Recent Searches ekzekutohet bisnesmeni illustrators women illustrations formula 1 f1 floatplane breast expansion videos girls shaking ass sexy dance giant bar-tailed godwit panty tease cherokee d ass angelicarj teen pusy Mif sissy horse Besir begic rozafa live skizzenblog claus ast biceps girls Stripping girl aconite aconitum littonia sexy bootys acv300 morot choke strangled tabbit Wispa Gold m daud kilau Vannessa hudgems Vanessa huggens tonujames
InstantMash T-Shirt
Advertise Here Free
|
InstantMash news
Top-ranked Jayhawks draws top overall NCAA seed - SI.com
On March 15, 2010 | | New York Times (blog)Top-ranked Jayhawks draws top overall NCAA seedSI.comLAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) -Look who's lurking deep in the Midwest bracket where Kansas proudly sits as overall No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. It's none other than Tennessee and Oklahoma State - the teams who account for the "2'' in that glittering 32-2 ...[16] LehighWashington PostFew surprises in seeds as NCAA bracket announcedReutersNCAA is determined to bust its perfect bracketKansas City Starmsnbc.com -Chicago Sun-Times -Chicago Tribuneall 1,154 news articles »
|
| Scientists identify genes for codeine and morphine
On March 15, 2010 | | Discovery raises possibility of manufacturing painkillers more cheaply using vats of microbes rather than fields of flowersScientists have identified the two genes in opium poppies which are used to make codeine and morphine, two of the most important painkillers in a doctor's armoury.The discovery opens the door to alternative ways of making the drugs which do not involve giving over vast areas of farmland to growing the flowers. One hope is to transfer the genes into microbes, which could be grown in vats and provide huge quantities of the drugs at a fraction of the cost of farming and processing the plants.Researchers said the findings could lead to the creation of strains of opium poppies that cannot make morphine, the opiate chemical turned into heroin and exported from Afghanistan and other countries for illicit use.More than 2,500 hectares of British fields have been turned into opium poppy farms to meet NHS demands for morphine, a potent painkiller that was first isolated in 1806. The flower variety, Papaver somniferum, has been grown commercially in the UK since 2002 and differs from the common red flower, which does not contain morphine.Pharmaceutical companies extract the drugs by processing seed pods stripped from the flowers, producing an annual national yield of codeine and morphine of 100 tonnes. Some 27m pills containing codeine are sold over the counter every year in a painkiller market worth £500m.A team led by Peter Facchini at the University of Calgary, in Canada, identified the two genes used to make codeine and morphine from out of 23,000 in the opium poppy. The finding, reported in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, ends a 50-year quest."The evolution of these two genes in a single plant species has had such a huge impact on humanity over the past several thousand years," said Facchini. "Our discovery allows this unique genetic power to be harnessed."Microbes are already used by the medical industry to mass produce synthetic insulin for diabetics and steroids for treating rheumatoid arthritis.Last year, Tasmania's attorney-general, Lara Giddings, raised concerns over the impact of opium poppy farms on wildlife. Farmers in the country, the world's largest producer of legal opium, reported that wallabies had been hopping around in circles after eating the plants.In 2008, the European Union's drug agency warned that Britain faced a heroin crisis following a record harvest of poppies in Afghanistan, which accounts for 90% of the world's illicit opium. By blocking one of the genes, scientists said they could create a strain of poppies that produce codeine but do not go on to convert this into morphine, the source of heroin.This would "allow the direct recovery of codeine from the plant and prevent the formation of morphine, which would preclude the illicit synthesis of heroin," the scientists write in the journal.GeneticsMedical researchDrugsPharmaceuticals industryIan Sampleguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
|
| | | Rob: Ad's not that Fab yet
On March 15, 2010 | | ADAM JOHNSON had his World Cup chances written off - despite his brilliant goal yesterday
|
| In a democracy, science has to speak up
On March 15, 2010 | | Britain must celebrate its scientists, because if the voters do, then so will the politiciansNational Science and Engineering Week – running now with 2,000-plus exhibitions, lectures, open days and debates for an expected audience of 1.5 million – began as a whistle in the dark. Back in 1994, the science minister, William Waldegrave, secured a derisory £100,000 for the first one, and it seemed like a gimmick.The charge of cynicism was unfair: Waldegrave was that rare thing, a minister with a prior and genuine interest in science. But the gesture came near the end of a long period of devastation of an intellectual tradition that had delivered Newton, Faraday, Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, Rutherford and one of the unsung giants of the 20th century, Paul Dirac. In 15 years of Conservative government, ambitious projects had been abandoned, long-established research teams broken up, laboratories closed, universities starved and institutions privatised. The asset-stripping continued for another three years and, by 1997, British science had a stagnant and impoverished culture, creaking equipment and demoralised personnel.Paradoxically, it also had a lively national festival of science, engineering and technology, and a separate, slightly later funfair in Edinburgh, both of which attracted crowds of buzzing schoolchildren and delighted adults. The science community took Waldegrave's crust not as a sop but a challenge, and began to campaign for the re-election of reason and curiosity to the national debate. Thatcherite logic had argued that, if the economy really needed research, the market would provide it. No such thing happened. France, Germany, Japan and the US went on increasing investment in R&D while Britain became the place for merchant bankers and estate agents. But a freshly politicised community had by then understood that, in a democracy, science had to speak up, and so – at their successive jamborees – scientists did just that. They spelled out how information technology was forging a society in which knowledge was the real capital, and economic growth the interest that it accrued.Here we go again. Last week the Royal Society reminded us that, while British science again faces cuts, France, Germany and the US are spending more than ever. Meanwhile, the inventor James Dyson urged the Tories not to cut the tax credits that support R&D. Peter Mandelson showed some sign of listening in an interview at the weekend, but that anyone should even need to make the argument shows how quickly forgotten have been the lessons of the past 30 years. Instead of paying university bosses the super-salaries we report on today, Britain must celebrate its scientists, because if the voters do, then so, eventually, will the politicians. We need our science festivals more than ever.Research and developmentResearch fundingResearchguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
|
| John Simpson: 'I'm very pessimistic about the future of the BBC'
On March 15, 2010 | | The BBC world affairs editor on how Rupert Murdoch has ruined British life, the time he 'liberated' Kabul and his passion for the dangers of frontline reportingThe BBC is very jumpy these days, and usually when you interview one of their bigwigs they insist on a PR person sitting in – to make sure nothing controversial gets said. But John Simpson, the corporation's grandly titled world affairs editor, is such a bigwig that on this occasion it is he who has done the insisting. He makes it clear to me when we meet at his agent's offices in Chelsea that he didn't have to bring the PR along – he is a freelance and not subject to staff rules – but he wanted to because he has no intention of holding back and he wants the Beeb to know exactly what he said.We are meeting to discuss his new book, Unreliable Sources, an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) 600-page history of the 20th century, as seen through the eyes of the British media. Everything from the Boer war to the Iraq war, via the Somme, Hitler and Suez, with a few brave and reliable reporters mentioned in dispatches amid a worrying number of egoists, charlatans and fantasists. But before we talk about the book, he wants to get something off his chest. "There are all sorts of things that have happened in journalism and in British national life which are really quite ugly," he says, almost before I've had time to ask a question, "and I would say having looked at it all that it dates from the arrival of Rupert Murdoch in British newspaper life. He's not totally a bad thing. If it weren't for him I think we would probably have three newspapers left – the Times would have vanished and I'm not sure about the Sunday Times – and I don't want to beat him around the head for everything. But I do think that he and the newspapers he's run have introduced an uglier side, an abusive side, into journalism and life in general in this country."He says this Murdochisation of national discourse, which was at its height in the UK with the Sun in the 80s, has now migrated to the US. "Murdoch encouraged an ugly tone, which he has now imported into the US and which we see every day on Fox News, with all its concomitant effects on American public life – that fierce hostility between right and left that never used to be there, not to anything remotely like the same extent."In truth, Simpson's charge is as much cultural as journalistic. He doesn't like the way in which debate is now conducted, hankers after the understated 50s Britain in which he grew up. "I watched something on the news yesterday – Nigel Farage from Ukip, abusing this poor, rather pathetic little Belgian guy, and I thought, 'I can't believe this is a British voice.' The British until relatively recently, well into my lifetime, were still known for their calm and their politeness and their cutting humour, and now we're known for our abuse. There has been a coarsening of our national life, in which the Sun and the Murdoch empire have played a very undistinguished part."This makes Simpson sound a bit of a fuddy-duddy, a grumpy old man, but his twinkling eyes and perpetual grin play against that stereotype. He is 65 but shows no sign of slowing down (he is off to Iraq again a few days after we meet), and says he plans to stay at the BBC – assuming they don't kick him out – until at least 2016, when he will have clocked up half a century with the corporation. He has a four-year-old son with his second wife, TV producer Dee Kruger, and says he will have to be a wage earner until he's 80 to see his son into adulthood."I've often said to myself that the day I wake up and think, 'Oh God, I've got to go to Baghdad and I really don't want to do it,' that's the day I'm going to jack it in." He doesn't anticipate that day coming any time soon. "I'm going to Baghdad on Sunday and I'm really looking forward to it. It's going to be quite nasty. We've got to do some things that you probably wouldn't want your nearest and dearest to do. But that's the price you pay for going to interesting places. I don't want to go to Baghdad and sit in the BBC bureau there, listening to people telling me stories about their days in the Marines and the SAS. I want to keep on – that awful expression – pushing the envelope."Part of the appeal of Simpson is that he still likes to don the flak jacket and dodge the bullets. He prefers as much as possible to experience life on the streets, doesn't want to be embedded. "It's not some kind of moral disapproval of the principle. I think embedding is very useful and helpful; it's just that I don't like it personally. I don't want to spend my whole time with people to whom I owe my safety, my protection, my food, my transport, and then be expected to be completely honest about them, because there's always that sense that you're betraying a trust. It's much better just to wander out and be on your own."A good principle, though it cost him the hearing in his left ear and almost cost him his life when he and his production team were hit by US friendly fire in northern Iraq in the war of 2003. "I lost the eardrum, and I've got this large lump of shrapnel in my arse," he says. "It tells me when it's going to rain. It's also a wonderful guide to the quality of metal-detection systems at airports. Mostly it doesn't ring, but when it does they check around your lower regions, a very strange look comes across their faces, and they wonder whether you've had some strange piercing somewhere."Simpson joined the BBC in 1966, was a reporter in the 70s, was briefly political editor in the early 80s (he hated the lobby system and makes sheep noises to describe the herd – or flock – mentality of many political journalists), had an equally brief stint reading the news at the time of the Falklands war, was diplomatic editor in the mid-80s, and became world affairs editor as part of the great Birtian revolution in 1988. How come he's stayed so long, albeit after 1988 in a freelance capacity that gives him an enviable degree of freedom? "It was always better than anything I thought I could do outside," he says, "and by better I'm not talking about money, because the money's never been any good at the BBC, unless you are director general or scream abuse on television and radio programmes. It's just that they've left me alone to be my own boss for such a long time now and they've treated me nicely."Mostly, anyway. He was sacked as presenter of the Nine O'Clock News in 1982 – he admits he wasn't much good at it – and put out to grass for a while. "The worst thing about that period was how other people didn't want to know me," he recalls. "It was very interesting but quite ugly; it was like being in Stalin's Kremlin circa 1936. You could see other people thought they might catch something from you, so they kept away. The first half of the 80s was a very difficult time for me."John Birt, the grandly titled new job and a string of remarkable reports – on the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the fall of communism (especially his bullet-dodging reports on the last days of the Ceausescu regime in Romania), and the first Gulf war – established his bulky frame and vivid, on-the-spot reportage in the popular consciousness and he's never looked back. "I had a string of amazing stories," he says. "The world changed and you couldn't fail."It's hard to divorce Simpson's criticism of the coarsening effect of Murdoch from the war between the BBC and News Corporation and his role as a defender of the reporting role of the BBC, which he feels will be undermined if funding is cut. "Murdoch and the Murdoch press stand to gain hugely from any damage that is done to the BBC," he says. "Yet the very people who ought to be most protective of the BBC, prime ministers for instance, can be its worst enemy. I've never in my long years at the BBC been so ashamed of a prime minister as when Tony Blair made some off-the-cuff and what he thought were off-the-record comments to Rupert Murdoch about how the BBC hated America. Whatever did he think – that Rupert Murdoch was a friend of his, who would spare his blushes? Of course Murdoch blurted it all out."Simpson fears the critics of the BBC are winning. "I'm very pessimistic about the future of the BBC," he says. "This is something I really disagree about with Mark Thompson. When I saw him recently we argued it out. He's very upbeat about the future of the BBC, not just for public consumption but also in private, but I'm not because I think it's an anomaly in today's world and the licence fee is under such an intense amount of pressure. I don't think British people understand what a huge voice the BBC now gives this country in the world. That lays it open to endless attacks, usually on this ideological basis that it's a tax, plus all the usual nonsense about how it's leftwing, or indeed rightwing if you listen to other voices. It all seems quite childish to me, but nevertheless those voices are louder than they've ever been in my life, and I've watched these things for 44 years." He likens those who make bellicose noises about the BBC – culture secretary Ben Bradshaw and his Conservative shadow Jeremy Hunt, for instance – to "mechanics going into a Rolls-Royce garage with a spanner and starting to lay about the bodywork".In Unreliable Sources, a recurrent theme is the past feebleness of the BBC. "Throughout its history I've been careful to note how timid it always was," says Simpson. "One of the things I'm most proud of during my time there is how it's thrown away the timidity. It hasn't thrown away the caution, and there are many times when I think the management is too cautious, but it doesn't genuflect before authority in the way that it used to."This all makes Simpson sound dourly earnest as well as grumpily middle-aged. He isn't really either of those things; you can sense his energy and good humour. It's more that he's a civilised, literate man – read his three volumes of journalistic memoirs and his book about his childhood – who feels that as a society we are losing our bearings and that we seem too willing to throw the BBC to the free-market wolves.The age of blogging and crowd-sourcing does not appeal to him. "I suppose I fear it," he says. "I despair, I really despair at times. You need to know nothing. All you need to have is a loud opinion. It's like a kind of bigger version of Hyde Park Corner on a Sunday morning. There's no check on anybody."In the introduction to Unreliable Sources, he describes writing the book as a "humbling experience". 'When I look back at the journalists who covered the second world war," he tells me, "I realise that nothing that I've done stands any kind of comparison with the things that [the BBC's] Richard Dimbleby or [the Daily Express's] Alan Moorehead did. They went right through the war and saw the whole thing."He's done pretty well with limited material, I suggest. It's not his fault that there hasn't been a major global conflagration on his watch. "It's a little bit like being a Chinese scholar in some unfavourable dynasty," he says. "You just sit and labour away writing the characters and hope that one day you might get something interesting to write about."Simpson is not usually seen as a modest man, and no doubt there is a considerable ego there. But he may not be quite the ogre he is painted. Much of the folklore relies on his claim to have liberated Kabul in 2001, but he says that was a joke. "I forgot that the British press has no sense of humour, no discernible sense of irony. It judges purely by what it reads in transcripts. I said on the Today programme, when the questioner asked who liberated Kabul given that the Taliban had fled even though the forces of the Northern Alliance hadn't gone in, 'I suppose it was the BBC,' and I laughed. But it wasn't very clever of me. Don't make jokes!"He was the model for David Bradburn, the monstrous "BBC chief foreign editor" in the comedy series Taking the Flak, shown last year on BBC2. The series was written and produced by Tira Shubart, an American television producer with whom Simpson lived for 10 years after the end of his first marriage. Was it her revenge? "Who can say? There were times when it felt like it. It's one of those things that ex-girlfriends do from time to time. I thought it was very amusing. The only thing that irritated me was having anybody who might in any way be me cheating on expenses or being mean to local staff, because I would think those two were the worst crimes you could commit."He may well be a bit of a monster – most journalists are crazed egoists, and you don't last as long as him as a foreign correspondent without exceedingly sharp elbows. But the monstrousness is rather endearing: he wants it all, to travel everywhere, to be first in to the danger zone, to consume the world. He is a brave reporter, a very good writer and an undoubted presence, a character in an increasingly characterless journalistic age. He was mocked for donning a burqa to get into Afghanistan in 2001, but wasn't that rather inspired, the sort of tactic the pressmen from the Beaverbrook Express of the 30s – whose brio he clearly admires – would have employed?'If there's anything in this book that I really wanted to say, it is that proper journalism isn't written sitting in offices at desks," he tells me. "The real quality comes from people who go out and find things and report on them." He says that if he was forced to choose between reporting in the early cold war part of his career, when the worst that might happen to you was being arrested by the KGB and kicked out of the country, and the much more dangerous later period of asymmetric warfare, terrorism and kidnapping, he would choose the latter. "I'd always want today, because it's much more complicated, much more interesting, much more difficult, and you've got to think about it more," he says. "You can't just drift into it."If his health holds up, he will go on and on. "It's being alive," he says of his need to report from far-flung, often dangerous places. "I'm a very supportive member of the Garrick [Club] and I love it very dearly. It used to have a big clutch of old correspondents, famous old journalists. They always used to sit in the same place and as you walked past you would hear wafted on the air the names of government ministers you hadn't thought of for 30 years. I remember once hearing somebody say Ray Gunter . . . 'When Ray Gunter was minister of Labour' . . . and I thought, 'That's a name that's been silent in the annals of history ever since he left office.' I don't want to be one of those people whose life in effect came to an end one day, and now all you can do is talk about the past."Unreliable Sources is published by Macmillan, price £20. To order a copy for £18, including free UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop, or call 0330 333 68467.BBCHistoryStephen Mossguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
|
| | Worldwide arms trade flourishing despite recession, report warns
On March 15, 2010 | | Average volume of sales increased by 22%, with South America and south-east Asia seeing the biggest risesThe worldwide arms race has accelerated, most dramatically in South America and south-east Asia, despite the economic and financial slump, according to a report published today.The average volume of arms sales increased by 22% over the past five years, compared to the previous five-year period, says the report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The last two of these years were marked by worldwide economic turbulence which has far from stabilised, yet the arms trade is booming, it finds.The report does not give the cost of the arms trade because most governments no longer release the figures. Britain stopped publishing the cost of its arms sales last year.The US remains the world's top arms exporter, accounting for 30% of the total, followed by Russia (23%), Germany (11%), and France (8%).Britain, with 4%, saw a fall in the volume of its exports, as the delivery of 72 of its Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft to Saudi Arabia was only just getting under way in the period covered by the report.Germany's arms exports have risen by more than 100%, mainly because of sales of armoured vehicles, says the report.Arms sales to South America rose by 150%, raising the spectre of an arms race in the region. Last year Venezuela received $2.2bn (£1.4bn) in credit from Russia for the purchase of air defence systems, artillery, armoured cars, and tanks.Mark Bromley, SIPRI researcher and Latin America expert, said: "We see evidence of competitive behaviour in arms acquisitions in South America. This clearly shows we need improved transparency and confidence-building measures to reduce tension in the region."In south-east Asia, arms sales to Indonesia and Malaysia increased significantly, while Singapore became the first country in the region to be among the world's top 10 arms importers, since the end of the Vietnam war.SIPRI Asia expert Siemon Wezeman said: "In 2009, Vietnam became the latest south-east Asian state to order long-range combat aircraft and submarines." He added: "The current wave of acquisitions could destabilise the region, jeopardising decades of peace."China was the world's biggest arms importer over the past five years, with 9% of the total, followed by India, South Korea, the UAE and Greece, traditionally a big weapons importer and now immersed in a serious economic crisis.Combat aircraft accounted for 39% of major US weapons sales over the past five years, and for 40% of Russian arms sales, according to today's report.The report also warns that deliveries of combat aircraft could fuel an arms race in the Middle East, north Africa, South America and south Asia. Meanwhile, Pakistan is importing the first batch of 300 combat aircraft from China and an early warning aircraft from Sweden.Arms tradeWeapons technologyGlobal recessionGlobal economyRichard Norton-Taylorguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
|
| China warns Google partners: Look for backup - CNET
On March 15, 2010 | | Portfolio.comChina warns Google partners: Look for backupCNETby Stephen Shankland The Chinese government has warned Google business partners to prepare for a day when they can't use Google services such as a search bar on their Web sites, according to a In a New York Times report Sunday. ...Google says China talks continue, but pullout signs growReutersGoogle to close its China Web site in weeks: WSJMarketWatchGoogle Clients Urged to Defect on Speculation of China PulloutBusinessWeekZDNet (blog) -Barron's (blog) -China Dailyall 102 news articles »
|
|
|
Popular New pictures Latest votes Latest reviews Latest items Don't miss these!
|
