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Why we were falsely arrested, by Amy Goodman
ST. PAUL, Minn. - Government crackdowns on journalists are a true threat to democracy. As the Republican National Convention meets in St. Paul, Minn., this week, police are systematically targeting journalists. I was arrested with my two colleagues, "Democracy Now!" producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, while reporting on the first day of the RNC. I have been wrongly charged with a misdemeanor. My co-workers, who were simply reporting, may be charged with felony riot.
[continued at link] ST. PAUL, Minn. - Government crackdowns on journalists are a true threat to democracy. As the Republican National Convention meets in ... more -
Bush quietly seeks to make war powers permanent, by declaring indefinite state of ...
As the nation focuses on Sen. John McCain's choice of running mate, President Bush has quietly moved to expand the reach of presidential power by ensuring that America remains in a state of permanent war.
Buried in a recent proposal by the Administration is a sentence that has received scant attention -- and was buried itself in the very newspaper that exposed it Saturday. It is an affirmation that the United States remains at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban and "associated organizations."
Part of a proposal for Guantanamo Bay legal detainees, the provision before Congress seeks to “acknowledge again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans.”
The New York Times page 8 placement of the article in its Saturday edition seems to downplay its importance. Such a re-affirmation of war carries broad legal implications that could imperil Americans' civil liberties and the rights of foreign nationals for decades to come. As the nation focuses on Sen. John McCain's choice of running mate, President Bush has quietly moved to expand the reach of presi... more -
Beijing hotels slash rates after foreign tourists fail to show up
Hotels in Beijing are slashing room rates for next month's Olympics after tighter security — among other measures — dashed an expected windfall of visitors, hotels and travel industry executives said Tuesday.
Fan Runjun, an employee of the press department of popular travel Web site Ctrip.com, said many two- to four-star hotels have reduced prices by 10 percent to 20 percent compared to May and June. Some have slashed rates by as much as 30 percent, said Fan, whose site lists about 500 hotels in its English-language section.
The usual pre-Olympic festive atmosphere host cities experience has not hit Beijing yet, with some hotels feeling empty and listless. In June, the number of visitors to Beijing, including overseas and domestic, declined by 19.9 percent from a year earlier, according to the Beijing Tourism Authority.
The government has said the games are a target of terrorism, and has reported breaking up plots to attack the games by Islamic radicals in the western province of Xinjiang. In a show of force, China's military has stationed a ground-to-air missile battery just 300 yards from one Beijing Olympic venue. Hotels in Beijing are slashing room rates for next month's Olympics after tighter security — among other measures — dashed an exp... more -
Crying Wolf: Are we all fascists now?
Book review of Naomi Wolf's The End of America and Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.
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A Child is Saved: Faith in Humanity is Restored
"Children of Men" is a science-fiction motion picture that is well worth remembering in our currently troubled times. The film presents the dark vision of a totalitarian world ravished by war, paranoia and the frustrations of man.
The world’s youngest citizen has just died at the age of eighteen, and with female fertility becoming obsolete, man cannot reproduce. No child has been born on the face of the planet for eighteen years. Man, and his future, is dying.
However, the unexpected discovery of a lone pregnant woman represents the miracle that can change the course of humanity. The discovery launches a desperate, perilous journey to deliver the woman and her child to safety, restoring faith in a future for humans beyond those presently on earth.
Photographs and the dramatic, chilling video of the movie's final scene are included. "Children of Men" is a science-fiction motion picture that is well worth remembering in our currently troubled times. The f... more -
White House asserts executive privilege in air-quality case
WASHINGTON — Setting up a constitutional showdown, the White House on Friday asserted executive privilege in denying a congressional request for thousands of pages of documents related to the federal government's rejection of California's efforts to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. Congress is attempting to determine whether President Bush played a role in the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to deny California's request for permission to impose tougher air-quality regulations than federal law called for. California had been granted such waivers numerous times over the years, but the Bush administration delayed and then rejected its request for authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. "I don’t think we’ve had a situation like this since Richard Nixon was president," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is conducting the investigation. An EPA official, Jason Burnett, has told committee investigators that EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson had favored granting the waiver but denied it after meeting with White House officials. In testimony last month, Johnson refused to say whether he’d discussed the waiver request with Bush. Waxman canceled a contempt vote that had been scheduled for Friday morning against Johnson and White House official Susan Dudley after the White House informed him of its last-minute decision. Waxman said the two had refused to cooperate with his panel...
(Click on the link for the rest of the story) WASHINGTON — Setting up a constitutional showdown, the White House on Friday asserted executive privilege in denying a congressional r... more -
'Ruthlessness gene' discovered
Selfish dictators may owe their behaviour partly to their genes, according to a study that claims to have found a genetic link to ruthlessness. The study might help to explain the money-grabbing tendencies of those with a Machiavellian streak — from national dictators down to 'little Hitlers' found in workplaces the world over.
Researchers at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem found a link between a gene called AVPR1a and ruthless behaviour in an economic exercise called the 'Dictator Game'. The exercise allows players to behave selflessly, or like money-grabbing dictators such as former Zaire President Mobutu, who plundered the mineral wealth of his country to become one of the world's richest men while its citizens suffered in poverty.
Ebstein and his colleagues decided to look at AVPR1a because it is known to produce receptors in the brain that detect vasopressin, a hormone involved in altruism and 'prosocial' behaviour. Studies of prairie voles have previously shown that this hormone is important for binding together these rodents' tight-knit social groups.
Ebstein's team wondered whether differences in how this receptor is expressed in the human brain may make different people more or less likely to behave generously.
To find out, they tested DNA samples from more than 200 student volunteers, before asking the students to play the dictator game (volunteers were not told the name of the game, lest it influence their behaviour). Students were divided into two groups: 'dictators' and 'receivers' (called 'A' and 'B' to the participants). Each dictator was told that they would receive 50 shekels (worth about US$14), but were free to share as much or as little of this with a receiver, whom they would never have to meet. The receiver's fortunes thus depended entirely on the dictator's generosity.
About 18% of all dictators kept all of the money, Ebstein and his colleagues report in the journal Genes, Brain and Behavior 1. About one-third split the money down the middle, and a generous 6% gave the whole lot away.
Long and short
There was no connection between the participants' gender and their behaviour, the team reports. But there was a link to the length of the AVPR1a gene: people were more likely to behave selfishly the shorter their version of this gene.
It isn't clear how the length of AVPR1a affects vasopressin receptors: it is thought that rather than controlling the number of receptors, it may control where in the brain the receptors are distributed. Ebstein suggests the vasopressin receptors in the brains of people with short AVPR1a may be distributed in such a way to make them less likely to feel rewarded by the act of giving.
Though the mechanism is unclear, Ebstein says, he is fairly sure that selfish, greedy dictatorship has a genetic component. It would be easier to confirm this if history's infamous dictators conveniently had living identical twins, he says, so we could see if they were just as ruthless as each other.
Researchers should nevertheless be careful about using the relatively blunt tool of the Dictator Game to draw conclusions about human generosity, says Nicholas Bardsley at the University of Southampton, UK, who studies such games.
That certainly fits with the image of a naïve yet arrogant dictator with no sense of the inappropriateness of his actions and attitudes. Such figures have cropped up with surprising regularity throughout history, all the way from the emperors of Rome, through to Napoleon Bonaparte, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein or Robert Mugabe, now tenaciously clinging to power in the face of uncertain electoral results. Selfish dictators may owe their behaviour partly to their genes, according to a study that claims to have found a genetic link to ruth... more -
License to kill....
a real license to kill found in orders for East German border police - in dealing with defectors. Wow...
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