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Thu, 05 Dec 2013 01:25

While Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year choices often appear to be intentionally buzzy '-- be it "podcast," the verb "GIF," or this year's selection of "selfie" '-- Merriam-Webster has turned to statistics to determine its Word of the Year, removing an editorial hand from the selection. That process makes 2013's Word of the Year a fairly fitting winner: science. The selection was based on the word with the greatest increase in lookups over the past year. "Science" may seem like an odd candidate, but Webster's editor-at-large, Peter Sokolowski, suggests in a statement that it was relevant to this year's news, "A wide variety of discussions centered on science this year, from climate change to educational policy."

"Science" saw a dramatic 176 percent increase in lookups this year. Webster also revealed the nine words that followed it, in order: cognitive,rapport,communication,niche,ethic,paradox,visceral,integrity, andmetaphor. It's an eclectic list to be certain, but Webster tries to explain how a few of them got there, tying "communication" and "rapport" to the NSA leaks, "cognitive" to NFL concussion issues, and "niche" to people just being confused about how to pronounce it. Basing the Word of the Year in actual stats certainly makes it more interesting, but it's worth noting that science's win isn't completely untouched by Webster's editors '-- Webster has been basing its Word of the Year on statistics for several years now, but what stat it's based on has changed more than a few times.

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Source: White House.gov Press Office Feed

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 15:12

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

December 02, 2013

INTERNATIONAL DAY OF PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES, 2013

- - - - - - -

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

Nearly a quarter century has gone by since our Nation passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a landmark civil rights bill that enshrined the principles of inclusion, access, and equal opportunity into law. The ADA was born out of a movement sparked by those who understood their disabilities should not be an obstacle to success and took up the mission of tearing down physical and social barriers that stood in their way. On this International Day of Persons with Disabilities, we celebrate the enormous progress made at home and abroad and we strengthen our resolve to realize a world free of prejudice.

Every child deserves a decent education, every adult deserves equal access to the workplace, and every nation that allows injustice to stand denies itself the full talents and contributions of individuals with disabilities. I was proud that under my Administration the United States signed the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, an international convention based on the principles of the ADA, and I urge the Senate to provide its advice and consent to ratification. By joining the 138 parties to this convention, the United States would carry forward its legacy of global leadership on disability rights, enhance our ability to bring other countries up to our own high standards of access and inclusion, and expand opportunities for Americans with disabilities -- including our 5.5 million disabled veterans -- to work, study, and travel abroad.

My Administration remains committed to leading by example. This year, as we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Rehabilitation Act, we updated rules to improve hiring of veterans and people with disabilities, especially among Federal contractors and subcontractors. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, insurers can no longer put lifetime dollar limits on essential health benefits for Americans with disabilities. And in January, it will be illegal to deny coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

The changes achieved in the last two decades speak to what people can accomplish when they refuse to accept the world as it is. Today let us once again reach for the world that should be -- one where all people, regardless of country or disability, enjoy equal access, equal opportunity, and the freedom to realize their limitless potential.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim December 3, 2013, as International Day of Persons with Disabilities. I call on all Americans to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this second day of December, in the year of our Lord two thousand thirteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-eighth.

BARACK OBAMA

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Tue, 03 Dec 2013 17:39

Woman robbed, kidnapped after Black Friday shopping at SC Wal MartWoman robbed, kidnapped after Black Friday shopping at SC Wal MartUpdated:Monday, December 2 2013 2:20 PM EST2013-12-02 19:20:09 GMT

SUMMERVILLE, SC - Shortly before 10 PM Friday, North Charleston Police responded to a Walmart parking lot at 9880 Dorchester Rd. According to police, the victim stated that she was getting inside her

SUMMERVILLE, SC - Shortly before 10 PM Friday, North Charleston Police responded to a Walmart parking lot at 9880 Dorchester Rd. According to police, the victim stated that she was getting inside her

Elf On The Shelf: Show Us Your Elf's Hiding Place Each DayElf On The Shelf: Show Us Your Elf's Hiding Place Each DayEvery December, more and more families are participating in Elf on the Shelf, a hide-and-seek game where kids wake up each morning and the elf is in a different spot.

Every December, more and more families are participating in Elf on the Shelf, a hide-and-seek game where kids wake up each morning and the elf is in a different spot.

Spartanburg Co. Man Charged After Mac & Cheese Fight With DadSpartanburg Co. Man Charged After Mac & Cheese Fight With DadUpdated:Monday, December 2 2013 12:20 PM EST2013-12-02 17:20:39 GMT

Spartanburg County Deputies say a fight over macaroni and cheese landed a man in jail, charged with assault.

Spartanburg County Deputies say a fight over macaroni and cheese landed a man in jail, charged with assault.

North Carolina Man Crashes Car Into Ice Skating RinkNorth Carolina Man Crashes Car Into Ice Skating RinkUpdated:Monday, December 2 2013 8:53 PM EST2013-12-03 01:53:55 GMT

Police have arrested a North Carolina man following a chase that ended when he crashed his car into a skating rink Sunday evening. Benjamin Tanner Watts is charged with fleeing to elude arrest with a motor vehicle, driving while impaired, reckless driving, resisting a public officer and injury to real property.

Police have arrested a North Carolina man following a chase that ended when he crashed his car into a skating rink Sunday evening. Benjamin Tanner Watts is charged with fleeing to elude arrest with a motor vehicle, driving while impaired, reckless driving, resisting a public officer and injury to real property.

Amazon Packages Could Be Delivered By Drones In The UpstateAmazon Packages Could Be Delivered By Drones In The UpstateUpdated:Monday, December 2 2013 5:22 PM EST2013-12-02 22:22:21 GMT

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced on Sunday that his company is testing an idea to deliver packages using a drone, an option that could be available to consumers in the Upstate.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced on Sunday that his company is testing an idea to deliver packages using a drone, an option that could be available to consumers in the Upstate.

Seneca Teen Dies After Chase, Crash On Highway 24Seneca Teen Dies After Chase, Crash On Highway 24Updated:Saturday, November 30 2013 4:13 PM EST2013-11-30 21:13:56 GMT

Jesse Logan Hannah, 14, was pronounced dead a little over an hour after the accident on Highway 24 early Friday morning. Troopers say he was driving a car that didn't stop for a police officer. Two other teenagers were injured in the crash.

Jesse Logan Hannah, 14, was pronounced dead a little over an hour after the accident on Highway 24 early Friday morning. Troopers say he was driving a car that didn't stop for a police officer. Two other teenagers were injured in the crash.

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 18:06

A Nova Scotia MLA is in hot water after posing with a man wearing blackface makeup and posting the image to Twitter.

Joachim Stroink, a Liberal who represents Halifax Chebucto, participated in a Dutch Christmas event in Halifax on Sunday featuring "Sinterklass" and "Zwarte Piet" '-- or Black Pete '-- who is described in the Netherlands as Santa's helper or servant.

Stroink got emotional at a news conference on Monday as he discussed the photo showing him sitting on the lap of the Black Pete character.

"I do acknowledge that that whole blackface culture, there is no place for that in Nova Scotia, nor in our (Dutch) culture as well,'' he said.

"There was no malicious intent whatsoever. This is a Dutch tradition that I grew up with and never ever in my deepest heart, ever thought that this would be portrayed in this manner."

Stroink fought back tears as he discussed how difficult it has been to deal with the reaction to the photo and why he got into politics.

"It's been incredibly hard," he said. "I didn't sign up for this. I did this because I wanted to better Nova Scotia."

Stroink deleted the photo Sunday, but not before many Twitter users expressed outrage.

Stroink, who was first elected in October, retweeted a post from a friend defending the MLA against charges of racism.

Stroink also addressed the controversy in a message posted to his Facebook page Monday morning, saying he did not mean to offend anyone by celebrating an aspect of his culture.

Christmas in my culture is a tradition focused on Sinterklaas and Zwarte Pete has always been his side kick, much like Santa's elves. While the history of Zwarte Pete and the blackface have contributed to perpetuating negative stereotypes, to ignore or to disavow Zwarte Pete would be to ignore that history within the Dutch community. In recent years issues have been raised in some communities, but to my knowledge never in Halifax or NS, with this cultural celebration.

As a child growing up and celebrating the Sinterklaas and Zwarte Pete tradition, the blackface did not lead me to think less of my African NS neighbours and friends, and as such I was not sensitive to the potential to offend through my participation, with my family, at Sunday's 2013 Sinterklaas event held in Halifax.

While it is certainly uncomfortable to be in the lime light for what was intended to be a fun community event for the family kicking off the Christmas season, the resulting conversation, highlighting the underlying issues with black face and how it has played a role in suppressing people of African heritage, is a worthy and necessary one. It is important we embrace discussions like this as a broader community.

The Black Pete tradition has stirred heated debate in the Netherlands for years and recently drew criticism from the U.N. Human Rights Commissioner.

Some believe the custom dates back to the 17th century, when wealthy Amsterdam families would often keep a black house slave.

But while the custom has brought forth charges of racism, a poll from October showed 91 percent of Dutch people believe the tradition should not be changed.

With files from The Canadian Press

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 03:56

An emotional Joachim Stroink fought back tears Monday afternoon as he apologized for a photo he posted of himself posing with the controversial blackface Dutch character Zwarte Piet.

"I do acknowledge that the whole blackface culture, there is no place for that in Nova Scotia, nor in our culture. There was no malicious intent. This is a Dutch tradition I grew up with and never in my deepest heart thought that this would be portrayed in this manner," said the Halifax MLA.

"Looking back, I guess I can see how the blackface prospect is unacceptable in today's culture and society."

Joachim Stroink, far right, poses with Zwarte Piet at a Sinterklaas event in Halifax on Sunday night. (Twitter)

In the Netherlands, Zwarte Piet, or Black Pete, is Santa Claus's helper. Stroink tweeted a photo of himself with a person in blackface portraying Black Pete at an event Sunday.

Stroink swiftly deleted the photo, but it had already spread on social media.

"This wasn't an intentional attack on the black [culture] of Nova Scotia, it was celebrating a Dutch tradition. I completely offended an African culture. I get that and I apologize for that," he said.

He said the tradition "can't continue as it is."

'I didn't sign up for this'Stroink, who is a first-term Liberal member of the legislative assembly in Nova Scotia, said the backlash stunned him.

"It's been incredibly hard. I didn't sign up for this. I did this because I wanted a better Nova Scotia," he said about entering politics. "Finding the balance between an MLA and being Joachim Stroink, I feel that that's gone."

He met with Tony Ince, the minister for African Nova Scotian affairs, said he understands why the photo upset people. He hopes it can become an educational moment about bridging the two cultures, he added.

"I want to be able to celebrate this tradition and maybe Zwarte Piet is no longer part of this tradition. That's a discussion the Dutch community has to derive on their own, hopefully with the help of myself and Minister Ince."

Stroink had earlier posted an apology on Facebook.

Stroink stressed that Dutch culture has long emphasized a black elf-like character as part of its Sinterklaas celebrations.

'For many people at least in Amsterdam, it's not acceptable anymore. [Black Pete] is seen as a slave.'- Jessica Silversmith

"As a child growing up and celebrating the Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet tradition, the blackface did not lead me to think less of my African Nova Scotian neighbours and friends, and as such I was not sensitive to the potential to offend," he wrote.

A traditional song refers to the character as a "servant" to St. Nicholas, but in recent years, those references have largely been replaced with the notion that he is black from chimney soot as he delivers toys for children.

"While the history of Zwarte Piet and the blackface have contributed to perpetuating negative stereotypes, to ignore or to disavow Zwarte Piet would be to ignore that history within the Dutch community," Stroink wrote.

Nova Scotia New Democrat MP Peter Stoffer, who was born in the Netherlands, said the tweet was taken out of context.

"Zwarte Piet has been a Dutch tradition for many, many, many years," said Stoffer.

"If the tradition is to change then that would be up to the Dutch government and the Dutch people to do that in that regard. In 16½ years, no one has ever come to me either in writing, email, fax, personal visit or phone across the country to raise this issue with me."

Tradition 'not acceptable anymore'But Jessica Silversmith, director of the Anti-Discrimination Bureau for Amsterdam, said it's time for the Netherlands to move on from the tradition.

"For many people at least in Amsterdam it's not acceptable anymore," she said. "He's seen as a slave '... his role is also a problem."

Silversmith told CBC's Maritime Noon that her group heard 240 complaints about Zwarte Piet in 2012.

"It's so strange to see a Dutch immigrant living in Canada and he's introducing Black Pete while in his former home country we don't like Black Pete. It's remarkable," she said.

"Traditions are most of the time never innocent. You have to look behind the tradition."

Members of the Twitter community took the newly elected politician to task.

"I'm Dutch too. I love Sinterklaas, but we've got to let Zwaarte Piet go. Surely you can see how this could offend," tweeted Ben Diepeven.

"Traditions are also a great way to spread racist sentiment," wrote Matt Neville.

"You can't delete the photo from my hard drive," tweeted user @musekaltweet.

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Source: BBC News - Home

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 16:46

4 December 2013Last updated at 10:21 ET Authorities will later release emergency dispatch recordings of last year's school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which left 26 people dead.

The tapes reportedly contain nearly half an hour of 911 calls made from inside Sandy Hook Elementary School amid the attack on 14 December 2012.

Residents have been advised to prepare themselves emotionally for the release of the seven landline calls.

Attacker Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six adults at the primary school.

Gunfire is said to be audible in the background of the recordings being released on Wednesday afternoon.

'Emotional trigger'Newtown School Superintendent John Reed reportedly contacted parents on Tuesday to alert them to the impending distribution of the recordings, warning them the tapes could act as an "emotional trigger".

The emergency recordings are being made public just days after a state judge ruled the tapes should be unsealed.

State's Attorney Stephen Sedensky, the prosecutor overseeing the shooting investigation, and town officials had argued the tapes' release could hamper the inquiry and violate victims' rights.

But Mr Sedensky said he would not pursue the effort further following the court ruling.

The first call to emergency services came at 09:35 and the last shot, believed to be Lanza firing a handgun at himself, came at 09:40. Most of the deceased were killed in two classrooms.

A report into the investigation was released last week, in which police determined that Lanza, 20, acted alone.

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A mother of a victim of the Sandy Hook shooting pleads for new gun control laws in April

They have not determined a motive for the massacre, which began with Lanza killing his own mother.

The report stated: "He had a familiarity with and access to firearms and ammunition and an obsession with mass murders, in particular the April 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado."

The Newtown shooting prompted a renewed US campaign for stricter firearms controls.

While no legislation was passed at a national level, some states - including Connecticut and Colorado - imposed tougher gun laws; other states loosened such restrictions.

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Tue, 03 Dec 2013 11:54

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos runs one of the world's most notoriously secretive organizations. Yet last night he went on national TV and showed off a bunch of dazzling delivery drones that he says won't realistically arrive in the real world for another four or five years, which in realspeak means they're a decade or more away.

Why is this incredibly tight-lipped company suddenly showing off prototypes? The answer is that these drones were not designed to carry packages, but to give a lift to Amazon's image.

For one thing, today is Cyber Monday, the day when everyone goes shopping online. Amazon somehow got CBS and 60 Minutes to create a 14-minute free ad spot for Amazon on the eve of this huge shopping day.

Did Amazon control the timing of the story and insist that the piece must run on the night before Cyber Monday? Was this a condition of the deal in exchange for getting access to Bezos? I think you'd be naive to believe otherwise, but who knows? Maybe it was just a lucky coincidence.

But there's another factor at work here. Bezos and Amazon are still reeling from the recent publication of a not entirely flattering book by Businessweek reporter Brad Stone. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon portrays Bezos as a ruthless tyrant and a "penny-pinching ballbuster," as Gawker put it.

As soon as the book came out, Amazon swung into action trying to discredit Stone. Jeff Bezos's wife MacKenzie Bezos published a scathing negative review of the book (on Amazon, of course) in which she claims the work contains "numerous factual inaccuracies." Craig Berman, VP of Global Communications at Amazon, issued his own statement blasting the book and criticizing Stone for not making an effort to get his facts right.

This is a very big deal. Amazon PR typically doesn't say anything to anyone. They're the most tight-lipped bunch in the business, right up there with Apple. Suddenly they were all over the place.

Worse, the spin campaign didn't work. Stone's book became a best-seller, and even won the prestigious Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award.

Now, suddenly, for no apparent reason, this company that never tells anybody anything about any future products, ever, is showing off prototype drones that are years away. This is like Apple inviting Charlie Rose in to show off that 60-inch TV that it may or may not ever actually manufacture and sell to the public.

Why the change in policy?

This is about shifting the narrative. The first spin campaign didn't work, so now you do what PR people call "closing one door and opening another." You deflect and distract.

You line up Charlie Rose to do one of his famous softball-tossing puff pieces, and while he's there you trot out some amazingly impossibly cool new technology to dazzle the folks in the cheap seats.

You let Jeff Bezos appear on camera being all goofy and happy and looking like the world's friendliest little nerd, talking to Uncle Charlie about how much he and his band of happy elves at Amazon just love exploring and tinkering and innovating. Let Bezos do his weird laugh, which you can catch in the final minute of this video:

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Source: RT - News

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 09:04

Published time: December 02, 2013 02:17Pakistani supporters of the Defence of Pakistan coalition shout slogans and carry placards at an anti-US rally in Lahore on December 1, 2013 (AFP Photo / Arif Ali)

Thousands of people took to the streets in Pakistan's eastern city of Lahore to protest against ongoing US drone strikes, amid a rise in local protests against US tactics.

Around 5,000 demonstrators called on the US to immediately stop the drone assaults on the country. The event was organized by the Defence of Pakistan Council, which is comprised of 40 religious and political groups, AFP reported.

Protesters chanted slogans to block NATO supplies being transported to Afghanistan through Pakistan.

Recently, local residents have become more vocal against the US tactics, organizing increasing numbers of rallies. Just over one week ago, thousands of demonstrators protesting US drone strikes in Pakistan blocked a main road in the northern Peshawar province, used to transport NATO supplies to and from Afghanistan.

Pakistan's government often speaks out against US drone strikes, heavily criticizing the tactic and calling it a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty but critics accuse the government of not actively doing enough to stop the strikes.

The US has also faced significant international pressures on account of its attacks. Amnesty International released a report in October, arguing that the US officials, who are responsible for carrying out the drone strikes, may have to stand trial for war crimes. It also listed extensive civilian casualties in Pakistan. Human Rights Watch has issued a similar report on Yemen.

Despite criticism, the US has carried out hundreds of drone strikes since 2004. In October, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism, Ben Emmerson, said that US drone strikes have killed 2,200 in the past decade, 400 of whom were civilians.

Pakistan confirmed that ''at least 400 civilians had died as a result of remotely piloted aircraft strikes and a further 200 individuals were regarded as probable non-combatants,'' Emmerson said in an interim report to the UN General Assembly.

Within the last week, one of Pakistan's major political parties published the name of what it believed to be the CIA's chief operative in Islamabad, after a US drone strike killed five people the previous week. The group was demanding that the spy chief face murder charges.

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 14:09

This week, fourteen people charged by the Department of Justice in connection with a coordinated denial of service attack on PayPal's services in 2010 will appear in Federal Court. The "PayPal 14," as they have been dubbed, are charged with participating in an attack orchestrated by Anonymous to retaliate against PayPal's suspension of its relationship with WikiLeaks. Their case as well as PayPal's actions in 2010 raise important questions about press freedoms and the nature of online protests.

As Chairman of eBay Inc., PayPal's parent company, and as a philanthropist and soon-to-be publisher deeply committed to government transparency, press freedoms and free expression, these issues hit close to home. (Since eBay is a public company, it's important for me to stress that the views in this article are my own and don't represent the views of the company.)

The story started in December, 2010, when PayPal suspended its relationship with WikiLeaks and the foundation accepting donations on their behalf for a period of several months. Today, PayPal can be found as one of several payment options available to support WikiLeaks' work.

When I learned of PayPal's decision, I immediately expressed my concerns to company management. A few days later, I contributed to an editorial by the Honolulu Civil Beat Editorial Board drawing attention to the important press freedom concerns raised by the actions of PayPal and other companies as a result of government pressure.

In the editorial, we affirmed that Julian Assange is a publisher and that the U.S. government used its power to attempt to silence him:

It used to be that a publisher owned his own presses and while even the angriest of politicians might want to stop him from running them, there was essentially nothing they could do.

With the Internet, many of us believed that the power of the publisher had spread to everyone, that we lived in a time of press freedom that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago.

But the WikiLeaks case exposes the vulnerability of any publisher on the Internet. What's happened to Assange and his website has deeply troubling implications for our society. And, no, we're not talking about the damage some believe he's doing to our national security by publishing classified records.

We're talking about how democracy can be diminished when government uses its power to silence a voice it disagrees with. Even more worrisome is how this case has exposed how foreign governments may be able to use their own criminal investigations to hurt and potentially silence journalists beyond their own borders.

We also noted that the commercial nature of the Internet posed new threats to press freedoms by virtue of the fact that these companies generally don't have the First Amendment rights of its customers in mind when the government starts howling about one of them.

Today, it appears, notification of a criminal investigation is enough to force businesses whose cause is not the First Amendment to cut off a publisher the way Amazon, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard each have done WikiLeaks...

Unlike the press barons of old, the executives of these businesses cannot tell their shareholders that it will hurt their company more to cave on a matter of principle than to drop a customer.

In contrast, our new media organization will have the First Amendment at its core, and will make very different decisions if faced with government pressure not to publish or retaliation after the fact.

Three years later, the vulnerability of Internet publishers is not much different, though according to recent reports the Justice Department has realized it has a "New York Times problem" if it wants to criminalize WikiLeaks' publication. It may have taken nearly three years for the Justice Department to realize something that seems evident to press freedom advocates, but it's still progress.

There is, however, still skepticism and uncertainty about whether or not WikiLeaks or Assange will be charged. While it's impossible to know what specific acts law enforcement officials are investigating, it's a sad state of affairs that the legality of what from the outside appears to be legitimate news-gathering operations are being questioned.

Today it's not just the process of news-gathering that's being questioned, but the nature of online protest. Is a distributed denial of service attack a legitimate form of protest?

Back in 2010, members of Anonymous retaliated against PayPal by launching exactly this type of attack. We don't know how many people participated in the attack but just fourteen were arrested and charged by the government.

A denial of service attack is damaging and costly. Many of PayPal's customers rely on PayPal for their livelihood. An interruption in service can have serious consequences: those customers may lose income that may cause them to become late on rent payments, medical expenses, etc. These are serious impacts that must not be ignored. An attack on PayPal's servers hurts these vulnerable people far more than it hurts a multinational company.

People at PayPal -- as in most companies -- take their responsibility to protect their customers very seriously. They sleep with pagers next to them so they can be woken in the middle of the night when something goes wrong. They put in extra hours on short notice at the expense of spending time with their families. They put their customers ahead of their own interests time and time again.

But on the other side, I can understand that the protesters were upset by PayPal's actions and felt that they were simply participating in an online demonstration of their frustration. That is their right, and I support freedom of expression, even when it's my own company that is the target.

The problem in this case however is that the tools being distributed by Anonymous are extremely powerful. They turn over control of a protester's computer to a central controller which can order it to make many hundreds of web page requests per second to a target website. The combined impact of just a few (say, one thousand) of these computers can overwhelm most websites. One thousand computers each initiating just 100 requests per second means that every minute, six million page requests are being made.

If we want to make parallels between real-world protests and online protests, that means that one thousand people can have the effect of six million people demonstrating in front of your office. That seems like an excessive impact in the hands of each person. It's like each protester can bring along 6,000 phantom friends without going to the trouble of convincing each of them to take an afternoon off and join the protest in the street.

That's why I've concluded that the use of these attack tools is vastly different than other forms of protest.

That said, from a justice point of view, I think prosecutors need to look at the actual damage caused by each defendant. First, it would be unjust to hold fourteen people accountable for the actions of a thousand (or however many other people were part of the same attack). Each person should be accountable for the damage they personally caused.

Second, the law allows prosecutors to calculate damage in a way that seems overstated. An appropriate damage estimate includes the pay and overtime pay required for employees to respond to the attack. But the damage estimate apparently being used by prosecutors in this case includes the cost of upgrading equipment to better defend against similar future attacks.

To me, that doesn't make sense. It's akin to charging a protester who illegally and ill-advisedly throws a rock through a window with the cost of replacing the window with much more expensive rock-proof glass. Yes, it's true the business wouldn't have thought to protect itself against rocks if it hadn't been for the protester's actions, but to me it's not fair to compel the protester to pay for the upgrade.

Prosecutors should also look at the circumstances of each defendant, and examine whether or not they were aware of the excessive impact their actions might have. They may have believed they were participating in a legitimate online protest and not aware of the multiplicative effect of the tools they were installing. Many people are not technically aware of the power of these tools and may have felt they were lending a single voice to the chorus of protest, rather than simulating thousands of voices. In those cases, I believe justice requires leniency. In my view, they should be facing misdemeanor charges and the possibility of a fine, rather than felony charges and jail time.

As a society, our notions of free speech and protest must evolve since much of the public sphere is now online. Online protest is a new form of expression and probably feels natural to people who have grown up participating in online communities. The principles of the First Amendment require that we create space for free speech and association, unencumbered by government intrusion, and that those spaces exist online as well as offline. But in creating those spaces, we must also be cognizant that a much smaller number of protesters can now significantly disrupt the activities of millions of their fellow citizens who have an equal right to go about their lives without undue disruption.

If the great civil rights March on Washington can now be simulated online by a few dozen people using purpose-built tools, simple parallels with offline protests aren't sufficient to give us guidance on the role of free expression online.

The government's actions against WikiLeaks in 2010 and companies' reactions to that pressure, as well as the prosecution of the PayPal 14 raise critical questions about the nature of the First Amendment in the digital age. The First Amendment is primarily a restraint on government intrusion and a bedrock principle of our society. How do commercial interests interact with those protections? How does government ensure space for free expression online when there are no public sidewalks or street corners? How can unpopular dissent resist government pressure when that dissent depends on commercial Internet providers to reach its audience?

These are vital questions in today's society. The First Amendment is one of the most important rights we have. How will our understanding of the First Amendment adapt as society and technology changes? Time will tell, but our freedoms depend on a vigorous engagement on these questions by all of us.

Follow Pierre Omidyar on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pierre

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 14:08

WASHINGTON -- Eleven of the 14 people allegedly affiliated with the hacker group Anonymous who were arrested in 2011 for launching a cyberattack against PayPal are prepared to plead guilty in California on Thursday as part of an agreement reached with federal prosecutors. The question is whether the Justice Department will approve the deal.

Lawyers for several of the defendants revealed in court filings this week that 11 members of the "PayPal 14" are prepared to accept the agreement.

But language in the plea agreement offered by federal prosecutors says the deal is only good if 13 of the defendants take it, and as of Wednesday there were two holdouts. (Any final agreement would not include PayPal 14 member Dennis Collins, since he was indicted earlier this month on separate charges alleging he helped Anonymous carry out attacks against credit card companies and recording industry groups.)

It's not clear whether the deal would involve jail time. Several lawyers involved in the case declined to give details of the plea offer, citing the confidentiality of the negotiations. One lawyer called the deal "exceptionally good, but very fragile," and declined to say whether it involved jail time.

As of Wednesday evening, attorneys for Jeffrey Puglisi, Tracy Ann Valenzuela and Christopher Quang Vo all indicated their clients were willing to take the deal.

Plea negotiations have been going on for several months, and the case has put the lives of the defendants involved on hold for more than two years. Several of the defendants spoke of the financial and emotional burdens of the case in interviews with The Huffington Post earlier this year.

The defendants have been charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which has come under increased scrutiny for the stiff penalties it imposes for minor computer crimes. Some Internet activists say so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which involve overwhelming websites with data until they crash, amount to nothing more than protests and should be protected First Amendment speech.

Most of the defendants in the Paypal 14 case are due in federal court in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday morning.

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 14:12

Some things truly haven't been seen before. WikiLeaks might be one of them.

It's hard to believe that the founding fathers could have ever imagined the possibilities of the Internet or a journalist like Julian Assange when they crafted the First Amendment.

If they were with us today they might well say they knew publishers they despised as much as some of our leaders today apparently do the editor-in-chief of the notorious website.

Yet the angry words of government officials and the swirling storm over whether Assange's brand of journalism can be justified are overshadowing a potentially far more disturbing aspect of this story -- the new power governments have to punish publishers.

It used to be that a publisher owned his own presses and while even the angriest of politicians might want to stop him from running them, there was essentially nothing they could do.

With the Internet, many of us believed that the power of the publisher had spread to everyone, that we lived in a time of press freedom that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago.

But the WikiLeaks case exposes the vulnerability of any publisher on the Internet. What's happened to Assange and his website has deeply troubling implications for our society. And, no, we're not talking about the damage some believe he's doing to our national security by publishing classified records.

We're talking about how democracy can be diminished when government uses its power to silence a voice it disagrees with. Even more worrisome is how this case has exposed how foreign governments may be able to use their own criminal investigations to hurt and potentially silence journalists beyond their own borders.

Today, it appears, notification of a criminal investigation is enough to force businesses whose cause is not the First Amendment to cut off a publisher the way Amazon, PayPal, Visa and Mastercard each have done WikiLeaks. (Disclosure: Civil Beat Publisher Pierre Omidyar is chairman of eBay, which owns PayPal.) Unlike the press barons of old, the executives of these businesses cannot tell their shareholders that it will hurt their company more to cave on a matter of principle than to drop a customer. It is their right and common practice to shut a customer down when they receive complaints from criminal investigators, even without a court order. This even though the existence of a criminal investigation is no indication of guilt.

The executives have a fiduciary duty to do what's best for their shareholders. And if they didn't respond to government warnings, they very well could risk their own business being shut down. The end result, we're learning: A website can be cut off and cut down, even by a foreign government. The existence of a criminal investigation in a foreign country with values different from our own may be enough cause for these companies to shut off a customer.

Alas, the Internet is not free. Nor is it a place of unlimited freedom. We knew that about places like China. But until it became abundantly clear in the WikiLeaks case, not the U.S.A. Sure, it'll be impossible for the government to ever remove what Assange has published from the Internet. This is a case where the cat is definitely out of the bag. But by taking the steps they have to shut down WikiLeaks, governments create a chilling effect on other publishers, making it less likely that information that sheds light on government policy and actions that citizens should know about becomes public.

Consider what the WikiLeaks case might mean for a local publisher. Even a news organization as young as Civil Beat has already received leaked documents from would-be whistleblowers. We've published articles based on those documents and could very well feel it's the right thing to do to post them on the Internet, as is our practice with many stories.

What would happen if a prosecutor or government official went to the service that was hosting our news service and said we were the subject of a criminal investigation? Civil Beat, like other publishers, relies on payment services provided by a third party, be it PayPal or Visa and MasterCard. Without them, we don't receive revenue. We also depend on third parties to host our website. Yet we've seen in the past week that those ties can easily be severed just by raising the specter of an investigation.

These threats are new tools to hurt publishers, not all of whom have the resources or resourcefulness of WikiLeaks but many of whom may have government secrets to share even more valuable, and potentially disturbing, to anybody in power.

It's important that we not let anger against someone we may disagree with, even revile, blind us to how the very democracy we treasure can be diminished more by the actions of aroused government officials than by a news service that many believe is irresponsible.

Victory in punishing WikiLeaks could be hollow at best. A critical lesson we should take from what has happened is that the Internet is vulnerable to abuse by governments who want to silence those who expose them.

This post originally appeared at Civil Beat.

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Archived Version

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 08:50

The other day I referred to those who "evince zero interest in the substance of the revelations about NSA and GCHQ spying which we're reporting on around the world", but "are instead obsessed with spending their time personally attacking the journalists, whistleblowers and other messengers who enable the world to know about what is being done." There are dozens of examples, one of whom is the author of a post this week at Pando.com which accuses me and Laura Poitras of having "promptly sold [the Snowden] secrets to a billionaire", Pierre Omidyar, and claims we made "a decision to privatize the NSA cache" by joining Omidyar's new media organization and vesting it with a "monopoly" over those documents.I've steadfastly ignored the multiple attacks from this particular writer over the years because his recklessness with the facts is so well-known (ask others about whom he's written), and because his fixation is quite personal: it began with and still is fueled by an incident where The Nation retracted and apologized for an error-strewn hit piece he wrote which I had criticized (see here and here).But now, this week's attack has been seized on by various national security establishment functionaries and DC journalists to impugn our NSA reporting and, in some cases, to argue that this "privatizing" theory should be used as a basis to prosecute me for the journalism I'm doing. Amazingly, it's being cited by all sorts of DC journalists and think tank advocates whose own work is paid for by billionaires and other assorted plutocrats: such as Josh Marshall, whose TPM journalism has been "privatized" and funded by the Romney-supporting Silicon Valley oligarch Marc Andreesen, and former Bush Homeland Security Adviser and current CNN analyst Fran Townsend ("profiteering!", exclaims the Time Warner Corp. employee and advocate of the American plundering of Iraq).Indeed, Pando.com itself is partially funded by libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal and CIA-serving Palantir Technologies. The very same author of this week's Pando post had previously described Thiel (before he was funded by him) as "an enemy of democracy" and the head of a firm "which last year was caught organizing an illegal spy ring targeting American political opponents of the US Chamber of Commerce, including journalists, progressive activists and union leaders" (one of whom happened to be me, targeted with threatened career destruction for the crime of advocating for WikiLeaks)).Moreover, the rhetorical innuendo in the Pando post tracks perfectly with that used by NSA chief Keith Alexander a few weeks ago when he called on the US government to somehow put a stop to the NSA reporting: "I think it's wrong that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000-- whatever they are, and are selling them and giving them out as if these-- you know, it just doesn't make sense," decreed the NSA chief. This attack is also the same one that was quickly embraced by the Canadian right to try to malign the reporting we're now doing with the CBC on joint US/Canada surveillance programs.I would think journalists would want to be very careful about embracing this pernicious theory of "privatizing" journalism given how virtually all of you are not only are paid for the journalism you do, but also have your own journalism funded by all sorts of extremely rich people and other corporate interests.Obviously, the rancid accusation that paid investigative journalism is tantamount to the buying and selling of government secrets is being made quite deliberately by the US government and its apologists with the knowledge that this is what sends people to prison. That language didn't fall out of Keith Alexander's mouth by accident. This Pando post is not only reckless with the facts but espouses a theory very few of the journalists cheering for it could or would apply to themselves. Standing alone, I'd simply ignore it.But any theory that is being simultaneously embraced by Gen. Keith Alexander, foreign governments on whom we're reporting, and DC functionaries to insinuate that there is something untoward or even criminal about our journalism is one I'm going to answer.So let's get to that. Here are a few questions about this theory, along with some facts. Moreover, in the spirit of what the Washington Post's Erik Wemple has noted is the extreme and very unusual transparency I've offered from the beginning on how this reporting is being done, I'll also address here once and for all a few other claims made and questions asked periodically about our methods of reporting:1) How is our reporting arrangement any different than the standard means used to report classified information? Bart Gellman has thousands of top secret documents from Snowden. He's repeatedly reported on them and published them in the Washington Post. He's not on the paper's staff, but is paid for the articles he writes for the Post. Shortly after he published his first article on the NSA documents at the Post (for pay!), it was announced that Gellman is writing a book about US surveillance.Does this mean that Gellman has "privatized" the NSA documents, is "profiteering" off of them, and that he sold US secrets to the Washington Post?Last month, it was announced that Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post for $250 million. Are any of you intrepid DC journalists citing this Pando post going to accuse Gellman of selling US secrets to his publisher and profiteering off of them, or Bezos of having bought secrets? Speak up, bold and principled Josh Marshall and Fran Townsend.Or let's take the revered-in-DC Bob Woodward, who has become America's richest journalist by writing book after book over the last decade that has spilled many of America's most sensitive secrets fed to him by top US government officials. In fact, his books are so filled with vital and sensitive secrets that Osama bin Laden personally recommended that they be read. Shall we accuse Woodward of selling US secrets to his publisher and profiteering off of them, and suggest he be prosecuted?Or let's take the New York Times. They reported that they received 50,000 classified Snowden documents fromthe Guardian. Rather than simultaneously publish them all on the internet, they've been reporting on selective documents while keeping the rest for themselves. They have published very well-linked articles by reporters such as Scott Shane, who are paid money to read through these documents and then write about them. Are the New York Times and Scott Shane also now guilty of "privatizing" the nation's secrets?Or how about Jim Risen, who in 2004 learned about one of the nation's most sensitive secrets: the NSA's top secret warrantless eavesdropping program. He wrote a best-selling book (for which he was paid!) in which he reported on that top secret program and others, and was also paid to write an article about it for the New York Times. Are Risen, his publisher, and the NYT now also guilty of "privatizing" secrets and "profiteering" off them? Should they be prosecuted for it?Since the NSA story began, Laura Poitras has reported on these documents in a freelance capacity with the New York Times (multiple times with Jim Risen), the Washington Post (bylined with Gellman), the Guardian (bylined with me and others), and der Spiegel (with that paper's staff reporters). Are these four newspapers, all of whom paid Poitras and her fellow reporters for this reporting, guilty of buying US secrets?Over the last three decades, Seymour Hersh has received all sorts of classified information from his sources. So has Jane Mayer. They do not dump it publicly on the internet. They keep it inside the New Yorker or their publishing company - where they vet it, understand it, verify it, and then report on it: all for pay! Let's hear all of you step up and accuse Mayer and Hersh of criminally "privatizing" and selling the nation's secrets and the New Yorker and their publishing companies of purchasing them.Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. The reporter with whom he worked was paid to write about those documents, and the NYT itself sold lots of papers by virtue of having that story. Was the NYT guilty of "privatizing" the Pentagon Papers, and Neil Sheehan guilty of selling them by being paid to write about them?Every worthwhile investigative journalist - by definition - at some point receives, and then publishes, classified information. They are virtually always paid for their work in exposing that information, because that's how professional journalists earn a living. It's also a necessary arrangement for journalists to report on these matters with legal protections (see below). And rather than mail the material they get from their sources around to other media organizations, they keep it themselves, work on reporting it, and then write about it in their own media outlets.If you are so infuriated by this NSA reporting that you short-sightedly embrace theories that suggest there's something untoward or criminal about this process, then you're essentially criminalizing all professional investigative journalism. Do you not see where this idiocy takes you?2) What better alternatives exist for our reporting on these documents? The strategy Laura Poitras and I used to report these documents is clear: I reported on most of them under a freelance contract with the Guardian, and she has reported on most under similar contracts with the NYT, the Washington Post, the Guardian and especially der Spiegel. But we also have partnered with multiple media outlets around the world - in Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Spain, Holland, Mexico, and Norway, with more shortly to come - to ensure that the documents are reported on in those places where the interest level is highest and are closest to those individuals whose privacy has been invaded.Feel free to criticize that method all you want. I'm extremely proud of the model we've created, one that borrows heavily from the WikiLeaks model of worldwide media partnerships, as it's ensured that no one media outlet has monopolized these documents. Instead, all the stories are reported with the benefit of journalists most familiar with the climate and landscape in the affected countries. That has made the story international in scope, and has made the reporting far better than if it had all been centralized in one place.The result has been - in just six months - the publication of more classified documents and revelations about the NSA than have appeared in the entire history of the organization before that. Six months is hardly a long time: WikiLeaks did not publish their first war log until five months after they received them from Manning, and did not publish their first diplomatic cable until nine months after they first received them. That's because these documents are complex, take time to understand, vet, and process. We have published a huge number in countries around the world in a short period of time, and there are still many, many more stories and documents to be reported in countries all over the world.But those that want to criticize that method are compelled to identify one that is superior. Let's examine those alternatives:Dump all the documents at once on the internet. As one of the most vocal and long-time supporters of WikiLeaks, this is a model that I endorse in some cases (though WikiLeaks also redacted documents it published and still withholds others it possesses for very justifiable reasons; they also only publish documents once they've vetted, authenticated and understood them). I completely empathize with those arguing this: as I've said many times, the complaint that we've published too little is infinitely more valid than the complaint that we've published too much. But there are so many reasons why this dump-it-all approach makes no sense in this particular case.To begin with, doing this would violently breach the agreement we made with our source. Edward Snowden knows how the internet works. If he had wanted all the documents uploaded onto the internet, he could have - and would have - done that himself. Or he could have told us to do it, or given it to a group with instructions to do that. Quite obviously, he did none none of that.He did the opposite: he came to journalists he personally selected, and asked that we only publish with media organizations. He also asked that we very carefully vet the material he gave us and only publish that which would be recognized as in the public interest but not anything which could be said to endanger the lives of innocent people. His primary concern has always been that the focus be on the substance of what the NSA is doing, and knew that mass, indiscriminate publication would drown meaningful discussions with accusations of how we recklessly helped The Terrorists', the Chinese, and every other World Villain.I'm absolutely convinced that the agreement we made with our source for how these documents were to be reported was the right one. Had we just published them all without any context, discrimination or reporting, the impact - for so many reasons - would have been far, far less than the slow, incremental and careful reporting we've done.But at this point, that debate doesn't matter: those demanding that we just publish all of the documents without regard to their consequences or content are demanding that we ignore and violate our agreement with our source, and we're never going to do that no matter who doesn't like it. And as our source has repeatedly proven: if he's unhappy about how matters are proceeding or has something to say, he's more than willing and able to speak out. He hasn't done so about this because the way we've reported these documents is completely consistent with the agreement and methodology he insisted upon.Moreover, those demanding that all of these documents be published indiscriminately are completely ignoring the very real legal risks for everyone involved in this process, beginning with Snowden, who already faces 30 years in prison and is currently protected only by 9 more months of temporary asylum in Russia. Everyone involved in the publication of these materials has already undertaken substantial legal risk.Just like it's cheap and easy for war advocates to demand that others go and risk their lives to fight the wars they cheer, it's very cheap and easy to demand that others (including Snowden) undertake even more legal risk by publishing all of these documents. Everyone has the right to decide for themselves what risks they're willing to endure, and if you aren't taking any yourselves for the cause you claim to support, then perhaps it's worth considering whether others are entitled to the same consideration you give yourself.I'd also like to test whether those who argue this are being genuine. Should we really publish everything we have without redactions or regard to their consequences? Speaking purely hypothetically:if we know the names of people the NSA is accusing of engaging in "online promiscuity" on the internet, or the names of those the NSA believes are terrorists, should we publish that, thereby invading their privacy and destroying their reputations?

if we have the raw chats, internet activity, and telephone calls of people on whom the NSA has spied, should we just publish those?

if we have documents that would help other states spy more effectively on their own citizens' internet activities, should we publish those, thereby subjecting hundreds of millions of people to heightened state surveillance?

if we have documents containing the names of innocent people whose reputations or lives would be endangered if they were exposed, should we just ignore their plight and publish those?

if we have documents that are so complex that we don't yet understand the potential consequences for other people from publishing them, should we just throw caution to the wind and publish them anyway, and learn later what happens?

The minute any of you say "no" to any of those questions, then you are asking us to do exactly that which we've been doing: take the time to go through the documents carefully, consult with experts, understand them, and then only publish those documents or parts of documents which do not cause any of these harms.All of the foregoing is addressed to the people who are asking in good faith why we aren't publishing more documents more quickly. I respect that critique. If I were watching someone else reporting on these documents, I'd likely be asking those same questions. That's why I've spent so much time and energy engaging those who raise these questions.By contrast, I have nothing but contempt for the DC functionaries who are cynically embracing that Pando post that holds out the WikiLeaks dump-it-all model as the ideal - the Josh Marshalls and Fran Townsends of the world - as though they would prefer we did that instead. Those are the very same people who hate WikiLeaks, and would be first in line to accuse us of recklessness and likely demand our prosecution if we followed that model (here, for instance, is a CNN debate I did in 2010 with the very same Fran Townsend when I defended Julian Assange after he signed a $1.2 million book deal). As one Twitter commentator put it regarding the DC WikiLeaks-haters heralding this Pando post:@ggreenwald "You didn't dump all the documents in public domain like Wikileaks did!" Sincerely, Those Who Attacked Wikileaks For Doing That'-- Mr. LV426 (@mrlv426) December 1, 2013

The DC functionaries citing that Pando post don't want a different model of reporting. They are just National Security State loyalists and/or Democratic partisans who don't want any NSA reporting being done at all. And that Pando post is just a convenient weapon to impugn the reporting we're doing even though its cited rationale is one that, in every other case, they vehemently reject.Hand out large amounts of documents to other news organizations.Another possible alternative to the reporting approach we've chosen is to distribute thousands of documents to multiple news outlets around the world, so that the reporting can be done more quickly. But this ignores the legal constraints we face.Even using the more limited approach we've undertaken, we've already been accused of possible criminality and/or had our prosecution advocated by the likes of Alan Dershowitz, Peter King, David Gregory, Dianne Feinstein, Marc Thiessen, Andrew Ross Sorkin (who later apologized), and many others. The UK government is formally equating our journalism with "terrorism" and "espionage" and has said there are criminal investigations pending. Eric Holder's recent statements about whether I'd be prosecuted if I tried to enter the US was so riddled with caveats and uncertainties that it raised more questions than it answered.One of the few protections you have when you're reporting on classified materials is that you're doing it as a journalist. It's therefore vital that we never act as a source or distributor of the materials, which is what the DOJ would eagerly claim if - as individuals - we just started handing out massive amounts of documents to media organizations around the world, rather than doing what we've been doing: reporting on them on a story-by-story basis with those outlets.I realize that it's very easy to be dismissive and blithe about those risks if they're not yours to take. But especially since I think the approach we've been using is the most effective, and since I know that even the more limited approach is risky, I'm not going to hand prosecution advocates inside the US government a gift by becoming a source or distributor of the documents. That's why I've been reporting on these documents in partnership with media outlets on a story-by-story basis and will continue to do so. It is true, as the Pando post points out, that WikiLeaks did do exactly this: they shared thousands of classified documents with media outlets around the world. But it's also true - as outrageous as it is - that WikiLeaks for years has been and still is the target of a US criminal grand jury investigation, and Julian Assange fears - justifiably so - that the US intends to prosecute him for Espionage Act violations. The fear that the US intends do so was the basis cited by the Ecuadorian government for granting him asylum.So again, it's very easy to demand that others follow the WikiLeaks model: if it's not your indictment and Espionage Act prosecution, then there's no need to be concerned. But I'm very content with the number of revelations we've enabled (and will continue to enable) and the massive impact our reporting has had around the world. And I make no apology whatsoever about incorporating legal constraints and considerations of legal risks - for both our source and ourselves - into our approach.Finally, the very same DC functionaries now heralding this Pando post would be the very first people in line accusing us of being "sources" and "distributors of documents" - rather than journalists - if we followed this model. Their interest is in stifling the reporting in order to protect the President, his Party, and the NSA - not critiquing how it's being done.3) How can anyone reconcile the "monopoly" accusation with the most basic facts?The accusation that we sold, and Omidyar purchased, NSA secrets, and the related claim that he now has a "monopoly" on the NSA documents, is without question the single dumbest accusation I've heard since we began reporting on these documents. And that's saying something. So many obvious, glaring facts makes clear how absurd that is:First, how is this different from virtually every other big journalistic story involving top secret matters? Did the Washington Post privatize and have a monopoly when Dana Priest learned and then informed the world in that paper about the CIA black sites? Did the New York Times have a "monopoly" on the Pentagon Papers once Daniel Ellsberg gave it to them? Did the Guardian have a "monopoly" on the NSA story before I left?It's almost always the case that the journalists and media outlets that get information from a source are the ones who keep it, work on it, and report it. That's how the source wants it, which is why the source came to those journalists. Since when is this called "privatizing" material or having a "monopoly"?Second, everyone already knows that tens of thousands of these documents are in the possession of the New York Times, the Guardian, ProPublica, and Bart Gellman/the Washington Post - entities that obviously are not controlled by me, Poitras, or the new venture with which we're working. Does that sound remotely like a "monopoly"? It's true that only Laura and I have possession of the full set, but such vast numbers of these documents are spread around to so many different media organizations, which continue to report on them, that the claim that Laura and I possess sole control over them is ludicrous.Third, the suggestion that the creation of NewCo has anything to do with acquiring a "monopoly" over NSA documents is nothing short of laughable. We are building a large, general-interest, sustained news organization that has almost nothing to do with the NSA story. Indeed, even among the first set of hires that have been announced, none of the journalists and editors other than me and Laura have had anything to do with the NSA story. Moreover, given that we have not even announced a launch date yet, it's far from clear how much NSA reporting will be left to do at this new organization.Fourth, just use basic common sense - and obvious public facts - when assessing this accusation. Since our new media venture was announced, Laura and I have both reported on and published these documents around the world. Laura has published multiple big NSA stories at der Spiegel and the New York Times, while I've done the same in Norway, Holland, and Canada. Moreover, we just published one of the biggest NSA stories yet - about the agency's exploitation of internet porn activities to destroy the reputation of "radicals" - atthe Huffington Post. I'm also currently working with a separate large US media outlet on very big NSA/GCQH stories to be reported shortly.Does that sound like a "monopoly" to anyone who understands the word? If we wanted a monopoly at our new media venture, why are we not sitting on these big NSA stories until we launch so we can publish them there? A "monopoly" is the exact opposite of what we want and what we've been doing, as conclusively demonstrated by the continuous, ongoing reporting we're doing around the world even after our new media venture was announced.Fifth, and finally, those making this accusation are revealing more about themselves than about us. As I said when I moved from my own blog to Salon, and then again when I moved to the Guardian, editorial independence is central to everything I do. The same is true of Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill and others we've already announced, let alone those who are coming. The idea that any of us would allow meaningful reporting or our commentary to be restricted for commercial or ideological reasons by anyone (to say nothing of the claim that this is the intention of Omidyar given who he has pursued) would trigger a laughing fit on the part of anyone with whom we've worked or is familiar with our work. The only people who would say this or believe this are those who themselves succumb to those sorts of pressures.4) On the allegation of "profiteering"The one thing I never thought I'd be accused of is lacking sincere passion and conviction about the dangers of surveillance. Laura and I have been working on surveillance issues for many, many years - when few people were paying attention and there were zero rewards from doing so. I spent almost every day for two straight years - in 2006 and 2007 - writing about little other than the Bush-era NSA scandal. Indeed, the very first New York Times article about my work on the Snowden story tried to suggest that my interest in this topic was virtually freakish, saying that I have been "writing intensely, even obssesively, for years about government surveillance." Laura was working on a documentary about NSA surveillance long before either of us ever heard the name "Edward Snowden."It is simply an unavoidable reality that if you want to do effective investigative journalism aimed at the US government, the National Security State, and the world's most powerful corporate factions, then you need resources to do that. You need editors, fellow experienced reporters, lawyers, researchers, technologies, the ability to travel, the knowledge that you can defend yourself from legal attacks, and a whole variety of other means of support. That's why the oh-so-pure Pando writers ran into the arms of Silicon Valley libertarian oligarchs after their prior NSFW model failed and after they spent years maligning others for taking exactly that sort of funding, and then justified it by saying: "We now have millions of dollars to do investigative reporting." It is absolutely the case that I consider the opportunity to help build this new media venture to be a once-in-a-career dream opportunity. That's because the organization is being built from the start to support, sustain and encourage truly independent, adversarial journalism. It has the backing and is being built by someone whom I am absolutely convinced is dedicated to this model of independent, adversarial journalism. It has the real potential to enable innovative and fearless journalism.The same is true of the book I'm writing. Somewhere along the way, certain factions on the left began embracing a supremely anti-intellectual view of books as something to be suspicious of rather than a vital instrument for spreading ideas. Books can be uniquely valuable in making the case for a set of political ideas - which is presumably why people like Noam Chomsky have spent their lives writing dozens of them. And the same is true of films: they can reach audiences who otherwise are unreachable when it comes to political questions, and shape how they think about such matters like nothing else can. After all these years of toiling on these issues, I'm thrilled to have a loud platform to warn of the dangers of state surveillance, US militarism, and government secrecy, and to herald the importance of individual privacy, internet freedom, and transparency for the world's most powerful factions. Refusing to do what one can to have the greatest impact in defense of one's political values is just self-indulgent.Being skeptical and asking questions about any new media organization is completely appropriate. I'm sure I'd be doing the same thing of other new organizations. But we haven't even begun yet. When I moved to Salon and then to the Guardian, I heard all sorts of claims about how I'd have to moderate or dilute my work to accommodate those environments and the interests and views of those who own and run them. I don't think anyone can reasonably claim that happened. And I am quite certain that the same will be true here. The people we have hired and will continue to hire - and, ultimately, the journalism we produce - will speak volumes about exactly the reasons we're doing this and why I'm so excited about it.

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Archived Version

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 08:20

Summary: With the NSA seemingly listening in to Google's datacenter traffic, Google, Yahoo, and other companies' need for datacenter-to-datacenter encryption has never been greater.

UPDATED, the evening of Oct. 30 with Google's Response. Not that this is going to come as any real surprise to anyone who's been following the Snowden NSA revelations but it appears that the NSA's newly revealed MUSCULAR project has been listening in to Google and Yahoo's datacenter-to-datacenter communications.

It may look like a post-it note, but this leaked NSA slide had Google engineers swearing. (Credit: The Washington Post)The NSA has denied that they're doing this. Politico reported that a NSA representative said, "The assertion that we collect vast quantities of U.S. persons' data from this type of collection is also not true."

But, what is the NSA doing, if anything, anyway? Good question. The NSA PowerPoint post-it note of a slide on Google Cloud Exploitation simply shows a sketch where the Public Internet meets the internal Google Cloud at a Google Front-End (GFE) server. This is not exactly a detailed technical document.

More on the NSA surveillance revelationsHere's are some of the ways this could work. First, you should know that Google, Yahoo, and other major multinational Internet traffic companies store multiple copies of data across datacenters. That way when you do a search, read a Facebook post, what-have you, when your Web request goes to the closest possible datacenter it will get the fastest possible results.

Six ways to protect yourself from the NSA and other eavesdroppersTo make that happen, and to ensure that you have the freshest information, the big boys use either their own or privately leased fiber-optic connections. These use networking technologies such as OC-768 and 100Gigabit Ethernet for data transmission rates of up to 100 Gigabits per second to hook up datacenters.

This traffic, over these network connections, is not being encrypted at this time. The companies seem to have thought that since encryption does take up some time, and the traffic goes over a private connection, this was safe enough. They were wrong.

After the news about NSA snooping first broke over the summer, Google decided it was time to start encrypting its datacenter-to-datacenter communications. Google also started automatically encrypting Google Cloud Storage data with 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-128) before it's written to disk. Yahoo, for its part, is finally turning Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) on as its default Yahoo Mail setting for improved end-user security.

Will these methods solve the major Internet players' privacy problem? Probably not.

For starters, it's not at all clear from The Washington Post report how the NSA is listening in. Is the NSA is squatting in international telecommunications centers snooping on clear-text traffic between datacenters, or is the NSA actually breaking SSL, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), and Transport Layer Security (TLS) traffic as it moves from Google's datacenters to the Internet? We don't know. For that matter, the Post story also implies that the GFE servers themselves may have been compromised.

If SSL and its related security protocols have indeed been compromised there are ways they could be toughened. One such possible fix is Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS).

With PFS encrypted Web connections, when a secure connection is made between a browser and a server, a temporary secure session key is generated using Diffie-Hellman (DHE) or Elliptic Curve cryptography (ECDHE). As you continue to interact with a site new secure keys are generated.

The good news is that this makes it much harder to break such secure connections. Instead of having to break one key, a would-be snooper must break multiple ones. The bad news is that both algorithms can slow down connections and they're not universally supported by Web servers and browsers.

Of course, it's a cryptography truism that it's easier to get around cryptography than it to break it. So if the NSA, or one of its partners such as the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) could tap into Google's and Yahoo's private networks, that would be their method of choice.

David Drummond, Google's Chief Legal Officer, said, "We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links, especially the links in the slide. We do not provide any government, including the U.S. government, with access to our systems. We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform."

ZDNet has asked Yahoo for their take on the matter, but Yahoo hasn't responded yet. When they do, we'll update this story.

For now, we just don't know, which, if not all three, methods the NSA used and what the companies will be doing in reaction to this. What we do know, and we should have known all along, is that privacy really doesn't exist on today's Internet.

The moral of the story, for anyone, who runs datacenters in more than one country, is that it's well past time to start using as secure connections as you can find for your datacenter-to-datacenter communications. Simply having a "private" line doesn't mean that you're not actually on a party line with the NSA.

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Source: Unfashionista

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 15:25

MPs today got Alan Rusbridger to admit a number of things he, and his paper had previously denied.

Firstly, that he shipped the names of GCHQ agents abroad to newspapers and bloggers. Mr. Rusbridger was reminded that this was a criminal offence, and said he had a public interest defence. He also, however, kept arguing that he hadn't published any names, which rather blows up his public interest defence '' it's self-evident that you don't need the names of intelligence agents to report on GCHQ spying, so why not redact them?

The fact is, Rusbridger did acknowledge that it put GCHQ agents at risk when he first shipped files to ProPublica. He redacted the names of GCHQ agents from those files, and he promised the government he had done so, so when he claims nobody from the government asked him about shipping names, it's possibly because they made the mistake of believing him.

Rusbridger replied that the files contained information that citizens in a democracy deserved to know, and he assured Heywood that he had scrubbed the documents so that no undercover officials were identified or put at risk.

If British papers had the guts to question members of their own club, they would ask Rusbridger why he scrubbed these documents '' his answers to Parliament have said that only publication would be risky '' and why he admitted to Heywood that undercover officials would be put at risk if he identified them.

In Parliament today when asked why he didn't redact the names he said there were 58,000 documents '' essentially, he could be bothered to go through the

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Thu, 05 Dec 2013 02:02

FASCIA is the National Security Agency's enormous database containing trillions of device-location records that are collected from a variety of sources. This document shows the volume and types of device-location data collected by the agency.

>> NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

Click to see the related section of the document.

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]]> GRAPHIC: Ashkan Soltani and Matt DeLong - The Washington Post. Published Dec. 4, 2013.

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Source: Zero Hedge

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 05:32

The most important chart that nobody at the Fed seems to pay any attention to, and certainly none of the economists who urge the Fed to accelerate its monetization of Treasury paper, is shown below: it shows the Fed's total holdings of the entire bond market expressed in 10 Year equivalents (because as a reminder to the Krugmans and Bullards of the world a 3 Year is not the same as a 30 Year). As we, and the TBAC, have been pounding the table over the past year (here, here and here as a sample), the amount of securities that the Fed can absorb without crushing the liquidity in the "deepest" bond market in the world is rapidly declining, and specifically now that the Fed has refused to taper, it is absorbing over 0.3% of all Ten Year Equivalents, also known as "High Quality Collateral", from the private sector every week. The total number as per the most recent weekly update is now a whopping 33.18%, up from 32.85% the week before. Or, said otherwise, the Fed now owns a third of the entire US bond market.

At this pace, assuming Janet Yellen keeps delaying the taper again and again over fears of how "tighter" financial conditions would get, even as gross US bond issuance declines in line with the decline in deficit funding needs, the Fed will own just shy of half the entire bond market on December 31, 2014... and all of it some time in 2018.

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Tue, 03 Dec 2013 17:33

3 December 2013Last updated at 08:11 ET By Chris VallanceBBC Radio 4, PM Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

Andy Bennett, of E2V, shows how the device works at Throckmorton Airfield, in Worcestershire

A British company has demonstrated a prototype device capable of stopping cars and other vehicles using a blast of electromagnetic waves.

The RF Safe-Stop uses radio frequency pulses to "confuse" a vehicle's electronic systems, cutting its engine.

E2V is one of several companies trying to bring such a product to market.

It said it believed the primary use would be as a non-lethal weapon for the military to defend sensitive locations from vehicles refusing to stop.

There has also been police interest.

The BBC was given a demonstration of the device at Throckmorton Airfield, in Worcestershire.

Deputy Chief Constable Andy Holt, of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), who has evaluated the tech, said the machine had "potential, but it's very early days yet".

Radio pulseAt one end of a disused runway, E2V assembled a varied collection of second-hand cars and motorbikes in order to test the prototype against a range of vehicles.

In demonstrations seen by the BBC a car drove towards the device at about 15mph (24km/h).

As the vehicle entered the range of the RF Safe-stop, its dashboard warning lights and dials behaved erratically, the engine stopped and the car rolled gently to a halt. Digital audio and video recording devices in the vehicle were also affected.

"It's a small radar transmitter," said Andy Wood, product manager for the machine.

"The RF [radio frequency] is pulsed from the unit just as it would be in radar, it couples into the wiring in the car and that disrupts and confuses the electronics in the car causing the engine to stall."

He did not provide other specifics. However, the Engineer magazine has reported the device uses L- and S-band radio frequencies, and works at a range of up to 50m (164ft).

Some experts the BBC has spoken with suggested that turning off the engine in this manner would not stop vehicles rapidly enough. Others worried about what effect it might have on a car's electronic brake and steering systems.

But E2V said the risks were lower than with alternative systems.

Acpo suggested the machine's ability to stop motorbikes "safely" could prove particularly useful.

Mr Holt noted that the tyre deflation devices used by some police forces posed the risk of causing "serious injury" if used against two-wheelers.

E2V added that its device could also be effective against other types of vehicles, including boats.

But because the device works on electronic systems, he acknowledged that it would not work on all older vehicles.

"Certainly if you took a 1960s Land Rover, there's a good chance you're not going to stop it," Mr Wood said.

The firm added that it did not believe the RF Safe-Stop posed any risk to people using a pacemaker.

Listeners in the UK can hear more about the device on BBC Radio 4's PM programme between 17:00 and 18:00 on Tuesday.

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Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:54

An emergency alert that sounded on cellphones across the Southland midday Wednesday came from the Monterey Park Fire Department, which apologized for the notification.

An emergency alert that sounded on phones across Southern California on Wednesday was sent by the Los Angeles County Emergency Operations Center, authorities said. (Credit: KTLA)

The alert, which read ''THIS IS ONLY A TEST,'' was sent at 2:13 p.m. It appeared to have come from the Monterey Park Emergency Operations Center.

A police official with the Monterey Park Police Department and a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said the city's Fire Department had sent the alert.

''It wasn't something sent out by police; it was sent out by fire,'' police clerk Margaret Mkrtichian said.

Monterey Park Fire Department personnel were unaware of any plans to send the alert, the dispatcher initially told KTLA.

Later, the department apologized for the notification on Twitter.

A spokesman for the Sheriff's Department, which has its headquarters in an unincorporated area next to Monterey Park, was initially unclear on where the message originated. The Sheriff's Department operates the county's Emergency Operations Bureau in its headquarters.

''It wasn't us. I don't know who sent it,'' Sgt. Richard Pena said. ''It might have been our guys, but we're still looking into it.''

Later, Deputy Tony Moore said the Sheriff's Department had indeed determined that the Monterey Park Fire Department send the alert.

''We were able to track it down,'' Moore said. ''They're working on trying to find out why the test was done.''

It was unclear how many people were reached by the alert.

In the KTLA newsroom, dozens of phones went off at the same time, all together sounding an alarming high-pitched tone.

Questions have been raised about the reach of the high-pitched emergency alert system after an early morning Amber Alert notification woke many California residents last August.

Wireless Emergency Alerts are part of a system developed by the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to let local, state and federal agencies target users of some cellphone models by sending alerts through geographically specific cell towers, according to the FCC website.

KTLA's Melissa Pamer contributed to this report.

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Thu, 05 Dec 2013 01:39

The use of Adderall and other stimulants started for many with all-nighters in college and is making its way to the workplace. Getty Images

Ella Benson was a junior in college the first time she took it. With a class assignment due, she was offered the drug as a means to stay up all night and crank out something respectable by morning.

It worked, and Benson now says it was the first time she ''really connected'' with something she was working on.

''It was the first paper I wrote where I felt like I came up with an idea that was meaningful and important,'' she said. ''I got an A on it.''

An A for Adderall.

Now, at 26, Benson is a professional writer who reports for a major news publication and has had her byline in The New York Times. She keeps an ''emergency stash'' of Adderall nearby for when she's working on a big story and has to stay awake all night.

Benson (whose name, like all the people in this story who discuss their ADHD drug use, has been changed to protect her identity) is typical of a growing population of young adults who went to college in the 2000s. As they age out into the workplace, they're taking with them the ADHD med habits they developed in college '-- and finding the drugs still work.

When I take Adderall, I think, 'This must be how really successful, smart people are all the time.'

While it is tempting to chalk up the rising use of ADHD drugs among young adults to a generational trend of lax morals and blind eyes towards addiction and other health risks, a more complete explanation suggests an environment that encourages stimulant use. A hugely popular New York Times op-ed written by Tim Kreider pointed out what is fast becoming the modern condition: guilt and anxiety over any minute not spent working or promoting that work.

In this culture of perfection, in which the worst thing someone could be is not busy, many young adults have latched onto a drug that makes them go faster, harder and stronger at work.

''When I take Adderall, I think, 'This must be how really successful, smart people are all the time,''' said Jonathan Collier, 27, who works in a senior position at a New York production house. ''I wish so badly I was one of those people.''

In his 2008 book, ''Outliers,'' Malcolm Gladwell theorized that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill and share the kind of success enjoyed by ''those people'' '-- the Bill Gateses and Paul Allens of the world. His theory may serve as both an explanation and a product of the current culture. Gladwell, after all, came to the conclusion that the way to succeed is to put the blinders on: to ignore all the distractions inherent in contemporary society and to single-mindedly and doggedly pursue a goal.

Dr. Henry Abraham, a psychiatrist who has treated doctors, lawyers and other high achievers, said stimulants now are used often in a way that is closer to sports medicine than it is to psychiatry: to enhance performance. That's because the working world '-- like college before it, and, for some, prep school before that '-- is a competition, and people are looking to get an edge. Everyone wants to get those 10,000 hours, but not everyone is wired to do it naturally. So, many turn to Adderall and other ADHD drugs.

The modern brain

It's unclear how many adults take ADHD drugs, but it is evident that use is skyrocketing. According to IMS Health, in 2007, 5.6 million monthly prescriptions for ADHD medications were written for people ages 20 to 39. By 2011, that number had jumped to 14 million, a staggering 150 percent increase. Anecdotal evidence also shows a large number of people illegally taking ADHD drugs without a prescription.

''I think part of the increase in the rate of (ADHD drug) prescriptions,'' said Dr. David Meyer, a professor of psychology, cognition and perception at the University of Michigan, ''is that people both younger and older are coming to feel totally overloaded with bunches of information and are trying to cope with the increasing demands as best they can.''

Our brains have mechanisms of executive function, similar to a computer operating system, he said. These mechanisms keep people's situational awareness up to speed and coordinate progress on various real-world tasks. But these executive functions are under constant attack in the modern world.

''Even a 10- (or) 20-second interruption can make you lose your situational awareness entirely,'' Meyer said.

I feel uncomfortable using it to write. It would mean that what I consider my greatest skill is a lie.

In many of the information-based jobs available to young professionals, those interruptions are not just unavoidable collateral damage; they are baked into the job itself.

''I'm expected to consume so much media and data every day on top of what I'm already supposed to do,'' said Cristina Long, a 24-year-old public-relations professional. ''I need to stay ahead of the trends.''

Long was hired to click everywhere and look at everything, all the while creating cohesive results.

The active ingredients in Adderall target the parts of the brain responsible for executive function. In other words, Adderall solves the very problems the modern world creates. Long now uses the drug daily, as do the many adults who don't have ADHD but are seeking an edge in the workplace.

'Cosmetic neurology'

The drugs are so popular because they work.

''Adderall opens up time for you,'' Collier said, emphasizing that using it enables him to get all his work done and still have time to work on other projects.

Long said the stimulant clears her thoughts and helps her produce better work.

For Benson, taking Adderall is like playing a video game and getting an extra life. She said she gets more done and is a better writer.

All three said using the drug made their lives better.

At the same time, Benson admitted she struggles with her use.

''I feel uncomfortable using it to write,'' she said. ''It would mean that what I consider my greatest skill is a lie.''

So she now stays up all night writing, then, if necessary, takes Adderall the next morning to get through the workday.

Benson's complex relationship with the drug illustrates problems Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, a professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, has highlighted in connection to what he refers to as ''cosmetic neurology'' '-- the use of drugs like Adderall for performance enhancement.

Essentially, Chatterjee argues that the advances in cognitive neuroscience and neuropharmacology mean the question of to what extent we want to create and live in a drug-enhanced society may no longer be relevant. That way of life is already here, and society must now account for the moral implications it brings.

Like cosmetic surgery, cosmetic neurology will likely be available only to those with the disposable income to afford elective medicine, expanding the already wide gap between the haves and have-nots. Drugs like Adderall already tend to circulate among the wealthy '-- those who come from competitive universities and have access to health care that covers expensive prescriptions.

An added concern is that the growing use of stimulants in the workplace will produce a new work environment in which use of neurological enhancement through pharmaceuticals is just one more thing expected of the perfect worker.

Benson said using the drugs doesn't make her feel guilty. Collier agreed, saying, ''It's more about being honest with yourself '-- if it's something you're comfortable with.''

But not everyone feels comfortable with it, yet they might feel compelled to use such drugs because of the pressure to keep up.

''Everyone is in an arms race of accomplishment,'' Chatterjee said.

How can society account for the coercive nature of a culture of perfection?

Dr. Todd Essig, a psychologist in New York, said medical professionals must address neurological performance enhancement openly and facilitate safer use and better oversight of such drugs rather than sweep it under the rug.

''Adderall is just the tip of the iceberg,'' Essig said. ''There are lots more drugs coming down the pike. The way we set up our cultural model for dealing with psychologically performance-enhancing drugs is a real serious question.''

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Source: bertb news feed

Sun, 01 Dec 2013 14:27

Dr Eugene McCarthy points to features that distinguish us from primatesHe says that the only animals which also have these features are pigsControversial hypothesis has been met by significant oppositionBy Damien Gayle

PUBLISHED: 04:45 EST, 30 November 2013 | UPDATED: 05:49 EST, 30 November 2013

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The human species began as the hybrid offspring of a male pig and a female chimpanzee, a leading geneticist has suggested.

The startling claim has been made by Eugene McCarthy, of the University of Georgia, who is also one of the worlds leading authorities on hybridisation in animals.

He points out that while humans have many features in common with chimps, we also have a large number of distinguishing characteristics not found in any other primates.

The origin of the species? A remarkable new theory advanced by a leading geneticist suggests that human beings may have originally emerged as the hybrid offspring of a male pig and a female chimpanzee

Dr McCarthy says these divergent characteristics are most likely the result of a hybrid origin at some point far back in human evolutionary history.

What's more, he suggests, there is one animal that has all of the traits which distinguish humans from our primate cousins in the animal kingdom.

'What is this other animal that has all these traits?' he asks rhetorically. 'The answer is Sus scrofa, the ordinary pig.'

Dr McCarthy elaborates his astonishing hypothesis in an article on Macroevolution.net, a website he curates. He is at pains to point out that that it is merely a hypothesis, but he presents compelling evidence to support it.

Scientists currently suppose that chimpanzees are humans' closest living evolutionary relatives, a theory amply backed by genetic evidence.

However, as Dr McCarthy points out, despite this genetic similarity, there are a massive number of divergent anatomical characteristics distinguishing the two species.

These distinguishing characteristics, including hairless skin, a thick layer of subcutaneous fat, light-coloured eyes, protruding noses and heavy eyelashes, to name but a few, are unmistakeably porcine, he suggests.

There are also a number of less obvious but equally inexplicable similarities between humans and pigs in the structure of the skin and organs.

Indeed, pig skin tissues and heart valves can be used in medicine because of their similarity and compatibility with the human body.

Similarities: Dr Eugene McCarthy suggests that humans' hairless skin and subcutaneous fat could be explained by porcine ancestry

Dr McCarthy says that the original pig-chimp hook up was probably followed by several generations of 'backcrossing', where the offspring of that pairing lived among chimps and mated with them - becoming more like chimps and less like pigs with every new generation.

This also helps to explain the problem of relative infertility in hybrids. Dr McCarthy points out that the belief that all hybrids are sterile is in fact false, and in many cases hybrid animals are able to breed with mates of the same species of either parent.

After several generations the hybrid strain would have become fertile enough to breed amongst themselves, Dr McCarthy says.

Unsurprisingly, Dr McCarthy's hypothesis has come in for substantial criticism from orthodox evolutionary biologists and their Creationist opponents alike.

One important criticism, which dubs his theory the 'Monkey-F******-A-Pig hypothesis', is that there is little chance that pigs and chimps could be interfertile. The two orders of creatures, according to evolutionary theory, diverged roughly 80million years ago, a ScienceBlogs post points out.

'[J]ust the gradual accumulation of molecular differences in sperm and egg recognition proteins would mean that pig sperm wouldn't recognize a chimpanzee egg as a reasonable target for fusion,' PZ Myers writes.

Furthermore, the blogger explains, while chimps have 48 chromosomes, pigs have just 38.

He adds: 'Hybridizing a pig and a chimp is like taking half the dancers from a performance of Swan Lake and the other half from a performance of Giselle and throwing them together on stage to assemble something. It's going to be a catastrophe.'

Finally, he suggests rather impudently that Dr McCarthy do the experimental work himself and try mating with a pig to see how far he gets.

But Dr McCarthy believes that, in the case of humans and other creatures, his hybrid modification to evolutionary theory can account for a range of phenomena that Darwinian evolution alone has difficulty explaining.

Despite the opinions of some peer reviewers that Dr McCarthy's work presents a potentially paradigm-shifting new take on conventional views of the origins of new life forms, he has had difficulty finding a publisher, so he has chosen to publish a book-length manuscript outlining his ideas on his website.

In its conclusion he writes: 'I must admit that I initially felt a certain amount of repugnance at the idea of being a hybrid. The image of a pig mating with an ape is not a pretty one, nor is that of a horde of monstrous half-humans breeding in a hybrid swarm.

'But the way we came to be is not so important as the fact that we now exist. As every Machiavellian knows, good things can emerge from ugly processes, and I think the human race is a very good thing. Moreover, there is something to be said for the idea of having the pig as a relative.

'My opinion of this animal has much improved during the course of my research. Where once I thought of filth and greed, I now think of intelligence, affection, loyalty, and adaptability, with an added touch of joyous sensuality '-- qualities without which humans would not be human.'

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 03:35

(C) Martin Harvey/Corbis

Property or person? A series of lawsuits could free U.S. chimpanzees from captivity.

This morning, an animal rights group known as the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a lawsuit in a New York Supreme Court in an attempt to get a judge to declare that chimpanzees are legal persons and should be freed from captivity. The suit is the first of three to be filed in three New York counties this week. They target two research chimps at Stony Brook University and two chimps on private property, and are the opening salvo in a coordinated effort to grant ''legal personhood'' to a variety of animals across the United States.

If NhRP is successful in New York, it could be a significant step toward upending millennia of law defining animals as property and could set off a ''chain reaction'' that could bleed over to other jurisdictions, says Richard Cupp, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and a proponent of focusing on animal welfare rather than animal rights. ''But if they lose it could be a significant step backward for the movement. They're playing with fire.''

The litigation has been in the works since 2007, when animal rights attorney Steven Wise founded NhRP, an association of about 60 lawyers, scientists, and policy experts. The group argues that cognitively advanced animals like chimpanzees and dolphins are so self-aware that keeping them in captivity'--whether a zoo or research laboratory'--is tantamount to slavery. ''It's a terrible torture we inflict on them, and it has to stop,'' Wise says. ''And all of human law says the way things stop is when courts and legislatures recognize that the being imprisoned is a legal person.''

NhRP spent 5 years researching the best legal strategy'--and best jurisdiction'--for its first cases. The upshot: a total of three lawsuits to be filed in three New York trial courts this week on behalf of four resident chimpanzees. One, named Tommy, lives in Gloversville in a ''used trailer lot '... isolated in a cage in a dark shed,'' according to an NhRP press release. Another, Kiko, resides in a cage on private property in Niagara Falls, the group says. The final two, Hercules and Leo, are research chimps at Stony Brook University. Wise says that 11 scientists have filed affidavits in support of the group's claims; most of them, including Jane Goodall, have worked with nonhuman primates.

In each case, NhRP is petitioning judges with a writ of habeas corpus, which allows a person being held captive to have a say in court. In a famous 1772 case, an English judge allowed such a writ for a black slave named James Somerset, tacitly acknowledging that he was a person'--not a piece of property'--and subsequently freed him. The case helped spark the eventual abolition of slavery in England and the United States. Wise is hoping for something similar for the captive chimps. If his group wins any of the current cases, it will ask that the animals be transferred to a chimpanzee sanctuary in Florida. Any loss, he says, will immediately be appealed.

Regardless of what happens, NhRP is already preparing litigation for other states, and not all of it involves chimpanzees. ''Gorillas, orangutans, elephants, whales, dolphins'--any animal that has these sorts of cognitive capabilities, we would be comfortable bringing suit on behalf of,'' Wise says. Some would be research animals; others would be creatures that simply live in confined spaces, such as zoos and aquariums. ''No matter how these first cases turn out, we're going to move onto other cases, other states, other species of animals,'' he says. ''We're going to file as many lawsuits as we can over the next 10 or 20 years.''

Frankie Trull, the president of the National Association for Biomedical Research in Washington, D.C., says her organization will fight any attempts at personhood in the courts. Chimpanzees, she notes, are important models for behavioral research, as well as for developing vaccines against viruses like hepatitis C. ''Assigning rights to animals akin to what humans have would be chaotic for the research community.''

Anatomist Susan Larson, who studies the Stony Brook chimpanzees to shed light on the origin of bipedalism in humans, says she is "very shocked and upset" by the lawsuit. She says the chimps live in an indoor enclosure comprised of three rooms'--''about the size of an average bedroom'''--plus another room where they can climb, hang, and jump from ladders and tree trunks. ''Everything I do with these animals I've done on myself,'' she says. ''I understand that animal rights activists don't want these animals mistreated, but they're hampering our ability to study them before they become extinct.''

The more immediate threat to Larson's research isn't NhRP, however'--it is the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In June, NIH announced plans to retire all but 50 of its 360 research chimpanzees and phase out much of the chimp research it supports. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, meanwhile, has recommended that captive chimps be listed as endangered, which would limit any research that isn't in their best interest. ''Soon, the type of work I do will no longer be possible,'' Larson says. ''They have effectively ended my research program.''

Stephen Ross, the director of the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, Illinois, wonders if there's a compromise. Ross, who has studied chimpanzees for more than 20 years and played a role in crafting NIH's new policy, advocates ending private ownership of chimps and invasive research. All other chimpanzees, he says, whether located at zoos or universities, should live in large enclosures, with access to the outside, and in group sizes of at least seven individuals. ''You don't need personhood to do that,'' he says. ''I think we share a common philosophy,'' he says of NhRP. ''We want to make things better for chimps. We just disagree on how to get there.''

To participate in a live video chat on this topic, check out this week's ScienceLIVE: Should Animals be Granted Legal Rights?

A more detailed version of this story will appear in the 6 December issue of Science.

*Clarification, 2 December, 4 p.m.: This item has been updated to reflect Richard Cupp's position on animal rights.

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Source: The TSA Blog

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 15:35

Here's your travel tip for this week: Enjoying the benefits of TSA Pre'''' just got a little easier with the rollout of the new application process.Starting tomorrow (Dec. 4), interested travelers may enroll directly into TSA Pre'''' for expedited screening benefits. Travelersmay visit an application center to provide biographic information (name, date of birth, address, etc.), fingerprints and valid required identity and citizenship/immigration documentation. Applicants also have the option to apply online to provide basic information and make an appointment before visiting an enrollment center.Applicants will be able to check their status online within five days and written responses will take approximately two-three weeks.TSA's first enrollment center is located on the public side of the Indianapolis International Airport (IND).TSA plans to open additional enrollment centers in the New York City area, Washington, D.C. metro area and Los Angeles area by the end of the year. By spring of 2014, TSA plans to open more than 300 enrollment centers.Eligible participants use dedicated TSA Pre'''' lanes at participating airports for screening benefits which could include no longer removing the following items:Shoes3-1-1 compliant bag from carry-onLaptop from bagLight outerwear/jacketBelt The $85 fee covers a five-year period.A U.S. passport is not required to enroll, only proof of U.S. is citizenship needed.Children 12 and under can travel with you through the TSA Pre'''' lane.Please visit TSA.gov to make an appointment at an enrollment center and to start the ''pre-enrollment'' process.See you next Tuesday with more travel tips.If you have a travel related issue or question that needs an immediate answer, you can contact us byclicking here.

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Mon, 02 Dec 2013 16:36

2 December 2013Last updated at 07:10 ET A court in France has ordered Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to block 16 video-streaming sites from their search results.

The case was brought by five groups representing film companies, distributors and producers.

The High Court in Paris ruled the websites were dedicated to the "distribution of works without consent of their creators".

Several internet service providers were also ordered to block the sites.

The two-year legal battle involved the streaming of copyrighted content on sites including allostreaming, Fifostream and dpstream.

The court said the sites broke French intellectual property laws and were "almost entirely dedicated" to streaming content without the owners' permission.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo must now take measures to ensure the blocked pages cannot be found in a list of search results.

ISPs, including Orange and Bouygues Telecom, will also have to prevent users from being able to access the sites.

Legitimising theftIn a statement, the groups representing the rights holders said the ruling "recognised the merits of the approach [of] forcing ISPs and search engines to cooperate with right holders in the protection of the law of literary and artistic property on the internet".

Some of the companies involved in the case told the court blocking the streaming websites was unworkable as users just created new sites under a different name and used forums to tell each other where pirated content could be found.

Google said it was disappointed with the court's verdict.

"We are committed to helping content owners fight piracy across Google's tools, and we will continue to work with them so that they can make the best use of our state of the art copyright protection tools," the company said in a statement.

The Motion Picture Association (MPA), which represents six major Hollywood studios, said it welcomed the outcome of the court case and that search engines had a responsibility to help users get a "high-quality viewing experience".

"Search engines are incredibly skilful, yet they are still leading consumers to illegal money-making sites even when the searcher is seeking legal content online," said Chris Marcich, president of MPA in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

"The present situation is confusing for consumers, damaging the legal download market and legitimising copyright theft. The decision in France clearly is a step in this direction."

The search companies and ISPs have two weeks to implement blocking procedures.

In a separate case in Ireland the Irish subsidiaries of Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music will appear at the High Court on Monday.

They will ask the court to order five of the country's largest ISPs to block access to the file sharing site Kickass Torrents.

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Thu, 05 Dec 2013 15:23

Australia is preparing to block public access to 10,000 websites deemed to carry ''unwanted content''.

By Bonnie Malkin in Sydney

The websites will be blocked as part of a government-sponsored trial of its filter technology that will start before Christmas and last six weeks.

The government has already identified 1300 websites that it wants to black list as part of the clean feeds scheme.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the sites mostly contained child pornography and other unwatned content, including images and videos.

''While the ACMA blacklist is currently around 1300 URLs, the pilot will test against this list '' as well as filtering for a range of URLs to around 10,000 '' so that the impacts on network performance of a larger blacklist can be examined,'' se said.

The government is calling for ISP providers to express interest in taking part in the trial. Just one ISP has volunteered so far.

A spokesman for Mr Conroy said: ''The pilot will provide an invaluable opportunity for ISPs to inform the Government's approach.

''The live pilot will provide valuable real-world evidence of the potential impact on internet speeds and costs to industry and will help ensure we implement a filtering solution that is efficient, effective and easy for Australian families to use.''

A trial of web-filtering technology earler this year found it could slow internet access by as much as 87 per cent and by at least 2 per cent. Australia's internet service is already notoriously sluggish.

The proposed filter is highly unpopular with civil liberty groups and the internet service industry.

Colin Jacobs, board member of Electronic Frontiers Australia said he was concerned at what would be deemed ''unwanted content''.

''It is unclear how ACMA will scale up their blacklist to 10,000 websites and what will go on the list,'' he told the Melbourne Herald-Sun.

''Conroy said the list would contain illegal and unwanted content but we still have to see what would end up on that list.

''Under the current mandate that includes adult material, which would mean most material that could be rated R and, in some circumstances, material rated MA15+.''

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Source: VK: Home

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 09:19

Bewerkt door: redactie '' 02/12/13, 07:13 '' bron: ANP/BuzzT

(C) anp. Studenten in de bibliotheek van de Erasmus Universiteit in Rotterdam. (Archieffoto)

Studenten worden door de de Nederlandse inlichtingendienst AIVD vaak benaderd om informant te worden. Zij worden onder meer geworven om inlichtingen over studentenprotesten in Nederland of het buitenland te geven. Dat schrijft het AD op basis van eigen onderzoek.

(C) ANP.

Uit een rondgang langs meerdere Nederlandse studenten die het afgelopen jaar zijn benaderd, blijkt dat de meesten zich hierdoor overrompeld en ge¯ntimideerd voelden. Allen bleken in eerste instantie benaderd te zijn door mensen die zich voorstelden als een ambtenaar van Binnenlandse Zaken. De inlichtingendienst vroeg hen onder meer naar informatie over China, Egypte, demonstraties en krakersbijeenkomsten.

'Het gaat om een kwetsbare groep'De AIVD mag iedereen rekruteren omdat het om de staatsveiligheid gaat, hoewel niemand mag worden gedwongen. SP-Kamerlid Ronald van Raak vindt echter dat studenten niet als informant moeten optreden. 'Het gaat om een kwetsbare groep.'

'Dat de AIVD studenten benadert, verbaast mij niet. Het valt onder human intelligence', aldus Beatrice de Graaf, hoogleraar Conflict en Veiligheid aan de Universiteit Leiden. 'Als er signalen zijn dat een groep zal radicaliseren, moet de AIVD dat in een voorstadium opmerken.'

Studenten zelf twijfelen of de AIVD wel goede redenen heeft. Zo werden enkelen ook benaderd tijdens de geweldloze demonstraties tegen de onderwijsbezuinigingen in 2011.

De geheime dienst kreeg in 1981 ook al kritiek op het ronselen van studenten. Toenmalig minister Ed van Thijn (Binnenlandse Zaken) moest zich verantwoorden toen een student was gevraagd om te infiltreren in een vredesbeweging.

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Tue, 03 Dec 2013 17:27

People often reveal their private emotions in tiny, fleeting facial expressions, visible only to a best friend '-- or to a skilled poker player. Now, computer software is using frame-by-frame video analysis to read subtle muscular changes that flash across our faces in milliseconds, signaling emotions like happiness, sadness and disgust.

With face-reading software, a computer's webcam might spot the confused expression of an online student and provide extra tutoring. Or computer-based games with built-in cameras could register how people are reacting to each move in the game and ramp up the pace if they seem bored.

But the rapidly developing technology is far from infallible, and it raises many questions about privacy and surveillance.

Ever since Darwin, scientists have systematically analyzed facial expressions, finding that many of them are universal. Humans are remarkably consistent in the way their noses wrinkle, say, or their eyebrows move as they experience certain emotions. People can be trained to note tiny changes in facial muscles, learning to distinguish common expressions by studying photographs and video. Now computers can be programmed to make those distinctions, too.

Companies in this field include Affectiva, based in Waltham, Mass., and Emotient, based in San Diego. Affectiva used webcams over two and a half years to accumulate and classify about 1.5 billion emotional reactions from people who gave permission to be recorded as they watched streaming video, said Rana el-Kaliouby, the company's co-founder and chief science officer. These recordings served as a database to create the company's face-reading software, which it will offer to mobile software developers starting in mid-January.

The company strongly believes that people should give their consent to be filmed, and it will approve and control all of the apps that emerge from its algorithms, Dr. Kaliouby said.

Face-reading technology may one day be paired with programs that have complementary ways of recognizing emotion, such as software that analyzes people's voices, said Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster. If computers reach the point where they can combine facial coding, voice sensing, gesture tracking and gaze tracking, he said, a less stilted way of interacting with machines will ensue.

For some, this type of technology raises an Orwellian specter. And Affectiva is aware that its face-reading software could stir privacy concerns. But Dr. Kaliouby said that none of the coming apps using its software could record video of people's faces.

''The software uses its algorithms to read your expressions,'' she said, ''but it doesn't store the frames.''

So far, the company's algorithms have been used mainly to monitor people's expressions as a way to test ads, movie trailers and television shows in advance. (It is much cheaper to use a program to analyze faces than to hire people who have been trained in face-reading.)

Affectiva's clients include Unilever, Mars and Coca-Cola. The advertising research agency Millward Brown says it has used Affectiva's technology to test about 3,000 ads for clients.

Face-reading software is unlikely to infer precise emotions 100 percent of the time, said Tadas Baltrusaitis, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge who has written papers on the automatic analysis of facial expressions. The algorithms have improved, but ''they are not perfect, and probably never will be,'' he said.

Apps that can respond to facial cues may find wide use in education, gaming, medicine and advertising, said Winslow Burleson, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction at Arizona State University. ''Once we can package this facial analysis in small devices and connect to the cloud,'' he said, ''we can provide just-in-time information that will help individuals, moment to moment throughout their lives.''

People with autism, who can have a hard time reading facial expressions, may be among the beneficiaries, Dr. Burleson said. By wearing Google Glass or other Internet-connected goggles with cameras, they could get clues to the reactions of the people with whom they were talking '-- clues that could come via an earpiece as the program translates facial expressions.

But facial-coding technology raises privacy concerns as more and more of society's interactions are videotaped, said Ginger McCall, a lawyer and privacy advocate in Washington.

''The unguarded expressions that flit across our faces aren't always the ones we want other people to readily identify,'' Ms. McCall said '-- for example, during a job interview. ''We rely to some extent on the transience of those facial expressions.''

She added: ''Private companies are developing this technology now. But you can be sure government agencies, especially in security, are taking an interest, too.''

Ms. McCall cited several government reports, including a National Defense Research Institute report this year that discusses the technology and its possible applications in airport security screening.

She said the programs could be acceptable for some uses, such as dating services, as long as people agreed in advance to have webcams watch and analyze the emotions reflected in their faces. ''But without consent,'' Ms. McCall said, ''they are problematic '-- and this is a technology that could easily be implemented without a person's knowledge.''

EMAIL: novelties@nytimes.com.

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Mon, 02 Dec 2013 08:14

RIP Paul Walker

David Chase TaylorDecember 1, 2013Truther.org

SWITZERLAND, Zurich '-- Based on evidence acquired to date, it appears that Fast and the Furious star Paul Walker was assassinated in a drone strike while riding in a car in Los Angeles, California on November 30, 2013. While initial reports state that the car split in two after striking a tree at a high rate of speed, one look at the crash scene (see photo below) and it's evident that the tree (no more than 6 inches in diameter) was not solely responsible for cutting in half, exploding and completely destroying the 2005 Porsche Carrera GT. A few inches of wood are obviously no match for thousands of pounds of forged steel allegedly traveling at an extremely high-rate of speed.. In other words, what is being alleged as the cause of death by authorities is scientifically impossible. The Walker crash scene is eerily similar to what is known to be a missile strike on a civilian vehicle and almost identical to that of fiery crash witnessed when Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings was assassinated on June 18, 2013, in Los Angeles, California. As evidenced in a video taken by witnesses who arrived at the crash scene only moments after the explosion, pieces of Walker's Carrera GT can be seen strewn across the street in every direction, characteristic of a high-impact missile strike.

It's no secret that drones are operating in American airspace, the only question is whether or not they are now openly assassinating U.S. citizens, something President Obama has already admitted doing. Roughly 4 months ago on July 26, 2013, the FBI informed U.S. Senator Rand Paul in an unclassified letter they have flown drones over U.S. airspace a total of 10 times in the past 7 years, a statistic which is likely much higher. Aside from the deaths of Walker and Hastings, other suspected drone strikes include the West Texas Fertilizer Company explosion on April 17, 2013, in which a missile can be seen striking the building just prior to the explosion, as well as the explosion which killed the 19 elite firefighters near Yarnell Hill, Arizona, on June 30, 2013. Curiously, the autopsies and photos of the 19 firefighters are being withheld from the victims families because they are most likely not consistent with the now retracted preliminary autopsy report which stated that burns and smoke inhalation were the cause of death in all 19 fatalities. Considering that the firefighters suffered a radio blackout just prior to the explosion (i.e., electronic blackouts generally precede black operations) and that drones are admittedly being used fight forest fires (or start them), the likelihood of foul play in the tragedy is exponentially higher. Although the FBI's drone missions are still classified, they're evidently comprised of assassinations which are intended to look like ''accidents''.

About the AuthorDavid Chase Taylor is an American journalist and the editor-in-chief of Truther.org. Taylor currently lives in Z¼rich, Switzerland where he has applied for political asylum after the release of The Nuclear Bible, a book credited with foiling a state-sponsored nuclear terror attack upon Super Bowl XLV in Dallas, Texas on February 6, 2011. Taylor has also authored The Bio-Terror Bible, a book and website exposing the 2013 global bio-terror pandemic. To date, Truther.org has identified and exposed over 50 Obama sanctioned terror plots, as well as the Alex Jones' links to STRATFOR.

Truther.org Legal DisclaimerTruther.org's stated purpose is to prevent terror attacks by drawing unwanted global attention to these terror plots prior to their fruition. State-Sponsored Terror Threat Assessments (SSTTA), assertions, and forecasts made by Truther.org DO NOT necessarily imply that these terror events will transpire in reality but rather that there is a distinct possibility they could theoretically occur based on the cited data. Historically speaking, once a major false-flag is exposed (e.g., the Super Bowl XLV Nuclear Terror Plot), the terror plot is immediately canceled or postponed. State-sponsored acts of terror must have a prior paper trail in order to set-up patsies, prime scapegoats, create plausible deniability, as well as mislead the public from the true perpetrators of terror. By first identifying and then connecting the dots of said terror paper trail, Truther.org has successfully blown the whistle on numerous terror related plots. Please spread the word and help make terrorism a thing of the past. Blessed are the Peacemakers. Namaste

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Source: WTF RLY REPORT

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 09:09

IB Times

A death hoax involving Fast & Furious star Paul Walker was swirling around cyberspace on the eve of his actual demise in a car crash in Los Angeles.

The hoax is believed to have emerged from a parody news site, MediaMass.net.

The website had carried an article stating that the 40-year-old actor had died and quoted one of Walker's representatives as denying the report.

Responding to the hoax, Walker's representative said: ''He joins the long list of celebrities who have been victimised by this hoax. He's still alive and well, stop believing what you see on the internet.''

Although many users recognised it as a hoax, some are said to have actually believed it.

Following the article, a user posted a message on an online forum: ''So I work in Santa Clarita at an automotive performance shop and a good customer just came from Paul's shop AE (Always Evolving) where they were having a car now. It seems Paul went for a ride in a guys Porsche and they ended up around a phone pole, the car burst onto flames and rumour has it Paul is dead. I hope he got it wrong but he insists it was Paul. I'm reluctant to post this being just hearsay, but the guy who informed us is a wealthy car enthusiast that just pulled up in his Maserati and nothing to gain from a lie, and has video on his phone of the burning car. It it does turn out to be true, damn'... RIP Paul.''

However, hours after the hoax, the news of the actual death emerged.

Despite official confirmation of his death, internet rumours are rife that the fatal car crash itself is a fake.

IB Times

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Tue, 03 Dec 2013 17:32

By Holly Yan and Martin Savidge, CNN

updated 9:59 AM EST, Tue December 3, 2013

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

The 2005 Porsche Carrera GT goes up to 208 mph and has more than 600 horsepower"It was beyond a super car. It is what we call a hyper car," a Car and Driver editor saysThe car costs $450,000 new, and an oil change alone costs $900(CNN) -- It has three times the horsepower of the average car. It's notoriously difficult to handle, even for professional drivers. And now, it's known as the car actor Paul Walker was riding in when he died.

Both Walker and his driving team partner, who was behind the wheel, died after the 2005 Porsche Carrera GT they were in slammed into a pole and burst into flames. Los Angeles County authorities say speed was a factor in the crash and are investigating how fast the exotic car was going.

So why is the 2005 Porsche Carrera GT so different from other street cars? Here are five reasons:

1)It flies on the road

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The sports car has a top speed of 208 mph, a very high-revving V10 engine and more than 600 horsepower, said Eddie Alterman, editor-in-chief of Car and Driver magazine.

Police rule out 2nd vehicle in Walker crash

"This was not a car for novices," Alterman said. "Actually, the Carrera GT program began as a racing program."

Todd Trimble, an exotic car mechanic in Las Vegas, said the Carrera GT is a "very hard car to drive."

"It's (a) pure racer's car. You really need to know what you're doing when you drive them. And a lot of people are learning the hard way."

5 things to know about Roger Rodas, who died with Paul Walker

2)It's incredibly expensive

Brand new, the car costs $450,000.

An oil change alone costs $900, Trimble said.

3)The engine is in the middle

Having the engine in the middle of the car means it's more agile and turns more quickly than a car with the engine in the front or in the rear.

The Carrera GT is able to change direction "very quickly, very much like a race car," Alterman said.

"It was beyond a super car. It is what we call a hyper car."

4)It has no stability control

The Carrera GT is also unusual because it has no electronic stability control. That means it's unforgiving with mistakes.

"Stability control is really good at correcting slides, keeping the car from getting out of shape," race car driver Randy Pobst said.

Pobst coached the actors in the second "Fast & Furious" movie -- including Paul Walker.

"Paul was by far the best driver -- a natural car guy," he said.

Alterman said learning to drive a car like a Carrera GT can be extremely tricky.

"Every car is sort of different. And this one, especially since it had such a hair-trigger throttle, because it changed directions so quickly, there is a lot to learn."

5) There are only 1,300 of them

Porsche made only about 1,300 Carreras GTs -- and they're disappearing fast.

"They're getting rarer and rarer," Trimble said. "Most of the time, when they do get wrecked, there's not much left of them."

Walker and other stars who died during production

CNN's Sarah Aarthun contributed to this report.

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 03:19

One evening in late May, four senior employees of Merck, the pharmaceutical company, sat in the bar of a Hilton Hotel in Rockville, Maryland, wearing metal lapel pins stamped with the word ''TEAM.'' They were in a state of exhausted overpreparedness. The next morning, they were to drive a few miles to the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration and attend a meeting that would decide the future of suvorexant, a new sleeping pill that the company had been developing for a decade. Merck's team hoped to persuade a committee of seventeen, composed largely of neurologists, that suvorexant was safe and effective. The committee, which would also hear the views of F.D.A. scientists, would deliver a recommendation to the agency. If the government approved suvorexant'--whose mechanism, inspired partly by research into narcoleptic dogs, is unlike anything on the market'--it would be launched within a year. Some industry analysts had described it as a possible blockbuster, a term usually reserved for drugs with annual earnings of a billion dollars. Merck had not created a blockbuster since 2007, when it launched Januvia, a diabetes drug. The company was impatient. A factory in Las Piedras, Puerto Rico, was ready to start production.

David Michelson, who runs Merck's clinical research in neuroscience, said of suvorexant, ''It's huge. It's a major product.'' He was sitting perfectly still in his chair; his hair flopped a little over his forehead. He looked as if he were waiting in an airport for a very late flight.

For months, in rooms across Merck's archipelago of mismatched buildings north of Philadelphia, Michelson had taken part in role-playing rehearsals for the F.D.A. meeting. The focus had been on readying Joe Herring, another Merck neuroscientist; he would be the primary speaker, having run the later clinical trials of suvorexant. Herring, a straight-backed, athletic-looking man in his fifties, had just gone up to his room, for an early night. ''Joe had to find a way to be authentic,'' Michelson recalled. ''He had to find a way to engage with the audience without becoming too informal.'' During the meeting, Herring would have access to a library of twenty-one hundred and seventy PowerPoint slides.

The Merck team was frustrated. The F.D.A. had just shown them the draft of a presentation, titled ''Suvorexant Safety,'' that would be delivered by Ronald Farkas, an F.D.A. neuroscientist who had reviewed thousands of pages of Merck data. In a relentless PowerPoint sequence, Farkas made suvorexant sound disquieting, almost gothic. He noted suicidal thoughts among trial participants, and the risk of next-day sleepiness. He quoted from Merck's patient notes: ''Shortly after sleep onset, the patient had a dream that something dark approached her. The patient woke up several times and felt unable to move her arms and legs and unable to speak. Several hours later, she found herself standing at the window without knowing how she got there.'' A woman of sixty-eight lay down to sleep ''and had a feeling as if shocked, then felt paralyzed and heard vivid sounds of people coming up the stairs, with a sense of violent intent.'' A middle-aged man had a ''feeling of shadow falling over his body, hunted by enemies, hearing extremely loud screams.''

An F.D.A. presentation that focusses on individual ''adverse events'''--and draws attention to patients feeling ''hunted by enemies'''--is discouraging to a drug's sponsor. Michelson called the presentation ''somewhat unusual,'' and emitted a dry laugh.

Darryle Schoepp, the head of Merck's neuroscience division, was at the other end of the table. During the human trials of suvorexant, he noted, it had been taken two hundred and seventy thousand times, and ''every time you take a drug it's an opportunity for something to happen that the user can report.'' He added, ''Go back to the early days of Ambien. I wonder how many patient days of data they had with Ambien.''

Ambien, which is now available generically as zolpidem, is one of America's most popular drugs, and it played a role'--silent or spoken'--in many conversations that I had heard on visits to the Merck offices. Zolpidem was the cheap drug that suvorexant had to take on, if not unseat, in order to succeed in the sleep-medication market. In addition, rising public worry about risks associated with taking Ambien'--ranging from amnesiac devouring of Pop-Tarts to premature death'--had reduced the F.D.A.'s tolerance for side effects in sleep medications.

John Renger was also at the bar. A forty-four-year-old neuroscientist, he has a round face, cropped hair, and a neat goatee. He helped lead the company to the suvorexant molecule, and ran the first tests on rats, mice, dogs, and rhesus monkeys. He, too, was politely indignant about the F.D.A. ''They've taken the emphasis off efficacy,'' he said, adding, ''They're saying any residual effects are bad. But they're not looking at the balance'--'What is the improvement in this mechanism?' ''

The central nervous system is in an ever-adjusting balance between inhibition and excitation. Ambien, like alcohol or an anesthetic, triggers the brain's main inhibitory system, which depends on binding between GABA'--gamma-aminobutyric acid, a neurotransmitter'--and gaba receptors on the surface of billions of neurons. gaba receptors can be found throughout the brain, and when they're activated the brain slows. Ambien encourages the process by sticking to the receptors, holding open the door to the neurotransmitter. Suvorexant, which Merck describes as ''rationally designed'''--rather than stumbled upon, like most drugs'--influences a more precise set of neurotransmitters and receptors. Orexin neurotransmitters, first identified fifteen years ago, promote wakefulness. When suvorexant is in the brain, orexin is less likely to reach orexin receptors. Instead of promoting general, stupefying brain inactivity, suvorexant aims at standing in the way of a keep-awake signal. This difference may or may not come to mean a lot to insomniacs, but Merck's marketing is likely to encourage the perception that suvorexant ends the dance by turning off the music, whereas a drug like Ambien knocks the dancer senseless.

If the Merck scientists succeeded at the F.D.A., they would be the first to bring an orexin-related drug to market. ''It's an amazing achievement,'' Richard Hargreaves, the fourth colleague at the Hilton, said. ''Everyone should be really proud.'' But, he added, ''my worry is that a new mechanism is being evaluated on the science of an old mechanism.''

''With Ambien, you've got a drug that's got basically only onset,'' Renger said, dismissively. That is, it sends you to sleep but might not keep you asleep. ''Suvorexant has the onset, but it has the great maintenance, especially in the last third of the night, where other drugs fail.'' And even though suvorexant keeps working longer than Ambien, suvorexant patients don't feel groggier afterward, as you might expect. Impassioned, Renger imagined himself addressing the F.D.A.: ''Why aren't you giving this a chance?''

''Drugs usually have some side effects,'' Schoepp said. ''It's all benefit-risk.'' He added, ''There is some dose where suvorexant will be ultimately safe'--because nothing will happen. If you go low enough, it becomes homeopathic.''

They stood to go to their rooms. Schoepp murmured, ''I'd love to take it right now.''

Jean-Pierre Kaplan lives in a southern suburb of Paris. When I visited him this summer, he tricked his elderly dog into thinking there was a cat in the front yard that needed chasing, and then we sat down to lunch with Marie-Louise Pelus-Kaplan, his wife. Kaplan is seventy-four, and when he retired, in 2000, he was a patent lawyer. Before that, he was a chemist in the pharmaceutical industry, a career that ended unhappily. In the late seventies, while working in a laboratory a few miles from where we were eating, he co-invented the drug that became known as Ambien. Kaplan's name is one of two on the French and American patents.

In 2006, Ambien's manufacturer estimated that it had been taken twelve billion times worldwide. The drug was worth two billion dollars a year in American sales. (Ambien, which was patented in the U.S. in 1981, went generic in 2007.) Last year, there were sixty million prescriptions for sleeping pills in the U.S., and forty-three million of them were for some form of zolpidem, including Ambien C.R., a deftly repatented controlled-release pill. Over lunch, I asked Kaplan, who has not previously given interviews, if he'd ever taken Ambien. ''Never,'' he said, in accented English. ''I sleep very well.''

Pelus-Kaplan, a retired professor of early-modern history, teasingly explained that her husband almost never takes medication. He allows his doctor to write prescriptions, and he even picks up the pills at the pharmacy, ''but he never eats one. He says, 'Too dangerous.' ''

''If I need a drug, I would take it, but I don't need it!'' Kaplan said. ''When I get flu, I stay in bed. Drugs are very important when you don't want to lose time, but when you have plenty of time you stay in bed.'' His annual drug intake, he estimated, was no more than ten over-the-counter painkillers.

Zolpidem is part of a third generation of synthetic compounds that treat insomnia by attaching to GABA receptors. Such drugs were first introduced a century ago, long before the gaba system was identified. The first generation, barbiturates, effectively induce sleep, but can be addictive, and it's easy to overdose on them (Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Jimi Hendrix, Jean Seberg). In the second, safer generation are benzodiazepines, a class that has some mixture of sedative, muscle-relaxant, anticonvulsant, anti-anxiety, and amnesiac effects. These were invented in the fifties by Leo Sternbach, a chemist at Hoffmann-La Roche in New Jersey. He synthesized Librium and then Valium, which, between 1968 and 1981, was the most frequently prescribed drug in the Western world. Valium was marketed as a treatment for anxiety, but insomniacs also used it. The first benzodiazepine explicitly approved by the F.D.A. as a sleep medicine was Dalmane, launched by Hoffmann-La Roche in 1970. Halcion, a benzodiazepine from Upjohn, became the world's best-selling sleep aid after its launch, in 1982.

In the early seventies, Sternbach visited the offices of Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, Switzerland, and ran into Jean-Pierre Kaplan, who then worked there. Sternbach shook Kaplan's hand, and wished him well. Kaplan, who had grown up in Paris, was then a few years out of college. A mountain climber, he was long-haired and instinctively unaccommodating. ''I felt very free,'' he said. ''I had a very different comportment from the Swiss researchers. I did not fear anybody.'' (He was once told that he was the first Jewish scientist to be employed at the site. He is not Jewish.)

In 1973, Kaplan took a new job, at Synth(C)labo, in Bagneux, near Paris. L'Or(C)al had just bought a majority stake in the firm, and wanted to turn it into a major pharmaceutical force. After he identified some compounds with anticonvulsive properties, he felt that one of them was being improperly accelerated toward commercial development. He considered the drug ineffective at safe doses'--''a big waste of money for the company.'' (The drug, progabide, was eventually approved as an epilepsy treatment in France, but not elsewhere.) Kaplan says that this disagreement, along with his activities in a trade union, had already begun souring his relations with the company when, in 1978, a colleague made a passing suggestion: why not try to build something ''a little like zopiclone''?

Zopiclone, a compound that had been created several years earlier by a rival company, was an interesting oddity. Although its chemical structure was quite unlike that of a benzodiazepine, it acted just like one. It eventually beat zolpidem to market, as the first in a new category of sleep medication: ''z-drugs,'' or non-benzodiazepines. (Lunesta, approved by the F.D.A. in 2004, is a close variant of zopiclone.) Kaplan recalled, ''I thought, O.K., if zopiclone and benzodiazepines act on the same brain receptor, why don't I try to make another drug'--a hybrid? That was the gist of the invention.''

The molecule, when finished, had another important characteristic. At the lunch table, Kaplan began sketching in my notebook the chemical structure of LSD. He drew hexagons attached to other hexagons. One of them had a tail of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon. This tail helps to make LSD unusually effective at reaching the brain from the bloodstream. He said of LSD, ''I knew that this kind of structure was very active in the brain.'' A similar tail was incorporated into zolpidem. ''This was important, to have activity in the brain. Maybe it increases the activity one hundred or one thousand times.'' (I asked Kaplan if he had taken LSD. ''Never!'')

He and Pascal George'--a younger colleague whom Kaplan described as ''sympathetic and brilliant'''--started by building wooden models, including ones for Valium, Halcion, and zopiclone. Colored one-inch spheres, representing atoms, were connected by thin rods, creating models the size of a shoebox. This was a more empirical, architectural approach than is typical in a lot of pharmaceutical chemistry. Kaplan and George tried to identify what these molecules had in common, structurally, that allowed them to affect the brain in the same way. Kaplan told me that their thinking wasn't wildly creative, but it was agile: ''You know, at that time it was maybe clever, because you have no computer. Now it's routine work.''

George wrote a report describing a few possible types of new chemical compounds. Working separately, they built molecules of the first two types: about ten of one, five of the other. These were unpromising. A third series, made by George, looked better. When it was tested on animals, Kaplan said, ''it was clear that it would be a great success. After the very first compound, I knew.'' But in 1980, while this work was still under way, Kaplan was taken off the project. In his account, Synth(C)labo, eager to get rid of him, ''didn't want to give me the merit of the invention.'' From then on, George ran the research. Kaplan heard only rumors about how the compounds were testing.

That fall, Synth(C)labo applied for a French patent on a series of seventy-seven compounds. The company knew that one of the compounds had far more pharmaceutical promise than the others, but did not need to disclose this to industry competitors. So the star molecule was also hidden from Kaplan, even though his name was at the top of the document. He showed me the patent. ''I was named the first inventor, but did not have the results of the compound I proposed!'' he said. He looked down a list of seventy-seven chemical formulas, and pointed to the seventy-fifth: this was Ambien.

Although Kaplan felt increasingly unwelcome at Synth(C)labo, he would not resign. The company eventually moved him to an office in central Paris, to a phantom job in an empty room. He left Synth(C)labo in 1984, and never worked as a scientist again, considering himself blacklisted. ''He was furious,'' Marie-Louise Pelus-Kaplan said. ''He went biking in the woods to think. . . . And then he decided to study law.''

In a friendly tone, Pascal George told me, ''Jean-Pierre was very intelligent, but very suspicious. I would say paranoiac. Since he was paranoiac, he was very happy to be frustrated'--it was a part of his happiness.'' (There is no evidence of ill will between him and Kaplan.) After the patent filing, it took some years before zolpidem reached the market. George recalled that ''the internal resistance'' at Synth(C)labo was ''rather strong.'' Among other things, zolpidem had been conceived by chemists, not biologists, which was unusual. He said that drug development accelerated in 1985, when a company pharmacist, preparing a batch of syrup for the first human trial, accidentally swallowed a teaspoonful of the drug. He immediately fell asleep.

Synth(C)labo also established that zolpidem was ''selective'' in its influence on the GABA system. Zolpidem had more impact on sleep than on amnesia, muscle relaxation, and the other effects associated with drugs that bind to gaba receptors. In theory, at least, this selectivity meant that the drug would have fewer undesirable outcomes.

Zolpidem was launched in France in 1988. Five years later, it was brought to America, with the name Ambien, in a joint venture between Synth(C)labo and Searle. George became the drug's acknowledged inventor, and Kaplan was sometimes left out of official accounts'--''like in the former Soviet Union,'' he said. Pelus-Kaplan once attended a conference, incognito, to confirm that her husband was being overlooked. It was George who built the molecule, but Kaplan argues that the initial collaboration created the blueprint for all that followed. George agrees.

Ambien had the good fortune to reach the market just as the reputation of Halcion, which had been promoted as safer than barbiturates, collapsed. The public was concerned about Halcion's perceived side effects'--including amnesia and panic'--and about reports that Upjohn had suppressed unfavorable data from its trials. William Styron, in his 1990 memoir, ''Darkness Visible,'' blamed Halcion for amplifying his suicidal thoughts. Philip Roth, in ''Operation Shylock,'' drew on his own reaction to Halcion, describing a ''mental coming apart'' that was ''as distinctly physical a reality as a tooth being pulled.'' In 1991, Upjohn settled a suit brought by a woman who had shot and killed her eighty-two-year-old mother after taking Halcion, and Time ran a story on ''The Dark Side of Halcion.'' That year, the drug was banned in Britain. (It remains available in the U.S., but it is no longer a best-seller.)

Searle and Synth(C)labo presented Ambien as a safe alternative to Halcion. Jed Black, a sleep specialist at Stanford's medical school who has worked in the pharmaceutical industry, recently recalled being visited by Ambien salespeople: ''They would say to me, with a very straight face'--and I think they believed it completely'--'This is not a benzodiazepine, and therefore it's safer.' '' Ambien did send people to sleep quickly, and the human body broke it down after a few hours, so there was a limited hangover effect. And a fatal overdose would be very hard, if not impossible, to engineer. (Ruth Madoff told ''60 Minutes'' that she and Bernie Madoff failed to commit suicide with Ambien: ''We took pills and woke up the next day.'') But, like benzodiazepines, Ambien sometimes caused amnesia and confusion. According to Black's reading of published data, the drug was selective'--focussed on sleep'--in its action on GABA receptors, but only in doses that were too low to induce sleep. At useful doses, it ''became indistinguishable'' from a benzodiazepine. Nevertheless, Ambien was accepted as a better drug. ''Everyone bought into it,'' Black said. The situation hasn't changed. He noted that, when he lectures to physicians at Stanford, ''I'll say, 'Who here would be equally happy to prescribe Halcion and Ambien?' And none of them raise their hand. Then I show them the data.''

Ambien quickly became the national best-seller in its category. As Black recalled, ''Everybody switched allegiance'--most physicians did'--and then nothing came along that was any better.'' Customers were satisfied, because the drug reliably induced sleep, and, as Black noted, sleep drugs that target GABA receptors ''impart a sense of feeling a little less stressed, like you've had a drink or two.'' And Ambien, in common with many other drugs, can be tricky for some patients to give up. Those who stop abruptly may experience ''rebound'' insomnia that is worse than when they started. Black said, ''And they inaccurately assume, 'Oh, my insomnia's really bad still.' '' He laughed. ''It's actually a nice feature for a drug to have, from a pharmaceutical perspective.''

By the turn of the century, there were more U.S. prescriptions for Ambien than for all benzodiazepines combined, and Ambien's benign reputation seemed to help normalize the idea of medical assistance for insomnia. (In 1998, Kathy Giusti, at the time a Searle executive, explained to an interviewer, ''We had to change consumer perception about the sleep category in general, to eliminate the stigma.'') Between 1993 and 2006, the number of times a year that a U.S. doctor gave a diagnosis of insomnia rose from fewer than a million to more than five million.

In 1995, Kaplan negotiated a payment'--about thirty thousand dollars'--from his former employers. George, who stayed at the company, happily, until his retirement, in 2010, received a little less. After Kaplan retired from his career in law, he formed an organization that lobbies on behalf of people who invent things while working as a salaried employee.

Kaplan described zolpidem as a ''professional disaster.'' He added, ''It's not lifesaving, it does not treat cancer, it does not treat malaria, it does not treat Alzheimer's'--the most difficult illnesses to treat. Therefore, I call it a comfort drug.''

A woman recently posted online a description of her Ambien experiences:

Ordered 3 pairs of saddle shoes from eBaySexted my best male friend who is married. I have a BF as wellOrdered $35.00 stylus off of amazon, I must have thought it said $3.00 or somethingPlayed draw something w/my friend and drew penises and rainbows for every wordTried to legally change my name on the computer

Ambien can be disinhibiting and depersonalizing. Or, to quote from the label of a bottle of sleep medication used by Tina Fey's character, Liz Lemon, on ''30 Rock'': ''May cause dizziness, sexual nightmares, and sleep crime.'' Zolpidem enters the gut, passes into the bloodstream, squeezes through the liver, and then crosses the blood-brain barrier, to make GABA receptors more receptive to gaba. When the neurotransmitter sticks to its target, negatively charged chloride ions flow into cells, making the inside of the cells more negative, and less likely to fire. Traffic is interrupted, signals don't reach their destinations, and the brain starts to quiet. Many people experience this as a contented swoon that silences inner chatter while giving a half glimpse of childhood; they are overtaken by sleep, like a three-year-old in a car seat.

But others resist sleep and embrace the woozy, out-of-body license. To some, this is an opportunity to take part in what Rachel Uchitel, a former girlfriend of Tiger Woods, has reportedly described as ''crazy Ambien sex.'' At the London Olympics, some Australian swimmers took Ambien to build team spirit. After taking the drug, they larked around and knocked on the doors of other athletes. As one of them later put it, they allowed themselves ''to be normal for one night.'' Because the drug had been banned by the Australian Olympic Committee, and because the team failed to win medals that it was expected to win, this became a national scandal.

But for many Ambien users, like the eBay shopper, their activities on the border of wakefulness and sleep are less purposeful. Drew Fairweather, an online cartoonist, has described the phenomenon in a popular series of panels in which a walrus addresses a human companion with such suggestions as ''Take some more Ambien and cut off all your hair, man. Let's do this.'' In 2006, Patrick Kennedy, then a congressman, crashed his Mustang into a barrier near Capitol Hill, in the middle of the night; he told police, inaccurately, that he was late for a vote. He had Ambien and an anti-nausea medication in his body. By the following spring, the F.D.A. had heard enough about Ambien-related sleep-driving, sleep-eating, and sleep-walking'--accompanied by amnesia'--to require new warnings. The drug's label now refers to the risk of ''preparing and eating food, making phone calls, or having sex.''

This kind of behavior can occur during dreamless, slow-wave sleep'--the state of an unmedicated sleepwalker'--or, more commonly, Jed Black suspects, while someone is awake but disinhibited, by Ambien alone or by Ambien and alcohol. Black noted that this altered state can be mischaracterized as sleep by people who have forgotten their adventures. A recent study, described in European Neuropsychopharmacology, suggests that these phenomena affect five per cent of users. (Other studies have reported lower numbers.) Zolpidem's reputation for outlandish side effects may be inflated by gossip'--by the interaction of medication and the Internet. Thomas Roth, the director of the sleep center at Henry Ford Hospital, in Detroit, who has consulted for Merck and other pharmaceutical companies, told me he has not yet seen persuasive evidence that there is more of this behavior among Ambien users than among the rest of the population (which includes drinkers). The F.D.A.'s 2007 warnings were prompted by doctors' reports, not by peer-reviewed data. But amnesiac confusion certainly occurs, and zolpidem's popularity makes misadventures commonplace, to the point that it's hard to use Ambien in a criminal defense. Defendants must argue that they were involuntarily intoxicated'--that they couldn't have foreseen the possible consequences of taking Ambien, alone or with drinks'--despite the warnings delivered both by their doctor and by Charlie Sheen, who called the drug ''the devil's aspirin'' after an incident, in 2010, involving a porn star and a damaged chandelier, in the Eloise Suite of the Plaza Hotel.

There may be other risks associated with zolpidem. In a recent paper in the online edition of the British Medical Journal, Daniel Kripke, a professor emeritus at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, examined five years of electronic medical records collected by a health system in Pennsylvania. He compared more than ten thousand patients who had been prescribed a sleep medicine'--most commonly Ambien'--and more than twenty thousand patients who had not. After adjusting for age, gender, smoking habits, obesity, ethnicity, alcohol use, and a history of cancer, and after controlling, as much as possible, for other diseases and disorders, Kripke found that people who had taken sleeping pills were more than three times as likely to have died during the study period as those who had not. Those on higher doses of the drugs were more than five times as likely to have died.

''My best estimate is that drugs like zolpidem are killing as many people as cigarettes,'' Kripke told me recently. That is, more than four hundred thousand Americans a year. ''And suppose they're only killing a tenth as many people'--you still wouldn't want them on the market.'' Echoing Ambien's co-inventor, Kripke called the risks unnecessary. ''Nobody dies because they didn't take a sleeping pill,'' he said.

Kripke acknowledges that his study did not identify the cause of any death; ill people take more sleeping pills than others, and some users might have had illnesses that were undiagnosed, and therefore not controlled for in the study. And insomnia itself could present a significant health risk, although Kripke resists that idea. Jed Black finds the data interesting but too inconclusive. A representative of Sanofi'--the company that Synth(C)labo became part of, after various mergers'--told me that Sanofi stood behind its Ambien safety data, which had satisfied the F.D.A.

Other research has linked zolpidem and similar drugs to depression, suicide, and car accidents; there are also data connecting zolpidem to cancer. (Such numbers do not establish causation.) The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration recently reported that E.R. cases involving zolpidem had risen from six thousand, in 2005, to nineteen thousand, in 2010.

If the public has largely overlooked such data, even as it pays attention to Patrick Kennedy'--or to his cousin Kerry Kennedy, who was arrested last year with zolpidem in her body, having driven for several miles on a shredded tire after colliding with a tractor-trailer'--it may be because Ambien deaths are disguised by circumstances. ''The people who die after taking sleeping pills tend to be older and obese, and to have multiple illnesses,'' Kripke said. ''So if they happen to die in the middle of the night nobody supposes that it's from the sleeping pill. And there's no way of proving that it was.''

John Renger, the Merck neuroscientist, has a homemade, mocked-up advertisement for suvorexant pinned to the wall outside his ground-floor office, on a Merck campus in West Point, Pennsylvania. A woman in a darkened room looks unhappily at an alarm clock. It's 4 A.M. The ad reads, ''Restoring Balance.''

The shelves of Renger's office are filled with small glass trophies. At Merck, these are handed out when chemicals in drug development hit various points on the path to market: they're celebrations in the face of likely failure. Renger showed me one. Engraved ''MK-4305 PCC 2006,'' it commemorated the day, seven years ago, when a promising compound was honored with an MK code; it had been cleared for testing on humans. Two years later, MK-4305 became suvorexant. If suvorexant reaches pharmacies, it will have been renamed again'--perhaps with three soothing syllables (Valium, Halcion, Ambien).

''We fail so often, even the milestones count for us,'' Renger said, laughing. ''Think of the number of people who work in the industry. How many get to develop a drug that goes all the way? Probably fewer than ten per cent.''

In 1998, when Renger was in Japan, finishing his postdoctoral work, two groups of scientists announced almost simultaneously that they had identified, in rodents, a previously unknown neurotransmitter. One group, in San Diego, called it hypocretin, after the hypothalamus, the area of the brain where it is produced. The other team, in Dallas, called it orexin, as in ''orexigenic,'' which means ''appetite-stimulating.'' Its primary function was thought to be the regulation of food intake. Orexin-abundant mice gained more weight than others on the same diet. (The naming question has still not been settled, although ''orexin'' is more widely used in nonacademic circles, including pharmaceutical companies. Renger referred to hypocretin partisans, affectionately, as ''a stubborn group.'')

The orexin papers were widely noticed, in part because of the connection to feeding. Several pharmaceutical companies, including Merck, began investigating possible obesity treatments. A year later, a remarkable paper from Stanford sent everyone in another direction.

Since the seventies, Stanford sleep scientists, led first by William Dement, had bred narcoleptic dogs. This was an achievement in itself. The animals suffered from extreme daytime sleepiness and had a propensity for mid-coital collapse: at moments of high emotion, the dogs, like narcoleptic humans, experienced sudden muscle weakness, or cataplexy. The first Stanford dog was a poodle named Monique. Later, there were other breeds; the Stanford colony, mostly Dobermans, had eighty dogs at its peak. Narcoleptic dogs gave birth to narcoleptic puppies; the disorder in canines has a single genetic cause. In 1999, after a decade-long search, a team led by Emmanuel Mignot, a researcher at Stanford, located the damaged gene, and reported that it encoded a receptor: the same one that had just been identified by the work done in California and Texas. Narcoleptic dogs lacked orexin receptors.

Mignot recently recalled a videoconference that he had with Merck scientists in 1999, a day or two before he published a paper on narcoleptic dogs. (He has never worked for Merck, but at that point he was contemplating a commercial partnership.) When he shared his results, it created an instant commotion, as if he'd ''put a foot into an ants' nest.'' Not long afterward, Mignot and his team reported that narcoleptic humans lacked not orexin receptors, like dogs, but orexin itself. In narcoleptic humans, the cells that produce orexin have been destroyed, probably because of an autoimmune response.

Orexin seemed to be essential for fending off sleep, and this changed how one might think of sleep. We know why we eat, drink, and breathe'--to keep the internal state of the body adjusted. But sleep is a scientific puzzle. It may enable next-day activity, but that doesn't explain why rats deprived of sleep don't just tire; they die, within a couple of weeks. Orexin seemed to turn notions of sleep and arousal upside down. If orexin turns on a light in the brain, then perhaps one could think of dark as the brain's natural state. ''What is sleep?'' might be a less profitable question than ''What is awake?''

Mignot had done something very unusual: he had discovered the genetic cause of a condition, helped to reframe thinking about a fundamental human behavior, and revealed clear pharmaceutical opportunities. An orexin receptor is the kind of place that many existing drugs are designed to reach. As Mignot put it, ''This was druggable.'' (That is often not the case: researchers know the genetic cause of Huntington's disease but have nothing to target.) A drug that activated orexin receptors might help treat narcoleptics, and a drug that blocked orexin receptors, if introduced to a brain producing orexin at unwelcome times, might help insomniacs, perhaps without intoxicating them. Pharmaceutical companies were reluctant to give up their obesity-drug ambitions, but it seemed that the orexin mice described in 1998 were fat because they stayed up late and had more time to eat.

Research at Merck had long focussed on eleven diseases, including Alzheimer's and diabetes. Insomnia was not one of them. Renger, who joined the company in 2001, recalled, ''The perception at that time was, You have a lot of medications available'--should we be working on this?'' How large was the population of insomniacs poorly served by Ambien? Should Merck invest in a market dominated by a drug that, within a few years, would become a cheap generic? The need for an ''orexin-antagonist'' sleep aid was neither commercially overwhelming nor clinically pressing. (Indeed, one detects a little professional defensiveness from the suvorexant team. Renger can sound effortful when describing the distress of insomniacs: ''We've got to think of the patients! That's why we make medicines.'')

But orexin-related work promised pharmaceutical novelty, which is extraordinarily uncommon. Most new drugs are remixes of old drugs'--clever circumventions of patent protections. The last truly original medicines in neuroscience were triptans, for the treatment of migraines, introduced in the early nineteen-nineties. ''The science is really what drove us,'' Renger said. ''To have a new target'--to know the genetics of the brain's control system and to be able to focus on that specifically to control sleep'--is a pretty rare event. It's like the thing people keep promising: you know, the 'cancer gene.' This was the first time there was the 'sleep gene.' ''

The work was also feasible. It's easier to observe sleep than, say, a reduction in anxiety or depression. Renger, upon his arrival at Merck, had set up a sleep laboratory that could make very fast, semiautomated measurements of the sleep patterns of rodents and monkeys. The lab was designed to identify sleep-related side effects of Merck compounds, but was well suited for testing insomnia treatments. ''With sleep, you can do an EEG study in a few days, and it'll tell you whether or not we're having an impact. I could do these studies'''--he snapped his fingers'--''and get an answer.''

Merck has a library of three million compounds'--a collection of plausible chemical starting points, many of them the by-products of past drug developments. I saw a copy of this library, kept in a room with a heavy door. Rectangular plastic plates, five inches long and three inches wide, were indented with hundreds of miniature test tubes, or wells, in a grid. Each well contained a splash of chemical, and each plate had fifteen hundred and thirty-six wells. There were twenty-four hundred plates; stacked on shelves, they occupied no more space than a filing cabinet.

In 2003, Merck conducted a computerized, robotized examination of almost every compound in the library. At this stage, the scientists were working not with Renger's animals but with a cellular soup derived from human cells and modified to act as a surrogate of the brain. Plate by plate, each of the three million chemicals in the library was introduced into this soup, along with an agent that would cause the mixture to glow a little if orexin receptors were activated. Finally, orexin was added, and a camera recorded the result. Renger and his colleagues, hoping to find a chemical that sabotaged the orexin system, were looking for the absence of a glow.

I visited the room in which this work had been done. Yellow robotic arms, on the same scale as car-assembly robots, were moving the trays from here to there, making bursts of sound like a nut being loosened in a tire shop. ''Summertime'' played on a radio. A computer monitor showed enhanced images of reactions on the plates: a fuzzy grid of light and dark dots, like a blurry telescope image of distant stars.

The robots ran through Merck's collection in about three weeks. ''If something's interesting, you grab that by the neck,'' Renger said. The molecules that best blocked orexin receptors were re-screened, in various ways. Chemists then modified the most promising candidates, much in the way that the Synth(C)labo chemists had worked twenty-five years earlier: they induced chemical change by heating and mixing, to build families of drug-like compounds. These were then tested on human liver cells, in vitro, and on animals in Renger's sleep lab.

Renger took me to see the rats and monkeys. The lab has soundproofed walls built out of the kind of air-infused blocks used in bomb shelters. The rats were transmitting live EEG data, wirelessly, from brain implants. So were the monkeys; they also had touch-responsive screens in their cages, on which they sometimes played games, for rewards of juice. A red square might appear on the screen and then disappear; after a pause, a red square might appear alongside a yellow square, and the monkey would be rewarded for touching the red one. (''It's like drinking soda and playing a little bit of Assassin's Creed,'' Renger explained.) With these games, Renger could simultaneously measure wakefulness and cognition. During the orexin research, when it was necessary to intrude on the monkeys' sleep, he played the amplified sound of a tiger's growl.

The work went back and forth between the chemists and the biologists: compounds were improved and tested. In December, 2006, Renger put on a good suit and drove with his team to Merck's offices in Branchburg, New Jersey. At the monthly meeting of the pre-clinical-development review committee, they pitched their best bet to the company. ''We had what we thought was a fantastic molecule,'' Renger recalled. ''It had all the properties we thought we would need, and it was going to look like a drug.'' It seemed likely that suvorexant would have a far longer half-life than Ambien, which implied a risk of next-day effects. But Renger wanted the drug to extend sleep. ''We wanted to have something that covers this system for the entire night,'' he said.

Merck approved the compound. ''At that point, the might of the corporation swings in behind the science,'' Richard Hargreaves, who helped run the meeting, told me. The company was now likely to fund at least a year or two of work. To bring a drug to market now costs an average of about two billion dollars, Hargreaves said. Renger and his team celebrated with drinks at the Cock 'n' Bull, in Lahaska, Pennsylvania.

Despite years of sleep problems, Samar Chatterjee, a seventy-year-old environmental engineer, had until recently never taken a sleep aid. Chatterjee, who lives in Washington, D.C., told me that he had feared ''getting hooked on the drugs, and getting dozy and dopey.'' He referred to the extreme example of Michael Jackson, who, at the time of his death, in 2009, was taking a general anesthetic, apparently as a remedy for insomnia. But, in 2010, Chatterjee saw an advertisement for a sleep-medication trial, at the Center for Sleep & Wake Disorders, in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and he applied. He thought that the study might benefit society, and he hoped to learn if he had sleep apnea: people with the condition would not be allowed to participate. After being monitored over two nights of imperfect sleep, at the Chevy Chase center, Chatterjee learned that he did not have sleep apnea, or other complicating conditions, and that he was sufficiently insomniac to join the trial. (The center, one of many contracted by Merck, heard from five hundred applicants, but found only seventeen who met all the criteria.) He took a tablet every night for three months; he was usually at home, but sometimes in a bed in Chevy Chase, where EEG readings, and other measurements, recorded ''sleep efficiency'' (percentage of time in bed spent asleep); L.P.S. (Latency to Persistent Sleep: the speed with which a person falls asleep); and WASO (Wake After Sleep Onset: the time spent awake in bed after initially falling asleep). When Chatterjee slept at home, he delivered an account of his night to the center, through an automated telephone questionnaire. He suspected, correctly, that he was taking a drug rather than a placebo. He fell asleep faster than usual, and stayed asleep. This seems to have pleased him, but left him ambivalent about insomnia medication. I asked him about side effects. ''Nothing major,'' he said. ''Some constipation. Maybe some dizziness or pain. Headache, that type of thing.'' He also experienced some sleepiness in the afternoons.

Drug trials usually have three phases, and Chatterjee had taken part in the final phase of the suvorexant trials. The Phase I trials, begun in 2007, tested for safety. Non-insomniac volunteers'--the researchers called them ''healthies'''--took the drug at high or low doses, or with other drugs, or the night before a supervised, hour-long highway drive in which they were told not to drift out of their lane.

These trials had barely begun when, in February, 2007, Nature Medicine published a paper, ''Promotion of Sleep by Targeting the Orexin System in Rats, Dogs and Humans,'' written by scientists at Actelion, the Swiss pharmaceutical company. Merck knew that other firms had built orexin antagonists, but Actelion's paper showed that it was clearly ahead of Merck, perhaps by a year or two.

''We thought, O.K., great,'' Renger recalled, with a sigh. But the news also galvanized the Merck team: ''We were already highly motivated, but seeing someone jump in front gives you that extra kick in the ass.''

In 2008, results from Phase I studies of suvorexant showed that it was safe enough to go forward. The data also provided enough indications of efficacy'--by sending ''healthies'' to sleep'--to allow Merck to accelerate its process, and skip a formal proof-of-concept stage. In late 2008, suvorexant began a Phase II trial, involving two hundred and fifty-four insomniacs in the U.S. and Japan. The results would establish the doses for much larger, and more expensive, Phase III trials, whose results are at the center of any submission to the F.D.A. In Phase II, Merck tested the drug at ten, twenty, forty, and eighty milligrams. Sleep measurements were taken by observing patients in the lab, and by collecting sleep diaries.

Daniel Kripke, of U.C. San Diego, argues that the effectiveness of insomnia treatments should be judged by patients' ability to function the next day. But the pharmaceutical companies, and the F.D.A., judge a sleep drug by its impact on sleeplessness. That impact is assessed objectively, with electronic monitoring, and subjectively, using patient reports. Objective data show that insomnia medications, on average, provide a gain of only ten or twenty minutes in total sleep time. But a patient's perception of improved sleep is also a recognized part of the clinical data. In this framework, insomnia is a condition not just of losing sleep but of being disturbed by sleeplessness. Indeed, most people with prescriptions for insomnia never visit a sleep lab, trusting their own assessment of a sleep deficit. This emphasis on the subjective also makes the amnesiac effect of sleep drugs oddly advantageous to those who manufacture them: the drugs inhibit people from creating memories of waking during the night.

The Phase II results were strong: suvorexant worked on insomniacs. Renger recalled that the team was ebullient: ''A novel mechanism in neuroscience'--whatever happens from there on, you've done something in your career.'' They took a day trip, with families, to an aquarium in Camden, New Jersey.

By then, the company had begun considering which of the four doses of suvorexant it should take into Phase III. The placebo effect of sleep drugs is powerful. A recent paper in the British Medical Journal suggested that it accounts for half the effect of z-drugs. So insomnia medications need to be quite potent to distinguish themselves from a placebo in clinical trials. The Phase II results showed that, at ten milligrams, suvorexant had an effect that could be measured in a sleep lab, but the dose had no advantage over a placebo in the subjective measures'--patients' estimations of their own speed in falling asleep, subsequent wakefulness in bed, and total sleep time.

Merck then made an important decision. For Phase III, starting in late 2009, it would drop ten and eighty milligrams in favor of twenty and forty milligrams, with forty regarded as the likely standard dose. In Phase III, Merck would also test fifteen- and thirty-milligram doses on patients sixty-five and older, who were more sensitive to the drug. The Chevy Chase sleep center, along with more than a hundred other facilities around the world, was contracted to test the four doses. Eighteen hundred patients participated in the trial.

At the time, Jed Black, the Stanford sleep specialist, was on a two-year leave of absence, working full time on almorexant, the rival drug made by Actelion. Phase III trials of the drug were under way. This work has not been published, and Black cannot discuss it, although he recently described almorexant as having ''an absolutely remarkable profile'' that was likely to outperform zolpidem in sleep maintenance.

But, in early 2011, Actelion announced that it was halting the drug's development, because of an undisclosed possible safety issue. Merck's scientists speculated about the nature of the concerns, and feared for the future of suvorexant. Black said that the problem was ''straightforward,'' but that Actelion had decided to pause and take its time. ''I don't think almorexant needs re-tinkering at the molecular level,'' he said, implying a problem of drug delivery. Black, who is back at Stanford, suspects that almorexant will be launched, and is certain that such drugs will eventually become dominant. (GlaxoSmithKline recently published results, from Phase II studies, of its own orexin antagonist.)

Actelion's Phase III trials had included a comparison of its drug's performance with zolpidem's. Merck used zolpidem in two tiny studies, but not in larger ones. This omission might seem surprising. If suvorexant really was a possible Ambien killer, then couldn't its superiority have been demonstrated in comparative studies? Merck scientists sometimes seemed evasive in their responses to this question, but an answer eventually came into focus. On the core issues that interest the F.D.A.'--efficacy and safety'--a de-facto head-to-head would become available; anyone could compare published data about the two drugs. But it was risky to go beyond those requirements, even if such trials might have demonstrated other possible strengths of suvorexant: a lower chance of nighttime confusion, perhaps. The trials would have slowed suvorexant's sprint to market, and they would have been very hard to engineer: Merck would have had to use safe, low doses of the two drugs, and the differences between them might have been subtle, if they existed at all. Suvorexant might even have lost the contest, and Merck would have been obliged to include that information in its filing with the F.D.A. ''We were in competition, and we were behind,'' Joe Herring said to me. ''We wanted to get across the line with a lean program.''

The real-world test'--a double dose, three glasses of wine, and a laptop'--would take place after F.D.A. approval. In the meantime, Merck scientists who spoke publicly about suvorexant had to restrict themselves to the data from F.D.A.-sanctioned trials; they could not discuss strengths that the drug seemed only likely to have. They had an impressive narrative about the creation of a rational, novel, and ''beautiful'' molecule. But they couldn't display a chart showing that suvorexant was, say, less likely than Ambien to lead to such episodes as ''cooking yourself breakfast and forgetting the next day,'' as Renger put it.

One possibly significant difference between suvorexant and Ambien may be indicated, informally, by Merck's Phase III trials, though it wasn't part of the official results. There were no reports of euphoria'--a word that is on Ambien's label. Thomas Roth, of Henry Ford Hospital, said of suvorexant, ''I would not expect any kind of high before sleep.'' Most people would regard clear-headedness as a pharmacological virtue, but to some the Ambien buzz is a pleasure enhanced by the comforting promise of imminent sleep.

Merck's decision to forgo more comparative data was ''quite bullish,'' Black said, but not unreasonable. ''They thought that they had a good safety profile, and that there would be no problems at the F.D.A.'' But, as he noted, ''the F.D.A., particularly under the direction of Ron Farkas, seems to be raising the bar a bit on safety.'' This year, the agency lowered the recommended dose of zolpidem for women from ten milligrams to five.

If there are Merck employees who regret the decision, I didn't hear them say it. But a recently published paper, written by Renger and others at Merck, offered hints about how suvorexant might have performed in a comparative study. The paper described an experiment involving rodents and monkeys dosed with Ambien, Valium, Lunesta, and a Merck compound called DORA-22'--another orexin antagonist that Merck made alongside suvorexant. The dora-22 study first established the amount of each drug necessary to send the animals to sleep, and then'--using cognitive tests like the red-square game'--measured the extent to which the drugs, soon after ingestion, affected memory and attention span. Renger was ''elated'' by the results. dora-22 performed far better than its rivals. In one test, monkeys administered thirty times the sleep dose of dora-22 showed no impairment after being woken and given an attention test. The Ambien monkeys were dozily incompetent even at doses too low to have initiated sleep.

The unspoken promise of orexin antagonists, then, is sleep without stupidity. The DORA-22 experiment measured mid-dose confusion. In effect, it was the Patrick Kennedy test. ''You can publish this kind of data and get people to think about it,'' Renger said, though he emphasized that the animal study had its limits. ''You don't know if it translates,'' he said. ''Maybe this is a monkey thing.''

Colorcon, the world's leading supplier of tablet coatings, provides its clients with a pill-color chart. Dots of various hues are arranged in a circle and divided into pizza slices of pinks, blues, and greens, which darken toward the edge. The chart can be overlaid with plastic sheets that are opaque but dotted with clear circles, allowing you to see some of the colors beneath. One sheet reveals the acceptable colors for pills in the E.U. and North America; another'--showing intolerance for dark grays, dark greens, and the brightest pinks'--also covers Japan.

Rick Derrickson, Merck's director of project leadership, recently showed me this chart, and recalled meetings, early in 2011, with the company's experts on drug stability, marketing, and supply chains. As Derrickson remembered it, the issue was: ''Do I want to look like something on the market, or do I want to be totally different? Do I want to convey strength or emotion?'' He explained, ''Reds are culturally not acceptable in some places. It has to do with death. And some colors are viewed as candy. And you don't see black, either.''

He showed me the finished suvorexant tablets. The forty-milligram version was a pale-green oval. Thirty milligrams was yellow and round. Twenty milligrams was white and oval, fifteen milligrams white and round. ''We were looking for non-offensive,'' he said. ''Hopefully, we won't run into a country that says, 'There's no way we'll take green.' ''

At this time, suvorexant had already been ''on a tablet path'' for two years. ''Everyone in the industry tries to gravitate toward a tablet,'' Derrickson explained. ''It's tried-and-true technology. When you get into some of the exotics'--like putting something under your tongue'--people aren't always comfortable.'' In its purest form, suvorexant is a fine crystal, with a texture somewhere between sugar and flour. Merck synthesizes it in Ireland, and ships it across the Atlantic in hundred-and-twenty-litre drums. (Derrickson expected Merck to need ''several metric tons'' a year.) That active chemical is mixed with a polymer that helps the drug's absorption by the body. The mixture is heated and then extruded from a machine, like pasta, and flattened between rollers. It cools and flakes, and those flakes are ground very finely, added to filler, and pressed into tablets.

''The U.S. prefers everything in a thirty-count bottle,'' Derrickson said. ''The rest of the world prefers blisters'''--that is, blister packs made of plastic and foil. In 2011, he asked for thousands of suvorexant tablets, in the various doses, to be packaged both ways and placed in several climate-controlled rooms, including one set at 86°F. and seventy-five-per-cent humidity. This was the start of a trial assessing the tablets' perishability. The F.D.A. asks for at least a yearlong trial, and Merck planned to run the study for three years. In addition to the main batch, some bottled suvorexant tablets were held in other rooms, for an ''in use'' study, where bottles were opened and closed, manually, on different schedules, as they might be by an occasional user of the drug.

The unopened bottles protected suvorexant well. But some of the ''in use'' bottles did not: the tablets absorbed moisture, their coating cracked, and they started to crumble. The advantages of an orange plastic bottle over blister packs were so evident to Derrickson'--''Cheaper, and more friendly,'' as he put it'--that he was slow to accept the results. Laura Jacobus, who was in charge of that process, recalled, ''He was saying, 'Are you sure? Check one more time.' ''

When Merck made its formal submission to the F.D.A., in August of last year'--with forty-one gigabytes of material'--it proposed selling suvorexant at fifteen, twenty, thirty, and forty milligrams, in blister packs of ten, in a child-resistant plastic case.

People attending the F.D.A. committee meeting on suvorexant passed, in a lobby, a display case of pharmaceutical shame. On shelves, behind glass, were samples of a century's worth of toxic drugs, including a pack of thalidomide'--the sedative and antiemetic, launched in Europe in the nineteen-fifties, that caused thousands of birth defects before it was withdrawn, in 1961. The F.D.A. is proud that thalidomide was never approved for sale in America; in 1962, Frances Oldham Kelsey, the agency reviewer who blocked it, received a President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service.

A red rope bisected a large hall. To the left, rows of seats reserved for the public went largely unused. To the right, there was a crush of dark suits: committee members sat at a U-shaped desk, and were flanked, in a kind of parliamentary arrangement, by Merck employees on one side and F.D.A. employees on the other.

Opening remarks were delivered by Russell Katz, the director of neurology products at the F.D.A. He affably described suvorexant as ''an exciting compound,'' but almost immediately spoke of an emerging F.D.A. preference for drug doses that are as low as one can ''get away with.'' Without naming zolpidem, he referred to the drug's recently reduced dosage for women, saying, ''We believe this is the right way to go.'' He noted that suvorexant was shown to impair next-day driving at a twenty-milligram dose, and perhaps at fifteen milligrams.

Katz also observed that Merck's Phase II investigation of ten milligrams had shown that it outperformed a placebo in sleep efficiency and Wake After Sleep Onset, although not in the time taken to fall asleep. ''These data, in our view, taken together, argue for recommending doses as low as ten milligrams, or even perhaps lower than ten milligrams,'' he said.

It was 8:30 A.M. The men and women on Merck's benches looked grimly composed, like C.E.O.s being scolded at a Senate hearing. For a few days, they had known that the committee was likely to discuss a dose of suvorexant that Merck had examined, and then rejected, four years earlier, at the end of Phase II trials. If this idea was pursued by the F.D.A., then there was the odd possibility that a drug could go to market at a starting dose that Merck had studied only long enough to conclude that it didn't work. A drug sold at an underperforming starting dose would, of course, be at a disadvantage.

Joe Herring, Merck's main speaker, was next. Company leaders were watching a live video feed on the F.D.A. Web site, as were pharma investors, and pharma analysts ready to tweet. Herring didn't need to make the case already made by his Phase III data: suvorexant was effective, particularly in maintaining sleep. His primary task, whose strangeness colored the rest of the day, was to talk down the effectiveness of suvorexant at the ten-milligram dose. He agreed with Katz that the objective Phase II results for ten milligrams were ''substantial and encouraging.'' But the subjective, patient-reported results were no stronger than those for a placebo, and insomnia ''involves patient perception of sleep disturbance and clinically significant distress.'' He noted that the F.D.A. had expected Merck to find subjectively significant doses to take into Phase III.

Herring then gave reassuring accounts of the side-effect data connected to the higher doses, and disputed the idea that any reported reactions to suvorexant could be thought of as ''narcolepsy-like.'' (Herring knew that Ronald Farkas's unfriendly PowerPoint presentation would make the suggestion.) The direct link between narcolepsy and orexin made such suspicions natural, but Merck, assisted by an external committee, had looked for cataplexy in the data and had not found it. A few episodes of excessive daytime sleepiness, at high doses of suvorexant, and of sleep paralysis, could be explained without reference to narcolepsy. Thomas Scammell, a narcolepsy specialist at Harvard who has published widely on orexin, was sitting on Merck's benches, as a consultant, and he later spoke to the committee in support of the company's position. (Emmanuel Mignot, the researcher at Stanford, recently told me that suvorexant seems to produce a rather normal experience of sleep, except that patients are hurried into the REM phase, which is also the experience, in a more extreme way, of narcoleptics. Suvorexant might not be the best drug for people prone to nightmares, he said.)

After Herring finished, David Michelson'--the executive who had said that suvorexant was a ''huge'' product for Merck'--spoke. A committee member asked him if suvorexant had been compared to zolpidem in a head-to-head study. No, he acknowledged.

Farkas then gave his PowerPoint presentation. Phrases like ''violent intent'' appeared in large type. He recommended a ten-milligram dose, and said, ''It really does come down . . . to what dose would you want used for your mother?'' He seemed to enjoy his role: slightly ill-mannered, and happy to open the door to doubt. He began one sentence, in an innocent tone, ''I think we don't want to raise concerns that suvorexant causes narcolepsy by causing an autoimmune death of cells that produce orexins.'' He also took a moment to undermine the importance of subjective results, saying, ''Everybody knows that sleep interferes with your ability to know how much time you've slept.'' John Carroll, an industry analyst, tweeted that the meeting was a ''disaster'' for Merck.

During a lunch break, Renger ate Doritos and groused: ''Ten years of work, all this innovation'--novel science'--and we're talking about dose and driving studies!'' In the afternoon, Merck continued its effort to undermine the ten-milligram plan: Julie Stone, an expert in statistical modelling at Merck, delivered an elaborate analysis and said, flatly, ''We don't believe that ten milligrams would be an effective dose.'' Herring, speaking to the committee again, said, ''Ten milligrams is ineffective from a patient perspective.''

In the midafternoon, committee members began to answer a series of questions asked by their F.D.A. hosts. They started with: Was suvorexant effective at the doses suggested by Merck? In two votes, the committee members agreed that it was.

The F.D.A.'s next question began, ''The applicant has submitted data supporting the conclusion that ten milligrams is an effective dose.''

This was peculiar. Robert Clancy, a professor of neurology and pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, pointed out that it wasn't true.

Katz agreed: the F.D.A., not Merck, was arguing for the efficacy of ten milligrams. He said, ''We shouldn't couch it in terms of 'Has the applicant done it?' Have we done it?''

The committee's opinion was mixed. Jason Todd, a neurologist from North Carolina, said, ''Honestly, it looks like the best treatment, in terms of balancing effectiveness and side effects, is placebo.'' Ronald Farkas wondered if ten milligrams would have performed better in a larger study. ''A small, underpowered, negative study does not mean the drug does not work,'' he said.

The committee was asked to vote on the question: Would a ten-milligram dose require additional studies before it could be approved by the F.D.A.? It voted no. Paul Rosenberg, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, said, ''I'm convinced that it maybe works.'' Clancy said, ''I feel like I'm stuck in an old episode of 'The Twilight Zone.' The company's arguing their drug doesn't work, and the F.D.A. is arguing, 'Yes, it does.' '' He said that he needed a sleeping pill.

By the end of the session, the committee had recommended to the F.D.A. that thirty and forty milligrams should not be approved, for safety reasons. Doses of fifteen and twenty milligrams should be approved, but the F.D.A. should consider instructing Merck to make ten milligrams the drug's starting dose.

David Michelson sank slowly into a chair in the lobby. ''I'm exhausted,'' he said. ''Just emotionally. You're up and down, and you don't know where it's going to go. You're forced to sit there and watch it. You're thinking, This is going south!'''--that the committee would vote suvorexant out of existence. ''And then it wasn't going south.'' He added, ''It's certainly unusual that they'd be willing to consider approving a dose that had not been extensively studied.''

Jed Black followed the day's events from afar, and was at this moment wondering if Merck ''might just say, 'Screw this,' and proceed with another molecule.'' I asked Michelson if Merck would pursue ten milligrams, if necessary, despite the company's public disparagement of the dose. He foresaw discussions. He and his colleagues then walked to their bus, pulling wheeled luggage, in a tight, flight-attendant formation.

A few weeks later, the F.D.A. wrote to Merck. The letter encouraged the company to revise its application, making ten milligrams the drug's starting dose. Merck could also include doses of fifteen and twenty milligrams, for people who tried the starting dose and found it unhelpful. This summer, Rick Derrickson designed a ten-milligram tablet: small, round, and green. Several hundred of these tablets now sit on shelves, in rooms set at various temperatures and humidity levels; the tablets are regularly inspected for signs of disintegration.

The F.D.A.'s decision left Merck facing an unusual challenge. In the Phase II trial, this dose of suvorexant had helped to turn off the orexin system in the brains of insomniacs, and it had extended sleep, but its impact didn't register with users. It worked, but who would notice? Still, suvorexant had a good story'--the brain was being targeted in a genuinely innovative way'--and pharmaceutical companies are very skilled at selling stories.

Merck has told investors that it intends to seek approval for the new doses next year. I recently asked John Renger how everyday insomniacs would respond to ten milligrams of suvorexant. He responded, ''This is a great question.'' After the approval process is finished, the marketing division of Merck'--a company whose worldwide sales last year totalled forty-seven billion dollars'--will conduct a different kind of public trial. The study will address this question: How successfully can a pharmaceutical giant'--through advertising and sales visits to doctors' offices'--sell a drug at a dose that has been repeatedly described as ineffective by the scientists who developed it? '...

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 05:20

Yubei Huang,Xiaoliang Zhang,Weiqin Li,Fengju Song,Hongji Dai,Jing Wang,Ying Gao,Xueou Liu,Chuan Chen,Ye Yan,Yaogang Wang,Kexin Chen'...show all 12hide368Downloads200Citations

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Get AccessObjectiveTo evaluate the association between induced abortion (IA) and breast cancer risk among Chinese females.

MethodsWe searched three English databases (PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Wiley) and three Chinese databases (CNKI, WanFang, and VIP) for studies up to December 2012, supplemented by manual searches. Two reviewers independently conducted the literature searching, study selection, and data extraction and quality assessment of included studies. Random effects models were used to estimate the summary odds ratios (ORs) and the 95 % confidence intervals (CIs).

ResultsA total of 36 articles (two cohort studies and 34 case''control studies) covering 14 provinces in China were included in this review. Compared to people without any history of IA, an increased risk of breast cancer was observed among females who had at least one IA (OR = 1.44, 95 % CI 1.29''1.59, I2 = 82.6 %, p

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Source: Valleywag

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 15:12

It's hard out there for a rule-flouting, heavily financed disruptor. If it's not government regulators, then it's "frivolous lawsuits," amirite? This time, it's a class action lawsuit filed in California accusing 23andMe of "falsely and misleadingly" advertising their $99 genetic tests. The complaint, which asks for at least $5 million, also says the tests are "not supported by any scientific evidence."

The timing of the complaint will no doubt spawn more outrage about silly government safety precautions.

The lawsuit was filed days after the FDA issued a warning letter to 23andMe for not finishing studies of its Saliva Collection Kit and Personal Genome Service five years after the company began marketing. In the letter, the FDA said "we still do not have any assurance that the firm has analytically or clinically validated the PGS for its intended uses, which have expanded..."

The agency's concern was that the tests and television ads would lead users to self-medicate based on unverified data. As epidemiologist and professor Cecile Janssens put it: "The FDA does not mind if people would like to know what their DNA sequence is, but it is concerned about the interpretation of that data by 23andMe."

That expansive marketing sans regulation is also noted in the suit:

2. In addition, Defendant uses the information it collects from the DNA tests consumers pay to take to generate databases and statistical information that it then markets to other sources and the scientific community in general, even though the results are meaningless.

3. Despite Defendant's failure to receive marketing authorization or approval from the Food and Drug Administration ("FDA"), Defendant has slowly increased its list of indicators for the PGS, and initiated new marketing campaigns, including television advertisements in violation of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act ("FDA Act").

In a letter to customers, 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki, the wife (as far as we know) of Google cofounder Segrey Brin, called the FDA "an important partner."

The company, which is backed by both Google Ventures and Brin personally, has stopped radio, TV, and online ads for 23andMe, but "has continued to sell its at-home testing kits," reports CNET.

Casey v 23andMe by jeff_roberts881

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by Joel Brind, Ph.D. | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 12/2/13 10:04 AM

A new systematic review and meta-analysis of abortion and breast cancer (ABC link) in China was just published four days ago in the prestigious, peer-reviewed international cancer journal, Cancer Causes and Control.

In this meta-analysis (a study of studies, in which results from many studies are pooled), Dr. Yubei Huang et al. reported that, combining all 36 studies on the ABC link in China that have been published through 2012, the overall risk of developing breast cancer among women who had at least one induced abortion was significantly increased by 44%.

These results, said the authors, ''were consistent with a previously published systematic review''. That review was the one I published in the British Medical Association's epidemiology journal with colleagues from Penn State Medical Center in 1996, which study reported an overall significant 30% increased risk of breast cancer in worldwide studies.

Since the our study came out in 1996, the ''mainstream'' abortion advocates entrenched in universities, medical societies, breast cancer charities, journals, and especially, government agencies like the National Cancer Institute (In reality, the NCI is just another corrupt federal agency like the IRS and the NSA) have relentlessly targeted the ABC link with fraudulent studies and other attacks, culminating in a 2003 international phony ''workshop'' by the NCI, which officially declared the ABC link non-existent.

Since 2003, armed with this new official ''truth'', NARAL and their ilk have viciously been attacking pro-life pregnancy resource centers (PRCs) for ''lying'' to women by telling them about the ABC link as a reality. In places like Maryland and New York City, they even went so far as to enact laws to muzzle the PRCs. Thankfully, the courts have struck down such laws as violations of free speech rights''so far.

But the new Chinese meta-analysis is a real game changer. Not only does it validate the earlier findings from 1996, but its findings are even stronger, for several reasons:

1. The link is a slightly stronger one, i.e., 44% v. 30% risk increase with abortion;

2. It shows what is called a ''dose effect'', i.e., two abortions increase the risk more than one abortion (76% risk increase with two or more abortions), and three abortions increase the risk even more (89% risk increase with three or more abortions). Risk factors that show such a dose effect have more credibility in terms of actually causing the disease.

3. Huang et al. state: ''The lack of a social stigma associated with induced abortion in China may limit the amount of underreporting''. Putative underreporting of abortions by healthy women has been routinely invoked to discredit the ABC link''the lack of credible evidence notwithstanding. This line of attack'--variously called the ''response bias'' or ''recall bias'' or ''reporting bias'' argument, has now been neutralized.

4. Huang et al. explain why two earlier high-profile studies in Shanghai did not find the link, essentially by citing and extending arguments I had articulated in the British Journal of Cancer in 2004. In that published letter, I explained that the Shanghai population was unsuitable for studying the ABC link in the usual manner, because the prevalence of induced abortion was so high (greater than 50%) in the general population. Huang et al. provided strong evidence for that explanation, by performing what is called a meta-regression analysis of all the Chinese studies, which meta-regression showed that the more prevalent abortion was in the study population, the lower risk increase associated with abortion.

5. The Huang study follows right on the heels of two new studies this year from India and Bangladesh, studies which reported breast cancer risk increases of unprecedented magnitude: over 600% and over 2,000%, respectively, among women who had any induced abortions.

CLICK LIKE IF YOU'RE PRO-LIFE!

Finally, the new Chinese meta-analysis follows on the heels of the recent decisions of the US 10th Circuit Court of Appeals which upheld the religious freedom rights of companies wanting to opt out of Obamacare, since Obamacare insurance funds contraceptive steroids and abortions. The Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer and the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute filed amicus curiae briefs for these cases, briefs which were specifically cited in the 10th Circuit's decision with respect to the cancer-causing effects of these steroid drugs (innocuously referred to as ''the pill'', in common parlance). At least two of these cases have just been accepted by the US Supreme Court for review in their next session.

LifeNews Note: Dr. Joel Brind is a Professor of Biology and Endocrinology at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the Science Adviser for the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer and the co-founder of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute.

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 15:14

By Cecile JanssensOn November 27, 2013

The market for personal genome services is facing a reality check. While the most prominent and innovative company 23andMe has flourished so far, in the past few years many of its competitors have gone out of business. Now, with the latest warning from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the rest of the genome testing industry may be counting its days too. 23andMe has failed to provide scientific evidence for their genetic tests and the FDA has urged them in a public letter to halt the marketing of their services until further notice.

The FDA treats genetic testing as a ''medical device'', and it wants all such devices to meet high quality standards. In this the FDA is right. 23andMe provides information that may lead its users to self-medicate, which, if based on faulty information can lead to serious adverse effects. The FDA does not mind if people would like to know what their DNA sequence is, but it is concerned about the interpretation of that data by 23andMe.

The FDA's letter is unlikely to have surprised the people at 23andMe. They acknowledge similar concerns in their Terms of Service. They are also aware of the limited predictive ability of their tests for common diseases. 23andMe follows scientific progress in genetic risk prediction research closely, and by now they must have realised that the promise of personal genome services has faded.

In 2009, when the company first filed for marketing authorisation of their service, the future of genetic prediction looked very bright. The discovery of genetic markers for common diseases had just started to take off. Each issue of Nature Genetics, the top journal for scientific discoveries in genetics and genomics, reported new markers for different diseases. It seemed global collaborations would soon rapidly unravel the genetic origins of disease.

But the reality appeared more complex.

Genomics researchers caught the bigger fish first, as new markers had increasingly smaller effects on disease risk. By now, only four years later, many scientific studies have investigated the predictive ability of risk models similar to those on which 23andMe's tests are based. Their results have been mostly discouraging, even though researchers have never used that word. Genetic markers are generally unable to predict risk of common diseases, and adding more markers to risk models does not improve their predictive ability that much.

The results of these studies are no surprise: most of them have investigated risk predictions that are based on relatively few genetic markers. For instance, 23andMe uses only 15 markers to predict the risk of coronary heart disease, 11 for type-2 diabetes, two for melanoma and obesity, and one for esophageal and stomach cancer. These numbers are much lower than the dozens that have already been discovered. Predictive ability can be good only if markers have a lot of impact on disease risk, such as in age-related macular degeneration and several autoimmune diseases.

Champions of the genetic medicine revolution could have been warned by looking at the degree of ''heritability'' of diseases. The lower this percentage, the less predictive the test can become. 23andMe discloses these estimates:

Heritability of melanoma is estimated at around 20%; type-2 diabetes at 26%; colorectal, esophageal and stomach cancer all around 30%; coronary heart disease between 39% and 56%; and type-1 diabetes between 72% and 88%.

But what does this mean? The high heritability of type-1 diabetes means that genes play a dominant role in causing the disease. If scientists manage to unravel all genetic markers for type-1 diabetes, a genetic test will be able to predict with high accuracy if a person will get diabetes.

Unfortunately, due to all the complex interactions between the markers, this full unravelling is impossible. The number of interactions is probably so high that every patient will have his or her own unique complex cause of disease. And what has never happened cannot be identified or predicted by big data.

Advances in genome science will improve what tests offer, but these improvements will be small. While the hope is based on big data, the reality is that most diseases are simply not genetic enough. Other risk factors such as diet, body weight, smoking, exercise and stress are too important. And big data cannot change the biology of diseases '' it will not make them more genetic.

That is why genetic testing for common diseases will never become as predictive as champions of genetic testing hope.

A Cecile JW Janssens does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

[This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.]

"We believe Bitcoin can become a major means of payment for e-commerce and may emerge as a serious competitor to traditional money transfer providers. As a medium of exchange, Bitcoin has clear potential for growth, in our view." That quote is from David Woo, FX and Rates Strategist at Bank of America/Merill Lynch.

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 20:56

Sheep Marketplace closed down over the weekend after someone got away with 96,000 bitcoins - and angry users are chasing him around the internet.

Some fan-made physical bitcoins. (Photo: antanacoins/Flickr)

One of the largest heists in bitcoin history is happening right now. 96,000 bitcoins - that's roughly £60m as of the time of writing - was taken from the accounts of customers, vendors and administrators of the Sheep Marketplace over the weekend.

Sheep was one of the main sites that came to replace the Silk Road when it closed in October, but it too has now closed as a result of this theft. It's a little hard to work out exactly what's happened, but Sheep customers have been piecing it together on reddit's r/sheepmarketplace.

Here's what happened: someone (or some group) managed to fake the balances in peoples' accounts on the site, showing that they had their bitcoins in their wallets when they'd actually been transferred out. Over the course of a week the whole site was drained, until the weekend when the site's administrators realised what was happening and shut everything down.

Originally it was thought that only 5,200BTC - or £3m - was taken, with a message posted on Sheep's homepage blaming a vendor called "EBOOK101" for finding and exploiting a bug. However, over the weekend it became clear that the amount stolen was much, much larger.

In a normal robbery that money would be gone by now, but it isn't. Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous, and bitcoins can't just disappear. It works because each and every transaction is public and visible to each and every other person using the Bitcoin network, and a person is only as anonymous as their link to their wallet.

A couple of reddit users realised that the sheer size of the heist makes ''tumbling'' the coins - the normal method of laundering bitcoins - impossible, as long as they kept on their toes. Someone with bitcoin can send some to a tumbler like bitcoinfog, where it will be split into smaller subdivisions and mixed with other bitcoins from other places, recombining and splitting again several times over until the whole amount eventually comes out the other end, theoretically in such a way that it's impossible to track. Silk Road's in-built tumbler successfully foiled the FBI, allegedly.

However, reddit user TheNodManOut managed to track where the first bunch of transfers out of Sheep went, and from there and silkroadreloaded2 worked out which tumbler that the thief was using. Here's how silkroadreloaded2 describes what's happened since (''Tomas'' is the alleged owner of Sheep, and one of the suspects for many users):

All day, we've been chasing the scoundrel with our stolen bitcoins through the blockchain. Around lunchtime (UK), I was chasing him across the roof of a moving train, (metaphorically). I was less than 20 minutes, or 2 blockchain confirmations, behind "Tomas".

He was desperately creating new wallet addresses and moving his 49 retirement wallets through them, but having to wait for 3 or 4 confirmations each time before moving them again. Each time I caught up, I "666"ed him - sent 0.00666 bitcoins to mess up his lovely round numbers like 4,000. Then,all of a sudden, decimal places started appearing, and fractions of bitcoins were jumping from wallet to wallet like grasshoppers on a hotplate without stopping for confirmations.

Shit!

He was tumbling our stolen bitcoins a second time, and a tumbler is unbeatable....

Unless you guess which one it is, nearly all the coins belong to the person you're tracking, jump in with him, and get jumbled up through the same wallets using the same algorithm. I was hopping from foot to foot shouting "come on!" at my laptop, waiting an age for 6 blockchain confirmations to get 0.5 btc into "bitcoin fog". My half a bitcoin got sliced and diced through loads of wallets and I followed the biggest chunk with blockchain.info - along with 96,000 stolen ones!

Or, in other words:

He gathered 96,000 in one pot, then split it into about 50 smaller ones. then he saw me 666ing them all. Imagine a sports stadium with 96,000 people in it, each with $1000.

He sent them all via different routes all over the world, but the same 96,000 people then arrived at a different stadium and he went to bed.

Now there are 96,001, and I just phoned you on my mobile to tell you where the stadium is.

A major problem with tumblers is that they only work with lots of bitcoins coming and going from a lot of different sources - if a tumbler is taking in 96,000 bitcoins, those will massively outnumber all other bitcoins being tumbled and it'll be easy to spot them coming out the other end. Mix in a little of your own with all those other ones and you'll find out the wallet addresses that the tumbler uses, and it should be easy to spot large transactions splitting off from there.

The fascinating consequence of this is that you can see the stolen bitcoins on the public blockchain, and as long as there are people keeping tabs on it there's going to be no way for the thief to cash in on their haul. Considering how people rely on tumblers to maintain anonymity when buying illegal stuff online, this unusual loophole is something of a revelation.

Right now, as you're reading this, you can watch as the the thief starts trying to move their bitcoins on again - it's currently down to 92,000 bitcoins and dropping as smaller chunks begin going out. Selling those bitcoins and turning them into cash is going to be extremely difficult, as the major Bitcoin exchanges all demand proof of identity (specifically to avoid charges that they're involved in money laundering), and if they're broken down into smaller quantities to sell via a site like localbitcoins.com a paper trail will still be generated. As soon as it's possible to link one real-life bank account or identity to any bitcoins from that stash, it will be possible to work out their real-life identity.

This counts as one of the largest robberies in history at Bitcoin's current market value, ranking in the same company as real-life thefts like the $108m diamond theft at the Harry Winston store in Paris in 2008. 96,000 bitcoins also places the thief as one of the wealthiest Bitcoin millionaires on the current rich list (but bear in mind that few serious Bitcoin players keep their currency in just one wallet) - and all without having to go to the trouble of wearing balaclavas or threatening someone with a gun.

Let's watch and see what happens next.

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Mon, 02 Dec 2013 09:40

Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to decide to peg currency to the dollar

Staff ReportDecember 1, 2013

Dubai: Four Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries will announce the introduction of a common currency by the end of December, a Bahraini daily reported on Sunday.

The common currency to be announced by Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia will be pegged to the dollar, a source told Akhbar Al Khaleej.

''The decision to peg the Gulf currency to the dollar is political and is not related to the economy,'' the source said.

''From an economic point of view, it would have been better to peg the new currency to a basket of currencies because the volume of trade of the Gulf states with the countries of the European Union is much larger than that of their commerce with the United States. Gulf exports of oil to the European Union are estimated to constitute about 70 per cent of European imports,'' the source said.

Related StoriesThe daily did not identify the sources, but said it was close to Gulf decision-making circles.

Oman and the UAE, the other two members of the six-country Gulf council set up in 1981, are not likely to join the common currency in the near future, the source added, without divulging the reasons for the same.

''I do not see any need for a common Gulf currency if it is not sovereign. Even though the GCC states have huge financial reserves, their currencies are not listed on the world's reserve currency list because they are not producing states,'' the source said.

Flexible exchange

The GCC countries have been discussing a currency union similar to the Eurozone for more than 15 years.

Several economists in the Gulf have been calling for dropping the GCC countries' long-entrenched peg to the dollar and consider moving to a more flexible exchange rate that will help them better face highly possible inflation risks and economic crises.

In September, an official of the European Central Bank (ECB) said that the GCC should not introduce a common currency before its members have a clear common objective.

Yves Mersch, an executive board member of the ECB, reportedly said at a global financial summit that no union of states would be ready for a common currency if there was no political consensus.

Most Popular in BusinessGCC common currency in 4 countries soonLamborghini unveils Dh16.5m car in Abu DhabiEtihad crowned world's leading airlineAbu Dhabi 'fastest growing emirate in UAE'UAE flag carriers soar higher in 2013New Stories in BusinessAviation (3)ConstructionMarkets (6)Oil & Gas (2)PropertyTechnologyTourism (1)Your Money

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Mon, 02 Dec 2013 09:27

Theoretical answer: yes and no.

Practical answer: not at all.

SHA-2, or specifically SHA-256, is a good hashing algorithm as far as we know. It has all the properties desired and there are no real attacks on it. It has already been battle-tested a lot in the past years. That Bitcoin uses SHA-256 makes it an even more interesting algorithm to try to crack (there is 'money' behind it now), and with all the ASIC producers popping up it becomes less work to also create ASICs that try to crack passwords hashed with this.

So with all the extra attention SHA-256 gets, it is now more likely that flaws are found rather sooner than later. However, SHA-2 is a very widely used algorithm as it is, regardless of its use in Bitcoin. If there were any great and obvious flaws, they would have been found already.

It can be compared with RSA, which now powers many of today's financial transactions and encrypted connections. That too draws a lot of attention to it, but good algorithms don't become bad just because they are in the picture.

So while all the extra ASIC production for Bitcoin mining may also provide for better password cracking tools and brings more people to look at the algorithm, this is no practical problem. Also, you should not use SHA-2 directly as a password hashing mechanism anyway. For that, see this question: http://security.stackexchange.com/q/211/10863

Edit: Read your question more thoroughly now instead of responding to the title.

Is bitcoin mining with its daily 4000+ TH/s power, funded and manned entirely by users of the hardware hoping to gain Bitcoins (and hoping they are worth some real $$) really performing a service for the NSA (or someone) and effectively "hiding in plain sight"?

No. That's just tinfoil hattery and not even worth the "thought experiment" (nice try, conspiracy theorist) since it can readily be disproved. See other answers about what we're hashing (hint: we're not finding hashes for actual passwords or other purposes).

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 23:50

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Bitcoin prices are unsustainably high after surging 89-fold in a year and that the virtual money isn't currency.

''It's a bubble,'' Greenspan, 87, said today in a Bloomberg Television interview from Washington. ''It has to have intrinsic value. You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven't been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.''

Bitcoins, which exist as software and aren't regulated by any country or banking authority, surged to a record $1,124.76 on Nov. 30. The currency has rallied on growing interest from investors, while merchants are starting to accept Bitcoins and U.S. officials have told lawmakers such payments could be a legitimate means of exchange.

''I do not understand where the backing of Bitcoin is coming from,'' the former Fed chief said. ''There is no fundamental issue of capabilities of repaying it in anything which is universally acceptable, which is either intrinsic value of the currency or the credit or trust of the individual who is issuing the money, whether it's a government or an individual.''

There are about 12 million Bitcoins in circulation, according to Bitcoincharts, a website that tracks activity across various exchanges. Bitcoin was introduced in 2008 by a programmer or group of programmers going under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto.

A Justice Department official said Nov. 18 Bitcoins can be ''legal means of exchange'' at a U.S. Senate committee hearing, boosting prospects for wider acceptance of the virtual currency.

''We all recognize that virtual currencies, in and of themselves, are not illegal,'' Mythili Raman, acting assistant attorney general at the department's criminal division, told the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told the Senate committee the U.S. central bank has no plans to regulate the currency.

''Although the Federal Reserve generally monitors developments in virtual currencies and other payments system innovations, it does not necessarily have authority to directly supervise or regulate these innovations or the entities that provide them to the market,'' Bernanke wrote to lawmakers.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeff Kearns in Washington at jkearns3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chris Wellisz at cwellisz@bloomberg.net

Enlarge imageBitcoin Virtual CurrencyTomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg

There are about 12 million Bitcoins in circulation, according to Bitcoincharts, a website that tracks activity across various exchanges.

There are about 12 million Bitcoins in circulation, according to Bitcoincharts, a website that tracks activity across various exchanges. Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 18:56

The former president of the Dutch Central Bank, Nout Wellink, has told students at the University of Amsterdam that the hype around bitcoin is worse than his country's Tulip mania in the 17th century.

"Sooner or later the facade will fall", Wellink said, calling bitcoin "pure speculation" and "hype" according to comments reported in the Dutch press.

"This is worse than the tulip mania," he continued. "At least then you got a tulip [at the end], now you get nothing."

Wellink's comments follow a warning from the Dutch Central Bank about the risks of virtual currencies like bitcoin, which fall outside Dutch financial supervision laws.

''The exchange rate is volatile and there is no central issuer which may be held liable,'' the bank warned. It also cautioned that the country's deposit guarantee scheme "does not apply.''

Tulip mania was one of the first recorded speculative bubbles. Over the course of four years in Holland, the price of tulips increased 200 times; at the peak of the bubble, a single bulb could sell for ten times a worker's annual wage.

Then, in just one month, the bubble burst, and the price dropped to nearly nothing.

' Somewhere in a landfill in Newport is a hard drive containing £4.5m in bitcoin

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Source: VK: Home

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 15:39

Bewerkt door: redactie '' 04/12/13, 15:19

(C) anp. Grachtenpanden uit bloembollen op de Keukenhof.

De virtuele munt Bitcoin is een bouwwerk dat vroeg of laat instort. Dat zei voormalig president van De Nederlandsche Bank Nout Wellink vandaag tijdens een bijeenkomst met studenten van de Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Het succes van de Bitcoin is volgens Wellink gebaseerd op een hype die erger is dan de Tulpenmanie uit de 17de eeuw. 'Toen kreeg je tenminste nog een tulp, nu krijg je niks.' Wellink deed zijn uitspraken tijdens de discussiebijeenkomst Room for Discussion.

Eerder al waarschuwden De Nederlandsche Bank en minister van financin Jeroen Dijsselbloem voor virtuele valuta als de bitcoin. De koers van de virtuele munt is erg wisselvallig. Sterke pieken worden gevolgd door diepe dalen, vaak zonder dat daarvoor een duidelijk aanwijsbare reden is.

Tijdens de Nederlandse Tulpenmanie, zo rond 1636-1637, was de tulpenbol enorm waardevol. Na een plotselinge prijsdaling raakten veel tulpenhandelaren aan de grond. Economen zien het als de eerste goed beschreven economische bubbel in de geschiedenis.

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 18:57

Tulip mania or tulipomania (Dutch names include: tulpenmanie, tulpomanie, tulpenwoede, tulpengekte and bollengekte) was a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for bulbs of the recently introduced tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed.[2]

At the peak of tulip mania, in March 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble (or economic bubble),[3] although some researchers have noted that the Kipper- und Wipperzeit episode in 1619''22, a Europe-wide chain of debasement of the metal content of coins to fund warfare, featured mania-like similarities to a bubble.[4] The term "tulip mania" is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble (when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values).[5]

The 1637 event was popularized in 1841 by the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written by British journalist Charles Mackay. According to Mackay, at one point 12 acres (5 ha) of land were offered for a Semper Augustus bulb.[6] Mackay claims that many such investors were ruined by the fall in prices, and Dutch commerce suffered a severe shock. Although Mackay's book is a classic that is widely reprinted today, his account is contested. Many modern scholars feel that the mania was not as extraordinary as Mackay described and argue that not enough price data are available to prove that a tulip bulb bubble actually occurred.[7][8]

Research on the tulip mania is difficult because of the limited economic data from the 1630s'--much of which comes from biased and anti-speculative sources.[9][10] Some modern economists[who?] have proposed rational explanations, rather than a speculative mania, for the rise and fall in prices. For example, other flowers, such as the hyacinth, also had high initial prices at the time of their introduction, which immediately fell. The high asset prices may also have been driven by expectations of a parliamentary decree that contracts could be voided for a small cost'--thus lowering the risk to buyers.

History[edit]The introduction of the tulip to Europe is usually attributed to Ogier de Busbecq, the ambassador of Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor to the Sultan of Turkey, who sent the first tulip bulbs and seeds to Vienna in 1554 from the Ottoman Empire. Tulip bulbs were soon distributed from Vienna to Augsburg, Antwerp and Amsterdam.[11] Its popularity and cultivation in the United Provinces (now the Netherlands)[12] is generally thought to have started in earnest around 1593 after the Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius had taken up a post at the University of Leiden and established the hortus academicus.[13] He planted his collection of tulip bulbs and found they were able to tolerate the harsher conditions of the Low Countries;[14] shortly thereafter the tulip began to grow in popularity.[15]

The tulip was different from every other flower known to Europe at that time, with a saturated intense petal color that no other plant had. The appearance of the non pareil tulip as a status symbol at this time coincides with the rise of newly independent Holland's trade fortunes. No longer the Spanish Netherlands, its economic resources could now be channeled into commerce and the country embarked on its Golden Age. Amsterdam merchants were at the center of the lucrative East Indies trade, where one voyage could yield profits of 400%.[16] The new merchant class displayed and validated its success, primarily by setting up grand estates surrounded by flower gardens, and the plant that had pride of place was the sensational tulip.

As a result, tulips rapidly became a coveted luxury item, and a profusion of varieties followed. They were classified in groups: the single-hued tulips of red, yellow, or white were known as Couleren; the multicolored Rosen (white streaks on a red or pink streaks background), Violetten (white streaks on a purple or lilac background), and the rarest of all, the Bizarden (Bizarres), (yellow or white streaks on a red, brown or purple background).[17] The multicolor effects of intricate lines and flame-like streaks on the petals were vivid and spectacular and made the bulbs that produced these even more exotic-looking plants highly sought-after. It is now known that this effect is due to the bulbs being infected with a type of tulip-specific mosaic virus, known as the "Tulip breaking virus", so called because it "breaks" the one petal color into two or more.[18][19]

The tulip was itself a conspirator in the supply-squeeze that fueled the speculation, in that it is grown from a bulb that cannot be produced quickly. Normally it takes 7''12 years to grow a flowering bulb from seed; bulbs can produce both seeds and two or three bud clones, or offsets, annually, but the "mother bulb" lasts only a few years. Properly cultivated, the "daughter offsets" will become flowering bulbs after one to three years. Before the demand for the "broken" tulips, virus-free bulbs producing ordinary single-color varieties were sold by the pound. Once affected by the virus, the "broken" exotics were an extremely limited commodity because the sought-after "breaking pattern" can only be reproduced through offsets, not seeds, as only the bulb is affected by the mosaic virus. Unfortunately, the virus that produced the sought-after effects also acted adversely on the bulb, weakening it and retarding propagation of offsets, so cultivating the most appealing varieties now took even longer. Taking this into account, quite probably from the time the speculation started until its collapse, the number of rare bulbs that changed hands so feverishly never increased beyond the original number.

The beautiful effects of the virus made the flamboyant and extravagant plants highly coveted, and because they were rare and desirable, they were expensive. Given that, it is not surprising growers named their new varieties with exalted titles. Many early forms were prefixed Admirael ("admiral"), often combined with the growers' names: Admirael van der Eijck for example, was perhaps the most highly regarded of about fifty so named. Generael ("general") was another prefix that found its way into the names of around thirty varieties. Later varieties were given even more superb and high-flown names, derived from Alexander the Great or Scipio, or even "Admiral of Admirals" and "General of Generals". However, naming could be haphazard and varieties highly variable in quality.[20] Most of these varieties have now died out,[21] though virus-free variegated-bred tulips continue in the trade.

Tulips bloom in April and May for only about a week. During the plant's dormant phase from June to September, bulbs can be uprooted and moved about, so actual purchases (in the spot market) occurred during these months.[22] During the rest of the year, florists, or tulip traders, signed contracts before a notary to buy tulips at the end of the season (effectively futures contracts).[22] Thus the Dutch, who developed many of the techniques of modern finance, created a market for tulip bulbs, which were durable goods.[12]Short selling was banned by an edict of 1610, which was reiterated or strengthened in 1621 and 1630, and again in 1636. Short sellers were not prosecuted under these edicts, but their contracts were deemed unenforceable.[23]

As the flowers grew in popularity, professional growers paid higher and higher prices for bulbs with the virus, and prices rose steadily. By 1634, in part as a result of demand from the French, speculators began to enter the market.[25] The contract price of rare bulbs continued to rise throughout 1636, but by November, the price of common, "unbroken" bulbs also began to increase, so that soon any tulip bulb could soon fetch hundreds of guilders. That year the Dutch created a type of formal futures markets where contracts to buy bulbs at the end of the season were bought and sold. Traders met in "colleges" at taverns and buyers were required to pay a 2.5% "wine money" fee, up to a maximum of three guilders per trade. Neither party paid an initial margin nor a mark-to-market margin, and all contracts were with the individual counter-parties rather than with the Exchange. The Dutch derogatorily described tulip contract trading as windhandel (literally "wind trade"), because no bulbs were actually changing hands. The entire business was accomplished on the margins of Dutch economic life, not in the Exchange itself.[26]

By 1636 the tulip bulb became the fourth leading export product of the Netherlands, after gin, herring and cheese. The price of tulips skyrocketed because of speculation in tulip futures among people who never saw the bulbs. Many men made and lost fortunes overnight.[27]

Tulip mania reached its peak during the winter of 1636''37, when some bulbs were reportedly changing hands ten times in a day. No deliveries were ever made to fulfil any of these contracts, because in February 1637, tulip bulb contract prices collapsed abruptly and the trade of tulips ground to a halt.[28] The collapse began in Haarlem, when, for the first time, buyers apparently refused to show up at a routine bulb auction. This may have been because Haarlem was then at the height of an outbreak of bubonic plague. While the existence of the plague may have helped create a culture of fatalistic risk-taking that allowed the speculation to skyrocket in the first place, this outbreak might also have helped to burst the bubble.[29]

Available price data[edit]The lack of consistently recorded price data from the 1630s makes the extent of the tulip mania difficult to estimate. The bulk of available data comes from anti-speculative pamphlets by "Gaergoedt and Warmondt" (GW) written just after the bubble. Economist Peter Garber collected data on the sales of 161 bulbs of 39 varieties between 1633 and 1637, with 53 being recorded by GW. Ninety-eight sales were recorded for the last date of the bubble, 5 February 1637, at wildly varying prices. The sales were made using several market mechanisms: futures trading at the colleges, spot sales by growers, notarized futures sales by growers, and estate sales. "To a great extent, the available price data are a blend of apples and oranges", according to Garber.[30]

Mackay's Madness of Crowds[edit]Goods allegedly exchanged for a single bulb of the Viceroy[31]Two lasts of wheat448Æ'Four lasts of rye558Æ'Four fat oxen480Æ'Eight fat swine240Æ'Twelve fat sheep120Æ'Two hogsheads of wine70Æ'Four tuns of beer32Æ'Two tons of butter192Æ'1,000 lb. of cheese120Æ'A complete bed100Æ'A suit of clothes80Æ'A silver drinking cup60Æ'Total2500Æ'The modern discussion of tulip mania began with the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published in 1841 by the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay; he proposed that crowds of people often behave irrationally, and tulip mania was, along with the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi Company scheme, one of his primary examples. His account was largely sourced to a 1797 work by Johann Beckmann titled A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins. In fact, Beckmann's account, and thus Mackay's by association, was primarily sourced to three anonymous pamphlets published in 1637 with an anti-speculative agenda.[32] Mackay's vivid book was popular among generations of economists and stock market participants. His popular but flawed description of tulip mania as a speculative bubble remains prominent, even though since the 1980s economists have debunked many aspects of his account.[32]

According to Mackay, the growing popularity of tulips in the early 17th century caught the attention of the entire nation; "the population, even to its lowest dregs, embarked in the tulip trade".[6] By 1635, a sale of 40 bulbs for 100,000 florins (also known as Dutch guilders) was recorded. By way of comparison, a ton of butter cost around 100 florins, a skilled laborer might earn 150 florins a year, and "eight fat swine" cost 240 florins.[6] (According to the International Institute of Social History, one florin had the purchasing power of '‚¬10.28 in 2002.[33])

By 1636 tulips were traded on the exchanges of numerous Dutch towns and cities. This encouraged trading in tulips by all members of society; Mackay recounted people selling or trading their other possessions in order to speculate in the tulip market, such as an offer of 12 acres (49,000 m2) of land for one of two existing Semper Augustus bulbs, or a single bulb of the Viceroy that was purchased for a basket of goods (shown at right) worth 2,500 florins.[31]

Many individuals grew suddenly rich. A golden bait hung temptingly out before the people, and, one after the other, they rushed to the tulip marts, like flies around a honey-pot. Every one imagined that the passion for tulips would last for ever, and that the wealthy from every part of the world would send to Holland, and pay whatever prices were asked for them. The riches of Europe would be concentrated on the shores of the Zuyder Zee, and poverty banished from the favoured clime of Holland. Nobles, citizens, farmers, mechanics, seamen, footmen, maidservants, even chimney sweeps and old clotheswomen, dabbled in tulips.[6]

The increasing mania contributed several amusing, but unlikely, anecdotes that Mackay recounted, such as a sailor who mistook the valuable tulip bulb of a merchant for an onion and grabbed it to eat. The merchant and his family chased the sailor to find him "eating a breakfast whose cost might have regaled a whole ship's crew for a twelvemonth". The sailor was jailed for eating the bulb.[6] Tulips are poisonous if prepared incorrectly, taste bad, and are considered to be only marginally edible even during famines.[34]

People were purchasing bulbs at higher and higher prices, intending to re-sell them for a profit. However, such a scheme could not last unless someone was ultimately willing to pay such high prices and take possession of the bulbs. In February 1637, tulip traders could no longer find new buyers willing to pay increasingly inflated prices for their bulbs. As this realization set in, the demand for tulips collapsed, and prices plummeted'--the speculative bubble burst. Some were left holding contracts to purchase tulips at prices now ten times greater than those on the open market, while others found themselves in possession of bulbs now worth a fraction of the price they had paid. Mackay claims the Dutch devolved into distressed accusations and recriminations against others in the trade.[6]

In Mackay's account, the panicked tulip speculators sought help from the government of the Netherlands, which responded by declaring that anyone who had bought contracts to purchase bulbs in the future could void their contract by payment of a 10 percent fee. Attempts were made to resolve the situation to the satisfaction of all parties, but these were unsuccessful. The mania finally ended, Mackay says, with individuals stuck with the bulbs they held at the end of the crash'--no court would enforce payment of a contract, since judges regarded the debts as contracted through gambling, and thus not enforceable by law.[6]

According to Mackay, lesser tulip manias also occurred in other parts of Europe, although matters never reached the state they had in the Netherlands. He also claimed that the aftermath of the tulip price deflation led to a widespread economic chill throughout the Netherlands for many years afterwards.[6]

Modern views[edit]Mackay's account of inexplicable mania was unchallenged, and mostly unexamined, until the 1980s.[35] However, research into tulip mania since then, especially by proponents of the efficient market hypothesis,[8] who are more skeptical of speculative bubbles in general, suggests that his story was incomplete and inaccurate. In her 2007 scholarly analysis Tulipmania, Anne Goldgar states that the phenomenon was limited to "a fairly small group", and that most accounts from the period "are based on one or two contemporary pieces of propaganda and a prodigious amount of plagiarism".[9] Peter Garber argues that the bubble "was no more than a meaningless winter drinking game, played by a plague-ridden population that made use of the vibrant tulip market."[36]

While Mackay's account held that a wide array of society was involved in the tulip trade, Goldgar's study of archived contracts found that even at its peak the trade in tulips was conducted almost exclusively by merchants and skilled craftsmen who were wealthy, but not members of the nobility.[37] Any economic fallout from the bubble was very limited. Goldgar, who identified many prominent buyers and sellers in the market, found fewer than half a dozen who experienced financial troubles in the time period, and even of these cases it is not clear that tulips were to blame.[38] This is not altogether surprising. Although prices had risen, money had not exchanged hands between buyers and sellers. Thus profits were never realized for sellers; unless sellers had made other purchases on credit in expectation of the profits, the collapse in prices did not cause anyone to lose money.[39]

Rational explanations[edit]There is no dispute that prices for tulip bulb contracts rose and then fell in 1636''37, but even a dramatic rise and fall in prices does not necessarily mean that an economic or speculative bubble developed and then burst. For tulip mania to have qualified as an economic bubble, the price of tulip bulbs would need to have become unhinged from the intrinsic value of the bulbs. Modern economists have advanced several possible reasons for why the rise and fall in prices may not have constituted a bubble.[40]

The increases of the 1630s corresponded with a lull in the Thirty Years' War.[41] Hence market prices (at least initially) were responding rationally to a rise in demand. However, the fall in prices was faster and more dramatic than the rise. Data on sales largely disappeared after the February 1637 collapse in prices, but a few other data points on bulb prices after tulip mania show that bulbs continued to lose value for decades thereafter.

Volatility in flower prices[edit]Garber compared the available price data on tulips to hyacinth prices at the beginning of the 19th century'--when the hyacinth replaced the tulip as the fashionable flower'--and found a similar pattern. When hyacinths were introduced florists strove with one another to grow beautiful hyacinth flowers, as demand was strong. However, as people became more accustomed to hyacinths the prices began to fall. The most expensive bulbs fell to 1 to 2 percent of their peak value within 30 years.[42] Garber also notes that, "a small quantity of prototype lily bulbs recently was sold for 1 million guilders ($US480,000 at 1987 exchange rates)", demonstrating that even today flowers can command extremely high prices.[43] Additionally, because the rise in prices occurred after bulbs were planted for the year, growers would not have had an opportunity to increase production in response to price.[44]

Legal changes[edit]UCLA economics professor Earl A. Thompson argues in a 2007 paper that Garber's explanation cannot account for the extremely swift drop in tulip bulb contract prices. The annualized rate of price decline was 99.999%, instead of the average 40% for other flowers.[40] He provides another explanation for Dutch tulip mania. The Dutch parliament was considering a decree (originally sponsored by Dutch tulip investors who had lost money because of a German setback in the Thirty Years' War[45]) that changed the way tulip contracts functioned:

On February 24, 1637, the self-regulating guild of Dutch florists, in a decision that was later ratified by the Dutch Parliament, announced that all futures contracts written after November 30, 1636 and before the re-opening of the cash market in the early Spring, were to be interpreted as option contracts. They did this by simply relieving the futures buyers of the obligation to buy the future tulips, forcing them merely to compensate the sellers with a small fixed percentage of the contract price.[46]

Before this parliamentary decree, the purchaser of a tulip contract'--known in modern finance as a futures contract'--was legally obliged to buy the bulbs. The decree changed the nature of these contracts, so that if the current market price fell, the purchaser could opt to pay a penalty and forgo receipt of the bulb, rather than pay the full contracted price. This change in law meant that, in modern terminology, the futures contracts had been transformed into options contracts. This proposal began to be debated in the fall of 1636, and if it became clear to investors that the decree was likely to be enacted, prices probably would have risen.[46]

This decree allowed someone who purchased a contract to void the contract with a payment of only 3.5 percent of the contract price (or about 1/30th the contract).[46] Thus, investors bought increasingly expensive contracts. A speculator could sign a contract to purchase a tulip for 100 guilders. If the price rose above 100 guilders, the speculator would pocket the difference as profit. If the price remained low, the speculator could void the contract for only 3½ guilders. Thus, a contract nominally for 100 guilders, would actually cost an investor no more than 3½ guilders. In early February, as contract prices reached a peak, Dutch authorities stepped in and halted the trading of these contracts.[46]

Thompson states that actual sales of tulip bulbs remained at ordinary levels throughout the period. Thus, Thompson concludes that the "mania" was a rational response to changes in contractual obligations.[47] Using data about the specific payoffs present in the futures and option contracts, Thompson argues that tulip bulb contract prices hewed closely to what a rational economic model would dictate, "Tulip contract prices before, during, and after the 'tulipmania' appear to provide a remarkable illustration of 'market efficiency'."[48]

Critiques[edit]Other economists believe that these elements cannot completely explain the dramatic rise and fall in tulip prices.[49] Garber's theory has also been challenged for failing to explain a similar dramatic rise and fall in prices for regular tulip bulb contracts.[5] Some economists also point to other factors associated with speculative bubbles, such as a growth in the supply of money, demonstrated by an increase in deposits at the Bank of Amsterdam during that period.[50]

Social mania and legacy[edit]The popularity of Mackay's tale has continued to this day, with new editions of Extraordinary Popular Delusions appearing regularly, with introductions by writers such as financier Bernard Baruch (1932), financial writers Andrew Tobias (1980),[51] psychologist David J. Schneider (1993), and Michael Lewis (2008). At least six editions are currently in print.

Goldgar argues that although tulip mania may not have constituted an economic or speculative bubble, it was nonetheless traumatic to the Dutch for other reasons. "Even though the financial crisis affected very few, the shock of tulipmania was considerable. A whole network of values was thrown into doubt."[52] In the 17th century, it was unimaginable to most people that something as common as a flower could be worth so much more money than most people earned in a year. The idea that the prices of flowers that grow only in the summer could fluctuate so wildly in the winter, threw into chaos the very understanding of "value".[53]

Many of the sources telling of the woes of tulip mania, such as the anti-speculative pamphlets that were later reported by Beckmann and Mackay, have been cited as evidence of the extent of the economic damage. These pamphlets, however, were not written by victims of a bubble, but were primarily religiously motivated. The upheaval was viewed as a perversion of the moral order'--proof that "concentration on the earthly, rather than the heavenly flower could have dire consequences".[54] Thus, it is possible that a relatively minor economic event took on a life of its own as a morality tale.

Nearly a century later, during the crash of the Mississippi Company and the South Sea Company in about 1720, tulip mania appeared in satires of these manias.[55] When Johann Beckmann first described tulip mania in the 1780s, he compared it to the failing lotteries of the time.[56] In Goldgar's view, even many modern popular works about financial markets, such as Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street (1973) and John Kenneth Galbraith's A Short History of Financial Euphoria (1990; written soon after the crash of 1987), used the tulip mania as a lesson in morality.[57][58][59] Tulip mania again became a popular reference during the dot-com bubble of 1995''2001.[57]

In this century, journalists have compared it to failure of the speculative dot-com bubble in 2000[60] and the most recently, to the subprime mortgage crisis.[61][62] Despite the mania's enduring popularity, Daniel Gross of Slate has said of economists offering efficient market explanations for the mania, that "If they're correct ... then business writers will have to delete Tulipmania from their handy-pack of bubble analogies."[63]

In popular culture[edit]The following novels incorporate tulip mania:[64]

The following films reference tulip mania:

See also[edit]^Nusteling, H. (1985) Welvaart en Werkgelegenheid in Amsterdam 1540''1860, pp. 114, 252, 254, 258.^Tulipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused. Mike Dash (2001).^Shiller 2005, p. 85 More extensive discussion of status as the earliest bubble on pp. 247''48.^Kindleberger, Charles P. and Aliber, Robert (2005 [1978]), Manias, Panics and Crashes. A History of Financial Crises, New York, ISBN 0-465-04380-1, p. 16.^ abFrench 2006, p. 3^ abcdefgh"The Tulipomania", Chapter 3, in Mackay 1841.^Thompson 2007, p. 99^ abKindleberger 2005, p. 115^ abKuper, Simon "Petal Power" (Review of Goldgar 2007), Financial Times, May 12, 2007. Retrieved on July 1, 2008.^A pamphlet about the Dutch tulipomania Wageningen Digital Library, July 14, 2006. Retrieved on August 13, 2008.^Brunt, Alan; Walsh, John, "'Broken' tulips and Tulip breaking virus", Microbiology Today, May, 2005, p. 68.^ abGarber 1989, p. 537^Dash 1999, pp. 59''60^Goldgar 2007, p. 32^Goldgar 2007, p. 33^Ricklefs, M. C. (1991). A History of Modern Indonesia Since c.1300, 2nd Edition. London: MacMillan. pp. 27^Dash 1999, p. 66^Phillips, S. "Tulip breaking potyvirus", in Brunt, A. A., Crabtree, K., Dallwitz, M. J., Gibbs, A. J., Watson, L. and Zurcher, E. J. (eds.) (1996 onwards). Plant Viruses Online: Descriptions and Lists from the VIDE Database. Version: August 20, 1996. Retrieved on August 15, 2008.^Garber 1989, p. 542^Dash 1999, pp. 106''07^Garber 2000, p. 41^ abGarber 1989, pp. 541''42^Garber 2000, pp. 33''36^Thompson 2007, pp. 101, 109''11^Garber 1989, p. 543^Goldgar 2007, p. 322^Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1997) pp 350''66 esp p. 362^Garber 1989, pp. 543''44^Garber 2000, pp. 37''38, 44''47^Garber 2000, pp. 49''59, 138''144^ abThis basket of goods was actually exchanged for a bulb according to Chapter 3 of Mackay 1841 and also Schama 1987, but Krelage (1942) and Garber 2000, pp. 81''83 dispute this interpretation of the original source, an anonymous pamphlet, saying that the commodity bundle was clearly given only to demonstrate the value of the florin at the time.^ abGarber 1990, p. 37^Goldgar 2007, p. 323^Deane, Green. "Tulips". Eat the Weeds. Retrieved December 4, 2013. ^Garber 1989, p. 535^Garber 2000, p. 81^Goldgar 2007, p. 141^Goldgar 2007, pp. 247''48^Goldgar 2007, p. 233^ abThompson 2007, p. 100^Thompson 2007, p. 103^Garber 1989, pp. 553''54^Garber 1989, p. 555^Garber 1989, pp. 555''56^Thompson 2007, pp. 103''04^ abcdThompson 2007, p. 101^Thompson 2007, p. 111^Thompson 2007, p. 109^Kindleberger & Aliber 2005, pp. 115''16^French 2006, pp. 11''12^Introduction by Andrew Tobias to "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" (New York: Harmony Press, 1980) available on-line at Andrew Tobias, Money and Other Subjects. Retrieved on August 12, 2008^Goldgar 2007, p. 18^Goldgar 2007, pp. 276''77^Goldgar 2007, pp. 260''61^Goldgar 2007, pp. 307''09^Goldgar 2007, p. 313^ abGoldgar 2007, p. 314^Galbraith 1990, p. 34^Malkiel 2007, pp. 35''38^Frankel, Mark, "When the Tulip Bubble Burst",Business Week, April 4, 2000.^"Bubble and Bust; As the subprime mortgage market tanks, policymakers must keep their nerve", The Washington Post, August 11, 2007. Retrieved on July 17, 2008.^Horton, Scott. "The Bubble Bursts", Harper's, January 27, 2008. Retrieved on July 17, 2008. Archived June 16, 2008 at the Wayback Machine^Gross, Daniel. "Bulb Bubble Trouble; That Dutch tulip bubble wasn't so crazy after all", Slate, July 16, 2004. Retrieved on November 4, 2011.^Goldgar (2007), p. 329.References[edit](Dutch) P. Cos (1637) '' Verzameling van een meenigte tulipaanen, naar het leven geteekend met hunne naamen, en swaarte der bollen, zoo als die publicq verkogt zijn, te Haarlem in den jaare A. 1637, door P. Cos, bloemist te Haarlem. '' Haarlem : [s.n.], 1637. '' 75 pl. available online at Wageningen Tulip Portal. Retrieved on August 11, 2008.Dash, Mike (1999), Tulipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused, London: Gollancz, ISBN 0-575-06723-3 French, Doug (2006), "The Dutch monetary environment during tulipomania" (PDF), The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics9 (1): 3''14, doi:10.1007/s12113-006-1000-6 . Retrieved on June 24, 2008.Galbraith, J. K. (1990), A Short History of Financial Euphoria, New York: Penguin Books, ISBN 0-670-85028-4 Garber, Peter M. (1989), "Tulipmania", Journal of Political Economy97 (3): 535''560, doi:10.1086/261615 Garber, Peter M. (1990), "Famous First Bubbles", The Journal of Economic Perspectives (The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 4, No. 2) 4 (2): 35''54, doi:10.1257/jep.4.2.35, JSTOR 1942889. (subscription required)Garber, Peter M. (2000), Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias, Cambridge: MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-07204-1 Goldgar, Anne (2007), Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0-226-30125-9 Hooper, William R. (April 1876), "The Tulip Mania", Harper's New Monthly Magazine52 (340): 743''746 Krelage, E. H. (1942), Bloemenspeculatie in Nederland, Amsterdam: P. N. van Kampen & Zoon Kindleberger, Charles P.; Aliber, Robert (2005), Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (5th ed.), Hoboken: Wiley, ISBN 0-471-46714-6 Mackay, Charles (1841), Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, London: Richard Bentley, archived from the original on March 31, 2008, retrieved 2008-08-15 Malkiel, Burton G. (2007), A Random Walk Down Wall Street (9th ed.), New York: W. W. Norton, ISBN 0-393-06245-7 Pavord, Anna (2007), The Tulip, London: Bloomsbury, ISBN 0-7475-7190-2 Pollan, Michael (2002), The Botany of Desire, New York: Random House, ISBN 0-375-76039-3 Schama, Simon (1987), The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, New York: Alfred Knopf, ISBN 0-394-51075-5 Shiller, Robert J. (2005), Irrational Exuberance (2nd ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-12335-7 Steimetz, Seiji S. C. (2008), "Bubbles", in David R. Henderson (ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (2nd ed.) (Indianapolis: Library of Economics and Liberty), ISBN 978-0865976658, OCLC 237794267 Thompson, Earl (2007), "The tulipmania: Fact or artifact?" (PDF), Public Choice130 (1''2): 99''114, doi:10.1007/s11127-006-9074-4, retrieved 2008-08-15 External links[edit]

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Source: Phys.org - latest science and technology news stories

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 16:17

Two arrested, bitcoins seized in German fraud probe1 hour agoGerman police say they have arrested two people and seized illegally generated bitcoins worth more than 700,000 euros ($950,000) in an investigation of computer fraud.

The Federal Criminal Police Office said Wednesday it staged searches earlier this week in an investigation of three people suspected of manipulating existing malware and spreading it over the Internet, creating a remotely controlled network of compromised computer systems.

Police say the perpetrators used the processing power of the hacked computers to generate bitcoins, a cryptography-based digital currency. They also are investigating further suspected fraud, violations of copyright law and offenses related to the distribution of pornography.

They gave no details on the two people who were arrested Monday, one in the southern state of Bavaria and the other in Lower Saxony, a northern region.

Explore further:UK police arrest 6 people in phone hacking probe

(C) 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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Thu, 05 Dec 2013 01:54

4 December 2013Last updated at 19:21 ET By Dave LeeTechnology reporter, BBC NewsBlinking, beeping, auto-playing. Popping up, over, under. Tracking, intruding, unsettling. If the internet was a pretty face, advertising would be its wart.

Thankfully, if getting "a great six pack in weeks!" isn't your thing, you can simply flick a switch and use an adblocker - software that banishes the sight and hushes the din of irritating advertising all over the web.

The appeal is obvious, and millions have done it, but should you?

According to one count, 84% of the top 100 websites in the world rely on advertising to generate revenue, utilising the now long-established trade-off: use our website for free, but you need to look at some ads while you do it.

Continue reading the main storyOne site fights back...The above image was displayed to visitors to online dating site OkCupid who had an adblocking program switched on.

On traditional mediums such as TV and radio, advertising has over time developed into a form of entertainment itself - just ask the millions who tune in to the Superbowl without any interest in football.

But online, evidence suggests we're far less forgiving. Adblock Plus, the most popular adblocking program on the market, has been downloaded 250 million times, and has around 60 million active users.

"I guess everyone agrees that online ads are just plain annoying," says Till Faida, co-founder of Eyeo, the firm that owns and maintains Adblock Plus.

"They don't work for most people, and most consumers have turned their back on them."

Mainstream adoptionWhat's more, as firms scramble to monetise however they can, it's arguably getting worse.

"Advertising has become even more aggressive," says Sean Blanchfield, chief executive of Pagefair, a firm that monitors how often advertising is blocked on websites.

"Most people are installing adblocks because of video advertising. That's where the mainstream adoption is coming from."

Adblock Plus sees its "mission" as being to encourage advertisers, and the websites that carry their material, to rethink how those ads work - minimising discomfort for internet users.

"Right now we block all video ads," says Ben Williams, Adblock Plus's director of operations. "It isn't inconceivable that in the future there will be a better format, but don't see that coming right now, personally."

Mr Faida adds: "We want to move away from the same old blinking banners, and encourage the industry to develop better advertising formats that actually work with the consumers instead of trying to force something upon them."

Yet an increasing number of people are questioning whether Adblock Plus's software is unfairly using its powerful position not just to encourage better ads, but also to build a quite considerable revenue stream of its own.

'Like the mafia'It's no spoiler to share that most publishers or advertisers have little time for Adblock Plus - and recently that annoyance has stepped up a notch.

Descriptions like "extortion", "protection racket" and "like the mafia" are all terms being voiced to describe the operation, says Mr Blanchfield.

"I can definitely confirm that that's what most publishers call it," he tells the BBC. "And I can see it from their point of view."

Continue reading the main story''Start QuoteThere could potentially be an issue of a conflict of interest''

End QuoteTill FaidaEyeo, owner of Adblock PlusThe row centres around a more recent addition to Adblock Plus's business, first trialled in 2011 but now gathering pace now it is out of its beta phase.

Where initially Adblock Plus would block all advertising, it now operates using a whitelist - a collection of, so far, around 150 sites and services whose ads are allowed through the filter.

To get on this whitelist, the advertising has to meet several fairly strict criteria: no animations, don't get in the way of reading text, and don't take up more than a third of a page's width, plus various other things.

Sensible parameters on the face of it, but here's the bone of contention: for "big" companies that want to be on the whitelist, Adblock Plus demands they pay a fee.

"Large companies that significantly increase their profits," explains Mr Faida, "In return support us to make the initiative sustainable."

If that fee isn't paid, advertising is blocked, even if it fits the "acceptable" criteria.

Pay up, in other words, or Adblock Plus will knock-out some of your revenue.

'Stirring up controversy'Such descriptions of Adblock Plus are unfair, argues Mr Williams.

"To describe it as extortion is absolutely imprecise and wrong," he says.

"I think that people call it that all the time in the hopes of stirring up a bit of controversy here and there.

Continue reading the main story'Acceptable ads'The principles of "acceptable" advertising, as defined by Adblock Plus and its volunteer community:

Acceptable Ads are not annoying. Acceptable Ads do not disrupt or distort page content. Acceptable Ads are transparent with us about being an ad. Acceptable Ads are effective without shouting at us. Acceptable Ads are appropriate to the site or tweet that we are on. But Mr Faida says he can understand why some people may be concerned at that set-up.

"There could potentially be an issue of a conflict of interest," he concedes. "We're trying to counter that with maximum transparency."

But both men argue that far from working against advertisers, they are instead playing the role of the much needed intermediary, working with advertisers in a way that keeps internet users happy.

Around 10% of the companies on the whitelist pay for the privilege, Mr Williams says, and he lists Google, Amazon, Yahoo and Reddit as some of the company's "strategic partners".

They would not not be drawn on how much they charge, nor do they give up any details on which companies had refused to play ball.

"There are of course cases where people are looking at it from a simplistic point of view," Mr Faida says of those firms distancing themselves.

£44-a-monthThe Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), a UK-based trade association for online and mobile advertisers, released a report earlier this year that hypothesised what it thought an advertising-free internet might look like.

The report argued that if some of the web's most popular services - excluding shopping - did not carry advertising, users would each need to pay around £44-a-month, on top of existing fees, to make up the revenue needed to keep those sites alive.

While the trade association has an obvious motivation behind stressing the importance of advertising, the report does at least highlight how integral that revenue stream is.

"As a trade body we support innovation in advertising technology," says Nick Stringer, director of operations at the IAB.

"But we don't support the blocking of ads per se, because it denies publishers the revenues they need."

Although often descending into a bitter war of words, both sides of the adblocking debate at least agree on one core issue.

"The advertising industry just wants advertising to be relevant," says Mr Stringer. "The more relevant it is to the consumer the more attractive it is to the advertiser, and it's more valuable to the web publisher."

But targeted advertising requires sophisticated techniques to track users and their browsing habits - a highly-contentious issue, to put it mildly.

Follow Dave Lee on Twitter @DaveLeeBBC

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Tue, 03 Dec 2013 17:47

After almost a year of tinkering, CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker has concluded that a news channel cannot subsist on news alone.

So he is planning much broader changes for the network'--including a prime-time shakeup that's likely to make CNN traditionalists cringe.

Once, CNN's vanilla coverage was a point of pride. Now, the boss boasts about the ratings for his unscripted series, and documentaries like the Sea World-slamming film Blackfish. Zucker, in his first one-on-one interview since taking control of CNN last January, told Capital he wants news coverage ''that is just not being so obvious.''

Instead, he wants more of ''an attitude and a take'':

MORE ON CAPITALADVERTISEMENT''We're all regurgitating the same information. I want people to say, 'You know what? That was interesting. I hadn't thought of that,''' Zucker said. ''The goal for the next six months, is that we need more shows and less newscasts.''

Zucker'--''rhymes with hooker,'' he likes to say'--also expanded on comments he has made about breaking CNN out of a mindset created by historic rivalries with MSNBC and Fox. He wants the network to attract ''viewers who are watching places like Discovery and History and Nat Geo and A&E.''

''People who traditionally just watch the cable news networks [are] a great audience,'' he said. ''I'm not trying to alienate that audience. But the overall cable news audience has not grown in the last 12 years, OK? So, all we're doing is trading [audience] share. '... We also want to broaden what people can expect from CNN.''

The 48-year-old Zucker initially faced internal resistance to his experiments beyond the realm of hard news, but he now has an irrefutable retort: The No. 1 show on CNN is now ''Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,'' a travel-adventure show featuring the bad-boy celebrity chef. Zucker said that inside CNN, his formula has finally been accepted ''because people have seen the results.''

Zucker is ramping up changes across the massive organization, some subtle and some extreme.

More series and films untethered to the news and produced by outside production companies will get runs in primetime: ''Yes, there will be more and, yes, they will not just be on Sundays'...," he said. "I think it will expand past just the weekends, and so there's a little piece of news for you'... This is a primetime play. It's too expensive to confine it to weekends.''

Among the prime-time possibilities he is considering at CNN: half-hour shows, perhaps including one for Bill Weir, recently hired from ABC.

''Honestly, there is not a piece of paper that has the lineup on it right now,'' he said.

HLN''the former Headline News''will be ''rethought, reimagined, and rebranded'' to get away from the wall-to-wall courthouse coverage that earned HLN massive viewership during big events like the Jodi Arias and George Zimmerman trials. HLN ''really just had a great year from an audience standpoint,'' he said, but: "it's not as strong a business proposition, and it's not really what advertisers are looking for. If we wanted to be in the court business, Time Warner would have kept Court TV.''

He tapped veteran TV executive Albie Hecht to lead the changes at HLN.

''His mandate is to figure out the white space for yet another cable news network in a world where headlines are ubiquitous on whatever mobile device you choose to use,'' Zucker said.

Zucker said he is in the middle of ''reinvigorating'' CNN International with more news and more news programs, to replace sponsored content.

Zucker leads each day's 9 a.m. editorial call '' a duty his predecessor, Jim Walton, delegated. After an embarrassing on-air mistake the day of the Boston Marathon bombing, Zucker has made a point of preaching caution over speed in the channel's breaking-news reporting.

WITH A SMALL OFFICE IN CNN'S FIFTH-FLOOR newsroom, Zucker is far removed from the executive suites on the upper levels of the Time Warner Center. The room is small and sparse for an office of someone at his level. Except for a ''CNN Miami'' hat'--a token from his childhood in South Florida'--and some stacks of papers, a few trinkets and a gift bag filled with CNN swag, the room is mostly empty.

But there are 11 TV screens lining the walls of his office. One of them used to be tuned to CNBC but has since gotten the boot, replaced by CNN.com. It's a small sign of his increasing mandate to focus on digital news.

For months, he has been working on combining ''our legacy television newsroom and our digital newsroom.''

''This weekend, we had more people learn about [Fast & Furious actor] Paul Walker's death from our mobile products than from our desktop products, which was the first time that something like that had happened,'' Zucker said.

For now, the cable channel brings in the money. But increasing resources and mindshare are going to other platforms.

''Television is still our bread and butter today, but digital will continue to be more important every day going forward,'' he said. ''The majority of our time is still spent on television, but much more'--an increasing amount every day'--is spent on digital.''

To that end, Zucker said, CNN is developing ''a suite of new products'' that will provide dual-screen experiences for cable subscribers.

''There's a reorientation of the organization that we're in the process of: understanding the importance going forward of digital and, in particular, mobile and video,'' he said. ''Are the revenues there, the way we want them today to be? No. But are they growing? Yes.''

New hires'--including Brian Stelter from The New York Times, hired last month to cover media and host CNN's weekly ''Reliable Sources'''--are being brought in for roles that ''are as much digital as they are television,'' Zucker said.

''We're in the video game already,'' he said. ''So shifting video to a different screen is much easier for us than an organization that is a legacy print organization.''

''In five years,'' Zucker continued, ''mobile video consumption with three little red letters called CNN is what the future looks like. I think that there are three incredible brands in the news and information space. I think ESPN owns sports, I think the Weather Channel owns weather, and I want CNN to own news and information in the global digital video space."

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Archived Version

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 01:24

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Lisa Kennedy Montgomery

In a move that's bound to make many a Gen-X-er feel a little old, Fox Business Network announced Tuesday that '90s MTV VJ Kennedy has just been tapped to host a primetime series about economics.

Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, who first joined FBN in 2012 as a Stossel contributor, will topline The Independents -- a new program that intends to direct the financial network's lens at the protection of economic and civil liberties.

PHOTOS: The Most Talked-About Faces of TV News

Kennedy will serve as a co-host alongside Reason magazine's Matt Welch, America's Future Foundation's Kmele Foster and a rotating panel of money experts. The program premieres Dec. 9 and will run four times weekly -- Mondays through Wednesdays and again on Fridays -- at 9 p.m. ET. (Stossel will continue to air in the time slot on Thursdays.)

The new hour marks another programming expansion for FBN, which currently airs an encore of Gerri Willis' Willis Report in the hour. FBN recently made headlines when it wooed financial news heavyweight Maria Bartiromo away from competitor CNBC. News of The Independents was announced by network executive vp Kevin Magee.

Kennedy, who is repped by N.S. Bienstock, recently published her second book: The Kennedy Chronicles: The Golden Age of MTV Through Rose-Colored Glasses. She also hosts Music in the Morning on Los Angeles' 98.7 FM.

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Source: The Local

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 16:43

Photo: DPA

Published: 04 Dec 2013 16:27 GMT+01:00Updated: 04 Dec 2013 16:27 GMT+01:00

Germany's biggest bank has been fined a record '‚¬725 million for rigging interest rates. It was one of several banks fined a total of '‚¬1.7 billion by the European Union Commission on Wednesday.

Deutsche Bank was fined the largest amount by the commission which handed down a decision in the Euribor and Libor interest rigging scandal, involving the Royal Bank of Scotland, Citi Group, Soci(C)t(C) G(C)n(C)rale and JPMorgan

Barclays and UBS were spared fines after alerting authorities to the scandal which saw the banks act as a cartel to rig the interest rate benchmarks, Euribor and Libor..

The German banks fine was broken down into one of '‚¬465m for taking part in euro market rigging and another '‚¬260 million for that of the Japanese Yen, the S¼ddeutsche Zeitung reported.

The money will come out of the '‚¬4 billion Deutsche Bank has set aside for paying fines.

''The decision today is a clear signal that the commission is resolute in its fight against cartels in the finance sector,'' said EU commissioner responsible for competition Joachin Almunia.

As well as Deutsche Bank, France's Soci(C)t(C) G(C)n(C)rale must pay '‚¬466 million and the Royal Bank of Scotland '‚¬391 million.

READ MORE: Deutsche Bank profits collapse by 94 percent

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Today's headlines

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Germany will review almost 750 unsolved murders, manslaughters and attempted killings dating back more than two decades to assess whether they were motivated by far-right extremism, officials said on Wednesday. READ () >>

Photo: DPA

Germany's biggest bank has been fined a record '‚¬725 million for rigging interest rates. It was one of several banks fined a total of '‚¬1.7 billion by the European Union Commission on Wednesday. READ () >>

Photo: Bernd Thissen dpa/lmv

Migrants in Germany would rather send their children to schools with fewer other migrants, a study published on Wednesday revealed. Parents fear that attending a school with too many other foreigners could hinder their children's education. READ () >>

Photo: DPA

Driving on the German Autobahn can be one of the greatest motoring experiences in the world. The Local's List this week looks at the top five dos and don'ts on the country's 13,000 kilometres of motorway. READ () >>

Photo: DPA

Northern Germany is braced for a violent winter storm which is forecast to hit on Thursday. The coastline could see huge waves, the worst flooding since 1962, and wind speeds of up to 140 kilometres per hour. READ () >>

SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel addresses party members at Baunatal to get out the "Yes" vote. Photo: DPA

Social Democrat chief Sigmar Gabriel is on a major charm offensive, racing across the country to win over sceptics to the plan for a coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel. READ () >>

Gaby Gossett with pet wild boar Lexa. Photo: DPA

A woman who kept a huge wild boar as a pet was forced to say goodbye after it was shot and killed on Monday by a hunter in western Germany. She had raised three-year-old Lexa by hand since it was piglet. READ () >>

Photo: DPA

A British soldier has been arrested in Germany on suspicion of terrorism offences after a nail bomb was found in a house on Thursday. READ () >>

Photo: DPA

Germans are confident their highly-rated national team will win the football World Cup in Brazil next year, a poll released on Wednesday suggested. READ () >>

Photo: Andrea Warnecke/DPA

More than half of Germans want greater state control over websites, but about the same share are worried about surveillance of their own online activity, a survey on Tuesday revealed. READ () >>

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Tue, 03 Dec 2013 17:37

ISTANBUL '-- The sharp, dry mountains that run between Turkey and Iraq have long marked a front line in the battle between the Turkish government and Kurdish separatists where cross-border attacks took many lives on both sides.

Though a rapprochement has calmed the border, the United States fears stability may now be in even greater danger. The problem is not war '-- but commerce. Iraqi Kurds are selling oil and natural gas directly to Turkey, infuriating Washington and the central government in Baghdad, which fear that oil independence could lead Kurds to declare a broad independence and the fracturing of the nation.

Even as sectarian killing is again spiking across Iraq, and the Syrian civil war destabilizes the region, American officials in Baghdad say the flow of oil to Turkey may be the greatest potential risk to Iraq's cohesion.

But a year-and-a-half-long diplomatic drive by the United States to stop the flow has so far failed, reflecting Washington's diminished influence in the region, even with its two longtime allies. Not only will trucks continue to travel daily from the Kurdish region to two Turkish cities on the Mediterranean coast, and not only will the Kurds continue to deliver oil via a pipeline to Turkey, but the parties plan to build a second pipeline, whose details have been kept secret.

The Iraqi Kurds run their own relatively prosperous region.

The New York Times

''The Kurdistan deal with Turkey is a huge violation against the Iraqi Constitution because they didn't make the deal with the coordination of the central government,'' said Ali Dhari, the deputy chairman of the Iraqi Parliament's oil and gas committee. ''This means the stealing of the Iraqi wealth, and we will not allow it.''

The oil accords with Turkey, potentially worth billions of dollars, are part of a broader effort by Iraqi Kurds in recent years to cut their own energy deals '-- including exploration agreements with foreign companies like Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Gazprom '-- that sidelined the central government. The Kurds, and the Turks, say they will pay Baghdad its fair share. But officials in the capital have long claimed such arrangements are illegal.

The controversy is in part the unfinished business of the American occupation of Iraq. The failure of the Iraqi government to pass a national oil law, one of the benchmarks set by President George W. Bush when he announced the United States troop ''surge'' in 2007, has left Baghdad and Erbil, the Kurdish capital, in a perpetual feud over how to divide profits and who has the authority to make agreements with international oil companies.

Qasim Mishkhati, a Kurdish member of Parliament's oil and gas committee, insisted that the wealth from the deals would be shared with the rest of Iraq, and that it was the responsibility of the regional government in the north to find international markets for its oil resources. ''Kurdistan is working to increase the national income so that all Iraqis can enjoy better services and more wealth,'' he said.

Oil tankers in Erbil. Iraqi Kurds are selling oil and natural gas directly to Turkey, angering Washington and Baghdad

Khaled Hasan for The New York Times

Although the mechanism for such payments has not been worked out, the Turks and the Kurds have indicated that they would adhere to the existing proportions for the division of national revenue, meaning Baghdad would receive 83 percent of the net profit and the Kurds would keep 17 percent.

But the alarm in Baghdad and Washington has grown with these oil deals, which appear to be part of a slow, long-term strategy by the Iraqi Kurds to pursue a path of increasing autonomy that experts say has one endgame: an independent Kurdish state.

Tens of millions of Kurds live in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran, and they have long held ambitions for independence that for decades were thwarted. Now, amid the turmoil of the Middle East, Kurdish leaders are taking decisive steps to advance that dream, not just in Iraq, but also in Syria, where Kurdish factions recently declared an autonomous administration in the northeast.

The Iraqi Kurds run their own autonomous and relatively prosperous region in northern Iraq, control their own ports of entry, field their own army and intelligence service and conduct their own foreign policy. The Kurdish region also has separate visa rules, so an American, for instance, might wait weeks or months to secure a visa to Baghdad, but could buy one at the airport in Erbil. The region has also served as a safe haven for Sunni officials looking to escape the reach of the Shiite-led government, including former Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, accused in 2011 of terrorism.

But the oil deals also highlight the drastic reshaping of regional alliances in the past few years. In 2003 Turkey, worried that the American invasion of Iraq would promote Kurdish independence, forbade American troops to use its territory to enter Iraq.

But now Turkey is in the process of making peace with its own Kurds, who have waged a three-decade insurgency against the Turkish state with bases in Iraq. In a region where Turkey has few allies these days, the Iraqi Kurds have become close partners.

For Turkey, though, the energy deals with Iraqi Kurdistan, which include oil and natural gas, underscore a persistent national challenge to secure reliable supplies of energy for its economy. Turkey boasts the Middle East's largest economy but has few domestic energy sources. It has historically relied on two countries for the bulk of its energy '-- Russia and Iran '-- and a national priority for Turkey has been to diversify its sources of oil and gas.

The only place in the world where demand for energy is growing faster than Turkey is in China, and the only people who pay more for gasoline at the pump than Turks are Norwegians. In Turkey it can cost more than $120 to fill the tank of a compact car because of high taxes the government has levied in an effort to keep demand down

While Turkey and the Iraqi Kurdish regional government have slowly expanded their relationship in the past few years, they have recently agreed to something ambitious and broader: a multibillion-dollar pact that includes the building of the second pipeline, according to press reports and oil executives involved in the negotiations.

That deal comes as Turkish and Iraqi government officials have recently sought to mend ties that had soured in recent years, an effort that included a visit to Baghdad on Sunday by Turkey's energy minister, who indicated Turkey would try to win Baghdad's support for the deals with the Kurds. Turkey had supported the Sunni Muslim opposition in Iraq, angering the Shiite leadership that dominates the government in Baghdad.

''There has been a rapprochement between Ankara and Baghdad, but what I see in the energy policy of Turkey relating to Kurdistan still seems to be a fly in the ointment for the Ministry of Oil in Baghdad,'' said Badr H. Jafar, the chairman of the Pearl Petroleum consortium, the largest private oil and gas investor in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The recent steps taken to improve the relationship between Turkey and Iraq '-- a reconciliation pushed by the Americans '-- now seem to be the best bet, analysts said, to achieve an agreement on an elusive national oil law to divide the country's vast petroleum profits.

The Iraqi Kurdish leadership ''is positioning itself for greater autonomy in negotiations with Baghdad, but as relations between Ankara and Baghdad continue to warm it is inconceivable that the K.R.G. will be allowed to export to Turkey without Baghdad's consent,'' said David L. Goldwyn, the State Department's coordinator for international energy affairs during the first term of the Obama administration, referring to the initials for the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq.

Turkey, though, has said it will ensure that the government in Baghdad will be paid for any oil it imports from Kurdistan in accordance with Iraq's revenue-sharing arrangement.

''If done correctly, these deals have the potential to generate huge revenues for Iraq, distributed by the Iraqi government in accordance with the Iraqi Constitution and for the ultimate benefit of the Iraqi people, including of course, the Kurdish region,'' Mr. Jafar said.

Tim Arango reported from Istanbul, and Clifford Krauss from Houston. Duraid Adnan contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul.

Correction: December 3, 2013

An earlier version of the caption with the photograph of the oil well in Kirkuk misstated the city's location. It is in a contested area of northern Iraq, not inside Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region.

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 03:51

WASHINGTON '-- The railroad industry brags in its national publicity campaign that it spends billions of dollars improving its infrastructure ''so taxpayers don't have to.''

But the ads don't tell everything. The nation's freight rail network has been the quiet recipient of more than $600 million in federal investment during the Obama administration.

According to Federal Railroad Administration numbers, at least half that amount has gone to projects that benefit the nation's four largest railroads, the same companies at the heart of the industry's ubiquitous ''Freight Rail Works'' campaign.

That doesn't even include tens of millions more that states have contributed for additional investment in ports and high-speed passenger trains that's boosted the nation's freight railroads.

The public dollars have built new overpasses to separate trains from one another, as well as cars and trucks. They've replaced aging bridges, laid new track and upgraded signal systems. They've paid to enlarge tunnels and raise bridges so that shipping containers may be double-stacked. They've built new facilities where cargo containers can be transferred from trucks to trains, or vice versa.

Supporters say these public investments, combined with private capital, are model infrastructure partnerships that will help take trucks off crowded highways, reduce pollution and improve the flow of goods to and from the nation's seaports.

''The majority of dollars that benefit freight rail are well spent,'' said Chuck Clowdis, the managing director of North American markets at economic forecaster IHS Global Insight.

But others wonder whether an industry that boasts about how little it depends on taxpayers really needs the extra help.

''We don't run (ad) campaigns like that, and we move 70 percent of all the tonnage in America at some point every day,'' said Bill Graves, the president and CEO of the American Trucking Associations and a former Republican governor of Kansas.

The trucking industry isn't bashful about pressing for more highway funding, Graves said, while railroads ''probably overstate their independence from public investment.''

The Obama administration's high-speed passenger rail initiatives have overshadowed its freight push.

While its passenger rail improvements have been mired in controversy and delays, many of the freight rail investments begun under the economic stimulus of 2009 are at or near completion. The White House is eager to show the results.

''This is the inland version of the widening of the Panama Canal,'' Vice President Joe Biden said last month, not at a seaport but at a CSX freight terminal in the middle of a cornfield in North Baltimore, Ohio.

North Baltimore anchors the National Gateway, a project partially funded with a $98 million grant from the Department of Transportation. CSX paid for the Ohio facility, while the federal money helped raise overhead clearances on its route to East Coast ports, to allow double-stacked container trains.

Last week in Missouri, Federal Railroad Administrator Joseph Szabo cut the ribbon on a new bridge that added a second track over the Osage River, eliminating a bottleneck between St. Louis and Kansas City. Though the Obama administration paid for $22 million of the $28 million project through its High Speed Intercity Passenger Rail Program, the bridge will benefit the nation's largest freight railroad, Union Pacific, which operates as many as 60 trains a day on the line.

In November, the Port of Miami restored its rail connection, which Hurricane Wilma had severed in 2005. A DOT grant paid for $22 million of the $49 million project. Port Director Bill Johnson said the grant was essential and that the project wouldn't have happened without it. The Miami port is undertaking a massive expansion to accommodate bigger ships. It's scheduled to be ready when a widened Panama Canal opens in 2015.

''We need a rail system to serve Florida and also the heartland of America,'' Johnson said. ''It's all about connecting.''

In Charlotte, N.C., $129 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money will separate the Norfolk Southern and CSX mainlines where they cross in the city. The grant is part of $520 million in stimulus funds awarded to North Carolina to improve passenger and freight service in the corridor from Raleigh to Charlotte.

For all the public money that freight railroads have received, they haven't talked much about it. The industry spent years trying to free itself from government regulation, and it doesn't want federal money with too many strings attached.

''I think the industry is concerned about maintaining its independence,'' said David Clarke, the director of the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

The worst recession since the Great Depression offered an opportunity few railroads could refuse. The Obama stimulus gave birth to a discretionary program called TIGER, for Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery.

The competitive program has proved popular with governors and mayors because it's helped them start, and in some cases finish, infrastructure projects they'd long desired. Many of them involved freight railroads.

TIGER helped pay for two projects that involve the heavily congested intersections of two of the nation's largest railroads, Union Pacific and BNSF Railway.

Until August, Colton Crossing in Southern California was a chokepoint for cargo moving out of the ports at Los Angeles and Long Beach. A $34 million TIGER grant helped build an overpass. The California Department of Transportation contributed another $41 million, while the railroads paid for the balance of the $91 million project.

A similar number of trains compete for a green signal at Tower 55 near downtown Fort Worth, Texas. A $34 million TIGER grant will cover about a third of the cost of fixing the junction, with the railroads sharing most of the rest. The work should be finished next year.

Freight rail investment might relieve congested roads, as well.

When it comes to moving smaller quantities of consumer goods faster over shorter distances, trucks have the advantage. But railroads excel at moving large quantities of freight over long distances at a lower cost.

''Our growth is driven by taking trucks off the highways,'' said Jeff Heller, the vice president for intermodal at Norfolk Southern.

Norfolk Southern would like to skim some new business from one of the country's busiest trucking lanes with what it calls its Crescent Corridor, stretching from the Northeast to the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast.

In a $2.5 billion partnership that involves the railroad, DOT and several states, Norfolk Southern has upgraded track and signals and has opened several new intermodal facilities, where trailers and containers can be loaded on trains. The latest such facility will open in Charlotte early this month.

The railroad hopes to divert 1.3 million trucks a year, while the federal and state transportation departments hope to improve traffic congestion and safety on interstate highways.

Chicago hopes that a state, federal and local partnership will relieve congestion at the nation's busiest rail hub.

A $2 billion, decade-long project is building lots of new overpasses to ease the delays caused when more than 1,300 passenger and freight trains converge on Chicago every day, creating headaches for shippers and commuters. Some trains arrive from the East Coast in a day only to get stuck in the city for two days.

But the success of both projects might be limited by decisions made in the 19th century that would take billions of dollars more to fix.

Chicago's congestion stems from the fact that major railroads built into the city without making efficient connections. They still don't connect seamlessly, and there are few options to bypass Chicago.

Portions of the Crescent Corridor were laid out before the Civil War, with an abundance of hills and curves that slow the trains. That makes it hard for the railroad to be an effective competitor with trucks on parallel interstate highways.

''The railroads are still hamstrung to a certain extent by how their routes run,'' said Clowdis of IHS Global Insight.

Email: ctate@mcclatchydc.com; Twitter: @tatecurtis

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Source: the tap

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 16:19

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Two Bombs Went Off Within Comet ISON":Hi Tap, According to Dahb007, NASA have fabricated pictures of ISON going into the SUN.For some reason they did not want us to know the Sun did not eat ISON.The comet did loose some of its tail, yet carried on its journey.They posted the same image with the clock still ticking.What are the Elite upto ???

Posted by Anonymous to the tap at 9:47 pm

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 22:15

Kal Penn (born Kalpen Suresh Modi; April 23, 1977) is an American actor, producer, and civil servant.

As an actor, he is known for his role portraying Dr. Lawrence Kutner on the television program House, as well as the character Kumar Patel in the Harold and Kumar film series. He is also recognized for his performance in the critically acclaimed film, The Namesake. Additionally, Penn has taught at the University of Pennsylvania in the Cinema Studies Program as a visiting lecturer.

On April 8, 2009, it was announced that Penn would join the Obama administration as an Associate Director in the White House Office of Public Engagement.[1] This necessitated that his character, Lawrence Kutner, be written out of the TV series House.[1][2] Penn resigned his post as Barack Obama's Associate Director of Public Engagement on June 1, 2010, for a brief return to his acting career.[3] He filmed the third installment of the Harold and Kumar series, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, and subsequently returned to the White House Office of Public Engagement as an Associate Director.[4] In July 2011, he again left the White House to accept a role in How I Met Your Mother.[5] He has since returned to his role with the White House.

Early childhood and personal life[edit]Penn was born Kalpen Suresh Modi in Montclair, New Jersey, to a HinduIndian family. His mother, Asmita, is a fragrance evaluator for a perfume company, and his father, Suresh Modi, is an engineer.[6][7] Both of his parents are Gujarati immigrants from India.[8] He has stated that stories of his grandparents marching with Mahatma Gandhi for Indian independence were a significant influence on his interest in politics.[9]

He attended Marlboro Middle School in Marlboro Township, New Jersey and played baritone saxophone in the jazz band there. Penn attended The Fine and Performing Arts Academy (a magnet program) at Howell High School for freshman, sophomore, and junior years; he transferred to Freehold Township High School for senior year; both schools are part of the Freehold Regional High School District. He was active in the schools' theater productions and competed on the Freehold Township forensics team. He attended UCLA, where he double majored in film and sociology.[10] Penn is vegetarian and ate veggie sliders during the filming of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.[11]

Acting career[edit]Penn's feature film debut came in 1998 in Express: Aisle to Glory. He has since appeared in American Desi, National Lampoon's Van Wilder, the final episode of The Lonely Island, Malibu's Most Wanted, A Lot Like Love, Dude, Where's the Party?, Love Don't Cost a Thing, Superman Returns, National Lampoon's Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj, Epic Movie, The Namesake, the Harold and Kumar series, and an uncredited appearance in Deck the Halls.

Penn says that he derived his acting name, Kal Penn, as a lark: "Almost as a joke to prove friends wrong, and half as an attempt to see if what I was told would work (that anglicized names appeal more to a white-dominated industry), I put 'Kal Penn' on my resume and photos." His audition callbacks rose by 50 percent. He has stated that he prefers his birth name and uses "Kal Penn" only for professional purposes.

In January 2007, Penn appeared in the first four episodes of the sixth season of 24 as Ahmed Amar, a teenage terrorist. Penn says he nearly turned down the role due to personal ethics, stating: "I have a huge political problem with the role. It was essentially accepting a form of racial profiling. I think it's repulsive. But it was the first time I had a chance to blow stuff up and take a family hostage. As an actor, why shouldn't I have that opportunity? Because I'm brown and I should be scared about the connection between media images and people's thought processes?"[12]

Also in January 2007, he appeared in the spoof comedy Epic Movie as well as the television show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In May 2007, Penn received the Asian Excellence Award for Outstanding Actor for his performance in The Namesake.[13]

In fall 2007, Penn joined the cast of the Fox medical drama House as a fellowship applicant.[14]E! reported that Penn had signed on as a regular on the show along with Olivia Wilde and Peter Jacobson and this was confirmed in the plot of the episode "Games". Penn continued with the series through to the episode "Simple Explanation", which aired April 6, 2009. He made an additional appearance as Lawrence Kutner on the fifth season finale, "Both Sides Now", that aired on May 11, 2009. However, due to his new job at the White House, Penn could not be present for the filming of this episode. The clip of him saying "Too bad it isn't true" was taken from a previous filming. Penn returned to the show for the series finale.[15]

Beside his role on the TV series House, he is best known from his role in Harold & Kumar, as Kumar Patel, a cannabis smoker who goes with Harold Lee (John Cho) to White Castle for a hamburger. Unlike his character, he does not smoke marijuana, claiming it is not for him,[16] nor does he eat meat.

Penn was recurring on How I Met Your Mother for the seventh season of the show,[17] in which he played Kevin, a therapist and later boyfriend of Robin Scherbatsky. Starting May 1, 2013, Penn hosts Big Brain Theory: Pure Genius on the Discovery Channel.[18] On May 10, 2013, it was announced that Penn would join the cast of We Are Men.[19]

Political interests[edit]Penn was an advocate for Barack Obama's presidential campaign in 2007 and 2008 and a member of Obama's National Arts Policy Committee.[20] He appears in the Barack Obama-supporting video "S­ Se Puede Cambiar" by Andres Useche[21] and appeared with comedian George Lopez on January 18, 2009, at "We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial".

In early 2009, Penn was offered the position of Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement in the Obama administration, which he accepted. This necessitated his character Lawrence Kutner being written out of the TV series House.[1][22][23] In his new role with the Obama administration, Modi served as a liaison with the Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities.[24] He had gone back to using his birth name, Kalpen Modi.[25]

Having made a commitment before his employment at the White House, Penn amicably left his post as Barack Obama's associate director of public engagement on June 1, 2010 to return to his acting career.[3] He returned to office on November 15, 2010, following completion of A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.[26]

In February 2012, it was announced that Penn would be a co-chair for the re-election campaign of President Barack Obama.[27] On September 3, 2012, Obama for America released a video featuring President Obama and Penn which announced that Penn would host the September 6 coverage of the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.[28] Penn's speech at the convention encouraged young people to register to vote and defended Obama's record.[29][30]

Other activities[edit]In 2008, Penn served as a visiting lecturer in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.[10][31] His course was titled "Images of Asian Americans in the Media."[32] In 2010, Penn wrote an article in the Huffington Post, responding to a Time Magazine article, which he said had contained racist comments against Indian immigrants in New Jersey.[33] Penn is currently working on a graduate certificate in international security from Stanford University.[1][10]

Filmography[edit]Film[edit]Television[edit]See also[edit]References[edit]^ abcdAusiello, Michael (April 7, 2009). "'House' exclusive: The shocking story behind last night's big death". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved 2009-04-07.^"It'll be the White House for Kal Penn now". Rediff.com, April 7, 2009. Retrieved 2009-04-07.^ abRoberts, Roxanne; Argetsinger, Amy (June 22, 2010). "Kalpen Modi, aka Kal Penn, aka Kumar, leaves the White House, returns to showbiz". WashingtonPost.com (The Washington Post). Retrieved June 23, 2010. ^"Kalpen Modi Returns To White House Job After Leaving To Film 'Harold & Kumar' Sequel". The Note blog. ABC News. November 15, 2010. Retrieved 2010-11-17. ^"Kal Penn to leave White House again". Click blog. Politico.com. July 14, 2011. Retrieved 2013-06-14. ^Chivukula, Som (April 12, 2002). "Article: Kal Penn's do's and don'ts". India Abroad. Retrieved 2010-04-02 '' via HighBeam. ^Yuan-Kwan Chan (October 16, 2007). "Happy Birthday, Asian American Arts Alliance". Meniscuszine.com. Retrieved 2011-02-28. ^Chhabra, Aseem (April 22, 2005). Kal Penn: Hollywood's Desi No1!. Rediff.com. Retrieved 2009-04-07.^"Kumar Goes to the White House (airdate April 10, 2009)" (Flash video). The Rachel Maddow Show. MSNBC. Retrieved 2011-02-28. ^ abcActor Kal Penn to Teach at the University of Pennsylvania. University of Pennsylvania Office of University Communications, 2007-03-26. Retrieved 2009-04-07.^"10 Things You Didn't Know About Kal Penn". USnews.com. April 8, 2009. Retrieved 2013-04-19. ^Yuan, Jada (2007-03-04). "The White-Castle Ceiling". New York magazine. Retrieved 2009-04-07.^"Asian Excellence Awards '' Winners (archive)". azntv.com. May 2007. Archived from the original on 2008-02-13. Retrieved 2011-02-28. ^"'House' gets a new group of trainees". CNN. Archived from the original on 2007-08-16. Retrieved July 18, 2007. ^Hibberd, James (March 22, 2012). "'House' finale scoop: Kal Penn in talks to return". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved March 22, 2012. ^"Kal Penn Does Not Smoke Marijuana". The Insider. showbiznews.info. April 26, 2008. Archived from the original on 2008-07-14. Retrieved 2010-05-04. ^"THIS JUST IN: Kal Penn joining How I Met Your Mother". How I Met Your Mother. CBS official Facebook page. July 13, 2011. Retrieved 2011-07-14. ^"Kal Penn, host of the Discovery Channel's The Big Brain Theory : Discovery Channel". Discovery.com. March 13, 2013. Retrieved 2013-05-06. ^Ausiello, Michael (May 10, 2013). "Fall TV Scoop: CBS Picks Up 8 Series, Including Sarah Michelle Gellar's Crazy Comedy, Josh Holloway's Intelligence and Chuck Lorre's Mom". Fall TV Scoop. TVline.com. Retrieved 2013-06-07. ^Penn, Kal. "Open Letter to Two Undeclared College Superdelegates". The Huffington Post, May 11, 2008. Retrieved 2009-04-07.^Joshi, Monika (February 4, 2008). "Actor Kal Penn roots for Obama". Rediff.com. Retrieved 2009-04-07.^"It'll be the White House for Kal Penn now". Rediff.com. April 7, 2009. Retrieved 2009-04-07.^"Kal Penn Leaves House for the White House". Tvguide.com. April 7, 2009. Retrieved 2011-02-28. ^"'House' actor Kal Penn joins White House team". news.yahoo.com. AP. April 7, 2009. Retrieved 2013-06-14. ^Choudhury, Uttara (July 8, 2009). "You can call me Kalpen Modi". DNA (Daily News & Analysis). Retrieved 2009-08-18.^"Kalpen Modi Returns To White House Job After Leaving To Film 'Harold & Kumar' Sequel". Blogs.abcnews.com. November 15, 2010. Retrieved 2011-02-28. ^"Obama campaign announces co-chairs". Politico.Com. February 22, 2012. Retrieved 2013-05-06. ^"Watch the 2012 Democratic National Convention Live on BarackObama.com". BarackObama.com YouTube channel. 2012-09-03. Retrieved 2013-05-06. ^Wing, Nick (2012-09-04). "Kal Penn Speech At Democratic Convention: My Four-Letter Word Is 'Vote'". huffingtonpost.com. Retrieved 2012-09-08. ^"Kal Penn's DNC Speech". The Daily Conversation's YouTube Channel. 2012-09-04. Retrieved 2013-05-06. ^Schwedel, Heather (2007-03-26)."Kal Penn to teach at Penn". The Daily Pennsylvanian. Retrieved 2009-04-07.^"Asian American Studies Program at University of Pennsylvania". Asam.sas.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2011-02-28. ^Penn, Kal (July 2, 2010). "The 'Hilarious' Xenophobia of Time's Joel Stein". Huffington Post.External links[edit]PersondataNameModi, KalpenAlternative namesShort descriptionIndian actorDate of birthApril 23, 1977Place of birthMontclair, New JerseyDate of deathPlace of death

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 22:06

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Thu, 05 Dec 2013 01:43

List your carCreate a new listing in minutes. Tell us about your car, add a few photos, and you're in the marketplace.

Before your first rental, get your car ready for renters. Put your RelayRides insurance card in the glovebox, double-check that you're up-to-date on maintainance, and tidy up the interior.

Respond to requestsWe'll notify you when somebody wants to rent your car. Check out their profile and ratings, and decide whether the trip works for you.

You're always in charge who can drive your car.

Meet the renterOn the day of the rental, meet the renter. Check their license, show them around the car, check the mileage and fuel level, and hand over the keys.

Relax and count your earningsSit back! RelayRides is keeping your car safe with our insurance and roadside support.

Collect your keysThe renter will return your car at the end of the trip. Talk to them about the vehicle condition, and make sure everythings in order.

Make sure to rate your renter, so other owners can stay informed.

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Source: HomeFree America

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 08:45

We're on the brink of an explosion in home automation. All of the technologies that make it possible are moving forward at light speed now.

The only question is: how will it arrive?

The work we've been doing here on the future of the American Dream provides us with some insight into what the answer won't be.

It won't be: automation that solves the last inch of convenience. For example, here's a smart egg tray built by the company Quirky.

This egg tray actively measures the weight of each egg it holds, to find rotten eggs.

When it finds a rotten egg, it sends an alert to your iPhone.

Wait for it. Here's the price.

Ouch. No sale.

The problem with this product isn't only the price. I'd expect nearly any new form of home automation to be expensive during the early phases of this technological roll-out.

The big problem with this is conceptual. It's a product that automates convenience. The problem is that we are already very comfortable and the extra inch of convenience it offers the buyer is so small, it's not worth even a dollar or two more than a standard egg tray. Quirky isn't alone in that. The same conceptual problem is true with nearly every other form of home automation I've reviewed recently.

We don't have a problem with convenience.

Our problem is achieving the American Dream and these products won't help us do it.

JR

01. December 2013 by John RobbCategories: Food, HomeFree, Interior | 2 comments

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Tue, 03 Dec 2013 23:13

Pandora has given up its efforts to seek legislation that would help reduce the royalties paid to rights holders, a source knowledgeable with the decision tells Billboard.

Instead of pursuing legislation, Pandora will focus its efforts on lobby­ing the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), the three-judge panel that sets statutory rates for webcasters like Pandora. The current rates run through 2015.

Pandora didn't comment on the company's specific strategy for addressing royalties. ''Pandora will focus on other paths to resolution,'' a representative says. One path could be direct deals with labels, which Apple has secured for iTunes Radio. ''Direct deals are not something that we're allergic to,'' Pandora founder/chief strategy officer Tim Westergren told investors in September.

Legislation to change webcasting royalties is dead without ­Pandora's support. Other companies and trade groups also backed the legislation, but Pandora was the primary force behind the Internet Radio Fairness Act. It hired a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm, and Westergren visited Capitol Hill to plead his case. At conferences, in the press and on its blog, Pandora was on the front lines of the public opinion battle. No one else is going to pick up where Pandora left off.

IRFA opponents hail Pandora's decision. RIAA chairman/CEO Cary Sherman calls the demise of IRFA ''a historic moment'' for the music industry. A coalition of labels, managers, artists, unions and trade groups like SoundExchange and the RIAA fought vociferously against the legislation. The op-ed articles, public statements, advertisements, email blasts and social media efforts ''clearly moved the needle,'' Sherman says.

Rights owners and artists were battling Pandora-supported legislation that would have ultimately lowered the statutory royalty rate for webcasters. The IRFA sought to change the standard by which the CRB sets statutory royalties for webcasters. Royalties for satellite and cable radio companies are established using what's called the 801(b) standard. Webcasters' rates are set using a ''willing buyer, willing seller'' standard that attempts to approximate an open-market negotiation between digital service and rights holder.

Giving the 801(b) standard to webcasters was likely to have lowered Internet radio's statutory royalties. Royalties for satellite radio companies are currently 9% of royalties, and will rise by a half percentage point every year through 2017. Cable radio services' rate is 8% of gross revenue, and will increase to 8.5% from 2014 through 2017. Webcasters pay fixed, per-stream royalties. The current rate set by the CRB is 0.23 cents. The Webcaster Settlement Act of 2009 allows independent, pure-play webcasters like Pandora to pay 0.12 cents. (Pandora pays 0.22 cents for streams originating from subscribers to its subscription service, Pandora One.)

There were signs earlier this year that Pandora had abandoned IRFA. In August, the musicFIRST coalition noticed the website for the pro-IRFA Internet Radio Fairness Coalition, an advocacy group launched in October 2012 by several Internet and broadcast companies, had been taken down. In addition, a source says Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), an IRFA co-sponsor, had clearly lost enthusiasm about the issue. And Pandora had been silent on the issue. When talking with investors about its royalties, the company referred only to the upcoming CRB rate proceedings.

IRFA expired in January at the end of the 112th Congress, and some people believed Pandora would reintroduce the legislation with different language and a different title. The particular legislation introduced last year effectively died in November after a congressional hearing on Internet radio royalties turned into an assault on radio broadcasters over the lack of a performance royalty. ''It went so badly for them last time there was no smart way to reignite the war they lost,'' one insider says. ''[Pandora] went from having a halo to having horns.''

The effort against IRFA may pay even more dividends. The broadcast radio performance right is still an important issue -- Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.) introduced legislation in September that would establish that right -- and could help Pandora regain favor within the artistic community.

Additional reporting by Alex Pham.

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Tue, 03 Dec 2013 17:33

3 December 2013Last updated at 08:11 ET By Chris VallanceBBC Radio 4, PM Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

Andy Bennett, of E2V, shows how the device works at Throckmorton Airfield, in Worcestershire

A British company has demonstrated a prototype device capable of stopping cars and other vehicles using a blast of electromagnetic waves.

The RF Safe-Stop uses radio frequency pulses to "confuse" a vehicle's electronic systems, cutting its engine.

E2V is one of several companies trying to bring such a product to market.

It said it believed the primary use would be as a non-lethal weapon for the military to defend sensitive locations from vehicles refusing to stop.

There has also been police interest.

The BBC was given a demonstration of the device at Throckmorton Airfield, in Worcestershire.

Deputy Chief Constable Andy Holt, of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), who has evaluated the tech, said the machine had "potential, but it's very early days yet".

Radio pulseAt one end of a disused runway, E2V assembled a varied collection of second-hand cars and motorbikes in order to test the prototype against a range of vehicles.

In demonstrations seen by the BBC a car drove towards the device at about 15mph (24km/h).

As the vehicle entered the range of the RF Safe-stop, its dashboard warning lights and dials behaved erratically, the engine stopped and the car rolled gently to a halt. Digital audio and video recording devices in the vehicle were also affected.

"It's a small radar transmitter," said Andy Wood, product manager for the machine.

"The RF [radio frequency] is pulsed from the unit just as it would be in radar, it couples into the wiring in the car and that disrupts and confuses the electronics in the car causing the engine to stall."

He did not provide other specifics. However, the Engineer magazine has reported the device uses L- and S-band radio frequencies, and works at a range of up to 50m (164ft).

Some experts the BBC has spoken with suggested that turning off the engine in this manner would not stop vehicles rapidly enough. Others worried about what effect it might have on a car's electronic brake and steering systems.

But E2V said the risks were lower than with alternative systems.

Acpo suggested the machine's ability to stop motorbikes "safely" could prove particularly useful.

Mr Holt noted that the tyre deflation devices used by some police forces posed the risk of causing "serious injury" if used against two-wheelers.

E2V added that its device could also be effective against other types of vehicles, including boats.

But because the device works on electronic systems, he acknowledged that it would not work on all older vehicles.

"Certainly if you took a 1960s Land Rover, there's a good chance you're not going to stop it," Mr Wood said.

The firm added that it did not believe the RF Safe-Stop posed any risk to people using a pacemaker.

Listeners in the UK can hear more about the device on BBC Radio 4's PM programme between 17:00 and 18:00 on Tuesday.

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 03:19

The high speed crash that killed Paul Walker and Roger Rodas caused a huge explosion and fireball that could be seen for miles ... and it was all recorded on a security camera that captured the precise moment of impact.

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 20:16

CUSTODIAN '' WHO ACTUALLY WAS RUNNING DOWN THE HALLS?

School nurse Sally Cox,[36] 60, hid under a desk in her office and described the door opening and seeing Lanza's boots and legs facing her desk from approximately 20 feet (6.1 m) away. He remained standing for a few seconds before turning around and leaving. She and school secretary Barbara Halstead then hid in a first-aid supply closet for up to four hours, after calling 9-1-1.[37] Custodian Rick Thorne ran through hallways, alerting classrooms.[38]

WIKIPEDIA

Jan 12, 2013 '' Bottom of article says updated Jan 12, 2013

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting#cite_note-abclocal-38

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting

^ Christoffersen, John (December 14, 2012). ''20 children, 6 adults killed at Connecticut school''. Associated Press. ABC News. Retrieved December 15, 2012.

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/national_world&id=8920117

NOT A SINGLE MENTION OF ANY CUSTODIAN IN THIS ARTICLE. Where did the name come from?

https://www.google.com/search?q=Custodian+Rick+Thorne&oq=Custodian+Rick+Thorne&aqs=chrome.0.57&sugexp=chrome,mod=3&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#hl=en&safe=off&tbo=d&sclient=psy-ab&q=Custodian+Rick+Thorne&oq=Custodian+Rick+Thorne&gs_l=serp.12'...0.0.1.22651.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0.les%3B..0.0'...1c.Ob-FQqoboz0&psj=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.1357700187,d.dmQ&fp=70f902665fe3d8c&biw=1152&bih=518

Google search

Sandy Hook School Custodian Kevin J. Anzellotti

getthetruthout.icyboards.net/showthread.php?mode'...tid'...Jan 5, 2013 '' Why hasn't custodian Rick Thorne been interviewed by any '... But according to wikipedia it was custodian Rick Thorne running thru the halls '...

A Faustian Bargain for State Pension Plans '' Businessweek

http://www.businessweek.com/'.../a-faustian-bargain-for-state-pensio'...Nov 29, 2012 '' Rick Thorne worked as a school custodian in Chelmsford, Mass., for more than two decades, earning $20 an hour cleaning floors, cutting grass, '...

Rick Thorne

http://www.sports-books.com/'.../article-popup.php?'...Rick%20Thor'...Rick Thorne worked as a custodian in Chelmsford, Mass., schools for 22 years, earning $20 an hour cleaning floors, cutting grass and setting up for assemblies '...

A Faustian Bargain? Or Not? ~ gad-fly

herdgadfly.blogspot.com/2012/'.../a-faustian-bargain-or-not.ht'...Dec 2, 2012 '' Rick Thorne worked as a custodian in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, schools for 22 years, earning $20 an hour cleaning floors, cutting grass and '...

Rick Thorne '' Silobreaker

silobreaker.com/rick-thorne-11_15107985Rick Thorne worked as a custodian in Chelmsford, Mass., schools for 22 years, earning $20 an hour cleaning floors, cutting grass and setting up for assemblies '...

Pension Fund's Gains Mean Worker Pain as Aramark Slashes Pay

washpost.bloomberg.com/Story?docId=1376'...Nov 20, 2012 '' 20 (Bloomberg) '-- Rick Thorne worked as a custodian in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, schools for 22 years, earning $20 an hour cleaning floors, '...

Middlesex University, London latest news

interceder.net/latest_news/Middlesex-University,-LondonRick Thorne worked as a custodian in Chelmsford, Mass., schools for 22 years, earning $20 an hour cleaning floors, cutting grass and setting up for assemblies '...

Twitter Trackbacks for Pension Fund's Gains Mean Worker Pain as '...

topsy.com/'.../Pension-Fund-s-Gains-Mean-Worker-Pain-as-40'...Rick Thorne worked as a custodian in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, schools for 22 years, earning $20 an hour cleaning floors, cutting grass and setting up for '...

Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting '' Wikipedia, the free '...

en.wikipedia.org/'.../Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shootin'...Custodian Rick Thorne ran through hallways, alerting classrooms. First grade teacher Kaitlin Roig, age 29, hid 14 students in a bathroom and barricaded the '...

Public pension funds in conflict '' jgmobile.net '' Business | The '...

http://www.jgmobile.net/article/'.../BIZ/'.../BIZ&template=mobileartShareDec 2, 2012 '' Rick Thorne worked as a custodian in Chelmsford, Mass., schools for 22 years, earning $20 an hour cleaning floors, cutting grass and setting '...

ONE ARTICLE:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-29/a-faustian-bargain-for-state-pension-plans

Sandy Hook School Custodian Kevin J. Anzellotti

FACEBOOK was on vacation never confirmed

Did they just have to come up with someone a custodian to fill in the blanks? He was unemployed and on his pension would he hire out to Sandy Hook???? Making $1500 a month and then what as of NOV 29 still on pension.

Jump for joy for a Sandy Hook Elementary janitor named Rick Thorne who did a Paul Revere run through the hallways after spotting the gunman, shouting, ''A gunman is coming! A gunman is coming!'' He checked to make sure the classroom doors were locked.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ssssssssss-article-1.1230029

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ThePaulstalServiceOffer UpgradeUser ID: 2536940 United States02/06/2013 01:02 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationWhat Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook Elementary100 Rounds AR-15 fire confused with "pots and pans falling" "the janitor setting up tables and rafters in the gym" and "someone kicking the door."

Not one bloody shoe, or any bloody footprints leaving the school, and no reports of anyone kicking or stepping on any empty bullets shells as they exit.

Where is Rick Thorne- the supposed hero janitor who told Adam Lanza to put his gun down?

It appears as though Rick Thorne didn't even work at Sandy Hook- there is no video evidence of him, and the news has never tried to interview him.

[link to www.youtube.com]

ThePaulstalService

Anonymous CowardUser ID: 5469786 United States02/06/2013 01:23 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryThe girl in the beginning just blows the whole timeline out.

DiamondGalUser ID: 5598080 United States02/06/2013 01:58 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryThe reporter "Chris Cuomo" is the little brother of Andrew Cuomo, Governor of NYS who passed a gun control law very shortly after this event in CT.

Anonymous CowardUser ID: 33001296 United States02/06/2013 02:13 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryKevin Anzellotti is supposedly the janitor... only saw Rick Thorne mentioned in that NYDN piece...[link to aangirfan.blogspot.com]

BittercritterUser ID: 26255514 United States02/06/2013 04:09 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryNobody heard rifle shots because it was a shotgun that was the murder weapon. NOBODY except police have stated they heards "rifle" shots specifically.Every child describes the noise as janitors moving tables, thuds,booms, someone kicking a door, etc. Loud but dull noises very unlike high velocity bullets would make.I even found a shotgun shell in the parking lot. There's a picture of a cop with 2 women and child running from the front of the school.Look on the right behind the row of cars. Photo here: [link to www.pennlive.com]Ever wonder how the glass near the door had such a large hole blown in it? Wonder why the kids weren't shown to the parents post-mortem? Why Carver said "the long weapon was used"? Why the children were so disfigured that they had closed casket ceremonies? If you are shot in the face with a .223 it leaves a hole in the front. The back of the head might is where the real damage is. Morticians can easily plug holes in a body but can't reconstruct a face hit by a shotgun blast.

Why seal the case for 90 days if it was a cut and dry murder/suicide mission by Adam Lanza? Why all the confusion over what weapons were found and where?

Wonder why each victims was reported hit so many times? Buckshot was used which would be far more efficient for that type of mass slaughter. Same deal happened at Aurora - many victims but most only had a couple pellets of #4 shot.It also explains why they reported long rifles and shotguns on the police scanner less than 10 minutes after police arrived.

Keep this in mind when you find more details. I'm 90% positive this is the case.

HooleyDooleyUser ID: 1366524 Australia02/06/2013 07:49 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryI wish you had added in what was NOT heard, namely sirens.I made a youtube video but I'm crap at it so I am hoping someone will make a better vid incorperating the info.

[link to www.youtube.com]

Previous thread:

Thread: Evidence showing sandy hook was a drill that didn't go live until 20min AFTER shooting.

I would like someone to make a video showing that what people heard is more likely just simulated noise and unrealistic of over a hundred rounds of gunfire, coupled with nobody hearing sirens, meaning the police were already on site when the fake noises were first played over the speaker system (or arrived quietly without sirens).

This combination makes a very strong case it was just a preplanned drill.

I will watch the OP youtube vid later, I think the most damning testimony is Kaitlin Roig's, she was in the immediate area yet doesn't report loud noises, was able to talk to her kids in a loving and caring way while hundreds of shots and screaming going off right nest door... riiiight.

One of her kids says he knows karate and he'll lead them out, this shows that even in the classes right next door to where the shooting supposedly occurred the noise was kept at a level that was not traumatic for the kids.

I will watch it later when I'm at a better computer.

Last Edited by HooleyDooley on 02/06/2013 07:59 PM

Anonymous CowardUser ID: 23200542 United States02/06/2013 08:16 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryHere's the only mention of seeing blood that I have run across so far.Anonymous CowardUser ID: 33695605 United States02/06/2013 08:27 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook Elementary100 Rounds AR-15 fire confused with "pots and pans falling" "the janitor setting up tables and rafters in the gym" and "someone kicking the door."

Not one bloody shoe, or any bloody footprints leaving the school, and no reports of anyone kicking or stepping on any empty bullets shells as they exit.

Where is Rick Thorne- the supposed hero janitor who told Adam Lanza to put his gun down?

It appears as though Rick Thorne didn't even work at Sandy Hook- there is no video evidence of him, and the news has never tried to interview him.

[link to www.youtube.com]

Quoting: ThePaulstalServiceDid they check your I'd?

Remember one thing about SANDY HOOKvISITORS are welcomeForget. Teaching just hang out a visitors are welcome signNow that is VERY WiERd

Anonymous CowardUser ID: 33695605 United States02/06/2013 08:31 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryThere were at least six suspects according to the police radio watch the sandy hook documentaryIt has the best factual informationApart from it missing the nun outfits by the carThat are not t shirts neither are they jackets

Anonymous CowardUser ID: 33695605 United States02/06/2013 08:33 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryThe sandy hook documentary has the best compilation of the actual factsIt even rationally discusses the online reported actual real eyewitness of the shooters entry into the school

Anonymous CowardUser ID: 33695605 United States02/06/2013 08:36 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryThere is only one living eye witness to the shooter entering the schoolAnd that witness describes the fact he was let in because he was thoughts to be a catholic priest.There are no other living eyewitnessesThis person has been censored by injuctionxBat WingUser ID: 33796495 Canada02/06/2013 08:48 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryI think there were more than one shooter. All the doors on the Honda were open. Looks to me like a car load of people arrived and went round back of the school threw a window. Remember the guy in camo pants and black shirt. Then there was the bomb threat at the church where the morners went the next day. The caller said he was a friend of Adam. That was reported on Yahoo news. What about the Van? We know there was a purple van with windows shot out of it, so why are they not saying anything about it. One think for sure , lots of loose ends

HooleyDooleyUser ID: 2316948 Australia02/06/2013 09:09 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryI think there were more than one shooter.

Quoting: Bat Wing 33796495I think there was less than one shooter and that is why the eyewitnesses describe sounds that are consistent with a poorly simulated, rather than actual, shooting.

Anonymous CowardUser ID: 25999930 United States02/06/2013 09:15 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryOperation Canned Goods....Know it?And yet, with all we know, the Communist New Networkcontinues to function as the enemy with in whileour childern die in far away land, presumably to bringliberty to ignorant savages.

Zuzu's PetalsUser ID: 31989439 Canada02/06/2013 09:17 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryNobody heard rifle shots because it was a shotgun that was the murder weapon. NOBODY except police have stated they heards "rifle" shots specifically.Every child describes the noise as janitors moving tables, thuds,booms, someone kicking a door, etc. Loud but dull noises very unlike high velocity bullets would make.I even found a shotgun shell in the parking lot. There's a picture of a cop with 2 women and child running from the front of the school.Look on the right behind the row of cars. Photo here: [link to www.pennlive.com]Ever wonder how the glass near the door had such a large hole blown in it? Wonder why the kids weren't shown to the parents post-mortem? Why Carver said "the long weapon was used"? Why the children were so disfigured that they had closed casket ceremonies? If you are shot in the face with a .223 it leaves a hole in the front. The back of the head might is where the real damage is. Morticians can easily plug holes in a body but can't reconstruct a face hit by a shotgun blast.

Why seal the case for 90 days if it was a cut and dry murder/suicide mission by Adam Lanza? Why all the confusion over what weapons were found and where?

Wonder why each victims was reported hit so many times? Buckshot was used which would be far more efficient for that type of mass slaughter. Same deal happened at Aurora - many victims but most only had a couple pellets of #4 shot.It also explains why they reported long rifles and shotguns on the police scanner less than 10 minutes after police arrived.

Keep this in mind when you find more details. I'm 90% positive this is the case.

Quoting: Bittercritter 26255514I wonder how Noah Pozner was shot 11 times, more than any other victim, and still had an open casket...with much of his face showing (just a cloth covering the lower part of it).

StickywicketUser ID: 2455163402/06/2013 10:04 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryThe reporter "Chris Cuomo" is the little brother of Andrew Cuomo, Governor of NYS who passed a gun control law very shortly after this event in CT.

Quoting: DiamondGal 5598080Interesting.....

New Age MessiahUser ID: 9993365 United States02/06/2013 10:35 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook Elementary"It Took Me A While To Realise, But N.A.M. Is The Greatest Poster On This, Or Any Other Forum."

StickywicketUser ID: 2455163402/06/2013 10:44 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryI see that Chris Cuomo went to Yale. I wonder if he's a Bonesman.....

RintyUser ID: 18164113 United States02/06/2013 11:02 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryAnonymous CowardUser ID: 33842893 United States02/06/2013 11:04 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook Elementary Quoting: Anonymous Coward 33001296Yes, Kevin Anzellotti... Media said he was a hero, locking doors and screaming for gunman to put gun down.

Same guy who's friend on facebook outed him saying how he was on VACATION !!

Some hero!!

[link to krystle-ann.blogspot.com]

Anonymous CowardUser ID: 33842893 United States02/06/2013 11:07 PMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook Elementary Quoting: Anonymous Coward 33001296Yes, Kevin Anzellotti... Media said he was a hero, locking doors and screaming for gunman to put gun down.

Same guy who's friend on facebook outed him saying how he was on VACATION !!

Some hero!!

[link to krystle-ann.blogspot.com]

Quoting: Anonymous Coward 33842893Also, being as he supposedly told the gunman (or men) to put the gun down, he then should've had a good view of the suspect....Making him a witness.

And... when I think of the thread title (seen and heard)I think of the inconsistency with media saying the gunman said no words as he killed, then the teacher saying he was pounding door yelling "let me in"....Said it before and I'll say it again, why would he bother yelling that when he can just shoot his way in? Makes no sense.

Anonymous CowardUser ID: 33833662 United States02/07/2013 12:24 AMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook Elementary"""""""I wonder how Noah Pozner was shot 11 times, more than any other victim, and still had an open casket...with much of his face showing (just a cloth covering the lower part of it)."""""""~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Yeah, according to the Naomi Zeveloff reported in the Jewish Daily Forward.

No disrespect intended to the Pozner family, or the Jewish Daily Forward.

I looked for the alleged photograph of the Pozner victim.

FOUND NOTHING...

Seeing is believing.

Sorry Folks...Zero Credibility...

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Here we have the Pozner family making the Governor look at the victim....

Heart rendering?...or perhaps a melodramatic agenda driven Psy-Op?

The photo of V. Pozner looks more like anger than anguish?XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Veronique Pozner, whose six-year-old son Noah was killed at Sandy Hook

She testified, with a few others, at last week's gun control hearings.

After the shootings, she insisted on seeing Noah's body, not a photograph of it.

she insisted on an open casket at his funeral.

She also purposefully brought the governor to look at it because, "If there is ever a piece of legislation that comes across his desk, I needed it to be real for him.'' It was real.

Noah took 11 bullets. His mouth and jaw were blown away;

A cloth covered that part of his face. Most of his left hand was gone.

The governor wept. Maybe he'll remember.

Anonymous CowardUser ID: 26255514 United States02/07/2013 12:27 AMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook Elementaryte/index.ssf/2013/01/sandy_hook_1.htmlI wonder how Noah Pozner was shot 11 times, more than any other victim, and still had an open casket...with much of his face showing (just a cloth covering the lower part of it).

Quoting: Zuzu's PetalsHe could have been hit with 11 pieces of shot rather than bullets if it was a shotgun that was used.

Anonymous CowardUser ID: 33854288 United States02/07/2013 12:51 AMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryCould Rick Thorne potentially be one of the wounded survivors, the unidentified adult, taken to the hospital?

Anonymous CowardUser ID: 33856734 United States02/07/2013 02:28 AMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryCould Rick Thorne potentially be one of the wounded survivors, the unidentified adult, taken to the hospital?

Quoting: Anonymous Coward 33854288the first injured victim was natalie hammond in her foot and the second should be the woman (forgot who) who got shot while trying to keep the door closed (in her arm and foot)

Anonymous CowardUser ID: 2918478202/07/2013 02:31 AMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook Elementary Quoting: Anonymous Coward 33001296Yes, Kevin Anzellotti... Media said he was a hero, locking doors and screaming for gunman to put gun down.

Same guy who's friend on facebook outed him saying how he was on VACATION !!

Some hero!!

[link to krystle-ann.blogspot.com]

Quoting: Anonymous Coward 33842893Also, being as he supposedly told the gunman (or men) to put the gun down, he then should've had a good view of the suspect....Making him a witness.

And... when I think of the thread title (seen and heard)I think of the inconsistency with media saying the gunman said no words as he killed, then the teacher saying he was pounding door yelling "let me in"....Said it before and I'll say it again, why would he bother yelling that when he can just shoot his way in? Makes no sense.

Quoting: Anonymous Coward 33842893Sounds like he realized he had been set up and the drill was live.

It's odd that it was claimed they let him because they thought he was a priest. Was he in priest costume, & not dressed for war?

swansongUser ID: 9183741 Canada02/07/2013 02:58 AMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryHere's the only mention of seeing blood that I have run across so far. Quoting: Anonymous Coward 23200542Interesting vid. Saw it before but didn't pay much attention. Vollmer is a kindergarten teacher, according to SHE's website. The kindergarten classes are allnear the front door by the office.

How could she have left after the shooting and not seen 2 dead bodies near the office/front door?

Just a lil blood? Just a lot of odd.

Zuzu's PetalsUser ID: 31989439 Canada02/07/2013 06:15 AMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook Elementaryte/index.ssf/2013/01/sandy_hook_1.htmlI wonder how Noah Pozner was shot 11 times, more than any other victim, and still had an open casket...with much of his face showing (just a cloth covering the lower part of it).

Quoting: Zuzu's PetalsHe could have been hit with 11 pieces of shot rather than bullets if it was a shotgun that was used.

Quoting: Anonymous Coward 26255514I know nothing about guns. I would think that should be something they'd clarify for those of us who have no clue about guns. When someone says he was "shot" 11 times - I think shot with bullets. If that's not the case, then they need to clarify that.

Zuzu's PetalsUser ID: 31989439 Canada02/07/2013 06:18 AMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryThis mother heard absolute silence. She arrived after the glass was already broken. No mention of seeing dead bodies near the entrance of the school, either.[link to video.katiecouric.com]

BittercritterUser ID: 26255514 United States02/07/2013 09:50 AMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryI know nothing about guns. I would think that should be something they'd clarify for those of us who have no clue about guns. When someone says he was "shot" 11 times - I think shot with bullets. If that's not the case, then they need to clarify that.

Quoting: Zuzu's PetalsIf you look at the Aurora shooting you had like 50 injured people - most of them only had a few pieces of shot in them.This gives the police and media the ability to say that dozens were wounded though very few were seriously hurt or killed at the theater.

Mind you shot comes in different sizes - from smaller than a BB to what is known as Double OO buckshot which is around 1/3" in diameter and each shell holds 8 or 9 pieces that size.A shotgun spreads the pattern out so that a distance of 20 ft the pellets or shot will spread out over an area of 1 ft or so allowing someone to hit multiple targets with a single shot. This is why shotguns would disfigure the victims so badly which is one reason I believe it was the primary weapon used.

Rifles and handguns on the other hand only shoot a single projectile so aim must be precise. Given what I have said which would you choose as a weapon to shoot multiple targets?

Anonymous CowardUser ID: 18417244 United States04/27/2013 03:24 AMReport Abusive PostReport Copyright ViolationRe: What Was Actually Seen and Heard at Sandy Hook ElementaryPrevious Page

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The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals '-- and map their relationships '-- in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.

The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.

(Video: How the NSA uses cellphone tracking to find and 'develop' targets)

The NSA does not target Americans' location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones ''incidentally,'' a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

One senior collection manager, speaking on the condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said ''we are getting vast volumes'' of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data are often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year.

In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs that have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among the people using them.

(Graphic: How the NSA is tracking people right now)

U.S. officials said the programs that collect and analyze location data are lawful and intended strictly to develop intelligence about foreign targets.

Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said ''there is no element of the intelligence community that under any authority is intentionally collecting bulk cellphone location information about cellphones in the United States.''

The NSA has no reason to suspect that the movements of the overwhelming majority of cellphone users would be relevant to national security. Rather, it collects locations in bulk because its most powerful analytic tools '-- known collectively as CO-TRAVELER '-- allow it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.

Still, location data, especially when aggregated over time, is widely regarded among privacy advocates as uniquely sensitive. Sophisticated mathematical tech­niques enable NSA analysts to map cellphone owners' relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phone users who cross their paths. Cellphones broadcast their locations even when they are not being used to place a call or send a text message.

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Dec 4, 2013|0:32NewsRAW: Power pole fireVideoNewsRAW: Power pole fireDec 4, 2013|0:32Much of Dartmouth is in darkness. Power pole is on fire on Brule Street. Crews on scene.

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Dec 3, 2013|2:19NewsRAW Wynne gas plant committeeVideoNewsRAW Wynne gas plant committeeDec 3, 2013|2:19Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne appears before the inquiry into the province's canceled power plants.

Dec 3, 2013|3:05CBC News Vancouver at 6RAW: Lawyer on horse-kicking caseVideoCBC News Vancouver at 6RAW: Lawyer on horse-kicking caseDec 3, 2013|3:05Robyn Wishart says Yuen Yen Wong remains in intensive care

Dec 3, 2013|1:33NewsRAW VID: Trailer park's feral catsVideoNewsRAW VID: Trailer park's feral catsDec 3, 2013|1:33More than 30 feral cats from a Lower Sackville trailer park are set to get spayed or neutered in an attempt to get the booming population under control.

Dec 3, 2013|1:18NewsRAW: The power of songVideoNewsRAW: The power of songDec 3, 2013|1:18Members of the Project PAL choir perform for CBC Montreal.

Dec 3, 2013|3:31CBC News Vancouver at 6RAW: Tentative 5-year labour dealVideoCBC News Vancouver at 6RAW: Tentative 5-year labour dealDec 3, 2013|3:31B.C. Minister Mike de Jong calls deal 'relatively unprecedented'

Dec 3, 2013|1:12CBC News: Winnipeg at 6:00RAW: Danny McManus on coming to WinnipegVideoCBC News: Winnipeg at 6:00RAW: Danny McManus on coming to WinnipegDec 3, 2013|1:12Danny McManus talks to reporters about joining the Blue Bombers coaching staff

Dec 3, 2013|1:48CBC News: Winnipeg at 6:00RAW: James Allum reacts to math skills reportVideoCBC News: Winnipeg at 6:00RAW: James Allum reacts to math skills reportDec 3, 2013|1:48Education Minister James Allum talks to reporters about Manitoba's poor showing in math skills report

Dec 3, 2013|1:52CBC News Vancouver at 6RAW: Pests in green binsVideoCBC News Vancouver at 6RAW: Pests in green binsDec 3, 2013|1:52Kitsilano resident Hal Kalman says he saw more rats, skunks and raccoons in green bins

Dec 3, 2013|1:20CBC News Vancouver at 6RAW: Councillor defends green binsVideoCBC News Vancouver at 6RAW: Councillor defends green binsDec 3, 2013|1:20Coun. Andrea Reimer defends Vancouver's food scraps program

Dec 3, 2013|0:26CBC News CalgaryRAW: Whiteout highway conditionsVideoCBC News CalgaryRAW: Whiteout highway conditionsDec 3, 2013|0:26Watch how bad the highway conditions are on Highway 567 west of Irricana, Alta. The video was submitted by Patrick Jessup who was trying to venture to the local grocery store.

Dec 2, 2013|2:58CBC News: Winnipeg at 6:00RAW: Pallister explains 'infidel atheists' remarkVideoCBC News: Winnipeg at 6:00RAW: Pallister explains 'infidel atheists' remarkDec 2, 2013|2:58Manitoba Tory leader Brian Pallister said he was genuine when he was wishing "infidel atheists" the best for the holiday season.

Dec 2, 2013|5:32NewsRAW: Joachim Stroink apologizesVideoNewsRAW: Joachim Stroink apologizesDec 2, 2013|5:32An emotional Stroink fought back tears as he apologized for a photo he posted of himself posing with the controversial blackface Dutch character Zwarte Piet.

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Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif) (AP File Photo)

(CNSNews.com) - Are Americans safer now than they were a year or two ago? No, said the chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees on Sunday.

"I don't think so," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told CNN's "State of the Union" with Candy Crowley.

"I think terror is up worldwide. The statistics indicate that -- the fatalities are way up. The numbers are way up. There are new bombs, very big bombs, trucks being reinforced for those bombs. There are bombs that go through magnatometers. The bomb maker is still alive. There are more groups than ever, and there's huge malevolence out there."

Feinstein later added that people "can get on aircraft with those bombs. They have tried to send four into this country..."

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, had a similar response:

"Oh, I absolutely agree that we're not safer today for the same very reasons," he told Crowley. "So the pressure on our intelligence services to get it right to prevent an attack are enormous. And it's getting more difficult because we see the al Qaeda as we knew it before is metastasizing to something different, more affiliates than we've ever had before, meaning more groups that operated independently of al Qaeda have now joined al Qaeda around the world -- all of them have at least some aspiration to commit an act of violence in the United States or against western targets all around the world.

"They've now switched to this notion that maybe smaller events are okay. So if you have more smaller events than bigger events, they think that might still lead to their objectives and their goals. That makes it exponentially harder for our intelligence services to stop an event like that," Rogers said.

Feinstein told CNN that the main problem is "displaced aggression in this very fundamentalist, jihadist, Islamic community," which blames the Western world for everything that goes wrong and believes that the only solution is "Islamic sharia law and the concept of the caliphate."

"And I see more groups, more fundamentalists, more jihadists more determined to kill to get to where they want to get. So, it's not an isolated phenomenon. You see these groups spread a web of connections. And this includes North Africa, it includes the Middle East, it includes other areas as well," Feinstein added.

Rogers expressed particular concern about nations like Syria, where al Qaeda and its affiliates are attracting Westerners to their cause. The "scary part" is that many people with Western passports are now returning home, fully trained and radicalized:

"A percentage of them have already gone home, including the United States, by the way, is included in that western number. We are very, very concerned that these folks who have western paper (passports) have gone there, participated in combat events, are trained, are further radicalized, now have the ability to go back in western countries.

And now they have a connection, a direct connection to al Qaeda affiliates operating in a place where most people would say, well, we have no interest in Syria. Well, clearly we do. And clearly, that's just one place. And it's starting to spread...Iraq is having its problems now. It's spreading into Lebanon, Jordan has issues, Turkey along the border has issues. This is very, very, very concerning."

Aside from the diversity of threats, Rogers pointed to the challenge of detecting them before something happens: "We have now three al Qaeda affiliate groups have changed the way they communicate, meaning it's less likely that we're going to be able to detect something prior to an event that goes operational, meaning that they've already started the final planning stages to blow something up or shoot someone.

And so we're fighting amongst ourselves here in this country about the role of our intelligence community -- that is having an impact on our ability to stop what is a growing number of threats. And so we've got to shake ourselves out of this pretty soon and understand that our intelligence services are not the bad guys. The bad guys, the al Qaeda affiliates, Russian intelligence services, Chinese intelligence services, the Quds force that operates terrorism events all around the world, those are the folks we need to focus our attention and our energy on in order to keep America safe."

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 03:57

The photo above was tweeted approvingly last night by Halifax Chebucto MLA Joachim Stroink. "Giving some love to Zwarte Piet and Sinterklass thank you to the Dutch Community for putting this event on," wrote Stroink.

Within minutes, Allison Sparling, who was voted "Best Twitterer" in The Coast's Best of Halifax poll, tweeted her objections, and posted a lengthy blog post, laying out her argument.

Today, the story has gone national, and "blackface" is trending in the part of the Twitterverse Halifax occupies as the town discusses the photo and its implications.

Stroink himself has offered the following explanation:

Yesterday, my family and I participated in a Dutch cultural event that marks the unofficial start of our Christmas season - this event has been taking place in Halifax for a number of years now. Families from all over Nova Scotia and New Brunswick attend each year.

Christmas in my culture is a tradition focused on Sinterklaas and Zwarte Pete has always been his side kick, much like Santa's elves. While the history of Zwarte Pete and the blackface have contributed to perpetuating negative stereotypes, to ignore or to disavow Zwarte Pete would be to ignore that history within the Dutch community. In recent years issues have been raised in some communities, but to my knowledge never in Halifax or NS, with this cultural celebration.

As a child growing up and celebrating the Sinterklaas and Zwarte Pete tradition, the blackface did not lead me to think less of my African NS neighbours and friends, and as such I was not sensitive to the potential to offend through my participation, with my family, at Sunday's 2013 Sinterklaas event held in Halifax.

While it is certainly uncomfortable to be in the lime light for what was intended to be a fun community event for the family kicking off the Christmas season, the resulting conversation, highlighting the underlying issues with black face and how it has played a role in suppressing people of African heritage, is a worthy and necessary one. It is important we embrace discussions like this as a broader community.

Given the controversial nature of my tweet, I will be removing the image from my profile.

Thank you for your collective passion and opinions.

Joachim.

In 2011, blogger Flavia Dzodan, who describes herself as "half Hispanic, half Eastern European," and who lives in Amsterdam, wrote a long piece detailing the racist origins of Zwarte Piet, and its continued racist connotations. Here's part of it:The above, for those not familiar with our local ''traditions'', are popularly known as ''Black Pete'', or ''Zwarte Piet'' in Dutch. These ''colorful'' characters are the helpers of Sinterklaas, or more formally Sint Nicolaas/ Sint Nikolaas or Saint Nicolas in French. Sinterklaas is a children's Winter holiday celebrated every year in The Netherlands, Belgium and some cities in the North of France. According to tradition, the Saint arrives to The Netherlands a few weeks prior to the celebration, in a boat, carrying the gifts he will deliver to children. The ''Black Petes'' are his helpers and they carry candy and control children's behavior (children who misbehave supposedly get no presents from the Saint). Again, according to ''tradition'', these helpers are Moors, or North African slaves. This ''tradition'' has evolved throughout the years, partially due to increasing protests from groups that find these depictions offensive. Nowadays, it is claimed that the Black face is due to the fact that the helpers have gone through chimneys and as a result, their faces are covered in soot. What again, nobody can clearly explain, is what kind of soot leaves such a uniform and evenly spread residue. Or worse, why these ''chimney dwellers'' speak in a fake accent that parodies the Black population of the Dutch former colony of Suriname.

I know Stroink, and have interviewed him. He's a good guy. Helps kids, donates to charities. On a personal level, I haven't witnessed any overt racism on Stroink's part, and I doubt I ever will. Stroink himself assures us that he his not racist, by re-tweeting his former roommate's defence of Stroink:But the issue is not how Stroink treats this or that black person, or what's in his heart and head. That's almost immaterial to this discussion. Racism is much, much deeper than a black guy and a white guy being good friends, and so that's the end of it. No, racism is NOT about how this or that white person treats this or that black person, or vice-versa. Rather, racism is a societal disease, a pervasive beast that pops up again and again, in governmental policies, in how companies do or do not police their workforce, in segregated schools, in housing discrimination and more.

I was born and raised in the American south. Just five years before I was born, the powers-that-be in my hometown of Norfolk, Virginia shut down the schools rather than desegregate them. As I was growing up, segregated water fountains were still being removed.

I won't bore you with the overt racism I saw growing up. Frankly, it embarrasses me, and doubly so because I benefitted from it.

But I was a first-hand observer of southern racism until I moved to California (where I found a different kind of racism) when I was 23, and then again when I took a one-year stint as a daily newspaper reporter in Arkansas, before moving to Halifax in 2004. I can tell you this: a unifying theme of it is the Confederate flag.

There are a lot of, well, straight-up racist assholes flying the Confederate flag, but I've met plenty of southerners who are nice people, refined, educated, contribute to charity, etc, who also fly the Confederate flag. This latter group assure us they're not racist, and it's just part of their "heritage" and "tradition."

Like these nice southerners flying the Confederate flag, Stroink doesn't intend to cause offense with the Zwarte Piet. It's just tradition, something he grew up with and un-thinkingly reenacts each year. But it's precisely this cluelessness, this unexamined playing out of "tradition" and "heritage" that is the problem. It lays out there in the world, part of the day-to-day symbolism that black people in our society have to put up with: "Hey, it's just tradition! You know, that tradition where we enslaved people that looked like you. Don't take it personally!"

Undoubtedly, many black people would be perfectly fine with Zwarte Piet if in return they got equal employment opportunities, the end of profiling while in stores and driving and so forth. Alas, that deal won't be in the works. That's because one is connected to the other: the symbolism and cultural representation of black faces is inexorably linked to the societal racism against black people.

All of which is to say, I don't think Stroink is a bad guy, but I urge him to think this through. He's right to say the discussion his tweet has generated is worthy. I just hope he listens to it.

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Wed, 04 Dec 2013 03:28

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Sanjay Gupta: Moral hazard causes some to neglect health when they get health insuranceHe says Obamacare alone won't guarantee good health; personal habits must do thatHe says research shows 30 minutes of daily exercise cuts heart attack, stroke risk by a thirdGupta: It's time to stop playing defense on your health; instead, start optimizing it yourselfEditor's note: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a practicing neurosurgeon, is the multiple Emmy®-award winning chief medical correspondent for CNN. Tune in to CNN this afternoon to hear him discuss what he thinks is the real issue with Obamacare.

(CNN) -- I have an uncle who has always been a robust and healthy guy. He drank a glass of skim milk every day, bragged about how many pull-ups he was doing and fit into pants he was wearing 20 years before. He didn't take a single medication and retired early.

Given that he had no medical problems and ran his own business, he opted to go several years without health insurance. Eventually, when he turned 65, he picked up Medicare.

What happened next was a little strange. He fell off the wagon. He exercised only sporadically, and paid hardly any attention to what he was eating. One day, I saw him eat an entire bag of potato chips. He bemoaned the fact that he was forced to buy new, bigger pants, and he stopped drinking his milk. For him, becoming newly insured had nearly the opposite effect on him of what we doctors hope to achieve. He'd become unhealthier.

In many ways, my uncle was demonstrating a concept known as the moral hazard. Two economists wrote about this exact scenario in 2006

They found that many men, at the time they obtained Medicare, started behaving badly. Moral, or morale, hazard is a term largely used by economists to describe the actions of people more willing to take risks because they are insulated from the cost of their actions, in this case because of their recently obtained health insurance.

In the case of these men, when they got Medicare, they took worse care of themselves; they actually exercised less. Among those who didn't visit the doctor after getting insurance, the effect was dramatic: Their overall physical activity dropped by 40%; they were 16% more likely to smoke cigarettes and 32% more likely to drink alcohol.

Even if that seems extreme, it's still worth asking: Does health insurance make us healthier?

The past five years have seen a tumultuous battle over Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, culminating in the bitter recriminations this fall over lost policies and the disastrous launch of the HealthCare.gov website. When I interviewed Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at the end of October, she downplayed the concerns and seemed certain the site would be up and running by the end of November.

The website may be working better now, but to me that's not the most important issue. In my mind, the real suspense comes from whether Obamacare will really make us a healthier America, even if it succeeds in its ambitions to dramatically expand coverage.

A healthier America: That is the goal we should share as Americans, but access alone won't get us anywhere close.

This past spring, the New England Journal of Medicine followed up on an important experiment in Oregon.

The state created a remarkable strategy to do a minimal expansion of Medicaid. It decided to conduct random lottery drawings to allocate the limited spots.

While it was controversial in its implementation, the situation was a goldmine for researchers. It offered something very rare in these types of studies: a unique opportunity for researchers to compare the newly insured to their highly similar counterparts, who remained uninsured. The results were surprising, and mostly disappointing.

The newly insured Medicaid population did go to the doctor more often, used more preventive health services and received more medications. Problem was, in nearly every area, they weren't any healthier. The scientists sat down with more than 12,000 people and compared some of the most important health indicators. They found having insurance did not improve measures of blood pressure, cholesterol or how well diabetics controlled their blood sugar. Furthermore, the 10-year risk of having a heart attack didn't change in those who had Medicaid. It wasn't at all what the proponents of universal access to health insurance hoped they would see.

The results remind me of a column I wrote a few years ago, shortly after my own marriage. It seemed like a good time to explore the question of whether marriage was in fact good for one's health. I spent a fair amount of time researching the topic and one of the experts I interviewed gave me an answer I have never forgotten: Marriage is good for your health (long pause) ... as long as it's a good marriage.

It was a terrific answer, and a metaphor for so many aspects of our lives.

As you might imagine, I had quite a bit of fun with that article on marriage, but it taught an important lesson. There is almost always a second beat to any story. Being married all by itself isn't necessarily good or bad for your health. It was the effort required to make it a good or bad marriage that made up the entire difference.

The same can be said about health insurance. In this case, I don't mean that "good" or "bad" insurance is the critical factor, but that health insurance alone doesn't lead to better health. None of this works unless we all take personal responsibility, and hold ourselves accountable.

To be clear, there will always be some baseline benefit to being insured versus not being insured, even if you account for the moral hazard. A major Institute of Medicine report in 2009 found that uninsured adults are more likely to be diagnosed at an advanced stage of cancer, more likely to die from a heart attack and less likely to recover from a serious injury.

Even in Oregon, the newly insured enjoyed some benefits. For example, they were nearly a third less likely to suffer from depression, perhaps because they had more peace of mind from being insured. And there were significant benefits in nonmedical areas: Whereas more than 5% of the uninsured faced "catastrophic" medical expenses in a year -- defined as greater than 30% of their income -- those catastrophic expenses were virtually eliminated in the group on Medicaid.

But strictly in terms of health, insurance, like marriage, doesn't guarantee good health. After all, I am sure you can think of people right now who have terrific health insurance and terrible health. It seems the benefits pale in comparison to what we can gain with a few simple personal decisions about our health.

A good example comes from a study in the journal Circulation. Researchers estimated that if all Americans exercised 30 minutes a day, we would reduce the number of cardiovascular events -- heart attacks and strokes -- by a third. A third! Just 30 minutes a day, and suddenly we are starting to get serious about a more healthy America.

You can break up the exercise into 10-minute chunks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and you don't even have to knock yourself out. Just go hard enough that your breathing is slightly labored, enough that it would keep you from singing if you suddenly got the urge.

Problem is that as things stand now, only half of us, at most, exercise that much.

While we are fond of comparing ourselves to France, a place that was ranked as having the best overall health care system in 2000, according to the World Health Organization, there's a huge difference between the United States and France that has little to do with the health care safety net.

We Americans are three times as likely to be obese as the average French person -- and obesity is related to just about every chronic disease imaginable.

I think about this all the time, and here is what I tell my own patients. It is time to stop merely playing defense when it comes to your health, and time to start optimizing yourself.

Yes, of course we are desperate to stamp out disease when it occurs, but we are more desperate for those diseases to never occur in the first place. I say that as a neurosurgeon, someone who is often called in to extinguish the brightest of fires. I also say this, however, as a 44-year-old dad who wants to be around for a long time.

I have been fortunate to have always had health insurance, but a few years ago, I decided to strive for something more. I wanted to optimize myself. I wanted to be the best that I could possibly be, instead of waiting around for the seemingly inevitable diagnosis of heart disease or diabetes. I found that it wasn't that hard. I became diligent about breaking a sweat every day. I made it as important as a meeting with my boss or a dinner date with my wife.

Also, as a student of neuroscience, I know the brain isn't particularly good at distinguishing thirst and hunger; so most people eat when they should drink. As a result we walk around overstuffed and dehydrated. Drinking fluids all day long has cut my calorie consumption by a third.

Studies of the mind-body connection also remind us that it takes about 15-20 minutes for the brain to know the stomach is full. Stop eating when you are 80% full, and you will likely take in the right number of calories. The Japanese call it hara hachi bu. To help, we use smaller plates in our home to trick the brain into believing we are eating more.

We eat meat occasionally, but no longer serve it in our home. I eat seven different colored foods a day, and try to buy locally grown vegetables whenever I can.

These are simple strategies that have made me biologically younger than I was nearly five years ago. At 44, I have the biological age of someone in his mid-30s.

It is true that the American Medical Association supports the aspects of Obamacare that expand insurance coverage, as do many others in the medical community, even if they aren't convinced that it will reliably lead to better health. It appeals to a sense of justice, and a desire to prevent the awful situation of people being turned away when they need help the most.

But, as we follow the story of Obamacare over the coming years, it's important to understand and agree on the true measure of success. As a doctor, I think a healthier America is the rallying cry we can all get behind. We have had a rocky, yet still vitally important start, but the point is that access to health care insurance is not nearly enough.

If we are serious about a more healthy America, the real change starts in each and every one of us, and it's not that hard to do.

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Sanjay Gupta.