Friday, September 16, 2011

If the shoe fits...

Chinese condoms too small for South Africans: report

A South African court has blocked the government from buying 11 million Chinese condoms, saying they are too small, a newspaper reported Friday.
The finance ministry had awarded a contract to a firm called Siqamba Medical, which planned to buy the Phoenurse condoms from China, the Beeld newspaper said.
A rival firm, Sekunjalo Investments Corporation, turned to the High Court in Pretoria after losing the bid, arguing that their condoms were 20 percent larger than the Chinese ones.
Judge Sulet Potterill blocked the deal with Siqamba, ruling that the condoms were too small, made from the wrong material, and were not approved by the World Health Organisation, the paper said.
South Africa has more HIV infections than any country in the world, with 5.38 million of its 50 million people carrying the virus.


Comment from Doozler:

We thought a condom-minimum was a building.   

If you were building a parking lot for a flying saucer, what shape would it be?

Visible Only From Above, Mystifying 'Nazca Lines' Discovered in Mideast

They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air but not the ground, and are virtually unknown to the public.
They are the Middle East's own version of the Nazca Lines — ancient "geolyphs," or drawings, that span deserts in southern Peru — and now, thanks to new satellite-mapping technologies, and an aerial photography program in Jordan, researchers are discovering more of them than ever before. They number well into the thousands.
Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes radiating inside. Researchers believe that they date back to antiquity, at least 2,000 years ago. They are often found on lava fields and range from 82 feet to 230 feet (25 meters to 70 meters) across. [See gallery of wheel structures]
 "In Jordan alone we've got stone-built structures that are far more numerous than (the) Nazca Lines, far more extensive in the area that they cover, and far older," said David Kennedy, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia.
Kennedy's new research, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, reveals that these wheels form part of a variety of stone landscapes. These include kites (stone structures used for funnelling and killing animals); pendants (lines of stone cairns that run from burials); and walls, mysterious structures that meander across the landscape for up to several hundred feet and have no apparent practical use. 
His team's studies are part of a long-term aerial reconnaissance project that is looking at archaeological sites across Jordan. As of now, Kennedy and his colleagues are puzzled as to what the structures may have been used for or what meaning they held. [History's Most Overlooked Mysteries]
Fascinating structures
Kennedy's main area of expertise is in Roman archaeology, but he became fascinated by these structures when, as a student, he read accounts of Royal Air Force pilots flying over them in the 1920s on airmail routes across Jordan. "You can't not be fascinated by these things," Kennedy said.
Indeed, in 1927 RAF Flight Lt. Percy Maitland published an account of the ruins in the journal Antiquity. He reported encountering them over "lava country" and said that they, along with the other stone structures, are known to the Bedouin as the "works of the old men."
Kennedy and his team have been studying the structures using aerial photography and Google Earth, as the wheels are hard to pick up from the ground, Kennedy said.
"Sometimes when you're actually there on the site you can make out something of a pattern but not very easily," he said. "Whereas if you go up just a hundred feet or so it, for me, comes sharply into focus what the shape is."
The designs must have been clearer when they were originally built. "People have probably walked over them, walked past them, for centuries, millennia, without having any clear idea what the shape was."
(The team has created an archive of images of the wheels from various sites in the Middle East.)
What were they used for?
So far, none of the wheels appears to have been excavated, something that makes dating them, and finding out their purpose, more difficult. Archaeologists studying them in the pre-Google Earth era speculated that they could be the remains of houses or cemeteries. Kennedy said that neither of these explanations seems to work out well.
"There seems to be some overarching cultural continuum in this area in which people felt there was a need to build structures that were circular."
Some of the wheels are found in isolation while others are clustered together. At one location, near the Azraq Oasis, hundreds of them can be found clustered into a dozen groups. "Some of these collections around Azraq are really quite remarkable," Kennedy said.
In Saudi Arabia, Kennedy's team has found wheel styles that are quite different: Some are rectangular and are not wheels at all; others are circular but contain two spokes forming a bar often aligned in the same direction that the sun rises and sets in the Middle East.
The ones in Jordan and Syria, on the other hand, have numerous spokes and do not seem to be aligned with any astronomical phenomena. "On looking at large numbers of these, over a number of years, I wasn't struck by any pattern in the way in which the spokes were laid out," Kennedy said.
Cairns are often found associated with the wheels. Sometimes they circle the perimeter of the wheel, other times they are in among the spokes. In Saudi Arabia some of the cairns look, from the air, like they are associated with ancient burials.
Dating the wheels is difficult, since they appear to be prehistoric, but could date to as recently as 2,000 years ago. The researchers have noted that the wheels are often found on top of kites, which date as far back as 9,000 years, but never vice versa. "That suggests that wheels are more recent than the kites," Kennedy said.
Amelia Sparavigna, a physics professor at Politecnico di Torino in Italy, told Live Science in an email that she agrees these structures can be referred to as geoglyphs in the same way as the Nazca Lines are. "If we define a 'geoglyph' as a wide sign on the ground of artificial origin, the stone circles are geoglyphs," Sparavignawrote in her email.
The function of the wheels may also have been similar to the enigmatic drawings in the Nazca desert. [Science as Art: A Gallery]
 "If we consider, more generally, the stone circles as worship places of ancestors, or places for rituals connected with astronomical events or with seasons, they could have the same function of [the] geoglyphs of South America, the Nazca Lines for instance. The design is different, but the function could be the same," she wrote in her email.
Kennedy said that for now the meaning of the wheels remains a mystery. "The question is what was the purpose?"
Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

 Comments from Doozer:

Love this kind of article.  So much better than Lindsay Lohan's most recent DUI adventure or news from the same war the U. S. has been in since we were kids.

These huge circles are intriguing.  Interestingly enough, the pattern they make resembles the layout of many modern airports when seen from above.  Come to think of it, circles make sense if the vehicle trying to land is also a circle.  Can you say flying saucer?  Dare we even mention it?

Several decades ago, Chariots of the Gods was a best seller that raised questions that are still very relevant.  Wonder why the space agencies are not trying to answer these questions?   

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Honest. Man bites off eyebrow in fight. Lawyer to blame Joan Crawford.

Man accused of biting off man's eyebrow in fight

BUENA PARK, Calif. (AP) — Authorities in Southern California say a man bit off another man's eyebrow during a fight at a house party, chewed it up and spat it out.
The Los Angeles Times reports (http://lat.ms/n6cuEv) that 29-year-old Luis Miguel Aguilar was arrested Monday after he got into a fight with a 41-year-old man at a party Friday night.
Buena Park Police Cpl. Andy Luong says the man lost "a pretty good chunk" of skin and hair on his face, an area about the size of an egg. The man will require reconstructive surgery. His identity has not been released.
Aguilar was expected to be arraigned Thursday on one count of felony mayhem.
___
Information from: Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com

Comment from Doozler:

Go to a phonebook.  You remember phone books don't you?  There's probably one at the libgrary.  You remember libraries don't you?  Anyway, look up lawyers and you will see hundreds of pages of lawyers.  In fact America is the Latin word for litigation.  Just kidding.

When there's lots of competition, lawyers have to get creative.  Case in point, the case above.  The defendant will interview a bunch of lawyers and choose the one with the best strategy.

Here's one that has a chance:  The defendant is not legally responsible for biting off the man's eyebrows because as a child he was forced to watch old Joan Crawford movies.  It was the victim's unusually thick eyebrows that were the problem.  We will give evidence that many neighborhood children thought he had dark caterpillars taped above his eyes.  The Crawford hairdo didn't help either.   

This could only happen in France

French Woman Sues Husband for Lack of Sex

By Molly Fergus | Yahoo! Contributor Network – 18 hrs ago
Husbands and wives, take note: The phrase, "Not tonight, honey," could end up costing quite a bit more than a bruised ego and grumbled acceptance.
A French wife sued her husband and won about $14,000 because he didn't have sex with her enough, according to Time.
The wife sued her husband about two years ago for the waning bedroom activity over 21 years of marriage, and now the Nice, France, judge has ruled that a lack of copulation is indeed a violation of the marital contract.
"A sexual relationship between husband and wife is the expression of affection they have for each other, and in this case it was absent," the judge ruled, according to the Telegraph. "By getting married, couples agree to sharing their life and this clearly implies they will have sex with each other."
Of course, some men also take extreme measures in dissolving relationships.
In 2009, a North Dakota man requested half the value of his wife's breast job when the two split.
Erik Isaacson appealed his judge's decision to exclude the value of the procedure from the divorce case. The judge worried that if breast implants were considered as marital assets, the precedent would extend to other, more necessary medical procedures like root canals or even hip replacements, according to the Bismarck Tribune.
No argument from Isaacson there: He also wanted his wife's Lasik vision surgery counted as an asset.

One Egyptian woman, however, might have the most valid of the three divorce requests.
According to Urban Titan, the woman had to bring her husband to court because he refused to bathe for their entire first month of marriage.
The man claimed an allergy to water prevented him from maintaining proper hygiene -- and a doctor backed up his excuse.
Though the doctor's validation of the water allergy made ending the marriage more difficult, the woman did eventually get to split from her husband. One can only imagine that she would not be complaining about lack of bedroom activity. 

Comment from Doozler:
This just in.  Two more pieces of bad news for the husband.  First, the family dog, Fifi, is talking to a lawyer about not being walked enough.  Second, the wife is going to use part of the 14 grand to install a trapeze in the bedroom. 

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

It's time the CIA came out of the dark

CIA reviewing ties with New York police department

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA inspector general is reviewing the spy agency's ties with the New York Police Department after critics questioned whether the relationship amounted to "domestic spying" that infringed civil liberties.
A U.S. Muslim civil liberties organization last month called for a federal investigation into a report the Central Intelligence Agency was helping New York City police gather information from mosques and minority neighborhoods.
A CIA analyst is embedded with the New York Police Department but no one from the agency was "out on the street collecting" intelligence, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told a congressional hearing on Tuesday.
"It's my personal view that that's not a good optic to have CIA involved in any city-level police department," Clapper said, adding the inspector general's investigation would "look into specifically the propriety of that."
One mission of the CIA adviser attached to New York's police department is to ensure sharing of information, new CIA Director David Petraeus told the same joint hearing of the House and Senate intelligence committees.
"We are very sensitive to the law and to civil liberties and privacy," Petraeus said.
"We welcome it," Paul Browne, deputy commissioner of the New York Police Department, said of the CIA investigation.
Information-sharing among intelligence and law enforcement agencies became a priority for the U.S. government after the September 11 attacks in 2001. New York bore the brunt of the attacks by al Qaeda militants.
"It should not be a surprise to anyone that, after 9/11, the Central Intelligence Agency stepped up its cooperation with law enforcement on counterterrorism issues or that some of that increased cooperation was in New York," CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf said.
"The agency's operational focus, however, is overseas and none of the support we have provided to NYPD can be rightly characterized as 'domestic spying' by the CIA. Any suggestion along those lines is simply wrong."
(Reporting by Tabassum Zakaria and Mark Hosenball; Editing by John O'Callaghan)



Comments from Doozler:
While we're at it, let's explore links between American people and the CIA. The CIA operates completely free of government oversight except for one person: the President. It allows Congressmen and Senators, the people we elect and send to Washington, 100 per cent deniability of CIA activities. No one is suggesting that the CIA should have open hearings. But what's the problem with closed door sessions with ranking members of the House and Senate? If they aren't going to be our watchdogs and held in some way accountable for a US government agency with enormous powers, then why are they collecting paychecks we sign?

Nearly 50 million Americans living in poverty

Number of poor hit record 46 million in 2010

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A record 46 million Americans were living in poverty in 2010, pushing the U.S. poverty rate to its highest level since 1993, according to a government report on Tuesday on the grim effects of stubbornly high unemployment.
Underscoring the economic challenges that face President Barack Obama and Congress, the U.S. Census Bureau said the poverty rate rose for a third consecutive year to hit 15.1 percent in 2010. The number in poverty was the largest since the government first began publishing estimates in 1959.
The report surfaces at a time when the economic straits of ordinary Americans are at the forefront of the 2012 election campaign.
Obama is suffering from low job approval ratings on the economy and evidence of rising poverty could give popular momentum to the $450 billion job-creation program he unveiled last week.
The Census data also could come into play in the deliberations of a bipartisan super committee in Congress, which has been charged with finding at least $1.2 trillion in budget savings over 10 years by November 23.
The United States has the highest poverty rate among developed countries, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The poverty line for an American family of four with two children is an income $22,113 a year.
The data showed that children under 18 suffered the highest poverty rate, 22 percent, compared with adults and the elderly.
In a sign of decline for middle-income Americans, the figures showed continued decline in the number of Americans with employer-provided health insurance, while the ranks of the uninsured hovered just below the 50 million mark.
Underlying the Census data was a rate of economic growth too meager to compensate for the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs from 2009 to 2010, as the recession officially ended but the jobless rate shot up from 9.3 percent to 9.6 percent.
"All of this deterioration in the labor market caused incomes to drop, poverty to rise and people to lose their health insurance," said Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute think tank. "One of the immediately obvious issues this brings up is that there is no relief in sight."
SOUTH FARES WORST
The numbers would have been worse, analysts said, but for government assistance programs including extended unemployment compensation, stimulus spending and Obama's health reforms, which appeared to reduce the number of uninsured young adults.
In Obama's hometown of Chicago, Salvation Army Major David Harvey knows well the effects of grinding poverty on the city's South Side, where he attended a food giveaway on Tuesday.
"There are more families falling into poverty," he said. "That's multiplied on the South Side of Chicago where there are pockets with 20 percent, or more, unemployment."
You've got people crying for jobs. They move out of state to get jobs because employers are leaving because of the tax increases here," Harvey said.
The poverty rate increased for non-Hispanic whites, blacks and Hispanics but did not differ significantly for Asians. Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 54 percent of the poor with whites at 9.9 percent and Asians at 12.1 percent.
The South fared worst among U.S. regions, recording the highest poverty rate, a significant drop in median income and the largest number of residents without health insurance.
The administration was quick to seize on data showing a 2.1 percent drop in uninsured young adults, aged 18 to 24, as evidence that families were benefiting from an Obama healthcare reform that allows parents to extend their coverage to children as old as 25.
The Affordable Care Act is the centerpiece of Obama's domestic policy agenda but has come under fierce attack from Republicans including presidential candidates who hope to challenge the president in the 2012 general election.
"We expect even more will gain coverage in 2011 when the policy is fully phased in," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a blog posting.
(Additional reporting by Andrew Stern in Chicago; Editing by Ross Colvin, Doina Chiacu and Bill Trott)


Comments from Doozler:
If Americans living in poverty were a country. It would be larger than Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Ireland  and the Czech Republic combined. Come to think of it, it should be allowed to be a country. Then it could apply for loans from the IMF as a third world country.
Reply

Sponge Bob gets kicked in the pants by pediatricians

Pediatricians' group finds fault with "SpongeBob"

By Daniel Frankel
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - First it was the far right, which singled out the animated kids' series "SpongeBob SquarePants" for promoting pro-gay and global-warming-awareness agendas.
And Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics will take aim at the 12-year-old Nickelodeon show, reporting a study that concludes the fast-paced show, and others like it, aren't good for children.
According to an individual with knowledge of the AAP's press strategy, the organization's Monday announcement will be picked up by news organizations including ABC and NBC.
Nickelodeon didn't have a comment on the matter, but did release this statement, questioning the seaworthiness of the study: "Having 60 non-diverse kids, who are not part of the show's targeted demo, watch nine minutes of programing is questionable methodology and could not possibly provide the basis for any valid findings that parents could trust."
A key issue for Nickelodeon officials: "SpongeBob" is targeted to kids 6-11, but the study focused on 4-year-olds.
An individual close to the network said the program's broad awareness among parents has been leveraged before to gain noteriety and spur funding.
In 2005, James Dobson, head of the Christian right group Focus on the Family, said the cartoon's tolerance themes were really code for gay-agenda promotion.
And just last month, Fox News personalities Steve Doocy and Gretchen Carlson criticized the series, as well as the U.S. Department of Education, for allegedly promoting global-warming science.
As for its study, officials for the American Academy of Pediatrics were unavailable for comment on Sunday.
"People do studies all the time about the effects of media. This one will stress out parents unnecessarily," said an individual close to Nickelodeon.


Comments from Doozler

Doctors' groups don't always get it right.   What group opposed national seatbelt laws back in the 60s?  Yes, the American Medical Association.  It claimed seatbelts would do unwarranted harm to the body's internal organs.

And the position of this group of pediatricians is also a little dubious.  If doctors' groups issued a thousand press releases about the negative influence of violent video games on young children, then we would take their concern about spongebob squarepants a little more seriously.  But since we don't see the former.  We can't get too interested when pediatricians say the cartoon series may encourage harmful environmental attitudes.

On someone's demented scale of social responsibility somehow global warming trumps murder or even genocide.  What's wrong with this picture?

As for Fox News, their position is entirely consistent with their political posture.  If Spongebob were a GI Joe type with a military haircut and an automatic weapon we don't think Fox would have too many problems with him.