GARDEZ, Afghanistan — The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. They shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ - God is great - as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar’s head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face. Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as ‘the worst of the worst.’ But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo’s Camp Four who hissed ‘infidel’ and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn’t: The U.S. government had the wrong guy. ‘He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government,’ a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was […]
The following is an excerpt from the book Zapped! Irradiation and the Death of Food by Wenonah Hauter (Food & Water Watch, 2008). Over the decades, the effects of irradiation have been compared dismissively to sunlight and glibly to atomic bombs — and many images in between. Few grasp it completely, one of many reasons for its obscurity. Though the issue is kaleidoscopic, one needn’t be an expert in physics or food science to gain a basic understanding. Knowing what irradiation isn’t is just as important as knowing what it is, if not more so. Irradiated foods don’t glow in the dark. It doesn’t make food measurably radioactive, though a mind-boggling FDA ruling could change this by dramatically increasing the maximum allowable radiation dose. And you won’t sprout a sixth finger if you eat the stuff. Now for what irradiation is. It uses astronomically powerful blasts of X-rays, electron beams, and gamma rays to kill bacteria, to extend shelf life of food by delaying ripening and spoiling, and to eradicate fruit flies and other invasive pests. Here’s where a little chemistry and physics come in. This radiation is ionizing, meaning it has enough energy to blow […]
Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music files. For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country’s largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity. One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of ‘Internet metering’ in one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes. That same week, Comcast said that it would expand on a strategy it uses to manage Internet traffic: slowing down the connections of the heaviest users, so-called bandwidth hogs, at peak times. AT&T also said Thursday that limits on heavy use were inevitable and that it was considering pricing based on data volume. ‘Based on current trends, total bandwidth in the AT&T network will increase by four […]
Liberal and progressive religious voices have become increasingly prominent in the 2008 presidential campaign. To complement a recent Forum-sponsored panel discussion on the ‘religious left,’ Associate Director Mark O’Keefe asked Senior Fellow John Green to define the various groups that make up the religious left movement and talk about implications for the ‘religious right.’ Featuring: John Green, Senior Fellow in Religion and American Politics, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life Interviewer: Mark O’Keefe, Associate Director, Web Editorial, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life For years we have been hearing about the ‘religious right’ and its impact on American politics, but liberal and progressive religious voices are becoming increasingly prominent in media reports and at campaign stops. What is happening? There is considerable evidence that the group often called the ‘religious left’ is more active in the 2008 presidential campaign than in the recent past. There has been a spate of books talking about religion and progressive politics, such as Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, Michael Lerner’s The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right and Marcia Ford’s […]
Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,’ says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. ‘I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.’ He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil. Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls ‘renewable petroleum’. After that, he grins, ‘it’s a brave new world’. Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
