WASHINGTON — Epicentro dos escândalos sexuais envolvendo padres e diáconos na primeira década dos anos 2000, a Igreja Católica nos Estados Unidos superou o trauma, mas enfrenta o desafio de se manter relevante social e politicamente às vésperas do conclave. O maior rebanho religioso dos EUA - com 78,2 milhões de fiéis declarados - está se distanciando dos dogmas do catolicismo e clamando pela modernização da instituição em temas que vão da ordenação de mulheres ao casamento gay. Cada vez mais hispânica, a Igreja também lida com novas necessidades, como pressão por foco nos assuntos sociais, em detrimento da agenda ortodoxa de defesa do direito à vida, e expansão de atividades e serviços, para os quais faltam padres e recursos, após US$ 3 bilhões pagos em indenizações nos casos de pedofilia e abuso até 2012.
Os escândalos foram um baque em uma das mais poderosas comunidades católicas do mundo. Um estudo comissionado pela própria Igreja ao John Jay College of Criminal Justice apontou que 4.450 dos 110 mil padres que serviram nos EUA entre 1950 e 2002 foram acusados de abuso sexual, resultando, segundo a ONG BishopAccountability.org, em mais de 3 mil ações na Justiça. Nove bispos renunciaram desde 1990 - oito por escândalos sexuais, incluindo ícones como o primeiro negro e o primeiro hispânico a chegarem ao cargo - e o então mais poderoso cardeal americano, Bernard Law, pediu afastamento após a diocese de Boston ser o estopim das denúncias.
A avalanche de compensações financeiras às vítimas saqueou os cofres locais. Apenas a diocese de Los Angeles pagou mais de US$ 700 milhões a cerca de 550 vítimas violentadas, aparentemente, sob a vista grossa do cardeal Roger Mahony. Oito dioceses decretaram falência. Os fiéis exigiram (e continuam exigindo) maior controle e punição, e os episódios contribuíram para o crescente desapego dos americanos à fé. O catolicismo é a religião nos EUA que menos mantém na vida adulta fiéis criados sob sua doutrina, com perda de 10% do rebanho nesta transição, segundo pesquisa do Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
- Mesmo assim, a Igreja vem crescendo, os escândalos tiveram mais impacto de relações públicas do que de adesão. Deixaram a Igreja aqueles que já tinham relação frágil com o catolicismo, apontam nossas pesquisas. Em parte isso se deve ao fato de a instituição ser enraizada. Mas há também o peso dos latinos. A Igreja é, para o imigrante, uma das poucas coisas certas quando desembarcam nos EUA - diz Juhem Navarro-Rivera, do Public Religion Research Institute.
Os hispânicos garantem a expansão do rebanho católico, mas implicam em mudanças às quais a Igreja americana ainda tem que se adaptar. Os imigrantes estão espalhados nos EUA e nas cidades, ampliando o escopo de dioceses, demandando novos serviços paroquiais, educacionais e sociais e uma nova abordagem litúrgica, desde o uso do espanhol até missas não tradicionais.
O dinheiro já não é tão abundante numa Igreja que fez da riqueza sua principal arma política, garantindo 10,7% dos sacerdotes com direito a voto no Colégio dos Cardeais para 5,9% dos católicos do mundo. E os latinos representam um desafio em termos de doações, pois são menos abastados do que os tradicionais fiéis brancos.
A pesquisadora Mary Gautier, do Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (Cara), da Universidade de Georgetown, acrescenta que 50% dos padres americanos têm mais de 60 anos, e a reposição dos que se aposentam ou morrem está muito aquém da formação de novos religiosos.
- Os hispânicos também formam uma comunidade mais jovem, mais aberta às mudanças culturais, mais desafiadora e menos disposta a obedecer cegamente. O impacto geracional já se percebe na aceitação, nesta base, do homossexualismo, do casamento gay e dos métodos contraceptivos. Mas a Igreja tem seus dogmas e não dá para antecipar como essa pressão será absorvida pelos líderes católicos - afirma Mary Gautier.
E a pressão para aliar tradição e nova realidade social é grande, para além dos latinos, em linha com a agenda progressista que ganha apoio crescente da sociedade. Na última sondagem do Public Religion Research Institute, 53% dos católicos afirmaram querer uma Igreja que se adapte aos novos tempos, incluindo novas práticas e crenças. Por exemplo, 54% se declararam favoráveis ao casamento gay - número que chega a 68% entre aqueles com 18 a 39 anos.
Na pesquisa conduzida pelo Pew Religion após a renúncia de Bento XVI, 46% afirmaram esperar do novo Papa uma nova direção para a Igreja, que traduziram como uma instituição mais moderna (19%), que seja rígida na prevenção e na punição de casos de abuso sexual (15%), permita o casamento de padres e seja mais aberta (14%), aceite a homossexualidade e a união gay e libere a ordenação de mulheres (9%). Apenas o aborto permanece como tabu, com só 1% dos fiéis defendendo flexibilização de posição.
No entanto, alerta Navarro-Rivera, os católicos americanos não querem uma Igreja que tenha como agenda prioritária a defesa do direito à vida. Com a ascensão da base latina e o empobrecimento após a Grande Recessão, a comunidade (60%) quer seus líderes espirituais engajados na defesa da justiça social e dos pobres, mesmo que isso sacrifique a batalha contra o aborto.
- A Igreja aborda esses temas (sociais), mas ganha mais publicidade quando fala de aborto. A preferência dos católicos e a opinião pública estão aí e é aí que querem sua Igreja. Mas a Igreja não é uma democracia - diz Navarro-Rivera.
Saturday, 9 March 2013
Veneno de rato encontrado em alface italiana
As autoridades alemãs encontraram veneno de rato em alfaces importadas de Itália, segundo noticia hoje a versão online do jornal italiano La Stampa.
Sete mortos em confrontos junto à fronteira com EUA
Pelo menos sete pessoas morreram e outras quatro ficaram feridas, na sequência de confrontos entre grupos armados no estado mexicano de Tamaulipas, na fronteira com os Estados Unidos, indicaram, na...
Photoshop fakery exposed by fake Photoshop tool
Free download restores models' flaws
Beauty products brand Dove, one arm of the Unilever conglomerate, has pranked graphic designers with a new Photoshop tool.…
Beauty products brand Dove, one arm of the Unilever conglomerate, has pranked graphic designers with a new Photoshop tool.…
Mexico's rural women fight drought
An increasing number of women farmers in Mexico are battling drought, gun-carrying gangs and a struggling domestic agricultural market. Despite recent efforts to support family farms, they are facing an uphill battle.
Domestic abuse is a private matter in China
Gender equality is enshrined in China's constitution. But two unusual cases of domestic abuse and the discussion surrounding them clearly show that women and men remain unequal.
ThyssenKrupp chairman Cromme steps down
ThyssenKrupp has announced the resignation of its supervisory board chairman Gerhard Cromme, following accusations of a lack of supervision. Germany's biggest steelmaker has been hit by scandals and weak performance.
Less stress, more living
The effects of stress on health, well-being, and even creativity were the focus of the Forum at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) this week.
In collaboration with the Huffington Post, the March 6 webcast event addressed the American Psychological Association’s latest Stress in America survey, which found that the majority of Americans report experiencing higher stress levels than they believe are healthy. One in three Americans reports living with extreme stress.
Chronic stress has been linked to health problems ranging from heart disease to asthma to ulcers, and the cardiovascular health risk it poses is not dissimilar to the risk conferred by cigarette smoking, said panelist Laura Kubzansky, associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at HSPH. (See the full list of panelists here.)
Representing a diverse array of approaches to stress and health, from psychology to nutrition science, the expert panelists explored the underlying causes and consequences of stress — particularly the “physiological wear and tear” incurred by repeated periods of stress. They singled out the role that mindfulness plays in combating stress and choosing healthy behaviors.
“We eat less thoughtfully when we are stressed,” said David Eisenberg, associate professor in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH, and “when we are in a good place emotionally we make better choices.”
Lilian Cheung, editorial director of The Nutrition Source at HSPH and an expert on mindfulness, shared her “three steps to bliss”: “mindful breathing, mindful eating, and mindful movements.”
Addressing stress from a public-health orientation is key to setting up systems that will better prepare people to cope with stress, according to the panelists. Stress is pervasive in American lives — and yet no systematic medical approach exists to prevent and treat it. Among the panelists’ recommendations: Doctors need to be trained to better recognize and respond to stress in their patients and to help patients practice healthy habits, and to look carefully at childhood development, creating structures that allow children to develop the adaptive tools they need to more effectively manage stress.
Read the live Tweet coverage here.
In collaboration with the Huffington Post, the March 6 webcast event addressed the American Psychological Association’s latest Stress in America survey, which found that the majority of Americans report experiencing higher stress levels than they believe are healthy. One in three Americans reports living with extreme stress.
Chronic stress has been linked to health problems ranging from heart disease to asthma to ulcers, and the cardiovascular health risk it poses is not dissimilar to the risk conferred by cigarette smoking, said panelist Laura Kubzansky, associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at HSPH. (See the full list of panelists here.)
Representing a diverse array of approaches to stress and health, from psychology to nutrition science, the expert panelists explored the underlying causes and consequences of stress — particularly the “physiological wear and tear” incurred by repeated periods of stress. They singled out the role that mindfulness plays in combating stress and choosing healthy behaviors.
“We eat less thoughtfully when we are stressed,” said David Eisenberg, associate professor in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH, and “when we are in a good place emotionally we make better choices.”
Lilian Cheung, editorial director of The Nutrition Source at HSPH and an expert on mindfulness, shared her “three steps to bliss”: “mindful breathing, mindful eating, and mindful movements.”
Addressing stress from a public-health orientation is key to setting up systems that will better prepare people to cope with stress, according to the panelists. Stress is pervasive in American lives — and yet no systematic medical approach exists to prevent and treat it. Among the panelists’ recommendations: Doctors need to be trained to better recognize and respond to stress in their patients and to help patients practice healthy habits, and to look carefully at childhood development, creating structures that allow children to develop the adaptive tools they need to more effectively manage stress.
Read the live Tweet coverage here.
Time of the essence for Germany's energy switch: Merkel
BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned on Thursday that time was of the essence if Germany was to shift to renewable energy and power intensive industries should expect cuts to their benefits and exemptions.
Furious with Europe, British fishermen lament demise of trade
ABOARD THE WHITBY ROSE, North Sea (Reuters) - His eyes fixed on the North Sea horizon, British skipper Howard Locker steers his boat far out to sea where he hopes to stumble on enough fish to save the day.
Local Network Patterns in Protein-Protein Interfaces
by Qiang Luo, Rebecca Hamer, Gesine Reinert, Charlotte M. Deane
Protein-protein interfaces hold the key to understanding protein-protein interactions. In this paper we investigated local interaction network patterns beyond pair-wise contact sites by considering interfaces as contact networks among residues. A contact site was defined as any residue on the surface of one protein which was in contact with a residue on the surface of another protein. We labeled the sub-graphs of these contact networks by their amino acid types. The observed distributions of these labeled sub-graphs were compared with the corresponding background distributions and the results suggested that there were preferred chemical patterns of closely packed residues at the interface. These preferred patterns point to biological constraints on physical proximity between those residues on one protein which were involved in binding to residues which were close on the interacting partner. Interaction interfaces were far from random and contain information beyond pairs and triangles. To illustrate the possible application of the local network patterns observed, we introduced a signature method, called iScore, based on these local patterns to assess interface predictions. On our data sets iScore achieved 83.6% specificity with 82% sensitivity.
Protein-protein interfaces hold the key to understanding protein-protein interactions. In this paper we investigated local interaction network patterns beyond pair-wise contact sites by considering interfaces as contact networks among residues. A contact site was defined as any residue on the surface of one protein which was in contact with a residue on the surface of another protein. We labeled the sub-graphs of these contact networks by their amino acid types. The observed distributions of these labeled sub-graphs were compared with the corresponding background distributions and the results suggested that there were preferred chemical patterns of closely packed residues at the interface. These preferred patterns point to biological constraints on physical proximity between those residues on one protein which were involved in binding to residues which were close on the interacting partner. Interaction interfaces were far from random and contain information beyond pairs and triangles. To illustrate the possible application of the local network patterns observed, we introduced a signature method, called iScore, based on these local patterns to assess interface predictions. On our data sets iScore achieved 83.6% specificity with 82% sensitivity.
The Effect of a Smoking Ban on Hospitalization Rates for Cardiovascular and Respiratory Conditions in Prince Edward Island, Canada
by Katherine Gaudreau, Carolyn J. Sanford, Connie Cheverie, Carol McClure
Background
This is the first study to have examined the effect of smoking bans on hospitalizations in the Atlantic Canadian socio-economic, cultural and climatic context. On June 1, 2003 Prince Edward Island (PEI) enacted a province-wide smoking ban in public places and workplaces. Changes in hospital admission rates for cardiovascular (acute myocardial infarction, angina, and stroke) and respiratory (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma) conditions were examined before and after the smoking ban.
Methods
Crude annual and monthly admission rates for the above conditions were calculated from April 1, 1995 to December 31, 2008 in all PEI acute care hospitals. Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average time series models were used to test for changes in mean and trend of monthly admission rates for study conditions, control conditions and a control province after the comprehensive smoking ban. Age- and sex-based analyses were completed.
Results
The mean rate of acute myocardial infarctions was reduced by 5.92 cases per 100,000 person-months (P = 0.04) immediately after the smoking ban. The trend of monthly angina admissions in men was reduced by −0.44 cases per 100,000 person-months (P = 0.01) in the 67 months after the smoking ban. All other cardiovascular and respiratory admission changes were non-significant.
Conclusions
A comprehensive smoking ban in PEI reduced the overall mean number of acute myocardial infarction admissions and the trend of angina hospital admissions.
Background
This is the first study to have examined the effect of smoking bans on hospitalizations in the Atlantic Canadian socio-economic, cultural and climatic context. On June 1, 2003 Prince Edward Island (PEI) enacted a province-wide smoking ban in public places and workplaces. Changes in hospital admission rates for cardiovascular (acute myocardial infarction, angina, and stroke) and respiratory (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma) conditions were examined before and after the smoking ban.
Methods
Crude annual and monthly admission rates for the above conditions were calculated from April 1, 1995 to December 31, 2008 in all PEI acute care hospitals. Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average time series models were used to test for changes in mean and trend of monthly admission rates for study conditions, control conditions and a control province after the comprehensive smoking ban. Age- and sex-based analyses were completed.
Results
The mean rate of acute myocardial infarctions was reduced by 5.92 cases per 100,000 person-months (P = 0.04) immediately after the smoking ban. The trend of monthly angina admissions in men was reduced by −0.44 cases per 100,000 person-months (P = 0.01) in the 67 months after the smoking ban. All other cardiovascular and respiratory admission changes were non-significant.
Conclusions
A comprehensive smoking ban in PEI reduced the overall mean number of acute myocardial infarction admissions and the trend of angina hospital admissions.
Soybean β-Conglycinin Induces Inflammation and Oxidation and Causes Dysfunction of Intestinal Digestion and Absorption in Fish
by Jin-Xiu Zhang, Lin-Ying Guo, Lin Feng, Wei-Dan Jiang, Sheng-Yao Kuang, Yang Liu, Kai Hu, Jun Jiang, Shu-Hong Li, Ling Tang, Xiao-Qiu Zhou
β-conglycinin has been identified as one of the major feed allergens. However, studies of β-conglycinin on fish are scarce. This study investigated the effects of β-conglycinin on the growth, digestive and absorptive ability, inflammatory response, oxidative status and gene expression of juvenile Jian carp (Cyprinus carpio var. Jian) in vivo and their enterocytes in vitro. The results indicated that the specific growth rate (SGR), feed intake, and feed efficiency were reduced by β-conglycinin. In addition, activities of trypsin, chymotrypsin, lipase, creatine kinase, Na+,K+-ATPase and alkaline phosphatase in the intestine showed similar tendencies. The protein content of the hepatopancreas and intestines, and the weight and length of the intestines were all reduced by β-conglycinin. β-conglycinin increased lipid and protein oxidation in the detected tissues and cells. However, β-conglycinin decreased superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), glutathione-S-transferase (GST), glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and glutathione reductase (GR) activities and glutathione (GSH) content in the intestine and enterocytes. Similar antioxidant activity in the hepatopancreas was observed, except for GST. The expression of target of rapamycin (TOR) gene was reduced by β-conglycinin. Furthermore, mRNA levels of interleukin-8 (IL-8), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), and transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) genes were increased by β-conglycinin. However, β-conglycinin increased CuZnSOD, MnSOD, CAT, and GPx1b gene expression. In conclusion, this study indicates that β-conglycinin induces inflammation and oxidation, and causes dysfunction of intestinal digestion and absorption in fish, and finally reduces fish growth. The results of this study provide some information to the mechanism of β-conglycinin-induced negative effects.
β-conglycinin has been identified as one of the major feed allergens. However, studies of β-conglycinin on fish are scarce. This study investigated the effects of β-conglycinin on the growth, digestive and absorptive ability, inflammatory response, oxidative status and gene expression of juvenile Jian carp (Cyprinus carpio var. Jian) in vivo and their enterocytes in vitro. The results indicated that the specific growth rate (SGR), feed intake, and feed efficiency were reduced by β-conglycinin. In addition, activities of trypsin, chymotrypsin, lipase, creatine kinase, Na+,K+-ATPase and alkaline phosphatase in the intestine showed similar tendencies. The protein content of the hepatopancreas and intestines, and the weight and length of the intestines were all reduced by β-conglycinin. β-conglycinin increased lipid and protein oxidation in the detected tissues and cells. However, β-conglycinin decreased superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), glutathione-S-transferase (GST), glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and glutathione reductase (GR) activities and glutathione (GSH) content in the intestine and enterocytes. Similar antioxidant activity in the hepatopancreas was observed, except for GST. The expression of target of rapamycin (TOR) gene was reduced by β-conglycinin. Furthermore, mRNA levels of interleukin-8 (IL-8), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), and transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) genes were increased by β-conglycinin. However, β-conglycinin increased CuZnSOD, MnSOD, CAT, and GPx1b gene expression. In conclusion, this study indicates that β-conglycinin induces inflammation and oxidation, and causes dysfunction of intestinal digestion and absorption in fish, and finally reduces fish growth. The results of this study provide some information to the mechanism of β-conglycinin-induced negative effects.
Global Average Temperatures Are Close to 11,000-Year Peak
Global average temperatures are now higher than they have been for about 75% of the past 11,300 years, a study suggests. And if climate models are any indication, by the end of this century they will be the highest ever since the end of the most recent ice age.
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Blood Test Device Developed for Early Cancer Detection
Swiss-based scientists are developing a device that will find chemical markers for cancer in a drop of blood. The team from EPFL in Lausanne says the hand-held device will enable doctors to make diagnoses very early in the disease process.
Mexico's bismuth mining set for nanotech overhaul
Colombia and Mexico are hoping to use nanotechnology to make new products and add value to their bismuth mining industries.
Palms May Be the Oldest Living Trees
Ever green: Pine trees, which can grow for thousands of years, are the oldest living trees. [More]
New discovery could have potential for regenerative medicine
Special cells that were discovered in healthy breast tissue from women undergoing breast reductions may hold the key for an important discovery. UC San Francisco researchers found that certain rare cells extracted from adult breast tissue have the capability to turn into other cell types. Similar to human embryonic stem cells, the newly found cells are pluripotent. Pluripotent cells have the potential to differentiate into almost any cell in the body.
Melanoma and Obesity Connection
A gene linked to obesity and over eating may also increase the risk of malignant melanoma – the most deadly skin cancer, according to scientists at the University of Leeds. The research, funded by Cancer Research UK, shows that people with particular variations in a stretch of DNA within the FTO gene, called intron 8, could be at greater risk of developing melanoma.
Spanish sperm whale death linked to UK supermarket supplier's plastic
Sperm whale on Spanish southern coast had swallowed 17kg of plastic waste dumped by greenhouses supplying produce to UK
A dead sperm whale that washed up on Spain's south coast had swallowed 17kg of plastic waste dumped into the sea by farmers tending greenhouses that produce tomatoes and other vegetables for British supermarkets.
Scientists were amazed to find the 4.5 tonne whale had swallowed 59 different bits of plastic – most of it thick transparent sheeting used to build greenhouses in southern Almeria and Granada. A clothes hanger, an ice-cream tub and bits of mattress were also found.
The plastic had eventually blocked the animal's stomach and killed it, according to researchers from the Doñana national park research centre in Andalusia.
Researchers at first found it hard to believe that the 10-metre animal had swallowed the vast amount of plastic they found protruding through a tear in its stomach.
In all the whale's stomach contained two dozen pieces of transparent plastic, some plastic bags, nine metres of rope, two stretches of hosepipe, two small flower pots and a plastic spray canister.
All were typical of the closely packed Almeria greenhouses that cover about 40,000 hectares – and are clearly visible in satellite photographs taken from space.
Desert-like Almeria has transformed itself into Europe's winter market garden thanks to the plastic greenhouses where plants are grown in beds of perlite stones and drip-fed chemical fertilisers. Local farmers report that Tesco, Waitrose and Sainsbury's are all valued customers.
The greenhouses produce 2.4 tonnes of plastic waste per hectare each year – or more than 45,000 tonnes altogether.
Much is treated in special waste centres, but environmentalists complain that local riverbeds are often awash with plastic detritus and, with greenhouses built right up to the high-tide line, some also ends up in the sea.
"The problem of degraded plastics that are no longer recyclable still remains," Renaud de Stephanis, lead researcher at Doñana, and his team reported in the Marine Pollution Bulletin.
Only about 1,000 sperm whales – the world's biggest toothed whales – are thought to live in the Mediterranean. They live for up to 60 years and are often killed after getting caught in nets or being hit by ships.
Now another man-made danger has been detected. "These animals feed in waters near an area completely flooded by the greenhouse industry, making them vulnerable to its waste products if adequate treatment of this industry's debris is not in place," warned de Stephanis.
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
A dead sperm whale that washed up on Spain's south coast had swallowed 17kg of plastic waste dumped into the sea by farmers tending greenhouses that produce tomatoes and other vegetables for British supermarkets.
Scientists were amazed to find the 4.5 tonne whale had swallowed 59 different bits of plastic – most of it thick transparent sheeting used to build greenhouses in southern Almeria and Granada. A clothes hanger, an ice-cream tub and bits of mattress were also found.
The plastic had eventually blocked the animal's stomach and killed it, according to researchers from the Doñana national park research centre in Andalusia.
Researchers at first found it hard to believe that the 10-metre animal had swallowed the vast amount of plastic they found protruding through a tear in its stomach.
In all the whale's stomach contained two dozen pieces of transparent plastic, some plastic bags, nine metres of rope, two stretches of hosepipe, two small flower pots and a plastic spray canister.
All were typical of the closely packed Almeria greenhouses that cover about 40,000 hectares – and are clearly visible in satellite photographs taken from space.
Desert-like Almeria has transformed itself into Europe's winter market garden thanks to the plastic greenhouses where plants are grown in beds of perlite stones and drip-fed chemical fertilisers. Local farmers report that Tesco, Waitrose and Sainsbury's are all valued customers.
The greenhouses produce 2.4 tonnes of plastic waste per hectare each year – or more than 45,000 tonnes altogether.
Much is treated in special waste centres, but environmentalists complain that local riverbeds are often awash with plastic detritus and, with greenhouses built right up to the high-tide line, some also ends up in the sea.
"The problem of degraded plastics that are no longer recyclable still remains," Renaud de Stephanis, lead researcher at Doñana, and his team reported in the Marine Pollution Bulletin.
Only about 1,000 sperm whales – the world's biggest toothed whales – are thought to live in the Mediterranean. They live for up to 60 years and are often killed after getting caught in nets or being hit by ships.
Now another man-made danger has been detected. "These animals feed in waters near an area completely flooded by the greenhouse industry, making them vulnerable to its waste products if adequate treatment of this industry's debris is not in place," warned de Stephanis.
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
Tooth replacement in prospect after scientists grow teeth from mouse cells
Researchers say hybrid of human gum cells and mouse stem cells raises possibility of growing new teeth on patient's jaw
People may in future be able to have missing or diseased teeth replaced with ones grown from cells taken from their own mouth, scientists have predicted.
Hybrid teeth created by combining human gum cells and stem cells from mouse teeth have been grown in laboratory mice by researchers who hope the work could lead to dentures being superseded by new teeth grown on a patient's jaw.
The mixture of mouse and human cells was transplanted into adult mouse kidneys and grew into recognisable tooth structures coated in enamel with viable developing roots, according to a study published in the Journal Of Dental Research.
Two kinds of cell were used to make the bioengineered teeth. Epithelial "surface lining" cells were taken from human gum tissue and mesenchymal stem cells from the mouse embryos.
Mesenchymal cells can develop into a range of different tissues, including bone, cartilage and fat.
Professor Paul Sharpe, who led the research at King's College London's dental institute, said: "Epithelial cells derived from adult human gum tissue are capable of responding to tooth-inducing signals from embryonic tooth mesenchyme in an appropriate way to contribute to tooth crown and root formation and give rise to relevant differentiated cell types, following in-vitro culture.
"These easily accessible epithelial cells are thus a realistic source for consideration in human biotooth formation. The next major challenge is to identify a way to culture adult human mesenchymal cells to be tooth-inducing, as at the moment we can only make embryonic mesenchymal cells do this."
Previous research has shown that embryonic teeth are capable of developing normally in the adult mouth.
"What is required is the identification of adult sources of human epithelial and mesenchymal cells that can be obtained in sufficient numbers to make biotooth formation a viable alternative to dental implants," said Sharpe.
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
People may in future be able to have missing or diseased teeth replaced with ones grown from cells taken from their own mouth, scientists have predicted.
Hybrid teeth created by combining human gum cells and stem cells from mouse teeth have been grown in laboratory mice by researchers who hope the work could lead to dentures being superseded by new teeth grown on a patient's jaw.
The mixture of mouse and human cells was transplanted into adult mouse kidneys and grew into recognisable tooth structures coated in enamel with viable developing roots, according to a study published in the Journal Of Dental Research.
Two kinds of cell were used to make the bioengineered teeth. Epithelial "surface lining" cells were taken from human gum tissue and mesenchymal stem cells from the mouse embryos.
Mesenchymal cells can develop into a range of different tissues, including bone, cartilage and fat.
Professor Paul Sharpe, who led the research at King's College London's dental institute, said: "Epithelial cells derived from adult human gum tissue are capable of responding to tooth-inducing signals from embryonic tooth mesenchyme in an appropriate way to contribute to tooth crown and root formation and give rise to relevant differentiated cell types, following in-vitro culture.
"These easily accessible epithelial cells are thus a realistic source for consideration in human biotooth formation. The next major challenge is to identify a way to culture adult human mesenchymal cells to be tooth-inducing, as at the moment we can only make embryonic mesenchymal cells do this."
Previous research has shown that embryonic teeth are capable of developing normally in the adult mouth.
"What is required is the identification of adult sources of human epithelial and mesenchymal cells that can be obtained in sufficient numbers to make biotooth formation a viable alternative to dental implants," said Sharpe.
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
Confirman primer caso de dengue autóctono en Argentina
Se ha registrado el primer caso de dengue autóctono en la capital de Argentina, Buenos Aires, según confirmaron las autoridades sanitarias, que recomendaron a la población realizar las prevenciones necesarias para evitar este tipo de infecciones.
La ministra de Salud porteña, Graciela Reybaud, confirmó el caso de dengue autóctono, dado que la paciente, una menor de 14 años, no tiene antecedentes de haber ido a zonas donde podría haberse contagiado.
“Nosotros tuvimos 24 casos positivos de dengue en laboratorio, pero esas personas habían estado en lugares endémicos como Paraguay y Bolivia, por ejemplo. Este fue el primero de manera autóctona”, dijo Reybaud a los medios locales.
La ministra de Salud porteña, Graciela Reybaud, confirmó el caso de dengue autóctono, dado que la paciente, una menor de 14 años, no tiene antecedentes de haber ido a zonas donde podría haberse contagiado.
“Nosotros tuvimos 24 casos positivos de dengue en laboratorio, pero esas personas habían estado en lugares endémicos como Paraguay y Bolivia, por ejemplo. Este fue el primero de manera autóctona”, dijo Reybaud a los medios locales.
How Facebook could get you arrested
Smart technology and the sort of big data available to social networking sites are helping police target crime before it happens. But is this ethical?
The police have a very bright future ahead of them – and not just because they can now look up potential suspects on Google. As they embrace the latest technologies, their work is bound to become easier and more effective, raising thorny questions about privacy, civil liberties, and due process.
For one, policing is in a good position to profit from "big data". As the costs of recording devices keep falling, it's now possible to spot and react to crimes in real time. Consider a city like Oakland in California. Like many other American cities, today it is covered with hundreds of hidden microphones and sensors, part of a system known as ShotSpotter, which not only alerts the police to the sound of gunshots but also triangulates their location. On verifying that the noises are actual gunshots, a human operator then informs the police.
It's not hard to imagine ways to improve a system like ShotSpotter. Gunshot-detection systems are, in principle, reactive; they might help to thwart or quickly respond to crime, but they won't root it out. The decreasing costs of computing, considerable advances in sensor technology, and the ability to tap into vast online databases allow us to move from identifying crime as it happens – which is what the ShotSpotter does now – to predicting it before it happens.
Instead of detecting gunshots, new and smarter systems can focus on detecting the sounds that have preceded gunshots in the past. This is where the techniques and ideologies of big data make another appearance, promising that a greater, deeper analysis of data about past crimes, combined with sophisticated algorithms, can predict – and prevent – future ones. This is a practice known as "predictive policing", and even though it's just a few years old, many tout it as a revolution in how police work is done. It's the epitome of solutionism; there is hardly a better example of how technology and big data can be put to work to solve the problem of crime by simply eliminating crime altogether. It all seems too easy and logical; who wouldn't want to prevent crime before it happens?
Police in America are particularly excited about what predictive policing – one of Time magazine's best inventions of 2011 – has to offer; Europeans are slowly catching up as well, with Britain in the lead. Take the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), which is using software called PredPol. The software analyses years of previously published statistics about property crimes such as burglary and automobile theft, breaks the patrol map into 500 sq ft zones, calculates the historical distribution and frequency of actual crimes across them, and then tells officers which zones to police more vigorously.
It's much better – and potentially cheaper – to prevent a crime before it happens than to come late and investigate it. So while patrolling officers might not catch a criminal in action, their presence in the right place at the right time still helps to deter criminal activity. Occasionally, though, the police might indeed disrupt an ongoing crime. In June 2012 the Associated Press reported on an LAPD captain who wasn't so sure that sending officers into a grid zone on the edge of his coverage area – following PredPol's recommendation – was such a good idea. His officers, as the captain expected, found nothing; however, when they returned several nights later, they caught someone breaking a window. Score one for PredPol?
Trials of PredPol and similar software began too recently to speak of any conclusive results. Still, the intermediate results look quite impressive. In Los Angeles, five LAPD divisions that use it in patrolling territory populated by roughly 1.3m people have seen crime decline by 13%. The city of Santa Cruz, which now also uses PredPol, has seen its burglaries decline by nearly 30%. Similar uplifting statistics can be found in many other police departments across America.
Other powerful systems that are currently being built can also be easily reconfigured to suit more predictive demands. Consider the New York Police Department's latest innovation – the so-called Domain Awareness System – which syncs the city's 3,000 closed-circuit camera feeds with arrest records, 911 calls, licence plate recognition technology, and radiation detectors. It can monitor a situation in real time and draw on a lot of data to understand what's happening. The leap from here to predicting what might happen is not so great.
If PredPol's "prediction" sounds familiar, that's because its methods were inspired by those of prominent internet companies. Writing in The Police Chief magazine in 2009, a senior LAPD officer lauded Amazon's ability to "understand the unique groups in their customer base and to characterise their purchasing patterns", which allows the company "not only to anticipate but also to promote or otherwise shape future behaviour". Thus, just as Amazon's algorithms make it possible to predict what books you are likely to buy next, similar algorithms might tell the police how often – and where – certain crimes might happen again. Ever stolen a bicycle? Then you might also be interested in robbing a grocery store.
Here we run into the perennial problem of algorithms: their presumed objectivity and quite real lack of transparency. We can't examine Amazon's algorithms; they are completely opaque and have not been subject to outside scrutiny. Amazon claims, perhaps correctly, that secrecy allows it to stay competitive. But can the same logic be applied to policing? If no one can examine the algorithms – which is likely to be the case as predictive-policing software will be built by private companies – we won't know what biases and discriminatory practices are built into them. And algorithms increasingly dominate many other parts of our legal system; for example, they are also used to predict how likely a certain criminal, once on parole or probation, is to kill or be killed. Developed by a University of Pennsylvania professor, this algorithm has been tested in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington DC. Such probabilistic information can then influence sentencing recommendations and bail amounts, so it's hardly trivial.
But how do we know that the algorithms used for prediction do not reflect the biases of their authors? For example, crime tends to happen in poor and racially diverse areas. Might algorithms – with their presumed objectivity – sanction even greater racial profiling? In most democratic regimes today, police need probable cause – some evidence and not just guesswork – to stop people in the street and search them. But armed with such software, can the police simply say that the algorithms told them to do it? And if so, how will the algorithms testify in court? Techno-utopians will probably overlook such questions and focus on the abstract benefits that algorithmic policing has to offer; techno-sceptics, who start with some basic knowledge of the problems, constraints and biases that already pervade modern policing, will likely be more critical.
Legal scholar Andrew Guthrie Ferguson has studied predictive policing in detail. Ferguson cautions against putting too much faith in the algorithms and succumbing to information reductionism. "Predictive algorithms are not magic boxes that divine future crime, but instead probability models of future events based on current environmental vulnerabilities," he notes.
But why do they work? Ferguson points out that there will be future crime not because there was past crime but because "the environmental vulnerability that encouraged the first crime is still unaddressed". When the police, having read their gloomy forecast about yet another planned car theft, see an individual carrying a screwdriver in one of the predicted zones, this might provide reasonable suspicion for a stop. But, as Ferguson notes, if the police arrested the gang responsible for prior crimes the day before, but the model does not yet reflect this information, then prediction should be irrelevant, and the police will need some other reasonable ground for stopping the individual. If they do make the stop, then they shouldn't be able to say in court, "The model told us to." This, however, may not be obvious to the person they have stopped, who has no familiarity with the software and its algorithms.
Then there's the problem of under-reported crimes. While most homicides are reported, many rapes and home break-ins are not. Even in the absence of such reports, local police still develop ways of knowing when something odd is happening in their neighbourhoods. Predictive policing, on the other hand, might replace such intuitive knowledge with a naive belief in the comprehensive power of statistics. If only data about reported crimes are used to predict future crimes and guide police work, some types of crime might be left unstudied – and thus unpursued.
What to do about the algorithms then? It is a rare thing to say these days but there is much to learn from the financial sector in this regard. For example, after a couple of disasters caused by algorithmic trading in August 2012, financial authorities in Hong Kong and Australia drafted proposals to establish regular independent audits of the design, development and modification of the computer systems used for algorithmic trading. Thus, just as financial auditors could attest to a company's balance sheet, algorithmic auditors could verify if its algorithms are in order.
As algorithms are further incorporated into our daily lives – from Google's Autocomplete to PredPol – it seems prudent to subject them to regular investigations by qualified and ideally public-spirited third parties. One advantage of the auditing solution is that it won't require the audited companies publicly to disclose their trade secrets, which has been the principal objection – voiced, of course, by software companies – to increasing the transparency of their algorithms.
The police are also finding powerful allies in Silicon Valley. Companies such as Facebook have begun using algorithms and historical data to predict which of their users might commit crimes using their services. Here is how it works: Facebook's own predictive systems can flag certain users as suspicious by studying certain behavioural cues: the user only writes messages to others under 18; most of the user's contacts are female; the user is typing keywords like "sex" or "date." Staffers can then examine each case and report users to the police as necessary. Facebook's concern with its own brand here is straightforward: no one should think that the platform is harbouring criminals.
In 2011 Facebook began using PhotoDNA, a Microsoft service that allows it to scan every uploaded picture and compare it with child-porn images from the FBI's National Crime Information Centre. Since then it has expanded its analysis beyond pictures as well. In mid-2012 Reuters reported on how Facebook, armed with its predictive algorithms, apprehended a middle-aged man chatting about sex with a 13-year-old girl, arranging to meet her the day after. The police contacted the teen, took over her computer, and caught the man.
Facebook is at the cutting edge of algorithmic surveillance here: just like police departments that draw on earlier crime statistics, Facebook draws on archives of real chats that preceded real sex assaults. Curiously, Facebook justifies its use of algorithms by claiming that they tend to be less intrusive than humans. "We've never wanted to set up an environment where we have employees looking at private communications, so it's really important that we use technology that has a very low false-positive rate," Facebook's chief of security told Reuters.
It's difficult to question the application of such methods to catching sexual predators who prey on children (not to mention that Facebook may have little choice here, as current US child-protection laws require online platforms used by teens to be vigilant about predators). But should Facebook be allowed to predict any other crimes? After all, it can easily engage in many other kinds of similar police work: detecting potential drug dealers, identifying potential copyright violators (Facebook already prevents its users from sharing links to many file-sharing sites), and, especially in the wake of the 2011 riots in the UK, predicting the next generation of troublemakers. And as such data becomes available, the temptation to use it becomes almost irresistible.
That temptation was on full display following the rampage in a Colorado movie theatre in June 2012, when an isolated gunman went on a killing spree, murdering 12 people. A headline that appeared in the Wall Street Journal soon after the shooting says it all: "Can Data Mining Stop the Killing?" It won't take long for this question to be answered in the affirmative.
In many respects, internet companies are in a much better position to predict crime than police. Where the latter need a warrant to assess someone's private data, the likes of Facebook can look up their users' data whenever they want. From the perspective of police, it might actually be advantageous to have Facebook do all this dirty work, because Facebook's own investigations don't have to go through the court system.
While Facebook probably feels too financially secure to turn this into a business – it would rather play up its role as a good citizen – smaller companies might not resist the temptation to make a quick buck. In 2011 TomTom, a Dutch satellite-navigation company that has now licensed some of its almighty technology to Apple, found itself in the middle of a privacy scandal when it emerged that it had been selling GPS driving data collected from customers to the police. Privacy advocate Chris Soghoian has likewise documented the easy-to-use "pay-and-wiretap" interfaces that various internet and mobile companies have established for law enforcement agencies.
Publicly available information is up for grabs too. Thus, police are already studying social-networking sites for signs of unrest, often with the help of private companies. The title of a recent brochure from Accenture urges law enforcement agencies to "tap the power of social media to drive better policing outcomes". Plenty of companies are eager to help. ECM Universe, a start-up from Virginia, US, touts its system, called Rapid Content Analysis for Law Enforcement, which is described as "a social media surveillance solution providing real-time monitoring of Twitter, Facebook, Google groups, and many other communities where users express themselves freely".
"The solution," notes the ECM brochure, "employs text analytics to correlate threatening language to surveillance subjects, and alert investigators of warning signs." What kind of warning signs? A recent article in the Washington Post notes that ECM Universe helped authorities in Fort Lupton, Colorado, identify a man who was tweeting such menacing things as "kill people" and "burn [expletive] school". This seems straightforward enough but what if it was just "harm people" or "police suck"?
As companies like ECM Universe accumulate extensive archives of tweets and Facebook updates sent by actual criminals, they will also be able to predict the kinds of non-threatening verbal cues that tend to precede criminal acts. Thus, even tweeting that you don't like your yoghurt might bring police to your door, especially if someone who tweeted the same thing three years before ended up shooting someone in the face later in the day.
However, unlike Facebook, neither police nor outside companies see the whole picture of what users do on social media platforms: private communications and "silent" actions – clicking links and opening pages – are invisible to them. But Facebook, Twitter, Google and similar companies surely know all of this – so their predictive power is much greater than the police's. They can even rank users based on how likely they are to commit certain acts.
An apt illustration of how such a system can be abused comes from The Silicon Jungle, ostensibly a work of fiction written by a Google data-mining engineer and published by Princeton University Press – not usually a fiction publisher – in 2010. The novel is set in the data-mining operation of Ubatoo – a search engine that bears a striking resemblance to Google – where a summer intern develops Terrorist-o-Meter, a sort of universal score of terrorism aptitude that the company could assign to all its users. Those unhappy with their scores would, of course, get a chance to correct them – by submitting even more details about themselves. This might seem like a crazy idea but – in perhaps another allusion to Google – Ubatoo's corporate culture is so obsessed with innovation that its interns are allowed to roam free, so the project goes ahead.
To build Terrorist-o-Meter, the intern takes a list of "interesting" books that indicate a potential interest in subversive activities and looks up the names of the customers who have bought them from one of Ubatoo's online shops. Then he finds the websites that those customers frequent and uses the URLs to find even more people – and so on until he hits the magic number of 5,000. The intern soon finds himself pursued by both an al-Qaida-like terrorist group that wants those 5,000 names to boost its recruitment campaign, as well as various defence and intelligence agencies that can't wait to preemptively ship those 5,000 people to Guantánamo.
We don't know if Facebook has some kind of Paedophile-o-Meter. But, given the extensive user analysis it already does, it probably wouldn't be very hard to build one –and not just for scoring paedophiles. What about Drug-o-Meter? Or – Joseph McCarthy would love this – Communist-o-Meter? Given enough data and the right algorithms, all of us are bound to look suspicious. What happens, then, when Facebook turns us – before we have committed any crimes – over to the police? Will we, like characters in a Kafka novel, struggle to understand what our crime really is and spend the rest of our lives clearing our names? Will Facebook perhaps also offer us a way to pay a fee to have our reputations restored? What if its algorithms are wrong?
The promise of predictive policing might be real, but so are its dangers. The solutionist impulse needs to be restrained. Police need to subject their algorithms to external scrutiny and address their biases. Social networking sites need to establish clear standards for how much predictive self-policing they'll actually do and how far they will go in profiling their users and sharing this data with police. While Facebook might be more effective than police in predicting crime, it cannot be allowed to take on these policing functions without also adhering to the same rules and regulations that spell out what police can and cannot do in a democracy. We cannot circumvent legal procedures and subvert democratic norms in the name of efficiency alone.
This is an edited extract from To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don't Exist by Evgeny Morozov, published by Allen Lane.
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
The police have a very bright future ahead of them – and not just because they can now look up potential suspects on Google. As they embrace the latest technologies, their work is bound to become easier and more effective, raising thorny questions about privacy, civil liberties, and due process.
For one, policing is in a good position to profit from "big data". As the costs of recording devices keep falling, it's now possible to spot and react to crimes in real time. Consider a city like Oakland in California. Like many other American cities, today it is covered with hundreds of hidden microphones and sensors, part of a system known as ShotSpotter, which not only alerts the police to the sound of gunshots but also triangulates their location. On verifying that the noises are actual gunshots, a human operator then informs the police.
It's not hard to imagine ways to improve a system like ShotSpotter. Gunshot-detection systems are, in principle, reactive; they might help to thwart or quickly respond to crime, but they won't root it out. The decreasing costs of computing, considerable advances in sensor technology, and the ability to tap into vast online databases allow us to move from identifying crime as it happens – which is what the ShotSpotter does now – to predicting it before it happens.
Instead of detecting gunshots, new and smarter systems can focus on detecting the sounds that have preceded gunshots in the past. This is where the techniques and ideologies of big data make another appearance, promising that a greater, deeper analysis of data about past crimes, combined with sophisticated algorithms, can predict – and prevent – future ones. This is a practice known as "predictive policing", and even though it's just a few years old, many tout it as a revolution in how police work is done. It's the epitome of solutionism; there is hardly a better example of how technology and big data can be put to work to solve the problem of crime by simply eliminating crime altogether. It all seems too easy and logical; who wouldn't want to prevent crime before it happens?
Police in America are particularly excited about what predictive policing – one of Time magazine's best inventions of 2011 – has to offer; Europeans are slowly catching up as well, with Britain in the lead. Take the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), which is using software called PredPol. The software analyses years of previously published statistics about property crimes such as burglary and automobile theft, breaks the patrol map into 500 sq ft zones, calculates the historical distribution and frequency of actual crimes across them, and then tells officers which zones to police more vigorously.
It's much better – and potentially cheaper – to prevent a crime before it happens than to come late and investigate it. So while patrolling officers might not catch a criminal in action, their presence in the right place at the right time still helps to deter criminal activity. Occasionally, though, the police might indeed disrupt an ongoing crime. In June 2012 the Associated Press reported on an LAPD captain who wasn't so sure that sending officers into a grid zone on the edge of his coverage area – following PredPol's recommendation – was such a good idea. His officers, as the captain expected, found nothing; however, when they returned several nights later, they caught someone breaking a window. Score one for PredPol?
Trials of PredPol and similar software began too recently to speak of any conclusive results. Still, the intermediate results look quite impressive. In Los Angeles, five LAPD divisions that use it in patrolling territory populated by roughly 1.3m people have seen crime decline by 13%. The city of Santa Cruz, which now also uses PredPol, has seen its burglaries decline by nearly 30%. Similar uplifting statistics can be found in many other police departments across America.
Other powerful systems that are currently being built can also be easily reconfigured to suit more predictive demands. Consider the New York Police Department's latest innovation – the so-called Domain Awareness System – which syncs the city's 3,000 closed-circuit camera feeds with arrest records, 911 calls, licence plate recognition technology, and radiation detectors. It can monitor a situation in real time and draw on a lot of data to understand what's happening. The leap from here to predicting what might happen is not so great.
If PredPol's "prediction" sounds familiar, that's because its methods were inspired by those of prominent internet companies. Writing in The Police Chief magazine in 2009, a senior LAPD officer lauded Amazon's ability to "understand the unique groups in their customer base and to characterise their purchasing patterns", which allows the company "not only to anticipate but also to promote or otherwise shape future behaviour". Thus, just as Amazon's algorithms make it possible to predict what books you are likely to buy next, similar algorithms might tell the police how often – and where – certain crimes might happen again. Ever stolen a bicycle? Then you might also be interested in robbing a grocery store.
Here we run into the perennial problem of algorithms: their presumed objectivity and quite real lack of transparency. We can't examine Amazon's algorithms; they are completely opaque and have not been subject to outside scrutiny. Amazon claims, perhaps correctly, that secrecy allows it to stay competitive. But can the same logic be applied to policing? If no one can examine the algorithms – which is likely to be the case as predictive-policing software will be built by private companies – we won't know what biases and discriminatory practices are built into them. And algorithms increasingly dominate many other parts of our legal system; for example, they are also used to predict how likely a certain criminal, once on parole or probation, is to kill or be killed. Developed by a University of Pennsylvania professor, this algorithm has been tested in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington DC. Such probabilistic information can then influence sentencing recommendations and bail amounts, so it's hardly trivial.
But how do we know that the algorithms used for prediction do not reflect the biases of their authors? For example, crime tends to happen in poor and racially diverse areas. Might algorithms – with their presumed objectivity – sanction even greater racial profiling? In most democratic regimes today, police need probable cause – some evidence and not just guesswork – to stop people in the street and search them. But armed with such software, can the police simply say that the algorithms told them to do it? And if so, how will the algorithms testify in court? Techno-utopians will probably overlook such questions and focus on the abstract benefits that algorithmic policing has to offer; techno-sceptics, who start with some basic knowledge of the problems, constraints and biases that already pervade modern policing, will likely be more critical.
Legal scholar Andrew Guthrie Ferguson has studied predictive policing in detail. Ferguson cautions against putting too much faith in the algorithms and succumbing to information reductionism. "Predictive algorithms are not magic boxes that divine future crime, but instead probability models of future events based on current environmental vulnerabilities," he notes.
But why do they work? Ferguson points out that there will be future crime not because there was past crime but because "the environmental vulnerability that encouraged the first crime is still unaddressed". When the police, having read their gloomy forecast about yet another planned car theft, see an individual carrying a screwdriver in one of the predicted zones, this might provide reasonable suspicion for a stop. But, as Ferguson notes, if the police arrested the gang responsible for prior crimes the day before, but the model does not yet reflect this information, then prediction should be irrelevant, and the police will need some other reasonable ground for stopping the individual. If they do make the stop, then they shouldn't be able to say in court, "The model told us to." This, however, may not be obvious to the person they have stopped, who has no familiarity with the software and its algorithms.
Then there's the problem of under-reported crimes. While most homicides are reported, many rapes and home break-ins are not. Even in the absence of such reports, local police still develop ways of knowing when something odd is happening in their neighbourhoods. Predictive policing, on the other hand, might replace such intuitive knowledge with a naive belief in the comprehensive power of statistics. If only data about reported crimes are used to predict future crimes and guide police work, some types of crime might be left unstudied – and thus unpursued.
What to do about the algorithms then? It is a rare thing to say these days but there is much to learn from the financial sector in this regard. For example, after a couple of disasters caused by algorithmic trading in August 2012, financial authorities in Hong Kong and Australia drafted proposals to establish regular independent audits of the design, development and modification of the computer systems used for algorithmic trading. Thus, just as financial auditors could attest to a company's balance sheet, algorithmic auditors could verify if its algorithms are in order.
As algorithms are further incorporated into our daily lives – from Google's Autocomplete to PredPol – it seems prudent to subject them to regular investigations by qualified and ideally public-spirited third parties. One advantage of the auditing solution is that it won't require the audited companies publicly to disclose their trade secrets, which has been the principal objection – voiced, of course, by software companies – to increasing the transparency of their algorithms.
The police are also finding powerful allies in Silicon Valley. Companies such as Facebook have begun using algorithms and historical data to predict which of their users might commit crimes using their services. Here is how it works: Facebook's own predictive systems can flag certain users as suspicious by studying certain behavioural cues: the user only writes messages to others under 18; most of the user's contacts are female; the user is typing keywords like "sex" or "date." Staffers can then examine each case and report users to the police as necessary. Facebook's concern with its own brand here is straightforward: no one should think that the platform is harbouring criminals.
In 2011 Facebook began using PhotoDNA, a Microsoft service that allows it to scan every uploaded picture and compare it with child-porn images from the FBI's National Crime Information Centre. Since then it has expanded its analysis beyond pictures as well. In mid-2012 Reuters reported on how Facebook, armed with its predictive algorithms, apprehended a middle-aged man chatting about sex with a 13-year-old girl, arranging to meet her the day after. The police contacted the teen, took over her computer, and caught the man.
Facebook is at the cutting edge of algorithmic surveillance here: just like police departments that draw on earlier crime statistics, Facebook draws on archives of real chats that preceded real sex assaults. Curiously, Facebook justifies its use of algorithms by claiming that they tend to be less intrusive than humans. "We've never wanted to set up an environment where we have employees looking at private communications, so it's really important that we use technology that has a very low false-positive rate," Facebook's chief of security told Reuters.
It's difficult to question the application of such methods to catching sexual predators who prey on children (not to mention that Facebook may have little choice here, as current US child-protection laws require online platforms used by teens to be vigilant about predators). But should Facebook be allowed to predict any other crimes? After all, it can easily engage in many other kinds of similar police work: detecting potential drug dealers, identifying potential copyright violators (Facebook already prevents its users from sharing links to many file-sharing sites), and, especially in the wake of the 2011 riots in the UK, predicting the next generation of troublemakers. And as such data becomes available, the temptation to use it becomes almost irresistible.
That temptation was on full display following the rampage in a Colorado movie theatre in June 2012, when an isolated gunman went on a killing spree, murdering 12 people. A headline that appeared in the Wall Street Journal soon after the shooting says it all: "Can Data Mining Stop the Killing?" It won't take long for this question to be answered in the affirmative.
In many respects, internet companies are in a much better position to predict crime than police. Where the latter need a warrant to assess someone's private data, the likes of Facebook can look up their users' data whenever they want. From the perspective of police, it might actually be advantageous to have Facebook do all this dirty work, because Facebook's own investigations don't have to go through the court system.
While Facebook probably feels too financially secure to turn this into a business – it would rather play up its role as a good citizen – smaller companies might not resist the temptation to make a quick buck. In 2011 TomTom, a Dutch satellite-navigation company that has now licensed some of its almighty technology to Apple, found itself in the middle of a privacy scandal when it emerged that it had been selling GPS driving data collected from customers to the police. Privacy advocate Chris Soghoian has likewise documented the easy-to-use "pay-and-wiretap" interfaces that various internet and mobile companies have established for law enforcement agencies.
Publicly available information is up for grabs too. Thus, police are already studying social-networking sites for signs of unrest, often with the help of private companies. The title of a recent brochure from Accenture urges law enforcement agencies to "tap the power of social media to drive better policing outcomes". Plenty of companies are eager to help. ECM Universe, a start-up from Virginia, US, touts its system, called Rapid Content Analysis for Law Enforcement, which is described as "a social media surveillance solution providing real-time monitoring of Twitter, Facebook, Google groups, and many other communities where users express themselves freely".
"The solution," notes the ECM brochure, "employs text analytics to correlate threatening language to surveillance subjects, and alert investigators of warning signs." What kind of warning signs? A recent article in the Washington Post notes that ECM Universe helped authorities in Fort Lupton, Colorado, identify a man who was tweeting such menacing things as "kill people" and "burn [expletive] school". This seems straightforward enough but what if it was just "harm people" or "police suck"?
As companies like ECM Universe accumulate extensive archives of tweets and Facebook updates sent by actual criminals, they will also be able to predict the kinds of non-threatening verbal cues that tend to precede criminal acts. Thus, even tweeting that you don't like your yoghurt might bring police to your door, especially if someone who tweeted the same thing three years before ended up shooting someone in the face later in the day.
However, unlike Facebook, neither police nor outside companies see the whole picture of what users do on social media platforms: private communications and "silent" actions – clicking links and opening pages – are invisible to them. But Facebook, Twitter, Google and similar companies surely know all of this – so their predictive power is much greater than the police's. They can even rank users based on how likely they are to commit certain acts.
An apt illustration of how such a system can be abused comes from The Silicon Jungle, ostensibly a work of fiction written by a Google data-mining engineer and published by Princeton University Press – not usually a fiction publisher – in 2010. The novel is set in the data-mining operation of Ubatoo – a search engine that bears a striking resemblance to Google – where a summer intern develops Terrorist-o-Meter, a sort of universal score of terrorism aptitude that the company could assign to all its users. Those unhappy with their scores would, of course, get a chance to correct them – by submitting even more details about themselves. This might seem like a crazy idea but – in perhaps another allusion to Google – Ubatoo's corporate culture is so obsessed with innovation that its interns are allowed to roam free, so the project goes ahead.
To build Terrorist-o-Meter, the intern takes a list of "interesting" books that indicate a potential interest in subversive activities and looks up the names of the customers who have bought them from one of Ubatoo's online shops. Then he finds the websites that those customers frequent and uses the URLs to find even more people – and so on until he hits the magic number of 5,000. The intern soon finds himself pursued by both an al-Qaida-like terrorist group that wants those 5,000 names to boost its recruitment campaign, as well as various defence and intelligence agencies that can't wait to preemptively ship those 5,000 people to Guantánamo.
We don't know if Facebook has some kind of Paedophile-o-Meter. But, given the extensive user analysis it already does, it probably wouldn't be very hard to build one –and not just for scoring paedophiles. What about Drug-o-Meter? Or – Joseph McCarthy would love this – Communist-o-Meter? Given enough data and the right algorithms, all of us are bound to look suspicious. What happens, then, when Facebook turns us – before we have committed any crimes – over to the police? Will we, like characters in a Kafka novel, struggle to understand what our crime really is and spend the rest of our lives clearing our names? Will Facebook perhaps also offer us a way to pay a fee to have our reputations restored? What if its algorithms are wrong?
The promise of predictive policing might be real, but so are its dangers. The solutionist impulse needs to be restrained. Police need to subject their algorithms to external scrutiny and address their biases. Social networking sites need to establish clear standards for how much predictive self-policing they'll actually do and how far they will go in profiling their users and sharing this data with police. While Facebook might be more effective than police in predicting crime, it cannot be allowed to take on these policing functions without also adhering to the same rules and regulations that spell out what police can and cannot do in a democracy. We cannot circumvent legal procedures and subvert democratic norms in the name of efficiency alone.
This is an edited extract from To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism, and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don't Exist by Evgeny Morozov, published by Allen Lane.
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
México: Declaran alerta por actividad volcánica en Colima
Las autoridades mexicanas han declarado la alerta en territorios aledaños al volcán Colima por el peligro de avalanchas y el creciente riesgo de expulsiones masivas del material piroclástico. A la población del estado con el mismo nombre se le recomienda que evite acudir a barrancos y zonas cercanas al volcán.
Desde principios de este año se observaba un ligero incremento en la actividad volcánica y los científicos identificaron “con anticipación la ocurrencia de un evento de mayores magnitudes”, según revela un comunicado de la Unidad Estatal de Protección Civil.
Desde principios de este año se observaba un ligero incremento en la actividad volcánica y los científicos identificaron “con anticipación la ocurrencia de un evento de mayores magnitudes”, según revela un comunicado de la Unidad Estatal de Protección Civil.
Hallan cinco cadáveres envueltos como momias en México
Los cuerpos de cinco hombres desnudos y envueltos como momias fueron hallados este viernes en el estado de Coahuila, México, según la Fiscalía de dicho estado.
La causa de su muerte se desconoce. Las autoridades locales informaron que, a priori, los cuerpos no presentan impactos de bala, como es usual en los ajustes de cuentas entre bandas del crimen organizado.
Coahuila, al norte del país, es una de las regiones más violentas de México y está controlada por los cárteles del narcotráfico.
La causa de su muerte se desconoce. Las autoridades locales informaron que, a priori, los cuerpos no presentan impactos de bala, como es usual en los ajustes de cuentas entre bandas del crimen organizado.
Coahuila, al norte del país, es una de las regiones más violentas de México y está controlada por los cárteles del narcotráfico.
Los consumidores de pescado en EE.UU. son sistemáticamente engañados
La Organización Internacional de defensa de los Derechos Humanos Ocean informó que un tercio del pescado que se vende en ese país no pertenece a la especie que el comprador cree que está adquiriendo. Todos los días en las pescaderías y restaurantes de Estados Unidos se registran casos de fraude con pescado. La mayoria del producto ofrecido está mal identificado y el pescado cultivado en cautividad se vende como salvaje. En caso de los restaurantes japoneses, el 74% del pescado que dicen que contienen los platos no se corresponde con la realidad porque en el 'sushi' no es sencillo distinguir los sabores y las especies. Las revelaciones de Oceana no son sólo un fraude para el consumidor sino que también pueden suponer un peligro para la salud pública debido a algunas especies de pescado que contienen elevados niveles de mercurio, como la caballa rey.
Dos aviones de pasajeros chocan en el aeropuerto de Nueva York
Dos aviones de pasajeros chocaron en una pista del aeropuerto internacional John F. Kennedy de Nueva York. El accidente tuvo lugar a las 11:15 GMT del sábado y no provocó víctimas.
Un representante del aeropuerto informó que una aeronave de la compañía regional estadounidense JetBlue con destino a Florida se detuvo en el carril de rodaje debido a problemas mecánicos, por lo que un avión de la empresa india Air India chocó contra ella.
"Como resultado de la colisión, el avión [de JetBlue] resultó ligeramente dañado. Los 150 pasajeros que se encontraban a bordo fueron trasladados a otra nave, que logró despegar de Nueva York tres horas y media después”, agregó.
Un representante del aeropuerto informó que una aeronave de la compañía regional estadounidense JetBlue con destino a Florida se detuvo en el carril de rodaje debido a problemas mecánicos, por lo que un avión de la empresa india Air India chocó contra ella.
"Como resultado de la colisión, el avión [de JetBlue] resultó ligeramente dañado. Los 150 pasajeros que se encontraban a bordo fueron trasladados a otra nave, que logró despegar de Nueva York tres horas y media después”, agregó.
Sacerdote católico italiano es condenado en Brasil por abusar de una menor
El sacerdote católico italiano Piergiorgio Albertini fue condenado a nueve años de prisión por abusar en 1993 de una menor de edad, que tenía nueve años, según informó la prensa brasileña.
Albertini, de origen suizo y nacionalidad italiana, en la actualidad con 73 años, era párroco en el municipio de Borba, a 150 kilómetros de Manaus, la capital del norteño estado de Amazonas. El cura fue condenado el pasado 26 de febrero, pero solo recibió la notificación judicial este jueves.
La menor, cuyo nombre fue preservado, habría sufrido abusos del sacerdote entre los nueve y doce años de edad, a partir de 1993, cuando Albertini tenía 53 años.
Albertini, de origen suizo y nacionalidad italiana, en la actualidad con 73 años, era párroco en el municipio de Borba, a 150 kilómetros de Manaus, la capital del norteño estado de Amazonas. El cura fue condenado el pasado 26 de febrero, pero solo recibió la notificación judicial este jueves.
La menor, cuyo nombre fue preservado, habría sufrido abusos del sacerdote entre los nueve y doce años de edad, a partir de 1993, cuando Albertini tenía 53 años.
Uranium threat to 15,000yo Australian rock art
The Wellington Range in the northeastern state of Queensland hasbeen under surveillance from uranium mining companies for manyyears. Cameco, a Canadian mining company, recently reported thediscovery of a large uranium deposit in this range, according to aGlobal Mail report.
However, this region is also home to an area dubbed one of thegreat rock-art precincts of the globe by United NationsEducational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), andregular guided tours are organized to the areas.
The secret wall paintings display ancient aboriginal scenes andsymbols, such as “bullymen” – police-type troopers, thepaintings of which were thought to be able to vanquish enemiesthrough sorcery. Other pictures are more nature-related.
The aboriginal paintings are thought to be thousands of yearsold, with the earliest discovered dating more than 10,000 yearsback.
Despite the fact that much of the rock art is contained in‘Designated Landscape Areas’, which means the site ofaboriginal heritage is entry is limited to some, state permissionfor mineral exploration has still been granted.
On Friday, the Global Mail published a report drawing onsix-month-long research by Noelene Cole, an assistant researchfellow in archaeology with James Cook University, and associatearchaeologist Alice Buhrich. Their research discovered thatapplications for coal and mineral exploration cover what isbasically an entire art-covered ‘precinct’ on the Cape YorkPeninsula.
“It is astounding, internationally speaking, that a regionlike this would be considered for mining,” said Cole.
Cameco located the deposit in remote northern hills thatcontained so much of the art, that one mere complex contained amassive 3,000 images. The oldest piece of art here was dated asbeing approximately 15,000 years old.
“It would be like the French mining the Lascaux Caves and theDordogne, which is World Heritage listed,” Tony Burke,Australia’s environment minister said.
His office went on to point out that although Cameco has not yetsubmitted a proposal for a uranium project in the Wellingtonregion, because it is such a sizeable discovery, it is likely thecompany will pursue it further.
Cameco Australia's managing director, Brian Reilly, has saidthat his company would work alongside stakeholders to ensure theprotection of the area's environment, culture and heritage,strongly suggesting that further exploration is on thecards.
Australian mining magnate and billionaire Gina Rinehart, theworld’s second-richest woman, began to create a stir in the lastweek, when it emerged that she had also sought permission to lookfor minerals over some of the countries older art on Cape York.
At the time, traditional aboriginal owners asked Australia’sFederal Environment Minister, Tony Burke, to place the area on theWorld Heritage List to protect the site of their ancestors’ art.One of Rinehart’s companies later announced that it would withdrawtwo applications to excavate for minerals.
Cole and Buhrich found that the Queensland Government hasalready granted some mineral and coal exploration permits in areasmeant to be protected as special Aboriginal places, according tothe Global Mail.
Australia is home to around a third of the planet’s uraniumresources and exports roughly 7,000 tonnes per annum.
However, this region is also home to an area dubbed one of thegreat rock-art precincts of the globe by United NationsEducational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), andregular guided tours are organized to the areas.
The secret wall paintings display ancient aboriginal scenes andsymbols, such as “bullymen” – police-type troopers, thepaintings of which were thought to be able to vanquish enemiesthrough sorcery. Other pictures are more nature-related.
The aboriginal paintings are thought to be thousands of yearsold, with the earliest discovered dating more than 10,000 yearsback.
Despite the fact that much of the rock art is contained in‘Designated Landscape Areas’, which means the site ofaboriginal heritage is entry is limited to some, state permissionfor mineral exploration has still been granted.
On Friday, the Global Mail published a report drawing onsix-month-long research by Noelene Cole, an assistant researchfellow in archaeology with James Cook University, and associatearchaeologist Alice Buhrich. Their research discovered thatapplications for coal and mineral exploration cover what isbasically an entire art-covered ‘precinct’ on the Cape YorkPeninsula.
“It is astounding, internationally speaking, that a regionlike this would be considered for mining,” said Cole.
Cameco located the deposit in remote northern hills thatcontained so much of the art, that one mere complex contained amassive 3,000 images. The oldest piece of art here was dated asbeing approximately 15,000 years old.
“It would be like the French mining the Lascaux Caves and theDordogne, which is World Heritage listed,” Tony Burke,Australia’s environment minister said.
His office went on to point out that although Cameco has not yetsubmitted a proposal for a uranium project in the Wellingtonregion, because it is such a sizeable discovery, it is likely thecompany will pursue it further.
Cameco Australia's managing director, Brian Reilly, has saidthat his company would work alongside stakeholders to ensure theprotection of the area's environment, culture and heritage,strongly suggesting that further exploration is on thecards.
Australian mining magnate and billionaire Gina Rinehart, theworld’s second-richest woman, began to create a stir in the lastweek, when it emerged that she had also sought permission to lookfor minerals over some of the countries older art on Cape York.
At the time, traditional aboriginal owners asked Australia’sFederal Environment Minister, Tony Burke, to place the area on theWorld Heritage List to protect the site of their ancestors’ art.One of Rinehart’s companies later announced that it would withdrawtwo applications to excavate for minerals.
Cole and Buhrich found that the Queensland Government hasalready granted some mineral and coal exploration permits in areasmeant to be protected as special Aboriginal places, according tothe Global Mail.
Australia is home to around a third of the planet’s uraniumresources and exports roughly 7,000 tonnes per annum.
Spicy food festival sickens hundreds in Newcastle
Hundreds poisoned as health officers attempt to treat sufferers and plot source of suspected salmonella outbreak
Around 200 people who attended a spicy food street festival have reported suffering from diarrhoea and vomiting amid fears of a salmonella outbreak, a council spokesman said on Thursday.
Early tests have shown four people proved positive for salmonella following the Street Spice festival in Newcastle's Times Square last week.
Environmental health officers and the Health Protection Agency investigated after scores of people fell ill.
A spokesman said: "In the first batch of tests, four people have proved positive for salmonella. Further results will be available in due course. It is estimated that of the 12,000 people who attended the event, up to 200 have reported sickness."
Stephen Savage, director of regulatory services and public protection at Newcastle city council, said: "The event organisers are cooperating fully and we are continuing to investigate the source of the outbreak.
"Please can anyone with symptoms contact Regulatory Services and Public Protection at the city council on 0191 278 7878."
Dr Kirsty Foster, of the Health Protection Agency and chair of the outbreak control team, said: "Initial investigations have not yet identified a definite source of infection, however, we are working closely with the organisers of the event to determine the source of infection.
"Anyone who is concerned about symptoms suggesting salmonella infection should contact their GP or out-of-hours service in the first instance.
"Those affected should not return to their place of work until their symptoms have ceased for 48 hours."
Most people recover from salmonella without treatment, but occasionally the illness can become more serious and require hospital admission.
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
Around 200 people who attended a spicy food street festival have reported suffering from diarrhoea and vomiting amid fears of a salmonella outbreak, a council spokesman said on Thursday.
Early tests have shown four people proved positive for salmonella following the Street Spice festival in Newcastle's Times Square last week.
Environmental health officers and the Health Protection Agency investigated after scores of people fell ill.
A spokesman said: "In the first batch of tests, four people have proved positive for salmonella. Further results will be available in due course. It is estimated that of the 12,000 people who attended the event, up to 200 have reported sickness."
Stephen Savage, director of regulatory services and public protection at Newcastle city council, said: "The event organisers are cooperating fully and we are continuing to investigate the source of the outbreak.
"Please can anyone with symptoms contact Regulatory Services and Public Protection at the city council on 0191 278 7878."
Dr Kirsty Foster, of the Health Protection Agency and chair of the outbreak control team, said: "Initial investigations have not yet identified a definite source of infection, however, we are working closely with the organisers of the event to determine the source of infection.
"Anyone who is concerned about symptoms suggesting salmonella infection should contact their GP or out-of-hours service in the first instance.
"Those affected should not return to their place of work until their symptoms have ceased for 48 hours."
Most people recover from salmonella without treatment, but occasionally the illness can become more serious and require hospital admission.
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
Federal agent with fake bomb passes through TSA screening
The daily newspaper reports this week that a team of agents withthe US Transportation Security Administration’s special operationsgroup entered Newark Airport on February 25 and attempted to boarda plane with fake bombs. One of the secret agents, claims the Post,successfully passed two separate security screenings whilecontaining an improvised explosive device-like contraption in hispants.
“He did have a simulated IED in his pants,” the sourcetells the paper. “They did not find it.”
According to the person familiar with the incident, the “bomber”made it to his gate in Newark’s Terminal B, where aircraftbelonging to American Airlines, JetBlue and Delta all regularlydock.
With 33,869,307 passengers going in and out of Newark in 2011,it is one of the busiest transportation hubs in the world. But isit the safest?
The latest report mishap is only the most recent in a laundry listof incidents in recent months that have raised serious concernsabout security breaches at Newark. Eleven years ago, agents ofal-Qaeda boarded a United Airlines flight departing Newark andhijacked it in the air, reportedly hoping to crash the aircraft inthe US Capitol Building. The attempt was foiled and the planecrashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all onboard. A decadeafter that tragedy, though, incidents continue to occur atNewark.
Last year, 52 screeners at Newark were fired for major securitylapses. In 2010, one passenger was caught walking into a securearea within the airport without presenting a ticket, arequirement.
Speaking of the latest incident, the Post’s source says,“This episode once again demonstrates how Newark Airport is theGround Zero of TSA failures.”
In October, New Jersey’s Star-Ledger newspaper reported that aleaked copy of an official TSA evaluation of Newark Airportdocumented a history of dastardly behavior. According to thatreport, TSA agents at Newark perform their job duties correctlyjust a fraction of the time, executing standard pat-downs properlyonly in 16.7 percent of cases and taking appropriate action withprohibited items passing through check-points in around one-quarterof the instances that they were evaluated on.
"There’s that often-repeated phrase, ‘We’ve got to get itright all the time,’” law professor Thomas McDonnell told thepaper for their report. "When it’s under 50 percent, under 20percent, that to me is very shocking."
The Post adds in this week’s report that of the four agents onTSA’s “Red Team,” one member was stopped at a security checkpoint.According to the source, the officer was a female agent“carrying a simulated IED inside her carry-on that was inside achild’s doll.”
It had “wires sticking out,” the source said, and wasobviously suspicious.
The TSA has responded to the report by declining to disclose anyofficial details.
“Due to the security-sensitive nature of the tests, TSA doesnot publicly share details about how they are conducted, whatspecifically is tested or the outcomes,” the agency tells ThePost.
“He did have a simulated IED in his pants,” the sourcetells the paper. “They did not find it.”
According to the person familiar with the incident, the “bomber”made it to his gate in Newark’s Terminal B, where aircraftbelonging to American Airlines, JetBlue and Delta all regularlydock.
With 33,869,307 passengers going in and out of Newark in 2011,it is one of the busiest transportation hubs in the world. But isit the safest?
The latest report mishap is only the most recent in a laundry listof incidents in recent months that have raised serious concernsabout security breaches at Newark. Eleven years ago, agents ofal-Qaeda boarded a United Airlines flight departing Newark andhijacked it in the air, reportedly hoping to crash the aircraft inthe US Capitol Building. The attempt was foiled and the planecrashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all onboard. A decadeafter that tragedy, though, incidents continue to occur atNewark.
Last year, 52 screeners at Newark were fired for major securitylapses. In 2010, one passenger was caught walking into a securearea within the airport without presenting a ticket, arequirement.
Speaking of the latest incident, the Post’s source says,“This episode once again demonstrates how Newark Airport is theGround Zero of TSA failures.”
In October, New Jersey’s Star-Ledger newspaper reported that aleaked copy of an official TSA evaluation of Newark Airportdocumented a history of dastardly behavior. According to thatreport, TSA agents at Newark perform their job duties correctlyjust a fraction of the time, executing standard pat-downs properlyonly in 16.7 percent of cases and taking appropriate action withprohibited items passing through check-points in around one-quarterof the instances that they were evaluated on.
"There’s that often-repeated phrase, ‘We’ve got to get itright all the time,’” law professor Thomas McDonnell told thepaper for their report. "When it’s under 50 percent, under 20percent, that to me is very shocking."
The Post adds in this week’s report that of the four agents onTSA’s “Red Team,” one member was stopped at a security checkpoint.According to the source, the officer was a female agent“carrying a simulated IED inside her carry-on that was inside achild’s doll.”
It had “wires sticking out,” the source said, and wasobviously suspicious.
The TSA has responded to the report by declining to disclose anyofficial details.
“Due to the security-sensitive nature of the tests, TSA doesnot publicly share details about how they are conducted, whatspecifically is tested or the outcomes,” the agency tells ThePost.
US airline staff oppose plan to allow small knives on planes
Flight crews, pilots and air marshals join growing protest against TSA plans to allow pen knives and sporting goods in cabins
American flight attendants, pilots, air marshals and insurance companies are part of a growing opposition to plans to allow passengers to carry small knives and sports equipment, such as souvenir baseball bats and golf clubs, on to planes.
The Flight Attendants Union Coalition, which represents nearly 90,000 air stewards, said it was co-ordinating a nationwide legislative and public education campaign to reverse the policy announced by the Transportation Security Administration this week. A petition posted by the flight attendants on the White House's website urging the administration to tell the TSA to keep knives off planes had more than 9,300 signatures by Friday morning.
"Our nation's aviation system is the safest in the world thanks to multilayered security measures that include prohibition on many items that could pose a threat to the integrity of the aircraft cabin," the coalition, which is made up of five unions, said in a statement. "The continued ban on dangerous objects is an integral layer in aviation security and must remain in place."
Jon Adler, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, whose 26,000 members include federal air marshals, complained that he and other "stakeholders" were not consulted by TSA before the "counter-safety policy" was announced. He said the association would ask Congress to block the policy change.
The Coalition of Airline Pilot Associations, which represents 22,000 pilots, said it opposed allowing knives of any kind in airliner cabins.
"We believe the [terrorism] threat is still real and the removal of any layer of security will put crew members and the flying public unnecessarily in harm's way," Mike Karn, the coalition's president, said.
The policy, which comes into effect on 25 April, permits folding knives with blades that are 60mm (2.36in) or less in length and are less than 12.7mm wide. The policy is aimed at allowing passengers to carry pen knives, corkscrews with small blades and other small knives.
Passengers will also be allowed to include in their carry-on luggage novelty-sized baseball bats less than 610mm long, toy plastic bats, billiard cues, ski poles, hockey sticks, lacrosse sticks and two golf clubs. Items such as box cutters and razor blades are still prohibited.
There has been a gradual easing of some of the security measures applied to airline passengers after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
The new policy conforms US security standards to international standards and would allow the TSA to concentrate its energies on more serious safety threats, the agency said when it announced the change. The change was based on a recommendation from an internal TSA working group, which decided the items represented no real danger, it said.
A TSA spokesman said the presence on flights of gun-carrying pilots travelling as passengers, federal air marshals and airline crew members trained in self-defence provide additional layers of security to protect against misuse of the newly allowed items.
Not all flights, however, have federal air marshals or armed pilots on board.
The policy has triggered a debate over the mission of the TSA and whether it is supposed to concentrate exclusively on preventing terrorists from hijacking or blowing up planes, or whether it should also help protect passengers and crews from unruly and sometimes dangerous passengers.
"The charter, the mission of TSA is to stop an airplane from being used as a weapon and to stop catastrophic damage to that aircraft," said David Castelveter, a spokesman for the agency, adding: "These small knives, these baseball bats, these sporting items aren't going to contribute to bringing an airplane down."
In era of reinforced cockpit doors and passengers who have shown a willingness to intervene, the threat from terrorism had been greatly reduced, said Andrew Thomas, a University of Akron business professor and author of several books on the airline industry and security. Rather, "acts of aberrant, abusive and abnormal passenger behaviour known as air rage remain the most persistent threat to aviation security".
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
American doctors warn of new killer virus
Most of the deadly infections have occurred in the Middle East,but it only takes one infected American to trigger a nationwideoutbreak. A new analysis of the virus has confirmed that it canspread through human contact, according to the Centers for DiseaseControl and Prevention.
Worldwide, a total of 14 cases have been documented, with eightof those resulting in fatalities. The CDC warns that peopletraveling to the Arabian Peninsula have the highest possible riskof transmission. Of the three cases seen in Great Britain, one camefrom a 60-year-old old man who had traveled to Pakistan and SaudiArabia, while the other two cases came through direct contact withthe first victim. The second person to become infected became illon Feb. 6 and died shortly thereafter.
"The routes of transmission to humans of the novelcoronavirus have not yet been fully determined, but the recent UKexperience provides strong evidence of human-to-human transmissionin at least some circumstances,” Professor John Watson, head ofthe respiratory diseases department at Britain’s Health ProtectionAgency, told Medical News Today.
The CDC is urging everyone who traveled to the Arabian Peninsulaand suffering from respiratory symptoms to immediately get testedfor the novel coronavirus. The health agency also advises USresidents who have been in close contact with such travelers to payclose attention to any symptoms. The illness usually shows upwithin 10 days of infection and brings on a fever, coughing andshortness of breath. All patients develop pneumonia, and somesuffer from kidney failure.
So far, no travel restrictions to the Arabian Peninsula andneighboring countries have been implemented.
The SARS virus, a close relative of the new coronavirus, killednearly 800 people and infected more than 8,000, most of whichoccurred in 2003. Similar to SARS, the new virus is thought toreside in bats, but it is unclear how humans first became infected.The latest patient to succumb to the infected died nine days afterbeing hospitalized in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 10.
The latest coronavirus is not the only American concern: the CDCrecently also warned of a growing number of cases of theCarbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), a superbug that isresistant to all existing antibiotics. Nearly four percent of allUS hospitals and 18 percent of specialized medical facilities haveinfected patients with the bacteria in the first half of 2012,including the National Institutes of Health, the CDC reported. More than 50 percent of patients whose bloodstream becomesinfected with the bacteria die from the infection.
“We have a very serious problem, and we need to sound analarm,” CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden said Tuesday during apress conference.
With two CDC warnings in the same week, Americans are beingurged to watch their symptoms closely for two separate illnesseswith high mortality rates.
Worldwide, a total of 14 cases have been documented, with eightof those resulting in fatalities. The CDC warns that peopletraveling to the Arabian Peninsula have the highest possible riskof transmission. Of the three cases seen in Great Britain, one camefrom a 60-year-old old man who had traveled to Pakistan and SaudiArabia, while the other two cases came through direct contact withthe first victim. The second person to become infected became illon Feb. 6 and died shortly thereafter.
"The routes of transmission to humans of the novelcoronavirus have not yet been fully determined, but the recent UKexperience provides strong evidence of human-to-human transmissionin at least some circumstances,” Professor John Watson, head ofthe respiratory diseases department at Britain’s Health ProtectionAgency, told Medical News Today.
The CDC is urging everyone who traveled to the Arabian Peninsulaand suffering from respiratory symptoms to immediately get testedfor the novel coronavirus. The health agency also advises USresidents who have been in close contact with such travelers to payclose attention to any symptoms. The illness usually shows upwithin 10 days of infection and brings on a fever, coughing andshortness of breath. All patients develop pneumonia, and somesuffer from kidney failure.
So far, no travel restrictions to the Arabian Peninsula andneighboring countries have been implemented.
The SARS virus, a close relative of the new coronavirus, killednearly 800 people and infected more than 8,000, most of whichoccurred in 2003. Similar to SARS, the new virus is thought toreside in bats, but it is unclear how humans first became infected.The latest patient to succumb to the infected died nine days afterbeing hospitalized in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 10.
The latest coronavirus is not the only American concern: the CDCrecently also warned of a growing number of cases of theCarbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), a superbug that isresistant to all existing antibiotics. Nearly four percent of allUS hospitals and 18 percent of specialized medical facilities haveinfected patients with the bacteria in the first half of 2012,including the National Institutes of Health, the CDC reported. More than 50 percent of patients whose bloodstream becomesinfected with the bacteria die from the infection.
“We have a very serious problem, and we need to sound analarm,” CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden said Tuesday during apress conference.
With two CDC warnings in the same week, Americans are beingurged to watch their symptoms closely for two separate illnesseswith high mortality rates.
Fitch downgrades Italy, outlook negative
The rating was cut from A- to BBB+, with a negative outlook.Fitch said that the failure to come up with a clear winner makes"it unlikely that a stable new government can be formed in thenext few weeks," thereby harming prospects of furtherreforms.
“The increased political uncertainty and non-conducive backdropfor further structural reform measures constitute a further adverseshock to the real economy amidst the deep recession,” therating agency said in the statement released late on Friday.
Fitch stressed that the country’s recession was one of the deepestin Europe, adding that it expect its economy to shrink by 1.8 percent this year. The outgoing technocrat government of Mario Montiforecasted only a 0.2 contraction.
Reacting to the downgrade, the Italian Treasury said that thecurrent political uncertainty was a normal part of democracy.“We reaffirm the confidence that Italy will find the politicalsolutions and will therefore continue the ongoing reformprocess," it said in a statement.
February’s election resulted in a hung parliament, with acenter-left coalition winning the lower house but falling short ofcontrol of the Senate, which has equal legislative powers. Talks onforming a new government are not expected to begin before March20.
Censored cupcakes: US school removed toy soldiers from kid’s birthday cake over violence fears
School officials at Schall Elementary rushed to remove HunterFountain’s plastic soldiers, designed to spice up his birthdaycupcakes, for fear they were asking for a fight.
The boy’s parents were reportedly chastized for the cakes’‘military’ nature; the school principal called Hunter’s mother athome. Principal Susan Wright later issued a public statement sayingthat in the climate of recent events in schools “we walk adelicate balance in teaching non-violence in our buildings andtrying to ensure a safe, peaceful atmosphere.”
“On one hand, there are those who advocate arming teachers,having armed security guards and creating a fortress of defense inour schools. On the other hand, there are those who feel that gunscreate fear in schools and we need to put solid security measuresin place plus practice routines to be prepared in case anemergency should ever occur. Living in a democratic society entailsrespect for opposing opinions,” Wright wrote.
She added that “by not permitting toy soldiers on cupcakes atschool, no disrespect for our military or for the brave men andwomen who defend our right to have differences wasintended."
“It disgusted me," Casey Fountain, Hunter's father, told FoxNews. “It’s vile they lump true American heroes withpsychopathic killers. We’re just taking political correctness toofar.”
A number of incidents have occurred since the notorious Newtownmassacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December, when 26people were dead, 20 of whom children.
In February, a seven-year-old Colorado boy was suspended forpretending to throw an imaginary grenade. According to Alex Evans,he was just trying to save the world from evil on the schoolplayground.
In January, a five-year-old girl was suspended from a Pennsylvaniakindergarten after telling another girl that she was going to shoother. The weapon she was going to use was a pink toy gun that blowssoapy bubbles.
Earlier this year, a six-year-old elementary school kid gotsuspended for forming a gun with his hands, pointing it at astudent and saying ‘pow’. Staff at Roscoe Nix Elementary School inSilver Spring called the action a ‘seriousincident'.
Russian satellite hit by ‘space junk’ from destroyed Chinese spacecraft
The collision took place between Russia’s Ball Lens in the Space(BLITS) spacecraft and China’s Fengyun 1C satellite, according tothe Center for Space Standards & Innovation (CSSI), based inColorado Springs, Colorado. The collision appears to have occurredon January 22, although it took over a month to determine whatexactly hit the craft.
The Chinese material is considered to be “space junk” left overfrom when the Chinese craft was destroyed in a 2007 anti-satellitedemonstration when the Fengyun 1C was intentionally demolishedafter exceeding its service life. The debris has posed a threat tosatellites and crewed spacecraft ever since, according toSpace.com.
China’s anti-satellite defense program aims at destroyingsatellites in space with the help of a missile, if needed. “Itis necessary for China to have the ability to strike US satellites.This deterrent can provide strategic protection to Chinesesatellites and the whole country's national security," said aJanuary editorial in China’s state-run Global Times. China hassince then conducted another test, in 2010.
The space collision involving BLITS was first reported on February4 by Russian scientists Vasiliy Yurasov and Andrew Nazarenko, ofthe Institute for Precision Instrument Engineering (IPIE) inMoscow. They reported a “significant change” in the orbit ofthe BLITS satellite to CSSI, as well as changes in the spacecraft’sspin velocity and altitude.
"They requested help in determining whether these changes mighthave been the result of a collision with another object inorbit," CSSI's technical program manager, T.S. Kelso, explainedin a blog post on the Analytical Graphics, Inc. website, whichanalyzed the crash.
On February 28, the International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS)confirmed the collision.
“As a result, an abrupt change occurred to the BLITS orbitparameters (a decrease of the orbiting period),” ILRS officialssaid. The BLITS spin period changed from 5.6 seconds beforecollision to 2.1 seconds after collision. The craft alsoexperienced a sudden decrease of 120 meters in the semi-major axisof its orbit.
While the BLITS satellite weighs 7.5kg, the weight of the piecethat struck it may only be around .08 grams. BLITS is aretroreflector demonstration satellite built for precisionsatellite laser-ranging experiments. It was launched in 2009 andexpected to last five years in space.
It remains unclear whether the satellite is merely damaged orcompletely non-functioning.
CSSI is continuing to search for answers regarding thecollision, such as whether the individual masses of the debrispieces can be determined, in order to assess how large a piecemight have come off the BLITS satellite.
The collision marks the second time that an active spacecrafthas collided with another artificial object in space. In February2009, a US communications satellite was hit by a defunct Russianmilitary satellite, creating a large debris cloud in orbit.
The threat of space debris to orbiting satellites and crewedspacecraft is a growing problem. According to NASA, the debriscloud surrounding the earth contains 500,000 objects bigger than amarble and 22,000 larger than a softball. The number of flecks atleast 1 millimeter in diameter likely runs into the hundreds ofmillions.
The Chinese material is considered to be “space junk” left overfrom when the Chinese craft was destroyed in a 2007 anti-satellitedemonstration when the Fengyun 1C was intentionally demolishedafter exceeding its service life. The debris has posed a threat tosatellites and crewed spacecraft ever since, according toSpace.com.
China’s anti-satellite defense program aims at destroyingsatellites in space with the help of a missile, if needed. “Itis necessary for China to have the ability to strike US satellites.This deterrent can provide strategic protection to Chinesesatellites and the whole country's national security," said aJanuary editorial in China’s state-run Global Times. China hassince then conducted another test, in 2010.
The space collision involving BLITS was first reported on February4 by Russian scientists Vasiliy Yurasov and Andrew Nazarenko, ofthe Institute for Precision Instrument Engineering (IPIE) inMoscow. They reported a “significant change” in the orbit ofthe BLITS satellite to CSSI, as well as changes in the spacecraft’sspin velocity and altitude.
"They requested help in determining whether these changes mighthave been the result of a collision with another object inorbit," CSSI's technical program manager, T.S. Kelso, explainedin a blog post on the Analytical Graphics, Inc. website, whichanalyzed the crash.
On February 28, the International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS)confirmed the collision.
“As a result, an abrupt change occurred to the BLITS orbitparameters (a decrease of the orbiting period),” ILRS officialssaid. The BLITS spin period changed from 5.6 seconds beforecollision to 2.1 seconds after collision. The craft alsoexperienced a sudden decrease of 120 meters in the semi-major axisof its orbit.
While the BLITS satellite weighs 7.5kg, the weight of the piecethat struck it may only be around .08 grams. BLITS is aretroreflector demonstration satellite built for precisionsatellite laser-ranging experiments. It was launched in 2009 andexpected to last five years in space.
It remains unclear whether the satellite is merely damaged orcompletely non-functioning.
CSSI is continuing to search for answers regarding thecollision, such as whether the individual masses of the debrispieces can be determined, in order to assess how large a piecemight have come off the BLITS satellite.
The collision marks the second time that an active spacecrafthas collided with another artificial object in space. In February2009, a US communications satellite was hit by a defunct Russianmilitary satellite, creating a large debris cloud in orbit.
The threat of space debris to orbiting satellites and crewedspacecraft is a growing problem. According to NASA, the debriscloud surrounding the earth contains 500,000 objects bigger than amarble and 22,000 larger than a softball. The number of flecks atleast 1 millimeter in diameter likely runs into the hundreds ofmillions.
Wales tourist beach 'risked being sprayed with machinegun fire'
A tourist beach near a popular seaside resort may have been sprayed with machine gun fire during training exercises during which an Army ranger was shot dead.
World's best restaurant Noma gives 70 customers food poisoning
The globally-renowned Noma, in Copenhagen, has apologised after 67 of 78 diners caught norovirus.
Mother on trial as boy named Jihad wears 'I am a bomb' T-shirt
A mother is facing five years in prison in France after dressing her three-year-old son in a T-shirt reading "I am a bomb" and "Born on September 11".
Van Dyck masterpiece discovered
A small portrait believed to have been painted by a pupil of Van Dyck has been confirmed as the work of the great master himself.
Archbishop of Canterbury offers personal apology to victim abused by cleric
Justin Welby said it was vital the Church of England 'learned lessons' from abuse scandals to maintain trust of worshippers.
Friday, 8 March 2013
Scottish priests 'out of control sexually', says former abuse adviser
ROMAN Catholic priests in Scotland were "out of control sexually" under the leadership of the disgraced Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the Church's former adviser on child abuse claims.
'Unclassified and unidentified' life found in Antarctic lake
Russian scientists claim to have found new "unclassified and unidentified" life forms after drilling through almost 4km (2.3 miles) of ice to reach a hidden lake in Antarctica.
Pig and horse DNA in 'beef' products
Three ready meals marketed as beef have been found to contain at least one per cent pig DNA and a further six may include traces of horse meat, according to Food Standards Agency.
Large rise in CO2 emissions sounds climate change alarm
Hopes for 'safe' temperature increase within 2C fade as Hawaii station documents second-greatest emissions increase
The chances of the world holding temperature rises to 2C – the level of global warming considered "safe" by scientists – appear to be fading fast with US scientists reporting the second-greatest annual rise in CO2 emissions in 2012.
Carbon dioxide levels measured at at Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii jumped by 2.67 parts per million (ppm) in 2012 to 395ppm, said Pieter Tans, who leads the greenhouse gas measurement team for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The record was an increase of 2.93ppm in 1998.
The jump comes as a study published in Science on Thursday looking at global surface temperatures for the past 1,500 years warned that "recent warming is unprecedented", prompting UN climate chief, Christiana Figueres, to say that "staggering global temps show urgent need to act. Rapid climate change must be countered with accelerated action."
Tans told the Associated Press the major factor was an increase in fossil fuel use. "It's just a testament to human influence being dominant", he said. "The prospects of keeping climate change below that [two-degree goal] are fading away."
Preliminary data for February 2013 show CO2 levels last month standing at their highest ever recorded at Manua Loa, a remote volcano in the Pacific. Last month they reached a record 396.80ppm with a jump of 3.26ppm parts per million between February 2012 and 2013.
Carbon dioxide levels fluctuate seasonally, with the highest levels usually observed in April. Last year the highest level at Mauna Loa was measured at 396.18ppm.
What is disturbing scientists is the the acceleration of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, which are occurring in spite of attempts by governments to restrain fossil fuel emissions.
According to the observatory, the average annual rate of increase for the past 10 years has been 2.07ppm – more than double the increase in the 1960s. The average increase in CO2 levels between 1959 to the present was 1.49ppm per year.
The Mauna Loa measurements coincide with a new peer-reviewed study of the pledges made by countries to reduce CO2 emissions. The Dutch government's scientific advisers show that rich countries will have to reduce enissions by 50% percent below 1990 levels by 2020 if there is to be even a medium chance of limiting warming to 2C, thus preventing some of climate change's worst impacts.
"The challenge we already knew was great is even more difficult", said Kelly Levin, a researcher with the World Resources Instistute in Washington. "But even with an increased level of reductions necessary, it shows that a 2° goal is still attainable – if we act ambitiously and immediately."
Extreme weather, which is predicted by climate scientists to occur more frequently as the atmosphere warms and CO2 levels rise, has already been seen widely in 2013.
China and India have experienced their coldest winter in decades and Australia has seen a four-month long heat wave with 123 weather records broken during what scientists are calling its 'angry summer'.
"We are in [getting] into new climatic territory. And when you get records being broken at that scale, you can start to see a shifting from one climate system to another. So the climate has in one sense actually changed and we are now entering a new series of climatic conditions that we just haven't seen before", said Tim Flannery, head of the Australian government's climate change commission, this week.
Earlier this week the Met Office warned that the "extreme" patterns of flood and drought experienced by Britain in 2012 were likely to become more frequent. One in every five days in 2012 saw flooding but one in four days were in drought.
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
The chances of the world holding temperature rises to 2C – the level of global warming considered "safe" by scientists – appear to be fading fast with US scientists reporting the second-greatest annual rise in CO2 emissions in 2012.
Carbon dioxide levels measured at at Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii jumped by 2.67 parts per million (ppm) in 2012 to 395ppm, said Pieter Tans, who leads the greenhouse gas measurement team for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The record was an increase of 2.93ppm in 1998.
The jump comes as a study published in Science on Thursday looking at global surface temperatures for the past 1,500 years warned that "recent warming is unprecedented", prompting UN climate chief, Christiana Figueres, to say that "staggering global temps show urgent need to act. Rapid climate change must be countered with accelerated action."
Tans told the Associated Press the major factor was an increase in fossil fuel use. "It's just a testament to human influence being dominant", he said. "The prospects of keeping climate change below that [two-degree goal] are fading away."
Preliminary data for February 2013 show CO2 levels last month standing at their highest ever recorded at Manua Loa, a remote volcano in the Pacific. Last month they reached a record 396.80ppm with a jump of 3.26ppm parts per million between February 2012 and 2013.
Carbon dioxide levels fluctuate seasonally, with the highest levels usually observed in April. Last year the highest level at Mauna Loa was measured at 396.18ppm.
What is disturbing scientists is the the acceleration of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, which are occurring in spite of attempts by governments to restrain fossil fuel emissions.
According to the observatory, the average annual rate of increase for the past 10 years has been 2.07ppm – more than double the increase in the 1960s. The average increase in CO2 levels between 1959 to the present was 1.49ppm per year.
The Mauna Loa measurements coincide with a new peer-reviewed study of the pledges made by countries to reduce CO2 emissions. The Dutch government's scientific advisers show that rich countries will have to reduce enissions by 50% percent below 1990 levels by 2020 if there is to be even a medium chance of limiting warming to 2C, thus preventing some of climate change's worst impacts.
"The challenge we already knew was great is even more difficult", said Kelly Levin, a researcher with the World Resources Instistute in Washington. "But even with an increased level of reductions necessary, it shows that a 2° goal is still attainable – if we act ambitiously and immediately."
Extreme weather, which is predicted by climate scientists to occur more frequently as the atmosphere warms and CO2 levels rise, has already been seen widely in 2013.
China and India have experienced their coldest winter in decades and Australia has seen a four-month long heat wave with 123 weather records broken during what scientists are calling its 'angry summer'.
"We are in [getting] into new climatic territory. And when you get records being broken at that scale, you can start to see a shifting from one climate system to another. So the climate has in one sense actually changed and we are now entering a new series of climatic conditions that we just haven't seen before", said Tim Flannery, head of the Australian government's climate change commission, this week.
Earlier this week the Met Office warned that the "extreme" patterns of flood and drought experienced by Britain in 2012 were likely to become more frequent. One in every five days in 2012 saw flooding but one in four days were in drought.
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
Papal conclave: fault lines emerge as cardinals gather to vote
A colourful cast of 115 cardinals are gathering to select a new pope from one of their number to lead 1.2bn Catholics
There are diplomats, academics, intellectuals and theologians. There are hardliners, conservatives, ultra-conservatives, moderates, mavericks and many who simply defy categorisation. When it comes to the conclave of 115 cardinals who will choose the next pope in the coming days, the phrase broad church is entirely appropriate.
Take Cardinal Manuel Monteiro de Castro of Portugal and Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iñiguez of Mexico. In 2004, while papal envoy to Spain, Monteiro de Castro appeared to hint that the church should acknowledge homosexual partnerships as well as heterosexual ones. Although most countries defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman, he said: "There are other forms of cohabitation and it is good that they be recognised."
Sandoval has taken the other side. Three years ago he described same-sex unions as an "aberration" and was equally blunt on the subject of gay people adopting children, asking: "Would you want to be adopted by a pair of faggots or lesbians?" His other betes noires include at least one other Christian denomination, "you've got to be shameless to be a Protestant", and women who he believes fail to dress and behave correctly: "Women shouldn't go around being so provocative – that's why so many get raped."
These are not the only fault lines. While cardinals such as Ennio Antonelli of Italy and Jean-Louis Tauran of France bitterly opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq, others are more hawkish on matters of security. After the capture of the head of the Shining Path terrorist group in 1992 – which signalled the end of the bloody insurgency that claimed 70,000 lives in his native Peru – Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani called for the earthly ultimate punishment. "We cannot allow the fears, worries and cowardice of a few people in the country to stop us approving the death penalty," said Cipriani, a member of Opus Dei and champion basketball player in his youth.
Some cardinals, however, share remarkably similar views. Many African cardinals, for example, are sceptical about using condoms to halt the spread of HIV/Aids. Wilfrid Napier of South Africa expressed doubts about the efficacy of condoms; John Njue of Kenya has blamed them for the spread of disease, while Cardinal Anthony Okogie of Nigeria has gone so far as to say: "The condom is widely known not to be a safe protector against HIV/Aids."
Cardinal Peter Turkson, the archbishop emeritus of Cape Coast in Ghana and the man judged Africa's best hope for pope, has stressed the importance of common values, recently telling a TV interviewer that that Africa had largely escaped the sexual abuse scandals that wrought so much damage on the western church thanks to its strong taboos against homosexuality.
"African traditional systems kind of protect or have protected its population against this tendency," he told CNN. "Because in several communities, in several cultures in Africa, homosexuality, or for that matter, any affair between two sexes of the same kind are not countenanced in our society … It's helped to keep this out."
Taboo or no taboo, other cardinals have found themselves bound together rather more ineluctably. Although Cardinal Keith O'Brien opted to absent himself from the conclave after he resigned as archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh over allegations that he had behaved "inappropriately" towards four priests, some scandal-hit cardinals have refused to recuse themselves.
Cardinal Sean Brady, archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop emeritus of Los Angeles, and Cardinal Justin Rigali, former archbishop of Philadelphia, have all faced – or are facing – questions about what they knew about the abuse of children by priests. But all have decided to go to Rome for the conclave.
Then there are those who find fame for other reasons: Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Jesuit intellectu al and archbishop of Buenos Aires who travels around town by bus and told his compatriots not to waste their money on plane tickets to Rome to see him become a cardinal but to give it instead to the poor; Cardinal Dominik Duka of the Czech Republic, who practised and deepened his faith despite enduring years of state repression; Cardinal Fernando Filoni, who refused to leave his diplomatic post in Iraq in the violence that followed the US invasion, saying "If the pastor flees in moments of difficulty, the sheep are also lost"; Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the charismatic, 55-year-old archbishop of Manila, whose scholarship on the second Vatican council and passionate defence of the sanctity of life have won him popularity on both sides of the political divide; and Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras, who has proved an ardent defender of human rights and a fierce critic of capitalism and the drug trade. The archbishop of Tegucigalpa would be a perfect Latin American candidate to succeed Benedict were it not for his leftist leanings and his intemperate comparison, in 2002, of the US media's coverage of the church sexual abuse scandals with the persecution of Christians by Nero, Hitler and Stalin.
The geographical divide is instructive: 60 of the cardinals are European, 19 Latin American, 14 North American, 11 African, 10 Asian and one Australian.
The 28 Italian cardinal electors, who comprise nearly a quarter of the total number of pope-makers, do not want for colourful characters among their ranks either, be they Angelo Amato, who takes a markedly revisionist approach to the church's treatment of Galileo, Angelo Bagnasco, who has publicly denounced the "intrinsically wretched and empty" behaviour of some Italian politicians – although he did not mention Silvio Berlusconi by name – or Gianfranco Ravasi, a Dante enthusiast who believes that Darwin's theory of evolution is compatible with the church's teachings on creation.
Then there is the Vatican's finance minister, Domenico Calcagno, who is known as Rambo in certain sections of the Italian press because of his extensive collection of firearms, which includes a Smith & Wesson magnum, a Turkish pump-action Hatsan shotgun and a Remington. It is unclear whether he possesses a Beretta to go with his biretta.
Even they, however, struggle to compete with Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who has a knack for attracting publicity – and not all of it positive. Despite winning fans by donning a sheepskin coat to provide live commentary for a match between Sampdoria and Juventus while archbishop of Genoa in 2004, and memorably dismissing The Da Vinci Code as "a potpourri of lies; a phantasmagorical cocktail of inventions", his more recent headlines have been less favourable. In 2010, he provoked an international outcry after suggesting that the blame for the sexual abuse crisis lay with the nature of homosexuality rather than the pressures of priestly celibacy.
"Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that there is no link between celibacy and paedophilia but many others have shown, I have recently been told, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia," he said.
But neither such pronouncements nor the pressures of the Vatileaks affair – which was seen by many as a direct attempt to discredit him – appear to have done serious damage to Bertone's reputation. Benedict XVI's secretary of state, who is now 78, remains a popular candidate to succeed his former boss.
With the clamour for the new leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics to be a strong, untainted reformer growing ever louder and more urgent – and so many candidates to choose from – the cardinals face an unenviable task as they enter the conclave to decide who he will be.
The only thing you can be sure of is that all 115 of the men meeting in the Sistine Chapel will have wondered what they would say if they were to be elected and suddenly found themselves asked for the papal name they had chosen. "I think," said one conclave veteran, "that all the cardinals have a name up their sleeve."
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
There are diplomats, academics, intellectuals and theologians. There are hardliners, conservatives, ultra-conservatives, moderates, mavericks and many who simply defy categorisation. When it comes to the conclave of 115 cardinals who will choose the next pope in the coming days, the phrase broad church is entirely appropriate.
Take Cardinal Manuel Monteiro de Castro of Portugal and Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iñiguez of Mexico. In 2004, while papal envoy to Spain, Monteiro de Castro appeared to hint that the church should acknowledge homosexual partnerships as well as heterosexual ones. Although most countries defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman, he said: "There are other forms of cohabitation and it is good that they be recognised."
Sandoval has taken the other side. Three years ago he described same-sex unions as an "aberration" and was equally blunt on the subject of gay people adopting children, asking: "Would you want to be adopted by a pair of faggots or lesbians?" His other betes noires include at least one other Christian denomination, "you've got to be shameless to be a Protestant", and women who he believes fail to dress and behave correctly: "Women shouldn't go around being so provocative – that's why so many get raped."
These are not the only fault lines. While cardinals such as Ennio Antonelli of Italy and Jean-Louis Tauran of France bitterly opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq, others are more hawkish on matters of security. After the capture of the head of the Shining Path terrorist group in 1992 – which signalled the end of the bloody insurgency that claimed 70,000 lives in his native Peru – Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani called for the earthly ultimate punishment. "We cannot allow the fears, worries and cowardice of a few people in the country to stop us approving the death penalty," said Cipriani, a member of Opus Dei and champion basketball player in his youth.
Some cardinals, however, share remarkably similar views. Many African cardinals, for example, are sceptical about using condoms to halt the spread of HIV/Aids. Wilfrid Napier of South Africa expressed doubts about the efficacy of condoms; John Njue of Kenya has blamed them for the spread of disease, while Cardinal Anthony Okogie of Nigeria has gone so far as to say: "The condom is widely known not to be a safe protector against HIV/Aids."
Cardinal Peter Turkson, the archbishop emeritus of Cape Coast in Ghana and the man judged Africa's best hope for pope, has stressed the importance of common values, recently telling a TV interviewer that that Africa had largely escaped the sexual abuse scandals that wrought so much damage on the western church thanks to its strong taboos against homosexuality.
"African traditional systems kind of protect or have protected its population against this tendency," he told CNN. "Because in several communities, in several cultures in Africa, homosexuality, or for that matter, any affair between two sexes of the same kind are not countenanced in our society … It's helped to keep this out."
Taboo or no taboo, other cardinals have found themselves bound together rather more ineluctably. Although Cardinal Keith O'Brien opted to absent himself from the conclave after he resigned as archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh over allegations that he had behaved "inappropriately" towards four priests, some scandal-hit cardinals have refused to recuse themselves.
Cardinal Sean Brady, archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop emeritus of Los Angeles, and Cardinal Justin Rigali, former archbishop of Philadelphia, have all faced – or are facing – questions about what they knew about the abuse of children by priests. But all have decided to go to Rome for the conclave.
Then there are those who find fame for other reasons: Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Jesuit intellectu al and archbishop of Buenos Aires who travels around town by bus and told his compatriots not to waste their money on plane tickets to Rome to see him become a cardinal but to give it instead to the poor; Cardinal Dominik Duka of the Czech Republic, who practised and deepened his faith despite enduring years of state repression; Cardinal Fernando Filoni, who refused to leave his diplomatic post in Iraq in the violence that followed the US invasion, saying "If the pastor flees in moments of difficulty, the sheep are also lost"; Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the charismatic, 55-year-old archbishop of Manila, whose scholarship on the second Vatican council and passionate defence of the sanctity of life have won him popularity on both sides of the political divide; and Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras, who has proved an ardent defender of human rights and a fierce critic of capitalism and the drug trade. The archbishop of Tegucigalpa would be a perfect Latin American candidate to succeed Benedict were it not for his leftist leanings and his intemperate comparison, in 2002, of the US media's coverage of the church sexual abuse scandals with the persecution of Christians by Nero, Hitler and Stalin.
The geographical divide is instructive: 60 of the cardinals are European, 19 Latin American, 14 North American, 11 African, 10 Asian and one Australian.
The 28 Italian cardinal electors, who comprise nearly a quarter of the total number of pope-makers, do not want for colourful characters among their ranks either, be they Angelo Amato, who takes a markedly revisionist approach to the church's treatment of Galileo, Angelo Bagnasco, who has publicly denounced the "intrinsically wretched and empty" behaviour of some Italian politicians – although he did not mention Silvio Berlusconi by name – or Gianfranco Ravasi, a Dante enthusiast who believes that Darwin's theory of evolution is compatible with the church's teachings on creation.
Then there is the Vatican's finance minister, Domenico Calcagno, who is known as Rambo in certain sections of the Italian press because of his extensive collection of firearms, which includes a Smith & Wesson magnum, a Turkish pump-action Hatsan shotgun and a Remington. It is unclear whether he possesses a Beretta to go with his biretta.
Even they, however, struggle to compete with Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who has a knack for attracting publicity – and not all of it positive. Despite winning fans by donning a sheepskin coat to provide live commentary for a match between Sampdoria and Juventus while archbishop of Genoa in 2004, and memorably dismissing The Da Vinci Code as "a potpourri of lies; a phantasmagorical cocktail of inventions", his more recent headlines have been less favourable. In 2010, he provoked an international outcry after suggesting that the blame for the sexual abuse crisis lay with the nature of homosexuality rather than the pressures of priestly celibacy.
"Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that there is no link between celibacy and paedophilia but many others have shown, I have recently been told, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia," he said.
But neither such pronouncements nor the pressures of the Vatileaks affair – which was seen by many as a direct attempt to discredit him – appear to have done serious damage to Bertone's reputation. Benedict XVI's secretary of state, who is now 78, remains a popular candidate to succeed his former boss.
With the clamour for the new leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics to be a strong, untainted reformer growing ever louder and more urgent – and so many candidates to choose from – the cardinals face an unenviable task as they enter the conclave to decide who he will be.
The only thing you can be sure of is that all 115 of the men meeting in the Sistine Chapel will have wondered what they would say if they were to be elected and suddenly found themselves asked for the papal name they had chosen. "I think," said one conclave veteran, "that all the cardinals have a name up their sleeve."
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
Barclays paid 428 staff more than £1m in year Libor scandal hit reputation
Annual report shows bank paid five staff more than £5m in 2012 – but half its 140,000 staff earned less than £25,000
Barclays paid 428 staff more than £1m in 2012 – the year the bank was fined £290m for rigging Libor.
The bank revealed that 1,338 of its bankers received more than £500,000 and more than half its workforce – 71,581 staff – took home £25,000 or less.
The pay deals at Barclays, which is providing more detailed disclosure about the earnings of its 140,000 staff than in the past, eclipse those at HSBC, Britain's biggest bank. HSBC, the only other bank to publish its annual report so far, has admitted 204 of its employees took home more than £1m.
David Hillman, spokesperson for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, said: "Barclays' top bankers may be celebrating, but these bloated rewards are a reminder of just how out of sync with the rest of reality banks have become. If banks can afford to dole out such sums despite being dogged by scandals, they should be contributing more to the society they continue to fleece."
TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady said Barclays' attitude to pay justified the EU bonus cap. "Barclays is acting as if the financial crisis never happened. But ordinary people, who have been made to pay for the folly of bankers, have longer memories and will find the size and scale of these payouts obscene," she said.
In accordance with rules set out by the government, Barclays disclosed that its top eight highest paid executives reporting to the chief executive received between £3.7m and £1.2m a year. Rich Ricci, the race-horse loving banker who runs the investment bank, appears to be the seventh highest paid with £1.5m after he waived his bonus as a result of the Libor fine.
Included in more 25 pages of disclosure of pay, the bank complies with rules set out by international regulators showing that it has 393 "code staff" – those who monitor risks or take risks – who were paid an average of £1.3m.
During the year the bank's chairman, Marcus Agius, chief executive Bob Diamond and chief operating officer, Jerry del Missier, all resigned following the Libor scandal. Sir David Walker was appointed chairman and Antony Jenkins promoted to chief executive from running the retail bank.
In 2012 Barclays faced protests for paying £5.7m of tax incurred by Diamond when he relocated to London from the US to become chief executive. In 2012 that bill fell to £602,000, which took his pay to £1.9m after he forfeited £19m of shares when he left. Diamond continues to be paid by the bank until July 2013 – a year after he left – including £400,000 in benefits for the period, which appears to indicate that he will receive up to £1m for the first six months of 2013.
Jenkins was paid a salary for the full year of £833,000, received pension contributions of £215,000 and benefits of £81,000, while £2.1m of long-term incentive plans from previous years were paid out to him. He became chief executive at the end of August and during the year was awarded £4.4m of long-term incentive plans which pay out in three years time; the value of £1.5m is assigned for 2012. The bank produced a figure for his pay of £2.5m which takes account of the fact he waived his annual bonus for 2012 and included the £1.5m of the portion of long-term incentives awarded to him.
Agius is receiving £175,000 as an adviser to the Barclays corporate bank.
The bank said: "We have made substantial reductions in remuneration, including clawing back £300m of unvested deferred and long-term incentive awards and risk adjustments of £860m to our 2012 incentives pool to reflect the Libor investigation and other risk issues in 2012." Barclays said average bonus was 8% to £4,800 and 45% of all investment bank did not receive bonuses.
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
Barclays paid 428 staff more than £1m in 2012 – the year the bank was fined £290m for rigging Libor.
The bank revealed that 1,338 of its bankers received more than £500,000 and more than half its workforce – 71,581 staff – took home £25,000 or less.
The pay deals at Barclays, which is providing more detailed disclosure about the earnings of its 140,000 staff than in the past, eclipse those at HSBC, Britain's biggest bank. HSBC, the only other bank to publish its annual report so far, has admitted 204 of its employees took home more than £1m.
David Hillman, spokesperson for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, said: "Barclays' top bankers may be celebrating, but these bloated rewards are a reminder of just how out of sync with the rest of reality banks have become. If banks can afford to dole out such sums despite being dogged by scandals, they should be contributing more to the society they continue to fleece."
TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady said Barclays' attitude to pay justified the EU bonus cap. "Barclays is acting as if the financial crisis never happened. But ordinary people, who have been made to pay for the folly of bankers, have longer memories and will find the size and scale of these payouts obscene," she said.
In accordance with rules set out by the government, Barclays disclosed that its top eight highest paid executives reporting to the chief executive received between £3.7m and £1.2m a year. Rich Ricci, the race-horse loving banker who runs the investment bank, appears to be the seventh highest paid with £1.5m after he waived his bonus as a result of the Libor fine.
Included in more 25 pages of disclosure of pay, the bank complies with rules set out by international regulators showing that it has 393 "code staff" – those who monitor risks or take risks – who were paid an average of £1.3m.
During the year the bank's chairman, Marcus Agius, chief executive Bob Diamond and chief operating officer, Jerry del Missier, all resigned following the Libor scandal. Sir David Walker was appointed chairman and Antony Jenkins promoted to chief executive from running the retail bank.
In 2012 Barclays faced protests for paying £5.7m of tax incurred by Diamond when he relocated to London from the US to become chief executive. In 2012 that bill fell to £602,000, which took his pay to £1.9m after he forfeited £19m of shares when he left. Diamond continues to be paid by the bank until July 2013 – a year after he left – including £400,000 in benefits for the period, which appears to indicate that he will receive up to £1m for the first six months of 2013.
Jenkins was paid a salary for the full year of £833,000, received pension contributions of £215,000 and benefits of £81,000, while £2.1m of long-term incentive plans from previous years were paid out to him. He became chief executive at the end of August and during the year was awarded £4.4m of long-term incentive plans which pay out in three years time; the value of £1.5m is assigned for 2012. The bank produced a figure for his pay of £2.5m which takes account of the fact he waived his annual bonus for 2012 and included the £1.5m of the portion of long-term incentives awarded to him.
Agius is receiving £175,000 as an adviser to the Barclays corporate bank.
The bank said: "We have made substantial reductions in remuneration, including clawing back £300m of unvested deferred and long-term incentive awards and risk adjustments of £860m to our 2012 incentives pool to reflect the Libor investigation and other risk issues in 2012." Barclays said average bonus was 8% to £4,800 and 45% of all investment bank did not receive bonuses.
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
World from Berlin: Friedrich 'Stoking Anti-Immigrant Sentiment'
Germany and a handful of EU countries have blocked Bulgaria and Romania from joining the Schengen Area of border-free travel. Editorialists at the Germany's left-leaning dailies are calling the move an election-year ploy on the part of conservatives in Berlin.
Merkel preocupada com tensão na península de Coreia
A chanceler alemã, Angela Merkel, declarou hoje a "grande preocupação" de Berlim com o aumento da tensão na península da Coreia.
Bulgaria regrets failing to save Jews
Bulgaria expresses regret that more than 11,000 Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps from areas under Bulgarian control during World War II.
‘US should stop war games simulating invasion of North Korea and lift sanctions’
The activist from the ANSWER Coalition believes the North Koreannuclear program is purely defensive, and following US sanctions onthe country, compares the American policies on the peninsula withthose in Iraq and Libya – not the road to peace, but to aninvasion.
RT: Prior to the sanctions being announced, NorthKorea threatened to use a pre-emptive nuclear strike against theUS. How likely is that to happen?
Brian Becker: No, it’s not likely to happen. NorthKoreans realize that the US, with 3,000 operational and 7,000nuclear weapons overall, would, as Colin Powell said in 1995 whenhe was threatening North Korea, turn their country into a charcoalbriquette. In other words, the overwhelming power of the Americannuclear machine is great indeed. But I think we have to step backand see what’s really going on because the North Koreans realizethat the United States’ strategy with the right-wing government inSouth Korea in pressuring China, North Korea’s traditional ally, togo along with the program because I think China fears, after theAsia pivot, that there’s growing danger of an actual war in thePacific to isolate North Korea.
But what has North Korea done? North Korea has carried out anuclear test, the third. But they’re responding to the major,massive US military exercises that are conducted in a way to stagea mock invasion and bombing of their country – the country that wasindeed invaded. Twenty years ago – in fact, exactly 20 years ago –the US strategic command said, “We’re reorienting US hydrogen bombsaway from the Soviet Union” - this was after the demise of the USSR– and are now targeting North Korea. And that’s when the DPRKwithdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and began building withearnestness its own nuclear capacity.
RT: And is this nuclear capacity though a threat tothe region as well as other parts of the world? The anti-missilesystem in Eastern Europe is being described as defensive actionagainst North Korea – is it really a threat?
BB: Well it’s not a threat in the sense I spoke about amoment ago, the US has such a preponderance of force. But the NorthKoreans, interestingly in February, just a month ago, said thelesson of the Libyan and the Iraq invasion that happened 10 yearsago when the US either invaded or bombed governments that weretargeted, that both of those governments had agreed to disarm, hadabandoned any weapons of mass destruction, and the North Koreaninterpretation of that is, if you disarm, the US will say, “Thankyou, let’s have peace”, but the US will say, “Thank you, now we canprepare more aggressively for an invasion or a bombingcampaign.”
North Korea is determined not to let that happen, and that’s howthey view the development of their nuclear arsenal – it’s strictlydefensive, it’s not a threat.
RT: The US has threatened even tougher measures ifthese newest sanctions fail to stop Pyongyang from more nucleartests. What else can they do short of military action?
BB: I think the economic sanctions are having a very bigimpact. The US is now basically depriving North Korea of access tointernational banking. They’re doing it to Korea, and they hope ifthey can break China, they will do it to Korea what they did toIraq as a precursor to regime change. Again, I think what needs tohappen is that the US needs to stop threatening North Korea. Itneeds to sign a peace treaty, which it refuses to do, and actuallyend the Korean War, rather than just armistice, which was on July26, 1953, 60 years ago. They need to lift the sanctions, and theyneed to normalize relations. That almost happened in the last eightdays of the Clinton administration, it was the beginning of a thaw,the US could go by that road, but it seems that the Obamaadministration is acting a lot like George W. Bush.
RT: As you say, the dialogue is the only way forward.But there’s been a lot of rhetoric and military action to get Iranover its perceived nuclear threat. We’re not actually seeing thesame sort of rhetoric over North Korea, are we?
BB: I actually think that the Korean Peninsula is so hot,so tense, it’s the most heavily-militarized part of the world. Eventhough none of the countries, none of the parties want a full-scalewar, any small incident in the Korean Peninsula could lead to bothsides stepping on the escalation ladder. That’s how wars start,even when there’s no intention for war. The need now is to reducetensions, and the … for that is not on North Korea which is notthreatening the US, it’s the US that should stop carrying out wargames simulating the invasion and bombing of North Korea and liftsanctions.
RT: China has actually cooperated with the US, and theUN over this latest round of sanctions. That’s an interesting move,is it not?
BB: I think it’s a clear result of China pursuing anappeasement foreign policy with the US after the Obamaadministration announced the pivot of Asia. It’s gonna be in thePacific waters. The US is militarizing its presence in the Pacific,China is very worried that the Korean Peninsula could become aspark causing a larger conflagration right on its own boundaries.So they’re upset with North Korea, but North Korea isn’t listeningto China, they’re not thinking mainly about China, they’rethinking, “How do we avoid being collapsed, either by economicsanctions, or military pressure, or combination of both?” Iactually think that the Korean Peninsula is so hot, so tense, it’sthe most heavily-militarized part of the world. Even though none ofthe countries, none of the parties want a full-scale war, any smallincident in the Korean Peninsula could lead to both sides steppingon the escalation ladder. That’s how wars start, even when there’sno intention for war. The need now is to reduce tensions, and theonus for that is not on North Korea which is not threatening theUS, it’s the US that should stop carrying out war games simulatingthe invasion and bombing of North Korea and lift sanctions.
RT: Prior to the sanctions being announced, NorthKorea threatened to use a pre-emptive nuclear strike against theUS. How likely is that to happen?
Brian Becker: No, it’s not likely to happen. NorthKoreans realize that the US, with 3,000 operational and 7,000nuclear weapons overall, would, as Colin Powell said in 1995 whenhe was threatening North Korea, turn their country into a charcoalbriquette. In other words, the overwhelming power of the Americannuclear machine is great indeed. But I think we have to step backand see what’s really going on because the North Koreans realizethat the United States’ strategy with the right-wing government inSouth Korea in pressuring China, North Korea’s traditional ally, togo along with the program because I think China fears, after theAsia pivot, that there’s growing danger of an actual war in thePacific to isolate North Korea.
But what has North Korea done? North Korea has carried out anuclear test, the third. But they’re responding to the major,massive US military exercises that are conducted in a way to stagea mock invasion and bombing of their country – the country that wasindeed invaded. Twenty years ago – in fact, exactly 20 years ago –the US strategic command said, “We’re reorienting US hydrogen bombsaway from the Soviet Union” - this was after the demise of the USSR– and are now targeting North Korea. And that’s when the DPRKwithdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and began building withearnestness its own nuclear capacity.
RT: And is this nuclear capacity though a threat tothe region as well as other parts of the world? The anti-missilesystem in Eastern Europe is being described as defensive actionagainst North Korea – is it really a threat?
BB: Well it’s not a threat in the sense I spoke about amoment ago, the US has such a preponderance of force. But the NorthKoreans, interestingly in February, just a month ago, said thelesson of the Libyan and the Iraq invasion that happened 10 yearsago when the US either invaded or bombed governments that weretargeted, that both of those governments had agreed to disarm, hadabandoned any weapons of mass destruction, and the North Koreaninterpretation of that is, if you disarm, the US will say, “Thankyou, let’s have peace”, but the US will say, “Thank you, now we canprepare more aggressively for an invasion or a bombingcampaign.”
North Korea is determined not to let that happen, and that’s howthey view the development of their nuclear arsenal – it’s strictlydefensive, it’s not a threat.
RT: The US has threatened even tougher measures ifthese newest sanctions fail to stop Pyongyang from more nucleartests. What else can they do short of military action?
BB: I think the economic sanctions are having a very bigimpact. The US is now basically depriving North Korea of access tointernational banking. They’re doing it to Korea, and they hope ifthey can break China, they will do it to Korea what they did toIraq as a precursor to regime change. Again, I think what needs tohappen is that the US needs to stop threatening North Korea. Itneeds to sign a peace treaty, which it refuses to do, and actuallyend the Korean War, rather than just armistice, which was on July26, 1953, 60 years ago. They need to lift the sanctions, and theyneed to normalize relations. That almost happened in the last eightdays of the Clinton administration, it was the beginning of a thaw,the US could go by that road, but it seems that the Obamaadministration is acting a lot like George W. Bush.
RT: As you say, the dialogue is the only way forward.But there’s been a lot of rhetoric and military action to get Iranover its perceived nuclear threat. We’re not actually seeing thesame sort of rhetoric over North Korea, are we?
BB: I actually think that the Korean Peninsula is so hot,so tense, it’s the most heavily-militarized part of the world. Eventhough none of the countries, none of the parties want a full-scalewar, any small incident in the Korean Peninsula could lead to bothsides stepping on the escalation ladder. That’s how wars start,even when there’s no intention for war. The need now is to reducetensions, and the … for that is not on North Korea which is notthreatening the US, it’s the US that should stop carrying out wargames simulating the invasion and bombing of North Korea and liftsanctions.
RT: China has actually cooperated with the US, and theUN over this latest round of sanctions. That’s an interesting move,is it not?
BB: I think it’s a clear result of China pursuing anappeasement foreign policy with the US after the Obamaadministration announced the pivot of Asia. It’s gonna be in thePacific waters. The US is militarizing its presence in the Pacific,China is very worried that the Korean Peninsula could become aspark causing a larger conflagration right on its own boundaries.So they’re upset with North Korea, but North Korea isn’t listeningto China, they’re not thinking mainly about China, they’rethinking, “How do we avoid being collapsed, either by economicsanctions, or military pressure, or combination of both?” Iactually think that the Korean Peninsula is so hot, so tense, it’sthe most heavily-militarized part of the world. Even though none ofthe countries, none of the parties want a full-scale war, any smallincident in the Korean Peninsula could lead to both sides steppingon the escalation ladder. That’s how wars start, even when there’sno intention for war. The need now is to reduce tensions, and theonus for that is not on North Korea which is not threatening theUS, it’s the US that should stop carrying out war games simulatingthe invasion and bombing of North Korea and lift sanctions.
Record sharks threaten Spring Break in Florida
Tens of thousands of sharks have been spotted around in the area around Palm Beach County, on Florida's south-east coast.
Os erros da política americana
O primeiro mandato de Obama foi uma agradável surpresa em termos de política externa. Apoiado por Hillary Clinton, deixámos de ver os Estados Unidos com a tendência intervencionista e monopolista que...
China warns over fresh currency tensions
Competitive devaluations will hurt emerging countries, says Beijing’s commerce minister, reminding G20 nations of promises to avoid currency wars
Berlusconi in Hospital with Eye Problem
Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (L) touches his eyes, 2011. He is currently in the hospital being treated for a recurring eye problem. (Eric Feferberg/AFP/Getty Images) Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is in the Hospital today being treated for an eye problem. This has been a recurring problem and lawyers have said it is a legitimate impediment to his appearance in court, according to Reuters.
Thursday Berlusconi was received a one year sentence for publishing the contents of an illegally obtained wiretap, though he will not serve any time because he is over 75 years old.
He was scheduled to appear in court again Friday on charges of paying for sex with an underage prostitute, according to Reuters. This hospital stay could delay the verdict, due March 18.
A slew of charges have been brought against Berlusconi in recent years, including bribery, perjury, corruption and fraud
The Epoch Times publishes in 35 countries and in 21 languages. Subscribe to our e-newsletter.
Thursday Berlusconi was received a one year sentence for publishing the contents of an illegally obtained wiretap, though he will not serve any time because he is over 75 years old.
He was scheduled to appear in court again Friday on charges of paying for sex with an underage prostitute, according to Reuters. This hospital stay could delay the verdict, due March 18.
A slew of charges have been brought against Berlusconi in recent years, including bribery, perjury, corruption and fraud
The Epoch Times publishes in 35 countries and in 21 languages. Subscribe to our e-newsletter.
Study: Facebook nudges users toward less privacy
A study published this week by Carnegie-Mellon University suggests that some design changes to the social media site have nudged users into sharing more information than they want to.
VIDEO: Romanians 'not lazy workshy people'
British newspapers have portrayed her fellow Romanians as "lazy workshy people" the Cheeky Girl singer Monica Irimia said in her This Week film on immigration.
Africa's Cocaine Hub: Guinea-Bissau a 'Drug Trafficker's Dream'
Guinea-Bissau has become a major hub of cocaine trafficking between Latin America and Europe. But any wealth the West African nation has derived from its middleman status has been offset by increased violence and instability.
Falkland Islands defy Argentine sovereignty push with referendum
BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Voters in the remote British-ruled Falkland Islands hold a referendum on their future on Sunday that seeks to challenge Argentina's increasingly vocal sovereignty claim.
Bill Clinton contra lei do casamento gay que assinou
O ex-presidente americano Bill Clinton pediu ao Supremo Tribunal a anulação de uma lei que ele próprio assinou em 1996 e que define o casamento como a união entre um homem e uma mulher, qualificando-a...
Police to stop subway migration controls
Stockholm's border police will stop checking commuters in the underground as part of their effort to find and deport illegal immigrants.
While the practice has not been found to be illegal, the attention and criticism it has received has demanded too much effort, Peter Nilson, head of the border police unit told Swedish Radio.
Nine out of 10 commuters who were stopped by police and asked to show ID under the so-called Reva project turned out to have the right to be in Sweden.
The government had pressured the police to increase the number of deportations of undocumented migrants from Sweden.
But in recent weeks, several politicians, immigrants’ rights activists and other members of the public have protested against Reva, with some accusing the police of practicing racial profiling by disproportionally targeting people who look foreign.
While the practice has not been found to be illegal, the attention and criticism it has received has demanded too much effort, Peter Nilson, head of the border police unit told Swedish Radio.
Nine out of 10 commuters who were stopped by police and asked to show ID under the so-called Reva project turned out to have the right to be in Sweden.
The government had pressured the police to increase the number of deportations of undocumented migrants from Sweden.
But in recent weeks, several politicians, immigrants’ rights activists and other members of the public have protested against Reva, with some accusing the police of practicing racial profiling by disproportionally targeting people who look foreign.
Pyongyang menace Washington de frappe nucléaire
En décembre 2011, avec l'arrivée de Kim Jong Un au pouvoir, la communauté internationale avait espéré, sinon une démocratisation, du moins un certain assouplissement du régime stalinien en Corée du Nord.
German jitters over cyber attacks
Alarmed by the pervasiveness of cyber hacking, the German business community and the government have been spurred into action. But the threats evolve constantly and hackers are becoming increasingly malicious.
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