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.
