60 percent of the world has mobile phones According to a new United Nations (UN) report, about 60 percent of the world’s citizens now own a mobile phone The report states the large jump up is attributable to the strong growth in poor, developing countries, most notably China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In 2002, only 14 percent of the world’s population had any type of mobile phone. According to the International Telecommunication Union, an agency of the UN, there were 4.1 billion cell phone subscriptions as of the end of 2008, compared with just over 1 billion in 2002. The report also added figures for Internet usage, noting that about 23 percent of the global population uses the Internet, up from over 12 percent from 2002. Finally, the report ranked the world’s nations on how ‘advanced their use of information and communications technology (ICT) is’ and found Sweden to be the best. Sweden even had more cellular accounts than it had population in 2007. The United States fell to 17th.
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department today released nine national security legal opinions written by the Bush administration, and revealed that in the weeks before President George W. Bush left office, an administration attorney had disavowed all of them. The newly released memos deal with warrantless wire tapping, executive power and the seizure of terrorism suspects, all of which were issues on which the Bush administration received criticism from civil liberties advocates. On Jan. 15, 2009, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury wrote a ‘memorandum for the Files’ stating that the opinions were no longer being relied upon and that they were ‘not consistent with the current views’ of the Office of Legal Counsel. The release of the memos today appears to be a tacit admission that many of the legal findings made by the Justice Department in weeks and months after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, giving Bush extradordinary executive power, were flawed. Some of the most broad sweeping memos concern what authority the military has on U.S. soil, which notes that the Fourth Amendment would not apply for domestic military operations and the assertion that the First Amendment, particularly as it applies […]
A US clinic has sparked controversy by offering would-be parents the chance to select traits like the eye and hair colour of their offspring. The LA Fertility Institutes run by Dr Jeff Steinberg, a pioneer of IVF in the 1970s, expects a trait-selected baby to be born next year. His clinic also offers sex selection. UK fertility experts are angered that the service will distract attention from how the same technology can protect against inherited disease. The science is based on a lab technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD. This involves testing a cell taken from a very early embryo before it is put into the mother’s womb. Doctors then select an embryo free from rogue genes – or in this case an embryo with the desired physical traits such as blonde hair and blue eyes – to continue the pregnancy, and discard any others. Dr Steinberg said couples might seek to use the clinic’s services for both medical and cosmetic reasons. For example, a couple might want to have a baby with a darker complexion to help guard against a skin cancer if they already had a child who had […]
HIV is evolving rapidly to escape the human immune system, an international study led by Oxford University has shown. The findings, published in Nature, demonstrate the challenge involved in developing a vaccine for HIV that keeps pace with the changing nature of the virus. ‘The extent of the global HIV epidemic gives us a unique opportunity to examine in detail the evolutionary struggle being played out in front of us between an important virus and humans,’ says lead researcher Professor Philip Goulder of the Peter Medawar Building for Pathogen Research at Oxford University. ‘Even in the short time that HIV has been in the human population, it is doing an effective job of evading our best efforts at natural immune control of the virus. This is high-speed evolution that we’re seeing in the space of just a couple of decades.’ The study better describes HIV’s ability to adapt by spelling out at least 14 different ‘escape mutations’ that help keep the virus alive after it interacts genetically with immunity molecules that normally attack HIV. ‘Key genetic regions of HIV introduced into individuals of different ancestry in different places have been evolving to a greater or lesser […]
For the old Kurdish shepherd, it was just another burning hot day in the rolling plains of eastern Turkey. Following his flock over the arid hillsides, he passed the single mulberry tree, which the locals regarded as ‘sacred’. The bells on his sheep tinkled in the stillness. Then he spotted something. Crouching down, he brushed away the dust, and exposed a strange, large, oblong stone. The man looked left and right: there were similar stone rectangles, peeping from the sands. Calling his dog to heel, the shepherd resolved to inform someone of his finds when he got back to the village. Maybe the stones were important. They certainly were important. The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer’s day in 1994, had made the greatest archaeological discovery in 50 years. Others would say he’d made the greatest archaeological discovery ever: a site that has revolutionised the way we look at human history, the origin of religion – and perhaps even the truth behind the Garden of Eden. The site has been described as ‘extraordinary’ and ‘the most important’ site in the world. A few weeks after his discovery, news of the shepherd’s find reached museum curators in […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
