What Adam Curry is reading

Nokia apologises for 'faked' ad
  Link to Article
  Source: BBC News - Europe
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:21
  6 September 2012Last updated at 12:48 Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
  An excerpt from the advert with the reflection (at the end) that shows it was not filmed on a smartphone
  Nokia has apologised after it emerged that an advert featuring video footage which appeared to have been filmed with its new flagship smartphone had in fact been created using different equipment.
  The Verge tech site revealed the issue after it noticed a window reflection revealed a cameraman holding what appeared to be an SLR camera.
  In a blog post the handset maker said it should have "posted a disclaimer".
  The news threatens to take the shine off the launch of the Lumia 920 phone.
  Investors had already shown doubts about whether the Windows Phone 8 handset could revive the Finnish company's fortunes, sending its shares nearly 8% lower on Wednesday.
  In Thursday's trade the stock fell a further 6%.
  'Faked' footageThe advert showed a man filming his girlfriend using the new smartphone while both of them were riding bicycles.
  The footage cut from professionally-filmed material, featuring both actors, to what looked like it was the video captured by the man's Nokia device.
  A split-screen sequence then showed what the smartphone's footage would look like with Nokia's optical image stabilisation (OIS) feature turned on and switched off.
  The footage was intended to support the firm's claim that its technology helped reduce image blur. It was shown at a press conference on Wednesday to support Nokia's boast that the Lumia 920 featured the best smartphone image quality on the market.
  The Verge's article said: "too bad it's faked".
  Nokia's blog acknowledged the problem in a post titled "An apology is due".
  "We produced a video that stimulates what we will be able to deliver with OIS," wrote the site's editor Heidi Lemmetyinen.
  "Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but we should have posted a disclaimer stating this was a representation of OIS only. This was not shot with a Lumia 920... we apologise for the confusion we created."
  Nokia also released footage that had been shot with the model.
  The director of the UK's Institute of Business Ethics (IBE) said the affair was surprising bearing in mind the Finnish company had previously addressed what kinds of marketing materials should be used.
  "It is good that Nokia has recognised how misleading their advertisement was and has apologised for that," Philippa Foster Back told the BBC.
  "That is an important element in trying to maintain trust. The company does have a code of conduct recognising that 'high ethics means success' and states that the company 'conducts its marketing in a responsible way'.
  "Whether oversight or deliberate, and sceptics might think the latter, Nokia has let itself down. The product will need, more than ever, to speak for itself."
  The IBE receives donations from some of the UK's mobile operators but not the handset makers themselves.
TSA Moves On From Your Underwear to Your Starbucks.
  Link to Article
  Source: DaDenMan news feed
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:20
  Not content with fondling your privates and banning liquids from entering the concourse, the Transportation Security Administration is apparently now also screening liquids bought by passengers after they've already gone through regular security screening.
  A passenger flying from Columbus, Ohio, to Oakland, California, over the holiday weekend captured the practice on video while he was sitting with other passengers in the airport's embarkment lounge waiting to board their flight.
  As the unidentified passenger points out in commentary posted with his video to YouTube, the liquid testing is being done ''well beyond the security check'' and on liquids that passengers have purchased inside the security perimeter after they already passed through security screening and threw out any drinks they might have brought with them to the airport.
  The passenger, identified only as Danno02 in his YouTube channel, writes that his wife and son were approached by TSA agents after purchasing drinks at a coffee shop around the corner from the passenger lounge.
  ''I asked [the agent] what they were doing,'' he writes. ''One of the TSA ladies said that they were checking for explosive chemicals (as we are drinking them). I said 'really..inside the terminal? You have got to be kidding me'. I asked them if they wanted to swab us all. She responded with something like, yes sometimes we need to do that. I then asked if she wanted a urin [sic] sample.''
  He concludes his post by asking, ''Whats next'...perhaps the TSA will come to your home prior to your drive to the airport? The police state of the US is OUT OF CONTROL!''
  But the TSA says the practice isn't new '-- it's been going on since 2007 '-- and is part of random screening techniques designed to catch liquid explosives that might slip through initial screening.
  ''TSA employs multiple layers of security throughout the airport where passengers may be randomly selected for additional screening,'' the TSA said in a statement. ''One measure may include testing liquids that are in a passenger's possession. This is not a new procedure and at no time during the test is the liquid or the container ever touched.''
  TSA's Blogger Bob wrote about the procedure in July, describing how it works.
  The test involves a test strip and a dropper containing a nontoxic solution. In case you're wondering, our officers don't place the test strips in your beverages/liquids. They simply have the passenger remove the cap/lid and they hold the strip over the opening of the container. Procedures call for moving the test strip to the side and applying the solution from the dropper to test the strip. If the test results are positive TSA will conduct additional testing to make a final assessment.
  Unlike with swab tests done at the security checkpoint, however, the TSA officers in the video did not change their gloves between tests to prevent cross-contamination.
  While TSA agents lack the authority to arrest or detain anyone, passengers cannot refuse screening once they have proceeded beyond the screening checkpoint entrance.
  Our advice is, the next time you're in an airport, feel free to visit the bar and order a drink '-- just don't make it an Irish Car Bomb.
P. Diddy's BlackBerry Surveillance Tactics Uncovered'...
  Link to Article
  Source: Jacky Jasper's Diary of a Hollywood Street King
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:19
  by Jacky Jasper
  A Bugged Out Bad Boy?HSK Exclusive -Privacy seems to be a scarce element in the lives of the members of P. Diddy's inner circle. That's because sources exclusively tell HSK the Bad Boy Records founder provides his close staff members, girlfriends, and jump offs with bugged BlackBerry smart phones '' tapped with programs enabling him to listen in on their live phone calls and retrieve voice mail messages with no one wise to the surveillance.
  We're told that's why Puffy is often seen wearing a headpiece in studio '' eavesdropping on both his employees' and ladies' personal conversations.
  Here's the drop:
  ''Puffy listens to all his chics conversations. He's a controlling Scorpio.
  Puff once overheard Sarah's conversation with Shakir Stewart, and got hip to what was up. He heard everything Shakir had to say about him. That's why Puffy had beef with Shakir.''
  Please Share This Article -
Yep, CNBC asked Kim Kardashian for her opinion on the economy
  Link to Article
  Source: TheBlaze.com - Blog
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:18
  Skippy_John_JonesPosted on September 6, 2012 at 9:01amThat's it. When some mattress-back whose claim to fame is having a big azz and a sex tape is consulted as an expert on all things economic, the end must certainly be neigh.
  Report Post >>Log in to Reply It appears that you have Javascript Disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser preferences for a better user experience on TheBlaze. You can not comment without Javascript enabled.
DE VAATSTRA FILES
  Link to Article
  Source: Klokkenluideronline
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:17
  RECHTZAAK MICHA KAT, 10 SEPTEMBER, 9.00 UUR, RECHTBANK DEN HAAG. BE THERE !!
  LEES ALLES OVER DE VAATSTRA ZAAK OP DEZE PAGINA!
  Het navolgende is een speculatie van mij op basis van de harde feiten die wij tot nu toe kennen na de uitzending van Peter R. de Vries van 20 mei jl. over de zaak VaatstraHet OM (FLDO) weigert het juiste haplotype (subgroep) van de verdachte kenbaar te maken terwijl daar geen enkele reden voor is. Zij noemen het DNA-type van de verdachte 'R1b', dat echter ongeveer over de gehele wereld voorkomt zodat het nooit een bewijs kan vormen voor een rasechte Friese verdachte. Zie bijgaande foto van Europa en Azi van de groep R1b links:
  En vergelijk dat met het sprookje van de witte vlekken (bij de rechterhand van de medewerkster) uit de uitzending van 20 mei jl.
  De subgroep die het meest in Nederland voorkomt is R1b1a2 of ook wel R-M269 genoemd. Ook in Friesland. Maar dan nog hebben we het nog maar over pakweg 42% van de inwoners van Nederland. De vraag rijst dan waarom het OM, via Peter R. de Vries, de juiste gegevens verzwijgt voor het Nederlandse publiek. (zie onderstaande tabel).
  Continent
  Population
  #No.
  Total%
  R-P25*
  R-V88
  R-M269
  R-M73
  AfricaNorthern Africa6915.9%0.0%5.2%0.7%0.0%AfricaCentral Sahel Region46123.0%0.0%23.0%0.0%0.0%AfricaWestern Africa1230.0%0.0%0.0%0.0%0.0%AfricaEastern Africa4420.0%0.0%0.0%0.0%0.0%AfricaSouthern Africa1050.0%0.0%0.0%0.0%0.0%EuropeWestern Europeans46557.8%0.0%0.0%57.8%0.0%EuropeNorth western Europeans4355.8%0.0%0.0%55.8%0.0%EuropeCentral Europeans7742.9%0.0%0.0%42.9%0.0%EuropeNorth Eastern Europeans741.4%0.0%0.0%1.4%0.0%EuropeRussians606.7%0.0%0.0%6.7%0.0%EuropeEastern Europeans14920.8%0.0%0.0%20.8%0.0%EuropeBalkanians51013.1%0.0%0.2%12.9%0.0%AsiaWestern Asians3285.8%0.0%0.3%5.5%0.0%AsiaSouthern Asians2884.8%0.0%0.0%1.7%3.1%AsiaSouth eastern Asians100.0%0.0%0.0%0.0%0.0%AsiaNorth eastern Asians300.0%0.0%0.0%0.0%0.0%AsiaEastern Asians1560.6%0.0%0.0%0.6%0.0%TOTAL5326
  Bovenstaande tabel laat zien dat het Nederlandse publiek door het OM, via Peter R. de Vries bewust op het verkeerde been is gezet. Het bewuste DNA-type van de vermoedelijke verdachte komt dus wel degelijk ook voor in Irak, Iran en Afghanistan hoeveel moeite Peter zich ook getroostte om dat in zijn uitzending te weerleggen. Kenners van deze DNA-materie hebben mij dan ook nog niet tegengesproken en op mijn kritische vragen van maandag 25 juni jl. heeft het OM ook nog geen ontvangstbevestiging gestuurd. Dat - niet - antwoorden leg ik voorlopig maar even uit als het gelijk aan onze kant...:
  http://www.klokkenluideronline.nl/artikel/14192/team-vaatstra-fileert-peter-r-de-vries
  Professor Peter de Knijff (ook van het FLDO en nota bene de baas van die medewerkster uit de uitzending) vertelde al in 2006 dat het haplotype van de verdachte nu juist niet in Nederland voorkwam. Maar in de uitzending van PRdV blijkt dit haplotype ineens het m(C)(C)st voor te komen in Nederland (????). Als je weet dat die splitsing in subgroepen talloze generaties en mogelijk zelfs duizenden jaren nodig heeft gehad, dan kan dat in 6 jaar tijd uiteraard niet ineens veranderd zijn. Werd De Knijff in 2000 ook al belazerd met een verkeerd DNA-monster?
  Per 1 april 2012 is het wettelijk mogelijk om verwantschapsonderzoek te doen naar mogelijke familieleden van een verdachte in onze DNA-databank. Zo kan, ook als de verdachte niet z(C)lf in de databank zit, worden gespeurd naar zijn mogelijke criminele familieleden in diezelfde databank. Op 3 april jl. was ook al bekend gemaakt dat het OM in Leeuwarden bij het College van Procureurs Generaal een grootschalig DNA-onderzoek in de regio Friesland zou verzoeken:
  ''Als het onderzoek geen resultaten oplevert, kan een nieuw grootschalig dna-verwantschapsonderzoek worden gedaan. "Wij vragen dan aan mensen uit de omgeving van het slachtoffer dna af te staan. Vervolgens kunnen we controleren of zij familie zijn van de dader", legt hoofdofficier van justitie in Leeuwarden Annette Bronsvoort uit. Daarvoor is wel nieuwe toestemming van de rechter-commissaris nodig''.
  http://dossiers.nieuws.nl/binnenland/koninginnedag/690502/Justitie_zoekt_familie_moordenaar_Marianne_Vaatstra
  Pas na de uitzending van Peter R. van 20 mei jl. barstte het internet zo ongeveer uit zijn voegen om massaal te melden dat er nu eindelijk een mogelijk grootschalig DNA-onderzoek zal worden gehouden onder de mannelijke bevolking rond de PD in Veenklooster. ''Eindelijk gaan ze die 'bekende van een bekende' van Marianne vinden''. ''Marianne kende haar moordenaar''. ''Een haar in de aansteker bewijst de link tussen Marianne en haar moordenaar''. ''Aantal zeer belangrijke tips over die aansteker''! Maar het meest opmerkelijke is wel dat Justitie in de afgelopen 13 jaar tot nu toe (ook in haar rapport van Ali Hassan uit januari 2011) telkens de meeste energie heeft gezet op het weerspreken dat een Irakese asielzoeker de dader zou zijn geweest:
  http://www.om.nl/actueel-0/strafzaken/vaatstra/@154892/geen_twijfel_over/
  En dat daar nooit kritische vragen over gesteld zijn in de mainstream media. Bestaan die MSM niet meer of hebben zij allen te vrezen voor hun gezin, hun hypotheek of hun baan?
  Zolang je in een opsporingsonderzoek namelijk geen verdachte kent, geen exact scenario (!) en vooral niet over tactische of technische sporen beschikt, dan hou je uiteraard alle opties open. Ook dat een asielzoeker onverhoopt de dader kan zijn geweest, of zelfs meerdere asielzoekers. Zo zou ik ook opnieuw uit kunnen weiden over de leugens die de 'vrienden' van Marianne hebben opgehangen over het wegbrengen van haar op de fiets terwijl zij (vlgs. 9 getuigen!) aantoonbaar lekke banden hadden gehad. Bevestigd door de vader van die 'vriend' tegenover de vader van het slachtoffer. Zelfs nog eens extra in beeld gebracht door Peter R. in 2003 waarin sprake is van twee getuigen die die zogenaamde vrienden hadden ontmoet buiten Kollum en zonder Marianne (vanaf minuut 2:30):
  Of zou ik kunnen melden dat het OM, bij monde van OvJ mr. Severein al in 1999 bevestigde dat er sprake was van een 'niet-westerse' moord, van een kort en gedrongen postuur van de hoofdverdachte asielzoeker en van door hem bevestigde berichten over donkere 'types' in de berm van de Keningswei en nog veel en veel meer'....
  Ik stel dus opnieuw vast dat we in het hele onderzoek al ruim 13 jaar consequent worden misleid en dat de uitzending van Peter R. van 20 mei jl. daar nu geen uitzondering op is. De hoofdmoot is telkens geweest dat het g(C)(C)n asielzoeker mocht zijn geweest. Zo werd ons nu ineens een nieuw, heel onwaarschijnlijk scenario voorgeschoteld (op basis van de door het OM verstrekte gegevens nog eens bevestigd door een Britse deskundige.., ja duhhhh'...): Marianne werd nog meer bezoedeld dan voorheen omdat zij met de eerste de beste 'bekende van een bekende' het weiland inliep. Voetsporen werden getoond die er bewijsbaar niet waren en bandensporen van de mogelijke daders waren vernietigd door alle hulpverlenersvoertuigen.
  Er werd nu ook een nieuw soort DNA-haplotype-onderzoek gepresenteerd waar blijkbaar zeer grote twijfels aan kleven en er werd met grote stelligheid en op basis van nieuwe leugens getracht om opnieuw te bewijzen dat het in ieder geval g(C)(C)n asielzoeker kon zijn geweest. Dit was in 1999 al geprobeerd door de verkeerde (onschuldige) Ali Hassan in Istanbul aan te houden en Mohammed Akbari in Londen in 2003. En opnieuw werd een aanval ingezet tegen de inwoners van de Westereen als erkende 'racisten' en werd ons team als complotdenkers weggezet zonder wederhoor of weerlegging van onze bevindingen..
  Wij hebben echter de beschikking over tientallen verklaringen van getuigen en even zo vele aanwijzingen dat het nu juist w(C)l om meerdere asielzoekers zou kunnen gaan die betrokken kunnen zijn geweest bij de moord. En waarbij (C)(C)n van hen enkele dagen na de moord opdook in Noorwegen. En het meest frappante is nu, dat juist op al die onderwerpen door het OM in de afgelopen 13 jaar aantoonbaar wordt gelogen. Nu weer met medewerking van Peter R. de Vries. Bovendien vind ik het nog eens extra frappant dat ik/wij nergens een antwoord krijgen als wij kritische vragen stellen. Niet bij herhaling bij de minister van justitie, niet bij het OM in Leeuwarden, niet bij het cold case team, niet bij kopstukken als Peter van Koppen, niet bij de erkende landelijke en regionale media en al helemaal niet bij 'misdaadverslaggevers' als Peter R. en Gerlof Leistra.
  Speculatie
  Mijn speculatie (voorspelling dus), gebaseerd op bovenstaande eerdere leugens van het OM en ondersteund door de propaganda-uitzendingen van Peter R., waar ik een Berenburg op heb ingezet met een collega uit Friesland, luidt dan ook als volgt:
  Het OM kent al jaren een 'Barbertje' dat moet hangen voor de moord op Marianne Vaatstra. Wij noemen hem even voor het gemak Peter Barbertje de Fries. Hij heeft in de afgelopen 13 jaren 'toevallig' zelfmoord gepleegd en/of is onder vreemde omstandigheden om het leven gekomen. Hij is 'helaas' al gecremeerd zodat hij ook niet meer kan worden opgegraven om zijn DNA te checken met het sperma-DNA op Marianne. En hij was een 'eenzame fietser met een seksuele en agressieve afwijking' die rond het tijdstip van de moord zomaar in de buurt kan zijn geweest van de PD in Veenklooster. Althans, niemand uit zijn directe omgeving kan anno 2012 nog een begin van een alibi geven voor die nacht van die 30e april op de 1e mei 1999. Hij woonde in die tijd wel in de omgeving van Veenklooster.
  En waarom denk ik dit? Dat komt omdat ik me de afgelopen jaren vooral afvraag waarom het OM die (C)ne asielzoeker in Noorwegen (en die andere in Nederland) al jaren met leugens uit de wind probeert te houden en waarom zij zo lang meeging in dat zgn. grootschalige DNA-onderzoek uit oktober 2000 om ''Peter Barbertje de Fries'' aan te wijzen. Wat nu alsnog lijkt te gaan gebeuren. Mijn ogen gingen pas echt open toen ik gisteren dit artikeltje van 28 oktober 2000 aangereikt kreeg: http://tinyurl.com/72q3ou2. Uit dit artikeltje werd mij alles duidelijk.
  Zo staat hierin dat het OM al in oktober 2000 over een schat aan informatie beschikte over vele, verdachte sterfgevallen uit de buurt van de PD en dat er tal van meldingen bij hen zijn gedaan van zelfmoord. Ook door journalisten blijkbaar als Peter Blom. En, terwijl Peter R. de Vries allang bezig was om de gemeentelijke basisadministratie van Kollum te laten plunderen door een illegaal bureau om er achter te komen wie er allemaal op dat AZC woonden, voerde hij in oktober 2000 ineens toch een Kort Geding met Bram Moszkowicz tegen de Staat om de dader te gaan zoeken in de omgeving van de PD. Waarom die plotse ommezwaai als dit alles niet was geco¶rdineerd met het OM om de aandacht opnieuw af te leiden van die asielzoekers?
  Peter B. de Fries heeft ook weinig of geen familie in de rest van Nederland en 'is een rasechte Fries van geboorte volgens zijn eeuwenoude stamboom'. Zijn DNA-haplotype wijst eerdaags via een grootschalig (verwantschaps-)DNA-onderzoek rond de PD op het haplotype van de verkrachter (!) van Marianne. Hijzelf kan immers niet meer aanwezig zijn bij het te houden grootschalige DNA-onderzoek en hij kan ook geen onderzoek meer doen naar zijn eigen alibi uit mei 1999.
  Bij vergelijking van zijn DNA met zijn vader, moeder en/of ooms, broers en/of zusters en/of neven en nichten blijkt dan ook 'ineens dat hij uit een familie komt die gerelateerd is aan het sperma-DNA dat op Marianne is gevonden'. Peter B. de Fries leidde bovendien een zeer teruggetrokken leven en zijn naaste verwanten kenden hem niet of nauwelijks en de rest van zijn familie stond bekend als keurige mensen zodat deze familie ook al niet in de DNA-databank voorkwam bij andere gewelds- en zedencriminaliteit. ´Gelukkig' had het OM in 1999 bijtijds vastgesteld dat het om een dader ging die volgens gedragsdeskundigen sterk leek op het gedrag van Peter B. de Fries. Later zullen zijn naaste buren alsnog graag verklaren dat 'het een rare snuiter was'.
  Dan zul je vragen: 'Kan het OM dan nu al niet Peter B. de Fries aanwijzen als mogelijke verdachte op basis van de aanwijzingen die het OM al heeft sinds 1999?NEE. Er zijn sinds 1999 zo'n 900 getuigen onderzocht en 'uitgesloten' op basis van hun DNA. Daar zat Peter B. de Fries toen blijkbaar nog niet tussen omdat zij hem dan anders ongetwijfeld zouden hebben aangemerkt als verdachte.
  Je volgende vraag is dan: ''Waar komt Peter B. de Fries dan w¨l in de picture als verdachte''? Nou niet dus, nergens dus, nooit dus. Als je een uitgebreid buurt-, getuigen- en sporenonderzoek doet en niemand noemt ook maar de naam van Peter B. de Fries, dan ga je hem ook niet zoeken i.v.m. de moord op Marianne Vaatstra. En let wel, Peter B. had toen ''ook nog geen zelfmoord gepleegd..''
  Je volgende vraag: ''Waarom zou Peter B. de Fries nu ineens dan w¨l moeten hangen (of meer specifiek) waarom zou hij de mogelijke dader zijn''? Mijn antwoord: NIET omdat Peter B. de Fries een ECHTE verdachte is maar omdat hij nu g(C)(C)n alibi meer heeft. Hij kan zich immers nooit meer verweren. Omdat hij ook nog eens op enkele km. van de PD woonde en op onverklaarde wijze om het leven is gekomen en omdat hij geen familie achterlaat die hem tot het einde toe zal willen verdedigen (waar rook is, is vuur t"ch?'...). En all(C)(C)n de advocaat van belanghebbenden kan met succes een beroep doen op inzage in het strafdossier van de zaak. Maar.., als de verdachte al dood is, vervalt daarmee ook de belanghebbendheid van de ouders en nabestaanden'...
  ''Is Peter B. de Fries dan wel een ¨chte verdachte van de moord op Marianne?'' NEE. Hij is wel de ideale verdachte voor het OM om de zaak Vaatstra eerdaags in de kiem te smoren omdat niemand hem ooit nog zal willen of kunnen verdedigen. En het OM wil uiteraard ook graag van deze zaak af om eindelijk die twee asielzoekers te kunnen ontlasten'...
  Nee, Peter B. de Fries is een verzinsel uit de mouw van het OM te Leeuwarden om 'die domme Nederlanders en die plaatselijke Friezen' bewust op het verkeerde been te zetten m.m.v. Peter R. de Vries. Want wie heeft inmiddels de volgende onzin nog niet gelezen op de diverse fora:
  ''Het is nu 100% zeker door Peter R. bewezen dat het geen asielzoeker kan zijn geweest''. Of: ''de dader komt uit de buurt''. Of: ''Die aansteker wijst erop dat die van de dader afkomstig was''. Of: ''Die gevonden haar in de aansteker wijst erop dat die ook van de dader moet zijn geweest''. Of: ''Een cluedo clubje van klokkenluideronline ''. Of: ''Die Vergeer brengt de oplossing iig niet dichterbij. Wat een arrogante wijsneus is dat''.
  Is het niveau in Nederland werkelijk zo laag of past de waarheid van een frauderende overheid gewoonweg niet in ons systeem'...?
Bill Clinton's long game - Salon.com
  Link to Article
  Source: Dave Winer's linkblog feed
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:16
  About 20 minutes into his speech last night, Bill Clinton invoked Mitch McConnell's 2010 statement that his party's top priority was denying Barack Obama a second term.
  ''Senator,'' Clinton said, ''I hate to break it to you, but we're going to keep President Obama on the job!''
  And with that the crowd erupted into the first of what turned into a series of ''Four more years!'' chants. The speech Clinton gave may help them realize that wish. Point by point, the former president rebutted the major lines of attack that Republicans have deployed against Obama. He also provided politically helpful context about the nature of the economic crisis Obama inherited and the Republican obstruction he's faced that the president himself can't spell out (for fear of seeming like he's passing the buck and pointing fingers at his predecessor).
  But the way Clinton was received Wednesday night, the ''Four more years!'' chants could just as easily have been directed at him. Clinton himself will never run for office again, but the possibility of a Clinton restoration is still very much alive. No matter who wins this fall, the Democratic nomination for 2016 will be open, and Clinton's speech undoubtedly advanced his wife's prospects for claiming it if she wants it.
  Obviously, it's still early '' very early '' but Hillary Clinton looms over the '16 Democratic race as a front-runner like we've never seen before. Yes, the same was said about her in the run-up to 2008, when she was supposedly assembling the biggest, meanest, best-funded campaign operation of the modern era '' and when she ended up losing out to a guy who'd been a state legislator until 2004.
  But Hillary also had two clear vulnerabilities in '08. One was her vote for the Iraq war, a serious sore spot with the party's base. The other was her image. Republicans had begun treating her as one of their chief enemies in 1992 and hadn't stopped even after her husband left office. They'd had no reason to; she'd gone straight from the White House to the Senate, and everyone knew it was only a matter of time before she ran for president. This left her with dangerously high negative poll numbers and left many Democrats open to an '08 alternative '' someone whose nomination wouldn't immediately relaunch the Clinton Wars of the '90s. In Obama, these Clinton-wary Democrats found the perfect vehicle, and the rest is history.
  As '16 approaches, these weaknesses no longer apply. The Democrats' intraparty divide over Iraq has long since healed. And, as I've written before, Republicans dramatically altered their posture toward the Clintons when Obama usurped them as the face of the Democratic Party in 2008. Since then, the GOP has portrayed both Bill and Hillary as sympathetic figures, victims of Obama and his ruthless thirst for power and symbols of a moderate, unifying style of leadership that Obama has forsaken. For the first time since they've been national figures, the Clintons for the last four years haven't been the subject of daily attacks from their partisan foes.
  And within the Democratic Party, the ill will toward them from Obama loyalists began disappearing when Obama tapped Hillary to be his secretary of state. And if there was any left before this week, Bill's rousing defense of Obama on Wednesday night surely erased it.
  The result of all of this is that both Clintons are more popular than ever. And with four years as secretary of state under her belt, Hillary seems even more prepared than last time to assume the presidency. Nor is there an Obama-like figure poised to swoop in and compete on an immediately level playing field with her. This is why early '16 polling shows her racking up absurd advantages over her prospective foes. The biggest obvious threat she faces is Joe Biden, but she runs well ahead of him, and the smart money says he won't run if she does. After Biden, the next biggest name in the mix is Andrew Cuomo '' and there's also reason to doubt he'll run if she does.
  The best parallel for where Clinton now stands might be found in George W. Bush, who was the overwhelming choice of his party's political, financial and activist base in 2000 '' so much that most of his opponents ended up dropping out before the first primary was held. Bush did get a brief scare that year from John McCain, but it was only because of McCain's support from non-Republicans, who could participate in some primaries (including New Hampshire). Within the GOP, Bush was the early consensus favorite. If she runs in '16, Hillary is poised to play a similar role. If she wants to.
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http://t.co/WNOu5KMN @adamcurry @THErealDVORAK
  Link to Article
  Source: @adamcurry - Twitter Search
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:33
  TWENTYNINE PALMS (CBSLA.com) '-- The owners of a modest home near Twentynine Palms lost their cherished possessions after a bank mistakenly foreclosed their residence.
  A crew broke into Alvin and Pat Tjosaas' desert home and took everything after being directed by Wells Fargo to secure the structure.
  The couple, however, didn't have a mortgage on the home.
  Alvin said the deputy sheriff said, ''Good news, we know who took (your possessions)'...Wells Fargo. Bad news, your stuff is all gone.''
  All the married couple has now are three generations of memories.
  Alvin, a retired mason, built the home with his father when he was a teenager.
  ''I know every inch, every rock'...my mom mixed all the cement by hand,'' he said.
  Alvin and his wife would later bring their six children to their desert oasis.
  ''My little kids (would) come out here and their dresses were the same color as the wildflowers,'' said Alvin.
  A spokesman for Wells Fargo released a statement apologizing to the couple.
  ''We are deeply sorry for the very personal losses the Tjosaas family suffered as a result of their home being mistakenly secured,'' said Alfredo Padilla. ''We are moving quickly to reach out to the family to resolve this unfortunate situation in an attempt to right this wrong.''
  Alvin and Pat remain distraught.
  ''When you put your heart into something'...it makes me real sad. I'm just glad I have my sweetheart. We've been together a long time,'' said Alvin.
@adamcurry British father killed in France shooting is Saad Al-Hilli http://t.co/iyDidtLt Possible FF revenge attack over Lyon shooter?
  Link to Article
  Source: @adamcurry - Twitter Search
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:32
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  Clinton: 'Every single person who has bet against America has lost money'
  Former US President Bill Clinton nominates Barack Obama to be the Democratic party's candidate for the White House, at the party convention in Charlotte.
  Save the Children's foreign staff are told to leave Pakistan amid claims, denied by the charity, that the CIA used it as cover in its hunt for Osama Bin Laden.
  A girl has been found hiding inside a British-registered car in which three bodies were discovered eight hours earlier, French police say.
The Organic Fable
  Link to Article
  Source: NYT > Most Recent Headlines
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:30
  LONDON '-- At some point '-- perhaps it was gazing at a Le Pain Quotidien menu offering an ''organic baker's basket served with organic butter, organic jam and organic spread'' as well as seasonally organic orange juice '-- I found I just could not stomach the ''O'' word or what it stood for any longer.
  Organic has long since become an ideology, the romantic back-to-nature obsession of an upper middle class able to afford it and oblivious, in their affluent narcissism, to the challenge of feeding a planet whose population will surge to 9 billion before the middle of the century and whose poor will get a lot more nutrients from the two regular carrots they can buy for the price of one organic carrot.
  An effective form of premium branding rather than a science, a slogan rather than better nutrition, ''organic'' has oozed over the menus, markets and malls of the world's upscale neighborhood at a remarkable pace. In 2010, according to the Organic Trade Association, organic food and drink sales totaled $26.7 billion in the United States, or about 4 percent of the overall market, having grown steadily since 2000. The British organic market is also large; menus like to mention that bacon comes from pampered pigs at the Happy Hog farm down the road.
  In the midst of the fad few questions have been asked. But the fact is that buying organic baby food, a growing sector, is like paying to send your child to private school: It is a class-driven decision that demonstrates how much you love your offspring but whose overall impact on society is debatable.
  So I cheered this week when Stanford University concluded, after examining four decades of research, that fruits and vegetables labeled organic are, on average, no more nutritious than their cheaper conventional counterparts. The study also found that organic meats offered no obvious health advantages. And it found that organic food was not less likely to be contaminated by dangerous bacteria like E.coli.
  The takeaway from the study could be summed up in two words: Organic, schmorganic. That's been my feeling for a while.
  Now let me say three nice things about the organic phenomenon. The first is that it reflects a growing awareness about diet that has spurred quality, small-scale local farming that had been at risk of disappearance.
  The second is that even if it's not better for you, organic farming is probably better for the environment because less soil, flora and fauna are contaminated by chemicals (although of course, without fertilizers, you have to use more land to grow the same amount of produce or feed the same amount of livestock.) So this is food that is better ecologically even if it is not better nutritionally.
  The third is that the word organic '-- unlike other feel-good descriptions of food like ''natural'' '-- actually means something. Certification procedures in both the United States and Britain are strict. In the United States, organic food must meet standards ensuring that genetic engineering, synthetic fertilizers, sewage and irradiation were not used in the food's production. It must also be produced using methods that, according to the Department of Agriculture, ''foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance and conserve biodiversity.''
  Still, the organic ideology is an elitist, pseudoscientific indulgence shot through with hype. There is a niche for it, if you can afford to shop at Whole Foods, but the future is nonorganic.
  To feed a planet of 9 billion people, we are going to need high yields not low yields; we are going to need genetically modified crops; we are going to need pesticides and fertilizers and other elements of the industrialized food processes that have led mankind to be better fed and live longer than at any time in history.
  Logically, the organic movement should favor genetically modified produce. If you cannot use pesticides or fertilizers, you might at least want to modify your crops so they are more resilient and plentiful. But that would go against the ideology and romance of a movement that says: We are for nature, everyone else is against nature.
  I'd rather be against nature and have more people better fed. I'd rather be serious about the world's needs. And I trust the monitoring agencies that ensure pesticides are used at safe levels '-- a trust the Stanford study found to be justified.
  Martin Orbach, the co-founder and program director of the Abergavenny Food Festival in Britain, owns a company called Shepherds that produces a superb sheep's milk ice-cream sold at a store in Hay-on-Wye. It has a cult following at the Hay literary festival and beyond. Journalists, Orbach told me, regularly report that they have eaten an ''organic sheep's milk ice cream.''
  The only catch is this is not true. ''We have never said it's organic because it would be illegal for us to do so,'' Orbach said. ''But it fits with the story of a small sheep's milk ice-cream maker.''
  Organic is a fable of the pampered parts of the planet '-- romantic and comforting. Now, thanks to Stanford researchers, we know just how replete with myth the ''O'' fable is.
  You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen, and on Facebook at facebook.com/RogerCohenReporter.
What I Learned: No Agenda Episode 439 | The Original DailySkew
  Link to Article
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:29
  Here are my notes for Episode 439 of No Agenda:
  - If you quit smoking, your eyes might go blurry
  - The New York Times does not like Paul Ryan. Bad cover photo
  - A nation of name callers. Divided we will fall
  - Adam's daughter had all her IDs stolen. You can't get a picture ID without a picture ID. ''Hire a lawyer, cut the Gordian knot''
  - Seal Team book about Osama capture; the guy who killed Bin Laden had already died in a helicopter crash?
  - Ann Romney: how women rule the world. Bigotry and sexual discrimination. ''I love you, women!''
  - 5 states wanted to nominate Ron Paul from the floor of the convention
  - Ron Paul speaks at Sun Dome. The media ''is part of the military-industrial complex''
  - a rogue seal
  - Adam in hot water for denying moon landing. ''You have to have an approved opinion'' when society turns fascist
  - Read Sinclair Lewis and John Dos Passos
  - Tom Brokaw thinks the White House Press Corp dinner sends the wrong message to small businesses and workers in America
  - Yahoo news guy says, ''They [Republicans] are happy to have a party while black people are drowning.'' He was fired immediately. Gwen Eiffel defended him
  Donate to No Agenda
  - Adam is not a big fan of Florence and the Machine
  - LA Pussy Riot auditions
  - Pussy Riot sponsored by enemies of Putin
  - Mayor Bloomberg offended by question from reporter about police shooting people at Empire State Building
  - Study: if you witness gun violence, you are more likely to commit gun violence
  - Russia Today goes after Syrian insurgents
  - Russia Today: ''The Age of Austerity''
  - John Goodman hired to play Syrian Foreign Minister
  - Manhattan being sprayed for West Nile Virus; mosquitos breeding without puddles
  - Al Gore has a new slideshow: ''Every night on the news is like a nature walk through the Book of Revelation''
  - Bill Gates funding an alert system to catch misinformation about vaccinations
  - Huge Venezuelan oil rig fire
  - And Brandon Raub interviewed by his lawyer John Whitehead for YouTube; ''Very specifically'' and ''horrific hell.'' 13 69
  - F.E.A.R.: the four assassins ''false flag''
  - Two guys toss peanuts at African-American CNN camera woman; who were these two idiots?
  - Two women on the Wall Street Journal talking about how to pep yourself up if you're feeling down. ''Use self-affirming passwords''
  - Pharmaceuticals team up with generic companies to lockout competitors
  - Apple really lost the Samsung case. Samsung's phones are the same as Apple
  - Japanese NHK supports Romney
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James Franco's former teacher sues actor for defamation
  Link to Article
  Source: Culture | guardian.co.uk
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:26
  Grade D student? '... James Franco at the Venice film festival. Photograph: Claudio Onorati/EPA
  A professor who claims he was fired from his job at New York University after giving James Franco a "D" is to sue his former student for defamation.
  Jos(C) Angel Santana, who is already engaged in legal action against his former employer, has now filed a civil action in the Manhattan supreme court over comments Franco made labelling his classes "awful". He says he handed out the low grade because the 127 Hours star attended just two out of his 14 scheduled directing classes.
  "Whoever was in Clint Eastwood's chair at the Republican national convention was more present than Mr Franco was in my classes," Santana told the New York Post. "[Franco] uses the bully pulpit of his celebrity to punish anyone who doesn't do his bidding."
  The offending comments were made during interviews for Franco's film The Broken Tower in April. He told reporters Santana was "awful," adding: "I didn't feel like I needed to waste my time with a bad teacher."
  "No teacher will ever be fired from NYU for giving a student a D," added the actor. "He wasn't fired, he was asked not to come back after three years because they didn't think he was a good teacher. He is not going to be hired at another institution."
  But Santana, who has been been a teacher since 1979 and was earning $70,000 (£44,000) prior to being let go by the university, said he had "overwhelmingly positive student evaluations". He said: "I didn't deserve to be on the receiving end of those falsehoods. I was outraged that someone with his attendance record at NYU had the audacity to make those statements."
  Santana, who taught as an assistant arts professor on the actor's graduate film course, also said he was simply doing his job by handing Franco a low grade, in contrast with other professors, who "bent over backwards to create a Franco-friendly environment".
  The teacher filed a lawsuit against New York University in December 2011 in protest at his dismissal, claiming that Franco received good grades from his former colleagues despite similar levels of absence from their lectures. These, Santana alleged, were in return for the publicity the actor's enrolment brought the school and because the actor had collaborated with faculty members on independent film projects.
In Greece, It's The Police Vs The Riot Police
  Link to Article
  Source: Untitled Feed
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:24
  As unemployment (broad and youth) goes from the sublime to the ridiculous in the troubled nation, Reuters is reporting that tensions are rising - even among the Police themselves. "They make us fight our own brothers," one riot-policeman urged with regard the Greek police protesting austerity cuts and preventing riot-police from leaving to secure other demonstrations this weekend.
  The government plans to slash police pay in a new round of spending cuts worth nearly EUR12bn over the next two years, which the police, firefghter, and coast guards will be prtesting later today in Athens. How soon before TROIKA demands 8 days a week and 99% taxation - as the hair-trigger on the gun they are holding to their own head becomes more and more sensitive.
  Reuters: Greek policemen, and members of police unions push riot police during scuffles outside a riot police facility in Athens, September 6, 2012
  Average: Your rating: NoneAverage: 5(2 votes)
@adamcurry @therealdvorak @noagendanation Looks like the West Nile virus meme is propagating in NC too. http://t.co/gv9fSFp4
  Link to Article
  Source: @adamcurry - Twitter Search
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:23
  Charlotte resident Elizabeth Leland never expected an afternoon of gardening to keep her from work for almost a month.
  On Aug. 23, Leland, a reporter for The Charlotte Observer, was diagnosed with West Nile virus '-- one of five cases reported in North Carolina in the last month.
  ''She started having flu-like symptoms '-- nausea, headache and fever,'' said Karen Garloch, Leland's coworker at The Observer.
  More than 30,000 people in the United States have gotten sick with West Nile since 1999. The virus originated in Africa.
  According to data from the Center for Disease Control, North Carolina has only reported five cases of the virus in 2012 so far, two resulting in death. Texas has reported 1,013 cases '-- and 40 deaths.
  N.C. Department of Health Spokeswoman Julie Henry said the department is keeping a close watch on the cases.
  ''The experts don't really have a good answer as to why West Nile is occurring more frequently this year,'' Henry said.
  The state reported no cases in 2009 and 2010 and only two cases in 2011, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
  Orange County has not had a confirmed West Nile case to date.
  But Stacy Shelp, spokeswoman for the Orange County Health Department, said the department is taking steps to educate residents on how to protect against the virus.
  ''We're focusing on education and prevention methods associated with that,'' she said.
  Shelp said the best way for residents to protect against West Nile is to drain any standing water near their home, wear protective clothing and use insect repellent.
  Henry said standing water can be a breeding ground for mosquitoes.''Mosquitoes can breed in something as small as a bottle cap,'' she said.
  Though some counties spray outdoor areas to keep down mosquitoes that spread the virus, Shelp said Orange County does not.
  ''At this time, Orange County does not have any plans '-- to the best of our knowledge '-- to do any kind of spraying or pesticide treatments,'' she said.
  And not all people who contract West Nile show as many symptoms as Leland.
  About 80 percent of cases involve no symptoms at all, Henry said.
  She said a small group will develop flu-like symptoms '-- and an even smaller group will develop more severe symptoms that lead to hospitalization.
  Garloch said Leland developed more severe symptoms, including sore throat, vomiting and meningitis.
  She said Leland was temporarily hospitalized and is now at home recovering.
  Garloch said she didn't know when Leland could return to work: ''She will be out for some weeks.''
  Contact the desk editor at city@dailytarheel.com.
An Islamist at the DNC
  Link to Article
  Source: FrontPage Magazine
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:21
  Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling, United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror. His new book is Showdown With Evil. He can be reached at jamieglazov11@gmail.com.
Holleeder-fotograaf WOEST op ANP
  Link to Article
  Source: GeenStijl
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:10
  Ferry de Kok, de voormalige bodyguard, herstel, persoonlijk assistent en zakenpartner van John Mieremet, is tegenwoordig keurig fotograaf. Getalenteerd ook. Zo maakte De Kok die spontane prachtplaat van een ontblote MinPres in het plastic paupersloepje van VVD-souffleur Jort Kelder. Ferry is overigens ook persoonlijk fotograaf van Heineken-ontvoerder Willem Holleeder en in diervoege mocht De Kok de cover van Nieuwe Revu schieten. Voor ANP Photo is het feit dat Holleeder op de omslag van het Sanoma-blaadje staat nieuwswaardig qua beeld, en ze lieten er een foto van maken. HIERRRR. (Mirror) Zulks tot grote woede van photog Ferry de Kok, die op zijn Feestboek uit zijn slof schiet (excusez le mot) en losgaat op de sympathieke ANP Beeldbank. "Wat een gekken zeg bij dat ANP, die maken een foto van mijn foto en bieden hem dan te koop aan ik zie een zaak voor mijn advocaat Mark Teurlings" (Mark Teurlings is tevens RTL Boulevard-expert, en doet het met de dochter van Henk Rommey aka De Zwarte Cobra, en Ferry en Mark zitten altijd bij traiteur Van Dam in de Amsterdamse Cornelis Schuyt, inderdaad van Nicolette van Dam, te babbelen met Ruud, Estelle, Brammetje en Badr. William Rutten, die in De Koks Facebook reageert is weer de ex van Nance, en bovendien de fotograaf van die geniale foto van Greet & Hero.) Goed, dit alles is klein bier. Echt groot nieuws is de foto van Ferry op pagina 23 van de Holleeder-Revu. Daarop staat Willem Holleeder die de hand schudt van NR-chef Noomen, na het ondertekenen van het contract. Als geintje staat er een blikje Heineken op tafel. (Kijk maar, hier een foto van een foto.) Dat lollig bedoelde blikje bier zou wel eens de ondergang van Sanoma kunnen betekenen. In een officile reactie, na het bekend worden dat Holleeder voor Sanoma ging werken, heeft Heineken laten weten "er niets mee te zullen doen, en dat de advertentiegelden voor dit jaar al ingepland zijn." Insiders bevestigen aan GeenStijl dat Sanoma het nu echt kan shaken bij grootadverteerder Heineken. Daar ga je, Wouter Verkennis. Proost.Update: ANP Photo heeft alle foto's van de Revu-omslag weggehaald. Op deze na.
  Pritt Stift | 06-09-12 | 13:20 | Link |
Tip of the Week: Linux on a Stick
  Link to Article
  Source: NYT > Most Recent Headlines
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:10
  An aging computer that cannot quite meet the requirements for a Windows 7 upgrade can sometimes find a few more years of usefulness with a switch to the Linux operating system. Ubuntu, which makes a free and easy-to-use version of Linux, has traditionally made it easy to try out the system by posting instructions for making a compact disc that can boot up and run Linux for a test drive before installing it. But for old computers with broken disc drives, Ubuntu Linux can also be run from a USB flash drive. The Ubuntu site has detailed instructions here for making a bootable USB stick (or CD) with the current version of Ubuntu from either a Windows or Mac computer, and an online demo here.
R Kelly Announces Ladies Tour'...but are the Girls Going t Show Up?
  Link to Article
  Source: Jacky Jasper's Diary of a Hollywood Street King
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:04
  by Jacky Jasper
  This October, Robert ''The Pisser'' Kelly will be hitting the road on a 24-date tour titled ''The Single Ladies Tour.'' The tour will find Kells making stops across the country in major cities like Detroit, Miami, New York and his own native Chicago.
  R. Kelly is also preparing his next album titled Black Panties, as well as a follow up to his ''Trapped in the Closet'' series.
  Women talk so much about respect, so it really surprises me to see women of all races paying to see a man who taped himself urinating on underage girls while high on Xtacy pills at three in the morning.
  R Kelly was never convicted for his sexual liaisons with minors, but we all either saw '' or heard about '' his disgusting porn tape with Sparkle's neice.
  Buying a ticket to a R Kelly concert is like giving money to a predator so he can continue to practice his demented sexual ways, but I'd like to know your thoughts?
$83,046 For A 3 Hour Hospital Visit '' Why Are Hospital Bills So Outrageous?
  Link to Article
  Source: Infowars » Featured Stories
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:00
  Michael Snyder The Economic CollapseSept 6, 2012
  The fastest way to go broke in America is to go to the hospital. These days it seems like almost everyone has an outrageous hospital bill story to share.
  It is getting to the point where most people are deathly afraid to go to the hospital. All the financial progress that you have made in recent years can literally be wiped out in just a matter of hours. For example, you are about to read about an Arizona woman that was recently charged $83,046 for a 3 hour hospital visit. How in the world is anyone supposed to pay a bill like that? I have a really hard time understanding why a visit to the doctor should ever be more than a couple hundred bucks or why a hospital stay should ever be more than a couple thousand dollars. Outrageous hospital bills are a real pet peeve of mine and I have not even been to the hospital in ages. What makes all of this even more infuriating is that Medicare, Medicaid and the big insurance companies are often charged less than 10 percent of what the rest of us are billed for the same procedures. There is a reason why 41 percent of all working age Americans are struggling with medical debt right now. It is because our health care system has become a giant money making scam. Millions of desperate Americans go into hospitals each year assuming that they will be treated fairly, but in the end they get stuck with incredibly outrageous bills and in many cases cruel debt collection techniques are employed against them if they don't pay.
  So why do we have to pay so much for medical care? Back in 1980, less than 10 percent of U.S. GDP went to health care. Today, about 18 percentof U.S. GDP goes toward health care.
  And considering the fact that over the next 20 years the number of Americans 65 years of age or older is projected to double that number is going to go even higher.
  On a per capita basis we spend about twice as much on health care as anyone else in the world.
  In fact, if the U.S. health care system was a nation it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet.
  America spent 2.47 trillion dollars on health care in 2009, and it is now being projected that we will spend 4.5 trillion dollars on health care in 2019.
  Our system is completely and totally broken, and Obamacare is going to make things far worse. We need to throw the entire system out and start over.
  A perfect example of why this is true is what happened when 52-year-old Marcie Edmonds went in to a hospital in Arizona recently to get treated for a scorpion sting'....
  With the help of a friend, she called Poison Control and was advised to go to the nearest hospital that had scorpion antivenom, Chandler Regional Medical Center. At the hospital, an emergency room doctor told her about the antivenom, called Anascorp, that could quickly relieve her symptoms. Edmonds said the physician never talked with her about the cost of the drug or treatment alternatives.
  Her symptoms subsided after she received two doses of the drug Anascorp through an IV, and she was discharged from the hospital in about three hours.
  Weeks later, she received a bill for $83,046 from Chandler Regional Medical Center. The hospital, owned by Dignity Health, charged her $39,652 per dose of Anascorp.
  What makes this even more shocking is that hospitals in Mexico only charge $100 per dose of Anascorp.
  These days many hospitals will do whatever they can get away with on hospital bills.
  One NBC News reporter was absolutely stunned at the bill that she received after she went in for neck surgery for degenerative disc disease recently'....
  Once I got my itemized bill, the grand total was a little over $66,013.40! That was for a one night stay and a four level vertebrae fusion surgery. The charges included $22 for one sleeping pill, $427 for one dissecting tool, and $32,000 for four titanium plates and ten screws.
  I brought it to Todd Hill, a fee based patient advocate who helps people decipher their medical bills. ''The screws in your procedure were billed at $605 a piece for a total of $6050 dollars. We've seen those in our past research for $25 or $30,'' he said. ''In this case, the markup is tremendous,'' he added.
  Considering the fact that 77 percent of American families are living paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time, a single hospital bill like this can be a financial death blow.
  If you have time, read this tragic story where one man was charged $11,000 and all he had was a case of bad indigestion. Nothing was even wrong with him and now his family is going to have to declare bankruptcy.
  Often medical bills are so complex and so confusing that nobody can really understand them. A lot of the times this is probably done on purpose to keep people from understanding how badly they are being overcharged. The following is from a recent article in the New York Times'....
  Hospital care tends to be the most confounding, and experts say the charges you see on your bill are usually completely unrelated to the cost of providing the services (at hospitals, these list prices are called the ''charge master file''). ''The charges have no rhyme or reason at all,'' Gerard Anderson, director of the Center for Hospital Finance and Management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. ''Why is 30 minutes in the operating room $2,000 and not $1,500? There is absolutely no basis for setting that charge. It is not based upon the cost, and it's not based upon the market forces, other than the whim of the C.F.O. of the hospital.''
  And those charges don't really have any connection to what a hospital or medical provider will accept for payment, either. ''If you line up five patients in their beds and they all have gall bladders removed and they get the same exact medication and services, if they have insurance or if they don't have insurance, the hospital will get five different reimbursements, and none of it is based on cost,'' said Holly Wallack, a medical billing advocate in Miami Beach. ''The insurers negotiate a different rate, and if you are uninsured, underinsured or out of network, you are asked to pay full fare.''
  It has been estimated that hospitals in the United States overcharge their patients by about 10 billion dollars every single year.
  Medical bills are the number one reason why Americans file for bankruptcy. As I mentioned earlier, approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans are struggling with medical debt.
  And health insurance is not as much protection as you might think. According to a report published in the American Journal of Medicine, of all bankruptcies caused by medical debt, approximately 75 percent of the time the people actually did have health insurance.
  And if you can't pay your bills, many hospitals will come after you ruthlessly.
  In fact, collection agencies sought to collect unpaid medical bills from approximately 30 million Americans during 2010 alone.
  If you don't cough up the cash they are demanding you can even end up in prison. The following example comes fromCBS News'....
  How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She didn't pay a medical bill '-- one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant was told she didn't owe. ''She got a $280 medical bill in error and was told she didn't have to pay it,'' The Associated Press reports. ''But the bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs.''
  Although the U.S. abolished debtors' prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who don't pay all manner of debts, from bills for health care services to credit card and auto loans.
  But why do these bills have to be so high? It is not like many doctors are getting rich these days. In fact, many of them are going broke.
  So what is the deal?
  Well, as a recent article by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts explained, there are a whole lot of people pulling profit out of the system other than just doctors these days'....
  There are two main reasons that US medicine is so expensive. One is that profits are piled upon profits. In addition to wages and salaries for doctors, nurses, and medical personnel, the American health care system has to provide profits for private hospitals, diagnostic centers, insurance companies, and for the accountants, attorneys and management consultants made necessary by the enormous litigation and regulatory compliance cost. American medicine is the most regulated in the world and the most criminalized.
  And another big factor is that the rest of us have to make up the difference for the patients that are not profitable.
  It has gotten to the point where some doctors in certain kinds of practices barely make any profit on Medicare and Medicaid patients. In fact, in many cases doctors actually lose money treating them.
  An article posted on medicalcostadvocate.com has some outrageous examples of the difference between what you and I are billed and what Medicare pays out for the exact same procedures'....
  A patient in Illinois was charged $12,712 for cataract surgery. Medicare pays $675 for the same procedure. In California, a patient was charged $20,120 for a knee operation for which Medicare pays $584. And a New Jersey patient was charged $72,000 for a spinal fusion procedure that Medicare covers for $1,629.
  So not only do we pay very high taxes to support Medicaid and Medicare, we also have to pay higher medical bills in order to make up the difference for the money that doctors and hospitals are not seeing from those patients.
  Unfortunately, Medicaid and Medicare are expected to grow dramatically in the years ahead.
  A d v e r t i s e m e n tFor example, it is now being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to Medicaid.
  And enrollment in Medicare is projected to grow from 50.7 million today to 73.2 million in 2025.
  How in the world can our current system possibly handle this?
  And please don't tell me that Obamacare is the answer.
  The truth is that Obamacare is going to take everything that is wrong with our health care system and make it even worse.
  For a good summary on this, please see this article.
  In the years ahead it is going to get even harder for those that are not dependent on the government for health care'....
  -Approximately 10 percent of all employers plan to drop health insurance coverage entirely because of Obamacare.
  -According to one recent poll, 83 percent of all doctors in the United States have considered quitting the profession because of Obamacare, and we were already projected to have a severe doctor shortage in the years ahead even before Obamacare came along.
  We are heading into the greatest health care crisis the United States has ever seen, and none of our leaders seem to have any answers.
  In a recent article entitled ''11 Signs That The U.S. Health Care System Is Heading Straight Down The Toilet'', I detailed a lot more reasons why our health care system is a national disgrace. If you can handle some more ranting I encourage you to go check that article out.
  I am just absolutely disgusted with the condition of our health care system. It is dominated by government bureaucrats, pharmaceutical corporations and the big health insurance companies. It is a giant money making scam that seeks to drain as much money from the rest of us as possible.
  So do you have a hospital bill horror story to share? Please feel free to share your thoughts below'....
  Tags: Financial, money
  Share this article:
HootSuite acquires Seesmic, Seesmic customers to be transitioned to HootSuite
  Link to Article
  Source: Dave Winer's linkblog feed
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:54
  HootSuite announced today that it has acquired social media tool maker Seesmic.
  Seesmic, led by charismatic chief executive Loic Le Meur, who also runs Le Web conference in Paris, is the king of the pivot, starting life as video commenting tool, becoming a Twitter client, transitioning to a client for social services in general, transmogrifying (yes, I'm running out of synonyms here) into a customer relationship management system, and most recently, transforming back into a social media cross-posting tool via its Ping.fm acquisition.
  That, of course, is very close to what HootSuite does, and while no details were disclosed in HootSuite's press release, Ping.fm's ability to post to many, many sites may be the value HootSuite is acquiring.
  In addition, while Seesmic's team was just halved, there's still talent for HootSuite to aqui-hire. There's no word on this yet, but the acquisition also gives Vancouver, Canada-based HootSuite a foothold in San Francisco.
  I have a conversation with HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes scheduled for tomorrow, and we'll post more details then.
  Le Meur had nice words for Holmes and HootSuite:
  ''We've always been big fans of Ryan Holmes and the HootSuite team, since the days we were all pioneering the Social Media landscape. We're thrilled today to announce that Seesmic is joining HootSuite, and we're excited for our users: they are becoming part of the HootSuite family, and they will be able to continue to build their brand and social business.''
  And Holmes had nice words for Le Meur and Seesmic:
  ''I have always had a lot of respect for Seesmic's CEO, Lo¯c Le Meur, and the role Seesmic has played in advancing social business. We are thrilled to welcome Seesmic's users into the HootSuite family.''
  The one pertinent detail other than the plain fact of the acquisition itself that can be derived from the press release is contained in Le Meur's statement that Seesmic users will become HootSuite users (''part of the HootSuite family'').
  This suggests that Seesmic will be shuttered as a product.
  That seems to be the only common sense solution, given the fact that HootSuite has almost five million users, and Seesmic has been floundering for years, with only perhaps 30 to 40,000 unique visitors a month.
  Other than those two paragraphs, literally 90 percent of the release is about HootSuite's product, pricing, and clients.
  More details tomorrow.
  Image credit: Big fish eating little fish/ShutterStock
You don't bring a 3D printer to a gun fight -- yet
  Link to Article
  Source: CNET News
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:45
  Welcome to the dark side of 3D printing.
  The hobby is best known for creating colorful toys and trinkets, but some enthusiasts are working on design files that would allow anyone to print a working gun. These don't exist yet, but some believe it's only a matter of time.
  Why would a 3D-printed gun be appealing? For one, it could potentially be cheap. You can buy a preassembled 3D printer for about $500. A spool of ABS plastic to print with goes for $50. Depending on where you shop, you can buy .38 Special ammunition for 30 cents a round. The plans will undoubted be distributed free like so many MP3s.
  In fact, plans for working guns parts already exist. They can be found on a site called Thingiverse, as well as other similar sites, alongside thousands of free plans for toys, jewelry, tools, and design equipment.
  Thingiverse is a creation of Brooklyn, N.Y.-based MakerBot and its CEO, Bre Pettis. Pettis and his company have become the de facto faces of 3D printing thanks to regular appearances in mainstream and tech media talking about how 3D printers democratize manufacturing. Pettis usually demonstrates this idea with brightly colored remote controlcars, robots, and other toys made with MakerBot printers. MakerBot and Pettis don't really talk about files related to gun parts.
  The more familiar side of 3D printing.
  (Credit:CNET)That doesn't mean it has gone unnoticed, with the intersection of 3D printing and firearms having made the news a few times this year. In June, Michael "HaveBlue" Guslick reported on his blog about successfully test-firing a homemade gun whose key component, the lower receiver, he made from ABS plastic on a '90s-era Stratasys FDM 1600 3D printer.
  And in August, Forbes' Andy Greenberg wrote about a group called Defense Distributed, which has some lofty goals as mapped out in the video below. In practical terms, their immediate aim is to create a design file for what they call a Wiki Weapon, a functional, 3D-printed firearm.
  The increased attention on printable guns comes as Defense Distributed is approaching a firing test, said Cody Wilson, a University of Texas graduate student and the chief spokesman for the group. Depending on the outcome of that testing, 3D-printing companies, file hosting sites, and law enforcement and legislative groups may have to tackle a challenging set of questions regarding the manufacture and regulation of firearms, both in this country and abroad.
  All of this might sound exciting, alarming, or nonsensical, depending on your personal beliefs and familiarity with guns and gunsmithing. Setting aside any moral leanings, the fact is that the idea will need to overcome significant material and legislative hurdles before you can crank out a working, legal, 3D-printed gun in the United States. On the physical side, the ABS printing plastic might not be strong enough to make a stable enough weapon. And law-abiding, gunsmithing Americans must first face numerous federal, state, and local gun regulations and bureaucratic procedures that may not take kindly to people printing their own firearms.
  None of that means printing a gun is impossible.
  Darwin Award, or upending the means of production?On Guslick's blog, Haveblue.org, he offers thorough documentation of the process he followed to design, print, fine-tune, and test his 3D-printed receiver. Guslick also addresses the reception to his project by the greater 3D-printing community, as well as the ensuing media swirl and the feasibility of the Defense Distributed project. All of those topics are worth reading about, but that last part will be of particular interest to would-be gunmakers.
  Michael Guslick's homemade pistol, with a plastic, 3D-printed lower receiver designed for an AR 15 hunting rifle.
  (Credit:Michael Guslick)You can make a receiver like Guslick's out of plastic because it houses only the basic mechanical parts of a firearm -- the trigger mechanism, the magazine, and other components. It's the barrel of a gun and/or the firing chamber, both of which you attach to the receiver, that must be strong enough to contain the heat and explosive pressure that comes from firing a round. A project like that of Defense Distributed and its Wiki Weapon is much harder, as Guslick explains on his site, (links added where appropriate):
  The problem is that even the strongest 3D-printable thermoplastic currently available for the FDM process (Ultem 9085) doesn't even have half the tensile strength needed to withstand the 24,000 psi maximum allowed chamber pressure of the .22LR round as defined by SAAMI (the Sporting Arms and Manufacturer's Institute). As such, yes, a 100 percent 3D-printed gun made on a RepRap could certainly go "bang," but even with a barrel of large enough diameter to keep it from exploding, there would be so much deformation in the bore that most of the available energy would be sapped by gas leakage around the projectile (to say nothing of the utter lack of accuracy). In the end, you'd have a smoking, charred crater left for a barrel bore after the single shot.
  Wilson says he intends to find out just what's possible with ABS plastic. "I'm excited about the question, because I'm interested to see how it fails," he told CNET.
  That doesn't mean Wilson expects to fail. He referred me to this list of barrel pressure tolerances, and said Defense Distributed plans to test .38 Special ammunition, as well as .45 Long Colt, both of which have lower maximum pressure output than the .22. And according to Wilson, "operational pressure is also about half of the SAAMI-suggested maximum tolerances."
  Bringing in a specialistRyder Washburn is the vice president of Specialists Ltd., the East Coast's largest provider of prop weaponry for film, TV, and theater. "What we try to do is the opposite of what you're talking about," Washburn said. "We want to take as much 'gun' out of our products as possible. Essentially we want to stay 10 feet back from the edge of making an actual firearm. But in order to do that, you have to know where the edge is."
  A homemade pistol made from common hardware.
  (Credit:Wikipedia)I asked Washburn about Wilson's likelihood of success. "Using lower-pressure ammunition sounds like a good decision, but it depends on how you define success. If his goal is to fire a bullet and not blow his hand off, I give him a 50 percent chance."
  To my disappointment, I did not get to meet Washburn at his SOHO office in New York ("It's pretty hectic here," he told me). Instead, we met at a nearby coffee shop.
  "People get excited by additive manufacturing [like 3D printing] because it seems like you're making something out of thin air. But it has been possible to make guns with reductive technology, like a CNC mill, for years, and it works the same way as a 3D printer. Most of the work goes on in 3D-modeling software. Then you take the design file from the computer and send it to the machine to build. You can make a working metal gun with a $3,000 CNC machine. If all you want to do is make a cheap gun, you can go down to Home Depot and build one with $20 worth of parts."
  Washburn also backed up Guslick's assessment that using Ultem or any other plastic-based FDM printer feedstock to make a complete, functional firearm would be very difficult, if not impossible. I asked him if it was possible for a gun made entirely from ABS plastic to fire a .22 caliber round, the same ammunition Defense Distributed had in mind initially. "You might be able to do that, but it would take a lot of design work, and a lot of research and funding. And the end result would still be an inferior product compared with what you can currently make using traditional machine tools."
  I was not invited down to the Specialists' shop.
  For Wilson, making a practical, working gun isn't necessarily the point. "We have to start here. This is the fundament. It's the beginning." The Defense Distributed project is less about the gun, according to Wilson, than about democratizing manufacturing technology. His intention is that "the non-expert user will have the ability to make a gun with just a click."
  As Washburn points out, you can already do that with a CNC milling machine. But, Wilson adds, it still requires some expertise in the assembly. Wilson also argues that 3D printers are unique in their potential to print using multiple materials. That, he says, gives 3D printing a more capable future than traditional machine tools.
  In summing up my goal for this article to Wilson, I said that it was in part to communicate the present-day reality of using a 3D printer to make a plastic gun and submitted that it was not currently feasible. Citing his team's upcoming ammunition test, he disagreed. "Literally, it might be possible to print out a gun in a few weeks."
  Not everyone will agree with Wilson's goals or philosophy, but enough people do that the project has made substantial progress toward its $20,000 fundraising goal. After stagnating at just over $1,000 toward the end of last week, on the evening of August 30, the group received a $10,000 windfall. Wilson tells me they also have a commitment for matching funds for every dollar above $10,000. According to the Defense Distributed Web site, the fundraising tally currently stands at $11,304, and he intends to conduct his firing test soon.
  The law wonBut is any of this even legal? Among the 1934 National Firearms Act, the 1968 Gun Control Act (PDF), and a variety of other laws, the federal government has all kinds of regulations pertaining to firearm manufacturing and possession. And those laws supply only the minimum standard. Layer state and local laws on top of those, and the legal obligations for the would-be home gunsmiths become rather burdensome.
  Expect to spend a lot of time here if you plan to make a 3D printed gun.
  (Credit:Rich Brown/CNET)From a federal point of view, you have three primary legal considerations before you hit print.
  If you aim to sell either your services as a gunsmith (i.e. "I charge $50 an hour to make a gun"), or you intend to sell the weapon once you've made it (i.e. "I charge $500 for this particular gun") you need to obtain a federal manufacturer's license. If the weapon is for personal use, no manufacturing license is required.
  You then need to consider the kind of weapon you intend to make. Crafting a Title I class weapon at home -- a long-barreled semi-automatic or single-action rifle, a long-barreled shotgun, or a traditional pistol or a revolver as defined by the Gun Control Act -- generally requires no preliminary paperwork. You still need to register the weapon once you've made it, but, federally speaking, you're free to engage in the act of making it without any prior permission. The problem is that using a consumer-grade 3D printer to make a functional firearm that meets the specifications of a Title I weapon would be extremely difficult, not to mention impractical, for the reasons outlined above.
  Instead, any successful design would most likely be considered a Title II-class weapon as defined by the National Firearms Act, specifically one that fits the "Any Other Weapon" category.
  Get ready for some paperworkTitle II-class weapons are the more heavily regulated firearms under federal law. Guns in this category consist of, among other things, machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, explosive devices, and what the U.S. government calls "Any Other Weapon." The latter includes pen, cane, and other gadget-type guns, and smooth-bore pistols. According to David Goldman, managing partner of Jacksonville, FL's Apple Law Firm, and publisher of the NFA Gun Trust Lawyer blog, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms would most likely put a 3D-printed plastic gun in that category.
  ATF F 5320.1, aka the Application to Make and Register a Firearm.
  (Credit:Rich Brown/CNET)Assuming your design does fall under the Title II Any Other Weapon classification, federal law mandates that before you make it, you fill out ATF Form 5320.1 (PDF), aka Form 1, aka the Application to Make and Register a Firearm. You then need to submit it and have it approved by the ATF.
  As part of the approval process, an ATF spokesperson informed me that the agency will want to see the design for your homemade gun. This will help them determine its classification, as well as whether the weapon would be legal for you to possess in your state or municipality.
  Form 1 also requires that you receive approval from a local law enforcement officer. Others have sued after failing to secure this approval for the transfer of weapons between owners, which requires a different form, but Goldman is familiar with no case law supporting those who have been unable to obtain this approval for a Form 1 application.
  You must also consider the obscure but very relevant Undetectable Firearms Act. It was Wilson who told me about this law ("I'm doing your research for you," he joked).
  The Undetectable Firearms Act says, simply, that you may not manufacture or possess a firearm that cannot be detected by an airport metal detector. The law is a product of the debut of the Glock 17 handgun that caused a stir in the 1980s for its composite plastic components. That gun was itself never capable of defeating an airport metal detector, but the law is still in place regardless, although it's due to expire in December of 2013.
  Trying this at homeThere are more legal considerations to making a Title II-class gun, but also interesting is the case of the Guslick's receiver design. According to federal law, the receiver is so integral to the specific functionality of a given weapon that the receiver itself is considered a firearm. Guslick's design in particular mirrors that of a Colt AR 15 hunting rifle, making it a Title I-class weapon. In New York City, possessing Guslick's receiver would be illegal.
  My smaller-scale print of Michael "HaveBlue" Guslick's AR 15 lower receiver design.
  (Credit:Sarah Tew/CNET)It's for that reason that I printed a significantly reduced-scale version of Guslick's receiver from ABS plastic on a MakerBot Replicator 3D printer. It's also why I felt even more secure when the print came out a little mangled after one corner pulled up from the build surface during printing. It's also the reason why, even despite the small size and the imperfect print, I destroyed the mini receiver last week.
  I printed the receiver first to see if the end result seemed like a feasible gun part. I'm neither a materials scientist nor a gunsmith, nor am I even a particularly adept 3D-printer user, but my miniature receiver felt solid enough, at least to me, to accept some mechanical internal components and mounting hardware.
  "This is about 25 percent scale," Washburn said of my mini receiver. "There's probably nothing illegal about this. If you made it at 100 percent scale, I wouldn't want to be your lawyer."
  The remains of my miniature AR 15 receiver.
  (Credit:Sarah Tew/CNET)Even if a consumer-level 3D printer can't currently make a functioning gun, it can make some rather serious gun components. "I'd hate to see some 15-year-old get in trouble for printing this full-sized," Washburn said.
  I become death, destroyer of my garageThe obvious retort to any discussion of the legalities of making your own firearms or firearm components, 3D-printed or otherwise, is that criminals don't care about gun control laws. And even if it's impractical, if not downright impossible, to make your own plastic gun now, as 3D-printing technology improves and grows you might envision a near-term future where crooks regularly arm themselves with cheap, easily reproduced plastic firearms.
  Even if you dial down the scare rhetoric, 3D printing at the very least seems like it could disrupt the idea that a government can regulate guns or their manufacture. Defense Distributed outright claims that kind of disruption among its goals.
  "In a sense, every dollar [that you donate to their project] is a statement to these international kleptocrats that this isn't in [their] control anymore."
  Here's the problem with that idea. As Washburn pointed out, you can already make a cheap gun with a trip down to the hardware store. And with only a little training, you can already use relatively affordable, widely available machine tools to mass-produce functioning weapons.
  Defense Distributed is closing in on its $20,000 fund-raising goal.
  (Credit:Rich Brown/CNET)This is not to say that zip guns and other illegal homemade weapons don't currently exist. Yet despite the widely distributed means of production and low financial and knowledge requirements, the regulation-shaking, homemade gun-making revolution hasn't happened in this country.
  Washburn, the ATF, and gun rights attorney Stephan Halbrook all believe current U.S. legislation is already well-equipped to handle the prospect of a plastic, 3D-printed firearm. You never know, of course. "You might find a legislator somewhere who wants to do something about it," Halbrook said. But the federal government has been regulating alternative gun designs, the Any Other Weapon, since the National Firearms Act of 1934. Wilson counters that if his group can design an effective, easily distributed plan for a printable plastic gun, "there is just not enough manpower to control it."
  "3D printing 20 years from now is a different animal," Washburn said, allowing at least the possibility that printing a functional firearm might one day become more practical. Even if it does, it will only offer another means to an end that we can already accomplish easily. "This has all been done before," Washburn said, "and there are smarter ways to do it."
  Meanwhile, Defense Distributed is going forward with its testing.
#Hillary2016 Tops Twitter Trends as Former President Bill Clinton Fires Up DNC Crowd - ABC News
  Link to Article
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:37
  Sep 5, 2012 11:38pm
  ABC News
  If people on Twitter had their way, Hillary Clinton would take one more crack at shattering America's highest glass ceiling.
  As President Bill Clinton took to the Democratic National Convention's main stage Wednesday night, the Twitter hash tag ''#Hillary2016'" briefly became the top trend on Twitter in the United States. The tweets asking the secretary of state to run skyrocketed to the top shortly before 11 p.m., about 10 minutes after President Clinton gave her a shout out in his speech.
  ''Heck, he even appointed Hillary!'' said the former president, making the point that President Obama is committed to cooperation, appointing Republicans to his cabinet and tapping his former primary opponent for secretary of state.
  An ABC News/Washington Post poll in April found Secretary of State Clinton scoring a favorable rating of 65 percent, hitting a new high in favorability data stretching back to her entry on the national stage 20 years ago.
  Clinton is currently in East Timor, steering thousands of miles clear of the convention in Charlotte, N.C.
  ABC News' Amy Bingham contributed to this report.
On Twitter, Bill Clinton's DNC speech was about Hillary
  Link to Article
  Source: TheBlaze.com - Blog
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:33
  During Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic convention last night, the hashtag #Hillary2016 became the top trending topic on Twitter for a moment, according to ABC News.
  Furthermore, a now-dead Internet meme was revived for Clinton's nearly 50-minute speech:
Why Fox is essential viewing : CJR
  Link to Article
  Source: Dave Winer's linkblog feed
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:30
  The Republican convention brought more evidence of The New York Times's soft spot for Fox News. On Friday, the paper offered a glowing profile of Carl Cameron, Fox's chief political correspondent. ''Propelled by a boundless enthusiasm for presidential politics, vast quantities of Red Bull (which he carries by the six-pack in his roller suitcase) and nicotine gum (which he admits to chewing `like a fiend'), his days on the campaign trail often runs 20 hours,'' Jeremy W. Peters wrote. The article described Cameron's star status at the convention, his collegiality, his easy access to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's campaign, and his straight shooting. ''Fellow journalists say they detect no bias in his reporting,'' Peters wrote.
  The Cameron profile recalled other complimentary pieces that the Times has periodically run about top Fox figures, like its January 2010 paean to Roger Ailes and its indulgent profile of Glenn Beck in the Times magazine later that year. When the Times is not cosseting Fox, it largely ignores it. In the last few years, it has run very few pieces analyzing Fox's fiercely partisan coverage and its outsized impact on conservative opinion.
  The reason, I think, is clear: fear. Fear of being accused of liberal bias. And fear of being attacked, either on the air or by Fox's vigilant supporters in the comments section. (Back in the mid-2000s, when Frank Rich was regularly criticizing Fox as ''GOP TV,'' an irate Bill O'Reilly threatened to ''get into'' the ''lives'' of him and then executive editor Bill Keller. O'Reilly's on-air attacks on Rich so rattled him that he sought security advice.)
  The Times's neglect of Fox is typical. Few major news organizations pay much attention to its programming. And that's too bad, for Fox is not only a major news network but also a key political actor, and watching it offers a window into both the state of the Republican Party and the conservative movement as a whole. While watching Fox (and listening to conservative talk radio) during the 2008 presidential campaign, I found the commentary on it utterly toxic and, based on it, predicted (in a piece for CJR) that the right would wage a nasty campaign to discredit President Barack Obama. One month into his term, the Tea Party erupted.
  During the recent Republican convention, Fox's tone seemed very different. While Sean Hannity and other partisan flame-throwers still attack Obama at every opportunity, I detected much hesitancy, doubt, and frustration. After Romney's speech, the commentators brought on to analyze it'--Brit Hume, Steve Hayes, and Charles Krauthammer'--were decidedly restrained. ''This was not a soaring speech,'' Hume said. It was ''a solid speech, a good speech, but not a great speech.''
  Even more striking was an exchange that Laura Ingraham had with Geraldo Rivera about Clint Eastwood. Cueing Rivera, Ingraham'--a Hannity-style zealot who at all times seeks to enforce the party line'--effusively praised Eastwood's RNC performance, saying she loved it from beginning to end, not least because ''it drove the left absolutely bonkers.'' Rivera would have none of it. ''Buffoonery,'' he called the act. With Eastwood's rumpled hair and ill-fitting suit, he said, the actor looked like he had just gotten out of ''Joe's bar'' and stumbled into the convention without preparation. ''I could go up there and vamp for 12 minutes and it would be funnier,'' Rivera said. Despite Ingraham's determined efforts to rein him in, Rivera kept denouncing Eastwood and the distraction he posed to Romney's speech. It made for riveting TV.
  It's important not to make too much of this. As Jon Stewart regularly shows, Fox News remains an Obama-bashing, climate-change-denying, war-on-Christmas-promoting purveyor of conservative talking points. But those talking points seem increasingly in flux. The Republican party as a whole seems to be entering a period of painful reflection and self-evaluation, and Fox offers a ringside seat.
VIDEO: Action man Putin takes to the skies
  Link to Article
  Source: BBC News - Home
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:25
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DutchNews.nl - 8,000 men asked to give dna to solve 1999 schoolgirl murder.
  Link to Article
  Source: WT news feed
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:24
  8,000 men asked to give dna to solve 1999 schoolgirl murderThursday 06 September 2012
  An effort to finally solve the 1999 murder of a teenage girl involves asking some 8,000 Frisian men to give dna samples in the hope of finding a link to her killer, the public prosecution department said on Thursday.
  The dna project is the biggest of its kind ever undertaken in the Netherlands.
  Marianne Vaatstra, 16, was murdered in Friesland 14 years ago and her body dumped in a field. Despite an extensive police investigation, her killer has never been found.
  Television crime journalist Peter R de Vries in May broadcast information about a Playboy cigarette lighter found in Vaatstra's bag which contains dna traces that match the traces found on the schoolgirl's body.
  Tip offs following the broadcast showed the lighter was on sale in the local area at the time, including in the village of Zwaagwesteinde where she lived.
  Survey
  In June, the department said it planned to launch a major dna check on people living near where Vaatstra was found in the hope of finally finding her killer. That project has now had official approval.
  All the men asked to give a dna sample lived within a five kilometre radius of the crime scene in 1999, an area which covers 12 villages. No-one will be forced to comply, the department said.
  The national forensic institute is also carrying out further research in the national dna bank to to try to find relatives of the probable killer.
  (C) DutchNews.nl
  We are not currently accepting comments on this article.
Secret account in mission-critical router opens power plants to tampering.
  Link to Article
  Source: WT news feed
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:12
  A Magnum 6K Managed Ethernet Switch sold by GarrettCom.
  The branch of the US Department of Homeland Security that oversees critical infrastructure has warned power utilities, railroad operators, and other large industrial players of a weakness in a widely used router that leaves them open to tampering by untrusted employees.
  The line of mission-critical routers manufactured by Fremont, California-based GarrettCom contains an undocumented account with a default password that gives unprivileged users access to advanced options and features, Justin W. Clarke, an expert in the security of industrial control systems, told Ars. The "factory account" makes it possible for untrusted employees or contractors to significantly escalate their privileges and then tamper with electrical switches or other industrial controls that are connected to the devices.
  GarrettCom boxes are similar to regular network routers and switches except that they're designed to withstand extreme heat and cold, as well as dry, wet, or dusty conditions. They're also fluent in the Modbus and DNP communications protocols used to natively administer industrial control and supervisory control and data acquisition gear.
  Search results recently returned by the Shodan computer search engine showed nine of the vulnerable devices connected to the Internet using US-based IP addresses. If the default credentials haven't been changed, the undocumented factory account can allow people with guest accounts to gain unfettered control of the devices, said Clarke, who is a researcher with Cylance, a firm specializing in security of industrial systems.
  "Cylance has identified an unforeseen method whereby a user authenticated as 'guest' or 'operator' can escalate privileges to the 'factory' account," an advisory published by the company warned. Clarke told Ars he discovered the account after buying a device from eBay for $12 and analyzing the way it worked. Clarke is the same researcher who discovered an undocumented account with a hard-coded password in a similar line of mission-critical switches sold by GarrettCom competitor RuggedCom.
  The Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team has issued an advisory recommending users of the GarrettCom devices install a security update that locks down the factory account.
Normaal: 'Disse kutregering'
  Link to Article
  Source: Telegraaf.nl - prive
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:09
  Normaal haalt ook op cd uit naar politiek - Verkiezingen 2012 | Het laatste nieuws over de Tweede Kamerverkiezingen leest u op Telegraaf.nl [Verkiezingen 2012]
  ');n.async=true;n.type='text/java'+s;n.src='http://cdn.kalooga.com/telegraaf/telegraaf_verkiezingen_300x200.js'; q.parentNode.insertBefore(n,q);})();
Young girl found alive at scene of massacre in France
  Link to Article
  Source: euronews
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:03
  Police have confirmed they have found a four-year-old girl alive hiding under the bodies of the three British victims of a fatal shooting in the French Alps.
  The discovery came after a heat-seeking thermal camera had failed to identify any other bodies in the UK registered car.
  Another young girl, thought to be aged around seven, remains in a critical condition after being helicoptered to hospital.
  ''Once the criminal investigators had arrived and the first measures had been taken we were able to open the vehicle and that is when we discovered a small child of around four years, who nobody had seen as she was not moving,'' explained Eric Millaud, Annecy Public Prosecutor.
  The car was discovered in a quiet forested parking area near Annecy lake not far from the French border with Switzerland, popular with British tourists.
  Around 60 police are involved in the investigation which they are calling ''multiple murder''. The three bodies in the car are believed to be the young girls' mother, father and grandmother.
  The body of a fourth person, a French cyclist thought to be a resident of the area, was found nearby the car while another cyclist who discovered the bodies around four o'clock on Wednesday afternoon was said to be in shock.
  Some 15 spent bullet casings from an automatic pistol were found at the crime scene.
  More about:France, Shootings, VictimsCopyright (C) 2012 euronews
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In Atlanta, where hip-hop rubs up against notorious strip clubs, rappers who want to make it big get their start by making it rain
  Link to Article
  Source: LIVE@LEEDS
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 11:01
  JON CARAMANICA NY Times 09/05/12
  The strip club Follies, in Atlanta, is neither a dump nor a gilded pleasure palace. It could probably pass for a college bar, if not for the metal detector at the door and the never-ending parade of bare and bespangled bosoms. Inside, a narrow stage snakes around the bar, dividing the room into different sectors named for properties on the Monopoly board. ''Travis Porter is right here at the end of Park Place!'' the house D.J. screamed one Sunday night earlier this year, acknowledging the arrival of a young Atlanta rap trio '-- Ali, Strap and Quez '-- that has given Follies and many places like it a theme song.
  ''Make It Rain,'' the group's 2010 hit, is one of the great hip-hop singles in recent memory, a jubilant, raw celebration of what passes for economic stimulus in these parts: tossing dollar bills into the sky without care. Among the latest generation of Atlanta rap acts, Travis Porter is probably the most promising, with a series of salacious and catchy mixtapes under its belt and a major-label debut, ''From Day 1'' (Porter House/RCA), that came out in May.
  When they entered Follies a little after 11 p.m., the men of Travis Porter were shown to a table near the D.J. booth. They exchanged large bills for neat stacks of singles, delivered by a waitress on a cocktail tray. Each member has his own way of redistributing these dollars. For Quez '-- tall, lanky and antic, with a huge, toothy grin '-- it's to grab a stack of 100 singles with one hand, then flick them off one at a time with his thumb. Ali, with a broad face and a slight curl in his lip, is more of a loose tosser. And Strap, the most reserved of the three, with a wisp of a beard, is methodical, doling out his singles in tight, staccato bursts.
  ''Shorty right here, I been knowing since she was dancing in this little dance group in Decatur,'' Quez said, talking about a woman, naked but for her shoes, who bent at a 90-degree angle in front of him as he rained dollars on her backside. A lot of times, he said, he can recognize the dancers from the rear.
  Travis Porter's first concert was in a strip club called Roosters, when the group members were still in their midteens; Ali's mother was a manager there. They didn't have money to give them, Ali said of the strippers who were dancing during their performance. ''My mom gave us ones.'' Later, Ali was chatting up a dancer wearing a neon green slingshot, while Strap lurked in a corner, a naked woman pressed up against him with intense familiarity as he whispered in her ear. The rules about touching appeared to be flexible.
  The D.J. spotted the R&B singer Ne-Yo in the crowd and gave him a shout-out. A few minutes later the D.J. pointed out Cam Newton, the Carolina Panthers quarterback. Late in the night, the Atlanta superstar Young Jeezy arrived with a big entourage, and sat, buddahlike, as the D.J. cued up his song ''I Do,'' with its flirty opening line: ''I said I see some ladies in here tonight I might marry.'' Again, the room got cloudy with dollar bills.
  But by 1 a.m., there were signs of fatigue. The strippers were attractive, sure, but to the hip-hop elite in attendance they were familiar, too '-- friends, former flings, sometimes both. For a while, it looked as if Ali might not make it through the stack of bills in his hand. Quez was doing a lot of talking, grabbing the attention of a curvy woman with glow-in-the-dark barbells through her nipples. In other words, it was just another night in Atlanta.
  Magic City, Blue Flame, Cheetah, Diamonds of Atlanta, Follies: the way some cities are known for their restaurants or their museums or their turn-of-the-century architecture, Atlanta's landmarks are strip clubs. In the way that people in Los Angeles or Miami might ask you if you've visited the beach, in Atlanta, you're asked if you've seen any strippers. And in Atlanta more than in any other city, hip-hop culture overlaps heavily with this world. The strip club is where new music is tested out, where stars go to be seen or to relax, where the value of a song can be measured by the number of dollars that fly skyward when it plays.
  But for rappers seeking to make names for themselves beyond the city limits, this venerable strip club scene has turned into something of an albatross. Atlanta's newest club champions '-- acts like Travis Porter, Future and Cash Out '-- all made their bones in places like Follies but have been fighting for the mainstream with more tenacity than their predecessors. In a way, they are running away from history.
  From the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, Atlanta had a worthy bass music scene that rivaled the bigger and better-known one in Miami, with local stars like Kilo Ali, DJ Smurf and MC Shy-D making music for, and about, the strip club. The club's centrality receded, somewhat, as the city moved away from that sound to the earthier, eccentric post-funk of groups like Outkast and Goodie Mob.
  In the mid-2000s, though, the clubs rose to renewed prominence at the intersection of several emergent movements in the city '-- there was the city's arrival as the center of hip-hop innovation, its rising black celebrity class and the pernicious influence of the crime syndicate BMF, which was known for its flamboyant and extravagant strip club outings. These were huge transactional scrums '-- rappers, dancers, criminals, bottles of alcohol, tens of thousands of dollars in the air.
  While the last decade has seen several hip-hop superstars come out of Atlanta '-- T.I., Young Jeezy, Ludacris '-- it's also fostered more than its share of club-friendly onetime crossover wonders like Dem Franchise Boyz or Shop Boyz. Acts like these ''were making songs to try to get played at Crucial and the Poole Palace, and they ended up on Billboard,'' said DJ Drama, a mixtape D.J. who's a fixture in Atlanta's rap world. When success caught them unprepared, they fizzled.
  That's a fate that Future, for one, has been trying to avoid. Future, who released his major-label debut, ''Pluto'' (A1/Freebandz/Epic), in April, is perhaps the least typical rapper to ever emerge from Atlanta's strip clubs. He not only raps but sings, and often manipulates his voice digitally on songs, giving him a spooky, post-human presence. His mixtapes have been a striking blend of grimy street realism and outer-space-focused fabulism. It's a blend suggestive of some of the extravagantly strange music made in Atlanta in the 1990s, including the debut albums by Outkast and Goodie Mob, which were produced by Organized Noize. (Rico Wade, one of Organized Noize's anchors, is Future's cousin and mentor.)
  Future was grateful but blunt about his success among the G-string set. ''My goal was never that,'' he said in the small studio in Atlanta in which he does all his recording. ''I just knew I had to start with that. You gotta go through the front door to get to the back of the house.''
  Future had just flown back from San Francisco, where he performed his breakthrough hit ''Tony Montana'' at the N.F.C. Championship Game. Even though it was the regular night of his own D.J., DJ Esco, at Magic City, Future came off the plane, went to the studio, and then home.
  In fact, during my two trips to Atlanta, it proved impossible to get him to a strip club, any strip club, despite the fact that one of his hits at the time was ''Magic,'' as in Magic City. For days, his representatives hemmed and hawed, eventually declining on his behalf. Future had meetings about brand partnerships to attend, and a dinner to celebrate the Steve Harvey film ''Think Like a Man'' '-- Future had a song on the soundtrack '-- but no time for strip clubs.
  ''I don't go to clubs for fun, I go to clubs for business,'' he said. ''I'm going to connect with the D.J.'s, or I'm going making sure I pay the girls, make sure they good and make sure we throw the money.'' Travis Porter echoed the sentiment. ''They're your promoters,'' Quez said of the dancers and D.J.'s. ''You're just paying your promoters '-- strip club payola, even though you can't write that off.''
  But years of patronage and torrents of dollars can't guarantee smooth passage from the club scene to the mainstream. Future's ambitious and eccentric first album, ''Pluto,'' sold only 40,000 copies in its first week, a middling debut. Meanwhile, on the heels of ''Make It Rain,'' Travis Porter signed to the pop powerhouse label Jive, a tough fit. Jive followed ''Make It Rain'' with ''College Girl,'' an almost comically tame love song with a video featuring the group dressed like neo-preps, neutering its rowdy charm. It didn't work out. Jive has now dissolved, and Travis Porter was reassigned to RCA. (The cover art for its latest hit, ''Ayy Ladies,'' features a woman sprawled facedown across the three members' laps.)
  But by the time of the BET Awards, in July, neither Travis Porter nor Future were invited to strut their stuff on the main stage. Instead, the nasal-voiced Cash Out acted as the ambassador from Atlanta's strip clubs, performing ''Cashin' Out,'' his breakthrough single. It was originally released late last year, and its grass-roots success eventually earned Cash Out a record deal with Epic. The song went on to top the Billboard rap songs chart and even crack the top 40 on the Hot 100 pop chart.
  The popularity of ''Cashin' Out'' had a lot to do with the Internet '-- the video now has more than 5 million YouTube views '-- and its viral success suggests that rappers might not need to be tossing dollars five nights a week just to get their songs played outside of Atlanta. ''Why would you give that money away?'' asked Sonny Digital, the producer of ''Racks'' by YC featuring Future, another unavoidable strip club anthem. ''When you break a song on the Internet, that's happening for free.''
  Cash Out may have broke out on the Internet, but he began his campaign the old-fashioned way. After his song was recorded, for ''three or four weeks straight, he was [at the clubs] politicking with the D.J.'s and the dancers,'' said his producer DJ Spinz.
  While the strip club remains the most reliable way to rocket-boost a song out of Atlanta, the scene competes increasingly with other hip-hop micromovements, including the country-rap of DJ Burn One and younger, tamer acts like Rich Kidz, who suggest something like a PG-13 version of Travis Porter. Then there are the bleak, intense street rhymes of Alley Boy and Trouble, whose Duct Tape Entertainment label feels miles removed from the showy dollar tossing of the clubs.
  I met both Alley Boy and Trouble in the Wallpaper-worthy midtown Atlanta apartment of a colleague. We talked about their recent jail sentences and about making street-oriented music in a city known for its joyous club anthems. Alley Boy was emphatic that, as a musician, he had no use for strip clubs. Which is why it surprised me when, before he left, he pulled me aside and warmly asked if I had seen any strippers while I was in town. The precise way he phrased that question was unprintable, but it felt like it was his civic duty to ask it: ''You really can't come to Atlanta and not see any.''
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French publishers want to charge Google for republishing articles
  Link to Article
  Source: WT news feed
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 10:59
  News
  By Loek Essers
  September 5, 2012 08:41 AM ET
  IDG News Service - French publishers have relaunched a discussion about the republishing of headlines and the first paragraph of articles by Google and other search engines without compensating the provider of the content.
  Plans to craft a law that allows publishers to charge search engines are back on the table after the German cabinet gave its support last week to a draft law that aims to do precisely that, said the French National Magazine Publishers' Society (SEPM).
  The German cabinet gave its backing to a proposal to extend copyright protection to snippets of news articles republished by search engines. Under the proposed law publishers could be allowed to charge search engines such as Google for the republishing of headlines and first paragraphs of articles.
  French publishers see the backing of this draft law by the German cabinet as "proof that there is really a problem between the content producers and the filter that is between the content and the viewers", said Guillaume Frappat, head of economic and digital affairs at SEPM. "We are very interested in this initiative," he said. "We are working to see what can be done in this context."
  The French publishers are thinking along the same lines as their German counterparts, and want to share in the revenue that Google earns from advertising displayed alongside news snippets. If a headline and a summary are published on Google News for instance, that is very often sufficient to satisfy the news reader, who then doesn't feel the need to click through to the publishers website, said Frappat. Because of that, publishers lose revenue, he said.
  The SEPM is not the only organization that wants to further discussions about a possible solution to this problem, he said. The French Union of the Daily Press (SPQN), which represents the interests of the newspaper industry, is also interested in a debate about this, because the news publishers might be hurt more than the magazine industry, said Frappat.
  SPQN director Denis Bouchez was not immediately available to comment on the initiative. Nathalie Collin, president of the French Association for Political and General News Publications, a known backer of the initiative, was also unavailable to comment on Wednesday.
  "In general, publishers are interested in all the initiatives that put the debate back on the table," Frappat said. "But we don't want to break the balance between copyrights and innovation." Google is thought of as a big innovation within publishing circles, he said. The digital world demands a great deal of investment, including from publishers, but the core is still content, he said. "We want the system to realize that traffic comes from either papers or magazines," he said.
  Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.
Lousewies van der Laan: Nederland is een voorbode van wat elders gaat gebeuren
  Link to Article
  Source: VK: Home
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 05:52
  Door: Rutger Bregman ''06/09/12, 07:18
  (C) ANP. Presentator Lousewies van der Laan tijdens de opnames van van All Women on Top, een programmaserie van RTL7 , in 2010.
  Ze wordt toch geen minister, denkt ze. En daarom kan oud-D66-politica Lousewies van der Laan mooi af en toe een stuk schrijven voor achtergrond- en opiniekatern Vonk. Zaterdag voor het eerst, over de aanstaande verkiezingen in Georgi.
  Lousewies van der Laan zwerft de wereld over, sinds ze in 2006 een lijsttrekkersverkiezing nipt verloor van Alexander Pechtold en de landelijke politiek verliet. In Oost-Europa, Azi en Afrika adviseerde ze over mensenrechten, de rechtstaat en democratie. Afgelopen mei was ze nog in Georgi, als vicevoorzitter van de Partij van Europese Liberalen en Democraten.
  'In tegenstelling tot wat vaak wordt gedacht, neemt de Georgische regering het niet zo nauw met de mensenrechten. De Georgische liberalen in de oppositie willen zich bij ons aansluiten. Wij komen dan kijken of het wel echte liberalen zijn. Het is ontzettend belangrijk om te investeren in zulke contacten. De grote problemen van dit moment - migratie, wapenhandel, klimaatverandering, enzovoorts - zijn allemaal grensoverschrijdend.'
  Is Nederland teveel naar binnengekeerd?'Laat ik het zo zeggen: in het buitenland zijn mensen altijd razend benieuwd naar de ontwikkelingen in Nederland. We zijn misschien een klein landje, maar niet onbelangrijk op het wereldtoneel. Ik zeg vaak dat Nederland een soort van hogedrukpan is, een voorbode van wat elders gaat gebeuren. Nu overheerst het beeld van Nederland als tolerant en progressief land nog. Denk aan onze soepele omgang met abortus, het homohuwelijk, euthanasie en drugs - allemaal D66 speerpunten trouwens.'
  'Ik geloof dat Nederlanders nog steeds overwegend kosmopolitisch zijn. Het is prachtig om te zien hoe we nu weer helpen met het aanleggen van dijken in de Verenigde Staten en Bangladesh. We doen daar veel goed en verdienen er ook nog aan.'
  Volgt u de verkiezingsstrijd?'De Nederlandse of de Amerikaanse? Ik zat gisteren bij de Democratisch Conventie te luisteren naar de speech van Michelle Obama. Als ik dan op Twitter al die zure Nederlandse tweets voorbij zie komen, moet ik wel lachen.'
  'Het is ontzettend leuk om te zien dat Diederik Samsom het zo goed doet. Ik heb indertijd erg prettig met hem samengewerkt. Maar Roemer in het Torentje zou natuurlijk dra-ma-tisch zijn voor het imago van Nederland in het buitenland. Van de PVV naar de SP, ze zullen denken dat we niet goed snik zijn. Vooral dat Polenmeldpunt heeft trouwens enorme schade aangericht. Ongelofelijk dat Rutte zich daar niet tegen heeft uitsproken. Zijn zwijgen heeft Nederlandse ondernemers gewoon contracten gekost.'
  D66 lijkt een sleutelrol te gaan vervullen in de formatie. Wat doet u als Pechtold straks belt voor een post in het kabinet?'Dat gaat niet gebeuren. Mijn plek zou natuurlijk Buitenlandse Zaken of Europa zijn, maar D66 moet voor heel andere posten gaan. Onderwijs en de hervorming van arbeids- en woningmarkt. Bovendien heb ik twee prachtige kinderen en mag ik van mezelf nog wel een poosje buiten de spotlights blijven. Ik kom nu op heel veel bijzondere plekken en vind het geweldig dat ik daar over mag schrijven voor een groot publiek. Ik maak graag de verbinding tussen Nederland en het buitenland. En politica zijn is geen doel op zich. Achter de schermen krijg je vaak veel meer voor elkaar.'
  Meedenken over journalistiek of over Vonk? Mail naar vonk@volkskrant.nl of benader chef Kustaw Bessems via Twitter of Facebook.
Has your weather got colder? Is it darker earlier than usual?
  Link to Article
  Source: the tap
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 05:42
  Horehound writes -I hear so many people, especially older people speak about how 'strange' the weather is now particularly how it goes warm/cold so quickly,and how it gets darker earlier at night,older people where I live(80 year old +) talk about how in late august/early September they would work in the local farms bringing in crops until late at night and it was still light enough to work,now they notice its chilly and dark much earlier.Few people doubt the weather has changed significantly in the last decades but weather has become such a political subject/argument trying to see the truth as to whether it is purely natural or not since every opinion seems to be a front for an agenda. TAP - this reminds me of the stories that the earth has tilted. The warm/cold effect could be chemtrails. But a dark/light effect cannot be. I am not sure about this myself. I was just interested if any other readers believed the nights are drawing in more sharply than in earlier times. Temperatures are certainly lower where I am currently located than they would have been not many years ago, and I put that down to chemtrailing. I haven't seen a clear sky all summer. Interestingly I was in London and Oxford the last few days, and the sky was completely blue from horizon to horizon, something I hadn't seen this year previously. The chemtrails started somewhere north of Oxford and were continuous after that. This could be Twig didn't used to believe they existed. The Homer Counties where the Camerons and the Rothschilds live are no doubt protected from weather modification and the worst elements of the depopulation agenda,
For Warren, Bad Blood Over Ethnic Claims
  Link to Article
  Source: NYT > Most Recent Headlines
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 05:37
  Karen Geronimo, a member of the Mescalero Apache tribe in town for the Democratic convention, knows what she wants from Elizabeth Warren, the Senate candidate from Massachusetts: a blood sample.
  ''Someone needs to make her take a DNA test,'' said Ms. Geronimo, whose husband, Harlyn Geronimo, is the great-grandson of the legendary warrior Geronimo.
  The still-simmering controversy over Ms. Warren's self-proclaimed American Indian heritage has chased her from the campaign trail in Massachusetts to the convention hall, resonating with a small but vocal constituency: American Indian Democrats.
  During her academic career, Ms. Warren, a Harvard Law School professor, identified herself as a minority, citing her one thirty-second Cherokee blood, a fact that Republicans pounced on to try to portray her as an opportunist and a fraud. The line on her r(C)sum(C) does not seem to set well with some Indian members of her own party.
  ''If you're going to be Native, don't just be Native on paper,'' said Lexie LaMere, a Nebraska delegate and member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. ''What's troubling is that she's shown nothing in her history of being involved in Native American issues.''
  Mr. Geronimo, wearing a ''Native Americans for Obama'' button, said he was disappointed when he first heard of Ms. Warren's claim.
  ''She needed leverage to further her career and started digging,'' he said. Ms. Warren brushed aside reporters who asked about the concerns on Wednesday, saying: ''I've answered those questions. I'm here to talk about what's happening to America's working-class families. That's my job. It's my full-time job.''
  Still, she may want to avoid bumping into Indians around the hall. Jim La Pointe, the great-grandnephew of Crazy Horse and a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, had a test in mind for Ms. Warren.
  ''I'd like to hear her speak her native language,'' he said with a sly smile.
  Everywhere,
  Kennedy Cousins
  Kerry Kennedy, the seventh child of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, could not provide a precise head count of Kennedy cousins who have flooded into Charlotte. ''It's not as many as the last convention,'' she said.
  But suffice it to say, in the first party gathering since the death three summers ago of her uncle Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the family is here in force.
  Caroline Kennedy is speaking to the convention on Thursday, two nights after her cousin Joseph P. Kennedy III, a candidate for Congress in Massachusetts, introduced a video tribute to the senator.
  The senator's son Patrick, a former congressman from Rhode Island who has acknowledged a drug addiction, held a counseling session for fellow conventiongoers (the ''Recovery Caucus'') while his brother, Edward M. Kennedy Jr., mused about running for elected office someday.
  But back to Kerry Kennedy. She has not had a peaceful summer. Her close friend Mary Richardson Kennedy, the wife of her brother Robert F. Kennedy Jr., committed suicide in May. Two months later, Ms. Kennedy, below, struck a tractor-trailer while driving erratically in Westchester County, apparently under the influence of Ambien.
  Rumblings that her ex-husband, Andrew M. Cuomo, will run for president may bring fresh scrutiny to their marriage.
  On Wednesday, she presided over a screening of a documentary about her mother, Ethel, and then, in an interview, let loose about Mitt Romney, her uncle's opponent from 18 years ago.
  She described the Republican nominee as ''just out of touch with people who are struggling.''
  Ms. Kennedy said she feared that under Mr. Romney, America's image abroad would suffer, likening it to the era of George W. Bush, when the United States ''was the most suspected and hated country on earth.'' She then slammed the Republican convention as lacking diversity.
  ''It was,'' she said, ''almost the last gasp of the dominance of white America.''
  Out and About
  In Charlotte
  The actress Eva Longoria, in multicolored sweat pants and sunglasses, catching a smoke break outside the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
  ...The lockdown of the Time Warner Cable Arena around 9 p.m. set off a rather unattractive rush of name-dropping and gate-crashing by the delegates and V.I.P.'s stuck outside. ''You have to let him in. He's running for Congress,'' one crowd member yelled, unpersuasively. True celebrity prevailed, as it usually does. The former Obama body man Reggie Love was recognized and let inside, while will.i.am simply slipped past the barricades.
  ...Robert E. Rubin, Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, falling into the indoor pool at a party for Democratic bigs at the Ritz-Carlton hosted by the hedge fund manager Orin Kramer, Mr. Love and Hamilton E. James of the Blackstone Group. Mr. Rubin said he didn't see the narrow ledge in front of the water as he walked into the room. ''It was kind of funny,'' Mr. Rubin said good-naturedly as he stood in the Ritz lobby a few hours later, in a dry change of clothes. One guest said he was ''waist-deep'' in the pool. Tom Brokaw, who was in the room, joked that he could now blackmail Mr. Rubin. ''I own him,'' he teased. Mr. Rubin was charmingly philosophical. ''It's a great way to get attention,'' he said.
'Bomb' strapped to bank manager in Los Angeles robbery
  Link to Article
  Source: The Guardian World News
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 05:36
  A Los Angeles bomb squad officer and robot with the device that was attached to a Bank of America manager, who was then made to rob the store. Photograph: Damian Dovarganes/AP
  A Los Angeles bank manager was strapped to what appeared to be a bomb and sent into her branch to take out money for two thieves who escaped with the cash, authorities said.
  The two suspects confronted the manager at her home on Tuesday night and forced her to participate in the robbery, said the Los Angeles county sheriff's office. "The two men took her to her bank on Wednesday morning, telling her that she had to wear this explosive device," said spokesman Steve Whitmore. "They strapped on what appeared to be pipe bomb."
  Following the robbery a sheriff's arson and explosives team removed the device from the woman and rendered it safe, Whitmore said. Officials did not identify the bank manager.
  Whitmore said the woman entered the Bank of America branch in east Los Angeles at mid-morning and told her colleagues what was happening before she took the money and threw it out the front doors.
  The suspects were thought to have taken the money from outside the bank before fleeing in a car described as possibly a white Kia, Whitmore said. He did not say how much money the robbers may have taken.
  The bank manager, who was described as frantic and crying, was being questioned by detectives.
  Whitmore said authorities had no further information. He could not provide a description of the suspects. Explosives experts were trying to determine if the device strapped to the bank manager was in fact a bomb.
The Company You Keep http://t.co/ehdjmNt4 The next title from the MoT @adamcurry @THErealDVORAK #NANN #ITM
  Link to Article
  Source: @adamcurry - Twitter Search
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 05:35
  EditStorylineA thriller centered on a former Weather Underground activist who goes on the run from a journalist who has discovered his identity.
  Add Full Plot|Plot SynopsisEditDetailsRelease Date:15 November 2012(Italy)See more >>Company CreditsTechnical SpecsSee full technical specs >>
The Bank's big day
  Link to Article
  Source: BBC News - Europe
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 05:18
  5 September 2012Last updated at 23:49 ET When the Governing Council of the European Central Bank meets on Thursday, the bankers will know that many regard it as the most important meeting in the bank's history.
  Before Europe embarked on its summer vacation the bank's president, Mario Draghi, promised to do whatever it took to preserve the euro.
  There have been many hints since but there has been no clarity and no detail. Even the hints, however, have calmed the markets over the summer.
  The expectation is that the ECB will buy short-term government bonds of troubled countries like Spain and Italy and lower their borrowing costs.
  If the costs remain high, Spain will struggle to meet its financial commitments and almost certainly would need a general bailout. Rescuing both Italy and Spain would probably be beyond the eurozone's capacity.
  ECB intervention, however, will be controversial. It risks breaking its own rules barring it from directly supporting governments.
  Economic fundamentalsThe ECB's core mission is to preserve price stability in the eurozone. However, the bank maintains that if monetary policy is not working as it should then it can employ "exceptional measures".
  The bank argues that a combination of low interest rates and high borrowing costs clearly indicates that the policy is not functioning as intended. Bond prices, they argue, have become detached from the economic fundamentals.
  Jorg Asmussen, a German member of the Governing Council, says that "markets are pricing in the risk of a collapse of the eurozone". That, in his view, is distorting prices and justifies ECB intervention.
  Some - like the president of the German Bundesbank - are unpersuaded by this argument. They believe the high borrowing costs accurately reflect the risk of investing in these countries.
  Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy disagree. They argue that they are fully committed to an austerity programme and to reforming their labour markets. Others say that both countries have embraced important reforms but have yet to deliver. Many of the measures have been watered down and the fear is that if the ECB intervenes the incentive for further reform will disappear.
  Important momentSo the ECB chief Mario Draghi may want to make it clear that he will only act if the politicians demonstrate they will do more to reform their economies. So the ECB, mindful of its critics, has been hinting that it will only intervene if the country in question has requested help from the eurozone's main bail-out fund and accepted a programme of conditions in exchange.
  The Spanish government objects to this. It insists it has already signed up to tough conditions but the ECB may want it to go further to justify buying its bonds.
  But this is where the critics come back in. They will want to know who will judge whether countries are abiding by these undertakings. And if a country is considered to be easing off on reforms, what does the bank do then? If it stops buying the bonds, the borrowing costs shoot up again. It is why the critics say the ECB is "on a very dangerous path".
  Some argue that such a step would signify a fundamental change in the way the bank operates. It was constructed in the image of the German Bundesbank with a mission to fight inflation. Now, it risks printing money on behalf of the so-called Club Med countries.
  So this meeting will be an important moment in the eurozone crisis. If the ECB takes no decision then the markets will show their disapproval.
  If the bank promises to support troubled countries then everything depends on the conditions. Spain is close to being unable to fund itself and customers are withdrawing deposits.
  Will Mario Draghi provide few details of his plans, so pushing Spain to ask for help, knowing tough conditions will be attached? Will Europe's leaders, weary with fighting a crisis that belies solution, cross a line into pushing its bank to support troubled governments and so weaken its independence?
  The markets will also be watching to see if the ECB lowers its interest rate to 0.5%, a new record low but the main scrutiny will be on Mario Draghi's words and his intentions.
After a Fashion
  Link to Article
  Source: The Austin Chronicle: Columns
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 05:13
  The Crayola Group of buckle bags by local designer Ben Freedland of Zink
  The Big 21It's hard to imagine that Austin Pride is celebrating its 21st anniversary '' a huge hug of congratulations to them. On Saturday, Sept. 22, celebrate with them at their event featuring the Rainbow Run through Downtown Austin, a magical parade (moved back to nighttime!), and, as they say, "an ultra-fierce festival lineup at Fiesta Gardens!" Entertainers run the gamut from veteran Pridesters like Lady Bunny, to Eighties and Nineties sensations Shannon ("Let the Music Play"), Stacey Q ("Two of Hearts"), La Bouche ("Be My Lover"), and many more, local and national. Tickets and further info can be found at www.austinpride.ticketleap.com/austinpride2012. Wear that rainbow proudly.
  IN THE BAGOn the heels of Austin Fashion Week, the style just keeps coming. This week, I came across handbags and accessories designed by Austinite Ben Freedland of Zink (www.zinkstore.com). Expecting to see more of the same kinds of purses we are flooded with here in town, I was shocked and thrilled with the stylistically simple but elegant bags in fine grain leather and canvas. In colors as well as neutrals, the bags (for men and women) are exquisitely made and exude the class and confidence you want out of a handbag.
  SOCK IT TO MEA few months ago, I received a press release about socks. Darn Tough, the company that makes them here in the USA (Vermont), uses fine merino wool with a touch of nylon and Lycra, and points out that if you wear the socks out, they will replace them. For free. For life. Pretty darn tough statement, I'd say. So I asked for samples, which arrived promptly ... and sat on my desk for months. Forgive me, I was just having a hard time wanting to discuss the merits of heavy wool socks in the midst of our blistering summer. With no seams to dig into the feet, and a variable amount of padding on the sole, depending on what the sock is for, the socks fit like a glove ... or like socks should. No slipping, bunching, blisters, hot spots, or any other disagreeable qualities that are found in socks of poorer quality. With styles for men and women, for virtually every need, Darn Tough socks are darn tough, but real easy to find. Go to www.darntough.com, darn it.
  HAPPENISTASThe always grand Ballet Austin Fªte, Sept. 21, 6pm, at the Driskill has limited seats available, but is well worth the cost '' not just for the fundraising, but for the fun, period. Followed by the lavish fªte-ish featuring DJ Spinderella of Salt-N-Pepa, Mandy Lauderdale, and the Invincible Czars, tickets and further info are available at www.balletaustin.org... Thursday, Oct. 11 at the Hilton Austin, Hospice Austin's Beauty of Life Brunch will feature a keynote speech by Kathryn Stockett, author of the bestselling novel The Help. This brunch is always glam and always entertaining; tickets and further info can be found at www.hospiceaustin.org... Sunday, Oct. 28, 5pm at the Mexican American Cultural Center is the Octopus Club's famous OctoTea Dance 17. Every penny contributed at the event from ticket sales, auction, raffle, and even corporate sponsorships go to the Paul Kirby Emergency Fund at AIDS Services of Austin. Go to www.octopusclub.org for further info and tickets... Sunday, Nov. 11, at the Driskill, White Star Manufacturing presents its charity fashion show for a high profile charity whose name cannot be disclosed at this time. Stay tuned for further details... Sunday, Dec. 2, at the Hilton Austin, the Center for Child Protection presents Dancing with the Stars Austin. Riveting, raucous, and more fun than a midnight raid at Christian Louboutin, Dancing with the Stars Austin brings out the big guns every time. Tickets and info can be found at www.centerforchildprotection.org.
Laurene Powell Jobs Spotted Next to Chelsea Clinton at Democratic National Convention
  Link to Article
  Source: Dave Winer's linkblog feed
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 05:04
  Laurene Powell Jobs (left) sitting next to Chelsea Clinton -- Image via @joelagro67Laurene Powell Jobs, the newest nominee to Stanford University's Board of Trustees, was spotted at the Democratic National Convention sitting next to former First Daughter Chelsea Clinton -- prime seating on a night when Clinton's father, former President Bill Clinton, was giving a major address. Powell Jobs has supported Democratic causes in the past, both financially and by volunteering her time.Note: Due to the inevitable political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
Naomi Wolf's book Vagina: self-help marketed as feminism | Suzanne Moore | Comment is free | The Guardian
  Link to Article
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 05:01
  Naomi Wolf: 'mindblowing'. Photograph: Jim Spellman/WireImage
  By now we all know that Naomi Wolf has mind-blowing orgasms. I must say globally this has been a concern. Was this woman getting enough? Yes, oh yes, she has got a book's worth. I read Vagina: A New Biography in a bar while feasting on some very fine cuts of meat, so I am not just judging it by the extracts, ie the insane pasta party where "Alan", a supposed friend, served her "cuntini". This trauma upset her for six months. Someone give her a hotdog quick to spare us more of this existential despair.
  See, my mind is already blown, but clearly not as much as super-sensitive Wolf's. I am sorry that she had a back injury which meant that a pelvic nerve was compressed. It has been sorted now and she is coming like a train in full Technicolor transcendental goddessy ecstasy. Phew! But this being Naomi Wolf, she feels this profound vagina/brain connection has been overlooked by everyone else.
  My problem with Wolf is longstanding and is not about how she looks or climaxes '' but it is about how she thinks, or rather doesn't. She comes in a package that is marketed as feminism but is actually breathlessly written self-help. Her oeuvre, if I can use this word, is basically memoir, in which she struggles to tell some heroic truth that many others have already told us. The great trick is to present this material as new, and to somehow speak on behalf of all women when she is infinitely privileged and sheltered.
  Hence feminism becomes simply a highly mediated form of narcissism devoid of any actual brain/politics connection. What we have here is Californication, with a little trot through some basic women's studies linking female creativity with sexual awakening. Think Georgia O'Keeffe with bit of Ana¯s Nin thrown in. Which is nice.
  It gets dodgy when she drags in some neuroscience as evidence and appears more clueless than someone who has failed her chemistry GCSE but has two TED talks on her iPhone. She boldly goes into the clitoral v vaginal orgasm argument saying we can have it all. Call me repressed, but in between work and kids and watching this recession hit the poorest women hardest, for some time now this argument has not been uppermost in my mind. Or should I say vagina?
  Still, she bangs on about dopamine and oxytocin, "the cuddle chemical", choosing studies which back up her theory that women need a lot of stroking and eye-gazing for great sex. It's all very wholesome. She follows the porn-as-desensitisation/addiction model, which is also questionable. She even goes a bit anti-dildo at one point, but who am I to say? Each to their own is my view '...
  Yet again we see neuroscience in the hands of the layperson being fused to very determinist ends. Thus neural pathways are formed, chemicals just do one thing, hormones rule. Actual scientists don't think so simplistically, however many rats they have tickled to orgasm.
  Wolf, though, is an essentialist and therefore fundamentally conservative. Let's not forget the time she discovered the soul and started "radically" questioning abortion, or the time when, 20 years after the event, she accused Harold Bloom of sexually harassing her or that she is now an apologist for Assange.
  Obviously she is right that women should be having amazing sex all the time for ever, but the big question is why women are so sexually unhappy. The answer may not lie in the holy grail of female Viagra or dopamine release. What if the problem were to be serial monogamy or, dare I say it, the unpleasant fact that not all men are tantric sex gods? Wolf does Skype a tantric guru in north London. He gives intimate "Loving Touch" massages. Or what we might call Happy Endings. Wolf doesn't have one of these as she is in a relationship. Pass the smelling salts and bring back the pioneers. At least my old mucker Germaine Greer showed us her bits and now many women, through a mixture of Wilhelm Reich, Tantra and good old mirrors, know what they are made of. My own experience of tantric sex, an affair with a Tibetan ex-monk, was not very enlightening, but it did go on for ages. Opioids were indeed flowing, but I feel they came from the actual opium we were taking.
  The way of the Tao and the Tantra is intriguing as we often see the most positive representations of female genitalia in societies that treat women appallingly. When rape is used as a systemic war crime (and Wolf has visited Sierra Leone and seen those brutalised women) surely we know the answer to women's sexual unhappiness cannot be a simple exhortation to men: use dimmer lights, scented candles and do more stroking? Will men read this dumbed-down feminism anyway? Are they up for a bit of goddess welcoming?
  It's like lesbianism never happened, nor class, nor vast swaths of feminist theory. The context of the vagina is the body, and bodies exist in culture. As do brains. So much of Wolf's work is utter drivel '' and I say this as someone in possession of the sacred feminine "force". Which is connected to my mind. Woo! Which is why I can be this brutal (according to Wolf, nasty words about our vaginas hurt our actual brains). Now I have made that connection, thanks, I have entered a profound state of oceanic bliss. Because I am indeed an actual cunt.
BitFloor exchange robbed of US$250,000, all trading halted | ZDNet
  Link to Article
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 04:49
  The fourth largest BitCoin (BTC) exchange market BitFloor has temporarily ceased trading and shut down, following an attack that has seen over US$250,000 stolen from the pool of coins that the organisation uses to execute trades.
  BitFloor founder Roman Shtylman announced earlier today on the Bitcoin Forum that the servers behind BitFloor had been hacked. Shytlman's account of the event reveals that, although the organisation encrypts the necessary wallet keys needed to conduct transactions, it also kept an unencrypted backup, which were most likely compromised by the attacker. Shtylman has not elaborated much further on the details of the attack, but has stated that the server that was compromised was not public facing.
  The stolen keys were used to conduct four transactions of a total of 24,078.39 BTC. At the current exchange rate of 1 BTC to US$10.45, the total amount stolen is US$251,600. Bitcoin transactions are decentralised and do not have an inherent dispute resolution process built into their design. While this affords users with the ability to have a currency free of any government body, it also means that transactions are almost impossible to trace.
  Shtylman said that the loss may result in BitFloor folding its operations; however, that would be a last resort measure. If he decides to take that option, Shytlman has said that he still has logs of all the accounts, trades and transfers, which will allow him to make account repayments to BitFloor customers using the exchange market's remaining funds.
  However, Shtylman hopes to continue operating BitFloor and increase the organisation's transparency.
  "Through exchange user support, I can continue to operate BitFloor. I believe that posting the exchange source and being even more transparent about operations would be a step in this direction, if we were to continue operating," he wrote in his post.
  BitFloor currently takes 0.3 percent from each trade in fees, which earns it about 210 BTC per month. From these fees, it would take about four years and nine months for it to completely recover its loss, but Shtylman has had some interest from investors willing to help out, and it is an option he is considering.
  While Shtylman brought the BitFloor website back up shortly after the attack, he quickly took it down again due to the confusion it was causing for users. Shtylman is now seeking legal advice on the exchange's financial situation. Shtylman had previously hoped to resume trading later this week.
  BitFloor is not the first Bitcoin exchange market to fall victim to an attack. In June last year, the Mt.Gox exchange was compromised via a hacked administrator's account. Using this account, the attacker withdrew 2,000 BTC, after driving the then exchange price of US$17.50 down to US$0.01 in a 30 minute time span. Mt.Gox has since recovered, and accounted for the 2,000 BTC theft out of its own pocket.
Putin Pulls Off His Latest Feat - Flying With Migratory Birds - NYTimes.com
  Link to Article
  Thu, 06 Sep 2012 04:47
  Alexey Druzhinin/Agence France-Presse '-- Getty Images; Pool photographs by Alexey Druzhinin
  Vladimir Putin clockwise from top left: In Russia's far east forests tranquilizing a tiger; horseback riding in southern Siberia; swimming in a Siberian lake; and digging at an archeological site in Greece.
  MOSCOW '-- Vladimir V. Putin is the unquestioned supreme leader of Russia, known for his icy stare and steely ways. But now Mr. Putin has taken on a new, perhaps more tender, leadership role. He has guided a flock of birds '-- through the air.
  Russia's president piloted a motorized hang glider over an Arctic wilderness while leading six endangered Siberian cranes toward their winter habitat, as part of an operation called ''The Flight of Hope,'' his press office confirmed Wednesday.
  While Mr. Putin recently has found some resistance to his stewardship at home, he found a more receptive crowd among his feathered followers. Experts say that when raised in captivity, these cranes quickly form bonds with figures they perceive as parents. That is a role, apparently, that Mr. Putin has been training for.
  ''For cranes, the parent is a man in a white robe,'' Yuri Markin, the director of the game preserve that reared the chicks, told Russian News Service, a radio network. ''They don't remember a particular person. They remember the white robe and hood, or on the ultralight, a white helmet '-- and a special beak that is worn on the head.''
  It was unclear if Mr. Putin wore the billowy, white costume, or donned the beak. Late Wednesday, the Interfax news agency reported that the president had flown three times in an ultralight aircraft at the Kushavet ornithological research station on the Yamal Peninsula, in the Arctic. On two flights, cranes followed him, the news agency reported.
  A political cartoon started making the rounds early in the morning, showing resentful-looking cranes and Mr. Putin wearing cardboard wings, telling them: ''Let's assign roles right now. I'll be the alpha crane!'' Another, darker one went this way: Mr. Putin looked at the crane and said, ''I will save you!'' The crane looked at the president and thought, ''Maybe I'd better die out.''
  Though Mr. Putin's flight was most likely the first ever for a Russian head of state, it was not the first time he had tried to burnish his public image as a caring outdoorsman, or macho man of adventure.
  Mr. Putin on past expeditions has tranquilized a tiger, used a crossbow to extract tissue from a whale and put a tracking collar on a polar bear. News of his latest plan rippled over the Internet all day Wednesday, to great merriment. Some wondered just how far he would go. Would he try to imitate the gasping-shrieking cry of the cranes, to instill more faith in his leadership?
  He has also appeared shirtless riding a horse in Siberia and flown on a fighter jet, a bomber and an amphibious firefighting airplane. Last summer, he dived into the Kerch Strait in the Black Sea and, remarkably, quickly discovered fragments of two ancient Greek urns.
  Mr. Putin's spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, however, was later compelled to admit that the discovery was staged. Indeed, it seemed last year that Mr. Putin's stunts had begun to fall flat. To the young sophisticates who dominate Russia's Internet, they looked stiff and fake, a throwback to the days when the vast apparatus of Soviet propaganda worked to glorify one man.
  Mr. Putin steered clear of them for the tense months around his election, but this project suggests a return of confidence.
  Mr. Peskov confirmed to Russian newspapers that the president had been training to pilot the motorized hang glider for the purpose of guiding the cranes.
  The president began guiding the birds to their winter retreat just before a summit meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organization opens Friday.
  For his critics, the image of Mr. Putin dressed in a bird suit and flying was, perhaps, too good an opportunity to pass up. Aleksei Navalny, an opposition leader and blogger, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday: ''About Stalin they said, 'In the night a light will burn in the window.' And of Putin they will say, 'He flew over our homes with a flock of cranes.' ''
  One post circulating on Twitter said, ''For the flock to recognize him as a leader he stuffed three feathers in his rear.''
  The stunt rippled in Russian politics in other ways, too. Masha Gessen, the editor of the magazine Vokrug Sveta, or Around the World, and the author of a critical biography of Mr. Putin, was fired this week for what she said was a refusal to send a photographer to cover Mr. Putin with the cranes. The publisher said broader long-term disagreements led to her dismissal.
  While Mr. Putin's interest seems more recent, Russian ornithologists have experimented with using slow-flying airplanes to guide captive-bred cranes to the south since 2002, the newspaper Vedomosti reported. They modeled the effort on experiments by North American conservationists, most famously shown in ''Fly Away Home,'' a 1996 film about Canada geese led to the south by a girl in an ultralight aircraft.
  After Mr. Putin's flights, he handed the baton of leadership '-- only over his feathered followers '-- to a professional pilot who will take over for the rest of the journey to the birds' winter habitat in Central Asia.
  Ellen Barry contributed reporting.