PARIS — The official euphoria with which the U.S. and European governments celebrated the fall of the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya has given way to growing concern that many among the new Libyan leadership are radical Muslims with links to al-Qaeda. Revelations are surfacing also of a close collaboration of Western governments with the deposed dictator.

The overwhelming presence of radical Muslims among the rebel Libyan leadership has been known in Paris at least since early March. But the dangers from this are now beginning to be discussed openly in Western capitals.

On Mar. 8, François Gouyette, ambassador to Tripoli until late February, told a select group of deputies at a closed session of the French parliamentary commission of foreign affairs that the rebellion, especially in the east of the country, comprised mostly ‘radical Muslims’.

‘In the east of the country, especially in the city of Derna, which was taken very easily by the insurrection, there is without question a high concentration of radical Muslims,’ Gouyette told the deputies. ‘Hundreds of Libyan combatants taking part in the international jihad in Afghanistan and in Iraq originate from this region.

‘Many of these combatants are back in Libya,’ Gouyette warned. IPS has the minutes […]

No Comments

Earlier this year, Stanford University researchers created a full-duplex radio that allowed wireless signals to be sent and received simultaneously, thereby doubling the speed of existing networks. Using the same approach, researchers at Rice University have now developed similar full-duplex technology that would effectively double the throughput on mobile networks without the addition of any extra towers.

Currently, mobile phones use two different frequencies to provide two-way communications – one to send transmissions and another to receive. This is because the strength of the transmission drowns out any incoming signal on the same frequency. While it was long thought impossible to overcome this problem, in 2010 Ashutosh Sabharwal, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, and colleagues Melissa Duarte and Chris Dick, published a paper showing that full-duplex was possible.

The trick lay in canceling out the transmitted signal at the source so an incoming signal on the same frequency could still be heard. Like the Stanford approach, the technology developed by the Rice researchers achieves this by employing an extra antenna at the source.

‘We send two signals such that they cancel each other at the receiving antenna – the device ears,’ Sabharwal said. ‘The canceling effect is purely local, so […]

No Comments

Chances are, you probably remember exactly what you were doing on the morning of September 11, 2001, at the moment when you first learned about the attack on the World Trade Center. And if you were one of the millions who stared in horror at the television images of smoke billowing from the crippled towers, you undoubtedly can recall the intense, excruciatingly painful surge of grief and anger and sadness that you felt.

You may be surprised, however, to learn that Princeton University researchers believe that so many people around the world were affected in the same way that their collective mental energy actually altered the operation of computers.

Those findings, which have aroused some controversy in the scientific world, were produced by Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project, whose goal is to determine whether, and if so to what extent, human consciousness-that is, our minds’ awareness of the world in which we exist-can synchronize and act coherently.

‘I think the data are pretty much indisputably in support of that we do interconnect, we interact, we’re not isolated,

No Comments

Dominionists want to impose a form of Christian nationalism on the United States, a concept that was dismissed as eroding freedom and democracy by the founders of our country. Dominionism has become a major influence on the right-wing populist Tea Parties as Christian Right activists have flooded into the movement at the grassroots. At the same time, legitimate questions have been raised about whether or not potential Republican presidential nominees Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, or Sarah Palin have moved from a generic form of Christian Right Dominionism toward the more totalitarian form know as Dominion Theology.

Clueless journalists and crafty Christian Right pundits have mocked the idea that Dominionism as a religiously motivated political tendency even exists. Scholars, however, have been writing about Dominionism for over a decade, some using the term directly, and others describing the tendency in other ways.

Dominionism is a broad political impulse within the Christian Right in the United States. It comes in a variety of forms that author Fred Clarkson and I call soft and hard. Fred and I probably coined the term ‘Dominionism

No Comments

LONDON — Healthier lifestyles and better diets could prevent up to 2.8 million cases of cancer each year, the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) said on Wednesday, calling on governments to ‘avoid a public health disaster’.

The number of global cancers has increased by a fifth in less than a decade to around 12 million new cases a year, and along with other chronic diseases like heart and lung disease and diabetes are the world’s biggest health challenges, the Fund said.

In a report released two weeks before a United Nations summit on non-communicable diseases (NCDs), the charity said political leaders had a ‘once in a generation’ opportunity to tackle a wave of cancer and other lifestyle diseases.

Global health experts say many deaths from NCDs, including around a third of all common cancers, could be prevented by curbing excessive alcohol intake, improving diets, discouraging smoking and promoting more physical activity.

But these measures often need government action such as taxation, regulation and advertising curbs, bringing politicians into conflict with tobacco, food and alcohol industries.

‘With millions of lives at risk around the world, the stakes are incredibly high,’ said Martin Wiseman, WCRF’s medical and scientific adviser.

‘People are still unaware that risk factors such as […]

No Comments