansson was promiscuous (rather than, say, "responsible") for publicly declaring she had regular STI checks.
They argued condoms were ineffective and "flimsy", and showed an American video lecture that urged women never to get abortions, even in the case of rape. Afterwards, they invited students - kids between the ages of 12 and 14 - to sign virginity pledges.
A similar organisation told young women the contraceptive pill was tantamount to abortion, that condoms were immoral before marriage (and blocked a husband's "essence" during marriage) and that homosexuality was exclusively caused by sexual abuse at a young age. These aren't fringe organisations.
They're well-funded by churches and donors, and regularly invited speak at both private and public schools in the regions and capitals.
Consumers warned over tap-and-pay technology
Banks, financial institutions and now internet service providers are tapping into the market for contact-free payment systems. It is a time-saving temptation for busy people, but tech experts say consumers must be aware of the risks when opting for the technology.
Contactless credit cards and mobile phone chips connect to payment terminals via a short range radio frequency identification (RFID). Unlike traditional payment methods, they do not require a signature or PIN to verify the card holder's identity.
Rob Livingstone from the University of Technology says it is a win-win for banks and retailers because cash is expensive. "There's a number of benefits, some of which relate to increased customer service, a lower per-transaction cost and more importantly the potential elimination of cash," he said.
Repeal the farce of "Corporate Personhood"
A Kafkaesque fiction put forth by the power establishment is that corporations are "persons'. This is an absurd perversion of nature itself. A person, after all, has a navel. Where's the corporate navel – or its heart, brain, or soul?
Also, if a corporation is a person, shouldn't it be subject to front-line military duty, to jail for its criminal violations, and even to the death penalty?
