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Extra points for identifying the guy in the photo.
Thanks Gasparrini.
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The harmful effects of global warming are being felt “here and now and in your backyard,” a groundbreaking US government report on climate change has warned.
“Climate change is happening now, it is not something that will happen decades or centuries in the future,” Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, one of the lead authors of the report, told AFP.
Climate change, which the report blames largely on human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases, “is under way in the United States and projected to grow,” said the report by the US Global Change Research Program, a grouping of a dozen government agencies and the White House.
The report is the first on climate change since President Barack Obama took office and outlines in plain, non-scientific terms how global warming has resulted in an increase of extreme weather such as the powerful heatwave that swept Europe in 2003, claiming tens of thousands of lives.
Thanks BubbaRay.
British Airways has asked its 40,000 staff to work without pay for up to a month as the ailing airline seeks to cut costs.
The group, which made a record £401 million loss in 2008 amid surging fuel prices and a collapse in premium-fare passengers, is seeking to reduce costs dramatically and has already offered staff unpaid leave or a reduction in hours.
Willie Walsh, BA’s chief executive, has now gone a step further by asking staff to volunteer for between one and four weeks of unpaid work in what he says is a “fight for survival.” Mr Walsh, who said last week that he would work for free in July, has set a deadline of June 24 for employees to volunteer for unpaid work. He said that the salary deductions would be spread over three to six months wherever possible. BA denied that those staff who volunteered for unpaid work would be given preference if the airline imposes a further round of redundancies.
The airline is currently negotiating pay deals and job reductions with its ground handling staff, pilots and cabin crew, who have been told that the airline needs to settle discussions by the end of the month. In total, BA is thought to be seeking as many as 4,000 job cuts, including 2,000 voluntary redundancies among the 14,000 cabin crew. Mr Walsh wrote: “I am looking for every single part of the company to take part in some way. It really counts. We face a fight for survival. These are the toughest trading conditions we have ever seen and there simply are no green shoots.
“Our survival depends on everyone contributing to changes that permanently remove costs from every part of the business,” he added.
It’s one thing for the CEO to work for free, he can well afford it. But the “grunts” among us who have been asked to take substantial pay reductions… can sympathize.
Thanks to Ian Warner
A teenage girl is suing a tattoo artist for £10,000 after she allegedly asked him for three stars on her face – but ended up with 56.
Eighteen-year-old Kimberley Vlaminck paid £55 for ‘the graffiti that has ruined my life’ in her Belgian home town of Courtrai. She claimed the Romanian tattooist who performed the artwork misunderstood her French and English.
She claims she fell asleep while he was doing his work… and awoke to ‘this nightmare’.
‘It is terrible for me,’ said Kimberley. ‘I cannot go out on to the street, I am so embarrassed. I just look horrible.’
‘I think he didn’t understand what I wanted. He spoke only fractured English and French.‘But I explicitly said in my native tongue, French, and also in a little bit of English when he looked confused, that I wanted three little stars only near my left eye.’
Rouslan Toumaniantz, who runs the tattoo parlour called The Tattoo Box in Courtrai, denies her claim.
He said she knew ‘exactly what she wanted’.
He added: ‘She was awake and looked into the mirror several times as the procedure was taking place.‘The trouble all started when she went home and her father and boyfriend threw a fit.
‘They are saying things now like I doped her or hypnotised her. What rubbish! ‘She asked for 56 stars and that’s what she got.’ To remove the stars would require surgery costing £8,500.
Tattoos are definitely not my thing, but I have to assume there would be some pain and noise involved. Therefore, we shall apply the BS detector.
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
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The Air Force will train more drone operators than fighter and bomber pilots combined for the first time this year, signaling a fundamental shift for the 61-year-old service.
The growing ranks of drone operators mark a turning point for the Air Force as it looks to a future that relies increasingly on unmanned aircraft. Over the next few decades, the Air Force plans to develop drones that would serve as fighters, bombers and tankers, the heart of its manned fleet, according to its Unmanned System Update. The document says piloted aircraft will be used in concert with drones…
The Air Force will train 240 pilots to fly Predator and Reaper drones compared with 214 fighter and bomber pilots for the budget year that ends in September. Overall, there are 550 drone pilots compared with 3,700 fighter and 900 bomber pilots. The current emphasis for drones reflects the need for persistent, eye-in-the-sky surveillance to track and kill insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The capability provided by the unmanned aircraft is game-changing,” Gen. Norton Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, told USA TODAY in an e-mailed statement. “We can have eyes 24/7 on our adversaries. The importance of that is clear in the feedback from the ground troops — this is a capability they don’t want to be without.”
Loren Thompson, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute, said intelligence gathering has been a weakness for the Pentagon for years but has improved recently. “The Air Force has now gotten the message that it’s important to be responsive to the war fighters on the ground,” he said.
Will this lessen the number of required fighter and bomber pilots – or simply involve an increased number of gamers/drone pilots? It looks like the reduction has already begun.
Georgia political hacks want Edwards on the state Supreme Court.
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The state high court’s decision overturned Fayette County Superior Court Judge Christopher Edwards’ blanket prohibition against exposing the children to their father’s gay partners and friends…
The Fayette County judge’s prohibition “assumes, without evidentiary support, that the children will suffer harm from any such contact,” Justice Robert Benham wrote. But there is no evidence that any member of the gay and lesbian community has engaged in inappropriate conduct in the presence of the children or that the children would be adversely affected by being exposed to members of that community, he said…
Beth Littrell, staff attorney for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund in Atlanta, said the visitation order was the most sweeping of its kind she had seen in Georgia.
“Placing a blanket ban on children’s association with gay people not only hurts this father’s relationship with his children, it is blatant discrimination,” Littrell said. “The court has done the right thing today by focusing on the needs of the children instead of perpetuating stigma on the basis of sexual orientation.”
Littrell was pleased the ruling took decisions like this away from “the prejudices of individual judges.” Which is why Georgia politicians want to put more homophobes on the State Supreme Court.
This guy delves into a number of areas from the economy to foreign policy and comes to the conclusion that… Have to read the article to find out.
Picture, if you will, an America apparently like our own. A country like ours bogged down in war on two fronts and suffering from the greatest economic slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s. An America indistinguishable from ours in every respect except that when you turn on the nightly news you see the face of President John Sidney McCain …
OK, Rod Serling as host of “The Twilight Zone” probably would have said it better. But seriously — where would we be in the summer of 2009, if in last November’s election John McCain rather than Barack Obama had been elected president of the United States?
“No difference!” would be the answer of those alienated populists and leftists for whom Republicans and Democrats are merely different tentacles of the same Bilderberger or Trilateral Commission octopus. Certainly from the perspectives of socialists or libertarians — or fascists or Islamic theocrats — the consensus shared by America’s two parties seems much greater than their differences. But from the vantage point of mainstream American politics, the differences between the Obama administration and a hypothetical McCain administration would have been real and can be vividly illustrated by counterfactual history.
After reading his conclusions, what do you think our world would be like today, June 16, 2009?
Are malls a fading fad? With all the brick and mortar stores that have gone belly up because of the economy, is there a reason for them to come back? Will the rest survive? If you can buy literally anything over the web, will there come a day when kids will wonder what the heck their parents mean when they say they once upon a time they physically went somewhere to buy something?
The [Hamilton Consultants] study shows that Internet commerce makes up 2.1 per cent or $300 billion of US GDP. Apparently dotcoms are doing better than they did during the IT retrenchment of 2000-2002 and are no longer folding right and left like used origami paper. The ones that are still around, that is.
More than 10 per cent of retail purchases are now made online and Internet-based advertising revenues have increased to more than $20 billion.
The employment figures are based on people who work directly in building or maintaining the Internet’s infrastructure, or have something to do with advertising or e-commerce and other direct uses.
Taking into account the number of indirect jobs supported by Internet business would double the figures, the report reckoned.
Ah, web commerce. Kinda makes ya nostalgic for the Pets.com sock puppet, don’t it?
 Microsoft-approved |
Like many large companies, Microsoft has been trimming costs in places in response to the global economic downturn…It also means scaling back perks. On the chopping block? Apple iPhone, RIM BlackBerry and Palm Pre service plans.
Regardless if the iPhone or BlackBerry is used for work purposes, Microsoft says if an employee wants to use one, it’s on his or her own dime, according to Business Insider.
The only phones Microsoft will pay for? Windows Mobile-powered smartphones, naturally.
Many companies do not reimburse employees for personal mobile devices, but that wasn’t the case at Microsoft (until now)…But questions remain about the move, such as:
If it didn’t affect that many staffers, why make the move at all? Just how much money is Microsoft saving if employees pay for the phones?
Aren’t data plans fairly similar in price?
If Windows Mobile is deemed inferior to the competition, what’s the use? Why frustrate employees?
The policy…poses less a financial question than a cultural one: if Microsoft employees don’t naturally gravitate toward in-house devices (say, the way Google employees do), isn’t that indicative that more work must be done in the mobile department?
Would Microsoft make a decision like this for petty reasons?.
WASHINGTON, June 14 (Reuters) – CIA director Leon Panetta says it’s almost as if former vice president Dick Cheney would like to see another attack on the United States to prove he is right in criticizing President Barack Obama for abandoning the “harsh interrogation” of terrorism suspects.
“I think he smells some blood in the water on the national security issue,” Panetta said in an interview published in The New Yorker magazine’s June 22 issue. “It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point.”
Cheney, who was a key advocate in the Bush administration of controversial interrogation methods such as waterboarding, has become as a leading Republican critic of Obama’s ban on harsh interrogations and his plan to shut the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In a blistering May 21 speech, Cheney said Obama’s reversal of Bush-era policies were “unwise in the extreme” that would make the American people less safe.
Panetta called Cheney’s actions “dangerous politics.”
He told The New Yorker he had favored the creation of an independent truth commission to look into the detainee polices of former President George W. Bush. But the idea died in April when Obama decided such a panel could be seen as politically vindictive.
My guess is yes.
Found by Ian Warner.
It is the biggest private yacht in existence and comes with a missile-detection system, two helipads, a luxury spa, swimming pool and a miniature submarine. But when you’re Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, only the most ostentatious displays of wealth will do. His latest baby is the Eclipse, a 557-footer reported to have cost a staggering £300million.
[…]
Annual overhead for the boats is more than £15million, and it costs him £73,000 just to fill up the tanks of his current largest boat, Pelorus.The son of Jewish parents, Abramovich began his business career selling plastic ducks from a grim Moscow apartment but, within a few years, his vast wealth spread from oil conglomerates to pig farms.
Russia’s richest man has flourished under president Vladimir Putin, with critics saying he used his government ties to take over former state-owned assests and reap the profits for personal use.
Found by Brother Uncle Don.
As U.S. stock markets plummeted last September, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, sold more than $115,000 worth of stocks and mutual-fund shares and used much of the money to invest in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
The Illinois senator’s 2008 financial disclosure statement shows he sold mutual-fund shares worth $42,696 on Sept. 19, the day after then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke urged congressional leaders in a closed meeting to craft legislation to help financially troubled banks. The same day, he bought $43,562 worth of Berkshire Hathaway’s Class B stock, the disclosure shows. Altogether, Durbin sold investments worth $116,000 in September. By Oct. 2, he had invested $98,046 in Omaha, Neb.-based Berkshire Hathaway, the form shows.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index plunged 4.7 percent last Sept. 15 after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Bank of America Corp.’s government-engineered takeover of Merrill Lynch & Co. By the end of October, the index had fallen 22.6 percent.
“Durbin was doing what a lot of other people were doing, taking a look at their savings” and seeing it “start to tank and trying to preserve some level of wealth by getting out of the market,” said his spokesman, Joe Shoemaker.
Shoemaker said Durbin didn’t capitalize on anything Paulson and Bernanke told congressional leaders at the Sept. 18 meeting.
Whatever information Paulson gave lawmakers wasn’t secret or classified and was disclosed publicly the next day, Shoemaker said.
I don’t know but this all sounds suspiciously familiar to me.
A WEEK-old pup was recovering today after his four-year-old owner accidentally flushed him down the toilet.
The tiny cocker spaniel was trapped in a waste pipe for nearly four hours after Daniel Blair decided he “needed a wash” and put him in the toilet before pulling the chain. After frantic rescue attempts by the RSPCA and the fire brigade failed, drainage firm Dyno-Rod was called in and used specialist camera gear to locate him in a pipe 18 metres away from the house, in Northolt, Middlesex.
He was then plucked to safety.
The animal has since been named Dyno after his rescuers. Daniel’s mother Alison, 40, said the pup’s ordeal began after Daniel’s twin brother Nicky took him out for a walk in the garden. She told the Mirror: “Daniel told me it had got muddy so they put it in the toilet and pulled the chain to give it a wash. I ran to the bathroom but the dog was nowhere to be seen. I assumed it was dead.
“I went into the garden, managed to lift up the drain cover and was amazed to hear him crying.”
Dyno-Rod man Will Craig, 22, from Harrow in Middlesex, was eventually called in, admitting he thought it was a wind-up at first. But after arriving at the scene he used camera gear to find the dog and gently nudge him towards a manhole cover and safety.
I know, I know, it wasn’t Roto Rooter… but you get the idea.
 You don’t go to the carwash either, eh? |
Religiously devout Jews barred by rabbis from surfing the Internet may now “Koogle” it on a new “kosher” search engine, the site manager said on Sunday.
Yossi Altman said Koogle, a play on the names of a Jewish noodle pudding and the ubiquitous Google, appears to meet the standards of Orthodox rabbis, who restrict use of the Web to ensure followers avoid viewing sexually explicit material.
The site omits religiously objectionable material, such as most photographs of women which Orthodox rabbis view as immodest, Altman said.
Its links to Israeli news and shopping sites also filter out items most ultra-Orthodox Israelis are forbidden by rabbis to have in their homes, such a television sets.
Har!
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