US Supreme Court Justice David Souter to retire 1 hour ago WASHINGTON (AFP) – US Supreme Court Justice David Souter is planning to retire at the end of the court’s current term, US media reported Thursday, giving President Barack Obama an early opportunity to name a judge to the highest US court. ‘David Souter intends to retire,’ NBC News reported late Thursday, citing unnamed sources. National Public Radio, citing US government officials, said that Souter is expected to ‘remain on the bench until a successor has been chosen and confirmed.’ Souter, 69, ‘has informed the White House of his decision,’ NPR added. Due to likely political wrangling in the US Senate over Souter’s successor, it is possible a new judge may not be ready by the time the Supreme Court reconvenes in October. Neither Souter nor the Supreme Court offered comment on the retirement reports. Rumors over Souter’s possible retirement began in recent days after he reportedly failed to hire new clerks for October’s new term — something all the other justices have done by now. NPR confirmed that Souter, who is younger than four of the other justices, is in […]
Internet users face regular ‘brownouts that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace, according to research to be published later this year. Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer. It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an ‘unreliable toy. When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British scientist, wrote the code that transformed a private computer network into the world wide web in 1989, the internet appeared to be a limitless resource. However, a report being compiled by Nemertes Research, a respected American think-tank, will warn that the web has reached a critical point and that even the recession has failed to stave off impending problems. ‘With more people working or looking for work from home, or using their PCs more for cheap entertainment, demand could double […]
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week – 54 percent – said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is ‘often or ‘sometimes justified. Only 42 percent of people who ‘seldom or never go to services agreed, according the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified – more than 6 in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only 4 in 10 of them did. The analysis is based on a Pew Research Center survey of 742 American adults conducted April 14-21. It did not include analysis of groups other than white evangelicals, white non-Hispanic Catholics, white mainline Protestants, and the religiously unaffiliated, because the sample size was too small.
As countries and industries grow increasingly overwhelmed by wave after wave of bankruptcies, layoffs, restructurings, botched contracts, and embarrassing bonuses, they might lose sight of a second, much larger set of tsunamis gathering force over the horizon. While the economy is melting down, technology is moving forward at an even faster rate. The ability to adapt to the accelerating pace of change will determine who survives. To use the current bailout jargon, at least three major technologies are shovel-ready: the programming of tissues, the ability to engineer cells, and robots. As these breakthroughs and others converge, we are going to see a massive restructuring of global economic power. *** We can now program life. Several months ago, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute and Synthetic Genomics took a mycoplasma cell and inserted long strands of DNA into it, making the cell an entirely different species. In January 2008, the same team built and inserted the world’s largest organic molecule into a cell-this is the equivalent of a complete software package to program cells. One year later they produced thousands of these programs in a single day. Taken together, these discoveries mean that one can write […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
