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MEXICO CITY (Reuters): Mexico arrested its head of Interpol on Tuesday for allegedly working for a powerful drug cartel and sent the military to take over police duties in the city of Tijuana in another step to flush out corrupt law enforcement.
Ricardo Gutierrez was Mexico's representative to Interpol, the world's largest international police force, and the latest top police officer to be locked up on suspicion of working for drug traffickers.
In October, two leading anti-drug agents were jailed for taking bribes of "up to $450,000 a month" from the Beltran Leyva crime group to leak intelligence about police operations.
The Beltran Leyva brothers recently split from the Sinaloa drug cartel run by Mexico's most wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, and also were bribing Gutierrez, prosecutors said. read more
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The Beltran Leyva brothers recently split from the Sinaloa drug cartel run by Mexico's most wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, and also were bribing Gutierrez, prosecutors said.">
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RROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) — By 2011? No recovery? No new bull? "Hey Paul, why do you keep talking about a bigger crash coming by 2011?" Readers ask that often. So here's a sequel to my predictions of 2000 and 2004, with a look three years ahead:
First. Dot-com crash
We pinpointed the dot-com crash at its peak, in a March 20, 2000 column: "Next crash? Sorry, you won't see it coming." Bulls-eye: The dot-com bubble popped. The economy went into a 30-month recession. The stock market lost $8 trillion. And today, over eight years later, the market is still roughly 40% below its 2000 peak. See previous Paul B. Farrell.
Factor in inflation and the average stock has lost well over 50% of its value. Stocks have proven to be a very big loser, a bad investment for Americans, thanks to Wall Street's selfish greed, plus the complicity and naiveté of politicians, press and public.
Second. Subprime meltdown. read more
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First. Dot-com crash
We pinpointed the dot-com crash at its peak, in a March 20, 2000 column: "Next crash? Sorry, you won't see it coming." Bulls-eye: The dot-com bubble popped. The economy went into a 30-month recession. The stock market lost $8 trillion. And today, over eight years later, the market is still roughly 40% below its 2000 peak. See previous Paul B. Farrell.
Factor in inflation and the average stock has lost well over 50% of its value. Stocks have proven to be a very big loser, a bad investment for Americans, thanks to Wall Street's selfish greed, plus the complicity and naiveté of politicians, press and public.
Second. Subprime meltdown.">
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Emboldened by its first mission to the Moon, India is to take on a target closer to Earth: Google.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), which is based in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of the sub-continent, will roll-out a rival to Google Earth, the hugely popular online satellite imagery service, by the end of the month.
The project, dubbed Bhuvan (Sanskrit for Earth), will allow users to zoom into areas as small as 10 metres wide, compared to the 200 metre wide zoom limit on Google Earth. read more
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The Bush administration has already handed out almost half of the $700 billion in bank bailout money authorized by Congress but has not even filled the mandated oversight positions to review how it is being used.
Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, has described the handling of the bailout as "borderline criminal" because of this and other problems. Klein spoke to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! on Monday to explain her accusations.
"We were all reassured that there was going to be transparency, accountability, legality," Klein stated. "But now we’re finding out that, in fact, Henry Paulson has achieved his original goal by stealth, because there is no accountability, and lawmakers are very hesitant to challenge this. ... Essentially, what the Bush administration has done is said, 'We dare you to challenge us and be responsible for the Great Depression.'" read more
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Democracy Now! on Monday to explain her accusations.
"We were all reassured that there was going to be transparency, accountability, legality," Klein stated. "But now we’re finding out that, in fact, Henry Paulson has achieved his original goal by stealth, because there is no accountability, and lawmakers are very hesitant to challenge this. ... Essentially, what the Bush administration has done is said, 'We dare you to challenge us and be responsible for the Great Depression.'"">
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Associated Press (McALLEN, Texas): A South Texas grand jury has indicted Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on state charges related to the alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County's federal detention centers.
The indictment, which had not yet been signed by the presiding judge, was one of seven released Tuesday in a county that has been a source of bizarre legal and political battles in recent years. Another of the indictments named a state senator on charges of profiting from his position.
Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra himself had been under indictment for more than a year and half before a judge dismissed the indictments last month. This flurry of charges came in the twilight of Guerra's tenure, which ends this year after nearly two decades in office. He lost convincingly in a Democratic primary in March.
Cheney's indictment on a charge of engaging in an organized criminal activity criticizes the vice president's investment in the Vanguard Group, which holds interests in the private prison companies running the federal detention centers. It accuses Cheney of a conflict of interest and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees because of his link to the prison companies. read more
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COMMENT: This forum on Obama’s Change.gov website is one place to present Obama & his crew with alternative proposals; like any other dropbox, the volume of response will be more telling than anything else.
Marc Gallagher, Liberty Maven: Ron Paul has been rightly critical of Barack Obama’s interventionist desires. It certainly seems the only foreign policy difference between our outgoing meddling President and our incoming one is the venue of destruction. Bush’s crusade was Iraq. It looks like Obama’s will be Afghanistan. Three or four years from now will Obama have plummeting approval ratings due to mismanagement of his coming interventionist crusade in Afghanistan?
The real answer depends on the level of the crusade. By level, I could mean blood level. The most morbid yet accurate indicator of failure in such an effort is the number of body bags on planes bound for home. Will the American people give Barack Obama more breathing room than Bush on this horrific statistic? I certainly hope not. read more
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Betsy Mason, Wired: A new crop of supercomputers is breaking down the petaflop speed barrier, pushing high-performance computing into a new realm that could change science more profoundly than at any time since Galileo, leading researchers say.
When the Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was announced at the international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second, the first two computers to do so.
These computers aren't just faster than those they pushed further down the list, they will enable a new class of science that wasn't possible before. As recently described in Wired magazine, these massive number crunchers will push simulation to the forefront of science.
Scientists will be able to run new and vastly more accurate models of complex phenomena: Climate models will have dramatically higher resolution and accuracy, new materials for efficient energy transmission will be developed and simulations of scramjet engines will reach a new level of complexity. read more
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Ali Eteraz, The Guardian:
Now that the election is over, it's interesting to look at how Gen Y compared politically to the generations before, largely because, if you do a little mental math, you are looking at a generation that by 2016, could represent slightly more than 30% of the American electorate. Indeed if you look at the voter breakdown in the 2008 presidential election you find that Gen Y chose Obama over McCain 68% to 30%.
Dumbocracy: Adventures with the Loony Left, the Rabid Right and other American Idiots, is a book by Marty Beckerman, a Gen Y'er who was a former college Republican, and in 2000 was a great cheerleader for John McCain, but voted for Obama this year. The book is Beckerman's chronicle of the four years he spent hanging out with "foot soldiers" of the left and right: pro-choice and anti-choice, pro-gay and anti-gay, pro-war and anti-war. Beckerman immersed himself into the culture wars that are everywhere percolating behind the scenes in America (consider that California's anti-gay marriage Prop 8 was victorious despite an Obama victory) and came out completely flabbergasted. read more
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I can confirm this story: I told Google iPhone "pickled herring" and Google returned "testicle hair" (you don't want to see the top sites, believe me!). My wife, who's American, said the same phrase and got a perfect result...
A new voice-recognition search tool for the iPhone has problems understanding British accents, leading to some bizarre answers to spoken queries, a newspaper report and users said Wednesday.
The free application, which allows iPhone owners to use the Google search engine with their voice, mistook the word "iPhone" variously for "sex," "Einstein" and "kitchen sink," said the Daily Telegraph.
Comments left by users on the application's website seemed to confirm the problem. "Awesome job google. only problem is every time I say the word 'fish' it registers as 'sex'," wrote one, identified as Kevin. read more
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A new voice-recognition search tool for the iPhone has problems understanding British accents, leading to some bizarre answers to spoken queries, a newspaper report and users said Wednesday.
The free application, which allows iPhone owners to use the Google search engine with their voice, mistook the word "iPhone" variously for "sex," "Einstein" and "kitchen sink," said the Daily Telegraph.
Comments left by users on the application's website seemed to confirm the problem. "Awesome job google. only problem is every time I say the word 'fish' it registers as 'sex'," wrote one, identified as Kevin.">
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Brandon Keim, Wired: Everybody knows a forgetful stoner, but research suggests that low doses of marijuana could be good for memory, and even help prevent Alzheimer's disease.
When given a compound similar to THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, rat brains displayed reduced levels of inflammation associated with Alzheimer's disease. The drug also stimulated the production of proteins associated with memory formation and brain cell growth.
"Everyone is aware that smoking too much marijuana impairs memory," said Ohio State University psychologist Yannick Marchalant. "Our work stays on the safe side — doses that we know are not going to impair memory, but improved it."
Marchalant and fellow OSU psychologist Gary Wenk previously showed that marijuana can improve memory formation in rats. The latest research, presented at this week's Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, provides a detailed look at THC's effect on the brain.
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Marchalant and fellow OSU psychologist Gary Wenk previously showed that marijuana can improve memory formation in rats. The latest research, presented at this week's Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, provides a detailed look at THC's effect on the brain.
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