It is used to implant a GPS-microchip in the body of a human being, using a high powered sniper rifle as the long distance injector. The microchip will enter the body and stay there, causing no internal damage, and only a very small amount of physical pain to the target. It will feel like a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second. At the same time a digital camcorder with a zoom-lense fitted within the scope will take a high-resolution picture of the target. This picture will be stored on a memory card for later image-analysis. nerdified link
Does the chip come with image perception enhancement controls? I’m thinking it would be cool to be able to sink one of those babies into each voter and then increase the brightness of the implantees.
In the remote reaches of the Sunderbans in Bengal, where rural electrification is still a distant dream, six women are ushering in a dual revolution.
They are harnessing solar power to bring light into the lives of fellow villagers and in the process empowering themselves like never before.
The women are innovators and inventors of solar powered torches and night-lights that have become must-haves in the villages of the Sunderbans where there is no electricity.
[snip]
“We are not spending any money right now. We are trying to accumulate so we can reinvest in the same business,” said Nilima Maity, another villager.
Sumana, Nilima and four others, who never finished school, are part of a project by The Energy & Resources Institute (TERI), New Delhi and the Ram Krishna Mission.
The project was launched last January to help disadvantaged rural women help themselves.
Trained in managing solar power units and given 30 solar lanterns to start a rental business, one year on, the women have come a long way.
It was just three weeks ago that Norwegian telecoms firm Telenor hosted the president of Pakistan at its headquarters outside Oslo. Today, hundreds of demonstrators attacked and plundered Telenor’s offices in Pakistan’s two main cities.
The mob, apparently set off by anger over the publication of offensive Muslim cartoons in a small Norwegian publication, broke into Telenor’s offices in Lahore and stole or vandalized computers, mobile phones and other equipment.
Two persons were shot and killed during the violence. Police also used tear gas and clubs to try to restore order, according to news bureau Reuters.
Several demonstrators were injured, while warning shots also were fired into the air. Several stores selling Telenor products have been attacked and torched as well.
The Basra provincial council has suspended relations with the British following new claims of abuse of Iraqis by UK troops, British military officials said today.
Officials in Basra cut off relations yesterday, a day after the News of the World reported video footage showing British troops apparently beating Iraqi civilians.
The video – filmed in Amara, north of Basra, in 2004 – appeared to show defenceless young Iraqis being kicked and attacked with batons.
It is thought the Iraqis had been plucked from a mob by a “snatch squad” of British troops during a riot in the town.
Military police have arrested a corporal from the 1st Battalion the Light Infantry as part of an ongoing investigation into the alleged abuse. He was last night named as Cpl Martin Webster.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 — The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.
New projections, buried in the Interior Department’s just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.
Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.
Why is it that when money is used for food, fuel, medicine or housing for the needy it’s an “entitlement program”, but when Bush gives away billions of OUR money to the already rich energy industries it’s “…essential to our economy and essential to our people.” ???
You just have to understand the physics of the whole equation, which is what underlies the moral calculus. See, when you put a drop of crude oil onto a dollar, it reproduces its single self into many dollars, just like when you put water on a Gremlin. (DO NOT FEED THE DOLLAR AFTER MIDNIGHT.) But when you put a dollar onto a poor person, poof, it erupts into flame and ash immediately. So you can clearly understand why we have to give all the money to rich oil barons — the whole future of money depends on it. And what kind of people would we be if we didn’t seek to protect poor people from the potential skin burns by not ever letting them have any money at all?
Florida lawmakers on Tuesday will consider legislation that would allow gays and lesbians to adopt children. The state banned gays from adopting in 1977 in response to and anti-gay campaign waged by singer Anita Bryant. It does, however, permit gays to be foster parents. The bill the Senate Children and Families Committee is scheduled to vote on would not repeal the adoption ban but would allow judges to decide in individual cases whether to override the law and place children permanently with gays and lesbians.
And remember when I posted before that the AFA was announcing another Senate vote on the federal anti-gay amendment in March? They were wrong, it’s going to happen in June. Thanks Congress, for planning such a wonderful birthday present for me. The past few years it’s been all war-war-war, torture-torture-torture, I know it’s hard to shop in the summertime, but that you’re all planning a little domestic oppression for my special occasion makes me tear right up.
Syria has switched all of the state’s foreign currency transactions to euros from dollars amid a political confrontation with the United States, the head of state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria said on Monday.
“This is a precaution. We are talking about billions of dollars,” Duraid Durgham told Reuters.
The bank, which still dominates the Syrian market although private banks have been allowed to set up in the last few years, has also stopped dealing with dollars in the international foreign exchange flows of private clients…
begin jury selection today in Sacramento, CA. This is another “terror cell” case that the government appears less than eager to pursue in court. Originally scheduled to begin in August, prosecutors have sought numerous delays. Story here.
“In the 1950s, the Seventh-day Adventist Church struck an extraordinary deal with the US Army. It would provide test subjects for experiments on biological weapons at the Fort Detrick research centre near Washington DC.
The volunteers were conscientious objectors who agreed to be infected with debilitating pathogens. In return, they were exempted from frontline warfare.”
In Haiti, public unrest is growing as the lead of Presidential front-runner Rene Preval continues to decline. After initial returns gave him over 60% percent of the vote, Preval’s share has fallen below the 50% needed to avoid a run-off vote. Two voting officials have charged Haiti’s electoral council with “manipulation.” On Monday, thousands of Preval supporters took to the streets around the capital of Port-au-Prince. Witnesses said United Nations troops fired into a crowd of un-armed protesters when they refused to let their convoy pass. At least two people were reported killed and another four injured.
Brazil (a major contributor of troops to the UN “peacekeeping” mission) called on Condi Rice to take the issue of Haiti’s violence to the UN security council. (Given the accusations that the UN troops have been shooting civilians indiscriminately . . . <sigh>)
Tens of thousands of angry protesters filled the streets of Haiti’s capital Monday, setting fire to barricades, storming a luxury hotel and demanding that front-runner René Préval be declared the winner of last week’s presidential elections.
At least two people were killed and several injured in gunfire in the Tabarre neighborhood near the international airport. Witnesses interviewed on Haitian radio blamed U.N. peacekeepers, but a U.N. spokesman denied troops had fired on protesters.
Late Monday, foreign diplomats and leaders of Haiti’s interim government were negotiating with several of Préval’s leading rivals, asking them to withdraw from a second round of voting and support him as president. Many diplomats fear a second round could spark widespread violence.
But Leslie Manigat, 75, the second-leading vote-getter, said late late Monday night in a telephone interview that he had no intention of withdrawing. {snip}
Elsewhere around the capital, demonstrations remained peaceful even as singing, dancing men and women shut down businesses and tied up traffic throughout the city. By nightfall, flaming barricades still dotted the city, but most traffic was allowed safe passage. {snip}
“I walked miles to cast my vote last week, and now these rich people need to respect it,” screamed Noel Rolane, a merchant who stood over a burning auto chassis in the Cité Soleil slum. “If they want us to turn this whole country into a heap of ash, then that’s what they’re going to get.” {snip}
A poorly managed election, allegations of fraud by two council members and computer glitches all fed the growing anger of Haiti’s poor masses.
With 90 percent of the vote counted, Préval was leading a 33-person field with 48.7 percent, elections officials said Monday. Manigat had 11.8 percent. Préval needs 50 percent plus one vote to avoid a runoff. Of the 2.2 million ballots cast, about 125,000 have been declared invalid because of irregularities.
Leading presidential candidate Rene Preval said Tuesday that “gross errors and probably gigantic fraud” marred last week’s elections, backing the protests of his supporters but urging them to be peaceful, a day after at least one person was killed in violent demonstrations.
Preval, who had just under 49 percent of the vote with most ballots counted, made the comments hours after a U.N. helicopter brought him to the capital from his rural home Monday as supporters accusing election officials of manipulating results stormed a luxury hotel in Port-au-Prince. {snip}
“We have observed there have been gross errors and probably gigantic fraud,” Preval told reporters.
He met late Monday with the top U.N. official in Haiti and ambassadors from the United States, France, Canada and Brazil. “We have questions about the electoral process,” he said after that meeting. “We want to see how we can save the process.” {snip}
In the middle-class Tabarre neighborhood, Associated Press journalists saw a man lying in the street, blood soaking the picture of Preval on his T-shirt. Dozens of witnesses said Jordanian U.N. peacekeepers opened fire from a jeep, killing two people and wounding four.
U.N. spokesman David Wimhurst first denied that peacekeepers fired any rounds, then later said they had fired in the air and that someone else fired shots afterward in the same area. {snip}
Of the 2.2 million ballots cast, about 125,000 ballots have been declared invalid because of irregularities, raising suspicion among Preval supporters that polling officials were rigging the election.
Another 4 percent of the ballots were blank but were still added into the total, making it harder for Preval to obtain the majority needed to win outright.
Jacques Bernard, director-general of the nine-member electoral council, denied accusations that the council voided many votes for Preval.
Council member Pierre Richard Duchemin said he was being denied access to the tabulation process.
“According to me, there’s a certain level of manipulation,” Duchemin said, adding that “there is an effort to stop people from asking questions.”
A U.S. filmmaker is hoping that her documentary will stir U.S. politicians to do more to alleviate fistula, an easily treated condition that has turned millions of African women into outcasts. Important screenings are planned for February and March.
OAKLAND, Calif. (WOMENSENEWS)–Like the lepers of the last century who were marooned on islands to suffer and die, women in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia who are stricken with obstetric fistula are often abandoned by their husbands and shunned by their family and community.
A lack of doctors, medical resources and education makes identifying women with the condition and finding doctors to repair the fistula a constant struggle in rural villages. Fistula primarily afflicts women in Africa and Asia, where early marriage, unassisted deliveries, gender inequality and lack of birth control are common.
Obstetric fistula typically occurs during difficult or prolonged labors. Women with the condition leak urine and or feces, but they learn to conceal it, constantly changing clothes and burning incense to hide the smell. Still, they soak mattresses rotten. And the smell is often so intolerable they are sent to live and work in isolation or at fistula compounds.
(more)
Nanette had a great diary entry on Fistula last year.
Beatrice Chelangat refused to be circumcised like her culture demanded and is struggling to help other Sabiny girls defy female genital circumcision
Beatrice Chelangat has been fighting against Female Genital Circumcision (FGC) in her home district of Kapchorwa for the last 10 years.
Because she grew up in a culture that practices FGC, the community listens to Chelangat’s message much more than they would if it were coming from an outsider. Chelangat uses traditional cultural leaders to educate the community about the physical and psychological affects of FGC.
FGC, which involves the removal of a female’s clitoris and stitching together of the labia, is “so deeply rooted in the culture, that you have to go deep in the cultural history to root it out,” Chelangat explains.
Chelangat, donning a white, embroidered African outfit and with almond-shaped eyes common with the Sabiny people, grew up in a religious family that didn’t encourage FGC. In 1984, after seeing a neighbour undergo the ritual, she decided she didn’t want to be cut; though she suspected her circumcised mother wanted her to also fulfil the tradition.
“After I saw it happen, the whole of the day I didn’t feel like eating,” she remembers. She didn’t want to have to show her genitals to the audience afterwards, as her neighbour had done, and didn’t want to go through the pain like her neighbour whom she heard moaning later that night. (Sabiny girls are expected not to cry or complain about the pain after the procedure.)
(more)
Does the chip come with image perception enhancement controls? I’m thinking it would be cool to be able to sink one of those babies into each voter and then increase the brightness of the implantees.
Full Article
Also see this CSM article. Similar project using LEDs.
Telenor attacked in Pakistan
Basra cuts off relations with British
link via NYT: free registration required
New projections, buried in the Interior Department’s just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.
Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.
Why is it that when money is used for food, fuel, medicine or housing for the needy it’s an “entitlement program”, but when Bush gives away billions of OUR money to the already rich energy industries it’s “…essential to our economy and essential to our people.” ???
I have often had the same question. I guess the royalty relief supports the claims of leadership by King George.
You just have to understand the physics of the whole equation, which is what underlies the moral calculus. See, when you put a drop of crude oil onto a dollar, it reproduces its single self into many dollars, just like when you put water on a Gremlin. (DO NOT FEED THE DOLLAR AFTER MIDNIGHT.) But when you put a dollar onto a poor person, poof, it erupts into flame and ash immediately. So you can clearly understand why we have to give all the money to rich oil barons — the whole future of money depends on it. And what kind of people would we be if we didn’t seek to protect poor people from the potential skin burns by not ever letting them have any money at all?
File under: still very fucked up, but a smidge less fucked up than it used to be:
And remember when I posted before that the AFA was announcing another Senate vote on the federal anti-gay amendment in March? They were wrong, it’s going to happen in June. Thanks Congress, for planning such a wonderful birthday present for me. The past few years it’s been all war-war-war, torture-torture-torture, I know it’s hard to shop in the summertime, but that you’re all planning a little domestic oppression for my special occasion makes me tear right up.
begin jury selection today in Sacramento, CA. This is another “terror cell” case that the government appears less than eager to pursue in court. Originally scheduled to begin in August, prosecutors have sought numerous delays. Story here.
Hidden history of US germ testing
are far from over.
Brazil (a major contributor of troops to the UN “peacekeeping” mission) called on Condi Rice to take the issue of Haiti’s violence to the UN security council. (Given the accusations that the UN troops have been shooting civilians indiscriminately . . . <sigh>)
More from the Guardian:
Apparently some of the shot “moved” to his heart.
Filmmaker Sharpens U.S. Focus on Fistula
Nanette had a great diary entry on Fistula last year.
Eluding the knife