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Thursday 23 October 2014

Vatican library digitizes 4,400 ancient manuscripts and gives them away for free

Ancient Manuscript

© Vatican Apostolic Library



The Vatican Apostolic Library is now digitizing its valuable ancient religious manuscripts and putting them online via its website. All of the content is available for free.

The Library was originally founded in 1451 AD and holds over 80,000 manuscripts, prints, drawings, plates and books printed prior to 1500 AD. The titles are all written throughout history by people who had different faiths or religions, from all over the world.


Not only are paintings, religious iconography and books being published online, but also letters by from important historical figures, drawings and notes by artists and scientists such as Michelangelo and Galileo, as well as treaties from all eras in history.


Finding all of the new digitized material is not easy, the library has a few samples online, but honestly its tedious right now to view the rest. Users have to search the database manually by clicking on each title and scanning through all the pages in each book. By the end of the year, a new rendering engine is going to be implemented with a more robust site-wide searching system.


In order to properly digitize the rest of the library, the Vatican is estimating that it will cost €50 million and take fifteen years. They are looking for corporate sponsors and normal people who want to see this work.


One of the ways they are attracting corporate sponsors is to hold exclusive fundraising events. In June 2014 they had one and gave attending guests an exclusive guided tour of areas generally closed to the public, including the Library halls, laboratories and the caveau where the manuscripts are safeguarded, with dinner in the Sistine Hall. They also seeking donations of €5 to save a single page in a manuscript, while donations of at least €1,000 will see the backer included on the official supporters list.


Grandfather opens fire at home invaders attempting to rape granddaughter, killing one


© Facebook

Jamie Lee Faison



A grandfather shot back and is believed to have killed a suspect in a home-invasion and attempted rape of his teen granddaughter on Monday night, Robeson County Sheriff's officials said.

The grandfather was also shot - but he also managed to shoot the 2 other suspects in the home-invasion and attempted rape, said Maj. Anthony Thompson with the Robeson County Sheriff's Office.


The incident started around 10 pm at a house on Yedda Road in Lumberton on Monday night when someone knocked on the home of the grandfather, his wife and their 19-year-old granddaughter, according to the sheriff's office.


Two of three men - all wearing black clothes, ski masks and gloves -- stormed into the house and demanded money, officials said.


The grandfather and his wife ended up in the back of the house and were directed at gunpoint to open a safe. The three men were all armed and tried to rape the teen girl, officials said.


The 67-year-old grandfather managed to grab a gun and shot all three of the suspects. The suspects fired back and the grandfather was hit several times, deputies said.


After that, all three wounded suspects fled in the grandfather's gold Cadillac.


Later, the sheriff's office was contacted when 2 men with gunshot wounds showed up at McLeod Hospital in Dillon.


Deputies received information that took them to Singletary Church Road near Lumberton where they found Jamie Lee Faison, age 20, dead inside the stolen Cadillac. He died from gunshot wounds, deputies said.


The grandfather was taken to a hospital and was later airlifted to another hospital.


A relative of the grandfather wrote on Facebook about the man's condition.


"He is out of surgery but is still critical in ICU!! Thanks everyone for all your prayers just keep them coming!!! But the intruders have been caught!!!" wrote Sherri Bridgeman on Facebook.


The two other wounded suspects were airlifted to other hospitals for emergency surgery. Those two men were identified as Brandon Carver Stephens and Jamar Hawkins, deputies told The Robesonian newspaper.


The three suspects are also believed to have committed other home invasions in the area, deputies said.


Signs of the Times

http://www.sott.net Signs of the Times: The World for People who Think. Featuring independent, unbiased, alternative news and commentary on world events. en-us Original content Copyright 2014 by Signs of the Times/Sott.net. For other content, see our Fair Use Policy at www.sott.net. Fri, 24 Oct 2014 05:04:41 +0200 http://ift.tt/1znbqC3 SOTT.net http://www.sott.net http://ift.tt/ZKAdQ1 A grandfather shot back and is believed to have killed a suspect in a home-invasion and attempted rape of his teen granddaughter on Monday night, Robeson County Sheriff's officials said. The grandfather was also shot - but he also managed to shoot the 2 other suspects in the home-invasion and attempted rape, said Maj. Anthony Thompson with the Robeson County Sheriff's Office. The incident started around 10 pm at a house on Yedda Road in Lumberton on Monday night when someone knocked on the home of the grandfather, his wife and their 19-year-old granddaughter, according to the sheriff's office. Two of three men - all wearing black clothes, ski masks and gloves -- stormed into the house and demanded money, officials said. The grandfather and his wife ended up in the back of the house and were directed at gunpoint to open a safe. The three men were all armed and tried to rape the teen girl, officials said. The 67-year-old grandfather managed to grab a gun and shot all three of the suspects. The suspects fired back and the grandfather was hit several times, deputies said. After that, all three wounded suspects fled in the grandfather's gold Cadillac. http://ift.tt/ZKAdQ1 Fri, 24 Oct 2014 05:01:51 +0200 http://ift.tt/1ozNRSe A very cold winter in Eastern Europe may tilt its political balance in Russia's direction, And why the situation might go from bad to worse. As winter approaches, Putin's hand is even stronger, as the crisis begins to transform from a military confrontation into a confrontation between Ukraine and Europe over the supply of Russian natural gas Reports out of Milan regarding last Friday's much anticipated meeting between Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko indicate that little progress has been made toward resolving the nearly yearlong Ukraine crisis. This, given the broader political currents at play in Europe, is unsurprising. To begin with, Mr. Poroshenko has, for all intents and purposes, lost the military battle over the Donbas in resounding fashion. While his bloc leads in the polls ahead of next Sunday's parliamentary election, Poroshenko faces a number of other challenges, not least of which is a collapsing economy (some estimates have the Ukrainian economy shrinking by 10 percent this year) and a burgeoning populist backlash over the government's handling of the crisis. So what we saw play out in Milan is more or less a repeat of the last Putin/Poroshenko meeting that took place in Minsk on August 26, because the same logic applies. Mr. Putin, as I wrote then, is always going to be the party - regardless of whether he is facing sanctions or a chorus of international condemnation - who will be playing the stronger hand in negotiations with Ukraine. Yet as we approach November, his hand is even stronger, as the crisis begins to transform from a military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine into a confrontation between Ukraine and Europe over the supply of Russian natural gas. Ukraine serves as the transit point for 50 percent of EU-bound Russian LNG, and Ukraine's siphoning off of LNG bound for southeastern Europe, which led to Russia cutting off the supply in January 2006 and January 2009, is still fresh in the minds of European leaders. The Rada's recent passage of a lustration bill, widely publicized acts of violence against sitting MPs through "trash bucket challenges," a popular revival of Nazi-era symbols and the incorporation of far-right elements into Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk's "People's Front" do not exactly augur well for the chances for a tranquil political environment in either Ukraine or in Eastern Europe, where the memory of Ukrainian collaboration against the Poles and the region's Jews is fresher there than it is here in the United States. http://ift.tt/1ozNRSe Fri, 24 Oct 2014 04:43:40 +0200 http://ift.tt/1ozNUNG Tens of thousands march in Mexico for missing students as Iguala mayor is accused of being 'mastermind' behind disappearances Tens of thousands marched in Mexico City and Iguala, Mexico on Wednesday to protest the disappearance of 43 student-teachers who went missing on September 26. Reflecting growing outrage over the failure of Mexican authorities to resolve the case, a group of masked protesters separated from the peaceful demonstration of several thousand in Iguala, broke into the city hall and smashed computers and windows before setting fire to the building. In Mexico City, students from 29 universities joined 50,000 marchers under the banner: "Alive they took them, alive we want them back!" One man held a sign that read: "Mexico has turned into an immense unmarked grave." A candlelight vigil in the Zócalo, the historic central square, followed the demonstration. http://ift.tt/1ozNUNG Fri, 24 Oct 2014 04:42:51 +0200 http://ift.tt/1xfsvID Prisoners serving time in the state of Pennsylvania can now be sued for speaking up from behind bars after Governor Tom Corbett signed into law this week the Revictimization Relief Act that legislatures rushed to approve only days earlier. The bill, signed on Tuesday by Corbett, a Republican, allows victims of "a personal injury crime" to sue the perpetrator if that offender "perpetuates the continuing effect of the crime on the victim." State Rep. Mike Vereb, a Republican and a co-author of the act, announced earlier this month that he'd be rallying lawmakers to support the bill after former death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal was allowed to record a commencement speech that was played for graduates of Goddard College during an October 5 ceremony. http://ift.tt/1xfsvID Fri, 24 Oct 2014 04:31:39 +0200 http://ift.tt/1ozIu5u A hatchet-wielding man attacked a group of patrol officers in a busy commercial district in Queens on Thursday, injuring two before the other officers shot and killed him, New York City police said. A bystander was wounded in the gunfire. At a news conference at a hospital where one officer was being treated for a serious head wound, Police Commissioner William Bratton said that investigators were still trying to confirm the identity of the assailant and determine a motive. Asked if the attack could be related to terrorism, Bratton didn't rule it out. He cited the fatal shooting of a solider in Canada earlier this week - what officials there have called a terror attack - as reason for concern. "This early on, we really cannot say yes or no to that question," Bratton said. The attack occurred in the commercial district in Queens at about 2 p.m., while four rookie New York Police Department officers on foot patrol were posing for a photo, police said. Without a word, the man charged the officers and began swinging the hatchet, first hitting one in the arm and another in the back of the head, they said. After the second officer fell to the ground, the two uninjured officers fired several rounds. The bullets killed the assailant and wounded the bystander, police said. The officer was in critical but stable condition and was expected to undergo surgery. The woman who was struck by a stray bullet also was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the back. http://ift.tt/1ozIu5u Fri, 24 Oct 2014 03:42:03 +0200 http://ift.tt/12mfqEm A physician with Doctors Without Borders who returned to New York City from West Africa has tested positive for Ebola, the New York Times said on Thursday. Dr. Craig Spencer was working for the humanitarian organization in Guinea, one of three West African nations hardest hit by Ebola. Spencer, 33, developed a fever and gastrointestinal symptoms and notified Doctors Without Borders on Thursday morning, the organization said in a statement. Spencer was transported to Bellevue Hospital from his Manhattan apartment by a specially trained team wearing protective gear, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said in a statement. He tested positive for Ebola, the Times said, making him the city's first diagnosed case. The Times said a further test will be conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to confirm the initial test. Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo planned a news conference at the hospital for 9 p.m. ET (0100 GMT). A spokeswoman for the mayor said she could not confirm or deny the report and declined to comment ahead of the news conference. http://ift.tt/12mfqEm Fri, 24 Oct 2014 03:33:32 +0200 http://ift.tt/1xfhkzS "I don't believe in anything. That's my cardinal rule. I do it for my mental health. If I believe in God, then I start talking to God and God starts talking to me. As soon as I start believing in something, then it talks to me. So, I don't believe in anything." Sara, whose name we changed to protect her identity, was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 19 during her senior year at New York University. She had not experienced any trauma as a child - no abuse, no bouts of depression, nothing that would raise any red flags. She led a more or less happy life. But in high school she experimented with drugs, and upon travelling abroad around the same time, she experienced intense culture shock. This series of events may have been Sara's personalized recipe for mental illness, cooked up with all the flavors of her unique position in life, her temperament, and her family's history. Her mind became a prison; she felt as though people were constantly laughing at her. She could no longer distinguish fantasy from reality. She assumed she wouldn't go back to school. http://ift.tt/1xfhkzS Fri, 24 Oct 2014 03:30:06 +0200 http://ift.tt/1xfhhUH A 9-month-old Indiana boy was fighting for his life on Thursday after being accidentally shot in the head by his father. WTHR reported that 31-year-old John Hambaugh, III, was in his kitchen cleaning his gun on Wednesday when the weapon discharged. The round traveled through Hambaugh's left thigh and into his 9-month-old son's head, who was thought to be standing next to his father. Neighbor Dawn Crecelius recalled that she felt helpless when the child's mother ran out of the home with the boy. "She was screaming, 'He shot my baby! He shot my baby!' and she was cradling the baby," Crecelius said. "What do you do? What do you do? Cause there's - you can't fix that. You can't help that. If he's choking, you can help that. If he's cut, you can help that. You can't help a baby that's been shot in the head." Hambaugh and his 9-month-old son were transported to Community Howard Regional Hospital in Kokomo. Hambaugh was expected to make a full recovery, but the child was listed in critical condition on Thursday. The Howard County Sheriff's Department was continuing to investigate the case. http://ift.tt/1xfhhUH Fri, 24 Oct 2014 03:20:13 +0200 http://ift.tt/1xfhhUF A video of Israeli Defense Forces degrading detention and mistreatment of a disabled 11-year-old boy has surfaced on Youtube, once again sparking harsh criticism of abuse and indiscriminately violent treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli military. The video, recorded by a member of the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem on Sunday, shows Israeli soldiers abusing a mentally disabled 11-year-old Palestinian boy next to the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, on the outskirts of Hebron. The footage shows soldiers violently grabbing the boy following the patrol's chase after Palestinians who were reportedly throwing rocks at vehicles on a main road outside the illegal Jewish settlement of some 7,600 people. "A developmentally disabled Palestinian boy, who is under the age of criminal responsibility, was briefly detained by the IDF "on suspicion that he had thrown stones," according to B'Tselem. http://ift.tt/1xfhhUF Fri, 24 Oct 2014 03:07:14 +0200 http://ift.tt/12m9OtG European economic denial has reached the point where we are straddling the abyss, facing a code red moment of meltdown. Whether by bloody-minded obstinacy or a clear incapacity to understand the mess it has overseen, the EU now reaches another of those critical junctures where simply papering over the cracks and maintaining a demented agitprop that growth is around the corner won't do. Besides, the green shoots of recovery have once again evaporated for the umpteenth time. As the world grows, Europe stagnates. The EU isn't working - as 12 percent of the continent's population know only too well (including that lost generation under 30 born near the Mediterranean). Meanwhile, former Communist-turned-totalitarian-Europhile Jose Manuel Barroso has been enjoying a typically bombastic pre-retirement tour demonstrating a majestic lack of understanding for the stagnancy which has resulted from his decade-long failure as EU president. Having spent much of the past year blithely mouthing a mantra of recovery, the outgoing commission departs the Berlaymont as even greater political failures than they were in national office before being elevated to Brussels. The demented hubris which preached recovery without coherent reworking of broken economies has been rendered mute by economic reality. Even in Brussels there may be a realization that political fudges won't do - the European empire must be restructured if it is not to face oblivion. As it is, the pathetic political posturing of national interests led by France (bankrupt) and Germany (deeply disingenuously protectionist) at all times have inexorably weakened Europe in a decade of prolonged growth in the emerging markets of the east. Thus we reach an abyss for Europe. Germany (as predicted) is a post-peak economic powerhouse. Ukraine has led the EU to self-defeating sanctions which have further trimmed the economy just as growth has proven a mirage. http://ift.tt/12m9OtG Fri, 24 Oct 2014 02:45:11 +0200 http://ift.tt/1znbqC7 The Obama administration has until early December to detail its reasons for withholding as many as 2,100 graphic photographs depicting US military torture of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, a federal judge ordered on Tuesday. By 12 December, Justice Department attorneys will have to list, photograph by photograph, the government's rationale for keeping redacted versions of the photos unseen by the public, Judge Alvin Hellerstein instructed lawyers. But any actual release of the photographs will come after Hellerstein reviews the government's reasoning and issues another ruling in the protracted transparency case. While Hellerstein left unclear how much of the Justice Department's declaration will itself be public, the government's submission is likely to be its most detailed argument for secrecy over the imagery in a case that has lasted a decade. http://ift.tt/1znbqC7 Fri, 24 Oct 2014 00:49:28 +0200 http://ift.tt/ZKAdQ6 What a roller coaster week it's been. If partial eclipses and giant sunspots aren't your thing, how about a close flyby of an Earth-approaching asteroid? 2014 SC324 was discovered on September 30 this year by the Mt. Lemmon Survey high in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson, Arizona. Based on brightness, the tumbling rock's size is estimated at around 197 feet (60-m), on the large side compared to the many small asteroids that whip harmlessly by Earth each year. http://ift.tt/ZKAdQ6 Fri, 24 Oct 2014 00:48:04 +0200 http://ift.tt/1seMt1V The oldest-known evidence of humans living at extremely high altitudes has been unearthed in the Peruvian Andes, archaeologists say. The sites - a rock shelter with traces of Ice Age campfires and rock art, and an open-air workshop with stone tools and fragments - are located nearly 14,700 feet (4,500 meters) above sea level and were occupied roughly 12,000 years ago. The discovery, which is detailed today (Oct. 23) in the journal Science, suggests ancient people in South America were living at extremely high altitudes just 2,000 years after humans first reached the continent. The findings also raise questions about how these early settlers physically adapted to sky-high living. "Either they genetically adapted really, really fast - within 2,000 years - to be able to settle this area, or genetic adaptation isn't necessary at all," said lead study author Kurt Rademaker, who was a University of Maine visiting assistant professor in anthropology when he conducted the study. [See Images of the High-Altitude Ancient Settlement] In follow-up work, the team plans to look for more evidence of occupation, such as human remains. http://ift.tt/1seMt1V Fri, 24 Oct 2014 00:39:37 +0200 http://ift.tt/1yrfugj You have heard that Sweden is hunting a "submarine" and that it is "presumed to be Russian". Here is an example Financial Times of October 21 - which incidentally also announces that the Swedish Prime Minister vows to increase defense spending. Not the slightest evidence There are only three problems with this: 1) There is not the slightest evidence of there being anything military, neither that it is a submarine nor that, whatever the object might be, it is Russian. 2) Even with CNN, BBC and AlJazeera this is nothing but speculative low-grade yellow press journalism. http://ift.tt/1yrfugj Fri, 24 Oct 2014 00:29:14 +0200 http://ift.tt/1znbqCa Microchips embedded in the arms of citizens to track their activities, the total destruction of the middle classes and a cashless economy where an authoritarian state can freeze the accounts of dissenting citizens excluding them from all economic activity..... These are all part of the cheery scenario painted by the highly respected author and IMF-insider with connections to the Pentagon, Jim Rickards in his most recent article for Agora Financial. "In the year 2024″ as the article is called, capitalism and markets will have been abolished in favor of a Marxist dystopia managed by the "New World Order." The savings and assets of the middle classes will have been annihilated. This unfolds through a series of panics and shocks to the markets and hyper-inflation. As the hyperinflation takes hold there is a mass exodus out of paper currency and into gold. The G-20 arrange for the mass confiscation of gold, to be stored in an enormous vault in the Swiss Alps, in order to force the public back onto newly created digital currency. To ensure that the public cannot protect themselves from the profligacy of governments gold is taken out of circulation forever. http://ift.tt/1znbqCa Thu, 23 Oct 2014 23:47:30 +0200 http://ift.tt/1tmTzqk America's neoconservatives, by stirring up trouble in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, are creating risks for the world's economy that are surfacing now in the turbulent stock markets, threatening another global recession, writes Robert Parry. If you're nervously watching the stock market gyrations and worrying about your declining portfolio or pension fund, part of the blame should go to America's neocons who continue to be masters of chaos, endangering the world's economy by instigating geopolitical confrontations in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Of course, there are other factors pushing Europe's economy to the brink of a triple-dip recession and threatening to stop America's fragile recovery, too. But the neocons' "regime change" strategies, which have unleashed violence and confrontations across Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran and most recently Ukraine, have added to the economic uncertainty. http://ift.tt/1tmTzqk Thu, 23 Oct 2014 23:34:55 +0200 http://ift.tt/1roBS5d Foreign tourists with any travel history are now not welcome in North Korea - concerns about Ebola made Pyongyang bar any tours from entering the country. At least this is what North Korean specialized travel agencies tell media. "We have just received official news from our partners in the DPRK that, as of tomorrow, tourists from any country, regardless of where they have recently visited, will not be permitted to enter," Gareth Johnson of the China-based Young Pioneer Tours told Reuters. North Korean state media released a statement on Thursday notifying its readers that checks on travelers were becoming more stringent. "Travelers and materials are undergoing more thorough checks and quarantine at airfields, trading ports and border railway stations than ever before," the state KCNA agency wrote. Further agencies reported similar instructions. "We have just received news from our partners in Pyongyang that the country is not accepting any international tourists from tomorrow, effectively closing its borders due to the threat of the spread of the Ebola virus," said a spokesperson for Beijing-based Koryo Tours. "It is unknown how long this closure will be in effect, and due to the very changeable nature of DPRK policy, we are still hopeful we will be able to run the three tours we have scheduled for the remainder of 2014," Nick Bonner stated. International travel to the notoriously insular North Korea is a rarity anyway. Tourist travel is only possible with a guide. This is not the first time the country has imposed entry limits over a health scare. "In 2003, the country closed its borders due to the threat of SARS, despite not a single case being reported there," said Bonner. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization announced that 9,936 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone - all of which have suffered the worst outbreaks - have contracted the disease. Some 4,877 people have died in total. http://ift.tt/1roBS5d Thu, 23 Oct 2014 22:57:15 +0200 http://ift.tt/1FKCcVN Thanks to the Federal Reserve, the middle class is slowly being suffocated by rising food prices. Every single dollar in your wallet is constantly becoming less valuable because of the inflation the Fed systematically creates. And if you try to build wealth by saving money and earning interest on it, you still lose because thanks to the Federal Reserve's near zero interest rate policies banks pay next to nothing on savings accounts. The Federal Reserve wants you to either spend your money or to put it in the giant casino that we call the stock market. But when Americans spend their paychecks they are finding that they don't stretch as far as they once did. The cost of living continues to rise at a much faster pace than wages are rising, and this is especially true when it comes to the price of food. Someone that I know wrote to me today and let me know that she had to shut down the food pantry that she had been running for the poor for so many years. It isn't that she didn't want to help the poor anymore. It was that she just couldn't deal with the rising food prices any longer. Now she is just doing the best that she can to survive herself. http://ift.tt/1FKCcVN Thu, 23 Oct 2014 22:29:09 +0200 http://ift.tt/1wgYSdk Authorities in southwestern Colombia have raised alert levels on Tuesday after a 5.6M earthquake hit the border region, raising concerns that two nearby volcanoes might erupt in a matter of days. Colombia's Geological Service have changed the alert level of two volcanoes from yellow to orange. The two volcanoes are Cerro Negro and Chiles, both active on Colombia's southern border with Ecuador. The orange alert level is defined by the Geological Service as "probable eruption in term of days to weeks." The earthquake that hit the border region caused a scare on both side of the border. Officials in the Colombian town of Cumbal, near the quake's epicenter, were quoted as saying by The Associated Press that they formed an emergency committee to survey possible damage. But so far, there were no reports of injuries in the town of 36,000 residents, the majority of them members of an indigenous tribe. "It was really strong, every house" felt it, Jose Diomedes Juezpesan, the town's top official, told AP. If the volcanoes are to erupt, it will mostly affect the state Nariño. Local state government have started to take security measures in order prevent tragedies. http://ift.tt/1wgYSdk Thu, 23 Oct 2014 22:19:06 +0200 http://ift.tt/1roiVQm Authorities in southwest Colombia ordered the evacuation of around 12,000 people living near the Chiles and Cerro Negro volcanoes on the border with Ecuador, amid fears that recent volcanic activity may result in an eruption. On Tuesday, Colombia's Geological Service have changed the alert level of two volcanoes from yellow to orange. 48 hours later, it was followed up by the National Disaster Risk Management Unit's (UNGRD) decision to evacuate more than 3,500 families belonging to indigenous reserves of Chiles , Panam and Mayasquer. According to Carlos Ivan Marquez, the director of the UNGRD, the authorities set up an incident command post in the town of Cumbal where they have delivered 3,000 tents for the people in temporary shelters. "In accord with the forecast given to us by the Geological Service, the change of alert level from yellow to orange means anticipated eruptions in the coming days or weeks," Marquez told the media. If the volcanoes are to erupt, it will mostly affect the state Nariño. Local state government have started to take security measures in order prevent tragedies. http://ift.tt/1roiVQm Thu, 23 Oct 2014 22:17:15 +0200 http://ift.tt/1wgIJoa One major volcanic eruption could make Japan "extinct," a study by experts at Kobe University warns, although the chances of that happening are relatively slim. The study, by Prof. Yoshiyuki Tatsumi and Associate Prof. Keiko Suzuki, concludes that the chance of a big eruption that would disrupt the lives of everyone in Japan are about 1% over the next 100 years. The researchers based their findings on the cycles and impacts of major eruptions in Japan on the study of the Aira Caldera near what is now the city of Kagoshima on southern Kyushu island. The caldera was created 28,000 years ago and has a diameter of 20 kilometers. If a similar eruption were to take place in the area today, within about two hours the flow of molten rock, lava and ash would cover an area in which seven million now live. A large amount of ash would be carried across the country, shutting down transportation and other key systems, disrupting the lives of nearly 120 million people, or almost everyone in Japan. "We should be aware," the researchers warn in their report to be published in November. "It wouldn't be a surprise if such gigantic eruption were to take place at any moment." http://ift.tt/1wgIJoa Thu, 23 Oct 2014 22:17:12 +0200 http://ift.tt/1roiYvt Ap­prox­i­mately 70 earth­quakes oc­curred on the Bárðar­bunga caldera rim in the last 24 hours re­ports the Ice­land Met Of­fice this morn­ing. The strongest quakes were of the mag­ni­tude of 4.8 yes­ter­day at 13:21 and at 4.6 at 01:36. Seven earth­quakes al­to­gether ex­ceeded the mag­ni­tude of 4, and 15 earth­quakes were in the mag­ni­tude range of 3-3.9. Sub­si­dence of the caldera is con­tin­u­ous. Ac­cord­ing to the Ice­land Met Of­fice, no sig­nif­i­cant changes are ob­served in the seis­mic ac­tiv­ity around the Bárðar­bunga vol­canic sys­tem. Around 30 events have been de­tected in the north­ern part of the dyke in­tru­sion, be­tween north­ern Dyn­gju­jökull and the erup­tion site in Holuhraun. The strongest ones were both of the mag­ni­tude 1.4 yes­ter­day at 10:07 and 13:33. http://ift.tt/1roiYvt Thu, 23 Oct 2014 22:17:06 +0200 http://ift.tt/1wgILwj A New York City hospital is running Ebola tests on a healthcare worker who returned to the United States from West Africa with a fever and gastrointestinal symptoms, the city's Health Department said on Thursday. Preliminary test results were expected in the next 12 hours, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said in a statement. The patient being treated at Bellevue Hospital is a healthcare worker who returned to the United States within the past 21 days from one of the three African countries facing the Ebola outbreak, it said. The Health Department said it was tracing all of the patient's contacts to identify anyone who may be at potential risk. It also said the patient had been transported by a specially trained unit wearing protective gear. http://ift.tt/1wgILwj Thu, 23 Oct 2014 22:11:44 +0200 http://ift.tt/ZKAbYp With just four days to go until Brazilians vote in a bitterly contested presidential election, an opinion poll published Wednesday suggests that the challenger, Aécio Neves, remains the underdog but still has a fighting chance of defeating President Dilma Rousseff. If he is going to unseat Brazil's first female president, however, Mr. Neves will have to do so without the endorsement of the American actress Lindsay Lohan. A spokeswoman for the actress clarified on Wednesday that "a tweet declaring Ms. Lohan's support for a Brazilian presidential candidate," which had attracted wide attention in Brazil one day earlier, was posted on her Twitter account in error. "While Ms. Lohan doesn't support any of the candidates," her publicist, Leslie Sloane, wrote in an email, "she encourages Brazilians to vote on Oct. 26." http://ift.tt/ZKAbYp Thu, 23 Oct 2014 21:26:00 +0200 http://ift.tt/1ro2zqF New data reveals there has been a rise of almost 300 per cent rise in the number of dogs attacks in Stevenage since January. A total of 31 offences were reported to police in the last 10 months, compared with just 11 in the equivalent period last year. Now Herts police have launched Is You Dog Fully Under Control? - a campaign that aims to educate people about responsible dog ownership along with the recent changes in the law. The Stevenage Safer Neighbourhood team were in the town centre on Saturday to spread the word. Officers, Stevenage Borough Council staff and representatives of dog charities were on hand to talk about the changes in the law and give advice on training, identification and other issues. Sgt Manjit Khela from the team said: "A dog can be dangerously out of control even if it is on a lead. "The correct level of control needs to be exerted to ensure it does not go on to injure another dog or person. "If a dog bites a person, it will be seen as being dangerously out of control - but even if the dog does not bite, but gives the person grounds to feel that the dog may injure them, the law still applies." http://ift.tt/1ro2zqF Thu, 23 Oct 2014 21:24:54 +0200 http://ift.tt/1wgwdoT Supplements of the fatty acids omega 3 and 6 can help children and adolescents who have a certain kind of ADHD. These are the findings of a dissertation at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, which also indicates that a special cognitive training program can improve problem behavior in children with ADHD. Between three to six percent of all school age children are estimated to have ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). ADHD is a disorder that entails a difficulty controlling impulses and temper, sitting still, waiting, or being attentive for more than short periods at a time. There are various kinds of ADHD where disturbances in attention, hyperactivity and impulsivity have varying degrees of prominence. ADHD is often treated with stimulant medications, which are effective for most, but do not work for everyone. Relevant improvement In this study, 75 children and adolescents with ADHD were given either the fatty acids omega 3 and 6 or a placebo over three months, and then they were all given omega 3/6 over three months. The study was conducted double-blind, which means that neither the researchers nor the participants were allowed to know whether they received the active capsules until afterwards. "For the group as a whole, we did not see any major improvement, but in 35 percent of the children and adolescents who have the inattentive subtype of ADHD called ADD, the symptoms improved so much that we can talk about a clinically relevant improvement," says Mats Johnson, doctoral student at the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg. http://ift.tt/1wgwdoT Thu, 23 Oct 2014 21:22:02 +0200 http://ift.tt/1ro2zaf As warned, after multiple staged incidents used to ratchet up fear and paranoia in the build-up to US and its allies' military intervention in Syria and Iraq, at least two live attacks have now been carried out in Canada - precisely as they were predicted. The first attack involved a deadly hit-and-run that left one Canadian soldier dead. AP would report in its article, "Terrorist ideology blamed in Canada car attack," that: A young convert to Islam who killed a Canadian soldier in a hit-and-run had been on the radar of federal investigators, who feared he had jihadist ambitions and seized his passport when he tried to travel to Turkey, authorities said Tuesday. The second, most recent attack, involved a shooting in Ottawa injuring several and killing another Canadian soldier. RT in its article, "Ottawa gunman 'identified' as recent Muslim convert, high-risk traveler," would report that: While the name of the Ottawa gunman is yet to be announced, a number of officials told numerous media that the shooter is believed to be Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a recent Muslim convert, allegedly designated as a high-risk traveler. Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was born in Quebec as Michael Joseph Hall north of Montreal, two US officials told Reuters, claiming that American law enforcement agencies have been advised that the attacker recently converted to Islam. AP sources also identified the man to be Zehaf-Bibeau. A Twitter account associated with Islamic State militants tweeted a photo they identified as the Ottawa shooter. The Globe and Mail reports that the shooter was designated a "high-risk traveler" by the Canadian authorities with his passport seized. Clearly, both suspects were under the watch of not only Canadian authorities, but also US investigators, before the attacks. http://ift.tt/1ro2zaf Thu, 23 Oct 2014 21:11:52 +0200 http://ift.tt/1ro2Biw John Boekamp, Ph.D., clinical director of the Pediatric Partial Hospital Program (PPHP) at Bradley Hospital recently led a study that found sleep difficulties -- particularly problems with falling asleep -- were very common among toddlers and preschool-aged children who were receiving clinical treatment for a wide range of psychiatric disorders. The study, titled "Sleep Onset and Night Waking Insomnias in Preschoolers with Psychiatric Disorders," is now published online in the journal Child Psychiatry & Human Development. "The most common sleep difficulties reported nationally for toddlers and preschoolers are problems of going to bed, falling asleep and frequent night awakenings -- collectively, these problems are referred to as behavioral insomnias of childhood," said Boekamp. "Sleep problems in young children frequently co-occur with other behavioral problems, with evidence that inadequate sleep is associated with daytime sleepiness, less optimal preschool adjustment, and problems of irritability, hyperactivity and attention." Boekamp's team was interested in learning more about sleep and sleep problems in young children with behavior problems, as early sleep problems may be both a cause and consequence of children's difficulties with behavioral and emotional self-regulation. "Essentially, these young children might be caught in a cycle, with sleep disruption affecting their psychiatric symptoms and psychiatric symptoms affecting their sleep-wake organization," said Boekamp. http://ift.tt/1ro2Biw Thu, 23 Oct 2014 21:07:22 +0200 http://ift.tt/1xe7Epc It is a place unlike any other and is, arguably, one of the greatest art galleries anywhere in the world. Yet you won't find masterpieces in the traditional sense here, with no Rembrandts, Monets, or Da Vinci's anywhere in sight. Instead, this is the Russian Altai mountain range, where art exists in its most natural sense, carved into the rocks by ancient civilisations 5,000 years ago. Located in Siberia, at its borders with China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, it is home to literally thousands of petroglyphs and drawings that continue to fascinate archaeologists today. Experts have been studying the area for more than a century, with each expedition deep into the heart of the valleys and gorges uncovering more fingerprints of the past. http://ift.tt/1xe7Epc Thu, 23 Oct 2014 20:40:20 +0200 http://ift.tt/1rnLv4c David Bronner, CEO of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, presides over a company with famously wacky product labels. Sample sentence, from the 18-in-1 Hemp PEPPERMINT soap bottle: "Each swallow works hard to be perfect pilot-provider-teacher-lover-mate, no half-true hate!" But Bronner himself, grandson of the founder (the one with the elaborate prose style), has emerged as a serious, though fun-loving, activist, particularly around pesticides and genetically modified crops, as Josh Harkinson's recent Mother Jones profile shows. But apparently, Bronner's writing on GMOs is too hot for the advertising pages of the English-speaking world's two most renowned science journals, Science and Nature -even though a slew of magazines, including Scientific American, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Nation, Harvard, and, yes, Mother Jones, accepted the Bronner ad. It consists of a short essay, known in publishing as an advertorial, that's nothing like the wild-eyed rants on his company's soap bottles. Bronner's ad (PDF) focuses on how GMO crops have led to a net increase in pesticide use in the United States, citing an analysis by Ramon Seidler, a retired senior staff scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency. Bronner wrote his essay in response to Michael Specter's recent New Yorker takedown of anti-GMO crusader Vandana Shiva. He first published his critique on Huffington Post, and then decided to publish it as an ad in a variety of high-profile magazines, because he felt that The New Yorker is highly influential among liberal elites, and he wanted to get his dissenting view out, he told me. Comment: Gunning for Vandana Shiva: The New Yorker, GMOs and chemical farming http://ift.tt/1rnLv4c Thu, 23 Oct 2014 20:17:38 +0200 http://ift.tt/1rnLv4b China's largest freshwater lake, Poyang, has shrunk by one third in the past three days due to reduced water supply from the Yangtze River and little rainfall. At 8 a.m. Wednesday, the lake's surface area was 1,490 sq km, a reduction of 679 sq km compared with 2,169 sq km on Monday, said the Jiangxi Provincial Hydrological Bureau. The water level at Xingzi hydrological station was 11.99 meters at 4 p.m. Wednesday, 2.13 meters lower than the levels in normal years. The water level is falling by 30 cm per day. http://ift.tt/1rnLv4b Thu, 23 Oct 2014 20:04:14 +0200 http://ift.tt/1znbrpC Polynesians from Easter Island and natives of South America met and mingled long before Europeans voyaged the Pacific, according to a new genetic study of living Easter Islanders. In this week's issue of Current Biology, researchers argue that the genes point to contact between Native Americans and Easter Islanders before 1500 C.E., 3 centuries after Polynesians settled the island also known as Rapa Nui, famous for its massive stone statues. Although circumstantial evidence had hinted at such contact, this is the first direct human genetic evidence for it. In the genomes of 27 living Rapa Nui islanders, the team found dashes of European and Native American genetic patterns. The European genetic material made up 16% of the genomes; it was relatively intact and was unevenly spread among the Rapa Nui population, suggesting that genetic recombination, which breaks up segments of DNA, has not been at work for long. Europeans may have introduced their genes in the 19th century, when they settled on the island. Native American DNA accounted for about 8% of the genomes. Islanders enslaved by Europeans in the 19th century and sent to work in South America could have carried some Native American genes back home, but this genetic legacy appeared much older. The segments were more broken and widely scattered, suggesting a much earlier encounter - between 1300 C.E. and 1500 C.E. http://ift.tt/1znbrpC Thu, 23 Oct 2014 19:56:23 +0200 http://ift.tt/ZKAe6l Nestled in the mountains of California, is the infamous tourist destination of Bodie. Once a thriving gold mining town, it is now an empty shell of its former self. As soon as the gold depleted in the early 20th century, the town faced decades of decline that it would never recover from. By the early 1960′s, the last handful of residents left the town. They leaving behind an eerie scene, filled with crumbling homes and businesses amidst a desolate landscape. However, gold isn't essential to living. If the Western drought continues on its current course, then we have dozens of ghost towns to look forward to in the near future. So far the drought in California has been relentless. Where I live in the Bay Area, we've had our first rain of the year today, if you could call it that. More like a fine mist. Normally we've gotten at least one rainy day by this time of year, but it's looking like this winter is going to be just as bad as last year. http://ift.tt/ZKAe6l Thu, 23 Oct 2014 19:54:55 +0200 http://ift.tt/1znbrpF Tucson - Riot police brutally handled a crowd following a NCAA basketball game, leading to multiple state-sanctioned assaults caught on video. On March 29th, 2014, Tucson officers held a heavy presence on University Boulevard, which was the site of some unruliness amongst the young people gathered in the street. One officer - clad in a gas mask and riot gear - was caught on film on that evening performing multiple acts of unprovoked aggression on students in the area. It was Tucson PD Sergeant Joel Mann, an 18-year-veteran of the force. Sgt. Mann shoved a female pedestrian so hard that she flew into a metal bench on the sidewalk. The woman, Christina Gardilcic, had been doing nothing other than walking along the sidewalk toward a group of students congregating up ahead. "We were just walking behind on the sidewalk and next thing I know I was just on a bench," Ms. Gardilcic told ABC News. "My feet were... up in the air and I just got hit. It really happened very fast. I got up fast 'cause I was kind of in shock." "What happened to me, I consider excessive force," Gardilcic added in the ABC interview. "I had no idea I was doing anything wrong. If I was, and he physically shoved me and I fell, I could have been really hurt." View a bystander's recording of Sgt. Mann's the assault on Christina Gardilcic below. A helmet-cam video shot from Mann's perspective is also available. http://ift.tt/1znbrpF Thu, 23 Oct 2014 19:48:35 +0200 http://ift.tt/ZKAbYs The invisible force that pulls in the Millennium Falcon spacecraft to the Death Star in Star Wars movies is still far from becoming a reality, but physicists have developed a miniature version of sorts: a tractor beam that can reel in tiny particles. The laser-based retractor beam pulled the particles a distance of about 8 inches (20 centimeters), which is 100 times farther than any previous experiments with tractor beams. "Because lasers retain their beam quality for such long distances, this could work over meters," study researcher Vladlen Shvedov, research fellow at the Australian National University, said in a statement. "Our lab just was not big enough to show it." During the experiment, the researchers used a laser that projected a doughnut-shaped beam of light with a hot outer ring and cool center. They used the light beam to suck in tiny glass spheres, each of which measured about 0.2 millimeters (0.008 inches) wide. Not only did the researchers move the glass spheres farther than had been demonstrated in previous experiments, but they used a different technique altogether. Other retractor beams rely on the momentum of light particles in the laser beam to reel in mass. In those experiments, the momentum from the light particles shooting out of the laser is transferred to the target that the laser is hauling in. However, that technique works well only in a vacuum that is shielded from other free-floating particles that can interfere with the momentum transfer. http://ift.tt/ZKAbYs Thu, 23 Oct 2014 19:36:57 +0200 http://ift.tt/1oygkI2 A classified US Senate probe into the CIA's post-9/11 detention and interrogation program does not evaluate the role of former President George W. Bush or top administration officials in approving abuses including torture, according to a new report. The Senate Intelligence Committee's $40 million investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency's detention and interrogation program - active from September 11, 2001 to 2006 - has found that the spy agency purposely deceived the US Justice Department to attain legal justification for the use of torture techniques, among other findings that resulted in a 6,000-page report, completed from March 2009 to December 2012. Of that investigative report, the public will only see a 500-page, partially-redacted executive summary that is in the process of declassification. What the report does not include, according to sources for McClatchy news service, is any accounting of responsibility that top members of the Bush administration have for the shadowy capture-and-detain regime at Guantanamo Bay and secret "black site" prisons, often fueled by suspect bounties, or for crafting the legal framework that allowed the CIA to interrogate detainees with waterboarding and other methods deemed to be torturous by international standards. http://ift.tt/1oygkI2 Thu, 23 Oct 2014 19:19:27 +0200 http://ift.tt/1oygizM The only thing spreading faster than the global pandemic outbreak right now is the mental illness it seems to invoke across the establishment media. The principle of isolation, a fundamental tool for halting any outbreak, is now being widely and repeatedly described in the leftist media as "racist." (See video below.) What we are being told by the media now is essentially that people with dark skin like Thomas Duncan should never be kept in medical isolation because that would be racist. Similarly, flights from countries with dark-skinned people can never be restricted because that, too, would be "racist." http://ift.tt/1oygizM Thu, 23 Oct 2014 19:16:01 +0200 http://ift.tt/1oygkHS Officials with a Saskatchewan wildlife center said workers and residents of a home invaded by snakes have captured 102 snakes in the house. Megan Lawrence, director of rehabilitation at the Salthaven West Wildlife Rehabilitation, said the family first discovered garter snakes in the basement of their home near Regina. "We got a call from a family that found some garter snakes in their basement, and as they investigated further they found a lot more. And then they started finding them in other areas of the house, like kitchens and bedrooms. So they decided then it wasn't a good idea to have them there anymore," Lawrence told CBC News. http://ift.tt/1oygkHS Thu, 23 Oct 2014 19:08:02 +0200 http://ift.tt/1oygkrx Home Secretary Theresa May has ordered an inquiry into police use of Taser stun guns, after it emerge


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Putin's power play: Why Russia's patience will pay off in the Ukraine crisis

Putin

© The Kremlin



As winter approaches, Putin's hand is even stronger, as the crisis begins to transform from a military confrontation into a confrontation between Ukraine and Europe over the supply of Russian natural gas


Reports out of Milan regarding last Friday's much anticipated meeting between Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko indicate that little progress has been made toward resolving the nearly yearlong Ukraine crisis. This, given the broader political currents at play in Europe, is unsurprising.


To begin with, Mr. Poroshenko has, for all intents and purposes, lost the military battle over the Donbas in resounding fashion. While his bloc leads in the polls ahead of next Sunday's parliamentary election, Poroshenko faces a number of other challenges, not least of which is a collapsing economy (some estimates have the Ukrainian economy shrinking by 10 percent this year) and a burgeoning populist backlash over the government's handling of the crisis.


So what we saw play out in Milan is more or less a repeat of the last Putin/Poroshenko meeting that took place in Minsk on August 26, because the same logic applies. Mr. Putin, as I wrote then, is always going to be the party - regardless of whether he is facing sanctions or a chorus of international condemnation - who will be playing the stronger hand in negotiations with Ukraine.


Yet as we approach November, his hand is even stronger, as the crisis begins to transform from a military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine into a confrontation between Ukraine and Europe over the supply of Russian natural gas. Ukraine serves as the transit point for 50 percent of EU-bound Russian LNG, and Ukraine's siphoning off of LNG bound for southeastern Europe, which led to Russia cutting off the supply in January 2006 and January 2009, is still fresh in the minds of European leaders.


The Rada's recent passage of a lustration bill, widely publicized acts of violence against sitting MPs through "trash bucket challenges," a popular revival of Nazi-era symbols and the incorporation of far-right elements into Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk's "People's Front" do not exactly augur well for the chances for a tranquil political environment in either Ukraine or in Eastern Europe, where the memory of Ukrainian collaboration against the Poles and the region's Jews is fresher there than it is here in the United States.


There are already signs of tension between Ukraine and what had been its most enthusiastic supporter in Europe - Poland. Because of the war in the east, Ukraine, while normally a coal exporter, will by some estimates now need to import between 3-4 million tons of coal as winter approaches. In spite of the war, Ukraine is continuing to import large amounts of Russian coal while Kiev only evinces an interest in Polish coal, according to Poland's economic minister, when "it is free."


Meanwhile a dispute over Kiev's ban, ostensibly over health concerns, of Polish meat continues to stoke tension between the two countries.


The bilateral relationship also has not been helped by popular demonstrations in Kiev calling for the rehabilitation of the wartime Ukrainian Partisan Army, which took part in the wholesale massacres of many thousands of Poles. The fact that wartime figures like Stepan Bandera elicit popular sympathy in western Ukraine is something that most American pundits studiously avoid mentioning. Here it might be worth recalling a passage from the historian Halik Kochanski's history of the Poles in the Second World War:



The Germans also exploited the disloyalty of the Ukrainians towards the Poles by recruiting large numbers into their auxiliary units and into the Roland and Nachtigel battalions. They became the Germans' most willing assistants and received German uniforms, arms and training before undertaking their main task: the destruction of the Jews...



Also, little noted in the American press is what effect the recent changes in personnel in the Polish prime and foreign ministers' offices may have on the regional crisis.

Last month, Prime Minister Donald Tusk took the top job in the European Union. He was replaced by Ewa Kopacz, who wasted little time in distancing herself from the activist (and frankly, Russophobic) foreign policy of Tusk's foreign minister, Radek Sikorski. No doubt Sikorski's views will continue to reach a wide audience here in Washington via his wife's increasingly imaginative musings in .


A final development that may favor Mr. Putin is the recent change in NATO's political leadership.


The preening former Danish prime minister and Iraq War - enthusiast Anders Fogh Rasmussen has been succeeded by former Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg. In contrast to Rasmussen (that rarest of species: a Euro-Neocon), the new secretary general has a reputation as a consensus-maker and is reported to be on good terms with Putin who has said of Stoltenberg, "We have very good relations, including personal relations."


Given all of this, it seems Mr. Putin has little in the way of motive in trying to help resolve the crisis. We should not expect any serious push to resolve the almost yearlong Ukraine crisis until the end of what may prove to be a very cold winter in Eastern Europe,by which time Europe's political balance may have tilted even further in Mr. Putin's direction.


More unrest: Protesters torch city hall, demand justice for missing Mexican students


© Encarnacion Pindado for Fusion

Parents of the 43 missing students held a candlelight vigil in Mexico City on Wednesday night.



Tens of thousands march in Mexico for missing students as Iguala mayor is accused of being 'mastermind' behind disappearances

Tens of thousands marched in Mexico City and Iguala, Mexico on Wednesday to protest the disappearance of 43 student-teachers who went missing on September 26.


Reflecting growing outrage over the failure of Mexican authorities to resolve the case, a group of masked protesters separated from the peaceful demonstration of several thousand in Iguala, broke into the city hall and smashed computers and windows before setting fire to the building.


In Mexico City, students from 29 universities joined 50,000 marchers under the banner: "Alive they took them, alive we want them back!" One man held a sign that read: "Mexico has turned into an immense unmarked grave." A candlelight vigil in the Zócalo, the historic central square, followed the demonstration.


Also Wednesday, Mexico's attorney general said Iguala's mayor and his wife were "probable masterminds" behind the Ayotzinapa Normal School students' attack and abduction. Six people were also killed on the day the students disappeared.


At a press conference in Mexico City, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam said his office has issued warrants for the arrest of Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca, his wife Maria de los Angeles Pineda Villa, and police chief Felipe Flores Velazquez. All three have been on the run since the day after the incident and are considered fugitives.


Murillo accused Abarca of ordering police to confront the students to prevent them from disrupting a public speech by his wife. He said that on the night of September 26, as the left-wing students were heading toward Iguala in several buses to protest against discriminatory hiring practices and to collect funds for their college, the order to stop them came over the local police radios, given by "A-5," the code name for Iguala's mayor.


Local police allegedly intercepted the students' buses and started shooting, killing six people and rounding up the 43 students. According to the attorney general, the students were transported to the outskirts of Iguala. Those orders, he said, came from the head of the drug gang Guerreros Unidos, whom federal authorities captured last week.


Murillo named the mayor's wife as the "principal operator" of the Guerreros Unidos, and said that she, together with her husband, ran the group's illegal activities right out of Iguala's city hall.


Watch Reuters video


Attack on First Amendement Rights: 'Mumia Bill' in Pennsylvania lets prisoners be sued over speech


Prisoners serving time in the state of Pennsylvania can now be sued for speaking up from behind bars after Governor Tom Corbett signed into law this week the Revictimization Relief Act that legislatures rushed to approve only days earlier.

The bill, signed on Tuesday by Corbett, a Republican, allows victims of "" to sue the perpetrator if that offender "."


State Rep. Mike Vereb, a Republican and a co-author of the act, announced earlier this month that he'd be rallying lawmakers to support the bill after former death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal was allowed to record a commencement speech that was played for graduates of Goddard College during an October 5 ceremony.


Abu-Jamal, 60, is currently serving a life sentence at a prison facility in Frackville, PA for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia cop, Officer Daniel Fulkner, but he has maintained his innocence throughout his incarceration, including three decades spent awaiting execution before prosecutors agreed in 2011 to drop the death penalty. Prior to the start of his prison sentence, Abu-Jamal was considered a renowned activist and journalist, and has since published several books and thousands of essays from behind bars.



group of 21 graduating students from Goddard, Abu-Jamal's alma matter, were told in the tape-recorded commencement speech.



Vereb sent a letter to his colleagues in the Pennsylvania House three days before that address was given, writing in it that he was "

The Pennsylvania legislature unanimously approved Vereb's bill days after the address was given, and Gov. Corbett signed the act on Tuesday, 11 days after the Goddard speech, from a makeshift stage erected in Philadelphia only a few feet from the location where Faulkner was gunned down during a traffic stop 33 years ago. Nevertheless, the reported that Corbett said in a statement that the law "," but rather "."


Corbett said at the signing, according to a CBS News affiliate.


the quoted Corbett as saying as protesters jeered nearby.



Free speech advocates see no issue with Abu-Jamal's communique from confinement, though, and say that the law signed this week is a serious blow to First Amendment protections.

Reggie Shuford, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Pennsylvania office, said in a statement offered to Reuters. "


Samantha Kolber, a spokesperson for Goddard, told the Patriot-News that the school was "" by Corbett's signing and said Vereb's bill"."


Speaking to the , protester Johanna Fernandez said during Corbett's public signing this week that the governor's decision to speedily make Vereb's bill a law was a "" from his administration only a month before Election Day since polls suggest that Corbett may lose the governor's seat. "," Fernandez said. "."


On Monday, Abu-Jamal himself weighed in on the debate and the politics surrounding Corbett's decision to speedily sign the bill during an interview with Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio Project.


"," Abu-Jamal said this week. "."


According to the activist-turned-inmate, he gave his address to Goddard after students there wrote and requested he speak. Marc Lamont Hill, a professor at Morehouse College, tweeted Wednesday that "."


Police in NYC attacked by hatchet-wielding man


© Twitter/@MicahGrimes



A hatchet-wielding man attacked a group of patrol officers in a busy commercial district in Queens on Thursday, injuring two before the other officers shot and killed him, New York City police said. A bystander was wounded in the gunfire.

At a news conference at a hospital where one officer was being treated for a serious head wound, Police Commissioner William Bratton said that investigators were still trying to confirm the identity of the assailant and determine a motive.


Asked if the attack could be related to terrorism, Bratton didn't rule it out. He cited the fatal shooting of a solider in Canada earlier this week - what officials there have called a terror attack - as reason for concern.


"This early on, we really cannot say yes or no to that question," Bratton said.


The attack occurred in the commercial district in Queens at about 2 p.m., while four rookie New York Police Department officers on foot patrol were posing for a photo, police said. Without a word, the man charged the officers and began swinging the hatchet, first hitting one in the arm and another in the back of the head, they said.


After the second officer fell to the ground, the two uninjured officers fired several rounds. The bullets killed the assailant and wounded the bystander, police said.


The officer was in critical but stable condition and was expected to undergo surgery. The woman who was struck by a stray bullet also was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the back.


Doctor in NYC tests positive for Ebola


© REUTERS/BRENDAN MCDERMID

Members of the New York City Department of Health exit the building of a Health Care worker who is suspected to have Ebola in in the Harlem section of New York, October 23, 2014



A physician with Doctors Without Borders who returned to New York City from West Africa has tested positive for Ebola, the New York Times said on Thursday.

Dr. Craig Spencer was working for the humanitarian organization in Guinea, one of three West African nations hardest hit by Ebola.


Spencer, 33, developed a fever and gastrointestinal symptoms and notified Doctors Without Borders on Thursday morning, the organization said in a statement.


Spencer was transported to Bellevue Hospital from his Manhattan apartment by a specially trained team wearing protective gear, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said in a statement.


He tested positive for Ebola, the said, making him the city's first diagnosed case. The said a further test will be conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to confirm the initial test.


Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo planned a news conference at the hospital for 9 p.m. ET (0100 GMT). A spokeswoman for the mayor said she could not confirm or deny the report and declined to comment ahead of the news conference.


Americans' fears about Ebola, which has killed nearly 4,900 people, largely in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, have mounted since the first person diagnosed with it in the United States, a Liberian man who had flown to Texas, was hospitalized in Dallas last month.


The man, Thomas Eric Duncan, died on Oct. 8, and two nurses who treated him became infected with the virus. A task force has been set up following missteps in handling the case.


Spencer's Facebook page, which included a photo of him clad in protective gear, said he went to Guinea around Sept. 18 and then flew to Brussels on Oct. 16.


He has specialized in international emergency medicine at Columbia University-New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City since 2011, according to his profile on the LinkedIn career website.


Columbia in a statement said he has not been to work nor seen any patients since his return.


The health department said earlier in the day that it was tracing all of the patient's contacts to identify anyone who may be at potential risk.


Spencer's Facebook page, which included a photo of him clad in protective gear, said he went to Guinea around Sept. 18 and then flew to Brussels on Oct. 16.


He has specialized in international emergency medicine at Columbia University-New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City since 2011, according to his profile on the LinkedIn career website.


Columbia in a statement said he has not been to work nor seen any patients since his return.


Before Spencer was admitted to Bellevue, the staff spent about three hours shutting off certain areas to isolate the seventh-floor ward where he would be kept, one nurse aide said.


Spencer's apartment in Manhattan's Harlem neighborhood was sealed off on Thursday but the rest of the six-story brick building remained open to residents, health officials said.


The virus is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids from an infected person and is not airborne.


The United States this week began requiring travelers coming from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea to enter through one of five airports conducting increased screening for the virus. It also is directing those travelers to check in with health officials every day and report their temperatures and any Ebola symptoms for 21 days.


Coping with voices in the schizophrenic brain

stressed woman

"I don't believe in anything. That's my cardinal rule. I do it for my mental health. If I believe in God, then I start talking to God and God starts talking to me. As soon as I start believing in something, then it talks to me. So, I don't believe in anything."

Sara, whose name we changed to protect her identity, was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 19 during her senior year at New York University. She had not experienced any trauma as a child - no abuse, no bouts of depression, nothing that would raise any red flags. She led a more or less happy life. But in high school she experimented with drugs, and upon travelling abroad around the same time, she experienced intense culture shock.


This series of events may have been Sara's personalized recipe for mental illness, cooked up with all the flavors of her unique position in life, her temperament, and her family's history. Her mind became a prison; she felt as though people were constantly laughing at her. She could no longer distinguish fantasy from reality. She assumed she wouldn't go back to school.


"I thought that my life was over, that I would never be able to do anything," she says. "Because that's what the doctors told me."


Then she began to hear voices.


The Schizophrenic Brain


Schizophrenia is a disease that afflicts almost all walks of life. Because it can be so debilitating, scientists have been feverishly searching for its genetic basis. In July, researchers affiliated with the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium compared the genomes of nearly 37,000 people with schizophrenia to the genomes of more than 113,000 people without the disease. In the end, they identified 108 locations where the DNA sequence in schizophrenic people tends to differ. The finding was a major advance in the field of psychiatric genomics, one that could ultimately help scientists understand who is susceptible and why.


Still, the biological markers aren't always clear - often, a patient's genes for schizophrenia can lay dormant until certain circumstances trigger their expression, making a diagnosis based on DNA alone less than clear-cut. And with no blood test or brain scan available to detect schizophrenia's symptoms elsewhere in the body, diagnosis is based almost entirely on what the patient reports.


Treatment of mental illness is nested in confusion, too. Many therapists approach their practice from a different medical perspective than a cognitive psychologist or a geneticist. And while a geneticist might have access to the most current research, she isn't going to have direct daily contact with a patient's behavioral nuances like a psychiatrist. What's going on in the lab, in other words, is often divorced from what's being implemented "on the couch."


But it doesn't have to be that way.


Some scientists are arguing that our new understanding of a particular network in the brain is allowing neuroscientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists - even artists and writers - to understand each other in ways that wouldn't have made sense ten years ago. Called the default mode network, or DMN, it's a set of brain regions that are typically suppressed when a person is engaged in an external task (playing a sport, working on a budget), but activated during a so-called "resting state" (sitting quietly, day-dreaming).


"It's an extremely important platform for any kind of thought that is disengaged from the 'here-and-now,' " says Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern California's Brain and Creativity Institute. That includes processing other people's stories, reflecting on our own lives, planning for the future, or making important decisions. Immordino-Yang says the default mode network is "metabolically expensive." In other words, when your head is lost in the clouds, your brain is hard at work.


Though not the only "resting state" network that's active when we're staring off into space, the DMN is unusual in that it is reliable and identifiable, making it easy for scientists to study. Like a web of taut ropes overlaying and intersecting one another, the regions of the DMN - which include the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate, both of which are involved in self-awareness, self-reflection, and so on - light up in concert, despite any distance separating them.


When neurologist Marcus Raichle and his colleagues discovered the DMN in 2001, it took the scientific community by surprise. How could rest and self-reflection excite the same brain regions in us all? Why are those regions so intimately correlated? Wouldn't a brain scan vary more from person to person depending on the content of an individual's thoughts? It turned out that the DMN has nothing to do with content and everything to do with context. This network is functioning all the time - focusing on a task merely tempers and subdues it.


"This is first time we've found a neural system that actually reveals your inner self," says Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, a research scientist at MIT. In 2009, she and her colleagues found that in schizophrenic people, the DMN operates on overdrive. When clinically diagnosed patients enter an fMRI scanner and are asked to perform various tasks, the dial on their DMN doesn't turn down like it should. And when the patients are at rest, their DMN is hyper-connected, buzzing with surplus energy. What's more, they lack the ability to toggle out of the DMN, this highly self-referential state of being. "They're actually stuck in their default mode network," Whitfield-Gabrieli says.


So how does a schizophrenic person get unstuck? That's a question hundreds of experts from diverse backgrounds are trying to answer.


Coping with Voices


One lens through which experts are studying schizophrenia is anthropology. If the default mode network is related to identity and self-reflection - and if schizophrenia, in turn, is associated with the default mode network - then considering culture may help us understand how psychosis manifests itself globally. After all, how you experience your inner world depends partly on where you live and how you've grown up. The same is true of mental illness. "When immigrant groups move to a new cultural group, they take on the mental illness liabilities of the culture where they are," Immordino-Yang says. Because 60 to 80% of people diagnosed with schizophrenia hear voices, a good indicator of how a given culture views the disease might be how its people cope with its most well known but most misunderstood facets: auditory verbal hallucinations.


"Americans hate their voices. Their voices mean schizophrenia to them," says Tanya Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford University. By contrast, people in India and Africa don't typically label their illnesses or their voices, she revealed in a study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry. "It's not that they don't recognize that they're struggling," she says. "But they talk about their experience as having much more of a natural role." For example, they may think of their auditory hallucinations as benevolent or spiritual - like a friend or even the voice of God.


People not diagnosed with a mental illness, too, hear voices. In some cases, what they experience may be something that would be classified as a hallucination if reported by a clinically psychotic person. "If you ask someone, 'have you ever heard a voice when you're alone?' the rate is somewhere between 15 to 80% depending on how you ask the question," Luhrmann says. If you couple it with an example of what might be considered an auditory verbal hallucination, the percentage of people who say "yes" goes up.


Testimonies from people who experience varying kinds of auditory hallucinations support the idea that voice-hearing is complex and culturally-dependent. Their range of experiences is vast. Some say they hear audible, crystalline voices that emanate from inside their heads. Others report cacophonous screeches and bangs coming from outside their bodies. Still others sense murmurs and whispers that crawl over from the next room. Finally, some people describe a phenomenon similar to what cognitive psychologists call "inner speech," the wordless soup of dialogue that you "hear" when deep in thought. For some, inner speech is acoustically more intense than it is for others. For example, they might say their mental landscape is made up of "loud thoughts" or "soundless voices."


For Sara, the voices she heard began as disembodied, made-up personalities. Then, after about a year of taking a handful of different medications to varying degrees of success, her voices became solely associated with real people and their private thoughts. Sara is now 33 - and though she's been well enough to go without medication for 11 years, she still hears this latter type of voice.


"If I hear somebody psychically communicating with me - which I don't believe in; I'm a complete atheist - then the sound will come from above their head or behind their hair...even from inside their stomach. It's somewhere besides their actual mouth," she says. "It's not as loud as their real voice. It's softer, but I don't think the tone and quality of the voice is compromised."


The reason why Sara can talk about her voices so intelligently is because she's cultivated a relationship with them, in a sense. Though she tries not to engage too much with them, she's learned to understand her voices and even use them to her advantage. If she's bored, they're sometimes entertaining. Occasionally she even asks them questions.


"Sometimes I'm worried about what people think of me," she says. "And so I ask them [what they think of me] in the air above their head, and I hear their voice say it."


Sara enjoys and even values some of her auditory hallucinations now, which is atypical of most American psychotic and post-psychotic patients. But that's not the case everywhere. A simple internet search in her early 20s led Sara to Intervoice, a network established in the U.K. and now widely recognized in 29 (mostly European) countries. The organization's central tenet is that hearing voices is a meaningful human experience and not necessarily a sign of mental illness. Members set up support groups where people can meet and talk about their experiences without fear of stigma.


Still, Intervoice has not caught on in the U.S. like it has in the U.K. and elsewhere. "There are real differences in the way Americans and Europeans think about voices," Luhrmann says. In Europe, people are generally more comfortable with the ambiguity between psychosis and religion, and there's more interest in applying humanities research to medicine.


For Sara, the idea that people could handle and live with their voices made the difference. "I decided I was going to be one of those people," she says. "Just a small glimmer of hope was all I needed."


Angela Woods, a medical humanities researcher at Durham University in the U.K., is leading a team of experts in a project called "Hearing the Voice," which works closely with the broader Intervoice network. It aims to dispel some of the myths about voice-hearing and to see how cognitive neuroscientists can work with writers, artists, clinicians, theologians, and even philosophers to grasp the full spectrum of schizophrenia itself.


"We wanted to call for a more nuanced, richer account of what it is like to hear voices," Woods says. An initial step in their research involved sending surveys to 158 people from around the world in an attempt to better understand what the experience is like. The team has hosted a number of different events to raise public awareness of schizophrenia and its many shades, including a "VoiceWalk" in a U.K. cemetery to bring people's voice-hearing stories to the fore and an event at the Durham Book Festival to promote a better understanding of how writers cope with disparate inner voices - their characters, their muse, their narrators, and so on.


Another way people can learn to cope with their voices is by bringing them into the lab. Whitfield-Gabrieli, in collaboration with Margaret Niznikiewicz of Harvard University, is training patients to regulate their auditory hallucinations by consciously controlling activation in their auditory cortex. Participants attempt to push their cortex activation levels up and down, without receiving any auditory stimuli other than the background noise of the fMRI scanner. Meanwhile, they receive visual feedback from the fMRI on their progress. Whitfield-Gabrieli says the hope is that patients can learn to mitigate their voices by focusing on what's going on in their own brain.


"Teaching people with psychosis to use their imagination to handle their voices is a promising tool," Luhrmann says. As a society, we can encourage positive relationships with auditory hallucinations by helping patients - schizophrenic or not - better understand them. That means allowing people to tag their voices as "me" or "not me," give the voices names, recognize what they're saying and why, and discover what personal significance, if any, a particular voice might have.


Whatever the auditory input may be, Luhrmann says people can have positive or negative experiences depending on the attitude they adopt. "People attend to different pieces of that good-bad spectrum depending on the way their culture invites them to attend," she says.


While there's no evidence yet that a learning-based method will work, Whitfield-Gabrieli has reason to believe it's possible. Research has linked increased DMN activity to the phenomenon of voice-hearing. While scientists still aren't entirely certain how or why people hear voices, they think that auditory hallucinations may be a misattributed form of inner speech. A hyperactive DMN agitates the auditory cortex, resulting in what could be a fundamental confusion between what the brain "hears" inside itself and what it actually hears as a result of real, external stimuli. Many factors, though - including social isolation - contribute to the health of a person's brain. Imagination can help with the healing process and reclaim a functioning relationship between the self, the auditory cortex, and inner speech.


Woods' and Luhrmann's work - as well as their colleagues' - dovetails with a study published about a month ago in the American Journal of Psychiatry, which concluded that the term "schizophrenia" actually encompasses eight genetically distinct disorders, not just one. The assertion, whether or not it holds up, suggests that mental well being comes in a variety of different "packages" depending on your genetic makeup. That goes for clinically diagnosed patients as well as healthy individuals.


"We should be wary of seeing a schizophrenic person as someone with a kind of deficiency," Woods says. Rather, it may be just another part of what it means to be human. A person might simply process language differently or ruminate on social interactions for too long. His or her inner speech might be more fragmented or circuitous. Individual differences in DMN activity account for the diverse ways the human mind freely wanders.


Searching for Answers


The default mode network may sound like a gold mine to psychiatrists and neuroscientists alike. The reality, though, is somewhat more complicated. Brain imaging, while promising, has yet to definitively solve major mental health issues like schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder.


Daniel Margulies of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences argues that even if our scientific understanding of the DMN evolves, its weight in the science world has "opened up a way of talking about the relationship between the self and these disorders." The default mode network (and its relationship to voice-hearing), he says, can provide a gateway to understanding the full range of how people comprehend themselves - even if anomalies in the network aren't proven to be a direct cause of schizophrenia.


That may be what matters most, since schizophrenia is not necessarily about neurons or synapses. It's about the people it affects.


"Technology is giving us important information, but not the final answers," says David Farb, professor and chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics at the Boston University School of Medicine. He advocates an approach that views diseases and disorders as "vast and complex chimeras of symptoms that can be mixed and matched." For example, depression may share symptoms with other disorders, like severe anxiety. It's also possible, he says, that a person may develop an anxiety disorder as they grow increasingly self-conscious of their schizophrenia, for example. In that case, Farb says that schizophrenia may be made even more complex by "an expression of learned helplessness."


By acquiring as much genetic and neurological information about a patient as possible, we may be able to intervene at an earlier stage and prevent schizophrenia before it develops. Whitfield-Gabrieli and Larry Seidman of Harvard University are studying at-risk people in Shanghai to find brain markers that predict whether or not someone will become schizophrenic. Interestingly, they've noticed a skew toward more female than male schizophrenic patients in China; in the U.S, schizophrenia is a predominantly male disorder, again pointing to the cultural element.


And that is what's so striking to the U.K. researchers associated with Hearing the Voice. We shouldn't assume that nature (rather than nurture) is the primary culprit when it comes to schizophrenia, they say. "If the default mode network is somehow connected with mind-wandering, self-referential cognition, you can't simply use objective measures," says Felicity Callard, another Durham University researcher involved in the project. "You have to get at what people think is going on in their own heads." In other words, to find a cure, we might have to put ourselves in other peoples' shoes.


"We should direct energy and funding and resources into exploring people's lives - not just their chemistry, their neuroanatomy, or their genes," Woods says. PSTD, for example, is a legitimate response to a traumatic event. Likewise, schizophrenia is a legitimate response to a lifetime of accumulated events, thoughts, interactions, and engrained beliefs. "We need to be able to ask, 'What happened to you?' That's not ruling genetics out, but it's taking things from another angle."


Farb suspects the answer might be simpler than that. Drugs that target genes regulating DMN connectivity or surgery that modifies key points of DMN activity, for example, could resolve schizophrenic symptoms. He acknowledges, though, that there may be other factors at play. Schizophrenia - like PTSD or chronic pain - may have a cumulative effect on the brain that's hard to anticipate. "While we may be able to correct the original deficit, we may still be left with others because they are a consequence of all of those years spent living with the disorder," he says. "It's really complicated to get a cure."


As a patient, Sara believes that the process needs to be individualized. Doctors should ask patients questions about their experiences and how they want to go about getting better. Woods agrees. "The more we treat schizophrenia as a mysterious entity that we're going to pin down in a piece of DNA," she says, "the more we'll miss the complicated, multifaceted aspects of existence that go into making someone have an experience of psychosis."


"And if people don't feel as though they're able to tell stories about their experiences, then it's hard to see that a cure would be particularly welcome, rich, or meaningful."


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Mission Creeps: Homeland Security Agents Confiscate Women's Panties For 'Copyright Infringement'



Homeland security's mission has transformed from fighting terrorists to stealing women's underwear for supposed intellectual property violations.



From the Kansas City Star:


Peregrine Honig says she just wanted to help celebrate the hometown team when she designed Lucky Royals boyshorts.



The panties, with “Take the Crown” and “KC” across the rear, were set to be sold in Honig’s Birdies Panties shop Monday. But Homeland Security agents visited the Crossroads store and confiscated the few dozen pairs of underwear, printed in Kansas City by Lindquist Press.



“They came in and there were two guys” Honig said. “I asked one of them what size he needed and he showed me a badge and took me outside. They told me they were from Homeland Security and we were violating copyright laws.”



She thought that since the underwear featured her hand-drawn design, she was safe. But the officers explained that by connecting the “K” and the “C,” she infringed on major league baseball copyright. (The officials involved could not be immediately reached for comment.)



They placed the underwear in an official Homeland Security bag and had Honig sign a statement saying she wouldn’t use the logo.

This would be considered a trademark violation, not copyright, I'm not sure if the victim misunderstood the agents, or the agents themselves were clueless (regardless,


both laws are crazy

).


What's interesting is how since the department's inception their goal was never to stop terrorism but to police the domestic population, be it through raiding


toy stores for suspected copyright infringement

one year after the department's creation back in 2004, or panty raids as they just did in Kansas now ten years later.


When


there is no actual terrorists to police

with all the high-tech police state gear you spent billions of taxpayers' dollars on, you have to use it somewhere.


Here's a video report on the theft from


41 Action News

:


Note, the store owner asked to see a warrant, to which the police responded by "waving a cellphone with a message on it."


One has to wonder if they even had a warrant, there was a story just a few days ago about how the secret service instructed police in Tennessee engaged in a standoff to fake a warrant by "


waving a piece of paper around

."


_


Chris runs the website


InformationLiberation.com

, you can read more of his articles


here

. Follow


infolib on twitter

.




Europe's economic panic inches ever closer

Frankfurt stock exchange

© Reuters / Stringer

Traders are pictured at their desks in front of the DAX board at the Frankfurt stock exchange October 22, 2014



European economic denial has reached the point where we are straddling the abyss, facing a code red moment of meltdown.

Whether by bloody-minded obstinacy or a clear incapacity to understand the mess it has overseen, the EU now reaches another of those critical junctures where simply papering over the cracks and maintaining a demented agitprop that growth is around the corner won't do. Besides, the green shoots of recovery have once again evaporated for the umpteenth time. As the world grows, Europe stagnates.


The EU isn't working - as 12 percent of the continent's population know only too well (including that lost generation under 30 born near the Mediterranean). Meanwhile, former Communist-turned-totalitarian-Europhile Jose Manuel Barroso has been enjoying a typically bombastic pre-retirement tour demonstrating a majestic lack of understanding for the stagnancy which has resulted from his decade-long failure as EU president.


Having spent much of the past year blithely mouthing a mantra of recovery, the outgoing commission departs the Berlaymont as even greater political failures than they were in national office before being elevated to Brussels. The demented hubris which preached recovery without coherent reworking of broken economies has been rendered mute by economic reality. Even in Brussels there may be a realization that political fudges won't do - the European empire must be restructured if it is not to face oblivion. As it is, the pathetic political posturing of national interests led by France (bankrupt) and Germany (deeply disingenuously protectionist) at all times have inexorably weakened Europe in a decade of prolonged growth in the emerging markets of the east.


Thus we reach an abyss for Europe. Germany (as predicted ) is a post-peak economic powerhouse. Ukraine has led the EU to self-defeating sanctions which have further trimmed the economy just as growth has proven a mirage.


The fine art of attending endless lavish intergovernmental dinners became a curious ritual in recent years. Some nations, such as Ireland, were sacrificed to save banks in Germany and France.As a financial professional (but not a banker), it has been singularly disgusting post-Lehmann collapse to watch an ongoing act of communist folly - socializing debt to protect banker hubris . For this reason alone, the EU abandoned fiscal credibility.


EU budget

© Reuters / Philippe Wojazer

A government member holds a press release of France's 2015 Budget Project as he leaves following the weekly cabinet meeting at the Elysee Palace in Paris, October 1, 2014



Alas it has shamelessly repeated the pattern across the continent, bailing out bankers when they, along with spendthrift governments, ought to have suffered default, as is the textbook case where a bondholder cannot repay. To countenance default was to suggest possible weakness in that flawed political instrument of finance, the Euro. The EU's fear of undermining its hubristic monetary folly now threatens the European project itself as the cancerous contagion of economic collapse has grown.

Tragically, for all the summitry, for all the talk of reform, actually nothing has been achieved during the past six years. Few, if any, economies have indulged in any meaningful reform while large nations such as Germany and France have ruthlessly defended their national interest. Now the problem has moved full circle. The unreformed on the Mediterranean are struggling to survive, stranded with vast debts from big bureaucracy and big government...The toxic time bomb of impending default ticks loudest of all in Paris. A 40th consecutive annual budget deficit is destroying France's third way socialist delusion, aided by that even more hapless than usual Elysee resident, President Hollande. Across the border, German growth is stalling - which is hardly surprising... After all, Europe is a train wreck of long standing fiscal incompetence. Eastern neighbors such as Russia are reluctant importers from a hostile West, while in China the long boom is much more muted than it has been for many years.


As soon as German growth data slipped last month, a certain realization began to dawn in Brussels - the EU has not even bought a strong roll of duct tape to bind together the glaring fiscal fissures it has been denying for years. Now the European Central Bank may hit the panic button - sloshing (Quantitative Easing) into the system. This action elsewhere has, to date, only served to generate vast asset inflation - aka making the rich richer without delivering coherent prosperity for all.


Every day government avoids acting to genuinely reboot the economy is not merely another day squandered for the lost generation, it marks one more sleep until we hit code red. The 28-member supranational state of 'Kickcanistan' cannot survive what is, at best, a status quo of stasis.


Europe may be about to hit the panic button - the only result will be: panic.