Soaring food prices and global grain shortages are bringing new pressures on governments, food companies, and consumers to relax their longstanding resistance to genetically engineered crops.

In Japan and South Korea, some manufacturers for the first time have begun buying genetically engineered corn for use in soft drinks, snacks and other foods. Until now, to avoid consumer backlash, the companies have paid extra to buy conventionally grown corn. But with prices having tripled in two years, it has become too expensive to be so finicky. Read more »

U.S.A. — AS THE VALUE OF THE U.S. dollar declines, investing in U.S. defense firms becomes more attractive to foreign companies. That worries Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calf., who fears more foreign ownership will mean more pilfered defense technology secrets.

“We’ve got people with lots of cash” in the rest of the world and American companies “that are desperate for cash.” The increase of foreign entities buying U.S. defense companies “is going to be a problem for years to come,” Hunter said.

It’s not as bad as it was two years ago, said Kathy Watson, director of the DEFENSE SECURITY SERVICE. But improvements are coming slowly. The DSS is a little-known agency within the Defense Department that determines which companies qualify for access to classified information. It awards clearances to company officials and evaluates “foreign ownership, control or influence over U.S. defense companies. SOURCE>>>>>>>

The initial logo of the Information Awareness Office of the Pentagon was an all-seeing eye fixed on the world. The office’s purpose was to fight terrorism by creating and integrating technologies that would allow for the “total information awareness” of all electronic data generated domestically. That data include Americans’ personal information in areas such as finances, travel and communications. It would then be sifted to find suspicious patterns. The program never got off the ground — or so we thought.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported the data-mining effort was merely shifted to the National Security Agency, a sprawling yet highly secret part of the federal government whose mission is to spy internationally.

According to the Journal, the spy agency now monitors “huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. “This information is analyzed by computer programs to look for anomalous patterns that could be used for terrorism leads. Apparently, none of it has been done with a court order or judicial oversight. ARTICLE>>>

President Vladimir Putin ordered his government Friday to speed up construction of a new cosmodrome and development of a booster rocket in a bid to revive the nation’s space glory.

Russia’s space agency chief, meanwhile, said the country may stop selling seats on its spacecraft to “tourists” starting in 2010 because of the planned expansion of the international space station’s crew from the current three to six or even nine in 2010.

The development came a day before the 47th anniversary of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s becoming the first man in space. The Soviets also launched the first satellite — Sputnik — and the first woman in space, and carried out the first spacewalk. Read more »

In protest to the use of biometric data in new German passports, hackers have threatened to publish Chancellor Merkel’s fingerprints.

The Chaos Computer Club (CCC), one of Germany’s oldest and largest hacker organizations, on Saturday published Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble’s fingerprints in its own magazine.

The minister’s fingerprints were taken from a water glass he used at a public debate, CCC spokesman Frank Rieger said. Read more »

Scotland’s first large-scale tidal energy project is to be installed on the island of Islay. Members of the community-owned Islay Energy Trust have backed creation of the commercial-sized project, which is to be built in collaboration with Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen.

Scotland’s fifth-largest island will become home to between four and six turbines with a total capacity of around 2 megawatts. Developing the turbines is expected to cost up to £750,000 and should take around three years to complete. Once in operation, revenue would be generated from the sale of electricity. Read more »

A jawbone and teeth discovered at the famous Atapuerca site in northern Spain have been dated between 1.1 and 1.2 million years old.

The finds provide further evidence for the great antiquity of human occupation on the continent, the researchers write in the journal Nature.

Scientists also found stone tools and animal bones with tell-tale cut marks from butchering by humans. Read more »

( This is actually a post I previously put up, but since its Black History month I thought the kids who have endured this “education” could use a dose of truth) As I watched my favorite show tonight, I was disturbed by a quick commercial that attempted to remind all of us dumb White folks that without Blacks we would not have the Air conditioner or the Lawn Mower? Why was I disturbed by this you ask? Well to be blatantly lied to usually has that effect on me, you see both these inventions were made by you guessed it Europeans! While our politically correct Orwellian government would have you believe that the Air Conditioner was invented by Frederick Jones in 1949, it was actually patented 43 years earlier by Dr. Willis Carrier. Dr. Willis Carrier Read more »

ATHENS, Greece - Analysis of a 40,000-year-old tooth found in southern Greece suggests Neanderthals were more mobile than once thought, paleontologists said Friday.

Analysis of the tooth — part of the first and only Neanderthal remains found in Greece — showed the ancient human had spent at least part of its life away from the area where it died.

“Neanderthal mobility is highly controversial,” said paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Read more »

Although the Bush administration calls it a vital weapon against terrorism, its domestic wiretapping effort could become a devastating tool for terrorists if hacked or penetrated from inside, according to a new article by a group of America’s top computer experts.

THE ARTICLE [HERE], slated to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal IEEE Security & Privacy, was written by six experts from Sun Microsystems, Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and California-based research giant SRI International. MORE>>>

According to a recent study, people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team of scientists claim to have tracked down a genetic mutation that leads to blue eyes. They say the mutation occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago and that before then there were no blue eyes. “Originally, we all had brown eyes,” said Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen. We can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor,” Eiberg said. “They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA.” Eiberg and his colleagues detailed their study in the Jan. 3 online edition of the journal Human Genetics. That genetic switch somehow spread throughout Europe and now other parts of the world. “The question really is, ‘Why did we go from having nobody on Earth with blue eyes 10,000 years ago to having 20 or 40 percent of Europeans having blue eyes now?” John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “This gene does something good for people. It makes them have more kids.” More>>>

LONDON - A small number of flu viruses resistant to Tamiflu, a top antiviral drug, have been detected in Europe, health authorities said this week.

Data from more than a dozen European countries show that Tamiflu doesn’t work in about 13 percent of H1N1 viruses, the main flu strain causing illness this year. Normally, resistance levels are well below 1 percent.

“It’s an unexpected finding and a signal worth watching,” said Fred Hayden, a flu expert at the World Health Organization. The resistant strains most likely emerged elsewhere, but were first identified in Europe. Read more »

Security screening for arriving passengers has been stepped up yet again at American airports with the implementation of 10 finger fingerprint scans.

Last week, Logan airport, in Boston, became the third US airport to install the 10-finger scanners. Dulles airport, which serves Washington, DC, began using the devices in November and Atlanta airport began this month. By the end of the year, the devices will be installed at every international airport in the USA, as well as at seaports and border crossings. Read more »

This past weekend, Washington Post writer, Ellen Nakashimo scored a major scoop>>> on a classified directive, signed by president Bush, that authorizes a “cyber initiative” aimed at protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure against the growing threat of cyber attacks by foreign governments. The initiative is controversial because it places under control of the secretive National Security Agency the $6 billion in funds that the government is slated to spend on cybersecurity in 2008 SOURCE>>>

Unfortunately they will be sending this technology to third world Africa. 

Freiburg, Germany - Clean water with free energy is the goal of German scientists who are using the sun’s rays to power small water treatment plants for developing countries. The system is designed for arid areas of Africa and Asia where a lack of electricity makes it impossible to use large industrial plants for the desalination of seawater, like those in the Middle East.

“The regions have a very poor infrastructure. Quite often there is no electricity grid, so conventional desalination plants are out of the question,” says Joachim Koschikowski. The engineer and his team at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) have developed small decentralized units with their own solar power supplies that can transform salt water or brackish water into pure drinking water. ” Read more »

London - The British Labour government Thursday gave the green light for the construction of a new generation of nuclear power plants which it claimed would safeguard energy supplies while meeting the challenges of climate change. The controversial plan, presented to parliament in a White Paper Thursday, marks the renaissance of of atomic energy in a country which produced one of the first major anti-nuclear movements in postwar Europe.

Private investors will be invited to build the new plants, which are set to replace Britain’s 19 old-fashioned nuclear power stations expected to be phased out by 2035. Read more »

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - A Swedish company plans to harness the body heat generated by thousands of commuters scrambling to catch their trains at Stockholm’s main railway station and use it for heating a nearby office building.

Real estate firm Jernhusen AB believes the system can provide about 15 percent of the heating needed for a 13-storey building being built next to the Central Station in the Swedish capital. Read more »

Fellow nationalist gathered along the boat house row section of Philadelphia, PA in honor of Leif Ericson’s discovery of North America 600 years before Christopher Columbus. Join us in October of this year for what promises to be a growing annual event! For more information log onto: www.keystoneunited.com

THE U.S. RECENTLY revealed that China had done some major damage to the N.S.A. (National Security Agency) via penetration of the NSA facility in Hawaii (which concentrates on monitoring China). The Chinese effort was two-fold. First, the Chinese set up a translation service in Hawaii, and managed to make it appear American owned (and able to pass a security check). Eventually, this translation company got NSA contracts to translate material obtained from China. The operators of the translation of the company were able to pass the NSA material back to China, letting the Chinese know what information the NSA was picking up, which helped the Chinese figure out how the the NSA was getting certain information, and with what. This made it easier to prevent the NSA from getting certain information, or setting up a trap, to feed the NSA false information.

But there was more. Many NSA employees were Chinese-American. The Chinese set up a recruiting operation, that was so carefully established and run, that it was several years before U.S. counter-intelligence caught on, and shut it down.

All this was a major blow to the N.S.A. , and a reminder that, in the intel business, when you get sloppy, you get hurt. SOURCE>>>

NEW YORK (AP) — Oil futures retreated from a new record over $100 a barrel set Thursday after the government reported a larger-than-expected decline in crude oil inventories and an unexpected increase in heating oil supplies.

One day after oil prices briefly touched $100 for the first time, the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration said crude inventories fell by 4 million barrels last week, much more than the 1.7 million barrel decline analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires, on average, had expected. Read more »

LONDON: Individual privacy is under threat in the United States and across the European Union as governments introduce sweeping surveillance and information-gathering measures in the name of security and controlling borders, an international rights group has said in a report.

Greece, Romania and Canada had the best privacy records of 47 countries surveyed by Privacy International, which is based in London. Malaysia, Russia and China were ranked worst.    Read more »

Here is something which we have already talked about since it was first discovered.  Now the pages of mainstream WIRED magazine are bringing this information to the tech portion of the public.   Enjoy and spread this info.

In the summer of 2002, the FBI, the Baton Rouge Police Department, and several other agencies began a massive search for a serial killer suspected of murdering three women. Based on an FBI profile and an eyewitness report, they upended southern Louisiana looking for a white man who drives a white pickup, collecting DNA from more than 1,000 Caucasian males. They found nothing. Meanwhile, the killer struck again.

In March 2003, investigators turned to Tony Frudakis, a molecular biologist who said he could determine the suspect’s race by analyzing his DNA. Uncertain about the science, the police asked Frudakis to take a blind test: They sent him DNA swabs from 20 people to see if he could identify their races. He nailed every one.

On a conference call a few weeks later, Frudakis reported his results on their killer. “Your guy could be African-American or Afro-Caribbean, but there is no chance that this is a Caucasian.” There was a prolonged silence, followed by a flurry of questions. They all came down to this: Would Frudakis bet his life on his results? Absolutely. Read more »

Evolutionary theorist Greg Cochran and genetic anthropologist Henry Harpending have teamed up again and with John Hawks, Eric Wang, and Robert Moyzis to argue that human evolution has greatly accelerated in the last 10,000 years and the human race is diverging.

Dec. 10, 2007 - Researchers discovered genetic evidence that human evolution is speeding up - and has not halted or proceeded at a constant rate, as had been thought - indicating that humans on different continents are becoming increasingly different.
 
“We used a new genomic technology to show that humans are evolving rapidly, and that the pace of change has accelerated a lot in the last 40,000 years, especially since the end of the Ice Age roughly 10,000 years ago,” says research team leader Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.

Read more »

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Frustrated by a lack of diversity in the city’s trade unions, the City Council is threatening a once-heretical move: allowing nonunion work at a massive $700 million public project.

A planned vote Thursday on a bill that would allow nonunion work and set ambitious minority-hiring goals was scrapped after Gov. Ed Rendell asked for more time to negotiate. Rendell tied state funding of the Pennsylvania Convention Center expansion to union work and called for a meeting with council leaders Monday.

But all sides agree the city must authorize the convention center expansion by year’s end or risk losing meetings booked for 2011. Read more »

MOBILE, Ala. (AP) - Between ads for hamburgers and liposuction, the giant digital billboards flashed an image of Oscar Finch’s face taken by a surveillance camera. The young man wasn’t selling anything. He was running from police.
Finch was a suspect in a bank robbery last month. More than a week after the crime, authorities obtained the photo and immediately posted it on 12 digital billboards in Mobile, using the eye-catching electronic signs as digital wanted posters.

The billboard showed a grainy mugshot of Finch taken during the Nov. 20 heist. The image, which was mixed in with commercial ads, included his name, his alleged offense and a phone number to contact police. Read more »

Homo sapiens sapiens has spread across the globe and increased vastly in numbers over the past 50,000 years or so—from an estimated five million in 9000 B.C. to roughly 6.5 billion today. More people means more opportunity for mutations to creep into the basic human genome and new research confirms that in the past 10,000 years a host of changes to everything from digestion to bones has been taking place.

“We found very many human genes undergoing selection,” says anthropologist Gregory Cochran of the University of Utah, a member of the team that analyzed the 3.9 million genes showing the most variation. “Most are very recent, so much so that the rate of human evolution over the past few thousand years is far greater than it has been over the past few million years.” Read more »

Washington - For foreign nationals upset about being fingerprinted when they enter the United States, it’s getting worse. Over the next few months, major US airports from Boston to San Francisco will start requiring 10 fingerprints from most non-US citizens - not just both index fingers - to help prevent terrorism.

By the end of 2008, all US points of entry will enforce the rule, the Homeland Security Department (DHS) said Monday. The new rule will make it easier for border officials to check the fingerprints against a government database of terrorist suspects. Read more »

While non-whites are breeding offspring at a rate far greater than they can afford and/or handle, some environmentally conscious white people are sacrificing having any children at all…this is not only sick, but very sad in that people in western civilizations will go to such extremes as to aid third world slums while sacrificing their own genes.

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy.
But the very thought makes her shudder with horror. Read more »

Humanity is rapidly turning the seas acid through the same pollution that causes global warming, the world’s governments and top scientists agreed yesterday. The process – thought to be the most profound change in the chemistry of the oceans for 20 million years – is expected both to disrupt the entire web of life of the oceans and to make climate change worse.
The warning is just one of a whole series of alarming conclusions in a new report published by the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which last month shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore.
Read more »

People living within five miles or so of any major American waterway can hear their psychotic roar on hot summer evenings. They’re “dick boats”—long, sleek, overpowered speedboats that can cut a sunset cruise into a deafening four-minute drag race. Their nickname is based on common beliefs that their owners are compensating for anatomical deficiencies.

A dick boat on the Niagara River, for example, can be heard by more than 100,000 people. One circling Manhattan could be heard by millions. But the noise pollution only makes this summer pastime obnoxious, like the midlife crises cruising their throaty Harleys up and down urban avenues. What makes the dick boat fetish criminal is that they burn upwards of 25 gallons of gas per hour. Read more »

When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they were quick to portray it as proof of humankind’s remarkable similarity. The DNA of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99 percent identical.

But new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain differences between people of different continental origins.

Scientists, for instance, have recently identified small changes in DNA that account for the pale skin of Europeans, the tendency of Asians to sweat less and West Africans’ resistance to certain diseases. Read more »

CHICAGO (AFP) - Scientists have identified a gene which leads children to have higher IQs if they are breastfed, according to a study released Monday.

The study took a bite out of the nature versus nurture debate by showing that intellectual development is influenced by both environmental and genetic factors.

“There has been some criticism of earlier studies about breastfeeding and IQ that they didn’t control for socioeconomic status, or the mother’s IQ or other factors,” said study co-author Terrie Moffitt, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Duke University and King’s College in London. Read more »

It’s a tough world, all right. Too bad it’s not tougher. Right now Earth is looking pretty fragile as it suffers from increasing human punishment.

This isn’t really news, of course. But CNN has packed the two-night, four-hour “Planet in Peril” with information and images that give a familiar story new urgency. Here is an eye-opening, often heart-wrenching exploration.

Airing Tuesday and Wednesday at 9 p.m. EDT, “Planet in Peril” dispatched correspondents Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta, as well as Animal Planet wildlife biologist Jeff Corwin, to report on far-flung instances of “environmental change.” This term encompasses four key areas: climate change, vanishing natural habitats, disappearing species and human overpopulation. Read more »

by Daniel Stewart, Newsnet14

Just when you thought your civil liberties were safe, think again. Several police departments in various Florida counties are going high tech and arming their patrol cars with cameras that are hooked up to a new license plate recognition system. As a patrol car drives through traffic these handy devices scan the vehicles in and around the police officer’s vehicle. The recognition software then records the license plate numbers in a database, and then checks that information against a stolen vehicle registry as well as gives the officer the ability to see if the vehicle belongs to a fugitive or a sexual predator. This new surveillance system is possible due to the generosity of the automobile insurance industry in an effort to “protect you.”

Well, I’m sorry to say that I don’t believe the automobile insurance industry when they say they’re doing it to protect me. In fact I’m very concerned about Read more »

SLAGEN, Norway (Reuters) - Archaeologists exhumed the body of a Viking queen on Monday, hoping to solve a riddle about whether a woman buried with her 1,200 years ago was a servant killed to be a companion into the afterlife. As a less gruesome alternative, the two women in the grass-covered Oseberg mound in south Norway might be a royal mother and daughter who died of the same disease and were buried together in 834.

“We will do DNA tests to try to find out. I don’t know of any Viking skeletons that have been analyzed as we plan to do,” Egil Mikkelsen, director of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History, told Reuters at the graveside. Continued>>>

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