Professor devises new form of solar cell
LEWISTON, Idaho – A University of Idaho professor is devising a new form of solar cell she says could lead to a breakthrough that would make solar energy commercially feasible.

Computer Detects Anger Before Fights Break Out
You can tell when you hear someone is really angry—and get out of the way. Now Sigard, a new software package developed by Sound Intelligence, can also detect verbal aggression with a high level of accuracy. Combined with closed circuit television systems, Sigard can quickly notify security personnel about loud, angry people in outdoor public spaces, public transportation, nightclubs and bars.

Spam Now Worse than Ever Before
A new report from e-mail vendor Postini indicates that spam — or unsolicited commercial e-mail — is worse than it has even been.

Phishing attacks now using phone calls
And consumers thought they were safe by not clicking on links in unsolicited e-mails. Now comes a new batch of phishing scams that rely on an old tool the phone to trick people into giving away their personal information.

Job Stress Fuels Disease
Studies have shown that workplace stress can lead to an increase in rates of heart disease, flu virus, metabolic syndrome and high blood pressure. One study found that stress can negate the heart-healthy aspects of a physically active job, leading to thicker arteries in physically active and stressed workers compared with active, non-stressed employees.

Using the Mind to Cure the Body
(HealthDay News) — The medical community traditionally has relied on potent drugs to relieve severe pain. But in a number of academic settings across the country, health-care practitioners are adding another therapeutic weapon to the mix — they’re helping patients harness the healing power of their own imaginations. The use of guided imagery, or mental images, to evoke physical benefits is perhaps the oldest form of therapy known to man. Today, academic researchers are studying guided imagery’s use as an adjunct to more traditional medical treatments.

Humpback whales have “human” brain cells: study
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Humpback whales have a type of brain cell seen only in humans, the great apes, and other cetaceans such as dolphins, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

Marine Life Leaped From Simple to Complex After Greatest Mass Extinction
New research suggests that the “great dying” 251 million years ago was followed by an explosion of complexity in marine life that has persisted ever since.

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Quote of the Day

Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.
 – Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha

Can’t have a peace wreath, not even when the angels sing “peace on earth, good will toward men.”
Associated Press (thanks to AMERICAblog)

Woman faces fines for wreath peace sign

By ROBERT WELLER, Associated Press Writer
Sun Nov 26, 11:13 PM ET

A homeowners association in southwestern Colorado has threatened to fine a resident $25 a day until she removes a Christmas wreath with a peace sign that some say is an anti-Iraq war protest or a symbol of Satan.

Some residents who have complained have children serving in Iraq, said Bob Kearns, president of the Loma Linda Homeowners Association in Pagosa Springs. He said some residents have also believed it was a symbol of Satan. Three or four residents complained, he said.

“Somebody could put up signs that say drop bombs on Iraq. If you let one go up you have to let them all go up,” he said in a telephone interview Sunday.

Lisa Jensen said she wasn’t thinking of the war when she hung the wreath. She said, “Peace is way bigger than not being at war. This is a spiritual thing.”…

… a fly on the wall when Cheney asked the Saudis for help.  They know as well as we do that the Iraq fiasco is Cheney’s fault, but I can’t help but think he tried to blame Junior.
Associated Press

Insurgents gun down 21 Shiites in Iraq

By THOMAS WAGNER and QAIS Al-BASHIR, Associated Press Writers
Sat Nov 25, 1:31 PM ET

Gunmen broke into two Shiite homes and killed 21 men in front of their relatives in an Iraqi village, police said Saturday, as Vice President Dick Cheney sought Saudi Arabia’s help in calming Iraq after an especially violent week of sectarian violence. U.S. and Iraqi forces also killed 58 insurgents during fighting north of the capital, they said.

Baghdad remained under a 24-hour curfew two days after suspected Sunni insurgents killed 215 people in Baghdad’s main Shiite district with a combination of bombs and mortars.

Another 87 people were killed or found dead in sectarian violence across Iraq on Friday. The chaos cast a shadow over the summit next week between Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and President Bush in Amman, Jordan.

Politicians loyal to the radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have threatened to boycott parliament and the Cabinet if al-Maliki goes ahead with the meeting. The political bloc, known as Sadrists, is a mainstay of support for al-Maliki…

The New York Times

U.S. Finds Iraq Insurgency Has Funds to Sustain Itself

By JOHN F. BURNS and KIRK SEMPLE
Published: November 26, 2006

BAGHDAD, Nov. 25 — The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.

The report, obtained by The New York Times, estimates that groups responsible for many insurgent and terrorist attacks are raising $70 million to $200 million a year from illegal activities. It says $25 million to $100 million of that comes from oil smuggling and other criminal activity involving the state-owned oil industry, aided by “corrupt and complicit” Iraqi officials.

As much as $36 million a year comes from ransoms paid for hundreds of kidnap victims, the report says. It estimates that unnamed foreign governments — previously identified by American officials as including France and Italy — paid $30 million in ransom last year.

A copy of the seven-page report was made available to The Times by American officials who said the findings could improve understanding of the challenges the United States faces in Iraq…

[And a good thing, too, because we can be sure the Bush administration will never give us this kind of information.—Caro]

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All Hat No Cattle

Associated Press

Britain may start pulling out of Iraq

By JENNIFER QUINN, Associated Press Writer
Mon Nov 27, 8:30 AM ET

Britain said Monday it expects to withdraw thousands of its 7,000 military personnel from Iraq by the end of next year, while Poland and Italy announced the impending withdrawal of their remaining troops.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski said his country, a U.S. ally in Iraq and Afghanistan, would pull its remaining 900 soldiers out of Iraq by the end of 2007. And Italian Premier Romano Prodi said the last of Italy’s soldiers in Iraq — some 60-70 troops — will return home this week, ending the Italian contingent’s presence in the south of the country after more than three years…

Reuters

Rumsfeld okayed abuses says former U.S. general

Sat Nov 25, 11:45 AM ET

Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the prison’s former U.S. commander said in an interview on Saturday.

Former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski told Spain’s El Pais newspaper she had seen a letter apparently signed by Rumsfeld which allowed civilian contractors to use techniques such as sleep deprivation during interrogation.

Karpinski, who ran the prison until early 2004, said she saw a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld detailing the use of harsh interrogation methods.

“The handwritten signature was above his printed name and in the same handwriting in the margin was written: “Make sure this is accomplished,”" she told Saturday’s El Pais.

“The methods consisted of making prisoners stand for long periods, sleep deprivation … playing music at full volume, having to sit in uncomfortably … Rumsfeld authorized these specific techniques.”

The Geneva Convention says prisoners of war should suffer “no physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion” to secure information…

Associated Press

Waxman has Bush administration in sights

By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer
Sat Nov 25, 2:12 PM ET

The lawmaker poised to cause the Bush administration’s biggest headaches when Democrats take control of Congress may just be a grocer’s son from Watts who’s hardly a household name off Capitol Hill.

Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record) has spent the last six years waging a guerrilla campaign against the White House and its corporate allies, launching searing investigations into everything from military contracts to Medicare prices from his perch on the Government Reform Committee.

In January, Waxman becomes committee chairman — and thus the lead congressional hound of an administration many Democrats feel has blundered badly as it expanded the power of the executive branch.

Waxman’s biggest challenge as he mulls what to probe?

“The most difficult thing will be to pick and choose,” he said.

The choices he makes could help define Bush’s legacy…

The Radical Fringe

The New York Times

In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning

By BEN STEIN
Published: November 26, 2006

NOT long ago, I had the pleasure of a lengthy meeting with one of the smartest men on the planet, Warren E. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, in his unpretentious offices in Omaha. We talked of many things that, I hope, will inspire me for years to come. But one of the main subjects was taxes. Mr. Buffett, who probably does not feel sick when he sees his MasterCard bill in his mailbox the way I do, is at least as exercised about the tax system as I am.

Put simply, the rich pay a lot of taxes as a total percentage of taxes collected, but they don’t pay a lot of taxes as a percentage of what they can afford to pay, or as a percentage of what the government needs to close the deficit gap.

Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.

It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”

Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

This conversation keeps coming back to mind because, in the last couple of weeks, I have been on one television panel after another, talking about how questionable it is that the country is enjoying what economists call full employment while we are still running a federal budget deficit of roughly $434 billion for fiscal 2006 (not counting off-budget items like Social Security) and economists forecast that it will grow to $567 billion in fiscal 2010…

[Buffet’s low tax rate is especially galling when you consider that he receives the same individual benefits from government that his employees receive, but for every one of his billions of dollars in investments, he receives huge benefits from the existence of fire and police protection, courts, highways, public education for employees of the companies he owns, not to mention the federal military keeping his companies and their properties from being stolen by foreign governments.—Caro]

The New York Times

Here Come the Economic Populists

By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: November 26, 2006

FOR years, the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, exercising a lock on the party’s economic policies, argued that the economy could achieve sustained growth only if markets were allowed to operate unfettered and globally.

Overcoming protests from labor unions, a traditional constituency, the Clinton administration vigorously supported free trade agreements like Nafta and agreed to China’s admission into the World Trade Organization. If there was damage to workers, then the Clinton camp proposed dealing with it after it occurred — through wage insurance, for example, or worker retraining and other safety-net measures.

This approach coincided with a period of economic prosperity, low unemployment and falling deficits. Over time, this combination — called Rubinomics after the Clinton administration’s Treasury secretary, Robert E. Rubin — became the Democratic establishment’s accepted model for the future.

Not anymore. With the Democrats having won a majority in Congress, and disquiet over globalization growing, a party faction that has been powerless — the economic populists — is emerging and strongly promoting an alternative to Rubinomics.

The populists argue that the national income has flowed disproportionately into corporate coffers and the nation’s wealthiest households, and that the imbalance has grown worse in recent years. They want to rethink America’s role in the global economy. They would intervene in markets and regulate them much more than the Rubinites would. For a start, they would declare a moratorium on new trade agreements until clauses were included that would, for example, restrict layoffs and protect incomes.

“We are at a point where the Reagan era might finally be over, including the eight years of Bill Clinton,” said Jeff Faux, a fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research group partly financed by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “The historic juncture here is whether the Democrats can come up with policies that get to the level of the problem.”…

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… even the playing field when it comes to foreign trade.
The Observer, U.K.

US dollar ‘will keep falling’

Heather Stewart
Sunday November 26, 2006

The US dollar has reached a ‘tipping point’ as foreign exchange markets wake up to the threat that the Federal Reserve will have to slash interest rates in the new year to stave off recession, analysts say. After a sharp sell-off on Friday took the greenback to 18-month lows against the euro, and pushed the pound to $1.93, economists warned that there was worse to come for the US currency.

‘We are just at the start of what we think will be a downtrend for the dollar – a tipping-point has probably been reached,’ said Tim Fox, currency strategist at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, who expects sterling to hit $2 within the next three months…

Ted Rall, Universal Press Syndicate

… for Social Security, this kind of thing will become a regular and frequent occurrence.
Forbes

A Billion-Dollar Retirement Rip-Off
Neil Weinberg, 11.27.06, 6:00 AM ET

In a move that could have far-reaching consequences for a $140 billion industry, the Orange County, Fla., Sheriff’s Office has filed a class action charging units of Nationwide Financial Services with receiving illegal kickbacks from fund companies whose products it included in public employee retirement plans…

The suit involves so-called 457 retirement savings plans, which are a public-sector equivalent of the 401(k). The 457 market, with $143 billion in assets, is dominated by variable annuities, which are bundles of mutual funds or separately managed accounts bundled into life insurance policies by Nationwide and other vendors. Variable annuities have been widely criticized as poorly disclosing what are sometimes excessive fees.

The Orange County suit claims that over the past decade and a half, Nationwide received kickbacks from the firms whose funds it included as investment options based on a percentage of plan assets gathered. Insurers refer to the payments as revenue sharing. To critics, they smack of pay-for-play. In the Orange County Sheriffs’ case, Nationwide’s fees were frequently equal to 2% to 3% of assets annually. The plan recently switched to a Vanguard-based plan that cut fees by roughly two-thirds.

“Unless these payments Nationwide received were specifically agreed to in the variable annuity contract, which they weren’t, they’re not allowed,” says Roger Mandel, an attorney with Stanley, Mandel & Iola who is representing the plaintiffs. “Fiduciaries aren’t supposed to be doing side deals.”…

Associated Press, posted at the Washington Post

Court Rejects Maine School Vouchers Case

By PETE YOST
The Associated Press
Monday, November 27, 2006; 10:41 AM

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday refused to take up the issue of school choice in Maine, where a state law bars the use of public funds to send students to private religious schools.

The case could have provided a platform for a court battle over school choice and the separation of church and state…

… with any “Harry and Louise” commercials this time.
The American Prospect

KONDRACKE VS. THE FACTS. I’m not exactly going to stun anyone by suggesting that Mort Kondracke doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but this is rather offensive:

The reason that V.A. prices are lower is, it’s basically a socialized medical system. You go to a V.A. doctor, you go to a V.A. hospital, you go to a V.A. pharmacy and the V.A. pharmacies only have 25 percent of the drugs that seniors actually use all the time. So, you know, it doesn’t work…

The VA, just like the Medicare presciription drug plans, uses a formulary of drugs on which they negotiate discounts. That formulary contains drugs for every condition, but mostly eschews the copycats and useless medications that clutter up the market. Your pharmacy, remarkably enough, does the same thing. Now, VA users still have coverage for drugs off the formulary, they just don’t get the bargained discounts on them. And here’s the kicker: The VA has the best outcomes, for the lowest cost…

in 2003, The New England Journal of Medicine found the “socialized” VA better on all 11 metrics of care than fee-for-service Medicare. The Annal of Internal Medicine found they surpass the commercial managed-care systems on all seven metrics of care for diabates patients. The National Committee for Quality Assurance, the gold-standard, found the VA the best health system in the country, beating out such star performers as John Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic. And an astounding 81% of Vets approve of their care, higher than Medicare, Medicaid, or the private sector.

But Kondracke doesn’t know any of that. Or if he does, he’s not telling. And in doing, he’s breaking trust with and misinforming his audience. What conservatives literally cannot get around — and so must ignore — is that the single best health system in the country today is the socialized one. But inconvenient as it is for their ideology, what’s all the more inconvenient is that the pundits Americans entrust to know about and inform them of these things are failing to do so.

Posted by Ezra Klein on November 27, 2006

LifeNews.com

Iowa Planned Parenthood Under Fire for Morning After Pill Giveaway

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
November 23, 2006

Des Moines, IA (LifeNews.com) — Planned Parenthood of Iowa is coming under fire from pro-life advocates for organizing a day next month where it will give away the morning after pill to anyone who comes to its facilities. The abortion business will make the Plan B drug, which normally ranges in cost from $30-$40, available to anyone for free.

Pro-life advocates said Iowa Planned Parenthood is empowering rapists to force the women they sexually abuse to use the drug so they can cover up their crimes.

“I think the fact they are handing this out to men is outrageous,” Rachel Cunningham of the Iowa Family Policy Center told the Des Moines Register newspaper…

… want it to be.
Unfairly Balanced

The New York Times

Experts Concerned as Ballot Problems Persist

By IAN URBINA and CHRISTOPHER DREW
Published: November 26, 2006

After six years of technological research, more than $4 billion spent by Washington on new machinery and a widespread overhaul of the nation’s voting system, this month’s midterm election revealed that the country is still far from able to ensure that every vote counts.

Tens of thousands of voters, scattered across more than 25 states, encountered serious problems at the polls, including failures in sophisticated new voting machines and confusion over new identification rules, according to interviews with election experts and officials…

Voting experts say it is impossible to say how many votes were not counted that should have been. But in Florida alone, the discrepancies reported across Sarasota County and three others amount to more than 60,000 votes. In Colorado, as many as 20,000 people gave up trying to vote, election officials say, as new online systems for verifying voter registrations crashed repeatedly. And in Arkansas, election officials tallied votes three times in one county, and each time the number of ballots cast changed by more than 30,000…

Accusations of missing ballots and vote stuffing were not uncommon with mechanical voting machines. But election experts say that with electronic voting machines, the potential consequences of misdeeds or errors are of a greater magnitude. A single software error can affect thousands of votes, especially with machines that keep no paper record.

There were a few signs of progress this month…