Posted: 13 May 2014 03:02 PM PDT

Experts from the drinking water inspectorate found that cocaine use in Britain is now so high it has contaminated the drinking water supply, even after it has gone through intensive purification treatments, UK media reports.
Scientists found supplies of drinking water contained traces of benzoylecgonine, the metabolized form of the drug after it has been processed by the human body. Benzoylecgonine is the same compound used for urine-based tests for cocaine, the Sunday Times reports.
The findings are an eye-opening indication of how widely the drug is used in Britain.
“We have near the highest level of cocaine use in western Europe. It has also been getting cheaper and cheaper at the same time as its use has been going up,” Steve Rolles, from the drug policy think-tank Transform, told the Sunday Times.
Nearly 700,000 people aged 16-59 are estimated to take cocaine every year in Britain, and there are around 180,000 addicted users of crack cocaine, according to the charity DrugScope.
Health officials stressed that the amounts found in drinking water were very low and unlikely to represent a danger to the public, however.
A recent report from Public Health England found that quantitiess of cocaine at 4 nanograms per liter, around one-quarter of what was found before the water was treated.
“Estimated exposures for most of the detected compounds are at least thousands of times below doses seen to produce adverse effects in animals and hundreds of thousands below human therapeutic doses,” the report states.
Although cocaine use in Britain is among the highest in Europe, its use has actually decreased since the 2008 financial crisis and has been steadily falling among 16-24 year olds, who no longer see it as glamorous – largely because its widespread availability has reduced its subversive appeal.
But among older generations, it still retains its whiff of subversive decadence and glamour.
“It’s ridiculous, I’ve been at parties when there have been more people in the bathroom than outside it, yet this strange etiquette is still upheld. I think it’s partly about exclusion and inclusion – who’s in, who’s out, who’s cool and who’s not. It’s remarkably childish, but if you’re a middle-aged professional who doesn’t get out much, then that bathroom can seem like the hottest ticket in town,” Matthew, a 49-year-old corporate lawyer, told The Guardian.
Source

Posted: 13 May 2014 02:41 PM PDT

Kiev has summoned the Hungarian ambassador over remarks made by Prime Minister Viktor Orban about autonomy for Hungarians living in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry expressed concern about the Hungarian premier’s call for autonomy and dual citizenship of ethnic Hungarians living in the western Ukrainian province of Transcarpathia.
The ministry said Orban’s comments contradict Ukrainian laws.
The move came as residents in the two Ukrainian eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk took part in local referendums on their future status.
The Hungarian Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, said Orban’s remarks have been misinterpreted, adding that the country has always supported Ukraine’s policies.
On May 10, the Hungarian premier said ethnic Hungarians supported his policies to unite the nation “above the borders.”
“Hungarians living in the Carpathian basin are entitled to have dual citizenship, are entitled to community rights, and also autonomy,” Orban said.
Up to 200,000 ethnic Hungarians are currently living in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia region, which shares a border with Hungary.
Many Hungarians view the 1920 Treaty of Trianon as a national tragedy because it took away two-thirds of the country’s territory and left millions of ethnic Hungarians living in what are now Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine and Serbia.
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Posted: 13 May 2014 02:17 PM PDT

Stephen Hawking has shocked physicists by admitting ‘there are no black holes’.
In a paper published online, Professor Hawking instead argues there are ‘grey holes’.
‘The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes – in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity,’ he says in the paper, called Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting For Black Holes.
He says that the idea of an event horizon, from which light cannot escape, is flawed.
He suggests that instead light rays attempting to rush away from the black hole’s core will be held as though stuck on a treadmill and that they can slowly shrink by spewing out radiation.
Hawking told the journal Nature: ‘There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory. [But quantum theory] enables energy and information to escape from a black hole’.
A full explanation of the process, Hawking admits, would require a theory that successfully merges gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature.
However, that is a goal that has eluded physicists for nearly a century.
‘The correct treatment,’ Hawking told Nature, ‘remains a mystery.’
The professor’s grey hole theory would allow matter and energy to be held for a period of time before being released back into space.
Hawking’s latest work was prompted by a talk he gave via Skype to a meeting at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, in August 2013.
It tries to address what is known as the black-hole firewall paradox, which has puzzled scientists for almost two years.
It stems from a theory where scientists tried to imagine what would happen to an astronaut unlucky enough to fall into a black hole.
Black hole expert Don Page, of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, admits: ‘The picture Hawking gives sounds reasonable.’
But theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski of the Kavli Institute is sceptical and insists: ‘In Einstein’s gravity, the black-hole horizon is not so different from any other part of space.
‘We never see space-time fluctuate in our own neighbourhood: it is just too rare on large scales.’
Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and former student of Hawking’s, admits many physicists will find Hawking’s work “abhorrent”.
He says: “The idea that there are no points from which you cannot escape a black hole is in some ways an even more radical and problematic suggestion than the existence of firewalls.
‘But the fact that we’re still discussing such questions 40 years after Hawking’s first papers on black holes and information is testament to their enormous significance.’
Source

Posted: 13 May 2014 11:20 AM PDT

An upcoming expert-level meeting of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) in Geneva is to host a debate on killer robots.
The discussion is to be held between Prof. Noel Sharkey, co-founder of the Campaign Against Killer Robots and chairman of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, and Prof. Ronald Arkin from the Georgia Institute of Technology, a public research university in Atlanta, Georgia.
The meeting will produce a draft report for the annual CCW meeting to review in November.
“[It] may see nations renew the mandate to continue the experts’ discussions or move to a different phase of a more formal negotiating process,” reads a guide by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.
“Autonomous weapons systems cannot be guaranteed to predictably comply with international law,” Sharkey has said. “Nations aren’t talking to each other about this, which poses a big risk to humanity.”
Arkin has likewise expressed concerns that the robots could be rushed into battle prematurely. “I support a moratorium until that end is achieved, but I do not support a ban at this time,” he said.
He, however, has claimed the machines could help reduce non-combatant casualties and may be more effective at determining when not to engage with a target than humans are.
Source

Posted: 13 May 2014 06:08 AM PDT

Chinese researchers at the Applied Superconductivity Laboratory of Southwest Jiaotong University claim their fast transportation concept based on magnetic levitation (Maglev) technology could potentially be three times faster than an airplane.
Maglev technology was first proposed in the mid-20th century. Nowadays, the Shanghai Maglev Train can reach speeds of over 430 kilometers (260 miles) per hour and is the world’s fastest passenger-carrying train.
The “Super-Maglev” could, however, beat even that. Chinese researchers have been testing a concept train encapsulated in a vacuum tube, thus decreasing the speed limitations imposed by air resistance on regular Maglev trains.
Should the project be successful, the workable prototype will set the standard for the future evacuation tube transportation (ETT).
“ETT systems might allow HTS Maglev trains to attain speeds in a new order of magnitude, such as super-high 3,000 km (1,800 miles) per hour, which could be applied to some military or space launch systems,” Dr. Deng Zigang, who’s been developing the technology for years, told The Daily Mail.
At the moment, the testing laboratory looks like a toy train track with the vehicle running inside a 6-meter diameter vacuum loop, reaching a speed of about 48 kilometers per hour. But the speed is only limited by the small radius of the ring, Dr. Deng Zigang says.
He says that if the speed exceeds 400 km per hour, more than 83 per cent of traction energy is wastefully dissipated in air resistance. But with a vacuum tube design, that speed could be surpassed in the future.
The researcher doesn’t limit his innovation to land-based transportation only, and hopes that similar vacuum tube technology would be used to launch space vehicles, or enable super-high speeds for military weapons.
Chinese authorities, on the other hand, could utilize the novelty in their grand scheme to link the country with Russia, Canada and the United States with a high-speed railway.
Source

Posted: 12 May 2014 03:53 PM PDT

About 400 elite mercenaries from the notorious US private security firm Academi (formerly Blackwater) are taking part in the Ukrainian military operation against anti-government protesters in southeastern regions of the country, German media reports.
The Bild am Sonntag newspaper, citing a source in intelligence circles, wrote Sunday that Academi employees are involved in the Kiev military crackdown on pro-autonomy activists in near the town of Slavyansk, in the Donetsk region.
On April 29, German Intelligence Service (BND) informed Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government about the mercenaries’ participation in the operation, the paper said, RIA Novosti reported. It is not clear who commands the private military contractors and pays for their services, however.
In March, media reports appeared suggesting that the coup-imposed government in Kiev could have employed up to 300 mercenaries.That was before the new government launched a military operation against anti-Maidan activists, or “terrorists” as Kiev put it, in southeast Ukraine.
At the time, the Russian Foreign Ministry said then that reports claiming Kiev was planning to involve “involve staff from foreign military companies to ‘ensure the rule of law,’” could suggest that it wanted “to suppress civil protests and dissatisfaction.”
In particular, Greystone Limited, which is currently registered in Barbados and is a part of Academi Corporation, is a candidate for such a gendarme role. It is a similar and probably an affiliated structure of the Blackwater private army, whose staff have been accused of cruel and systematic violations of human rights in various trouble spots on many occasions.
“Among the candidates for the role of gendarme is the Barbados-registered company Greystone Limited, which is integrated with the Academi corporation,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “It is an analogue, and, probably and affiliated body of the Blackwater private army, whose employees have repeatedly been accused of committing grievous and systematic human rights abuses in different troubled regions.”
Allegations increased further after unverified videos appeared on YouTube of unidentified armed men in the streets of Donetsk, the capital of the country’s industrial and coalmining region. In those videos, onlookers can be heard shouting “Mercenaries!”“Blackwater!,” and “Who are you going to shoot at?”
Academi denied its involvement in Ukraine, claiming on its website that “rumors” were posted by “some irresponsible bloggers and online reporters.”
“Such unfounded statements combined with the lack of factual reporting to support them and the lack of context about the company, are nothing more than sensationalistic efforts to create hysteria and headlines in times of genuine crisis,” the US firm stated.
The American security company Blackwater gained worldwide notoriety for the substantial role it played in the Iraq war as a contractor for the US government. In recent years it has changed its name twice – in 2009 it was renamed Xe Services and in 2011 it got its current name, Academi.
The firm became infamous for the alleged September 16, 2007 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad. The attack, which saw 20 others wounded, was allegedly without justification and in violation of deadly-force rules that pertained to American security contractors in Iraq at the time. Between 2005 and September 2007, Blackwater security guards were involved in at least 195 shooting incidents in Iraq and fired first in 163 of those cases, a Congressional report said at the time.
Source

Posted: 12 May 2014 03:31 PM PDT

The most famous Michael Harari was a James Bond-style Mossad agent and gun-runner. However the Dr Michael Harari recently in the news is an Australian trained paediatrician (apparently no direct relative to the spy) who helps al Qaeda fighters and their families get back on their feet.
Dr Harari held a speech on 8 May at Sydney University on his treatment of injured children at Ziv, which has taken ‘Syrian’ patients since February 2013. He grew up and practised as a doctor in Australia but has since worked in Israel. His story is a humanitarian one, but with a heavily politicised context.
Here are images of a little girl who has lost a limb, and others who have suffered blast injuries. No doubt they are victims of the war in Syria. Unusually, as the doctor recognises, they have come across the previously ‘impervious’ and heavily militarised border between Syrian and that part of Syria which Israel has illegally annexed for the past 47 years, the Golan Heights.
An Israel Defence Forces (IDF) triage team (the ‘battalion medical aid station’) does assessments along parts of this ‘rebel’ controlled border and, in an operation Dr Harari calls ‘shrouded in secrecy’, delivers patients to several Israeli hospitals, including Safed and Ziv.
While Dr Harari focusses on his patients, the political spin is clear. This is said to be a ‘civil war’ which began after teenagers wrote graffiti on a wall, and which culminated in carnage ‘the most tragic on earth since the Rwandan genocide’. Israel is just doing its humanitarian bit, through Ziv and other hospitals. The ‘humanitarian’ admission of these ‘refugees’ came as a novel initiative for his ‘sleepy country hospital’.
There is little mention of the fighter patients, until a law student asks about the IDF presence in the hospital; then Dr Harari admits that all men of fighter age (the great majority of patients) have soldiers stationed outside their rooms. Their injuries are so serious that, although these ‘Syrian’ patients comprise only 5% of inpatients, they occupy 50% of Ziv’s Intensive Care Unit.
Other reports tell us that these ‘rebel fighters’ pouring across the Golan border from the south of Syria, are mostly from Jabhat al Nusra (al Qaeda) and many if not most are foreign fighters, not even Syrian.
There is a mystery over the actual numbers of ‘Syrian’ children treated at Ziv. While media reports all accept that the majority admitted from Syria are fighters (including reports from Australian journalists who were hosted by the Israeli lobby), Dr Harari’s figures on children differ from those given by the Director of Ziv Hospital, Dr Oscar Embon.
David King from The Australian acknowledges that he ‘travelled to Israel on a study tour provided by the Australia-Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.’ Other Australian Journalists (from The Sydney Morning Herald, Sky News Business, SBS Television World News and Channel Ten News) participated in a NSW Jewish Board of Deputies’ Journalists Mission to Israel.
Dr Embon told Vic Alhadeff of JWire (a Jewish Australian publication) that between February and November 2013, Ziv Hospital treated ‘177 Syrians, including 2 women and 4 children’. That is, the great majority were fighters, with just a handful of family members.
Dr Harari’s figures maintain the male-suspected-fighter majority but increase the numbers of children. He said that Ziv had taken 266 ‘Syrian’ patients from February 2013 to April 2014, of which 242 were male (91%) and 17% were children. However as ‘children’ means under 18, and as several of these were teenagers, regarded as possible fighters (and therefore held under IDF guard), actual numbers admitted to the Paediatric ward were 32 (12%). When I asked if there had been a recent rise in child admissions, Dr Harari claimed that the data given by Ziv Director Dr Embon was either wrong or that he had been wrongly quoted. He claimed many children had come in from the beginning.
However the ‘shroud of secrecy’ meant that hospital staff did not know where patients had come from or to where they were returning. They might go to Jordan or to Syria. It turned out that they were ‘all going back to Syria’, yet ‘several had returned to Israel for follow-up… I don’t know how they come back to us but they do,’ he added.
Dr Harari said the residents of the occupied Golan and Northern Israel, ‘Arabs, Jews and Druze’, had formed volunteer squads to provide food and toys for the children. He did not mention PM Netanyahu’s recent visit to Jabhat al Nusra fighters at various northern Israel hospitals, nor the ‘gratitude’ expressed by ‘rebel’ commanders for Israel’s assistance, which has been reported widely across the Israeli media (5,6). This was meant to be a ‘humanitarian’ story, with a Syrian villain in the background.