Journalists can be considered "unprivileged belligerents"

That's what the Department of Defense says in its "Law of War Manual". Thus, those reporting on the military in any capacity are open to be treated the same as spies - or even terrorists.

Some excerpts from the manual:

...journalists can be captured and held by the military for "engaging in hostilities," "spying" or "sabotage and similar acts behind enemy lines."

"Reporting on military operations can be very similar to collecting intelligence or even spying. A journalist who acts as a spy may be subject to security measures and punished if captured. To avoid being mistaken for spies, journalists should act openly and with the permission of relevant authorities." 

...journalists should "act openly and with the permission of relevant authorities."

Interestingly, most of the people the US military has imprisoned in Guantánamo, along with some held in Afghanistan, have been labeled "unprivileged belligerents." 

Enduring a traffic jam in England

The leaders of the world meet

from the NY Times

Stay off the roads in India

Every four minutes someone in India is killed in a road accident. Peddakunta, a very small village, has seen its male population vanish because of accidents when they try to cross the road. In the village of 35 huts and families, there is only one male adult. Thirty seven others have died, and three have left the village for good. The problem is that it is necessary for villagers to walk across the four lanes of the highway bypass if they are to collect their monthly pensions or take up employment in nearby villages.

Slave wages?

You might have a strong argument when it comes to adjuncts, i.e., those who teach at all levels within the higher-education system, from remedial writing classes to graduate seminars. But they do not have tenure. In fact, according to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), roughly three in four college professors are adjuncts. Adjuncts do everything tenured professors do, but get paid very little.

One study found that a quarter of all adjuncts receive public assistance, such as Medicaid or food stamps. Another reported last year that many adjuncts earn less than the federal minimum wage. Furthermore, unless they work 30 hours or more at a single college, they’re not eligible for health insurance from that employer, and similar to other part-time employees, they do not qualify for other benefits.

Scientific Thought

A good way to start the day

Another drug company extortion

Construction by helicopter

From our Plymouth, Mass. correspondent

Crickets for dinner

The UN says that 20 percent of the world’s consumers eat insects. Very few live in the West. But there are people here who hope that will change and crickets will be as popular as kale. 

Currently, in the U.S. there are four large producers of crickets. The largest one is Big Cricket Farms. Here's a quote from the CEO of the company,

“At any one time there are about 6 million crickets in the facility. My demand has been so robust that over the summer I finished getting a secondary facility up and running. That one probably carries between 4 to 8 million crickets at any given time. The crickets are sold four weeks before they’re finished being raised … so we’ve had to be selective at times about who ends up with our crickets. I’ve raised my prices maybe six times so far.”

Do you believe him?

Getting a job

I grew up in Cambridge, Mass. There were two public high schools, Cambridge High and Latin and Rindge Technical. Latin was for those who intended to go to college, Rindge for those who didn't. Many of my friends went to Rindge and 62 years later there was not much difference in their work life from that of Latin graduates. Some of each group did well, others did okay. 

When I was in business, I paid little attention as to whether an applicant had gone to college. I wanted to hire good programmers and my experience told me that a college education was not necessary for that.

In college I felt that about half of the students should not have been admitted as they were really not college material as I understood the term.

You can imagine how pleased I was to read of Randolph Technical High School in Philadelphia. It is one of the city’s Career and Technical Education High Schools, where all students participate in vocational programs. The students take regular classes such as math and English, but they also choose a speciality where they can earn college credit or a professional certification in areas such as dentistry, carpentry, automotive repair, vending, or health care.

When they graduate, the kids can go on to college (usually a community college) or get a well-paying job. Interestingly, these kids are more likely to graduate from high school than the typical Philadelphia student. 

Can't say I understand it

Hubble photos of the Veil Nebula

The cloud of material 110 light-years wide that lies about 2,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus (The Swan).
The structure formed about 8,000 years ago, after a star 20 times more massive than the sun died in a supernova explosion

A challenge to us

The Pope's conclusion of his speech to Congress:

A nation can be considered great when it defends liberty as Lincoln did, when it fosters a culture which enables people to “dream” of full rights for all their brothers and sisters, as Martin Luther King sought to do; when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work, the fruit of a faith which becomes dialogue and sows peace in the contemplative style of Thomas Merton.

Refugee Reality

Look ma, no prosthetic

A 28-year-old paraplegic man walks with the help of technology by which scientists rerouted signals from his brain to electrodes on his knees. The electrode cap the man is wearing picks up brain waves and beams them wirelessly to a computer, which deciphers the waves as an intention to stand still or walk. The relevant command is then sent to a microcontroller on the man’s belt, and on to nerves that trigger muscles to move the legs. 

The man, who was paralyzed from the waist down by a spinal cord injury, has become the first such patient to walk without the use of robotics. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, south of Los Angeles, say the outcome marks a promising step that one day may help stroke and spinal injury.


ABC Breaking News

Life, Love, Death

Our judicial system has problems

1. Plea bargaining has replaced the trial in a vast majority of cases. Thus, the district attorney has more power than the judge. There is seldom a review of the deal and, in many cases, the accused is actually innocent.
2. Mandatory sentencing removes the judge from deciding punishment based on the details of a particular case. It also increases the prison population.
3. Because they can't afford to pay bail, poor people spend time in jail even though they are innocent.
4. The War on Drugs has increased the amount of crime here and in many other countries.

The 100-year-old track star

Don Perelman is 100 years old. He did quite well in the San Diego Senior Games yesterday. He broke records for his age group for the 100-meter dash, high jump, shot put, discus long jump. He ran the dash in less than 27 seconds. And he doesn’t take any vitamins. 

John Dean on the Republican candidates for President.

Excerpts from a recent article:

• Not one of the GOP candidates is attempting to lead; rather, they all are dancing to the tune(s) they believe the GOP base wants to hear. But the contemporary GOP base, after years of irresponsible Republican leadership that has turned them off to all things relating to government, has lost contact with reality. Accordingly, the GOP base has made clear they do not want a candidate who is really qualified. To the contrary, as the polls leading up to this second debate showed, the party’s base favors the least qualified candidates.
• Remarkably, the Republican base at this stage of the primary process favors candidates who know absolutely nothing about being president: Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
• In short, at this stage of the primary process, the Republicans favor two of the least qualified potential candidates in modern history for the presidency, and after this last debate, they may make it a trio if Fiorina advances in the polls.
• No one can really be surprised at this anti-Washington, anti-qualified politician posture of the GOP base. After all, Republican leaders have been playing their base, as well as other Americans, for fools for several decades. Republican leaders have been pushing anti-government rhetoric for decades. The effort to diminish–or better yet, destroy–federal power began in earnest when Newt Gingrich was a back-bencher in the late 1970s, throwing grenades in the House of Representatives. His total irresponsibility in gaming the system attracted attention, and soon he was the leader of the House Republicans, and Speaker of the House by 1995. He never stopped pushing the envelope, down to his forcing an impeachment of President Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, while Gingrich was deeply involved in his own marriage destroying affair. Other GOP leaders have picked up where Gingrich left off as his own bad behavior made him irrelevant on the national stage.

Advice from a 6 year-old to her divorced parents

I find it hard to believe that this was all the little girl's doing.

What's wrong with our electoral system

Another major increase in the price of drug

Daraprim has been around for 62 years and the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection. It's used to treat babies born to women who become infected during pregnancy and people with compromised immune systems, like AIDS patients and certain cancer patients. Its cost before being acquired by a new drug company, Turing Pharm-aceuticals, was $13.50 per tablet; its current cost in $750 per tablet. This increase could cost some patients hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

This is not the first time something like this has occurred. Doxycycline, an antibiotic, went from $20 a bottle in October 2013 to $1,849 by April 2014. Again, this was a case where an old drug was acquired by another company.

Is this a polar bear?

The effects of climate change?

A scary article

Harriet Washington has written a very scary article in the American Scholar. It's about tropical diseases, which she asserts are no longer restricted to the Tropics, they are here now and, unless we do something, they will really flourish. 

Currently, those most affected by these diseases are the poor. At least 330,000 U.S. citizens have Chagas disease, the most common parasitic disease in the Americas, and estimates range as high as one million. It infects six million to seven million more people in Latin America. It can be treated, but the lack of awareness by doctors in the United States means that it often isn’t.

It appears that tropical diseases have more than straightforward physical effects; they also undermine intellectual development. They affect our ability to calculate, to focus, and to process visual information. While we made a big deal about Ebola, about 11,000 people have died from Ebola in sub-Saharan Africa, but 10 million people—nearly half the population of these countries—suffer from at least one NTD or malaria or both. 

More questionable information gathering by the FBI

The FBI apparently wants to fingerprint all of us. Currently, only the fingerprints of criminals or suspected terrorists, etc. are stored in FBI files and accessible to the rest of law enforcement and some other government agencies. Now the FBI will be storing fingerprints taken for a background and, thus, available to be searched right along with fingerprints taken for criminal purposes.

The FBI is also moving beyond fingerprints they'll include photos. Employers and agencies will be able to submit a photograph along with prints as part of the standard background check. 

Gimmicking the testing

Since 2009 Volkswagen has been deceitful with regard to its diesel vehicles. It developed software to control emissions. When the car is on the road, there is little control over emissions. When the car is being tested for emissions, the software turns on the full emissions control system. The company has been ordered to recall and fix about 500,000 of its cars, both VW and Audi. There will likely be penalties. 

The Pope said...

1. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” -- Comment the pope made July 29, 2013, at a press conference. 
2. “A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.” -- He said during a blessing at St. Peter’s Square March 18, 2013.  
3. “I believe in God -- not in a Catholic God; there is no Catholic God. There is God, and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being.” -- Francis said Oct. 1, 2013, to La Repubblica. 
4. “The faith with which a person enters marriage must also be examined, and we also need to make it clear that the divorced are not excommunicated.” -- Francis said in May 2014 to reporters.
5. “Wretched are those who are vindictive and spiteful.” -- He said at a public sermon in 2013. 
6. "God is not a divine being or a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life." -- From the address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences Oct. 28, 2014. 
7. “When we see a holy people of God that is humble, whose wealth is in its faith in the Lord, in its trust in the Lord, they are the ones who are saved." -- On Vatican Radio Dec. 16, 2014. 
8. “Although the life of a person is in a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.” -- Interview with American magazine Sept. 30, 2013.
9. “The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord's mercy motivates us to do better.” -- The pope said this Sept. 19, 2013, during an interview with Jesuit publications.
10. “Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good... Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.” -- As said to Cultura Oct. 1, 2013.

From International Business Times

The frog moves

The start of the perpetual presidential campaign

It all started on January 2, 1960. That's when John F. Kennedy announced his campaign for presidency and his entry in the New Hampshire primary. Before then, the party bosses selected the candidates just before the convention. I know the quality of presidential candidates has not improved, at least not in the 21st century. But the perpetual campaigning we suffer through has only helped boost media profits.

What I don't know about water

The alumni magazine for Columbia has a fascinating article about the work being done with water by some of the faculty. Here are some interesting facts:

• We use about 100 gallons of water a day per person. (I find this hard to believe, but consider the toilet, the washers, etc.). But we drink only about a half-gallon a day.
• The essential point made in the article is that we treat all water so that it is drinkable. This is a huge waste of energy.
• Salt water comprises 97% of earth's water. Two-thirds of the remaining water is encased in ice sheets. Our supply of water is a mere 1% of all the water on earth.
• 70% of our water is used by agriculture. The most common form of irrigation used in agriculture is flood irrigation, 15-20% of which will evaporate before use.
• The largest expense in bringing water to California is powering it over the mountains.
• 20% of our water is lost because of faulty piping.

Maybe we need to look at our water problem in a different way.

Telling it like it isn't

Last item on her bucket list

Books without a library

That's what Bexar County, Texas, is doing. They have opened the BiblioTech library, which offers about 10,000 free e-books for the 1.7 million residents of the county. This is not the first time this has been tried. Arizona tried it in 2002, but it was too soon.

You can still go to the library and use its 600 e-readers, 48 computer stations, laptops and tablets. Plus, the library also offers kids' story time and computer classes. You must use its 3M Cloud Library app.

From our Florida correspondent

Police Chief on the grill

An excerpt from an interview of the Texas police chief by Chris Hayes re the kid and the digital clock bomb: 

“Once it’s determined that this is just a clock or just a piece of electronics, why then the arrest and all of that?” he asked Boyd. “That’s very hard for folks to understand.”

“I get that. I understand the concern,” the chief responded. “The officers pretty quickly determined that they weren’t investigating an explosive device. What their investigation centered around is the law violation of bringing a device into a facility like that that is intended to create a level of alarm. In other words, a hoax bomb — something that is not really a bomb, but is designed and presented in a way that it creates people to be afraid.”

“Right, but he never called it a bomb, right?” Hayes countered. “He just kept calling it a clock. I mean, it never came out of his lips, he never did something or started showing it around saying, ‘Look at this bomb I have.’ He said, ‘Look at my clock.'” 

“There definitely was some confusion and some level of information that didn’t come out immediately,” Boyd said, adding that in many cases, someone who would make a “hoax bomb” would not be likely to admit to doing so to police.

How different would the interrogations of the kid been if he were not Muslim?

You need the right name

Clearly, Ahmed Mohamed does not have the right name in 21st century America. Mohamed is a kid, he attends the ninth grade in a Texas school. He decided to build a digital clock to impress his teacher. The impression he created was that it was a bomb. The police were called to the school and interrogated him. He was refused a call to his parents. Evetually he was arrested and left school in handcuffs. A national brouhaha has followed; Obama, Clinton, Zuckerberg, MIT have all chimed in and derided the stupidity of the school and the police. Eventually, the police chief acknowledged, “We have no evidence to support that there was an intention to create alarm or cause people to be concerned.” Would anything have happened if his name was Smith? That's very likely as he did create something interesting. But we live in fear. Anyone who might be a Muslim has to be suspicious.

The Military around the world

Probably no other country has deployed troops to so many foreign lands. We have around 800 U.S. bases in eighty or so foreign countries.  Although the wars ended more than sixty years ago, there are still 174 U.S. “base sites” in Germany, 113 in Japan, and 83 in South Korea. Some estimates say it costs us about $156 billion a year, money we could use for our deteriorating infrastructure.

White collar crime is down

Or, is it simply that the number of federal prosecution of white collar criminals is at its lowest level in the last twenty years? It is down by more than one third (36.8%) from levels seen two decades ago but the population is up.

There are differences in the popularity of certain crimes. Twenty years ago, mail fraud was the most frequent lead charge. Ten years ago it was bank fraud  Five years it was aggravated identity theft. Currently, fraud by wire, radio or television tops the list of lead charges. 

Net loss of 10 billion a year

Another flaw in our legal system

Poor spider

Is the daiquiri a thing of the past?

The daiquiri was reasonably popular back in the 20th century although I must confess that I haven't had one for maybe 10 years. Last night we went out to dinner at a popular local restaurant. One of our party ordered a daiquiri. The waitress, a young lass in her twenties, did not understand the word, she had never heard of it. Okay, I can understand that. But the bartender had never heard of it either and he might have been in his forties. Maybe this is another indication of getting old?

Who is in prison

From janitor to principal

Another Angola?

Yesterday I posted a video about Angola, the Louisiana prison that has undergone a massive change towards humanity under a warden driven by his Christian beliefs. Today's NY Times talks about a Brazilian prison that is beginning to change due to a warden driven by religion. 

Antônio Galdino da Silva Neto is certainly not an ordinary prison warden. His first job was that of a police officer. However, he wound up in jail for killing his wife in a domestic dispute. Life in prison, especially for an ex-cop, was like hell. And hell began on day 1. Murder, beatings, sexual attacks - it went on and on. But then he met a minister and that changed everything for him. He began to practice his religion and in five years he was released for good behavior.

For some unknown reason, in 2011 he was nominated by the governor to head a prison. He has tried many innovative things based on the same ideas as the warden of Angola, although he is not as fervent a believer as the Angola warden. Will he succeed?

Mike, the headless chicken

Ok, so you don't believe it's possible for a chicken to live without his head. Well, it's happened at least once. It was on a farm in Colorado in 1945. Mike survived a killing of the chickens owned by a farmer. He lived another 18 months and traveled around the country. Life Magazine even featured Mike in one of its issues.

They first took the chicken to the University of Utah, where the chicken was put through a battery of tests and was deemed to be alive. Then, they toured the country. Mike died in 1947.

Dr Tom Smulders, a chicken expert at the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution at Newcastle University, contends that Mike did not bleed to death. He was able to survive because, in Smulders opinion,  up to 80% of his brain by mass - and almost everything that controls the chicken's body, including heart rate, breathing, hunger and digestion - remained untouched.

This is Angola Prison?

Declining Arctic Ice

Homo naledi

It looks like scientists have discovered another prehuman species. They're calling it Homo naledi. It seems to be a big find as the 1,550 body pieces they have discovered so far is the largest sample for any hominin species in a single African site, and one of the largest anywhere in the world.The discovery was made in a cave in South Africa. It is thought the cave served as a burial chamber.

Pharmaceuticals is a good business

Especially in the U.S. where drugs cost twice as much as in the rest of the world. It is a tough business. On average, only one in every 5,000 compounds that drug companies discover and put through preclinical testing becomes an approved drug. Of the drugs started in clinical trials on humans, only 10 percent secure F.D.A. approval.

Still, it is profitable. Gilead, maker of Sovaldi, has profits of around 50 percent. Biogen, Amgen and other biotech firms have profits of around 30 percent. Merck and Pfizer are seeing profits of 18 percent.

Some drugs can cost you $300,000 per year. Although these specialty drugs are not widely used (they represent about 1 percent of prescriptions), they do bring on the money ( they account for 32 percent of all spending on drugs).

Ezekiel Emmanuel asks why don't we adopt a system like Australia or Switzerland? Australia is the only purchaser of drugs for the country, making drugs available at fixed prices that are now listed online. Switzerland includes only those drugs that are effective and cost-effective on its approved drug list. It then establishes a maximum allowable price for the drug, but up to that point, companies can decide what to charge. 

Water Risk Around the World

Here's a sample:

For more click here

Getting ready for the school year

Refugees

Today's NY Times has two powerful op-eds on the refugee crisis, one by Michael Ignatieff, the other by Nicholas Kristof. Some interesting excerpts:

• The Syrian civil war has created more than four million refugees. The United States has taken in about 1,500 of them. Canada 1,074. Australia 2,200. Brazil 2,000.
• The Gulf States and Saudi Arabia have taken in 0 refugees. 
• The United Nations system to register refugees is overwhelmed. 
• If governments won’t help refugees escape Syria, smugglers and human traffickers will, and the deadly toll will rise. 
• Other refugees. Albert Einstein. Madeleine Albright. The Dalai Lama.
• In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States received hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese boat people. 
• United Nations aid requests for Syrian refugees are only 41 percent funded, and the World Food Program was recently forced to slash its food allocation for refugees in Lebanon to just $13.50 per person a month. 
• Half of Syrian refugee children are unable to go to school. 

Is there anything more to be said?

Numbers with a lot of zeroes

Water, Water. Is it everywhere?

NASA has a satellite called GRACE; it is used for gravity recovery and climate experiment. One of the interesting things it can do is predict major flooding, because it can determine saturation of the ground by water and thus its predisposition to flooding.

GRACE recently completed a study of the world's 37 largest aquifers and found that more than a third of them are being used at unsustainable rates — they are being drained far faster than natural processes can restore them. It found that 13 of the 37 aquifers, from California to the Middle East to China, were running out of water. Eight of the 13 were determined to be overstressed, with no replenishment at all. Five were declared extremely stressed or highly stressed, with some replenishment but not enough to sustain their use. An overused aquifer will collapse and no longer retain inflows of water.

The worst one was in the Middle East, the Arabian Aquifer System. It supplies water to 60 million people in the Middle East and was declared in the study to be the most overstressed water supply in the world. The Indus Basin aquifer in India and Pakistan is the second most overstressed system. 

Another couple of million down the drain.

Where else but in Afghanistan? Another building boondoggle - a new, single headquarters on Camp Brown in Kandahar. The contract was let to an Afghan company in 2012 to build a $5 million, two-story building with administrative space and a secure communications room for logistics, maintenance, personnel and operations management. Completion was scheduled for July 2013. (You may recall that our combat mission was scheduled to end at the end of 2014.)

Well, the contractor fell almost a year behind schedule, and in October 2013, the commanders whose troops had been assigned to occupy the building decided it was no longer needed. Six months later, the military cancelled the project. By this time, $2.2 million had already been spent. The building remains half constructed, with no stairs to the second floor, electrical wiring or plumbing. It has never been used.

52 years later are we any better off?

An Unlivable Hell?

That's essentially what the latest UN report on Gaza says, “The social, health and security-related ramifications of the high population density and overcrowding are among the factors that may render Gaza unliveable by 2020”.

Here are some excerpts:

• The Israeli blockade “ravaged the already debilitated infrastructure of Gaza, shattered its productive base, left no time for meaningful reconstruction or economic recovery and impoverished the Palestinian population in Gaza". 
• Gaza’s electricity supply was not even enough to cover 40 percent of demand, 95 percent of water from coastal aquifers — Gazans main source of freshwater — was considered unsafe to drink. 
• Unemployment in Gaza last year was 44 percent — the highest level on record — hitting young women especially hard, leaving more than eight out of 10 women out of work.
• 72 percent of all households in Gaza are meanwhile struggling with food insecurity, and the number of Palestinian refugees who rely entirely on food distribution from UN agency has ballooned from 72,000 in 2000 to 868,000 by last May.

21st Century Transportation

From our Plymouth correspondent

Follow the wires

More loosening up by Pope Francis

It used to be that a priest needed special permission from a bishop to forgive the sin of abortion. Most American bishops did grant the permission. However, as part of the upcoming special Holy Year of Mercy, every priest in the world will be able to forgive the sin of abortion.  
Francis also made a gesture towards so-called breakaway traditionalist groups, the most prominent of which is the Society of St. Pius X. This group pulled away from the church when Bishop Lefebvre of France ordained four new bishops without papal approval. As part of the Holy Year, anyone who confesses their sins to a priest of such a group will be forgiven.