Future Quantum Computers Begin to Take Shape
Cracking the most secure codes in existence might require a computer farm covering much of North America to run at full speed for 10 years, even if it did not consume all of the Earth’s energy in a single day. By contrast, a future quantum computer the size of a building might only take 16 hours and have about the same power requirements as today’s supercomputers.
Science still remain decades away from making a quantum computer capable of harnessing the wildly strange behavior of particles on small scales — the “quantum mechanics” that allow particles to exist in two different states at once. But researchers have finally reached the point where they can begin to envision what a quantum computer might look like.
Syria’s ‘Arab Spring’: failed or hijacked?
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is ‘disgusted’ at the stance taken by Russia and China against foreign military intervention in Syria.
But clearly ‘Madame Clinton’, as many Syrians enjoy calling her, has not made time to read the report by the Head of the Arab League (AL) Observer Mission that was deployed throughout Syria’s provinces from December 24, 2011 to January 18, 2012.
It seems our media have not read it either, even though it was publicly released in English over two weeks ago.
Russia and China’s conviction that a mediated domestic political process and cessation of violence by all perpetrators in Syria is a far more sustainable course of action and is completely affirmed by the AL Report.
Olympic VIPs take fast lane leaving patients at risk ~ Guardian
The Guardian
‘Sick and vulnerable NHS patients will be left stranded in ambulances in traffic jams while dignitaries and sponsors race past in a fleet of expensive cars on specially designated lanes during the Olympics, healthcare providers fear.
Games organisers have been accused of risking people’s health by banning the routine use by ambulances of the “Games lanes” introduced to ensure that VIPs can travel quickly to events. The decision to reject a request for access from NHS London, the capital’s strategic health authority, has led to a storm of anger. Medical Services, an independent business that transports patients for the health service, and whose clients include the hospitals closest to the Olympic stadium, says it fears that the ill, including those on dialysis, will be trapped in vehicles as London suffers unprecedented congestion, with traffic on key routes expected to slow to a crawl.
The Games lanes comprise 30 miles of road in central London on which only the “Olympic family” will be allowed to travel – athletes, officials and sponsors, including Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. BMW has donated 4,000 3 and 5 series cars to be used during the Games. Following consultation with the NHS, ambulances will be allowed to use the lanes when they have their blue lights on, but critics say there are many urgent journeys that cannot justify the use of blue lights. They can only be employed in a genuine emergency and those entitled to use them generally require special training.’
Turmeric’s Powerful Life-Promoting Properties Put Pharmaceuticals to Shame
Curcumin, the key chemical in turmeric, has been shown to possess very powerful health-promoting properties. Recent research has even found that curcumin can even prolong lives of fruit flies by 75 percent. While the research was done on insects, it highlights the life-promoting aspects of this powerful substance — along with mountains of other scientific research. The findings also shed light on how curcumin can slow the development of Alzheimer’s and dementia. This research provides a potential explanation of why rates of dementia are less common among the elderly in India, where turmeric is widely used in the production of spices.
Out of Control Violence in Libya
Once Africa’s most developed country, Libya today’s a ravaged, out-of-control charnel house. Tens of thousands died. Multiples more were injured, made homeless, and forcibly displaced.
Terror now stalks Libyans living in fear. Protracted conflict continues. Violence and instability rage. Expect no end for years. Washington’s-led NATO war is one of history’s great crimes. Colonization, occupation, plunder and exploitation were planned.
America got another bloodstained imperial trophy. Keeping it’s another matter. Green Resistance continues its liberating struggle.
Amnesty International’s (AI) New Report
Better late than never explaining NATO’s legacy. AI’s 2011 account misreported “ The Battle for Libya.” It pointed fingers the wrong way. It blamed Gaddafi for NATO aggression. It falsely accused him of “kill(ing) and injur(ing) scores of unarmed protesters.”
It added “serious violations of international humanitarian law (IHL), including war crimes, and gross human rights violation, which point to the commission of crimes against humanity.
Before Western-backed killer gangs arrived, Libya had peace and calm. AI blamed Gaddafi for their crimes. Its new report paints an entirely different picture, but still falls way short of truth and full disclosure. Titled, “Militias Threaten Hopes for New Libya,” it discusses pervasive violent lawlessness.
It doesn’t explain illegitimate National Transitional Council (NTC) authority or NATO’s illegal aggression against a nonbelligerent country. International law’s clear. AI knows it.
No nation may interfere in the internal affairs of another except in self-defense if attacked. NATO claimed responsibility to protect authority as Trojan Horse deception for war. Crimes of war and against humanity followed.
They continue out-of-control. NATO’s still involved. Thousands of US forces invaded to guard key oil facilities. Occasional air attacks occur. NATO warships occupy Libya’s ports. US, Italian, French, and perhaps other forces are involved. Reports from Misrata in January said Apache helicopters slaughtered rebel insurgents trying to scale Brega oil platforms.
US and Israel clash over attack on Iran
American-Israeli relations have not been so bright recently.
The visit of a top Obama administration official was supposed to ease tensions between the countries but instead it might have only widened the gap regarding attitudes toward the Iranian nuclear problem.
President Obama’s National Security Adviser Tom Donilon arrived in Israel this week and sat with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for two hours to warn Israel against unilateral attack on Iran. According to the Israeli news outlet Debka, however, this message didn’t sit well with the hawkish leader. To military sources that have spoken to Debka, Netanyahu is believed to be upset that the US is willing to work with Iran in terms of a possible nuclear program, giving them the go-ahead as long as they promise to avoid enrichment that will lead to them developing nukes. Iran has long insisted that any nuclear related efforts are in the work for energy procurement, although the US and Israel have been called this into question.
The Obama administration has so far avoided any military action against Iran, hoping instead that international sanctions and strong words will serve as enough of a warning to keep Tehran from working on warheads. Netanyahu, on the other hand, is not convinced. He is not willing to wait for an optimistic outcome and doesn’t rule out a strike on Iran.
Last month, Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon explicitly called the Obama administration “hesitant” in their unwillingness to attack, which was followed by a warning only a day later by the nation’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, in which he urged the US to “move from words to deeds.”
Lately, however, the US is relying less on threats in terms of taking down a weapons program and more on the hope that Iran will keep their word that the nuclear enrichment program there won’t be used for a warhead. According to the latest reports to the media made by American officials close to the matter, an US strike on Iran is currently out of the cards.
Free “Syrian” Army stronghold equipped with Milan missiles
The Battle of Homs was particularly deadly for the belligerents on both sides, as well as for civilians. During the first three days, the Syrian Arab Army was warded off by the rebels that blocked all entry points to their neighborhood. They destroyed all approaching armored vehicles using Milan missiles. Ultimately, the Syrian Arab Army had to resort to multiple rocket launchers to bombard the Milan firing posts, at the risk of causing heavy civilian casualties.
Each Milan shooting station, located on every street going into Bab Amr costs 100,000 euros, and each missile about 12,000 euros. The missiles were fired at a rate two to three rounds per minute. This equipment is manufactured by North Aviation (France) and MBB (Germany). It is supposed to have been given to the Free “Syrian” Army by the United Kingdom and Germany.
In April 2011, Doha officials acknowledged that Qatar had delivered Milan missiles to Libyan insurgents from Benghazi to help overthrow the Arab Jamahiriya, by way of the UN resolution that allowed the delivery of “defensive weapons ” (sic) to the Libyan opposition.
Nuclear Weapons on a Highway Near You
“Is that it?” My wife leans forward in the passenger seat of our sensible hatchback and points ahead to an 18-wheeler that’s hauling ass toward us on a low-country stretch of South Carolina’s Highway 125. We’ve been heading west from I-95 toward the Savannah River Site nuclear facility on the Georgia-South Carolina border, in search of nuke truckers. At first the mysterious big rig resembles a commercial gas tanker, but the cab is pristine-looking and there’s a simple blue-on-white license plate: US GOVERNMENT. It blows by too quickly to determine whether it’s part of the little-known US fleet tasked with transporting some of the most sensitive cargo in existence.
As you weave through interstate traffic, you’re unlikely to notice another plain-looking Peterbilt tractor-trailer rolling along in the right-hand lane. The government plates and array of antennas jutting from the cab’s roof would hardly register. You’d have no idea that inside the cab an armed federal agent operates a host of electronic countermeasures to keep outsiders from accessing his heavily armored cargo: a nuclear warhead with enough destructive power to level downtown San Francisco.
That’s the way the Office of Secure Transportation (OST) wants it. At a cost of $250 million a year, nearly 600 couriers employed by this secretive agency within the US Department of Energy use some of the nation’s busiest roads to move America’s radioactive material wherever it needs to go—from a variety of labs, reactors and military bases, to the nation’s Pantex bomb-assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas, to the Savannah River facility. Most of the shipments are bombs or weapon components; some are radioactive metals for research or fuel for Navy ships and submarines. The shipments are on the move about once a week.
The OST’s operations are an open secret, and much about them can be gleaned from unclassified sources in the public domain. Yet hiding nukes in plain sight, and rolling them through major metropolises like Atlanta, Denver, and LA, raises a slew of security and environmental concerns, from theft to terrorist attack to radioactive spills. “Any time you put nuclear weapons and materials on the highway, you create security risks,” says Tom Clements, a nuclear security watchdog for the nonprofit environmental group Friends of the Earth. “The shipments are part of the threat to all of us by the nuclear complex.” To highlight those risks, his and another group, the Georgia-based Nuclear Watch South, have made a pastime of pursuing and photographing OST convoys.
Dominic Lawson: Spare me these orgies of self-congratulation
It is said by psychologists that we have become as a people increasingly dependent on various forms of praise and decreasingly able to gain a sense of personal pride simply in knowing that we have done a good job. The shrinks have divided the world up into those whose sense of self-worth is internal and those who gain such validation only through comments and compliments from others – and the latter group is becoming an alarmingly large slice of the human pie.
In this context, the manic expansion of show-business awards ceremonies can be seen not just as yet more evidence of the increasing power and scope of film companies’ marketing departments, but also of the character of almost all actors. These are needy, needy people. Applause is the drug that they cannot live without – which is fair enough, given that they are in the performance business. And, boy, do they get that applause at their awards ceremonies. The readiness of these audiences to put their hands together at the slightest cue is something not usually seen outside sessions of the general assembly of the North Korean Communist Party. This especially accompanies the clips of the films being paraded, and as the applause mounts, the star in question sheds an obligatory tear or two for the benefit of the television audience watching her watching – not least to demonstrate how deeply moved is she by the quality of her own performance.
It is all rather American, you might say – and if so, that is most appropriate: the commercial significance of the Baftas is to influence the members of the American academy in its frenetically lobbied deliberations over the Oscars, which take place at the end of the same month.
That truly is the alpha and omega of self-congratulatory ceremonies, the one which every year captures the undisputed prize for most grotesquely overblown display of manufactured emotions. I suppose it is harmless compared with President Bashar al-Assad’s bombardment of Homs; but that’s all the more reason, my dear BBC, not to confuse it with real news.
The rise and rise of the American Sugar Daddy
There is nothing particularly subtle about the sales patter. “We make mutually beneficial relationships,” goes one pitch. “We are where the attractive meet the affluent,” claims another. A third bills itself: “An upscale community of beautiful women seeking wealthy men.”
The service being brokered is as old as the institution of arranged marriage. But the medium it’s being offered through isn’t. The pitches are aimed at wealthy male “sugar daddies” who, in the jargon of lonely hearts ads, WLTM very much younger women.
In America’s booming online dating market, few sectors are hotter than so-called “sugar daddy” sites, which help rich men to make “arrangements” with attractive and financially needy younger women. Between them, these specialist sites now account for 10 per cent of the entire industry. That’s no small beans, given that in the US the online dating business now generates profits estimated at $700m ($442m) per year and, according to the polling firm GlobeSpan, has helped just over one in five Americans to find their life partner.
The “sugar daddy” trend began in 2006, when the entrepreneur Brandon Lee founded a website called SeekingArrangement. Though it now boasts dozens of copycats, he claims to have a attracted a million members worldwide. The older, male subscribers pay a fee of $50 per month; young women can join for free.
European Super State One Step Closer or Approaching Imminent Collapse?
Jean Monet, the founding father of the European Union, had a very particular vision of Europe’s future back in 1952, and he expressed it in a letter to a colleague on 30th April that year: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.”
Here, in a nutshell, we plainly see the trickery that stands behind the fabricated ‘Union’ of individual nations, each of which was led to believe that its economic and social stability would prosper once it committed to the ‘common market’ and the various treaties which mark its inexorable passage to ‘superstate’.
The actual mission of the founders of the EU has always been something of a chimera; Monet’s letter makes it clear however, that the motivation was both idealistic and elitist. The supranational entity was to be created “without (their) people understanding what was happening” following a pattern of elitist oligarchical ambition stretching back through past dynasties.
Why are we still spending money on children’s database?
The Minister for Education and Children has twice told the Examiner of his concern about cuts in education set up by the last government and the Department has explained that school staffing cannot be reduced any further.
Everyone knows government has to cut costs but our children need as many experienced teachers as possible. Teachers are the lifeblood of our children’s education but their numbers have apparently been pared to the bone.
So why, with all the cuts, are civil servants being allowed to continue to waste our money on an expensive and intrusive pupil database?
In December the department told Tynwald it is spending £267,500 setting up a database of every Manx schoolchild which will cost at least £44,000 a year to run.
With 40 schools in the Isle of Man that money could alternatively provide £6,500 to equip every school with a decent reference library to help our children with their exams. £44,000 per year would provide an experienced special needs teacher or future employment for two newly qualified teachers presently under training.
The department claims the database will improve services for disadvantaged children but surely spending the money on more teachers would be of more direct benefit to the children?
Surely the minister could save hundreds of thousands of pounds by scrapping the database of all children and setting up a simpler arrangement that just focuses on the much smaller number of disadvantaged children?
There is also the matter of intrusion. The Children Bill 2010 consultation proposed a similar database of every child in the Isle of Man.
New mental health manual is “dangerous” say experts
Millions of healthy people – including shy or defiant children, grieving relatives and people with fetishes – may be wrongly labeled mentally ill by a new international diagnostic manual, specialists said on Thursday.
In a damning analysis of an upcoming revision of the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychologists, psychiatrists and other experts said new categories of mental illness identified in the book were at best “silly” and at worst “worrying and dangerous.”
“Many people who are shy, bereaved, eccentric, or have unconventional romantic lives will suddenly find themselves labeled as mentally ill,” said Peter Kinderman, head of Liverpool University’s Institute of Psychology at a briefing in London about widespread concerns over the manual.
“It’s not humane, it’s not scientific, and it won’t help decide what help a person needs.”
The DSM is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and has symptoms and other criteria for diagnosing mental disorders. It is used internationally and seen as the diagnostic “bible” for mental health medicine.
Rising to its feet: Japan before & after (AMAZING PHOTOS)
With the powerful earthquake and tsunami hitting Japan last year, the country seemed to be devastated and almost beyond recovery. Still, 11 months on, the Japanese have made amazing progress in raising their lives and cities from the rubble.
The natural disaster which hit Japan back in March 2011 left the country’s northeastern coast almost entirely destroyed. The earthquake caused a major nuclear crisis as the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility was partially destroyed and leaking radiation.
The natural disaster left over 20,000 dead or missing, generating global sympathy over the terrible tragedy. About 100,000 people had to flee their homes to escape radiation.
The country’s authorities said that their drive to reconstruct the devastated territory was more than just a domestic issue.
MAN EATS HEART ATTACK BURGER, SUFFERS HEART ATTACK
A very real medical emergency has unfolded at a Las Vegas restaurant that offers “Bypass” burgers and “Flatliner” fries.
The doors to the Heart Attack Grill warn that eating off the menu may be hazardous to your health; and the warnings appear to have come true for one diner.
Amateur video has emerged showing a man being wheeled out of the Heart Attack Grill on a stretcher after a medical episode that restaurant employees say looked like, well, a heart attack.
Despite the serious nature of the incident, fellow diners reportedly thought it was just another part of the show.
“I actually felt horrible for the gentleman because tourists were taking photos of him as if it were some type of a stunt”, Dr Jon said, “But even with our morbid sense of humour we wouldn’t pull a stunt like that.”
A single meal there can exceed 8,000 calories, and customers weighing in at over 350 pounds (159kg) eat for free.
Man survives in snowed-in car for two months
A Swedish man who says his car became trapped in deep snow in a forest the week before Christmas has been found alive and in surprisingly good condition.
The man, believed to be Peter Skyllberg, told police that he had eaten nothing but snow for two months, but that thanks to having good clothes and a sleeping bag, he was able to stay relatively warm inside his car, even as temperatures outside fell to -30 degrees Centigrade (–22 degrees Fahrenheit.)
Skyllberg was discovered by a pair of snowmobilers, who thought they had found a crashed car and were amazed when they dug down through a meter of snow and discovered the driver lying on the back seat in his sleeping back. He was weak and emaciated and barely able to speak but is now recovering well in the hospital.
