Representatives from Sunni and Shia groups in Iraq agreed on a road map to peace based on the experience in Northern Ireland after four days of secret talks in Finland, reconciliation group the Crisis Management Initiative said last night. The meeting brought together 16 delegates from the feuding groups to study lessons learned from successful peacemaking efforts in South Africa and Northern Ireland. The factions were convened by the John W McCormack graduate school of policy studies at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. The former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari organised the seminar but was not present. ‘Participants committed themselves to work towards a robust framework for a lasting settlement,’ a statement issued by CMI said. It added that the participants ‘agreed to consult further’ on a list of 12 recommendations to begin reconciliation talks including resolving political disputes through non-violence and democracy. Politicians from Northern Ireland including the unionist Jeffrey Donaldson and the Sinn Féin leader Martin McGuinness also attended the talks. The recommendations included disarming feuding factions and forming an independent commission to supervise this ‘in a verifiable manner’. Mr Donaldson said: ‘Agreement has been reached on the way forward between the parties, […]
The evolving and growing complexity of the human brain allowed our ancestors the ability to question, wonder, and consider new possibilities-to be creative. Life altering advances were the result. Is unconditional adherence to dogma (whether religious or secular) at odds with this evolved capability and our full potential as creative beings? Something changed.Whether it happened gradually over several hundred thousand years, as noted anthropologists Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks suggest, or quickly in a ‘great leap forward,’ as Jared Diamond puts it, we are at least certain of this: early humans became dissatisfied with their circumstances and began to diverge from what was practiced and known. Stone implements gave way to the more easily shaped and versatile bone. Bare cave walls were brought to life with paintings. Adorning jewelry was carefully fashioned from ordinary objects previously ignored. Simple weapons, somehow now seen as insufficient, gave way to more complex and multi-piece devices. The notions to plant instead of gather, to breed captive animals rather than hunt them, took hold. Humans have altered their environments and enhanced their well-being unlike any other life form on the planet. This unique capacity to diverge from what is, and create something which […]
It’s almost fifty pages long, but well worth the read: a recent study by the Pew Research Center for People & the Press synthesizes 165 separate national surveys and finds that American news preferences have remained ‘surprisingly static’ over the last twenty years. Tucked behind this central conclusion, however, is a suite of more intriguing observations about readership and audience habits. Overall, the study found the percentage of people who follow the news ‘very closely’ dropped from thirty percent during the 1980s to twenty-three percent during 1990s – but then jumped back to thirty percent during the twenty-first century. That swing has less to do with changes in information technology (from broadcast, to cable, to online) than with changes in world events – or ‘reality’ as study author Michael J. Robinson described it. The dip in public attention during the last decade of the twentieth century was likely the result of relative peace and economic prosperity in the United States, he wrote: ‘The ’80s were more ‘interesting’; the ’90s, less so; the ’00s have been most interesting so far.’ The study broke down news in nineteen separate categories and then six ‘super categories.’ Not surprisingly, war and terrorism […]
The Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer and levels of sea ice in the region now stand at record lows, scientists have announced. Experts say they are ‘stunned’ by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as the UK disappearing in the last week alone. So much ice has melted this summer that the Northwest passage across the top of Canada is fully navigable, and observers say the Northeast passage along Russia’s Arctic coast could open later this month. If the increased rate of melting continues, the summertime Arctic could be totally free of ice by 2030. Mark Serreze, an Arctic specialist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre at Colorado University in Denver, said: ‘It’s amazing. It’s simply fallen off a cliff and we’re still losing ice.’ The Arctic has now lost about a third of its ice since satellite measurements began thirty years ago, and the rate of loss has accelerated sharply since 2002. Dr Serreze said: ‘If you asked me a couple of years ago when the Arctic could lose all of its ice then I would have said 2100, […]
Scientists at Eli Lilly say the first human trial of a new schizophrenia drug shows promise for sufferers of the debilitating mental illness. There are already many drugs which are designed to treat schizophrenia but this latest drug differs in that unlike all other antipsychotics it targets the glutamate receptors in the brain rather than dopamine. The scientists say patients treated with the new drug ‘LY2140023’ showed improvements in symptoms and suffered fewer side effects. Schizophrenia affects around 1% of the population and is a chronic mental illness. The main symptoms are hallucinations (hearing voices), delusions (a firm belief in something that isn’t true) and changes in outlook and personality. Schizophrenia can manifest itself in positive symptoms (hallucinations, delusions and thought disorder), and in negative symptoms such as social withdrawal, apathy and emotional blunting with symptoms such as psychomotor retardation, lack of insight, poor attention and impulse control. The antipsychotic drugs currently used to alleviate these symptoms can have serious side effects such a violent tremor, similar to that experienced by Parkinson’s disease sufferers; for some, the side effects are so distressing that they often stop taking the medication and run the risk of a […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
