Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, May 11, 2010.
OND is a community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
The OND concept was borne under the keen keyboard of Magnifico - proper respect is due.
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This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: Ziggy Stardust by David Bowie
Please feel free to browse and add your own links, content or thoughts in the Comments section.
Any timestamps shown are relative to each publication.
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N.Korea boasts success in nuclear fusion
By (AFP)
North Korea announced Wednesday it has successfully carried out a nuclear fusion reaction in what it called a breakthrough towards developing new energy sources.
The report in Rodong Sinmun, newspaper of the ruling communist party, made no mention of using the claimed new technology for the North's atomic weapons programme.
Nuclear fusion reactions can be employed to make hydrogen bombs.
"The successful nuclear fusion marks a great event that demonstrated the rapidly developing cutting-edge science and technology of the DPRK (North Korea)," the paper said.
It said scientists worldwide were studying nuclear fusion as a way of obtaining "safe and environment-friendly new energy" but the North's experts had worked hard to develop the technology their own way. |
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As Monarch Butterflies Journey North, Gardeners Can Help Protect Species, Researcher Says
By (ScienceDaily)
. . .
The Monarch Watch director said that the health of butterfly population would be determined by the number of first-generation monarchs that come north out of Texas over the next six weeks and weather conditions throughout the northern breeding range over the remainder of the summer. Depending on these factors, the number of monarchs could stay steady, decline or increase compared to last year.
But gardeners can help the butterflies by planting milkweed and other monarch-friendly plants, Taylor said.
"We need the public to pitch in to save the monarch migration," said Taylor. "Without an effort to protect monarch habitats and restore milkweeds, this incredible migration will slowly fade away."
Taylor encourages gardeners, homeowners, schools, governments and businesses to plant monarch "way stations" consisting of milkweeds and other butterfly plants, in hopes that the dedicated habitats will sustain a threatened population during its migration. |
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Kagan expected to win fairly easy Senate confirmation
By David Lightman and Margaret Talev
nitial signs Monday pointed toward a tame, perhaps even smooth, Senate confirmation process for Solicitor General Elena Kagan, whom President Barack Obama nominated to succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court.
To be sure, any path to confirmation is riddled with potential pitfalls, and so far, a few have surfaced: Kagan’s limited courtroom experience, her effort as dean of Harvard Law School to bar military recruiters from campus and concerns among liberals that she may not be a reliable vote.
However, independent analysts thought that none of those concerns appeared likely to derail her nomination, particularly in a Senate in which Democrats control 59 of 100 seats.
"If that’s all they can come up with, she should be fine," said Thomas Keck, a professor of constitutional law and politics at Syracuse University. |
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Pakistan can't link N.Y. bombing suspect to extremist groups
By Saeed Shah
Pakistani investigators have been unable to find evidence linking Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bombing suspect, with the Pakistani Taliban or other extremist groups, Pakistani security officials said Tuesday. Investigators also have been unable to substantiate Shahzad's reported confession that he received bomb-making training in the country's wild Waziristan region, officials said.
The lack of evidence found by investigators stands in contrast to forceful statements by top Obama administration officials linking Shahzad to extremist Pakistani groups.
The prime Pakistani suspect, Muhammad Rehan, was detained early last week outside a radical mosque in Karachi after Shahzad was arrested in New York. A member of the banned extremist group Jaish-e-Mohammad, Rehan was the only concrete link found so far between the 30-year-old Shahzad and the militant underworld in Pakistan.
However, the interrogation of Rehan didn't provide any link to the Pakistani Taliban or another militant group, officials said. |
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Tree-ring patterns are intellectual property, not climate data
By Michael Baillie
In April, the UK Information Commissioner's Office ruled that Queen's University Belfast must hand over data obtained during 40 years of research into 7,000 years of Irish tree rings to a City banker and part-time climate analyst, Doug Keenan. Professor Mike Baillie, the man who collected most of that data, called the ruling a "staggering injustice". He explains his opinion below.
I regard myself as a chronologist and a dendro-catastrophist; in particular I wish to link the tree-ring and ice core chronologies so that we can view some historical events, such as those around AD540 or 44BC, in human records, in tree-ring records and in ice core records of atmospheric chemistry. My early work was as part of a team involved in constructing a 7,000-year oak chronology at Belfast to allow calibration of the radiocarbon timescale. Since then I have built further chronologies and have studied some extreme events initially indicated by the Irish trees.
To put the record straight, I am neither a climatologist nor a dendro-climatologist. I have no academic stance on human-caused global warming except that, as a scientist reviewing the issue from an evolutionary perspective, if humans are even partly the cause of the warming since 1990 then we are already doomed as a species. I agree with Doug Keenan (the man who placed FOI requests at Queen's University Belfast asking for my data) that the issue of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) is of critical importance at the present time. In a nutshell, either the MWP was warmer than now and we are in with a chance of surviving long enough to do something about climate change, or the MWP was cooler than now and we are probably due for rapid extinction.
. . .
I consider that our raw tree-ring measurements should not have been released following an FOI request. I know the Irish data better than anyone else; particularly the highly disparate nature of the samples before the year AD1700 (variously from historic buildings, archaeological sites, lake margins and peat bogs). It is unlikely that these ancient woodland, forest or bog trees would have the same response to climate factors (such as temperature or rainfall) as current living oak trees. Worse still, living parkland oaks in Ireland are much wider ringed than any of the ancient oak populations. This is almost certainly because modern oaks on walled estates are probably imported stock, brought in from the 17th century onwards by landowners who wished to beautify their estates with large oaks. Even worse than that, although ancient bog oaks occur across Northern Europe, there are no good examples of oaks currently growing on raised lowland bogs anywhere. So it is essentially impossible to find out exactly what such oaks were responding to. |
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Uganda's gays fight back
By Gregory Branch
Even as Uganda’s parliament considers the Anti-Homosexuality Bill - which calls for the death penalty for some gay acts - a group of about 100 Ugandan gays and lesbians held a secret meeting to determine how to stand up for their rights.
The clandestine conference was held a hotel function room in downtown Kampala last week and was titled "gStanding on the side of Love, Re-imagining Valentine’s Day.・
Organized by the Rev. Mark Kiyimba of the Ugandan Unitarian Universalist Church, and financially supported by the Austria Foundation, the meeting was a strategy session to discuss how to respond to the bill. The participants resolved to petition the Ugandan Speaker of Parliament to scrap the bill and to instead move to decriminalize homosexuality.
"Our conference showed that religion does not need to be an enemy to the cause of LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] concerns," said Kiyimba, who declares himself a married bi-sexual. "What is at stake here is religious freedom, human rights and minority protections." |
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Leaked: Telcos' secret plans to use fake "citizens groups" to kill Net Neutrality
By Cory Doctorow
ThinkProgress has a leaked copy of a telcoms industry PowerPoint presentation laying out their plans to use astroturf to kill Network Neutrality. The industry is hiring the same turfers who work with the Tea Party movement to carry their message to the people.
What the telcos want to do is reduce your access to websites and services unless those services have paid a bribe for "premium carriage" to you. So Google buys its bandwidth from its ISP. You buy your bandwidth from your ISP. Then your ISP goes to Google and says, "If you want to send your bits to our customers when they ask for them, you'll have to pay us too." If Google doesn't pay, the ISP slows down its bits when you ask for them.
. . .
Here's how I see it: the telcos and cable operators got a huge public subsidy when we agreed to let them use our public sewers, tunnels and streets (not to mention our houses and basements) for their wires. We give them all this for free or far below the market costs. They put their wires in our dirt. |
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Red Cross confirms 'second jail' at Bagram, Afghanistan
By Hilary Andersson
The US airbase at Bagram in Afghanistan contains a facility for detainees that is distinct from its main prison, the Red Cross has confirmed to the BBC.
Nine former prisoners have told the BBC that they were held in a separate building, and subjected to abuse.
The US military says the main prison, now called the Detention Facility in Parwan, is the only detention facility on the base.
. . .
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that since August 2009 US authorities have been notifying it of names of detained people in a separate structure at Bagram. |
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UN rights forum in hot spotlight of controversy
By (AFP)
Fourteen countries were expected to be elected unanimously Thursday to the UN Human Rights Council, to the dismay of non-governmental groups that argue five of them -- including Libya -- have records that should keep them out.
In a joint statement, high-profile NGOs including Human Rights Watch which formed a "Coalition for an Effective Human Rights Council" said five candidates this year -- Angola, Libya, Malaysia, Uganda and Thailand -- should not be eligible to be members.
The Geneva-based body, the United Nations' main human rights venue, has been a persistent lightning-rod for controversy since it was set up in 2006 as part of a UN reform initiative. |
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Gay political party competes in Philippines elections
By Nancy-Amelia Collins
The Philippines' gay political party participated in the country's national elections for the first time this week, seeking to raise the profile of gay rights in this predominantly Roman Catholic country.
"It's like a national coming out!" said Danton Remoto, founder of Ang Ladlad, or "Out of the Closet," as the party is called in English. "I've been getting text messages all day from our members who say their whole family or entire neighborhood voted for Ang Ladlad," he added, shortly after casting his vote.
Representing lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people (LGBT), Remoto has been trying to get Ang Ladlad registered with the commission on elections, or Comelec, since the party's inception seven years ago. |
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Spain to unveil deep budget cuts amid EU economic fears
By (BBC)
The Spanish government is set to detail deep cuts in public spending amid EU concerns that economic problems afflicting Greece may spread.
PM Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is expected to outline the cuts on Wednesday, aimed at bringing down Spain's borrowing levels.
On Monday, Spain said it planned to cut annual borrowing by 4.7% of GDP by the end of 2011.
US President Barack Obama has urged Mr Zapatero to take "resolute action". |
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To Congo, with trouble
By Antonaeta Becker
A barter deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) trumpeted by China as a showcase of its "win-win" strategy in Africa has been hit by charges of corruption, a court case and a barrage of Western criticism. The surprise onslaught is causing Beijing to suspect a plot to undercut its expanding presence in the resource-rich continent.
"It is now clear that Western countries don't want to see China's influence grow in Africa," says Duan Hongwu, a Beijing-based analyst who has been following China's investment in Congo. "The barter deal is an obvious 'double win' - it helps Congo convert its rich mineral resources into a real economic capital. At the same time, it takes care of China's abundant foreign reserves by finding a suitable outlet for investment."
. . .
Beijing's deal has recently also been a subject of investigation by a commission set up by the National Assembly of DRC. The probe is focused on the disappearance of $23 million in a signing bonus that Chinese companies were due to have paid to Congo's Gecamines, their local partner in the Sicomines project. The adverse publicity China has received in the probe is raising questions about the transparency of its long-term projects in the country and in Africa as a whole. |
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Medvedev in US-Middle East appeal
By (Al Jazeera)
Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, has called for a more active US role in the Middle East peace process during a visit to Syria, saying the situation in the region was "very bad" and risked worsening further.
"In essence, the Middle East peace process has deteriorated," Medvedev said, speaking alongside Bashar al-Assad, his Syrian counterpart, after two days of talks on the first visit to Damascus by a Russian head of state.
"The situation is very, very bad. It's time to do something," Medvedev said.
"I agree with President Assad, the American side could take a more active position." |
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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US expands Caribbean AIDS program
By (AFP)
The United States and the Caribbean Community (Caricom) signed an agreement Tuesday paving the way for Washington to expand an AIDS relief program to 12 Caribbean nations.
Previously, only two Caricom member-nations --- Guyana and Haiti--- and the Dominican Republic had benefited from the program introduced by the George W. Bush administration for African and Caribbean countries worst affected by HIV and AIDS.
Under the agreement, the 12 countries would get 25 million dollars annually or up to 125 million over the next five years to assist with prevention, testing, strategic information and counseling, said the charge d'afffaires of the US embassy, Karen Williams. |
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Kagan nomination could influence November elections
By William Douglas
Both Democrats and Republicans say they expect Solicitor General Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court to become an issue in November's congressional elections, even though outside experts say her Senate confirmation is likely to be uneventful.
Indeed, it already has become an election issue in some states.
In Arizona, where incumbent Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is fighting for his political life, ultra-conservative GOP challenger J.D. Hayworth is clubbing McCain with Kagan's nomination, challenging him to oppose her.
. . .
"Both sides are going to work it," said Brad Coker, managing partner of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research. "She'll get confirmed, but it's a matter of how much hay (Republicans and Democrats) can make on the nomination." |
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Detained local DJ/artist Kutmah faces deportation on immigration violations
By Jeff Weiss
Last week should have been an unimpeded celebration for the local beat scene, with the latest release from standard bearer Flying Lotus garnering raves from national and international press and further solidifying the community’s reputation as having one of the world's most innovative and genre-bending electronic music scenes.
Instead, news broke Friday that agents from the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division had detained Justin McNulty, a well-respected artist, producer and deejay, better known as Kutmah.
Widely considered one of the progenitors of the Los Angeles sound, McNulty, 34, was detained May 5 at his Los Angeles residence. After being interrogated at a downtown facility, he was transferred the following day to a federal immigration center in Chaparral, N.M., and since has been awaiting deportation to Great Britain, his country of birth. |
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Welcome to the "Hump Point" of this OND.
News can be sobering and engrossing - at this point in the diary, an offering of brief escapism:
Random notes related to this video:
The following is a David Bowie discography of sorts (albeit an abbreviated one) from the mouth of Bowie himself.
(On Ziggy Stardust:)
Bowie: "I think that [Ziggy] would probably be fairly shocked that, one, I was still alive and that, two, I seem to have regained some sense of rationality about life and existence."
Back to what's happening:
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China's coal bubble...and how it will deflate U.S. efforts to develop "clean coal"
By Richard Heinberg
The conventional wisdom in energy-and-environment circles is that China's economy, which is growing at a rate of eight percent or more per year, is mostly coal powered today and will continue to be so for decades to come. Coal is cheap and abundant, and China uses far more of it than any other nation. The country is trying to develop other energy sources fast?including nuclear, solar, and wind?but these won't be sufficient to reduce its reliance on coal. That's one of the reasons it is important for the U.S. to develop "clean coal" technology, which China can then begin to adopt so as to reduce the horrific climate impacts of its coal-heavy energy mix.
Most of this conventional wisdom is correct, but some of it is plain wrong: so wrong, in fact, that environment-, economic-, and energy-policy wonks are constructing scenarios for the future of U.S. and world energy, and for the global economy, that bear little or no resemblance to the reality that is unfolding.
It is true of course that China's coal consumption is enormous and growing, and that coal is the basis of the Chinese economy, fueling over 80 percent of electricity generation. China's coal output grew an astonishing 28.1 percent from first quarter 2009 to first quarter 2010, to over 750 million metric tons consumed in just the past three months. But this is a situation that is patently unsustainable?not just because of the carbon emissions it entails, but because China simply doesn't have enough coal to continue growing its consumption much longer.
. . .
China's economic bubble in some ways represents a microcosm of the entire industrial period?itself a relatively brief era of urbanization, fossil-fueled expansion, technological innovation, and unprecedented explosion of consumption. China has taken only two or three decades to accomplish what some other nations did over the course of a couple of centuries. This suggests that, for that country, implosion may come just as quickly. |
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High-Quality Beef: Start Cattle on Corn, Finish on Co-Products, Researchers Find
By ScienceDaily
The traditional practice of finishing cattle on corn may not be the only way to achieve high marbling, a desirable characteristic of quality beef.
Researchers at the University of Illinois have discovered that high-quality beef and big per-head profits can be achieved by starting early-weaned cattle on corn and finishing them on a diet high in co-products.
"The goal is to get the highest quality beef product in the most profitable way," said U of I animal scientist Dan Shike. "If you can initiate marbling at a young age with corn, calves are smaller and they eat much less, so feeding them corn for 100 days early saves on feed costs. This system will use considerably less corn and achieve the same effect." |
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For the agrichemical industry, organic cotton is a pest
By Tom Philpott
Like the food you eat, the clothes on your back come from somewhere. If you wear cotton, that "somewhere" is ultimately a farm (with detours at a textile mill, a clothes factory, etc).
Growing vast monocrops of cotton, it turns out, is a dirty business. Globally, cotton occupies 2.4 percent of cropland -- and burns through 16 percent of the insecticides used every year, the Environmental Justice Foundation reports.
. . .
Trouble is, that "solution" to cotton's chemical dependence is already failing. In cotton country, Roundup-resistant "superweeds" are a large and growing problem, forcing farmers to employ a toxic cocktail of herbicides to control weeds. And now, Monsanto recently revealed, a strain of cotton bollworms has developed resistance to the company's widely planted pesticide-carrying cotton strain. Who knows what new poison concoctions will be needed to exterminate these "superbugs"? |
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Predicting Economic Crises With 'Econophysics'
By ScienceDaily
Do physicists have better tools than economists or financial experts for predicting economic crises? Mainstream economists largely failed to forecast the sub-prime mortgage bubble, the ensuing financial crisis, and its global impact on world economy, which has now even challenged Europe's economic, political and social systems. A handful of physicists working on economic problems -- in the small but rapidly growing field of "econophysics" -- have done better.
Already in 2005 Didier Sornette, a physicist, earthquake scientist, and financial expert at ETH Zurich, predicted bubbles in the US real estate markets. His prediction turned out to be completely right, despite the arguments of many economists that such bubbles could not exist, and even if they could, their bursting would be unpredictable. Since then Sornette has successfully predicted the bursting of many other bubbles, for example, in the oil and Asian financial markets.
. . .
Econophysicists agree, but also think that this is just aesthetic surgery. They claim that the pillars on which economic theory is built are fundamentally flawed. In a recent letter to George Soros, they point out that, in contrast to what mainstream economics says, markets are not stable, efficient, and self-regulating by nature, but would tend to stray far from equilibrium (as bubbles and crashes illustrate). Their models -- inspired by years of success in understanding the rich dynamics of many physical systems -- explain extreme events such as financial crises as emerging naturally through interactions and feedbacks among market participants. Upheavals in financial markets, these models suggest, should be almost as difficult to respond to as earthquakes, unless the structure of today's market interactions is changed. |
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Whole Grain, Bran Intake Associated With Lower Risk of Death in Diabetic Women
By ScienceDaily
Women with type 2 diabetes who ate the most bran in a study had a 35 percent lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD) and a 28 percent reduction in death from all causes than women who ate the least amount, researchers reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
After adjusting for age, the women in the top 20 percent for consumption of whole grain, bran, germ and cereal fiber were at reduced risk of death from all causes and from CVD compared to the women in the bottom 20 percent, Qi said. However, after adjusting for a range of lifestyle and factors such as smoking and physical activity, only the association with bran remained statistically significant and independent of those factors.
"These findings suggest a potential benefit of whole grain, and particularly bran, in reducing death and cardiovascular risk in diabetic patients," said Qi, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and assistant professor of nutrition in the Harvard School of Public Health. |
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People who eat organic junk food don’t know what organic means
By Ashley Braun
Atkins. South Beach. Master Cleanse.
Each of these diets is supposed to help you lose weight (and feel great!). "Organic," on the other hand, does not belong in quite the same category. According to a new study, however, there appears to be an organic-cookie-eating portion of the U.S. confusing "organic" with "low calorie."
. . .
What the study really tells us is that -- besides supermarket-wide organic ignorance -- there are people eating junk food who think "organic" is some kind of new "Sweet 'n' Low" . . . |
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Mother's phone call 'can be as soothing as a hug'
By (BBC)
The working mother who cannot be at home to cuddle a distraught child can relax - her voice on the phone soothes as much as a hug, a study suggests.
US researchers put more than 60 girls in a stressful situation and monitored their hormonal responses when they were either phoned or hugged afterwards.
Their mother's voice produced virtually the same amount of the stress-quelling hormone oxytocin as physical comfort. |
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Ignorance is Strength, Opt-In is Opt-Out
By Kevin Drum
Via Twitter, Jack Schafer directs our attention to a New York Times Q&A with Elliot Schrage, Facebook's vice president for public policy. "Newspeak from Facebook's top flack," he calls it, and perhaps that's a wee bit unfair. Some of Schrage's answers are contrite ("we'll do better, promise") and some are admirably direct ("that's how Facebook works, get used to it"). But this one sure seems like classic Newspeak:
Why not simply set everything up for opt-in rather than opt-out? Facebook seems to assume that users generally want all the details of their private lives made public.
. . .
Perhaps I should be charitable. Maybe Schrage misunderstood the question. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding something. But saying that "participating in the service" or uploading a photo constitutes opting in is sort of Orwellian, no? The issue, of course, is that the vast majority of Facebook users have no idea that the default privacy setting for their photo galleries is "friends of friends" or that the default setting for Likes is "everyone on the planet." . . . |
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Barack Obama warns students about distractions of technology
By Adam Gabbatt and agencies
US president Barack Obama, whose 2008 election victory has been acclaimed as the first to be "won on the internet", has warned university graduates against relying on technology for information.
In a commencement speech to more than 1,000 graduates, and thousands of their family and friends gathered at Hampton University, Obama said the era of the iPod and the Xbox has not always been good for the cause of a strong education.
. . .
"With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations ? none of which I know how to work ? information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," Obama said. |
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Report: $50.1B Lost Globally to Software Piracy
By Shane McGlaun
Software companies continue to cite huge monetary losses that they attribute to piracy. The question for some who doubt the claimed losses resulting from piracy is whether the people pirating software would actually buy the software if they didn’t get it illegally.
. . .
The report claims that in 2009, 43% of the software on computers around the world was pirated, up from 41% the previous year. Of the $50.4 billion in losses attributed to piracy globally, $16.5 million of that number is said to be in the Asia-Pacific region alone. The most prolific pirating nations are Brazil, India, and China. The average piracy rate in the Asia-Pacific area is 59%. Yahoo News reports that the 59% number means that 900 million computers in the area run pirated software.
. . .
The world's top pirate country is Georgia in the former Soviet Union where 95% of all software is claimed to be illegal. Behind Georgia are Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Moldova, Armenia, and Yemen. The country with the lowest piracy rate is the U.S. at 20% followed by Luxembourg, New Zealand, and Australia. |
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Apple Responds to NPD's Sales Analysis Which Places Android Ahead of iPhone OS
By Brandon Hill
Yesterday, DailyTech reported on the news that the plethora of Android-based smartphones on the market have finally jumped ahead of Apple's iPhone in the United States. The numbers pegged Android's market share at 28 percent while smartphones running iPhone OS were a bit further back at 21 percent.
We never expected Apple to respond to NPD's numbers -- the company is usually "above" such responses and marches to its own drumbeat. However, the news picked up steam all across the internet yesterday and Apple felt the need to respond.
. . .
Paczkowski makes a point of noting that while NPD's numbers don't give a snapshot of the global smartphone market and only surveyed 150,000 customers, Apple isn't exactly being straightforward either. The Apple spokeswoman points out that over 85 million iPhone and iPod touches have been sold, despite the fact that the iPod touch is in no way a smartphone . . . |
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China targets online commentator anonymity
By Michael Bristow
China is considering forcing its citizens to use their real names when they post comments on internet bulletin boards.
The suggestion came from Wang Chen, head of the government's information office, at a meeting of senior Chinese leaders.
If introduced, the measure could strengthen the government's control over what people say on the internet. |
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What Have Atheists Lost?
By Kevin Drum
I suppose it's pointless to continue engaging in this argument, but a few weeks ago I wrote a post about atheism that keyed off an essay by David Bentley Hart. Damon Linker responds today:
What・s most disappointing is Drum・s failure to grasp the culminating point of Hart’s essay, which, as I take it, is this: the statements ・godlessness is true・ and "godlessness is good・ are distinct propositions. And yet the new atheists invariably conflate them. But a different kind of atheism is possible, legitimate, and (in Hart's view) more admirable. Let・s call it catastrophic atheism, in tribute to its first and greatest champion, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in a head-spinning passage of the Genealogy of Morals that ・unconditional, honest atheism is ... the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two-thousand years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God.・ For the catastrophic atheist, godlessness is both true and terrible.
. . .
But there's probably little chance of discussing this profitably, and not because of any absence of good faith on either side. It's just that the prospect of a Godless world is more salient for some than for others. Nietzche wrote about this in the broader cultural sense above, and Linker talks about it later in the personal sense: "There are no disappointments recorded in the pages of [New Atheist] books, no struggles or sense of loss. Are they absent because the authors inhabit an altogether different spiritual world than the catastrophic atheists?" Speaking for myself: yes. I have never in my life felt the need to believe in God, and that lack simply doesn't inspire any emotional resonance in me. I don't know why this is, but I do know that I don't feel empty inside, I'm perfectly capable of feeling wonder and awe, and there's no sense of loss or anything else involved in any of this. Linker might regard that as unfathomable, finding the tortured brooding of the catastrophic atheist more to his liking, but it's so. And I have no idea how you discuss this. . . |
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World Cup welcome: a billion condoms and 40,000 sex workers
By Iva Skoch
The taxi drivers hustling around the bars on Long Street in Cape Town say they are ready for all the soccer fans that will flood the city in June for the World Cup. So are hotels, restaurants, breweries and, inevitably, prostitutes.
Arguably, the soccer World Cup is to the sex industry what the holiday season is to candy shops. A temporary surge of excited people feeling collectively festive, willing to pay for a bit of extra indulgence.
South Africa's Drug Central Authority estimates 40,000 sex workers will trickle in for the event from as far as Russia, the Congo and Nigeria to cater to the wide taste spectrum of some 400,000, mostly male, visitors and their apres-soccer needs. |
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Heroic Skydiver Saves Woman's Life After Parachute Failure
By Kyle VanHemert
If you're skydiving and your parachute fails, there's always a backup. But what if the backup fails, too? That's when you pray that you're jumping with a hero like Dave Hartsock, who risked his own life to save someone else's.
Hartsock was the instructor paired with Shirley Dygert for her first ever skydive?a challenge she undertook to celebrate her 54th birthday. But the jump took a nightmarish turn when their first parachute failed to fully deploy and the backup chute got tangled up along with it.
As they were plummeting toward the Earth at 40mph, Hartsock pulled the chutes' control handles to position himself underneath Dygert, hoping to break her fall when they hit the ground. His plan worked . . . |
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Vicky Ntetema wins bravery award for BBC albino report
By (BBC)
Tanzanian journalist Vicky Ntetema has won an international award for her BBC reports on the murder of albinos.
The International Women's Media Foundation gave her a Courage in Journalism Award for her investigation.
"I am surprised but not happy," Ms Ntetema told the BBC, saying that a four-year-old boy with albinism had recently been killed. |
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