Pluto in Cap, the USA, the future of the world

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SPIEGEL ONLINE
03/28/2012 05:25 PM

A Civilization on Edge: Amid Debt Crisis, Athens Falls Apart

By Julia Amalia Heyer

As Greece struggles to master its devastating debt problem, decades of mismanagement have taken their toll on the country's once-proud capital. Athens has degenerated into a hotbed of chaos and crime, where tensions between Greeks and immigrants have led to attacks on foreigners by the far-right. 

Massoud starts walking faster as the shadows lengthen. He glances at the scratched display on his mobile phone. It's 7:15 p.m.

The sun is setting behind the large apartment buildings on Patission Street, disappearing behind the few remaining classical facades where the plaster is beginning to crumble. "For Rent" and "For Sale" signs are posted on boarded-up windows or behind sheets of opaque glass.

Massoud is in a hurry. He wants to get home before dark, because that's when the people who are out to get him come out.

The gangs of right-wing thugs, sometimes up to 20 at a time, approach their victims on foot or on mopeds, carrying clubs and knives. They are masked, faceless and fast. They appear suddenly and silently before striking.

The neo-fascists are hunting down immigrants in the middle of downtown Athens, in the streets north of the central Omonia Square. They call it cleansing.

They hunt people like Massoud, a 25-year-old Afghan from Kabul. He has been living in Athens for five years without a residency permit, even though he speaks fluent Greek. He studied geography in Kabul, but in Athens he works as a day laborer.

The gangs also hunt the dark-skinned man pushing a shopping cart filled with garbage and scrap metal through the streets. Or the woman with Asian features, who now grabs her child and the paper cup with which she has just been begging in the streets.

Social Bankruptcy

The area around Patission Street used to be one of the most upscale parts of Athens. Maria Callas lived there, but that was a long time ago. Today there is a shoe store on the street that sells patent leather ballerina shoes from China for €5 ($7) and sneakers for €8. The columned structure of the National Archaeological Museum, which houses the largest collection of art from Greek antiquity, is also on Patission Street. A section of Aristotle Street frequented by prostitutes, who are getting ever-younger, is only 50 meters (165 feet) from the museum.

The Greeks may have come to terms with the fact that the luster of antiquity is long gone. But the notion that Athens, a once-proud city, has now become synonymous with political failure and mismanagement is difficult to take. The consequences of decades of mismanagement are most glaringly evident in the center of the Greek capital.

A few years ago, Café Frappé on Omonia Square was filled with tourists and Athenians. Today, the homeless camp out on air shafts, and police wearing bulletproof vests patrol the area at regular intervals. Even the traffic has declined.

The Greeks are moving away, and they are already a minority today. Here, in the middle of the city, the central issue is no longer the nation's insolvency but its social bankruptcy. The plaster is crumbling on the polykatoikias, the apartment buildings typical of Athens, and so is civilization. And in the places where poverty and destitution are most clearly evident, hatred is outpacing any desire to help people.

Stickers in the colors of the Greek flag are attached to the corners of many buildings. "Greece for the Greeks," the stickers read, put there by the right-wing extremist Chrysi Avgi party. Polls show the party at close to 4 percent, and it now stands a good chance of entering the parliament after the election in a few weeks. It would be a small step toward the party's goal of securing the "dominance of the white race and the Greek nation."

'The Focal Point of the Greek Plight'

Athens has a population of more than three million people, but no one knows how many more are living there illegally and without papers. Nevertheless, where they live is no secret: in the city center. Their numbers are estimated at more than 100,000.

The downtown area is "a hotbed of crime, drugs and prostitution," says Athens Mayor Giorgos Kaminis, sounding more resigned than combative. Kaminis, a constitutional lawyer, is supported by several parties on the left. City hall is in the middle of the 6th district, the largest in the downtown area. His proposal to solve the problem doesn't sound much different from that of the right-wing hardliners.

"Voluntary repatriation" is the only way to cope with the plight. Together with European Union authorities, Kaminis wants to develop a plan and create incentives for the refugees to voluntarily allow themselves to be sent home. The problem in downtown Athens, according to the mayor, is also a consequence of the failure of European refugee policy. "Some 300 people come across the border in northern Greece every day," which is far too many, says Kaminis.

A walk along Panepistimou Street, one of the city's main arteries, reveals people openly injecting drugs into their arms, carotid arteries or penises. Depending on the police presence, the scene sometimes shifts by a few hundred meters, to Syntagma Square or Omonia Square. Most of these people are young Greeks, and their numbers are growing by the day.

No other European capital's city center looks like downtown Athens, says Nikitas Kanakis. "This is where you'll find the focal point of the Greek plight," he says. Kanakis, a 44-year-old dentist, runs the aid organization Doctors of the World in Greece. He was in Rwanda shortly after that country's genocide, and he was in Baghdad during the Iraq war. Now he runs a humanitarian mission in the middle of his native city. He calls it "a favela of sorts, just with real houses."

Violence, Drugs and Disease
Athens had problems before the crisis, but the crisis has only intensified and exposed them. The Greek flight from downtown Athens began in the 1980s, when people moved to the suburbs for cleaner air and more space. Downtown rents declined and immigrants moved in. Their numbers increased as new immigrants came to live with acquaintances and relatives.

Sometimes up to 25 people live in a 50-square-meter (540-square-foot) apartment, and few have papers. The police periodically search the buildings during raids, sometimes accompanied by prosecutors and tax investigators.

Kanakis also runs Medicenter, a clinic on Sappho Street, which provides medical care to people without income and insurance, and often to illegal immigrants. The number of patients increased dramatically last year, and now the clinic handles about 300 patients a day, including a growing number of Greeks. Treatment is provided free of change, and the lines form outside the grate at the entrance long before the clinic opens at 9 a.m. In addition to medication, the clinic also distributes free aid packages. Each 8-kilo (17-lb.) package contains rice, noodles and powdered milk.

The situation is untenable, says Kanakis, and the mood becomes increasingly aggressive among both Greeks and immigrants. There is more violence, including muggings and holdup murders. Everyone knows this, even though no one is keeping accurate statistics. Doctors are diagnosing more syphilis and tuberculosis, at levels that haven't been seen in decades. In 2011, the rate of new HIV infections increased by 1,250 percent over the previous year.

For Kanakis, the immigrants are the weakest link in this miserable scenario. He calls the stranded immigrants "the Dubliners." They are people who came to Greece with the intention of moving on to other EU countries but were forced to stay under the European Union's Dublin II Regulation, a law that determines which member country is responsible for asylum seekers -- usually the country through which they have entered the EU. They are now living in a country of agony, if they are lucky. In the worst of cases, they are just as persecuted in Greece as they were in the countries from which they fled.

Even Kanakis, a Greek and an Athenian, has been avoiding certain blocks for a while. He calls the area around Aghios Pantelimonas Square a "national liberated zone." The extreme right rules the area, and the balconies are decorated with flags. Half a year ago Kanakis' translator, an Afghan, had to be hospitalized after being beaten by right-wing extremists on the square. Since then, there are two security guards at the clinic, which also houses 66 refugees, and now Kanakis only drives to work.

Right-Wing Extremists Gain Support

When the attacks increased at the end of last year, the doctor, together with other aid organizations, began collecting data on racially motivated violence. They counted 61 such attacks between October and the end of January alone. The immigrants, including women and children, were beaten and sometimes stabbed.

Kanakis and others have now written letters to Greek politicians, demanding that they finally take action "against the tolerance of racist violence" and "against the impunity of such crimes."

There are suspicions that many police officers sympathize, at the very least, with the Chrysi Avgi ("Golden Dawn") party. The name is intended to convey the hope among the far-right that the Greeks will find their way out of the darkness and return to glory, "as in the days of Homer," says party leader Nikos Michaloliakos, 54, an elected member of the Athens city council.

Michaloliakos is in a good mood as he sits in his office near Omonia Square. He has just come from party headquarters, where he organized an event for Greek shop owners to address the problem of growing crime in the downtown area. A group of broad-shouldered men with crew cuts have gathered in front of his office, where pamphlets on the "Lenin lie" and "Aryan culture" are laid out in display cases. There are also various items for sale, including T-shirts from the Pit Bull Germany collection, a label associated with right-wing extremism, flags and other memorabilia. Most items sport the party's logo, a rune-like character surrounded by a laurel wreath. The resemblance to the swastika is so striking that it has to be deliberate.

"We are nationalists," says Michaloliakos, by way of explanation, and points out that his party has more than 10,000 members nationwide and is growing by the day. "Golden Dawn" wants to close Greece's borders and, with the help of the EU and the United Nations, send immigrants back to their countries. Until then, his supporters will just have to deal with the problem, Michaloliakos says with a chuckle -- and quickly adds that it's just a joke.

But it doesn't seem like a joke. One owner of a souvlaki snack bar now keeps a telephone number next to his cash register. It's an emergency number of sorts. If he feels threatened, he says, he dials the number and they show up -- on mopeds, carrying clubs and usually masked. They know what to do, he says, unlike the police. Who are they? "The members of Golden Dawn," says the man.

'A Bomb That Must Be Neutralized'

The number of vigilante groups and initiatives in downtown Athens has grown significantly in recent months, as residents begin to organize. A neighborhood group recently removed a telephone booth from a small square in front of their apartment buildings -- to prevent immigrants from standing in line to make calls.

Many residents feel abandoned by the state, the city and the police. According to a study by the University of Peloponnese, more than 90 percent of shop and tavern owners in the downtown area believe that their neighborhood is "very unsafe." More than half say that they have already been attacked and robbed. Hotels are closing or hiring security personnel.

Penelope Agathou founded a group called Epoizo about a year ago. According to the bylaws, the club supports "a better quality of life." It has 110 members, "cultivated people only," as Agathou is quick to point out. An older woman in an angora sweater with a heart-shaped pattern and carefully made-up lips, she lives on America Square, which she says ought to be called Africa Square.

"Everything was black," says Agathou, looking out the window. The Africans were eating, sleeping and urinating in front of her door. She says that she is no racist, and that she gives regularly to UNICEF. But, she adds, "for us, these people are a threat to public health."

Now that an election campaign is underway in Athens and the police presence has suddenly been increased, many illegal immigrants are afraid to go into the streets, and America Square isn't quite as full of immigrants. Last week, the minister of citizen protection announced the so-called broom campaign. People without residency permits will now be arrested and taken to newly constructed detention centers. The situation in downtown Athens, says the minister, is "a bomb that must be neutralized."

Massoud, the Afghan, has reached his home unscathed before the onset of darkness. An old woman is standing in the entrance to the building.

"What do you want?" she shouts at him.

"I live here," Massoud says quietly. He shows her his key, and the woman sighs. When he reaches the third floor, he unlocks the door to the single room he shares with his cousin. "I have to get out of here," he says. Life used to be good in Greece, he says, but now it's terrible.

So where does he want to go? To Germany, France, it doesn't matter, says Massoud -- any place that's better than this.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

[Rad]

Clinton in Saudi push to end crackdown in Syria

By Agence France-Presse
Friday, March 30, 2012 7:22 EDT

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was holding talks in Riyadh Friday with Saudi leaders as she kicked off a two-country tour aimed at raising pressure on the Syrian regime, the US embassy here said.

“Mrs Clinton has arrived in Riyadh for talks with senior Saudi officials,” an embassy spokesman said.

The US State Department said earlier this week Clinton would meet Friday in Riyadh with Saudi King Abdullah and Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal.

On Saturday, she is due to meet with ministers of Saudi Arabia’s five Gulf Arab neighbours — Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman — before engaging in broader meetings Sunday with Arab, Turkish and Western officials in Istanbul.

The Friends of Syria meeting in Turkey follows the inaugural one Clinton attended in Tunis at the end of February — a response to Western and Arab failure to win Russian and Chinese backing at the UN Security Council.

Aides said Clinton will discuss how to make President Bashar al-Assad comply with a new plan to end the crackdown on a pro-democracy movement, study further sanctions against his regime and consider ways to aid the opposition who will be in Istanbul.

Her visit comes a day after Assad said he would “spare no effort” for the success of UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan’s six-point peace plan but said the proposal would only work if “terrorist acts” by foreign powers stopped.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner described the president’s remarks as “discouraging” and urged Assad to halt the violence immediately.

“It’s not surprising, but it’s discouraging and disappointing,” Toner told reporters in Washington, adding that Syrian government forces had done nothing to comply with Annan’s plan in the three days since agreeing to it.

The plan by the former UN chief includes a commitment to stop all violence, daily two-hour humanitarian ceasefires and media access to all areas affected by the fighting.

It also calls for an inclusive Syrian-led political process, the right to demonstrate, and the release of people detained arbitrarily.

“We’ve seen absolutely nothing on the ground that indicates that they’re adhering to its calls for Syrian artillery and heavy weaponry to go back to barracks and for a ceasefire to allow humanitarian assistance to be put in place,” Toner said.

“We’ve been very clear that we want to see a ceasefire in place. We want to see an end to the violence as soon as possible so that we can get humanitarian assistance in to the beleaguered Syrian people.”

US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said on Wednesday the US delegation would discuss ways to deliver humanitarian aid to the Syrian people — during a crackdown UN officials now estimate has cost more than 9,000 lives in a year — and how to promote opposition unity.

Clinton said Tuesday the United States will press the disparate opposition “very hard” to present a “unified vision” in Istanbul that protects the rights of all Syrians.

Washington wants the opposition to fully represent Sunnis, Christians, Kurds, Druze, Turkmen and others, including Alawites, the minority Muslim sect from which Assad hails.

Saudi Arabia and its neighbour Qatar have called for arming the opposition, which includes the Free Syrian Army, made up of Syrian military defectors.

An Arab league summit in Baghdad on Thursday rejected the option of arming any sides, and called on all parties to engage in a “serious national dialogue.”

[Rad]

Suu Kyi says Myanmar polls not completely fair

By Agence France-Presse
Friday, March 30, 2012 7:09 EDT

Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi said Friday that elections in Myanmar would not be “genuinely free and fair”, sounding a note of caution over her landmark bid for a seat in parliament.

The Nobel laureate, who spent most of the past 22 years as apolitical prisoner, complained of a series of problems, including “many, many cases of intimidation” as well as the vandalism of signboards.

“I don’t think we can consider it a genuinely free and fair election,” the democracy icon told a news conference ahead of Sunday’s polls, when 45 seats are at stake — not enough to threaten the ruling party’s majority.

“While we recognise that even in well-established democracies there are irregularities and misdemeanors when elections take place, what has been happening in this country (is) really beyond what is acceptable for a democratic election,” she added.

“Still we are determined to go forward because we think that this is what our people want.”

The National League for Democracy (NLD) leader said the polls were boosting people’s interest in politics in the country formerly known as Burma after decades of outright military rule ended last year.

“It is the rising political awareness of our people that we regard as our greatest triumph,” she said. “We don’t at all regret having taken part.”

The polls mark the first time that Suu Kyi is standing for a seat in parliament, and she has drawn huge crowds on the campaign trail.

Experts believe the regime wants the pro-democracy leader to win a seat in a parliament dominated by the army and its political allies to burnish its reform credentials and encourage an end to Western sanctions.

But Suu Kyi said that she had no plan to accept a position as minister in the army-backed government if offered because under the constitution she would be required to give up her seat in parliament.

“I have no intention of leaving the parliament to which I have tried so hard to get into,” she said. But she indicated that she might be willing to take on some kind of non-ministerial role.

The NLD won a landslide election victory in 1990 but was never allowed to take office.

A 2010 election that swept the army’s political proxies to power was marred by complaints of cheating and intimidation, as well as the exclusion of Suu Kyi, who was released from years of house arrest just days later.

The NLD has complained that it was not allowed to use suitable venues for campaign rallies, while in the constituency where Suu Kyi is standing, the names of hundreds of dead people were found on the electoral roll.

They also complained that somebody catapulted a betel nut at the car of one of its candidates, although he was not injured.

President Thein Sein acknowledged in a recent speech that there had been “unnecessary errors” in ballot lists, but said the authorities were trying to ensure the by-elections would be free and fair.

Since taking office a year ago, Thein Sein has carried out reforms including releasing hundreds of political prisoners, easing media restrictions and welcoming the opposition back into mainstream politics.

Unlike in 2010, the government has invited foreign observers and journalists to witness a vote seen as a major test of its reform credentials.

Suu Kyi described the vote as “a step towards step one in democracy”.

She added: “Our opinion is that once we get into parliament we will be able to work towards genuine democratisation.”

A gruelling schedule of rallies and speeches has taken its toll on the health of the opposition leader, who cancelled campaigning this week after she fell ill and was put on a drip during a trip to the south.

“I’ve not been well recently and I’m feeling a little delicate so any difficult questions and I shall faint straight away,” she joked to the hundreds of journalists and diplomats who crammed into the grounds of the crumbling lakeside mansion where she was locked up by the junta until 2010.

[Rad]

Sen. Leahy: Supreme Court thinks corporations can be president

By Eric W. Dolan
Thursday, March 29, 2012 16:21 EDT

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said Thursday that corporations could be elected president according to the rationale of the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

“I remain troubled today that the Supreme Court extended to corporations the same First Amendment rights in the political process that are guaranteed by the Constitution to individual Americans,” he said at a hearing on the DISCLOSE Act of 2012. “Corporations are not the same as individual Americans. Corporations do not have the same rights, the same morals or the same interests. Corporations cannot vote in our democracy.”

According to the Supreme Court’s logic, we should elect corporations to public office, Leahy said.

“This country has elected General Eisenhower as president, shouldn’t we elected General Electric as president? We know we like to elect a lot of yahoos as vice president, why not elect Yahoo as a corporation as vice president. ”

“Vermonters and Americans across the country have long understood that corporations are not people in this political process,” he continued. “Unfortunately, a very narrow majority on the Supreme Court apparently did not.”

The controversial Citizens United ruling struck down key provisions of the federal McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law and gave rise to super PACS, which have caused campaign spending by outside groups to skyrocket. Super PACs have also exploited a loophole that allows them to postpone the disclosure of their donors until after the elections they participate in.

The DISCLOSE Act of 2012 would require any organization that spends 10,000 or more during an election cycle to file a report with the Federal Election Commission within 24 hours. It would also require the head of any organization that puts out a political ad on TV or radio to state that he or she approves the message, similar to what candidates must do now.

The DISCLOSE Act of 2010 was blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

[Rad]

Myanmar opposition says Suu Kyi wins parliamentary seat

By Agence France-Presse
Sunday, April 1, 2012 8:23 EDT

Myanmar’s opposition claimed a historic victory Sunday for pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in her bid for a seat in parliament, sparking scenes of jubilation among crowds of supporters.

Hundreds of people cheered as a giant screen outside National League for Democracy (NLD) party headquarters in Yangon announced a big by-election win for Suu Kyi, who was locked up by the junta for most of the past 22 years.

The Nobel peace laureate took an estimated 82 percent of the vote in Kawhmu constituency, said NLD senior member Tin Oo, based on the party’s own unofficial tally. Official results were expected within a week.

The party also claimed it had won at least 10 of the other 45 seats at stake in the vote, which cannot threaten the army-backed ruling party’s majority.

“We are so happy and waiting for the other results,” said NLD senior member Mwint Mwint Win.

Observers believe Myanmar’s new quasi-civilian government wants Suu Kyi to win a place in parliament to burnish its reform credentials and smooth the way for an easing of Western sanctions.

Many of her supporters had earlier waited for hours in searing heat to catch a glimpse of the 66-year-old, who was running for political office for the first time.

In rural villages dotted between parched fields, people stood in front of their thatched bamboo homes and waved enthusiastically as Suu Kyi’s convoy snaked past, whipping up thick clouds of dust.

A crowd of supporters and journalists mobbed her as she visited a polling station in rural Kawhmu, where her main rival was a former military doctor with the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party.

Voters, many in traditional ethnic Karen dress, queued patiently in the heat to cast their votes. In stark contrast to life under the junta, many openly expressed their support and affection for “The Lady”.

“There’s only been one person for us for 20 years,” said Tin Zaw Win.

“We believe in her and want to vote for her. Almost my whole village will vote for Aunt Suu.”

Some people complained that their names were missing from the voter lists, although it was unclear how many were affected.

“I want to vote for Mother Suu but they haven’t given me my ballot paper so I’m here to demand it,” Zin Min Soe told AFP at a polling station.

“They can’t just lose my vote,” he added.

The polls were also marred somewhat by allegations of ballot-paper irregularities, notably that wax had been put over the check box for the NLD that could be rubbed off later to cancel the vote.

It wasn’t immediately clear how widespread irregularities were.

“This is happening around the country,” NLD spokesman Nyan Win told AFP. “I have sent a complaint letter to the union election commission.”

In the run-up to the vote, the party decried alleged intimidation of candidates and other irregularities.

Suu Kyi said on Friday that the vote could not be considered “a genuinely free and fair election” but stopped short of announcing a boycott.

A 2010 general election, won by the military’s political proxies, was plagued by complaints of cheating and the exclusion of Suu Kyi, who was released from seven straight years of house arrest shortly afterwards.

The seats being contested Sunday were made vacant by MPs who joined the government.

The NLD swept to a landslide election victory in 1990, but the generals who ruled the country formerly known as Burma for decades until last year never recognised the result.

A gruelling schedule of rallies and speeches has taken its toll on the opposition leader, who cancelled campaigning in the week before the vote after she fell ill.

Suu Kyi appeared to have recovered her strength by election day, smiling broadly when she emerged just after dawn from the village house where she was staying in Kawhmu, about two hours’ drive from Yangon.

After almost half a century of military rule, the junta in March last year handed power to a new government led by President Thein Sein, one of a clutch of former generals who shed their uniforms to contest the 2010 election.

Since then, the regime has surprised even its critics with a string of reforms such as releasing hundreds of political prisoners.

But remaining political detainees, fighting between government troops and ethnic rebels, and alleged human rights abuses remain major concerns for Western nations which have imposed sanctions on the regime.

Unlike in 2010, the government allowed foreign observers and journalists to witness Sunday’s polls. More than six million people were eligible to vote.

[Rad]

Britain to monitor citizens’ text messages and emails

By Agence France-Presse
Sunday, April 1, 2012 3:17 EDT


The British government wants to expand its powers to monitor email exchanges and website visits, The Sunday Times newspaper reported.

Internet companies would be instructed to install hardware to allow the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) — Britain’s electronic “listening” agency” — to go through “on demand” every text message and email sent, websites accessed and phone calls made “in real time, the broadsheet said.

The plans are expected to be unveiled next month.

The Home Office said ministers were preparing to legislate “as soon as parliamentary time allows” but said the data to be monitored would not include content.

“It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public,” a spokesman said.

“We need to take action to maintain the continued availability of communications data as technology changes.

“Communications data includes time, duration and dialling numbers of a phone call, or an email address.

“It does not include the content of any phone call or email and it is not the intention of government to make changes to the existing legal basis for the interception of communications.”

An attempt to bring in similar measures was abandoned by the former Labour government in 2006 amid strong opposition.

However, ministers in the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government believe it is essential that the police and security services have access to such communications data in order to tackle terrorism and protect the public.

The plans would not allow GCHQ to access the content of communications without a warrant.

However, they would enable the agency to trace whom a group or individual had contacted, how often and for how long, the report said.

[Rad]

AI robot: How machine intelligence is evolving

By Marcus du Sautoy, The Observer
Sunday, April 1, 2012 7:01 EDT

No computer can yet pass the ‘Turing test’ and be taken as human. But, says Marcus du Sautoy, the hunt for artificial intelligence is moving in a different, exciting direction that involves creativity, language – and even jazz.

‘I propose to consider the question “Can machines think?”‘ Not my question but the opening of Alan Turing’s seminal 1950 paper which is generally regarded as the catalyst for the modern quest to create artificial intelligence. His question was inspired by a book he had been given at the age of 10: Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know by Edwin Tenney Brewster. The book was packed with nuggets that fired the young Turing’s imagination including the following provocative statement:

“Of course the body is a machine. It is vastly complex, many times more complicated than any machine ever made with hands; but still after all a machine. It has been likened to a steam machine. But that was before we knew as much about the way it works as we know now. It really is a gas engine; like the engine of an automobile, a motor boat or a flying machine.”

If the body were a machine, Turing wondered: is it possible to artificially create such a contraption that could think like he did? This year is Turing’s centenary so would he be impressed or disappointed at the state of artificial intelligence? Do the extraordinary machines we’ve built since Turing’s paper get close to human intelligence? Can we bypass millions of years of evolution to create something to rival the power of the 1.5kg of grey matter contained between our ears? How do we actually quantify human intelligence to be able to say that we have succeeded in Turing’s dream? Or is the search to recreate “us” a red herring? Should we instead be looking to create a new sort of machine intelligence different from our own?

Last year saw one of the major landmarks on the way to creating artificial intelligence. Scientists at IBM programmed a computer called Watson to compete against the best the human race has to offer in one of America’s most successful game shows: Jeopardy! It might at first seem a trivial target to create a machine to compete in a general knowledge quiz. But answering questions such as: “William Wilkinson’s An account of the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia inspired this author’s most famous novel” requires a very sophisticated piece of programming that can return the answer quickly enough to beat your rival to the buzzer. This was in fact the final question in the face-off with the two all-time champions of the game show. With the answer “Who is Bram Stoker?” Watson claimed the Jeopardy! crown.

Watson is not IBM’s first winner. In 1997 IBM’s super computer Deep Blue defeated reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov. But competing at Jeopardy! is a very different test for a computer.

Playing chess requires a deep logical analysis of the possible moves that can be made next in the game. Winning at Jeopardy! is about understanding a question written in natural language and accessing quickly a huge database to select the most likely answer in as fast a time as possible. The two sorts of intelligence almost seem perpendicular to each other. The intelligence involved in playing chess feels like a vertical sort of intelligence, penetrating deeply into the logical consequences of the game, while Jeopardy! requires a horizontal thought process, thinking shallowly but expansively over a large data base.

The program at the heart of Watson’s operating system is particularly sophisticated because it learns from its mistakes. The algorithms that select the most likely answers are tweaked by Watson every time it gets an answer wrong so that next time it gets a similar question it has a better chance of getting it right. This idea of machine learning is a powerful new ingredient in artificial intelligence and is creating machines that are quickly doing things that the programmers hadn’t planned for.

Despite Watson’s win, it did make some very telling mistakes. In the category ‘US cities’ contestants were asked: “Its largest airport is named for a world war two hero; its second largest for a world war two battle.” The humans responded correctly with “Where is Chicago?” Watson went for Toronto, a city that isn’t even in the United States.

It’s this strange answer that gives away that it is a probably a machine rather than a person answering the question. Getting a machine to pass itself off as human was one of the key hurdles that Turing believed a machine would need to pass in order to successfully claim the realisation of artificial intelligence. With the creation of the Loebner prize in 1991, monetary prizes were offered for anyone who could create a chatbot that judges could not distinguish from the chat of a human being. Called the Turing test, many working in AI regard the challenge as something of a red herring. The Loebner prize, in their opinion, has distorted the quest and has proved a distraction from a more interesting goal: creating machine intelligence that is different from our own.

The AI community is beginning to question whether we should be so obsessed with recreating human intelligence. That intelligence is a product of millions of years of evolution and it is possible that it is something that will be very difficult to reverse engineer without going through a similar process. The emphasis is now shifting towards creating intelligence that is unique to the machine, intelligence that ultimately can be harnessed to amplify our very own unique intelligence.

Already the descendants of Deep Blue are performing tasks that no human brain could get anywhere near. Blue Gene can perform 360 trillion operations a second, which compares with the 3 billion instructions per second that an average desktop computer can perform. This extraordinary firepower is being used to simulate the behaviour of molecules at an atomic level to explore how materials age, how turbulence develops in liquids, even the way proteins fold in the body. Protein folding is thought to be crucial to a number of degenerative diseases so these computer simulations could have amazing medical benefits.

But isn’t this number-crunching rather than the emergence of a new intelligence? The machine is just performing tasks that have been programmed by the human brain. It may be able to completely outperform my brain in any computational activity but when I’m doing mathematics my brain is doing so much more than just computation. It is working subconsciously, making intuitive leaps. I’m using my imagination to create new pathways which often involve an aesthetic sensibility to arrive at a new mathematical discovery. It is this kind of activity that many of us feel is unique to the human mind and not reproducible by machines.

For me, a test of whether intelligence is beginning to emerge is when you seem to be getting more out than you put in. Machines are human creations yet when what they produce is beginning to surprise the creators then I think you’re getting something interesting emerging.

Exciting new research is currently exploring how creative machines can be in music and art. Stravinsky once wrote that he could only be creative by working within strict constraints: “My freedom consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.” By understanding the constraints that produce exciting music, computer engineers at Sony’s Computer Science Laboratory in Paris are beginning to produce machines that create new and unique forms of musical composition. One of the big successes has been to produce a machine that can do jazz improvisation live with human players. The result has surprised those who have trained for years to achieve such a facility.

Other projects have explored how creative machines can be at producing visual art. The Painting Fool is a computer program written by Simon Colton of Imperial College. Not everyone likes the art produced by the Painting Fool but it would be anaemic art if they did. What’s extraordinary is that the programmes in these machines are learning, and changing and evolving so that very soon the programmer no longer has a clear idea of how the results are being achieved and what it is likely to do next. It is this element of getting more out than you put in that represents something approaching emerging intelligence.

For me one of the most striking experiments in AI is the brainchild of the director of the Sony lab in Paris, Luc Steels. He has created machines that can evolve their own language. A population of 20 robots are first placed one by one in front of a mirror and they begin to explore the shapes they can make using their bodies in the mirror. Each time they make a shape they create a new word to denote the shape. For example the robot might choose to name the action of putting the left arm in a horizontal position. Each robot creates its own unique language for its own actions.

The really exciting part is when these robots begin to interact with each other. One robot chooses a word from its lexicon and asks another robot to perform the action corresponding to that word. Of course the likelihood is that the second robot hasn’t a clue. So it chooses one of its positions as a guess. If they’ve guessed correctly the first robot confirms this and if not shows the second robot the intended position.

The second robot might have given the action its own name, so it won’t yet abandon its choice, but it will update its dictionary to include the first robot’s word. As the interactions progress the robots weight their words according to how successful their communication has been, downgrading those words where the interaction failed. The extraordinary thing is that after a week of the robot group interacting with each other a common language tends to emerge. By continually updating and learning, the robots have evolved their own language. It is a language that turns out to be sophisticated enough to include words that represent the concept of “left” and “right”. These words evolve on top of the direct correspondence between word and body position. The fact that there is any convergence at all is exciting but the really striking fact for me is that these robots have a new language that they understand yet the researchers at the end of the week do not comprehend until they too have interacted and decoded the meaning of these new words.

Turing might be disappointed that in his centenary year there are no machines that can pass themselves off as humans but I think that he would be more excited by the new direction artificial intelligence has taken. The AI community is no longer obsessed with reproducing human intelligence, the product of millions of years of evolution, but rather in evolving something new and potentially much more exciting.

Marcus du Sautoy is Simonyi professor for the public understanding of science and a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford.

[Rad]

First evidence for string theory at the Large Hadron Collider

By Jon Butterworth, The Guardian
Sunday, April 1, 2012 3:30 EDT

A bug in the software used to model the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider could have been covering up evidence for extra space time dimensions.

Complex software models are used to understand the results from the Large Hadron Collider. These include simulations of the particle physics in the proton-proton collisions, as well as of the material and geometry of the detectors and the strength of the various magnetic fields. As more data are accumulated, the required precision of this software increases.

A recent review recommended that the number of decimal places used to represent numbers in the software should be increased. This means all mathematical constants such as e and pi, as well as physical constants and the measured dimensions of the detectors. So far, so routine. But when adding more precision to pi, a strange effect was noticed. The alignment of charged particle tracks across detector boundaries actually got worse when a more precise value was used. In addition, the agreement between simulation and data also got slightly worse.

This really should not happen – more precision should mean better alignment and better agreement.

Boring scientists say this is probably evidence that some physicists don’t know how to write proper code. However, string theorists have pointed out that a firm prediction of string theory is the existence of extra space-time dimensions. In a space which is curved into a higher dimension, the apparent value of pi can deviate from that seen in real life. And thus the LHC may have proved that they were right all along. More data are needed before we can be sure.

Less welcome news for CERN is that since they have been near to the beams for two years, the values of pi used in those parts of the ATLAS which were built in the UK are now hot, and therefore as of today will attract VAT.

[Rad]

Gulf’s dolphins pay heavy price for Deepwater Horizon oil spill

By Peter Beaumont, The Observer
Saturday, March 31, 2012 9:31 EDT

New studies show impact of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster on dolphins and other marine wildlife may be far worse than feared.

A new study of dolphins living close to the site of North America’s worst ever oil spill – the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe two years ago – has established serious health problems afflicting the marine mammals.

The report, commissioned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA], found that many of the 32 dolphins studied were underweight, anaemic and suffering from lung and liver disease, while nearly half had low levels of a hormone that helps the mammals deal with stress as well as regulating their metabolism and immune systems.

More than 200m gallons of crude oil flowed from the well after a series of explosions on 20 April 2010, which killed 11 workers. The spill contaminated the Gulf of Mexico and its coastline in what President Barack Obama called America’s worst environmental disaster.

The research follows the publication of several scientific studies into insect populations on the nearby Gulf coastline and into the health of deepwater coral populations, which all suggest that the environmental impact of the five-month long spill may have been far worse than previously appreciated.

Another study confirmed that zooplankton – the microscopic organisms at the bottom of the ocean food chain – had also been contaminated with oil. Indeed, photographs issued last month of wetland coastal areas show continued contamination, with some areas still devoid of vegetation.

The study of the dolphins in Barataria Bay, off the coast of Louisiana, followed two years in which the number of dead dolphins found stranded on the coast close to the spill had dramatically increased. Although all but one of the 32 dolphins were still alive when the study ended, lead researcher Lori Schwacke said survival prospects for many were grim, adding that the hormone deficiency – while not definitively linked to the oil spill – was “consistent with oil exposure to other mammals”.

Schwacke told a Colorado based-publication last week: “This was truly an unprecedented event – there was little existing data that would indicate what effects might be seen specifically in dolphins – or other cetaceans – exposed to oil for a prolonged period of time.”

The NOAA study has been reported at the same time as two other studies suggesting that the long-term environmental effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill may have been far more profound than previously thought.

A study of deep ocean corals seven miles from the spill source jointly funded by the NOAA and BP has found dead and dying corals coated “in brown gunk”. Deepwater corals are not usually affected in oil spills, but the depth and temperatures involved in the spill appear to have been responsible for creating plumes of oil particles deep under the ocean surface, which are blamed for the unprecedented damage.

Charles Fisher, one of the scientists who jointly described the impact as unprecedented, said he believed the colony had been contaminated by a plume from the ruptured well which would have affected other organisms. “The corals are long-living and don’t move. That is why we were able to identify the damage but you would have expected it to have had an impact on other larger animals that were exposed to it.”

Chemical analysis of oil found on the dying coral showed that it came from the Deepwater Horizon spill.

The latest surveys of the damage to the marine environment come amid continued legal wrangling between the US and BP over the bill for the clean-up. BP said the US government was withholding evidence that would show the oil spill from the well in the Gulf of Mexico was smaller than claimed. Last week BP, which has set aside $37bn (£23bn) to pay for costs associated with the disaster, went to court in Louisiana to demand access to thousands of documents that it says the Obama administration is suppressing.

The US government is still pursuing a case against BP despite a deal the company reached at the beginning of March with the largest group of private claimants. That $7.8bn deal, however, does not address “significant damages” to the environment after the spill for which BP has not admitted liability. And it has not only been the immediate marine environment that has been affected. A study of insect populations in the coastal marshes affected by the catastrophe has also identified significant impact.

Linda Hooper-Bui of Louisiana State University found that some kinds of insect and spider were far less numerous than before. “Every single time we go out there, the Pollyanna part of me thinks, ‘Now we’re going to measure recovery’,” she said. “Then I get out there and say: ‘Whaaat?’”

She had expected that one group of arthropods might be hit hard while others recovered, but her work, still incomplete, shows a large downturn among many kinds. “We never thought it would be this big, this widespread,” she said.

For its part BP has claimed in a recent statement that it has worked hard to fulfil its responsibility to clean up after the spill. “From the beginning, BP stepped up to meet our obligations to the communities in the Gulf Coast region, and we’ve worked hard to deliver on that commitment for nearly two years,” BP chief executive Bob Dudley declared recently.

[Rad]

Syria declares it has defeated revolt

By Agence France-Presse
Saturday, March 31, 2012 9:47 EDT

Syria’s regime declared on Saturday it has defeated those seeking to bring it down while reiterating support for a UN-Arab peace plan, as its troops reportedly shelled rebels in the city of Homs.

Foreign ministry spokesman Jihad Makdisi, cited by the official SANA news agency, also said Syrian troops would only draw back from urban areas once the security situation is stable.

The United Nations says more than 9,000 people have been killed in the crackdown by forces of President Bashar al-Assad on an Arab Spring-inspired uprising that began a year ago with pro-democracy protests.

“The battle to topple the state is over, and the battle to solidify stability… and move on towards a renewed Syria has begun,” Makdisi said in an interview originally carried on state television.

The spokesman said the Assad government’s focus was also to “rally visions behind the reform process” and “prevent those who seek to sabotage reform.”

Troops would only withdraw from residential zones once they were secure, Makdisi said, adding UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan acknowledged there were “illegitimate armed elements within the opposition”.

“The presence of the Syrian Arab army in Syrians cities is for defensive purposes (so) as to protect the civilians,” he said. “Once peace and security prevail, the army is to pull out.”

SANA said Makdisi made the appearance on television in a bid to explain to Syrians why the government had this week accepted Annan’s six-point peace plan.

Annan appealed for an immediate ceasefire on Friday, as monitors said at least 39 people — all but seven of them civilians — were killed in Syria as security forces sought to crush the revolt.

Shells rained down on the flashpoint central city of Homs on Friday, as thousands of people protested nationwide against what they regard as the inaction of Arab governments dealing with the crisis.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a child was killed on Saturday by rocket fire in the Bayada area of Homs, where troops fired shells at rebels in its Khaldiyeh district at the rate of one a minute.

The monitoring group also reported heavy fighting near Damascus and in the southern province of Daraa, cradle of the uprising, with at least seven people reported killed nationwide.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held talks on Saturday with Gulf Arab leaders aimed at putting pressure on Syria’s regime to stop its bloody crackdown.

Clinton’s talks in Riyadh came before a “Friends of Syria” meeting in Istanbul on Sunday which ministers from dozens of Arab and Western countries are due to attend.

But there are differences over how to help the Syrian people in their bid for democracy.

Saudi Arabia and its neighbour Qatar have called for arming the opposition, which includes the Free Syrian Army made up of Syrian military defectors.

Makdisi said the Istanbul gathering was not of Syria’s friends, “and its agenda does not include friendship towards Syria, but enmity.”

“It is a clear obstacle to Annan’s mission,” he added, urging the international community to help Syria, not exert pressure on it.

An Arab League summit in Baghdad this week rejected the option of arming any side, and urged all parties to engage in a “serious national dialogue.”

The Iraqi premier’s spokesman said on Saturday his country may not attend the Istanbul conference as it wants to maintain its ability to mediate.

“We want to maintain our mediation role, and the role of mediator sometimes requires not participating in this conference or that,” Ali Mussawi told AFP.

On Friday, Clinton discussed with Saudi leaders efforts to send more humanitarian aid into Syria, and support opposition efforts to present a united and inclusive political vision for the future.

They also discussed tightening US, European, Canadian, Arab and Turkish sanctions on Syria, a US State Department official said.

The United States and Turkey have agreed on the need to provide communications and other non-lethal aid to Syria’s opposition.

In Washington, the Treasury Department announced it was targeting Defence Minister Dawoud Rajiha as well as the army’s deputy chief of staff and the head of presidential security, in its latest round of sanctions against Damascus.

The United Nations is making plans for a Syria ceasefire observer mission if hostilities halt.

Syria has agreed to admit a UN team of experts to examine the conditions for deploying the mission, Makdisi said on Saturday.

A UN official in New York said a minimum of 250 observers would be needed if Damascus halted its offensive on protesters and agreed to the international force.

Annan’s peace plan calls for a commitment to stop all armed violence, a daily two-hour humanitarian ceasefire, media access to all areas affected by the fighting, an inclusive Syrian-led political process, a right to demonstrate, and release of arbitrarily detained people.

[Rad]

02 April 2012 - 06H06 

China's Tibetan herders face uncertain future

AFP - Tibetan herder Gatou used to live a nomadic life on the grasslands of the Tibetan plateau before he was rehoused under a controversial Chinese government scheme.

Now he inhabits one of scores of small brick houses that have sprung up in incongruously neat rows in the rugged and mountainous terrain of the Guoluo Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwest China.

"They are giving us houses for free, with electricity," Gatou, who like many Tibetans only goes by one name, told AFP at a prayer festival he has organised for his community, his brown eyes beaming from a dark tanned face.

"Most people welcome this. But they are also making people settle down in fixed homes, which does not conform with the traditional lives of herders."

China has invested billions of dollars into resettling Tibetan herders, who have for centuries led a nomadic life, moving regularly to seek fresh grazing for their animals.

Beijing says the policy is aimed at improving nomads' living standards, creating markets for their livestock and the traditional herbal medicines they gather and curbing rampant environmental degradation on the roof of the world.

But while some Tibetans welcome the changes, many worry about the disappearance of a lifestyle that has endured for hundreds of years, and see the resettlements as part of a broader erosion of Tibetan culture in China.

Kate Saunders, spokeswoman for the International Campaign for Tibet pressure group, told AFP the policy appeared to be aimed largely at bringing nomadic populations traditionally free of government interference under control.

"These policies give the authorities greater administrative control over people's movements and lifestyle," she said.

Herders also complain of being forced to sell their livestock, of unfulfilled government promises of jobs, schools and medical facilities, and of corruption in the settlement scheme.

"They promised me a job if I sold my herds and settled down," said a former nomad in his 40s who identified himself as Norbu.

"But I can only find seasonal work and I can never make enough money to support my family. I feel cheated," he told AFP.

The resettlements into exclusively Tibetan neighbourhoods are ostensibly voluntary, but activists say there is plenty of government pressure.

Simmering resentments have fed into rising tensions in China's Tibetan-inhabited areas, where anger at Beijing's rule has sparked a series of self-immolations by Tibetan Buddhists over the past year.

Stephanie Brigden, head of the rights group Free Tibet, has described the policy as "one of the greatest expulsions of a people from their land in history," and said there is no doubt it has fuelled the protests in Tibet.

It is hard to know exactly how many Tibetan herders have been resettled. The UN cited recent Chinese reports saying between 50 and 80 percent of the 2.25 million nomads on the Tibetan plateau were being "progressively relocated."

The UN Human Rights Council in January urged China to "suspend the non-voluntary resettlement of nomadic herders from their traditional lands."

China should "examine all available options, including recent strategies of sustainable management of marginal pastures," and allow herders more say in how they seek out their livelihoods, it said.

The United Nations says the settlement programme covers the Tibetan Autonomous Region and Tibetan-inhabited areas in Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu provinces, although policies differ widely from one area to another.

Gatou said those rehoused herders who have been able to keep their animals and still have access to grasslands were now enjoying better lives, although unemployment was turning some settlements into shanty towns.

"Things are changing quickly on the Tibetan plateau," Gatou told AFP as he fiddled with his mobile phone and looked out over a line of cars and motorbikes parked next to a quiet meadow below snow-capped peaks.

"Not even a decade ago, most people travelling in those cars would have been on horseback."

[Rad]

Polish PM Admits They Tortured Terror Suspects For US

By Susie Madrak

Via Juan Cole. As a result of a Polish newspaper article published in February, the Polish PM is admitting that his country's security forces helped torture al-Qaeda suspects for the U.S.:

    Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk is now more or less admitting what has long been suspected: The Bush administration established a secret CIA prison in Poland and had Polish security officials help torture al-Qaeda suspects there.

    These steps were unconstitutional in Poland on two grounds: first, high Polish officials surrendered sovereignty over Polish territory to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Second, torture is forbidden in Poland. In addition, it contravenes European Union conventions and treaties.Poland had only escaped the grip of the Soviet Union in 1989, and so its democracy was a fledgling one. For the Bush administration to seduce its high officials into committing torture risked permanently marring its politics and undermining that democracy. Polish human rights workers have been deeply critical of Soviet-era torture, and to be put in the position of having to acknowledge this practice in their own country weakens their moral standing and besmirches the name of those tortured in the Stalinist era. Waterboarding and extreme stress techniques are also illegal in US law and practice.

    One of the suspects tortured in Poland was Abu Zubayda, an addled safehouse keeper whom the Bush administration built up into a mythical ‘number three man in al-Qaeda.’ Abu Zubayda still suffers ill health and increased symptoms of mental illness as a result of the torture.Some detainees at Guantanamo are guilty of plotting or carrying out terrorist operations of some magnitude, and that George W. Bush should have transformed them into victims of torture is the most degrading thing he did to those killed on September 11. In other instances, the U.S. swept up a lot of innocents or petty criminals in its dragnet against al-Qaeda, and torturing them was not only useless and illegal, but actually a way to lose hearts and minds in the Muslim world and so was supremely self-defeating.

    President Barack Obama ordered, on coming into office, that waterboarding and other torture cease. He has, however, gone out of his way to block victims of torture from launching legal actions, and has run interference for guilty officials, ensuring that there is no accountability for the torture programs.

    Former Polish officials who allowed the torture on their soil, including the then head of Polish intelligence and the then prime minister and president, may be called to testify before the State Tribunal, Poland’s equivalent of the Supreme Court. The prime minister was Leszek Miller. The President of Poland at the time, Aleksander Kwasniewski, had not been told by his intelligence officials about the black site.

    But in 2003 when George W. Bush visited Warsaw, he thanked Kwasniewski so profusely and warmly for Poland’s help in the “war on terror” that the Polish leader became suspicious, since he hadn’t to his knowledge actually done much. He made inquiries, discovered the truth, and shut the prison down.This darkly comic anecdote demonstrates a number of important points. First, W. is thick as two blocks of wood. Second, he knew about the torture programs and about the farming out of torture to US allies, which is a punishable offense in US law. Third, the practice of torture, being illegal in Europe, impels intelligence agencies to go rogue and establish black cells inside themselves that can hide operations from the president and other civilian political leaders. (Allegedly PM Miller did know about the operation). This procedure, adopted under US pressure, profoundly undermined democracy and human rights in Poland.

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for more click this link: http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Sovietera_compound_in_Poland_was_site_0307.html

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[Rad]

Scientists find clue to human evolution’s burning question

By Alok Jha, The Guardian
Monday, April 2, 2012 21:32 EDT

The discovery in Africa of a one million year old fireplace may enable us to identify when humans first began using fire

Cooking is a universal in human culture. The mixing and heating of raw ingredients to make dinner is a fundamental part of our lives, one of the most noticeable things that separates us from even our closest animal cousins.

The advantage of this method of preparing food is clear: it makes food tastier, easier to digest and makes the extraction of energy from raw ingredients quicker and more efficient. All useful things if you want to power an over-sized, energy-hungry brain without having to spend all your time foraging and chewing food.

Richard Wrangham, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, has argued that the invention of cooking split the ancestors of humans from the evolutionary path that went on to include modern gorillas and chimpanzees. Cooking allowed our ancestors to develop bigger brains and, in his hypothesis, is the key reason modern humans emerged. The controlled use of fire, according to Wrangham, was a more important milestone in human evolution than the invention of agriculture or eating meat.

Critics of Wrangham’s “cooking hypothesis” have pointed to a lack of archaeological evidence. If our ancestors were cooking regularly, where are the fossilised fireplaces?

In an article, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists led by Francesco Berna of the University of Boston has found strong evidence of such a fireplace. They have uncovered evidence of burned bones and ashes of plant material created in controlled fires that were lit at least 1m years ago in southern Africa.

Until now, the oldest evidence for fire has been dated to around 800,000 years ago, based on evidence for charred wood and burned bones located at the Gesher Benot Ya’akov site in Israel, though it has not been determined whether these fires were controlled or accidental.

Berna’s team examined specimens of rocks inside the 140-metre-long Wonderwerk Cave in the northern Cape Province of South Africa. They found the burned material 30 metres inside the entrance to the cave, which makes it unlikely to be a result of natural causes.

“It’s 30 metres inside the cave, there weren’t any trees growing there, so it was unlikely there was any vegetation of wood or wood-like material that would have been there to burn on the spot – you can exclude local burning of material by natural causes,” said Prof Paul Goldberg of the University of Boston, an author on the study.

“These ashes are really quite delicate, so they can’t have been transported by wind or water, they would have never survived as intact pieces. It has to be something local, right there on the spot. I don’t think it’s been transported at all.”

Modern humans are biologically adapted to cooked foods, according to Wrangham, because cooking means that food is partly digested before we eat it. Cooked food freed humans from needing to spend half the day chewing tough raw food in the way most other modern primates do – compared to apes, modern humans have much shorter digestive systems and our jaws are much weaker.

According to Wrangham’s hypothesis, cooked foods allowed the evolution of our ancestor, Homo erectus, around 1.9m years ago, which had a brain 50% bigger than the preceding species of human, Homo habilis.

“It gave extra energy, used for evolutionary success; reduced feeding time, freeing men to hunt; lowered weaning time, creating bigger families; allowed brain size to increase; gave us our shortfaced, flat-bellied anatomy; enabled the sexual division of labour,” said Wrangham. “It was so important that it likely drove the evolution of our genus Homo. Basically, if the cooking hypothesis is right it turned us from advanced ape to early human.”

In their paper, Berna’s team do not speculate on exactly how the fire inside the Wonderwerk Cave might have been started, nor what the fire was used for or how often.

Goldberg said that the circumstantial evidence, however, points to a role for human ancestors. Near the burned material in the Wonderwerk Cave, for example, the researchers also found pot lids made from flakes of ironstone, a rock that exists in layers above the limestone cave.

“This had to have been brought into the cave, there’s no way for it to get in there any other way than humans,” said Goldberg. “When you put this together, the weight of the evidence is that how this is going to get into the cave is somebody brought it in. I can’t imagine antelope making fires – I’m trying to be facetious – or bringing in these blocks of bedrock that occur above the site. You can’t find another explanation – it doesn’t mean that’s the one – but it seems pretty reasonable.”

Berna and Goldberg used a technique borrowed from geologists – called soil micromorphology – to study paper-thin sections of their burned specimens. “We collect an intact block of material, something the size of a milk container where everything is preserved in its original shape,” said Goldberg. “We can pick out a block of this stuff … dry it, soak it in polyester or epoxy resin and turn it into a rock, essentially. Once we do that, we can slice it just like geologists do, mount it on a slide and then look at it under the microscope.”

Previous excavations of other sites in South Africa, such as at Swartkrans near Johannesburg, have burned material dated to 1.5m years ago, but the techniques used to study this and other old sites do not provide conclusive evidence that the burning occurred in controlled fires. Goldberg said that using soil micromorphology to test samples from these areas could help answer the long-standing questions of how long ago the ancestors of humans were using fire in a controlled way.

Goldberg added that the evidence from Wonderwerk Cave goes some way to supporting Wrangham’s cooking hypothesis. “To tell you the truth, I’ve heard Richard give several lectures on this topic but I’ve said [previously] there’s no archaeological evidence, so I dismissed it myself,” he said. “And here we are and we found this evidence. One of the reasons, perhaps, that ashes evidence of fire doesn’t show up [in other places] is that people aren’t using the right techniques and approaches.”

[Rad]

April 02, 2012 05:00 PM

France's Former Middle Class Citizens Are The New Working Poor, Reduced To Living In Campgrounds

By Susie Madrak

    It is perhaps not a coincidence that the austerity shock troops have imposed their will on most of the Western world, steadily driving down wages, shredding safety nets and producing a growing, more permanent class of the working poor. But let's look at the bright side — once people are desperate enough, we're competitive with the Third World!

    Europe’s long-running euro crisis may be cooling. But the economic distress it has left in its wake is pushing a rising tide of workers into precarious straits in France and across the European Union. Today, hundreds of thousands of people are living in campgrounds, vehicles and cheap hotel rooms. Millions more are sharing space with relatives, unable to afford the basic costs of living.

    These people are the extreme edge of Europe’s working poor: a growing slice of the population that is slipping through Europe’s long-vaunted social safety net. Many, particularly the young, are trapped in low-paying or temporary jobs that are replacing permanent ones destroyed in Europe’s economic downturn.

    Now, economists, European officials and social watchdog groups are warning that the situation is set to worsen. As European governments respond to the crisis by pushing for deep spending cuts to close budget gaps and greater flexibility in their work forces, “the population of working poor will explode,” said Jean-Paul Fitoussi, an economics professor at L’Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris.

    To most Europeans, and especially the French, it seems this should not be happening. With generous minimum wage laws and the world’s strongest welfare systems, Europeans are accustomed to thinking they are more protected from a phenomenon they associate with the United States and other laissez-faire economies.

    But the European welfare state, designed to ensure that those without jobs are provided with a basic income, access to health care and subsidized housing, is proving ill-prepared to deal with the steady increase in working people who do not make enough to get by.

    The trend is most alarming in hard-hit countries like Greece and Spain, but it is rising even in more prosperous nations like France and Germany.

[Rad]

Britain’s Cameron faces backlash over mass electronic surveillance plans

By Agence France-Presse

Monday, April 2, 2012 13:50 EDT

British Prime Minister David Cameron is facing a growing backlash from within his own party over plans to extend the government’s powers to monitor people’s email exchanges and website visits.

The measures would see Internet firms being instructed to install hardware enabling GCHQ — the government’s electronic “listening” agency — to examine “on demand” and in “real time” details of any phone call, text message or email, and any website visited.

A previous bid to introduce a similar law was dropped by Labour in 2006 amid fierce opposition from the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

The Home Office interior ministry argues the proposals, expected to be unveiled in next month’s Queen’s Speech, are “vital” to combat terrorism and organised crime.

It also stressed a warrant would be needed to access the content of the communications being monitored.

However, data showing the time, duration and phone numbers in a communication or email addresses could be accessed without a warrant.

The latest government plans have been opposed by rights groups and now a growing number of Tory MPs.

“It is not focusing on terrorists or on criminals. It is absolutely everybody. Historically governments have been kept out of our private lives,” Conservative former shadow interior minister David Davis told BBC radio.

“Our freedom and privacy has been protected by using the courts by saying ‘If you want to intercept, if you want to look at something, fine, if it is a terrorist or a criminal go and ask a magistrate and you’ll get your approval’.

“You shouldn’t go beyond that in a decent, civilised society but that is what is being proposed.”

Mark Field, a Conservative member of the the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, which oversees the work of the intelligence agencies, raised the likelihood of significant opposition from MPs over the measures.

“I would imagine… that they would be extremely concerned if this were to see the light of day in legislation in this entirely unvarnished way,” he told BBC radio.

“I think the notion of having a warrant and having this done through an open and transparent legal process is one that has worked well and I hope that it will work well in the future.”

Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil liberties group Liberty, denounced the move as “a pretty drastic step in a democracy.”

The Home Office said ministers were preparing to legislate “as soon as parliamentary time allows” but said the data to be monitored would not include content.

“It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public,” a spokesman said.

“We need to take action to maintain the continued availability of communications data as technology changes.

“Communications data includes time, duration and dialling numbers of a phone call, or an email address.

“It does not include the content of any phone call or email and it is not the intention of government to make changes to the existing legal basis for the interception of communications.”