Belgium’s lower house of parliament has approved a radical ban on Islamic face-covering veils. If approved by the Senate, the country would become the first in Europe to prohibit the burqa and niqab. Currently, it seems to be one of the few issues uniting the linguistically divided country. Belgium may be in the throws of political disarray, but its squabbling political parties have been able to agree on one thing: The banning of the burqa in public. If the legislation is approved, the Benelux country would become the first in Europe to ban the Islamic face-covering veil. The lower house of parliament voted on Thursday to ban clothes or veils that did not allow the wearer to be fully identified, including the full-body veil, known as the burqa, and the face veil which leaves slits for the eyes, known as the niqab. A cross-party consensus of 136 deputies voted for the measure, with just two abstentions and no opposing votes. The ban still has to be passed by the Senate, which has two weeks to raise any objections. But a final vote on the controversial measure could be delayed until after early elections, which are likely to […]
AHMEDABAD, India — A team of military doctors backed by India’s national defence research centre is studying an 83-year-old holy man who claims to have spent seven decades surviving without food or water. The long-haired and bearded yogi, Prahlad Jani, has been sealed in a hospital in the western city of Ahmedabad where he is under 24-hour observation by 30 doctors and will be subjected to a series of medical tests. ‘The observation from this study may throw light on human survival without food and water,’ doctor G. Ilavazahagan, director of India’s Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS), told AFP. The DIPAS is part of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, India’s state defence and military research institute also behind a grenade packed with chilli powder that recently hit headlines. ‘This may help in working out strategies for survival during natural calamities, extreme stressful conditions and extra-terrestrial explorations like future missions to the Moon and Mars by the human race,’ Ilavazahagan said. The tests on Jani include magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, measuring brain and heart activity with electrodes and other neuro-physiological studies, in addition to blood tests. The experiment started on […]
Do you really want to know all of the information encoded in your genes? A thought-provoking new study shows why you might — and why you might not. It’s not science fiction. It now costs less than $10,000 to learn your own personal genome. Soon it will cost no more than $1,000. What might you learn? Ask Stephen Quake, PhD, a Stanford University bioengineer. Recently, Quake and colleagues showed that a whole human genome — his own — could be unraveled by a single technician using a single machine. When a 19-year-old relative died suddenly in his sleep, Quake began to wonder whether the information he collected could tell him whether he risked the same fate. He took his genome to cardiologist Euan Ashley, MD, who runs Stanford’s hypertrophic cardiomyopathy center. ‘This made me start thinking about what doctors are supposed to do when a patient walks into your office, shows you his whole genome, and asks, ‘What is in my crystal ball?” Ashley tells WebMD. ‘It’s a challenge. Lots of people have looked at human genomes, but nobody had ever looked at a single patient before.’ Ashley and Quake assembled a large group of […]
HOUSTON — A massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico neared wildlife refuges and seafood grounds along the Louisiana coast on Friday, as efforts redoubled to avert what could become one of the worst U.S. ecological disasters. President Barack Obama pledged on Thursday to ‘use every single available resource’ to contain the oil slick and the U.S. military ratcheted up operations. The leak from a ruptured oil well on the ocean floor off the coast of the southern state is pouring out crude oil at a rate of up to 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons or 955,000 liters) a day, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — five times more oil than previously thought. The escalating threat has deepened fears of severe damage to fisheries, wildlife refuges and tourism in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The Gulf Coast and its marshlands are home to many species of animals, including manatees, sea turtles, dolphins, porpoises, whales, pelicans and other birds. The Gulf is also one of the world’s richest seafood grounds, teeming with shrimp, oysters, mussels, crabs and fish. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, whose state is still recovering from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina […]
GUANTANAMO BAY — A brief detour from my Guantanamo coverage, as a State Department official, speaking only on background, confirmed something else I’ve been working on. The private security company formerly known as Blackwater and now known as Xe Services, will be allowed to bid on the next generation of the State Department’s lucrative Worldwide Protective Services Contract. The company’s track record of killing Iraqi civilians, shooting at Afghan civilians, taking for personal use U.S. military-issued rifles from the Afghan police and setting up shell companies to win government contracts will not be an obstacle. Once again, the fact that no federal acquisition official has recommended Blackwater be barred from bidding on federal contracts means, the official said, that ‘any company, including Xe Services and its subsidiary companies, [may] submit a proposal in response to an acquisition process established on the basis of full and open competition. While a Blackwater/Xe Services spokeswoman did not reply to repeated phone calls seeking comment before I left for Guantanamo, she told me last year that the company intends to bid on the contract - which is the successor contract to the one that allowed it to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq and […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
