James Brown is Dead

December 25, 2006 - 7:08PM

Photo: James Brown performs during a concert in Shanghai, China, early this year.Photo: AP

James Brown, the dynamic US singer known as the "Godfather of Soul,'' whose rasping vocals and revolutionary rhythms made him a founder of rap, funk and disco, died early today in Atlanta, his agent said. He was 73.

Brown was hospitalised yesterday at Emory Crawford Long Hospital with pneumonia and died around 1.45am local time (1745 AEDT), said his agent, Frank Copsidas, of Intrigue Music.

Longtime friend Charles Bobbit was by his side, Copsidas said.

"We really don't know at this point what he died of,'' Copsidas said.

Along with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and a handful of others, Brown was one of the major musical influences of the past 50 years. At least one generation idolised him, and sometimes openly copied him.

His rapid-footed dancing inspired Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson among others.

Songs such as David Bowie's 'Fame', Prince's 'Kiss', George Clinton's 'Atomic Dog' and 'Sly' and the Family Stone's 'Sing a Simple Song' were clearly based on Brown's rhythms and vocal style.

If Brown's claim to the invention of soul can be challenged by fans of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, then his rights to the genres of rap, disco and funk are beyond question. He was to rhythm and dance music what Dylan was to lyrics: the unchallenged popular innovator.

"James presented obviously the best grooves,'' rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy once told The Associated Press. ``To this day, there has been no one near as funky. No one's coming even close.''

His hit singles include such classics as 'Out of Sight', ('Get Up I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine', 'I Got You (I Feel Good') and 'Say It Out Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud', a landmark 1968 statement of racial pride.

"I clearly remember we were calling ourselves coloured, and after the song, we were calling ourselves black,'' Brown said in a 2003 AP interview.

"The song showed even people to that day that lyrics and music and a song can change society.''

He won a Grammy award for lifetime achievement in 1992, as well as Grammys in 1965 for Papa's Got a Brand New Bag (best R&B recording) and for Living In America in 1987 (best R&B vocal performance, male.)

He was one of the initial artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, along with Presley, Chuck Berry and other founding fathers.

He triumphed despite an often unhappy personal life. Brown, who lived in Beech Island near the Georgia line, spent more than two years in a South Carolina prison for aggravated assault and failing to stop for a police officer. After his release on in 1991, Brown said he wanted to ``try to straighten out'' rock music.

From the 1950s, when Brown had his first R&B hit, 'Please, Please, Please' in 1956, through the mid-1970s, Brown went on a frenzy of cross-country tours, concerts and new songs. He earned the nickname 'The Hardest Working Man in Show Business'.

With his tight pants, shimmering feet, eye makeup and outrageous hair, Brown set the stage for younger stars such as Michael Jackson and Prince.In 1986, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And rap stars of recent years overwhelmingly have borrowed his lyrics with a digital technique called sampling.

Brown's work has been replayed by the Fat Boys, Ice-T, Public Enemy and a host of other rappers.

"The music out there is only as good as my last record,'' Brown joked in a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

"Disco is James Brown, hip-hop is James Brown, rap is James Brown; you know what I'm saying? You hear all the rappers, 90 per cent of their music is me,'' he told the AP in 2003.

Born in poverty in Barnwell, South Carolina, in 1933, he was abandoned as a four-year-old to the care of relatives and friends and grew up on the streets of Augusta, Georgia, in an ``ill-repute area,'' as he once called it. There he learned to wheel and deal.

"I wanted to be somebody,'' Brown said.

By the eighth grade in 1949, Brown had served three and a half years in Alto Reform School near Toccoa, Georgia, for breaking into cars.

While there, he met Bobby Byrd, whose family took Brown into their home. Byrd also took Brown into his group, the Gospel Starlighters. Soon they changed their name to the Famous Flames and their style to hard R&B.

In January 1956, King Records of Cincinnati signed the group, and four months later 'Please, Please, Please' was in the R&B Top Ten.

While most of Brown's life was glitz and glitter, he was plagued with charges of abusing drugs and alcohol and of hitting his third wife, Adrienne.In September 1988, Brown, high on PCP and carrying a shotgun, entered an insurance seminar next to his Augusta office. Police said he asked seminar participants if they were using his private restroom.

Police chased Brown for a half-hour from Augusta into South Carolina and back to Georgia. The chase ended when police shot out the tyres of his truck.

Brown received a six-year prison sentence. He spent 15 months in a South Carolina prison and 10 months in a work release program before being paroled in February 1991. In 2003, the South Carolina parole board granted him a pardon for his crimes in that state.

Soon after his release, Brown was on stage again with an audience that included millions of cable television viewers nationwide who watched the three hour, pay-per-view concert at Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles.

Adrienne Brown died in 1996 in Los Angeles at age 47. She took PCP and several prescription drugs while she had a bad heart and was weak from cosmetic surgery two days earlier, the coroner said.

More recently, he married his fourth wife, Tomi Raye Hynie, one of his backup singers. The couple had a son, James Jr.

Two years later, Brown spent a week in a private Columbia hospital, recovering from what his agent said was dependency on painkillers.

Brown's lawyer, Albert "Buddy'' Dallas, said the singer was exhausted from six years of road shows.

AP

Affluent lifestyles harming climate

Stephanie Peatling
December 7, 2006
SMH

AFFLUENT lifestyles are producing more waste, using more water and energy and relying more on cars with damaging effects on the environment.
The State of the Environment report, produced every five years and released yesterday, warned that most of the threats reported in 2001 were still present and, in some cases, had worsened.

The past decade had produced higher incomes and lower unemployment, the report found, but the higher consumption rates this brought had affected the environment.

"Realising a sustainable human environment requires a reduction in net consumption and waste," the report found.

"This will involve greater population densities than currently is the case, significant increases in building and material recycling, the capture and use of stormwater, the recycling of wastewater and biological waste, and improved urban form and urban structures.

"It also requires changes in behaviour by individuals."

The chairman of the report committee, University of Queensland Associate Professor Bob Beeton, said "business as usual is not an acceptable model". "We have got to plan to live in this country," he said.

A different approach was needed to get people thinking about their impact on the environment and changing their lifestyles, Professor Beeton said.

"The shock-horror approach is not working," he said.

"If you scare people with something they can't fix they switch off."

Some environmental programs were having unintended consequences and he warned against assuming that market-based approaches would solve natural problems.

The Federal Government will announce a taskforce soon to look at carbon emissions trading and its potential impact on greenhouse gas emissions.

It is also pursuing a national water trading market to help prevent water shortages.

The Minister for the Environment, Ian Campbell, said the Federal Government was "the best friend the environment had ever had".

Spending on environmental programs had increased in the past decade, he said, and the Government was near to its target of planting 1 billion trees.

But the Opposition's environment spokesman, Anthony Albanese, said despite the billions of dollars spent, most environmental indicators were going backwards.

"On John Howard's watch, Australia's greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and our vital waterways are deteriorating," he said.

Mr Albanese released a discussion paper raising the possibility of combining land, water and biodiversity programs to cut back on bureaucracy and increase the amount of money spent on environmental protection.

"Labor will establish national targets for environmental improvement, take immediate action to help avoid dangerous climate change and will put 1500 gigalitres per annum back into the Murray River within 10 years," Mr Albanese said.

The Greens senator Rachel Siewert said the report attempted to "greenwash the severe environmental crisis".

"The report acknowledges that increasing demand for water is placing significant pressure on Australia's inland water systems and notes that the impact of wetlands has been dramatic," she said.

The executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Don Henry, said: "Our greenhouse emissions continue to rise, the condition of vital waterways is deteriorating and the decline of important indicator species, including many frogs and fish, is reaching alarming levels."

UNDER THREAT
- Greenhouse gas emissions to increase 22 per cent by 2020.
- Rainfall in the eastern states has been below average for five years.
- 231 nationally significant wetlands under threat.
- Ocean temperatures have risen 0.28C since 1950.

Making Australians understand how easy it is to fight climate change is the biggest challenge facing the nation's leading green politicians.

Stephanie Peatling reports.

Ian Campbell likes to carry a couple of light bulbs with him wherever he goes. The affable federal Environment Minister is not afraid of the dark but is fond of telling people, especially school students, that if everyone in Australia replaced their ordinary light bulbs with energy-efficient ones, the world could do without one coal-fired power station.

"You can't look students in years five or six in the eye and say we can't solve climate change," he says. "You have to empower people and individuals and businesses and break things down into action you can take that will change the world."

While Campbell is in charge of a climate change policy that includes impressive-sounding technological solutions such as geosequestration and controversial options such as nuclear power, he is also responsible for explaining a tricky concept to everyone from primary school students to business leaders.

Since taking on the portfolio in 2004 he has tinkered with various explanations to help people understand climate change and encourage them not to see something as simple as changing a light bulb as pointless.

"I have tried to just simplify it by breaking it down to simple statistics," he says. "One of my favourites is: we have produced 1 trillion tonnes of carbon in the past 150 years; it will be another trillion in the next 50 if we keep going the way we are."

Although he admits the language of "trillions" might bamboozle some people he believes it at least conveys the magnitude of the problem.

Another favourite, trotted out by almost every Howard Government minister, is that closing all power stations overnight would be pointless because China would create the same amount of greenhouse gas emission in about 10 months.

For those not illuminated by the light bulbs, Campbell also travels with a set of coloured wedges, each representing the amount of emissions that could be saved or removed by using renewable energy, being more energy-efficient and turning to nuclear power.

Based on a Princeton University study, the idea is to illustrate that there is no one solution to climate change but that if all options are used, there is every chance the world can head off the dangerous consequences.

"You need real policies; hence all the wedges," Campbell says. "People on the left say you can do it with wind turbines, people on the right say you can do it with nuclear power, but both are wrong. You need everything. If you run through all of the things you need to do, people understand. If the problem is that big then people think it makes sense that there is a range of things that need to be done."

Until this week, Campbell's political competition came from Labor's Anthony Albanese, who tirelessly spruiked the Opposition's climate change policy. But he has been replaced by Peter Garrett, the former president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, whose huge public profile will be used to boost the Opposition's environmental credentials, seen as one of the key differences between the two major parties.

The wisdom of the decision was apparent as Garrett crossed the country this week, being approached by an overwhelmingly positive population wanting to know more about Labor's green policies.

Just whom Garrett faces off against next year in the race towards a federal election remains to be seen. The Prime Minister, John Howard, is believed to be considering promoting Malcolm Turnbull, who has impressed with his work on water policy, to a more senior environmental role.The prospect of two of Federal Parliament's most charismatic and recognisable MPs facing each another is enough to make political junkies salivate.

For now, Garrett is taking a more homespun approach to explaining climate change than his Coalition counterpart. Like most other Australian men he likes to talk about his shed - "a little sustainable shed we had some years ago which ran on solar power, a bit of gas and some insulation, but which was designed as an enclosed farm shed".

The building was used by the Garrett family as a weekender for many years. It slept as many as six people and had an annual electricity bill of about $100. Not only does the shed conjure up an instantly recognisable form but it also appeals to people's hip pocket.

"If you're running solar electricity you become aware of energy in a much more acute way than when you're just using it from the grid," Garrett says. "Talking to a younger audience I tend to talk about the fact that the energy has to come from somewhere, to take them through the process of where it comes from. I'm also a notorious nagger in my own family for turning lights off."

Environmentalists and scientists have complained for years that the threat of rapid climate change has been all but ignored by mainstream politics and the media and, as a result, most of the public.

But the past four months have seen the issue dominate discussion, the result of a culmination of factors: a severe drought; Britain's Nicholas Stern report which tried to put a price on the cost of not doing anything about climate change; and An Inconvenient Truth, the film about global warming featuring the former US vice-president, Al Gore.

Until then, most of the coverage of the issue was either scientific threats about what might happen or political wrangling about whether the Federal Government should ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations' international climate change treaty.

And while the major parties argued about an agreement most people probably thought was about a town in Japan, energy use, car use and all the other things contributing to global warming continued to rise further, compounding the problem.

Environmentalists wondered why people who happily started using the now ubiquitous green bags to cut marine pollution were not at least scared into doing something about climate change. Others, whose job is also to explain climate change, believe that it presents an unprecedented challenge because the idea itself is so complicated.

Professor Brendan Mackey agrees with Campbell and Garrett's moves to deconstruct the idea of climate change, to give people a better understanding of how they can fight it.

Mackey, of the Australian National University's School of Resources, Environment and Society, says people have to understand an issue before they are prepared to do something about it, particularly if doing something involves changing their own behaviour and that of most people.
"They have the message that rapid climate change is happening and humans are causing it but I don't think people understand how that can be. They don't understand the mechanics of it.

They probably have heard about carbon or greenhouse and they have a fuzzy understanding of it.

"They associate it with drought and fossil fuels but how they are linked together is quite complicated. That means you have to take someone's word on it without understanding what's going on."

Mackey says the issue has been oversimplified to the extent that most people assume that any extreme weather event is the "smoking gun of climate change".

"But what we're talking about is long-term changes in weather patterns. When we talk about climate change we will still have weather. It's not like polluted water which might look and taste foul and make you sick if you drink it. We will still have weather but it might create problems. The concept is abstract. So you have to make it more real for people."

There would be people, Mackey says, who think global warming and the hole in the ozone layer are the same thing. This leaves people confused about what needs to be done and instead of being presented with a clear set of solutions, they hear competing slogans from the major political parties.

"Politicians are now talking about climate change presumably because the polls are telling them people are worried about climate change. But what if it rains next week? Will this mean we don't have to worry about climate change?"

Mackey says people need to be told exactly what action needs to be taken, including an honest assessment of whether the worst effects of climate change can be headed off and whether people are prepared to act. It is not as simple as taking the politics out of the equation and leaving people to grapple with a purely scientific approach.

Campbell says it is a good thing for public debate that discussion has moved on from the Kyoto Protocol: "The debate was so simple for so long it worked against people taking action. If people think you can solve it just by doing that it diminishes the quality of the debate. The great thing about this year is it forced a debate on the real solutions."

The Federal Government continues to argue against Kyoto and its binding targets on reducing emissions, saying it would damage Australia's economy because of its reliance on industries such as coal and aluminium.

Instead, it is spending hundreds of millions of dollars investigating what it refers to as technological solutions such as geosequestration (which basically buries emissions underground) and bilateral agreements with countries such as the United States, Japan and South Korea. Howard also recently announced that he had appointed a taskforce to investigate a carbon emissions trading scheme.

Labor, for its part, says it would ratify Kyoto if it won government, as well as significantly boost the amount of energy from renewable sources and institute carbon trading.

Not surprisingly, Campbell and Garrett say politics cannot be taken out of the discussion. After all, they have the responsibility to ensure the issue is stuck in people's minds when they step into the ballot box late next year.

"It seems to me the responsibility cuts in every direction: individuals, businesses and governments," Garrett says.

"Until there's an alignment between all of those then I don't think it's a deficiency for us to talk about bigger policy issues. It's still absolutely essential that the right laws, the right policy settings and the right long-term planning is in place and governments are critically important.

"We need more than ever for this public expression of concern to be translated into government action. It's turning off the light switch and thinking about how we vote."

Game of chess anyone ???

MOSCOW, December 14
(RIA Novosti)

An alleged Moscow serial killer, arrested in June, has been charged with 49 murders, but claims that he killed 62 people in all, a senior law police official said Thursday.

Alexander Kshevitsky, a deputy head of the Interior Ministry's operations and investigations bureau, said that in some of the murder cases Alexander Pichuzhkin claims to have committed, the victims are still considered missing.

Pichuzhkin, 32 at the time of his arrest, was earlier charged with killing at least 10 people, most of them in Bitsa park, a stretch of dense woodland in the south of Moscow, where he was apprehended by police this summer.

The investigation determined that Pichuzhkin began killing in 2000. Most of the victims found in the park were killed with a blow to the head after Pichuzhkin approached them from behind.

If it turns out to be true that Pichuzkin, who has already been dubbed the "Bitsa Maniac," killed as many people as he claims, he will become the bloodiest serial killer in Russian history, well ahead of Andrei Chikatilo.

Between 1978 and 1990, Chikatilo, or the "Rostov Ripper," killed 53 people, many of them young women and boys, in and around the city of Rostov, near the Black Sea. He was eventually caught, found guilty of multiple murders, sentenced to death and executed in 1994.

In 1996, Russia imposed a moratorium on the death penalty, and if Pichuzhkin is found guilty of the murders he claims, the most severe punishment he faces will be a life sentence.

For more info on Chikatilo check out:

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/chikatilo/coat_1.html


'Chess murders' Russian charged
14 December
BBC


Russian who reportedly said he wanted to kill 64 people to correspond with the squares on a chess board has been charged in Moscow with 49 murders.

Alexander Pichushkin is suspected of being the "Bitsyevskiy maniac", named after the park where 14 of the victims' bodies were found.

He has allegedly confessed to killing 62 people over six years and reportedly said he had missed his goal.

Prosecutors say they only have evidence to pursue 49 cases.

Mr Pichushkin, who worked at a small grocery store in south-west Moscow, was arrested in June on suspicion of killing a female colleague, whose body was found in Bitsyevskiy park the day before.

The woman, Marina Moskaleva, had reportedly left Mr Pichushkin's number with her son before she was killed.

The killings began in 2000 and led to bodies being found in many parks and other places across the Russian capital.

Many, but by no means all, of the victims were elderly men, and there was little else to link the murders, except that they were caused by a blow to the head.

The head of the Russian interior ministry's criminal investigation department, Alexander Kshevitsky, told the MosNews website that Mr Pichushkin was yet to undergo psychiatric tests to see whether he was fit to stand trial.

Bansky

Some artwork from Bansky. Some excellent work !!!

http://www.banksy.co.uk/menu.html

Anger and Courage

Hope has two beautiful daughters: anger and courage.Anger at the way things are and courage to change them.

St. Augustine

Climate change 'to impact big miners'

December 11, 2006

Mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton are among six Australian companies most at risk from the impact of climate change, a report says.

Among the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) top-100 listed companies, those involved in emissions-intensive industries are most at risk, says Citigroup research.

In a surprise result, property trusts are among those most likely to benefit from climate change as they could earn emissions credits from a likely trading scheme by reducing energy use when constructing environmentally friendly buildings.

The companies most at risk are Rio Tinto, BHP and BlueScope Steel, Caltex, Iluka and OneSteel, according to the research titled Climate change and the ASX100 - An assessment of risks and opportunities.

Climate change effects companies' profitability due to the cost of potentially pricing carbon,and through weather and climate impacts, the report says.

"Those at risk include emissions-intensive companies, facilities particularly exposed to severe weather damage, agriculture and water-intensive industries exposed to drought, and in the long term insurers that may misprice catastrophe risk," the report said.

BlueScope Steel is the most emissions-intensive company by double that of the next companies, Iluka, OneSteel and AGL and Alumina, when levels of carbon dioxide production for each $10,000 market of capitalisation were compared, the report said.

Citigroup Investment Research managing director Bruce Rolph said some of Australia's biggest companies were beginning to recognise the importance of climate change.

"Some of the big resource companies are taking it seriously - both the issues to do with emissions but also the understanding what physical risks there may be to their portfolio of assets," Mr Rolph said.

He said Rio, BHP and Alumina were among companies most aware of climate change issues and all had strategies in place to reduce emissions.

The report noted that the big miners could be exposed to falling coal sales, as governments seek alternative energy sources to meet climate change commitments.

Prime Minister John Howard announced a task force on the weekend to inquire into Australia's possible involvement in an emissions trading scheme.

The task force of bureaucrats and resource industry figures, will also investigate how Australia might be involved in an emissions trading system that involved other major nations.

Mr Rolph said the research found that the "winners" in renewable energy and gas, as they had low or zero emissions.

"Winners were also in the property industry where a number of property trusts are building sustainable buildings and in some cases earning emissions credits (in the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme) through reducing energy use," he said.

Top of the list of "winners" were property investment company Investa Property Group, energy retailer Origin Energy Limited, and metals recycler Sims Group Ltd.

The airline, media and retail sectors were among the 40 per cent of ASX100 companies that failed to provide relevant climate change information and were therefore not included in the research.

AAP

The Report Of The Chief Health Officer released today by NSW Health

In 2005 more than half of all men (57.5 per cent) and almost half of all women (42.3 per cent) over 16 years old were overweight or obese, up from 56 per cent and 41 per cent in 2003.

Almost 25 per cent of school kids were overweight or obese and rates had skyrocketed in the past 20 years. The report blames sedentary lifestyles and high consumption of energy-dense, nutrient-poor food such as soft drinks for much of the ill health in NSW.

Half of all adults and a quarter of school students don't get enough exercise each day.

Only 4.7 per cent of men, 10.1 per cent of women and 20 per cent of children reported eating the recommended five vegetables a day. Yet 60 per cent of boys and 40 per cent of girls drank more than 250 millilitres of soft drink a day.

As a result, the number of people with diabetes or high blood sugar has almost doubled in the past decade to 8 per cent of men and 7 per cent of women.

Other key findings included a halving of the death rate between 1972 to 1994 and a 12-year increase in life expectancy for men and 10 years for women over the past decade. Although women could still expect to live longer than men (83.7 years compared to 78.8 years), the gap is closing.

Few own most of the world's assets: Study

Richest 2% of adults hold more than half of global household wealth, data reveals
Dec. 6, 2006. 01:00 AM
Olivia Ward
STAFF REPORTER

There's fierce debate about whether the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer. But a pioneering study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research leaves no doubt the tiny fraction of the planet's population who are living in affluence own more than half of its wealth.

"The richest 2 per cent of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth," says a study released yesterday by the Helsinki-based institute, a division of the United Nations University. "And the richest 1 per cent alone owned 40 per cent of global assets in the year 2000."

Some 37 million people worldwide have reached the top rung of the ladder, owning $500,000 (U.S.) in assets, after debts have been deducted.

"What's special about this project is that it puts personal assets into a global perspective," says University of Western Ontario economist James Davies, one of the authors. "It looks at the role of household assets and debts in relation to growth, and for the first time shows what the global distribution of assets looks like."

The study outlines the economic comfort — and discomfort — zone of people and countries by defining wealth as net worth: "the value of physical and financial assets less debts." And it says, "in this respect, wealth represents the ownership of capital."

Although the world's income gap has been amply confirmed, the gap in wealth is even more dramatic.

"Half the world has net worth per adult below $2,200," Davies says.

Not surprisingly, Canada is one of the handful of countries in which wealth is concentrated, though it is less affluent than the United States, the world's richest nation.

"Canada has 2 per cent of the wealthiest 10 per cent of people in the world," Davies points out. "As we only have 0.5 per cent of the world's population, we're right up there, and in fact, over-represented."

Canada has average per capita wealth of $89,252 and the U.S. $180,837, in terms of purchasing power. Japan, with $143,727, ranks just below the U.S.

While capital may be only a part of personal resources, "it is widely believed to have a disproportionate impact on household well-being and economic success, and more broadly, on economic development and growth," the study says.

The world's total household wealth amounted to $125 trillion in the year 2000, a sum which, averaged out, should give every adult $20,500. But in some countries, average per capita wealth was below $2,000, while the richest ranked many times higher.

Does the sharp division of the world's wealth mean that globalization has failed?

"Some people are certainly gaining from it, and others are suffering," says Davies. "We should not see globalization as necessarily reducing global inequality."