Read moreIn fact, the real profanity is that almost a million properties are standing empty in England and Wales, while millions of impoverished people have nowhere safe to live. Britain has a housing crisis, and the scale of that crisis makes squatting a practical, sensible option for many desperate people. There are currently half a million homeless people in this country, and another 500,000 who are “precariously housed” – sleeping on friends’ sofas, living in temporary accommodation. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of properties are standing entirely empty in London alone, patrolled by security guards, waiting for their value to increase when the market picks up again.
In these circumstances, squatting is starting to look like a principled response to the moral bankruptcy of contemporary housing inequality, as well as the smart option for homeless people with nowhere else to go. There are currently 15,000 squatters in England and Wales – the law is different in Scotland – and as the cuts come in, that number is likely to rise.
The prospect of a wave of squats and occupations poses two problems for this Government. When thousands of people squatted in London after the Second World War, they were lauded as heroes, bravely responding to the housing shortages created by the Blitz. But when housing shortages are the direct result of bungled forward planning and ideological austerity measures, the presence of squatters is an embarrassment. More importantly, Britain has a long tradition of occupation and squatting as a form of political resistance, dating back to the Diggers and Levellers of the 1640s, and continuing through contemporary university and workplace occupations.
If it comes into force, the new law will make criminals of students who occupy their universities, of outraged citizens who occupy their council buildings, of striking employees who occupy their places of work. Taking over an empty building and using it to set up a family home or a community garden is itself a political statement, but it is the more overtly political occupations which the Government is keen to do away with. Occupations like the Deptford anti-cuts space, where activists took over a disused Job Centre and used it to train locals to fight the cuts.
The occupation of private property by the poor and outraged is a matter of principle, as well as a practical response to hardship. If we believe that it is unfair for the wealthy to buy up empty buildings while millions of people squeeze through their lives in narrow, crumbling council blocks, in hostels or on the streets; if we believe that ordinary people should not be criminalised for protesting peacefully against Government-imposed austerity, then it is up to all of us to stop this spiteful new law in its tracks.
Quotes
Read moreReflecting the growing impatience in Congress with the war in Afghanistan and the sometimes tepid support from Pakistan, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont grilled Gates during a Capitol Hill hearing, demanding: “How long do we support governments that lie to us? When do we say enough is enough?”
Gates responded that based on his 27 years at the CIA and more than four as Pentagon chief, “most governments lie to each other. That’s the way business gets done.”
“Do they also arrest the people that help us, when they say they’re allies?” Leahy pressed.
“Sometimes,” replied Gates, adding, “and sometimes they send people to spy on us, and they’re our close allies. That’s the real world that we deal with. ”
Read moreThe density of space junk peaks around 620 miles up, in the middle of so-called low-Earth orbit. That’s bad, because many weather, scientific, and reconnaissance satellites circle in various low-Earth orbits. But that height also offers an opportunity. Below about 560 miles, small objects start to feel a significant drag from the Earth’s upper atmosphere. This drag causes them to slowly spiral toward Earth, and they eventually burn up in the atmosphere. The tungsten cloud could theoretically provide extra drag on objects orbiting above the 600-mile mark, slowing the itty-bitty debris down enough to fall below the 560-mile threshold. Tungsten wouldn’t clear up space instantly—objects at 560 miles can still circle for decades. But that’s vastly better than the centuries-long orbits of fast-moving objects even a little higher.
That said, there could be a downside to sending 20 tons of heavy metal dust aloft. Eventually, the tungsten cloud would itself fall toward Earth. Tungsten isn’t acutely toxic, and Ganguli and friends argue that, spread over many years, all that dust would not amount to much, especially compared with the hundreds of tons of micro-meteors and other space dust that already flits down onto Earth each day. But their five-page paper outlining the tungsten cloud devotes 54 words to the potential environmental impact, hardly an exhaustive look. Astronomers might also object, because the dust could interfere to an unknown degree with light streaming toward Earth from space. Fighting through swarms of microscopic dust could give satellites fits, too, though again, the naval scientists argue the impact would be negligible. (Most satellites point their instruments either straight down toward Earth or straight out into space, and therefore away from what would be mostly horizontal streams of tungsten dust.)
These scenarios all assume, though, that the tungsten dust will behave, and that the ionosphere or solar wind or whatever else won’t interact with it in funny ways. For instance, what if the tungsten doesn’t disperse in nice soft poofs but clumps together? Something similar happened with Project West Ford, a Cold War operation in the early 1960s to improve the reliability of radio communication (in case the Soviets sabotaged our undersea cables) by giving transmitters something solid to bounce signals off in space. To howls worldwide, the U.S. injected 480 million inch-long copper needles into orbit, clusters of which still circle Earth. Or, some observers have suggested that the dust could swell outward—perhaps even form a Saturn-like ring of Element 74 around Earth.
So, yeah, the idea still needs polishing. But if the growing amount of space junk wipes out a few billion-dollar satellites soon, a silvery tungsten cloud could be the least of many evils.
Read moreTill now, scientists and multinational corporations promoting GM crops have maintained that Bt toxin poses no danger to human health as the protein breaks down in the human gut. But the presence of this toxin in human blood shows that this does not happen. Scientists from the University of Sherbrooke, Canada, have detected the insecticidal protein, Cry1Ab, circulating in the blood of pregnant as well as non-pregnant women. They have also detected the toxin in fetal blood, implying it could pass on to the next generation. The research paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Reproductive Toxicology. They were all consuming typical Canadian diet that included GM foods such as soybeans, corn and potatoes. Blood samples were taken before delivery for pregnant women and at tubal ligation for non-pregnant women. Umbilical cord blood sampling was done after birth. Cry1Ab toxin was detected in 93 per cent and 80 per cent of maternal and fetal blood samples, respectively and in 69 per cent of tested blood samples from non-pregnant women.
Read moreIn a request to industry earlier this month, SOCOM said it is looking to acquire a nondevelopmental radio for team members with a range of just over a mile. Requirements include the capacity to plug-and-play with Android devices through a USB or serial port and also to run on either a Windows or Android operating system.
SOCOM said it wants a radio that can transmit voice and data at the same time and comes equipped with both commercial and GPS receivers. The equipment also must be capable of running military applications, specifically applications like the Tactical Ground Reporting system, a map-based tool developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and now widely used by the Army in Afghanistan.
The game, which The Sims creator hopes to have up and running in a year, riffs off of the Sterling short story Maneki Neko.
“He describes a karmic computer that’s keeping a balance of payments between different people, and causing them to interact with each other in interesting ways to improve their lives even though they’re strangers,” Wright told Eurogamer in a new interview conducted at E3 in Los Angeles.
“They earn karmic points that are redeemed by having somebody else help them.”
Wright told Eurogamer that the Sterling-inspired game he’s working on is likely set for launch on tablets, smart phones and social networks such as Facebook.
What’s inspired Will Wright’s next game? News – – Page 1 | Eurogamer.net
the Gamification of Economics? this is very 20!!
The worms in question were of the species Caenorhabditis elegans, and were supplied by boffins at Nottingham uni having originally been found browsing a dump in Bristol. Many of C elegans’ genes perform the same function as those in humans, and the scientists wanted to see if RNA interference therapy (RNAi) could be used to fight the serious loss of muscle which astronauts are subject to during long spaceflights.
Some millions of the worms were sent up aboard space shuttle Atlantis on the STS-129 mission in 2009, and subsequently treated in the station’s Japanese-built “Kibo” lab podule. They were subsequently brought back to Earth on the next shuttle to visit, Endeavour (now retired), executing mission STS-130.
“It was really a quite straightforward experiment,” says Nottingham uni’s Dr Nathaniel Szewczyk. “Once the worms were in space the scientists onboard the International Space Station treated them with RNAi and then returned them to us for post flight analysis.
"These results are very exciting as they clearly demonstrate that RNAi can be used effectively to block proteins which are needed for muscle to shrink.”
Szewczyk’s colleague and fellow space garbage-worm gene therapy boffin, Dr Timothy Etheridge, added: “We were very pleased… our experiments allowed us to demonstrate that this form of gene therapy works effectively during spaceflight. The unexpected finding that RNAi can effectively block protein degradation in muscle in space was also a very welcome surprise.”
Brit rubbish-dump worms in space station science triumph
Garbage-scoffing creatures prove zero G therapy
Read moreIn addition to calling on governments to maintain Internet access “during times of political unrest,” the report goes on to urge States to change copyright laws, not in favor of the music and movie industries as has been the recent trend, but in keeping with citizens’ rights.
Read moreMarcelo is an illiterate 24-year-old drug addict whose home is a sliver of cardboard on the streets of Rio Branco, a riverside city in the Brazilian Amazon. His drug of choice is oxi, a highly addictive and hallucinogenic blend of cocaine paste, gasoline, kerosene and quicklime (calcium oxide) that is wreaking havoc across the Amazon region.
Oxi, or oxidado – “rust” – is the latest drug to surface in the Amazon. It is reputedly twice as powerful as crack cocaine and just a fifth of the price.
“It is terrifying,” said Alvaro Mendes, an outreach worker in Rio Branco from the state of Acre’s Harm Reduction Association, the NGO that first detected the drug. “The majority of first-time users become addicted on their first contact with the drug. Most of them go seven to 10 days without sleeping, without eating. They start to go into a process of degeneration. After months of use … they go into a state where they look like zombies, wandering … in search of pleasure.”
Described as a cheaper and deadlier successor to crack, oxi sells for about R$2 (75p) a rock and is smoked in pipes improvised from cans, pieces of piping and metal taps. According to Mendes, whose support group works with slum-dwellers, prostitutes, transvestites and homeless people who are hooked on the drug, oxi can kill within a year.
“The difference between cocaine and oxi is like the difference between drinking beer and pure alcohol,” said a federal police operative on the Peru-Brazil border, who refused to be named.
Oxi surfaced in the Amazonian border region between Brazil, Bolivia and Peru in the 1980s, and is said to have been originally used by a small number of hippies who came to the region to experiment with ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic plant native to the Amazon rainforest.
In the past five years, however, its use has exploded, particularly in the slums and rural communities of Acre state in the western Amazon, where it is peddled in street-corner drug dens known as bocadas. Mendes estimates there are at least 8,000 oxi users in Acre’s capital, Rio Branco, a city of 320,000 inhabitants.
But oxi is no longer just an Amazonian drug. A series of recent suspected seizures in cities such as Sao Paulo, Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro have propelled it into the national headlines. Health workers and politicians warn of a catastrophe if its spread is confirmed.
“The Brazilian state is unprepared to face this threat and to help its victims,” José Serra, a leading opposition politician and former governor of Sao Paulo, wrote in a recent column in the national daily Estado de Sao Paulo, describing oxi on his Twitter account as a “weapon of mass destruction”.
Strange children should smile at each other and say, “Let’s play.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (via liquidnight)
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The Committee to Nuke Elysium 