0 Modern Humans Reached Arabia as much as 65,000 Years Earlier

Archaeologists working in the Arabian peninsula are re-documenting the first human migrations out of Africa, and offer new evidence that modern humans reached the Persian Gulf as much as 65,000 years earlier than previously believed.

The international team of researchers said the modern humans might have followed a direct route to the Arabian Peninsula, heading across the Red Sea, rather than traveling via the Nile Valley or the Near East as previous studies had suggested.

The researchers, led by Hans-Peter Uerpmann from Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, Germany, discovered an ancient human toolkit at the Jebel Faya archaeological site in the United Arab Emirates, which resembled technology used by early humans in east Africa but not the craftsmanship that emerged from the Middle East.

The toolkit included relatively primitive hand axes, perforators and scrapers, suggesting that technological innovation was not necessary for early humans to migrate to the Arabian Peninsula.

The researchers calculated the age of the stone tools using a technique known as luminescence dating, and determined that the artifacts were about 100,000 to 125,000 years old.

"These 'anatomically modern' humans — like you and me — had evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago and subsequently populated the rest of the world," said Simon Armitage from Royal Holloway, University of London, lead author of the study.

"Our findings should stimulate a re-evaluation of the means by which we modern humans became a global species."

The researchers also analyzed sea level and climate-change records for the region during the last interglacial period, approximately 130,000 years ago.  They determined that the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which separates Arabia from the Horn of Africa, would have narrowed due to lower sea-levels, allowing safe passage prior to and at the beginning of that last interglacial period.

At that time, the Arabian Peninsula was much wetter than today, with greater vegetation cover and a network of lakes and rivers.  This would have allowed early humans access into Arabia and then into the Fertile Crescent and India, the researchers said.

"Archaeology without ages is like a jigsaw with the interlocking edges removed — you have lots of individual pieces of information but you can't fit them together to produce the big picture," said Armitage. 

"At Jebel Faya, the ages reveal a fascinating picture in which modern humans migrated out of Africa much earlier than previously thought, helped by global fluctuations in sea-level and climate change in the Arabian Peninsula."

The study appears in the January 28 issue of the journal Science.

http://www.redorbit.com 

http://www.independent.co.uk/ 

0 Graph Visualizes Egypt's Internet Blackout (PICTURE)

San Francisco-based CPJ Internet Advocacy Coordinator Danny O’Brien has worked globally as a journalist and activist covering technology and digital rights. Follow him on Twitter @danny_at_cpj.

My colleague at CPJ, Mohamed Abdel Dayem, was the first to mail me. "Just a second ago," he wrote, "about 10 contacts of mine all disappeared off instant messaging in unison. That cannot be a coincidence."

That was yesterday, January 27th, at 5:34pm New York time. A stream of similar emails followed. Everyone I knew had lost contact with Egypt. On the wider Internet, the Twitter streams and Facebook updates from Egyptian journalists, bloggers, and others, which had been overwhelming us since the protests on the 25th, had all suddenly gone quiet.
Could it be a coincidence? Internet connectivity disappears all the time, for many reasons, almost always accidental. Sometimes, it's a cut optical fiber. A ship might drag its anchor over a submarine cable. It can be very difficult to determine the true extent or origins of any online disruption.
To find out what was really going on, I posted a message to a mailing list where many of administrators of the American corner of the Internet discuss day-to-day operations. Were they all seeing a similar drop-off in connectivity to Egypt?
At first, the replies were equally anecdotal: someone with a server in Cairo could no longer access it; attempts to reach prominent Egyptian websites were failing. Finally, Andree Tonk at BGPMon, an Internet routing monitoring organization, provided the first concrete evidence of an Egypt-wide shutdown.
Tonk's article is somewhat technical, so let me explain the background. In order to direct traffic across the Internet, a large number of key machines across the Net maintain among themselves a global index of routes. Think of it as a constantly-updated roadmap of how to get from one part of the Internet to another.
At around 5:28PM Eastern, the routes to almost all of Egypt's share of the Internet began to disappear from this global index. Egypt went from having 2903 networks connected to the wider Internet, routed over 52 ISPs, to only 327, via only 26 remaining ISPs. Either because of a physical break in communications, or through a deliberate act by Egyptian ISPs, Egypt was vanishing from the Internet's map of itself.
Craig Labovitz, the Chief Scientist of Arbor Networks, a company that makes some of the Internet's most widely-used traffic-monitoring software, quickly added this more dramatic visualization of what his engineers were seeing (complete with typo):

                                            Arbor Network's traffic analysis for Egypt

This is, Labovitz writes, a "graph of Egyptian Internet traffic across a large number of geographically and topologically diverse providers on January 27th". You can see that traffic plummeting to a "handful of megabits after the withdrawal of most Egyptian ISP ... routes".
Note that both Labovitz and Tonk's analysis showed that not everything was down in Egypt. The rest of my evening was spent working with others to try and find out what was up, and why.
The main network that was completely unaffected by the early lockdown was the systems run by the Egyptian ISP, the Noor Group. There was some early speculation that this was because the Egyptian Stock Exchange was hosted on that network, which led to an online rumor that the service was being kept up to maintain government services.
Actually, Egypt's Stock Exchange was, like any high-availability website, hosted on multiple redundant Internet connections, including Noor. Noor also offered a DSL service to many ordinary Egyptians, which some journalists have been using to communicate.
Right now, we know that there are also some multinational companies that have connectivity (possibly because their internal networks don't use the public net). We've heard talk that "five star hotels" have connectivity also, as well as a handful of other networks beside Noor. SMS seems to be down, but mobile phones are working.
What we don't have is complete answers to why such a drastic Internet shutdown happened. As the hours of Egypt's disappearance from the global Net drag on, I have heard nothing of any catastrophic accident that could explain it. And as foreign journalists in Egypt are locked down in their hotels or are attacked on the streets as Al-Jazeera, AFP, and others are reporting, as local mobile provider Vodaphone admits "all mobile operators in Egypt have been instructed to suspend services in selected areas,"the chances that this is all just a coincidence grow slim indeed.

0 Egytpian Government Pull Plug On Internet....Countrywide.

Egypt's Internet Shut Down,

By James Cowie on January 27, 2011 7:56 PM

 

Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers. Virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.
This is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the Internet stayed up in a rate-limited form designed to make Internet connectivity painfully slow. The Egyptian government's actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map.
What happens when you disconnect a modern economy and 80,000,000 people from the Internet? What will happen tomorrow, on the streets and in the credit markets? This has never happened before, and the unknowns are piling up. We will continue to dig into the event, and will update this story as we learn more. As Friday dawns in Cairo under this unprecedented communications blackout, keep the Egyptian people in your thoughts.
Update (3:06 UTC)
One of the very few exceptions to this block has been Noor Group (AS20928), which still has 83 out of 83 live routes to its Egyptian customers, with inbound transit from Telecom Italia as usual. Why was Noor Group apparently unaffected by the countrywide takedown order? Unknown at this point, but we observe that the Egyptian Stock Exchange (www.egyptse.com) is still alive at a Noor address.
Its DNS A records indicate that it's normally reachable at 4 different IP addresses, only one of which belongs to Noor. Internet transit path diversity is a sign of good planning by the Stock Exchange IT staff, and it appears to have paid off in this case. Did the Egyptian government leave Noor standing so that the markets could open next week? 

UPDATE: (2:10 a.m. ET) HuffPost reader Thomas Jaworowski, a tech enthusiast, emails in that he "decided to try a few tricks" to see if Egypt's Internet really was down or it was just server overload causing the problems. He traced IP addresses, particularly for the U.S. Embassy in Cairo which is hosted in Egypt, and found that the Web traffic is indeed being blocked at the country level, not just a simple censoring.

0 Utah's Top Secret Army base locked down after 'serious concern'

Installation works to protect troops from biological and chemical weapons 

A Utah military base that carries out tests to protect troops against biological attacks was locked down over a "serious concern," but was beginning to reopen early Thursday, officials said. Early Thursday, base spokeswoman Paula Thomas said the base, located about 85 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, had reopened to incoming personnel, and preparations were under way to allow people inside to leave.
She said there were no injuries resulting from the cause of the lockdown, which began Wednesday afternoon. She said more details would be released later in the day.
Col. William E. King, base commander at Dugway Proving Grounds announced Wednesday evening that gates were locked to both incoming and outgoing personnel to resolve the problem, but that no one was in danger.
King and other base officials declined to provide any details on the cause of the lockdown.
"As you know measures like these (lockdown of our gates) are not taken lightly," King said Wednesday, according to NBC station KSL-TV. "No one is in immediate danger but these steps are required."
Thomas called as accurate media reports that about 1,200 to 1,400 people — a mix of military personnel and contractors and civilian workers — were inside the base when the lockdown occurred.
The Salt Lake Tribune reported that a lockdown began at 5:24 p.m. MST Wednesday, with no one allowed in or out of the base.
According to its website, the nearly 800,000-acre base conducts chemical and biological defense training, and "is the Defense Department's leader in testing battlefield smokes and obscurants."  Personnel there also test military equipment's viability in environments where they're facing chemical or biological threat.
The base also is used by the U.S. Army Reserves and the U.S. National Guard for maneuver training.

Further interesting reading...
http://www.project-112shad-fdn.com/ 
Aiming to expose and highlight the problems of the military personnel who participated in the US Army's
"atmospheric testing of chemical, biological and radiological warfare agents."

Looking at the pictures of the main gates from the above  website reminded me immediately of the Stephen King Classic..."The Stand." (Below).



and the Secret Nuclear Reactor, Biological and Future Weapons and Space vehicle testing below is very interesting..
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread61315/pg1 

DUGWAY PROVING GROUND 

THE NEW GROOM LAKE?

 
Dugway Proving Ground is located 80 miles southwest of Salt Lake City and covers an area of approximately 800,000 acres in the Great Salt Lake Desert. It is by far the most secretive facility in Utah as well as the most controversial. Many residents feel threatened and unsure of its close location to Salt Lake City, especially because of the type of testing that takes place there.

The primary mission of Dugway Proving Ground is to plan, conduct, analyze, and report the results of technical tests and studies; especially in the areas of chemical defense, biological defense, incendiary, smoke and obscurant systems, and environmental technology testing. Dugway also provides test expertise, services and support for all authorized customers, including United States and foreign governments, as well as non-governmental organizations. In addition, Dugway is a major range and test facility for chemical and biological defense testing and a reliance center for the U.S. Department of Defense.

With the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States and its military forces suddenly realized a need for increased military capability in many areas, which included expanded knowledge in chemical and biological warfare.

Dugway Proving Ground was authorized to fill the need for testing weapons and defenses against chemical and biological agents. Over the years, the proving ground has undergone various name changes and periods of deactivation and reactivation.

Dugway is now part of the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command (TECOM), headquartered at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. TECOM is a major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Material Command, headquartered at Alexandria, Virginia. At present, Dugway Proving Ground encompasses 798,855 acres. In addition to chemical and biological defensive testing and environment characterization and remediation technology testing, Dugway is the Defense Department's leader in testing battlefield smokes and obscurants. The installion currently consists of more than 600 buildings with a total value of more than $240 million.

NASA's X-33

Lately there has been an increase in activity at the Utah facility, both on the ground and in the airspace above Dugway. Reported last year, was the construction of a new 15,000 feet runway which is now known to be for the testing of NASA's next generation space shuttles, including the X-33. Also, unusual aerial objects emitting mysterious vapor contrails lends support to Dugway being a secret test facility for new aircraft.

Security at the installation has also been increased quite dramatically. Warning signs have been established along the perimeter of the base and if someone happens to wander to close to the restricted zones, expect to see unmarked "black" helicopters challenge your presence in the area.

It has also been revealed that an unusual facility within Dugway may house experimental craft, possibly of alien origin. During the 1950s and 1970s, the facility was constantly under armed guard. During this time period, convoy trucks had been seen entering the hangar with their cargo covered by tarpaulins. One truck was seen which was carrying something oval or circular in shape and being about 30 feet wide. The truck was accompanied by five men. Could this have been a flying disc-shaped craft? Three concentric fences were later built around the hangar.

Rumors persist as to what is housed in the hangar, a more common one being that it is a storage facility for a SLR-1 portable nuclear reactor. However, there is unusual evidence which may suggest that the flying disc was of a very secretive nature. The five men who were seen with the truck all happened to mysteriously die within a year of delivering the cargo to Dugway. Two of them died in a single plane crash from Chicago to Denver. The third died in an auto wreck when his car fell off a cliff in Northern California, presumably because of brake failure. The fourth committed suicide by hanging himself with a necktie, for no apparent reason. The fifth man simply was reported missing one day after leaving home for work.

Of course, the above story could simply be disinformation, to distract people from a different project at Dugway Proving Ground. But whatever the truth, the base is alive with strange and unusual activity. 
 

0 Yet Another Major Snowstorm Hits Northeast US

 
Yet another snowstorm hit the Northeast US Wednesday through early Thursday. 

The storm came in two rounds, an initial burst on Wednesday morning and then a heavier round late Wednesday through early Thursday. Unlike previous storms this season, heavy snow also fell in D.C. and Baltimore in addition to Philadelphia, New York City and Southern New England.

As snow began in the D.C. and Baltimore areas late Wednesday, thunder and lightning were common. Snowfall rates of 1-2" per hour made for a nightmare rush hour.

These heavy snow rates with thunder and lightning then moved northward through portions of eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Philadelphia piled up near 15" from this latest storm.

New York City and Newark picked up a whopping 19" snow. For the month, both cities now have piled on between 36-38" making January 2011 the snowiest January on record! Bridgeport, Conn., Islip, N.Y. and New York-La Guardia have also now seen their snowiest Januaries.

Hartford, Conn. now has near 48" this month, beating December 1945 as the snowiest month on record.

Below are some of the snow totals reported in the Northeast from this storm. 

0 Bank of England chief Mervyn King: standard of living to plunge at fastest rate since 1920s

Households face the most dramatic squeeze in living standards since the 1920s, the Governor of the Bank of England warned, as he reacted to the shock disclosure that the economy was shrinking again

Families will see their disposable income eaten up as they “pay the inevitable price” for the financial crisis, Mervyn King warned.

With wages failing to keep pace with rising inflation, workers’ take- home pay will end the year worth the same as in 2005 — the most prolonged fall in living standards for more than 80 years, he claimed.

Mr King issued the warning in a speech in Newcastle upon Tyne after official figures showed that gross domestic product fell by 0.5 per cent during the final three months last year. The Government blamed the unexpected reduction — the first since the third quarter of 2009 — on the freezing weather that paralysed much of the country last month.

But there were fears that the country was poised to slip back into recession, defined as two successive quarters of negative growth. Economists said the situation was “an absolute disaster”.

The economic gloom deepened this morning as figures showed that mortgage lending by the major banks dived to an 11-and-a-half-year low during December.

Telegraph 

 

0 WHY IS IRELAND ONLY PRINTING ITS OWN MONEY NOW TO GIVE TO THE BANKS?

Michael Sheldrake who writes a column on economics, mainly on China’s, falsely says that the money the Irish central bank is currently printing out of thin air to support its bank sector is counterfeit money becaue it is not backed by government bonds or a loan.

http://www.businessinsider.com/ecb-allows-ireland-to-counterfeit-51-billion-euros-2011-1

He is absolutely wrong. It is not counterfeit money. It is money being printed the way Thomas Jefferson envisaged it being printed ie without creating debt or borrowing from the Federal Reserve paying interest. It is money acting as a medium of exchange for economic transations as it was originally intended to do before bankers hijacked the money creation process to turn printing money by governments into a loan from a private bank requiring interest payments.

It is money being printed the way the Chinese government today prints money – as a medium of exchange to facilitate economic growth and wothout creating debt or the need to pay interest. No wonder Sheldrake consistently misinterprets Chinese economic developments in his column: he has not understood this difference between the way China and the USA print money today and how it impacts on their economies.

The lion’s share of the 51 billion euros Irish central bank’s money appears to be flowing to the bondholders of the Anglo Irish Bank demanding interest payments from an essentially insolvent bank that should have been allowed to fail and should never have been nationalised, according to figures in a report FT.
There is no economic reason why Ireland or say the USA does print their own money. There is only a political reason. The private banks profit from printing money as debt and they have their puppets in government, controlling monetary policy. And Michael Sheldrake perpetuates the myth that only money borrowed against a loan is real money, helping the banks continue their fraud.

full story : why-is-ireland-only-printing-its-own-money-now-to-give-to-the-banks/

1 TASER announces wildlife management stungun

We've seen TASER electroshock weapons designed for law enforcement, personal protection and even riot control, but in all of the above cases, it's a human on the receiving end.

   Now the company has a different target in sight for its "less lethal" technology ... and it's one that could create as much controversy as its predecessors – the TASER Wildlife Electronic Control Device (ECD).

Introduced at this week's SHOT Show in Las Vegas, the TASER Wildlife ECD has been developed as an alternative tool for less effective methods of animal control used by wildlife professionals like chemical or acoustic repellents. It is designed for use on large animals like bears and elk.

"The TASER Wildlife ECD is an extension of TASER's technology to save animal lives," said Rick Smith, CEO and co-founder of TASER International. "It is designed to incapacitate larger animals more effectively and safer than current animal control tools."

The wildlife specific model is a three-shot, semi-automatic that can deliver a pulse from up to 35 feet (10.6 m) away. It's been ruggedized to stand-up to sea spray, rain, dust and short-term water submersion, and has the same logging and dual range laser targeting systems as the TASER X3 on which it is based. The MSRP has been set at US$2,000.

The company says that while it "believes that the modification of human behavior is the key to the management of human-animal conflicts, it sometimes becomes necessary for wildlife managers to utilize tools to modify animal behavior." Programs are being developed to train wildlife professionals in the safe use of these ECDs, but like any weapon, it's open misuse by humans and controversy is most likely to arise when it falls into the hands of untrained, unprofessional users.

Of course, we can't ask even smarter than average bears what they think.

gizmag com

0 US Debt "Officially" crosses $14 trillion mark.....imagine what it realllly is.

The amount of U.S. debt subject to the country's legal maximum has topped $14 trillion for the first time...

On Wednesday, the amount of debt subject to the cap hit $14.001 trillion at the close of trade, according to the daily Treasury statement released on Thursday.

The "Old Trusty Answer"

That means the country is less than $300 billion away from the $14.294 trillion debt ceiling, which is a cap on how much the federal government can legally borrow.

The debt ceiling has become a focal point of the debate over spending and debt. Even though congressional leaders say the cap will be raised, Republicans are vowing to use the issue as leverage to force spending cuts.

The Treasury Department estimates that borrowing could reach the cap sometime between March 31 and May 16, according to a letter Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner sent to Congress earlier this month.

Debt ceiling: Geithner won't let U.S. default

While Treasury has certain measures it can take to postpone a breach from occurring, Geithner said they would only last "several weeks."

He urged lawmakers to act soon to raise the ceiling, warning that failure to do so would be disastrous for the economy and for Americans.

Although the debt ceiling has never been reached -- so it's impossible to say definitively what would happen if it were -- budget and debt experts warn that no good can come of it.

Debt ceiling: What you need to know

If U.S. borrowing hits the ceiling and lawmakers fail to raise it, Treasury would be prohibited from borrowing more money. Barring immediate and draconian policy changes, the country would be unable to pay its bondholders or fund programs and benefits in full. That's because there wouldn't be enough tax revenue coming in to cover all of the country's bills.

Experts say the cascade effect would be crippling not only to the U.S. economy but very likely to economies and markets worldwide.

 http://money.cnn.com

The US need to default now, as do the UK and many other Country's... it may hurt...but it'll hurt a trillion times less NOW.. than in another 2-3 years, this will not go away.
The UK alone has been said to have £ 4 trillion worth of hidden debt Daily Telegraph ,  it show's the admitted US debt
figure is ....very conservative.

0 news Vandenberg Launch: Air Force Launch Spy Satellite in World’s Largest ,Tallest Rocket

The Air Force is taking great strides to keep its plan to put the U.S. Government’s latest top-secret spy satellite into orbit by hiding it in their tallest rocket.

The 235-foot-tall Delta IV Heavy rocket is planned to be blastoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base located near Santa Barbara, California.

Standing at 23-stories tall, the three-engine Delta IV w
ill be carrying a spy satellite for the Defense Department capable of taking high resolution pictures detailed enough to distinguish the
make and model of a car hundreds of miles below.

The expected launch (see update below) Thursday afternoon will happen from Vandenberg‘s Space Launch Complex 6. Officials expect the blast radius from the launch will be so powerful that it will shatter windows throughout the base.

The 235-foot-tall Delta IV Heavy rocket is planned to be blastoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base located near Santa Barbara, California.

Standing at 23-stories tall, the three-engine Delta IV w
ill be carrying a spy satellite for the Defense Department capable of taking high resolution pictures detailed enough to distinguish the make and model of a car hundreds of miles below.

The expected launch Thursday afternoon will happen from Vandenberg‘s Space Launch Complex 6. Officials expect the blast radius from the launch will be so powerful that it will shatter windows throughout the base.

As Cape Canaveral is the home to NASA and the base for the U.S. Government’s civilian space program, Vandenberg has typically been the unofficial home for the U.S. militarized space efforts. The base has been in use since the start of the Cold War and is in an ideal location for putting satellites into north-to-south orbits.

Air Force spokeswoman Lt. Ann K. Blodzinski informed the press that the Air Force had warned near by residences of the launch. “We got the word out to people, so they don’t think it’s an earthquake,” he said. Adding “Even if you don’t see it, you’re definitely going to feel it. It’s significantly more powerful than our typical launches at Vandenberg.”

The hydrogen-powered rocket is the largest unmanned vehicle capable of reaching space. Its three engines, alone are larger than the conventional semi-truck. The rocket is a joint effort by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, built under their United Launch Alliance venture.

Due to the launch still being “classified,” little is officially known about the mission. However it is believed to be a highly technical spy satellite, estimated to cost of over $1 billion. The speculation arose when it was announced that the purchaser of the rocket was the National Reconnaissance Office, the highly secretive federal intelligence agency that operates the nations’ space intelligence operations.

Wow!....wonder what's "Really" in there...as "A spy satellite capable of taking high resolution pictures detailed enough to distinguish the make and model of a car hundreds of miles below."... was done around ten years ago.....it's called 

Google earth.

0 Biometric blood vessel reading cash machines to spread in Poland in 2011

Poland´s cooperative BPS SA bank claimed Tuesday to be the first in Europe to install a biometric cash point allowing its clients to use their fingertips rather than a bank card to withdraw money.
 

“Our bank is the first in Europe to provide its clients with a new means to secure transactions to complement the secret code of their banking card,” BPS SA Bank vice-president Krzysztof Jagielski told reporters Tuesday.

“Thanks to a system which scans blood vessels in fingers, they can withdraw cash from a bank machine,” he said of a new BPS cash point installed in the capital Warsaw.

Based on “Finger Vein” technology developed by Japanese technology giant Hitachi, the bank machine which scans the unique network of minute veins in fingertips was developed by Wincor Nixdorf, a leading IT provider for retailers and retail banking.

BPS said it would install three to four of the new biometric machines in Warsaw by the end of the year, and about 200 more in the 365 banks in its network across Poland.

The new biometric machines will serve to “secure the payout of pensions at the end of the month and to guard against fraud such as “skimming”, or the theft of credit card information,”.

according to reports "They intentionally were not designed to scan fingerprints so the system is more safe by working only on fingers where blood still flows and there is pulse".

Several dozen clients have already tested the system but “as with all technological changes, there must be some time for people to adapt,” he added.

Although new to Europe, bank machines with the technology are already widely used in Japan.

Not designed to scan fingerprints...Mmmm, bet that changes.

also blood taken from new born babies for the last 35 years....will never be put on a database.

0 Yet another green-tinted Meteor prompts sighting reports

An unusually bright shooting star shot across the sky Wednesday night, prompting sighting reports from the Chicago area to Indiana, a local astronomer said.

A green-tinted burst was reported by amateur astronomers in LaPorte, Ind., just after 8 p.m.., said Adler Planetarium Astronomer Chris Lintott.

The shooting star, which was a meteor probably about the size of 10 grains of salt, likely won’t hit the ground and won’t become a meteorite, he said. Meteoroids are pieces of material traveling through space that become meteors when they streak through the Earth’s atmosphere and meteorites if they strike the ground.

At least two motorists on Chicago-area expressways also reported seeing the flash.

It’s “Good luck for those who saw it,” Lintott said. “And very beautiful.”
http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com

This latest report comes within a very busy fortnight for Meteorite sightings and hits.

 NewsOn6.com

Jan 14, 2011 10:30 PMLEFLORE  COUNTY, Oklahoma -- A NASA scientist says the fireball that lit up the Oklahoma sky Tuesday night was in fact a meteor.  He also says it was bigger than previously thought.
1/14/2011: Related story: Meteor Streaks Across Southeastern Oklahoma Sky Late Tuesday
Bill Cooke is an astronomer with the Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama who writes a blog on the center's home page.
In an entry Friday afternoon, Cooke says he used information gathered by the Elginfield Infrasound Array (ELFO) in Canada to track the meteor's path and to estimate its key characteristics.  The array records very low frequency sound waves in order to track meteors.
Cooke says based on the information gathered by ELFO, the meteor was 21 inches in diameter and weighed 376 pounds.
Cooke believes the meteor was traveling more than 33,000 miles per hour.
So far he hasn't found video of the actual meteor, but has told other web sites he believes the meteor exploded with a force of 40 to 80 tons of TNT.  He says the evidence suggests a large "fall zone" for debris in the area of Jackson, Mississippi.

Great blog for keeping up to date in realtime: http://lunarmeteoritehunters.blogspot.com/

0 Girl discovers Obama Related to all but one U.S. president...and an English King

 I realise this is in direct contrast to the last post on this subject..but just had share this.

My question is, how significant is this? In other words, are their relations to each other close enough to raise a red flag or can this really be done with anyone? If I did enough research would I discover that I am related to all of these presidents as well? It would be interesting to hear what a mathematician has to say about the odds of them being related to each other at those distances. 
I'm not convinced, but if it is significant it's some amazing research and a great talking point.

Video originally from this US NEWS website:

http://www.krem.com/video/featured-videos/Girl-discovers-royal-blood-runs-deep-with-US-presidents-99728664.html

0 LOL! Hawaii governor can't find Obama birth certificate

Artist's Impression of Original

Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie suggested in an interview published today that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Barack Obama may not exist within the vital records maintained by the Hawaii Department of Health. 

Abercrombie told the Honolulu Star Advertiser he was searching within the Hawaii Department of Health to find definitive vital records that would prove Obama was born in Hawaii, because the continuing eligibility controversy could hurt the president's chances of re-election in 2012.

Donalyn Dela Cruz, Abercrombie's spokeswoman in Honolulu, ignored again today another in a series of repeated requests made by WND for an interview with the governor.
Toward the end of the interview, the newspaper asked Abercrombie: "You stirred up quite a controversy with your comments regarding birthers and your plan to release more information regarding President Barack Obama's birth certificate. How is that coming?"
In his response, Abercrombie acknowledged the birth certificate issue will have "political implications" for the next presidential election "that we simply cannot have."

Read more: Hawaii governor can't find Obama birth certificate http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=252833#ixzz1BUcmrYhB

0 BREAKING : Bomb Is Found in Backpack Before March Honoring MLK

SEATTLE — A suspicious backpack found Monday along the route of a march honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in Spokane, Wash., contained a live bomb that was “likely capable of inflicting multiple casualties,” federal investigators said Tuesday.

The package, found before the morning march, prompted law enforcement to ask march officials to change their route and several businesses to evacuate as investigators sent in bomb-smelling dogs, a robot and specially trained officers.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said the bomb was neutralized at the scene. It was found on a bench at North Washington Street and West Main Avenue.

“We’re certainly approaching it as a potential domestic terrorism event at this point,” said Frank Harrill, the F.B.I.’s supervisory senior resident agent in Spokane.

“Whether the motive was racial or an individual was being targeted, it’s too soon to say,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/us/19bomb.html

0 Fossil fuels on demand & We’re not talking “biofuels”....this is much better.

 In September, a privately held and highly secretive U.S. biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for “a proprietary organism”

– a genetically adapted E. coli bacterium – that feeds solely on carbon dioxide and excretes liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline. This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (U.S.) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, “fossil fuels on demand.”

We’re not talking “biofuels” – not, at any rate, in the usual sense of the word. The Joule technology requires no “feedstock,” no corn, no wood, no garbage, no algae. Aside from hungry, gene-altered micro-organisms, it requires only carbon dioxide and sunshine to manufacture crude. And water: whether fresh, brackish or salt. With these “inputs,” it mimics photosynthesis, the process by which green leaves use solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds. Indeed, the company describes its manufacture of fossil fuels as “artificial photosynthesis.”

Joule says it now has “a library” of fossil-fuel organisms at work in its Massachusetts labs, each engineered to produce a different fuel. It has “proven the process,” has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 U.S. gallons an acre a year. It anticipates that this yield could hit 25,000 gallons an acre a year when scaled for commercial production, equivalent to roughly 800 barrels of crude an acre a year.

By way of comparison, Cornell University’s David Pimentel, an authority on ethanol, says that one acre of corn produces less than half as much energy, equivalent to only 328 barrels. If a few hundred barrels of crude sounds modest, recall that millions of acres of prime U.S. farmland are now used to make corn ethanol.

Joule says its “solar converter” technology makes the manufacture of liquid fossil fuels 50 times as efficient as conventional biofuel production – and eliminates as much as 90 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions. “Requiring only sunlight and waste C0{-2},” it says, “[this] technology can produce virtually unlimited quantities of fossil fuels with zero dependence on raw materials, agricultural land, crops or fresh water. It ends the hazards of oil exploration and oil production. It takes us to the unthinkable: liquid hydrocarbons on demand.”

Full story:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com

0 Flashback : Gaza children shelled by flechette rounds 21st July 2010

 "she came in through the front door and it wasn’t clear she was injured. Suddenly a lot of blood came from her nose and she vomited, all of the family saw this ~ her little brothers were very scared. She had just been playing in the front of the house.”

flechette round

That is how Nihed al-Massry describes what happened to her daughter, nine-year-old Samah Eid al-Massry, after the Israeli army reportedly shelled and fired four bombs into and around a residential area in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza Strip, on 21st July 2010.

Samah is now being hospitalized in serious condition, suffering from extensive blood loss and very low haemoglobin. She was hit by shrapnel and flechettes from a nail bomb that landed 100 meters away, causing internal bleeding to the chest and severe head trauma. Nails are now embedded throughout her body.

Shells containing flechettes are illegal under international law if fired into densely-populated civilian areas. Three other children were wounded in the attack.

Two young men were killed; Muhammad al-Kafarneh, 23, suffered severe shrapnel injuries to the back and chest and Kasim al-Shinbary, 19, was wounded by nails embedded in his skull and shrapnel his back. It was unclear earlier whether they were resistance fighters or if they were civilians.

Haitham Thaer Qasem, a four-year-old boy and an only child, was asleep on a hospital bed, occasionally gasping for breath through the apparatus around his nose. He had suffered deep nasal trauma, and flechette darts from the bomb were still embedded in his tiny body, through his back, right elbow and right leg. He was 200 meters from the impact of the bomb.

Haitham’s mother was standing off to the side, quietly crying while one of his aunts at his bedside explained what happened.

Samah Eid al-Massry, after the IDF's  soldiers  shelled and fired four bombs wounding and killing four children and two young men.

“We had asked Haitham to get shopping for [his mother] from the market, then we heard the bombings and somebody came to our home and told our family that he was in the hospital and was injured in the bombing. We came quickly to the hospital.”

Meanwhile, Samah’s doctor explained that the girl’s blood loss was a major concern. Her injuries are exacerbated by the fact that she, like three of her brothers, already suffers from the blood condition thalassemia and the drug to treat the condition, Exjade, is scarce because of the Israeli blockade. She was clearly in pain and confused, trying to remove the nasal tubes. Her mother showed us the bandages on her chest.

Her doctor, Muhammad Abu Hassan, described her situation as “semi-critical.”

“She was in very bad condition when she arrived ~ it’s difficult for children and very traumatic to insert a chest tube for small children ~ very painful. Blood was mainly coming from the chest. We will have to perform surgery and we will further explore her abdominal pain,” he explained.

The al-Massry family has been affected by Israeli attacks before. Samah’s four-year-old brother Ryad was injured during Israel’s three weeks of attacks on the Gaza Strip during winter 2008-09 when more than 400 Palestinian children were killed.

Just children of Gaza,
Palestinians.
Not much to look at here.
Move along.

As always, the international press ignores such attacks on these children.

She is not your daughter?

These are all our children and we should fight

for every child as he or she is truly "flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone".