HEARTS AND MINDS

Marine Sergeant Frank Wuterich, 27, faces 17 counts of murder over the Haditha killings - the most serious war crimes allegations faced by US troops in Iraq.

Marine 'ordered to execute women and children'

A US marine was ordered to execute a room full of terrified Iraqi women and children during an alleged massacre in Haditha, Iraq that left 24 people dead, a military court has been told.

The testimony came in the opening of a preliminary hearing for Marine Sergeant Frank Wuterich, who faces 17 counts of murder over the Haditha killings, the most serious war crimes allegations faced by US troops in Iraq.

Lance Corporal Humberto Mendoza:

"When I opened the door there was just women and kids, two adults were lying down on the bed and there were three children on the bed ... two more were behind the bed," Mendoza said.

"I looked at them for a few seconds. Just enough to know they were not presenting a threat ... they looked scared."

After leaving the room Mendoza told Tatum what he had found.

"I told him there were women and kids inside there. He said 'Well, shoot them,'" Mendoza told prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Sean Sullivan.

"And what did you say to him?" Sullivan asked.

"I said 'But they're just women and children.' He didn't say nothing."

Mendoza said he returned to a position at the front of the house and heard a door open behind him followed by a loud noise. Returning later that afternoon to retrieve bodies, he said he found a room full of corpses.

Prosecutors allege marines went on a killing spree in Haditha in retaliation for the death of their colleague in the bomb attack.

Defence lawyers will argue that Wuterich followed established combat zone rules of engagement.

A total of eight marines were initially charged in connection with the Haditha deaths. Four were charged with murder while four senior officers were accused of failing to properly investigate the killings. Of the four marines charged with murder, two have since had charges withdrawn, while allegations against Tatum are also expected to be dismissed.

DEMOCRACY DYING

High Court overturns prisoner vote ban

Prisoners will be able to vote at the upcoming federal election after the High Court overturned the Federal Government's ban today.
Prisoner Vickie Lee Roach successfully challenged amendments passed last year by the Federal Government to prevent prisoners voting.
In a majority decision, the High Court agreed to overturn the ban.
But the court has reaffirmed earlier laws that stipulate that prisoners serving a sentence of three years or more cannot vote.

[The Commonwealth Electoral Act was changed last year to make an amendment to disqualify all prisoners. However Sections 7 and 24 of the Constitution say that the only rational and legitimate basis under which voting rights can be limited is by virtue of a person's mental capacity.
Section 41 of the Constitution, what the lawyers are using as one of the arguments in this case is that no adult person who has or acquires a right to vote shall, while the right continues, be prevented by any law of the Commonwealth from voting at election for either House, etc. In that Section 41 there are also three words: 'while the right continues'.]

The Law Report (June 12, 2007

Anita Barraud: What about the argument that if you're not fit to walk the streets, you're not a proper person to cast a vote.

Phil Lynch, Human Rights Law Resource Centre, Melbourne: That's an argument which is completely contrary to recognised principles of human rights law, and it's also an argument that's completely contrary to recognised principles of commonsense.

Anita Barraud: But this was the rationale for last year's legislation which denies prisoners the vote.

Phil Lynch: That is the rationale, and we say that it's an illegitimate and irrational rationale. The reason we say that, among others, is that at international law it's well recognised that prisoners shouldn't be deprived of any of their rights or freedoms other than those which are a necessary incident of the deprivation of liberty itself. And that basic principle of human rights comes from commonsense. The overwhelming majority of prisoners are not serving life sentences, they will be released into the community and it is absolutely critical, therefore, that if they're going to be released, that our policies and practices in prison, and our policies and practices pertaining to prisoners, promote rehabilitation, reintegration, and a sense of social responsibility.

Professor Kim Rubenstein from the ANU College of Law, is also director of the Centre for International and Public Law says that if the court determines that it's within the Commonwealth's power to limit who the people of the Commonwealth are, and in this circumstance limit it in the way that prisoners are not the people of the Commonwealth for the purposes of voting in our Australian elections, then what does that say about the capacity of the Commonwealth to really limit people's rights in Australia and in fact what we think of as their citizenship rights. So voting is one of the rights that we think of as citizenship; another is the right to live here in Australia and to travel in and out of Australia freely as Australian citizens.

STATE ASBO

APEC antisocial behaviour

According to the NSW Meals on Wheels Association, no client should go without.
Because the NSW government has declared APEC Friday a public holiday in 25 local government areas around central Sydney, no meals on wheels workers will be working.
The association cited the necessity of paying workers double time as the reason.
Extra meals will be provided on Thursday to cover Friday according to a Meals on Wheels spokesperson.

Also, according to Crikey.com.au:
The alert citizens of Sydney got a little bit alarmed last night. At 11.30pm a truck with massive loudspeakers was driving around the CBD, stopping at intervals to announce, very loudly, that this was "a public safety announcement to test the city's response system in the event of a natural disaster' (or something along those lines). Sound preparation, security overkill or public scare campaign?

 * I was told today by somebody that works there that Sydney's homeless (at least those who seek shelter in the CBD) will be rounded up and housed at Long Bay Jail for the duration of the APEC soiree.

 * Perhaps Pru Goward might like to ask the Minister of Police in NSW whether it is true that the 225 graduates from the Goulburn Police Academy as of August 28th, 2007, will be deployed in the Sydney CBD during APEC as one of the new graduates has been instructed? If so, does the Minister and/or Goward think that inexperienced officers might a) endanger their fellow officers, b) the visiting worthies, c) members of the public, particularly those peacefully protesting in an atmosphere of government and media generated hysteria, or d) themselves.

ABC Radio recently had a vox pop on the installation of loudspeakers around Sydney. No one knew what they were for. Some guessed APEC.

CLOAK AND DAGGER

FLASHBACK: Lockerbie's dirty secret

More people died at Lockerbie than in Madrid, and you would have thought that the government, if only as proof of its horror at terrorism, would be keen to question its new friends in Tripoli about the bombing. Not so, apparently. So the only hard information the families have is that Abdul Basset al-Megrahi, a Libyan official, apparently working in intelligence, was convicted in January 2001 of bombing the airliner. How he accomplished this feat is still a mystery. The details of the crime did not emerge at the trial, which was held by Scottish judges sitting without a jury in Holland. It lasted 18 months and cost an estimated £50m.

Megrahi's co-accused was acquitted, so the prosecution's suggestion that the two men conspired to bomb the plane cannot be right. Indeed, the crucial evidence that the bomb was put on a feeder flight at Malta and was transferred twice, at Frankfurt and at Heathrow, was so thin it was derisory.

No one knows whether anyone else took part in this sophisticated crime of terror. One man has been convicted. The Libyan government has forked out many millions in compensation. And that, apparently, is the end of the matter. Many of the bereaved relatives, including Dix, are increasingly disturbed at the behaviour of ministers who talk business and politics to the Gadafy regime, but are not remotely interested in pressing anyone in it to tell the whole story about Lockerbie.

There is, in my opinion (not necessarily shared by the families), an explanation for all this, an explanation so shocking that no one in high places can contemplate it. It is that the Lockerbie bombing was carried out not by Libyans at all but by terrorists based in Syria and hired by Iran to avenge the shooting down in the summer of 1988 of an Iranian civil airliner by a US warship. This was the line followed by both British and US police and intelligence investigators after Lockerbie. Through favoured newspapers like the Sunday Times, the investigators named the suspects - some of whom had been found with home-made bombs similar to the one used at Lockerbie.

This line of inquiry persisted until April 1989, when a phone call from President Bush senior to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned her not to proceed with it. A year later, British and US armed forces prepared for an attack on Saddam Hussein's occupying forces in Kuwait. Their coalition desperately needed troops from an Arab country. These were supplied by Syria, which promptly dropped out of the frame of Lockerbie suspects. Libya, not Syria or Iran, mysteriously became the suspect country, and in 1991 the US drew up an indictment against two Libyan suspects. The indictment was based on the "evidence" of a Libyan "defector", handsomely paid by the CIA. His story was such a fantastic farrago of lies and fantasies that it was thrown out by the Scottish judges.

In Britain, meanwhile, Thatcher, John Major and Blair obstinately turned down the bereaved families' requests for a full public inquiry into the worst mass murder in British history.

PORNUCOPIA

Why internet safety policy is cracked

A 16-year-old disables and bypasses the Australian Government's much vaunted pornography filter within 30 minutes.

Tom Wood, unlike some of his peers, did not post the instructions on the internet for others to follow but has used his knowledge and skill to ask some rather pertinent questions of the Government: Why did they spend $84 million on a solution which was ineffectual and - more importantly - where is the current Australian research data that recommends this solution?

OUR COSMOS

Great 'cosmic nothingness' found

Astronomers have found an enormous void in space that measures nearly a billion light-years across.It is empty of both normal matter - such as galaxies and stars - and the mysterious "dark matter" that cannot be seen directly with telescopes.
The "hole" is located in the direction of the Eridanus constellation and has been identified in data from a survey of the sky made at radio wavelengths.

THOUGHT CRIMES

Concern over SA's ASBO plans
Welfare groups say a South Australian State Government plan to introduce a controversial British law to curb anti-social behaviour is an over reaction.
The State Government wants to introduce Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), which restrict where people can travel and who they associate with.Attorney-General Michael Atkinson says crime often follows anti-social behaviour.
"The crime may be hard to prove. The precursor is easy to prove because it's in everyone's face," he said.

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Howard pressured over children overboard knowledge

Mike Scrafton was the defence liaison officer in Peter Reith's office, and was well aware that the claims made by his boss and the Prime Minister were hotly disputed at Defence headquarters.
Prevented from giving his side of the story to the Senate inquiry, Mr Scrafton has now spoken out, claiming he personally told John Howard that there was no evidence to back the story.
But, as he has done for almost three years, Mr Howard denies anyone ever told him of such doubts before the 2001 election.

Rudd strip club visit sparks rash of confessions | NEWS.com.au

Rudd strip club visit sparks rash of confessions

Australian Greens leader Bob Brown said the Rudd strip-club revelations should be kept in perspective.
"Four years ago Kevin Rudd got drunk and took himself into a strip club," Senator Brown said.
"Four years ago John Howard, sober, took Australia into the Iraq war.
"I think the electorate can judge which one did the more harm," he said.

POLICE STATE

Terrorism suspects Adham Amin Hassoun, second left, Jose Padilla, second right, and Kifah Wael Jayyousi listen as attorney Michael Caruso, left, presents his closing arguments in this Aug. 16, 2007 courtroom drawing in

A travesty of justice: Jose Padilla found guilty

Jose Padilla, a 36-year-old American citizen from Chicago, faces a possible life sentence.

The verdict is a travesty of justice and a testament to the growth of police state measures and the advanced state of decay of democratic rights in the United States.

Padilla was convicted along with two co-defendants -- Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi -- on two counts of material support for terrorism and one count of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas. The verdict was reached after only a day and a half of deliberations.

Padilla was arrested in May 2002 in Chicago’s O’Hare International airport. The government first held Padilla as a “material witness” to the September 11 attacks, but in June of that year, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft held a press conference to announce that Padilla had plotted to explode a radioactive “dirty bomb” somewhere in the United States. He was declared an “enemy combatant” and shifted to a military brig in South Carolina, where he was held in an isolation cell without being charged and without access to a lawyer for three-and-a-half years.

It quickly became clear that the allegations against Padilla were not only sensationalized, but of highly dubious substance. While Padilla evidently had some ties to Islamic fundamentalists, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged at the time that there was “not an actual plan” to carry out a dirty bomb attack.

The portrayal of Padilla as a major terrorist threat who was, in the words of Ashcroft, prepared to inflict “mass death and injury,” served two essential purposes. It came at a convenient time for the Bush administration -- amidst revelations that US intelligence agencies and Bush himself had ignored or suppressed warnings of the September 11 terrorist attacks -- and enabled the administration to divert attention from the many unanswered questions about its failure to avert the attacks, while promoting the Padilla case as a victory in the “war on terror.”

More fundamentally, the Bush administration wanted to use Padilla to assert its claim that the president could order the indefinite military detention of a US citizen, detained on US soil. On the grounds that he was an “enemy combatant,” Padilla was denied communication with the outside world, stripped of his habeas corpus rights, and subjected to systematic physical and psychological torture.

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CLOAK AND DAGGER

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case.

METEOROLOGICA

These strange sky circles of unknown origin were spotted on 28th of July in Murmansk city. The author of the shots says that they appeared suddenly, without any sound of flying jet and there are even no any air bases in this area.

See also Red Dots on Moscow Skies
(more…)

PANTS ON FIRE

Costello speaks: an ethics lesson from a liar

A low key Peter Costello fronted a doorstop outside the Ministerial Entrance at 8:40 this morning with a very important message: you can’t trust journalists. (Click here to listen to the audio.)
Those of us in the handful of hacks who were around at that time – and there were some senior people there, like Michelle Grattan, Paul Bongiorno, Fran Kelly and David Speers – got an ethics lessons from a liar.
Twice yesterday – in the morning, on Channel 9, and later in the day on Sky – the Treasurer was asked if he’d said of the Prime Minister and the government: "He can't win; I can. We can, but he can't."
Twice he denied it – but he was in trouble once he’d done it on Sky, because the interviewer countered with: "Because one of those who was there present has told me today there's no question you did and there were others present."
At the doorstop today he denied a charge that has not been made – "I have never urged supporters of mine to carp against the prime minister nor have I ever urged supporters of mine to do anything which would undermine the Liberal Party" – and then tried to turn the matter into an ethical issue.

DARK FUTURE

Milky way will become an island galaxy

"So dark energy is even more mysterious than dark matter, because dark energy is something that's completely uniform, fills up the universe and, unlike gravity, it seems to repel matter and it's intrinsically repulsive in the sense that it causes the universe not to come together, but to accelerate," he said.

"We've found the universe seems to be accelerating, and this acceleration is due to a sort of anti-gravity, in effect, which we call dark energy."

But he says scientist do not know if the acceleration will come to an end.

"One hypothesis is that the expansion, the acceleration will continue forever and the universe will never be able to re-collapse, it'll just... all galaxies will move farther and farther apart," he said.

"Right now we can see many billions of galaxies when we look around the sky with the biggest telescopes. As the universe accelerates they will drift away from us, they'll become invisible.

"Some day there'll be only our own galaxy and nothing else and after that, very little at all in the visible universe."

Professor Joe Silk, Oxford University

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Too much haste to nuclear waste

Halliburton, Dick Cheney's former company, constructed the railway line between Adelaide and Darwin, now managed by Serco Asia Pacific, a leader in the management and transport of Britain's nuclear waste.
It runs adjacent to both the SA Olympic Dam uranium mine and to Muckaty Station at Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory - the preferred site chosen by the Federal Government to store radioactive waste from Lucas Heights.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard is mooting domestic uranium enrichment, construction of 25 nuclear reactors on the East Coast, storage of foreign radioactive waste in Australia and reprocessing spent radioactive nuclear fuel in a "closed nuclear fuel cycle".
Even the 'alternative government', the Labor Party, has joined the Coalition's open-slather uranium mine policy

[Has our nuclear future already been decided? All that is left to do is to spring the plan on 'we the people'.]

GOD SQUAD

Baseball games get evangelical

Christian groups are holding evangelical extravaganzas after sporting events, and they want to bring the practice to Australia.
Baseball teams use all sort of promotions to lure fans to game. There are bald nights, when men without hair get in for free.
But the major league team in Washington, the Nationals, is using a different and more controversial strategy - a Faith Night.
After a Nationals baseball game, 3,000 people pay $US10 extra to stay behind for an evangelical extravaganza.

Carl Jung recalls his boyhood:

Church gradually became a place of torment to me. For there men dared to preach aloud - I am tempted to say, shamelessly - about God, about his intentions and actions. There people were exhorted to have those feelings, and to believe that secret which I knew to be the deepest, innermost certainty, a certainty not to be betrayed by a single word. I could only conclude that apparently no-one knew about this secret, not even the parson, for otherwise, no-one could have dared to expose the mystery of God in public and to profane those inexpressible feelings with stale sentimentalities.
Moreover, I was certain that this was the wrong way to reach God, for I knew, knew from experience, that this grace was only accorded to one who fulfilled the will of God without reservation. This was preached from the pulpit, too, but always on the assumption that revelation made the will of God plain. To me, on the other hand, it seemed the most obscure and unknown thing of all. To me it seemed that one's duty was to explore daily the will of God. I did not do that, but I felt sure that I would do it as soon as an urgent reason for doing so presented itself. ['Memories, dreams reflections']

GO BANANAS

A future with no bananas?

The world's most popular fruit and the fourth most important food crop of any sort is in deep trouble. Its genetic base, the wild bananas and traditional varieties cultivated in India, has collapsed.

Virtually all bananas traded internationally are of a single variety, the Cavendish, the genetic roots of which lie in India. The world Cavendish crop is threatened by pandemics of diseases such as that caused by the black sigatoka fungus. The main hope for survival of the Cavendish lies in developing new hybrids resistant to the fungus, but this is a difficult and time-consuming task because the seedless modern fruit does not reproduce sexually and has to be bred from cuttings.

Now the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned that wild banana species are rapidly going extinct as Indian forests are destroyed, while many traditional farmers' varieties are also disappearing. It could take a global effort to save the bananas' gene pool.

GO BANANAS

A future with no bananas?

The world's most popular fruit and the fourth most important food crop of any sort is in deep trouble. Its genetic base, the wild bananas and traditional varieties cultivated in India, has collapsed.

Virtually all bananas traded internationally are of a single variety, the Cavendish, the genetic roots of which lie in India. The world Cavendish crop is threatened by pandemics of diseases such as that caused by the black sigatoka fungus. The main hope for survival of the Cavendish lies in developing new hybrids resistant to the fungus, but this is a difficult and time-consuming task because the seedless modern fruit does not reproduce sexually and has to be bred from cuttings.

Now the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned that wild banana species are rapidly going extinct as Indian forests are destroyed, while many traditional farmers' varieties are also disappearing. It could take a global effort to save the bananas' gene pool.

RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW

Animal battle video becomes hit

An eight-minute-long amateur video - filmed in South Africa's Kruger National Park - shows how a big buffalo from a herd gores a lion and tosses it in the air to save a calf.
The buffalo calf is then seen running away to rejoin the herd, while the lion pack is forced to retreat.
The footage first shows several lions attacking a group of buffalo, snatching a calf.As the lions wrestle with a calf by a watering hole, a crocodile joins in the battle, pouncing on the buffalo. The lions win the tug-of-war, but then the buffalo herd returns, chasing away the lions and freeing the calf.
Video

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Ministers accused of 'driving' Haneef case

Civil libertarians say any inquiry into the bungled prosecution of Dr Mohamed Haneef should focus squarely on the actions of Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock and Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews.

The terrorism-related charge against the 27-year-old Indian was dropped yesterday after prosecutors abandoned their case amid revelations of mistakes in the case against him.

The outrages concerning this case include:

1. Accusations by the prosecuting lawyer that the mobile phone SIM card which Dr Haneef was alleged to have given to his second cousin in Britain was found in the burning
Jeep rammed into Glasgow airport.

[The SIM card, given to his cousin a year ago, was discovered not in Glasgow but in Liverpool.]

2. Police claimed he offered no explanation of why he tried to leave Brisbane on a one-way ticket to India.

[A transcript of his first police interview, leaked to the press by his defence team, showed he did: he wanted to see his wife, who had just given birth to their child.]

3. When the magistrate at that hearing in Brisbane, Jacqui

Payne, decided to grant the doctor conditional bail,
the government controversially intervened. Kevin Andrews, the immigration minister, decided to cancel his visa and keep him detained under immigration laws.

4. Following a story in the Queensland press Police at first refused to confirm or deny whether its officers found photographs of a prominent Gold Coast building and documents relating to the destroying of structures while searching Haneef's unit.

5. Police officers wrote the names of terrorism suspects in
Haneef's personal diary after he was taken in for questioning in
Brisbane. The paper says police then asked Haneef if he had written the names, before admitting their mistake.

APE ASCENDANCY

Fossil find casts doubt on origins of man

Research published in the journal Nature today has thrown up a serious challenge to the widely accepted view on human evolution.

An international team of researchers, including a geologist from the Australian National University (ANU), has found that two different species of early man lived side by side in the same place for almost half a million years.

Susan Anton, an associate professor of anthropology at New York University and co-author of the research, said "the co-existence of the two species suggests that they were more like sister species, as opposed to homo habilus being the mother to homo erectus".

ANU geologist Ian MacDougall was part of the research team that travelled to the Koobi Fora Formation in Kenya.

"It really does throw into doubt a whole series of assumptions that have previously been made on the basis of the fossils," he said.

DEMOCRACY DYING

If you live in Australia, you may have seen Diebold ATM machines around the place. After a transaction you get a receipt on request.
Diebold's electronic voting machines do not give receipts and the machines connect to a central server. With no paper trail and no ability to presume the machines can be imune from hacker or government interference. At a meeting with George W Bush fans the president of Diebold is reported to have said he would give Mr Bush the presidency.

Freepress (2004) Sworn testimony from election observers in Lucas County and Hocking County revealed that technicians from the Diebold and Triad companies had inexplicably taken control of voting machines and dismantled them, rendering verifiable recounts impossible.

Miami Herald:
Florida Voting Machines Can Be Hacked
The study by Florida State University found that, despite recent software fixes, an "adversary" could use a pre-programmed computer card to swap one candidate's votes for another or create a "ballot-stuffing attack" that multiplies votes for a candidate or issue.


Electronic voting machines like this one leave no paper trail and have a handy infra-red port to their internal processor.

Pencil and paper voting still the safest

Diebold AccuVote TS electronic voting machines have an infrared (IrDA) port installed. This is a remote communication port through which another remote device could communicate with the touch screen and change either its data or its software or both.


Open your eyes, this is the thin edge of the wedge?

Blind and vision impaired voters in Adelaide will have the chance to trial electronically assisted voting machines when they go to the polls at this year's Federal Election. The Australian Electoral Commission will trial the machines in 29 locations around the country, including in the SA seats of Sturt, Kingston and Adelaide. The system aims to help vision impaired people cast a secret ballot, without help from friends, family or official

HISTORY ...


News site mysteriously shut down after Diebold-US election criticism

California to sue Diebold over false claims
Installation of touch-screen voting systems that were not tested or approved nationally or in California.

EARTH CHANGES

© abk.

SERIOUS LEVITY

Experts float levitation theory

"The Casimir force is the ultimate cause of friction in the nano world, in particular in some microelectromechanical systems," explained St Andrews University physicists Professor Ulf Leonhardt.
"Such systems already play an important role - for example tiny mechanical devices which trigger a car airbag to inflate or those which power tiny devices used for drugs testing or chemical analysis.
"Micro or nano machines could run smoother and with less or no friction at all if one can manipulate the force."
Prof Leonhardt added: "In order to reduce friction in the nano world, turning nature's stickiness into repulsion could be the ultimate remedy.
"Instead of sticking together, parts of micro machinery would levitate."

[The research is due to be published in the New Journal of Physics.]

WEIRD SCIENCE

The memory of water a reality?

Scientists are discussing recent scientific work exploring the idea that water can display memory effects.
The concept of memory of water is important to homeopathy because it offers a potential explanation of the mechanism of action of very high dilutions often used in homeopathy.

Guest editor Professor Martin Chaplin of the Department of Applied Science at London South Bank University, remarks: “There is strong evidence concerning many ways in which the mechanism of this ‘memory’ may come about. There are also mechanisms by which such solutions may possess effects on biological systems which substantially differ from plain water.”

The concept of the memory of water goes back to 1988 when the late Professor Jacques Benveniste published, in the international scientific journal Nature, claims that extremely high ‘ultramolecular’ dilutions of an antibody had effects in the human basophil degranulation test, a laboratory model of immune response. In other words, the water diluent ‘remembered’ the antibody long after it was gone. His findings were subsequently denounced as ‘pseudoscience’ and yet, despite the negative impact this had at the time, the idea has not gone away.
In a special issue of Homeopathy, scientists from the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, USA and the UK present remarkably convergent views from groups using entirely different methods, indicating that large-scale structural effects can occur in liquid water, and can increase with time. Such effects might account for claims of memory of water effects.

[Water memory is a concept, basic to homeopathy, which holds that water is capable of retaining a "memory" of particles once dissolved in it. This memory allows water to retain the properties of the original solute even when there is literally no solute left in the solution. No proof exists to support this theory.]

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Bad bosses get promoted, not punished: study

One way people get ahead in the workplace seems to be by making their subordinates miserable, according to a new Australian study.
The study found almost two-thirds of 240 participants in an online survey said the local workplace tyrant was either never censured or was promoted for domineering ways.
The study's authors, Anthony Don Erickson, Ben Shaw and Zha Agabe from Bond University on the Gold Coast, said "the fact that 64.2% of the respondents indicated that either nothing at all or something positive happened to the bad leader is rather remarkable - remarkably disturbing".
They faulted senior managers for not recognising the signs of workplace strife wrought by bad bosses.
"The leaders above them who did nothing, who rewarded and promoted bad leaders... represent an additional problem," they wrote.

[How do they think the leaders above them got there?]

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SWEET SIXTEEN

Atefeh Rajabi

Girl, 16, hanged in public in Iran

Ateqeh Sahaleh was hanged in public on Simetry Street off Rah Ahan Street at the city center.
The sentence was issued by the head of Neka’s Justice Department and subsequently upheld by the mullahs’ Supreme Court and carried out with the approval of Judiciary Chief Mahmoud Shahroudi.
In her summary trial, the teenage victim did not have any lawyer and efforts by her family to recruit a lawyer was to no avail.
Ateqeh personally defended herself. She told the religious judge, Haji Rezaii, that he should punish the main perpetrators of moral corruption not the victims.
The judge personally pursued Ateqeh’s death sentence, beyond all normal procedures and finally gained the approval of the Supreme Court. After her execution Rezai said her punishment was not execution but he had her executed for her “sharp tongue”.




Violence, poverty and abuse led girl, 16, to gallows

The orphaned 16-year-old girl hanged in front of residents in this town close to the Caspian Sea suffered years of brutal violence, exploitation and torture in the hands of relatives, local officials and plain strangers, and in a country where girls are the most vulnerable members of society, she had no one to go to for help.
The hanging of Atefeh Rajabi has shocked the residents of Neka, who still differ widely in their assessment of the girl, but none voices support for the punishment that she has received.