Wearing the mantle of education reform, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told attendees at a recent summit on innovation in education that,“My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age.”
A really, really good way to do that, Zuckerberg said, is to let kids ages 13 and under join Facebook.
Research Credit: afterhours
KHOU:
Newly-released e-mails from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality show the agency’s top commissioners directed staff to continue lowering radiation test results, in defiance of federal EPA rules.
The e-mails and documents, released under order from the Texas Attorney General to KHOU-TV, also show the agency was attempting to help water systems get out of formally violating federal limits for radiation in drinking water. Without a formal violation, the water systems did not have to inform their residents of the increased health risk.
“It’s a conspiracy at the TCEQ of the highest order,†said Tom Smith, of the government watchdog group Public Citizen. “The documents have indicted the management of this commission in a massive cover-up to convince people that our water is safe to drink when it’s not.â€
Smith is talking about what happened to residents who live in communities served by utilities like Harris County Municipal Utility District 105. For years, tests performed by the Texas Department of State Health Services showed the utility provided water that exceeded the EPA legal limit for exposure to alpha radiation.
However, the TCEQ would consistently subtract off each test’s margin of error from those results, making the actual testing results appear lower than they actually were. In MUD 105’s case, the utility was able to avoid violations for nearly 20 years, thanks to the TCEQ subtractions.
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Alpha radiation is emitted from radionuclides such as uranium and radium. While health scientists have said it poses little danger if someone is externally exposed to it, the experts maintain that ingesting even the smallest amount of the particles can cause damage to DNA, and in rare cases, cause cancer.
The head of a Catholic religious order in the Netherlands has confirmed one of his subordinate priests served on the board of an organisation that promotes paedophilia.
Herman Spronck, head of the Dutch arm of the Salesian order, said in a statement Friday the priest served on the board of the“Martijn” organization, which is widely reviled but not illegal.
“Of course we reject this and distance ourselves from this personal initiative” on the part of the priest, Spronck’s statement said.
“Membership in such organizations does not fit with the ethos of the Salesian order.”
However, RTL Nieuws, which broke the story, published interviews both with Spronck and the priest, identified as 73-year-old“Father Van B.,” in which they defend some paedophile relationships.
“Society thinks these relationships are harmful. I disagree,” RTL quoted Van B. as saying. He served on Martijn’s board from 2008 until 2010, when the organization’s founder was arrested for alleged possession of child pornography. That case is ongoing.
RTL quoted Spronck as saying that“formally I always say that everyone must obey the law. But these relationships do not necessarily have to be damaging.”
Spronck and his organisation could not be reached for comment.
BBC:
China has expanded export quotas for rare earth metals, further tightening its grip on the minerals used in a number of high-tech electronics.
From Friday, iron alloys containing more than 10% of rare earths will fall under the export quota, the commerce ministry said in a statement.
Rare earths are a collection of 17 chemical elements in the periodic table.
World manufacturers rely heavily on China for these minerals.
Rare earth metals are used in high tech goods such as mobile phone handsets, hybrid car batteries, wind turbines and weapons guidance systems .
China had already cut exports by about 35% in the first half of 2011 driving up prices to record levels. It produces around 97% of rare earth metal supply.
If you’ve read the lead story in The New York Times on President Barack Obama’s Middle East speech this afternoon, you’re probably under the impression that the president has taken a bold new step to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The first paragraph of the story, filed from Washington, is quite dramatic. Obama,“seeking to harness the seismic political change unfolding in the Arab world… publicly called for the borders prevailing before the 1967 Israeli-Arab war to be the baseline for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the first time an American president has explicitly taken that position.”
The only problem is, it’s not much of a shift at all.The key word in that opening paragraph is that word“explicitly.” What it means in this context, is that he said something that multiple presidents have said before him, but with slightly weaker language. What did he say?“The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”
That an eventual settlement would be based around borders from before the 1967 war, with land“swaps” of some kind to reflect the growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, has been a central assumption behind the peace process kicked off under President Bill Clinton in the early 1990s and pursued with subtle variations by presidents George W. Bush and Obama after him. Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters, amid a push to restart peace talks that failed, that a solution could be found that“reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders.”
Sound familiar?
What wasn’t in Obama’s speech was anything new on how you get from here (complete dysfunction– it’s a“process” by convention only at this point) to there (peace). He made no mention of the settlement freeze his administration had pushed for– and failed to get – in return for restored talks with the Palestinian leadership. He also sought to shoot down Palestinian efforts to win recognition for an independent state at the United Nations, something the Palestinian Authority has been gearing up for in September.
Fresh doubts have arisen about the safety of genetically modified crops, with a new study reporting presence of Bt toxin, used widely in GM crops, in human blood for the first time.
Genetically modified crops include genes extracted from bacteria to make them resistant to pest attacks.
These genes make crops toxic to pests but are claimed to pose no danger to the environment and human health. Genetically modified brinjal, whose commercial release was stopped a year ago, has a toxin derived from a soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis ( Bt).
Till now, scientists and multinational corporations promoting GM crops have maintained that Bt toxin poses no danger to human health as the protein breaks down in the human gut. But the presence of this toxin in human blood shows that this does not happen.
Scientists from the University of Sherbrooke, Canada, have detected the insecticidal protein, Cry1Ab, circulating in the blood of pregnant as well as non-pregnant women.
They have also detected the toxin in fetal blood, implying it could pass on to the next generation. The research paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Reproductive Toxicology. The study covered 30 pregnant women and 39 women who had come for tubectomy at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke (CHUS) in Quebec.
None of them had worked or lived with a spouse working in contact with pesticides.
They were all consuming typical Canadian diet that included GM foods such as soybeans, corn and potatoes. Blood samples were taken before delivery for pregnant women and at tubal ligation for non-pregnant women. Umbilical cord blood sampling was done after birth.
Cry1Ab toxin was detected in 93 per cent and 80 per cent of maternal and fetal blood samples, respectively and in 69 per cent of tested blood samples from non-pregnant women. Earlier studies had found trace amounts of the Cry1Ab toxin in gastrointestinal contents of livestock fed on GM corn. This gave rise to fears that the toxins may not be effectively eliminated in humans and there may be a high risk of exposure through consumption of contaminated meat.
As Binney imagined it, ThinThread would correlate data from financial transactions, travel records, Web searches, G.P.S. equipment, and any other“attributes†that an analyst might find useful in pinpointing “the bad guys.†By 2000, Binney, using fibre optics, had set up a computer network that could chart relationships among people in real time. It also turned the N.S.A.’s data-collection paradigm upside down. Instead of vacuuming up information around the world and then sending it all back to headquarters for analysis, ThinThread processed information as it was collected—discarding useless information on the spot and avoiding the overload problem that plagued centralized systems. Binney says, “The beauty of it is that it was open-ended, so it could keep expanding.â€
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When Binney heard the rumors, he was convinced that the new domestic-surveillance program employed components of ThinThread: a bastardized version, stripped of privacy controls.“It was my brainchild,†he said. “But they removed the protections, the anonymization process. When you remove that, you can target anyone.†He said that although he was not “read in†to the new secret surveillance program, “my people were brought in, and they toldme, ‘Can you believe they’re doing this?They’re getting billing records on U.S. citizens! They’re putting pen registers’ â€â€”logs of dialled phone numbers—“ ‘on everyone in the country!’ â€
Drake recalled that, after the October 4th directive,“strange things were happening. Equipment was being moved. People were coming to me and saying, ‘We’re now targeting our own country!’ †Drake says that N.S.A. officials who helped the agency obtain FISA warrants were suddenly reassigned, a tipoff that the conventional process was being circumvented. He added, “I was concerned that it was illegal, and none of it was necessary.†In his view, domestic data mining “could have been done legally†if the N.S.A. had maintained privacy protections. “But they didn’t want an accountable system.â€
Aid, the author of the N.S.A. history, suggests that ThinThread’s privacy protections interfered with top officials’ secret objective—to pick American targets by name. “They wanted selection, not just collection,†he says.
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Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with“dictionary selection,†in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.â€
Research Credit: coxsone
