'the Gorilla" dead

Papal favourite linked to Vatican scandal dead at 84

By Adam Bernstein
in Washington
February 23, 2006

Photo: Papal bodyguard and banker … Paul Marcinkus in 1982.
Photo: AP

PAUL MARCINKUS, the papal bodyguard dubbed "the Gorilla" and a titular archbishop who led the Vatican bank into a monetary scandal of staggering proportions, has died at his home in Sun City, Arizona.

Archbishop Marcinkus, 84, reportedly had emphysema.

After joining the priesthood in Chicago, where he was born to Lithuanian immigrants, he served in the Vatican's diplomatic corps and soon became a favourite of Pope Paul VI.

A hulking, 195-centimetre-tall rugby player, he served as bodyguard and "advance man" on Paul's historic diplomatic outreach trips abroad.

He was said to have safeguarded the pontiff in 1970 from a knife-wielding assailant at Manila airport. This, along with a penchant for one-liners and an athletic swagger, endeared the archbishop to Paul.

He was president of the bank, formally known as the Institute for Religious Works, from 1971 to 1989, and always had a zinger that explained his work: "You can't run a church on Hail Marys."
He was among the most powerful members of the Vatican elite, and it was assumed he would be elevated to cardinal or serve as president of Vatican City. But his reputation suffered markedly in 1982, when he was indicted as an accessory in the multibillion-dollar financial collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, once the largest private bank in Italy and an institution with close ties to the Vatican.

Shortly after the news broke, Ambrosiano's chairman, Roberto Calvi, sometimes labelled "God's banker" for his Vatican relationships, was found dead under mysterious circumstances - hanging from a bridge in London, in what was officially ruled a suicide. Calvi was said to have had Mafia connections, spurring speculation that he would publicly divulge some nexus between the church and the underworld.

It was sensational news carried worldwide. Archbishop Marcinkus became a central figure in the affair, and he was also one of the most enigmatic.

Largely hidden in the Vatican during the investigation, he declined to answer Italian investigators' questions about the church's role in dummy companies set up abroad to which Banco Ambrosiano funnelled more than $US1 billion.

Later, so-called "letters of comfort" surfaced, reputedly showing his guarantee of protecting bank creditors' investments. While denying wrongdoing, the Vatican paid $US244 million to creditors of the Ambrosiano bank in what it called "recognition of moral involvement" in the bank's collapse.

The Italian Government issued an arrest order for Archbishop Marcinkus and two bank subordinates as "accessories to fraudulent bankruptcy," but the Vatican, an independent state, refused to comply and cited diplomatic immunity. The Italian high court agreed, allowing him to avoid standing trial.

The Washington Post

Dunken Sailor

Waratahs winger Wendell Sailor, who now faces a ban after admitting he was drunk and vomited in the street after becoming involved in a scrap at a nightclub near his team's Cape Town hotel on Friday night.

Sailor also has a two-week suspension still hanging over his head after being involved in a similar incident last year before the Test match between SA and Australia at another nightclub.

"I had some wine at dinner. Then, between the hours of 10 and one, I picked up the pace a bit..." said Sailor.

Breath Testing - Prepare to Run

Fallen Eagle Cousins stands down
February 21, 2006

AFL Brownlow medallist Ben Cousins has resigned as West Coast captain in the wake of the infamous booze-bus incident.

Cousins admitted to errors of judgement after his car was found abandoned near a booze bus in Perth and decided to resign because of the pressure placed on the club. Cousins refused to take questions at a media conference yesterday, leaving soon after he read a prepared statement.

WA police are investigating after Cousins admitted he had been the driver of a car abandoned 50m from a booze bus last Sunday week. They said Cousins had ignored orders to stop as he ran away and later refused to answer questions about why he evaded officers.

AAP

"teenage delinquent" elephants

By Roger Highfield
February 17, 2006
Telegraph London


THE reputation that elephants never forget has been given a chilling new twist - a generation of pachyderms may be taking revenge on humans for the breakdown of elephant society.

New Scientist has reported that elephants appear to be attacking settlements as vengeance for years of abuse by humans.

In Uganda, elephant numbers have never been lower or food more plentiful, yet there are reports of the creatures blocking roads and trampling through villages, apparently without cause or motivation.

Scientists suspect that poaching in the 1970s and 1980s marked many of the animals with the equivalent of post-traumatic stress disorder, perhaps caused by being orphaned or witnessing the death of family members.

Many herds lost their matriarch and had to make do with inexperienced "teenage mothers". Combined with a lack of older bulls, this appears to have created a generation of "teenage delinquent" elephants.

Joyce Poole, the research director at the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya, said: "They are certainly intelligent enough and have good enough memories to take revenge.

"Wildlife managers may feel that it is easier to just shoot so-called 'problem' elephants than face people's wrath. So an elephant is shot without [people] realising the possible consequences on the remaining family members and the … possibility of stimulating a cycle of violence."

A study by Dr Poole showed that a lack of older bulls to lead by example had created gangs of aggressive young males with a penchant for violence towards each other and other species.

In Pilanesburg National Park in South Africa, young bulls have been attacking rhinos since 1992. In Addo Elephant National Park, also in South Africa, 90 per cent of males are killed by another male - 15 times the "normal" figure.

Richard Lair, a researcher specialising in Asian elephants at Thailand's National Elephant Institute, said there were similar problems in India."The more human beings they see, the less tolerant they become," he said

Global Warming

Scientists muzzled for Bush election campaign
By Andrew RevkinFebruary 17, 2006
The New York Times

POLITICAL appointees in NASA's press office exerted strong pressure during the 2004 presidential campaign to cut the flow of press releases on glaciers, climate, pollution and other earth sciences, public affairs officers at the agency say.

The disclosure comes two weeks after the space agency's administrator, Michael Griffin, called for "scientific openness" at the agency. In response to the call, NASA researchers and public affairs officials described how political appointees altered or limited news releases on scientific findings that could have conflicted with Bush Administration policies.

Examples have been reported to senior scientists and administrators who are assembling complaints as part of a review demanded by Mr Griffin.

Press officers said much of the pressure in late 2004 was placed on Gretchen Cook-Anderson. At the time, she was in charge of managing the flow of earth science news at NASA.

In a conference call in October 2004, the colleagues said, Cook-Anderson said that Glenn Mahone, who was then assistant administrator for public affairs, had told her a planned news conference on fresh readings by a NASA satellite, Aura, that measures ozone and air pollution, should not take place until after the election.

Cook-Anderson this week said she could not discuss the matter, but added, "I won't disagree with that description of what took place." Mr Mahone has since left NASA. Dean Acosta, a political appointee who was Mr Mahone's deputy and is now Mr Griffin's press secretary, said he had never pressed Cook-Anderson to cut back on news releases.

But archives of the NASA website show a sharp decline in the number of news releases issued - from about 48 in 2004 to 12 last year.

Mr Griffin announced the review after complaints last month by James Hansen, the agency's top climate scientist, that political appointees were trying to stop him from speaking out on global warming. After those complaints were reported, other staff came forward with similar stories.

In another example of political pressure at the agency, press officers and scientists cited an email sent last July from NASA's headquarters to its jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena.
The message said a web presentation describing the uncontroversial finding that Earth was a "warming planet" could not use the phrase "global warming". It was "standard practice", the message said, to use the phrase "climate change".

NASA officials said the aim was to use the most general term to describe climate fluctuations.
But other public affairs workers and some scientists called it an effort to avoid mentioning a rise in global temperatures. They said it was a standing unwritten order from political appointees in public affairs.

"There was this general understanding that when something in this field was written about that it was to be described as climate change and not global warming," said Elvia Thompson, who recently retired from the same office.

Allegations of political interference appear to reflect an intensifying debate between a cluster of presidential appointees at NASA and civil servants and scientists at the agency's research centres around the US. "The issue is where does science end and policy begin," said David Goldston, a Republican spokesman.

fun anyone?

NSW gamblers are losing $4.8 billion a year on poker machines.

Department of Gaming and Racing figures showing the average household is losing almost $1300 a year on gaming machines.

Player losses are increasing by about $200 million a year.

The average punter loss on each machine is now $66,000 a year for hotels -- a 25 per cent increase since 2001 -- and $45,000 for clubs.

Symonds 151 (127)

by Alex Brown SMH

For broken records, controversy and all-round intrigue, the Australians' effort against the Sri Lankans yesterday is unsurpassed, rebounding from a seemingly dire predicament at 3-10 to score their highest limited-overs total, 5-368, record a thumping 167-run victory and enforce a third and deciding final at the Gabba tomorrow.

Adam Gilchrist, for one, was enthused by the performance. "I think from the position we were in it's got to be one of the greatest comebacks and most dominating wins ever," he said.

To achieve that, Andrew Symonds and Ricky Ponting combined for the highest partnership by an Australian pair (237) and ensured that Muttiah Muralitharan, who bamboozled the home side in Adelaide on Friday night, returned the worst 10-over figures in the history of limited-overs cricket (0-99). A bloody end to what was almost certainly Muralitharan's last match at the SCG.

"[It was] one of the best batting displays we've ever witnessed," Ponting said. "I said to Andrew on the way in that those sort of things don't happen every day in this game … especially after getting off to the start we did."

The Australian innings was not without its share of controversy, most notably when Mahela Jayawardene claimed to catch Ponting at gully, only for the Australian captain to stand his ground and be subsequently ruled not out.

Replays were inconclusive as to whether the ball bounced before Jayawardene. However, the Sri Lankans were visibly upset at Ponting's decision to stand his ground, and umpire Peter Parker's decision to rule him not out. Jayawardene, however, eventually apologised to Ponting, who was on 57 at the time and went on to post a breathtaking 124 from 127 deliveries; his 19th one-day international century.

Not to be outdone, Symonds also produced an innings of tremendous power, recording his first one-day century on Australian soil and his second-highest limited-overs total. At the conclusion of his innings he had totalled 151, which included 13 boundaries and three sixes over 127 deliveries.

The efforts of Symonds and Ponting overshadowed the late-innings feats of Michael Clarke and Michael Hussey, although both were vital in steering Australia to their record total. Clarke blasted six boundaries to post an unbeaten 54 from 28 deliveries, while Hussey finished with 23 not out from just eight balls - half the deliveries he faced either travelling to, or over, the rope. Such precise, heavy hitting ensured the early failures of openers Adam Gilchrist (0) and Simon Katich (1) and Damien Martyn (8) were all but forgotten.

After Sri Lanka's veteran paceman Chaminda Vaas (4-56) removed those three batsmen within his first two overs - including Gilchrist to the second ball of the game - Australia seemed in danger of losing the match, and the finals series, in quick time.

Enter Ponting and Symonds. United at the crease with Australia reeling at 3-10, the Australian duo adopted a positive approach from the start of their innings. Ponting, the Allan Border medallist, was in particularly menacing form early, while Symonds, after a more watchful start, also found his rhythm.

The Queensland all-rounder, who would have been Australian one-day player of the year if not for his infamous drinking binge in Cardiff last year, celebrated enthusiastically upon reaching his 150, standing mid-pitch with arms raised triumphantly.

"I'll remember that forever - till I'm senile, probably," Symonds quipped. "You couldn't punch the smile off my face tonight."

Faced with such an imposing total, the Sri Lankans were never in the chase. Nathan Bracken (4-30) removed dangermen Sanath Jayasuriya (0) and Kumar Sangakkara (13) early, and Symonds continued his sensational outing by also claiming a pair of wickets.

"It's not going to be hard [to rebound] at all," said Sri Lanka's coach Tom Moody, throwing forward to tomorrow night's decider. "We've done it all series."

SCOREBOARD
At the SCG

AUSTRALIA Runs (Balls)
A GILCHRIST c Dilshan b Vaas 0 (2)
S KATICH lbw b Vaas 1 (5)
R PONTING c Vaas b Perera 124 (127)
D MARTYN c Jayawardene b Vaas 8 (5)
A SYMONDS lbw b Vaas 151 (127)
M CLARKE not out 54 (28)
M HUSSEY not out 23 (8)
Sundries (1lb 4w 2nb) 7

Five wickets for 368

Fall: 0 2 10 247 320.

Bowling: C Vaas 10-0-56-4 (1nb), R Perera 10-1-72-1 (2w), N Kulasekera 5-0-41-0, M Muralitharan 10-0-99-0 (1nb), T Dilshan 2-0-10-0, S Jayasuriya 8-0-52-0 (1w), M Bandara 5-0-37-0 (1w).
Batting time: 227 mins. Overs: 50.

SRI LANKA Runs (Balls)
M ATAPATTU c Gilchrist b Clark 24 (35)
S JAYASURIYA c Lee b Bracken 0 (6)
K SANGAKKARA b Bracken 13 (13)
M JAYAWARDENE b Hogg 50 (48)
R ARNOLD not out 64 (62)
T DILSHAN c Ponting b Symonds 13 (14)
C KAPUGEDERA run out 1 (3)
C VAAS c Clarke b Hogg 0 (6)
M BANDARA c Clark b Symonds 0 (6)
M MURALITHARAN c Lewis b Bracken 27 (24)
R PERERA c Ponting b Bracken 0 (2)
Sundries (4lb 2w 3nb) 9

Total 201

Fall: 4 26 74 116 139 145 146 147 200 201.

Bowling: B Lee 8-0-42-0 (3nb 1w), N Bracken 6-0-30-4 (1w), S Clark 5-0-28-1, M Lewis 5-0-30-0, A Symonds 5-1-32-2, B Hogg 7-0-35-2.

Batting time: 166 mins. Overs: 36.

Result: Australia won by 167 runs.

Best of three series locked 1-1.

Plenty of Pushy - bikeshop

Robot goes missing

Philip K Dick is missing.

Not the American science fiction writer whose novels spawned hit films such as Blade Runner and Total Recall -- he died more than 20 years ago -- but a state-of-the-art robot named after the author.

The quirky android, was lost in early January while en route to California by commercial airliner.

"We can't find Phil," said Steve Prilliman of Dallas-based Hanson Robotics, which created the futuristic robot with the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis, the Automation and Robotics Research Institute at the University of Texas at Arlington and Dick's friend Paul Williams.

"We're very worried because it's been a few weeks now," said Prilliman. "We're pressing hard to find Phil."

Robotics wizard and lead designer David Hanson built the robot as a memorial to Dick, whose 1968 book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the 1982 classic Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford.

Short stories by Dick, who died in 1982, served as inspiration for other hit films including the 1990 Total Recall, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the 2002 Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise.

In Blade Runner, set in a Los Angeles of 2019, Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckhard, a Blade Runner or policeman whose job is to track down and terminate escaped human clones known as "replicants."

The irony of the situation -- a missing replica of the very author who championed "replicant" freedom -- is not lost on Phil's creators.
But they still want him back.

"We really need to find him soon because the Smithsonian wants to put him in a travelling collection in the autumn," said Prilliman referring to Washington's Smithsonian Institute, an organisation of museums and art galleries.

Along with an eerie likeness to the author, the robot features award-winning artificial intelligence that mimics the writer's mannerisms and lifelike skin material to affect realistic expressions.

Top-of-the-line voice software loaded with data from Dick's vast body of writing allows the robot to carry on natural-sounding conversations, although it does come off as a bit doddering at times.

Biometric-identification software and advanced machine vision allows the robot to recognise people -- even in a crowd -- read their expressions and body language and talk to them sounding a lot like a normal, albeit slightly senile, author who likes to quote his own books when he gets confused.

Prilliman and others close to Phil baulked at giving too many details about his disappearance including the name of the airline that was transporting the robot when he went missing.
Hanson officials said news of Phil's disappearance could hamper the ongoing investigation and search for the robot.

The company officials said they feared ransom demands might be made or Phil could turn up listed for sale on an internet auction house such as eBay.

A spokeswoman, Elaine Hanson, said the company is considering building a new android if the original Phil does not turn up.

AFP

Remote Control Robot (SWORDS)

SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems)

These robots are poised be the first working robots that are actually designed to break Isaac Asimov's First Law of Robotics:

"A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."

The TALON robot can be reconfigured in the field by operators using simple pin mounted components and plug-and-play subsystems. To date, over 80 different payloads have been developed or adapted and mounted on the TALON robot platform including the following lethal and non-lethal payloads:

Gripper manipulator.
Smoke dropping module.
Grenade dropping module.
Breaching tool.
Gen III night vision camera.
NBC sensors.
UXO/countermine systems/sensors.
Anti-Tank (AT4) launcher.
Light Anti-Tank Weapon (LAW) launcher.
40-mm grenade launcher (M203 barrel).
12-gauge shotgun.
Mounts for remotely controlled weapons including: M240; M249: M16; M82A1 (50-cal).

A smaller version of the TALON robot is available for reconnaissance missions where a low profile platform is required for stealth. Another version is used for underwater missions including inspection of the surf zone and countermine operations. TALON robots have been used in Special Operations missions including EOD and reconnaissance operations in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

According to Bob Quinn, general manager of Talon robots for Foster-Miller, Inc., this control system may be replaced with a "Gameboy" type of controller hooked up to virtual reality goggles.

Repliee Q2 (human-like robot)

February 1, 2006 SMH

Students of Hiroshi Ishiguro will struggle to tell their teacher from his robotic doppelganger, writes Deborah Smith.


Travelling long distances to meetings and conferences will soon be a thing of the past for Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, the creator of the world's most human-like robot - a female named Repliee Q2. Ishiguro, of Osaka University, is close to finishing an even more advanced robot - a male, this time - that will be a physical replica of himself.

"I will not need to come here again," he told a conference in Sydney earlier this week. "I will send my android instead."

The busy Japanese scientist expects his $500,000 lookalike will prove most valuable for avoiding the regular trips to see his research students at the ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories in Kyoto, an hour's drive away from his Osaka office.

Its lifelike presence will keep his researchers on their toes during teleconferences, he hopes. "If they feel my authority with my android there, it will be good," he told the Herald.

Hollywood's robotic creations usually have hard, metallic shells. But people prefer human-like machines with soft skin, Ishiguro says. "They don't like to spend time with a robot-like robot."
He predicts that as lifelike androids become cheaper and more sophisticated, some of their first uses will be as companions for the elderly and as guides for people in railways stations or museums. Replacements for models draped over cars at motor shows is another possible early application, he says. "Then you don't need to hire beautiful women."

He thinks other busy people, apart from himself, will also be attracted to the idea of a stand-in android to do the travelling for them.

Ishiguro was covered from top to toe in a plaster cast and precise measurements of his skull were taken to ensure his new robot, which he expects to be completed within a few months, would resemble him as closely as possible.

The first robot he made in this way was a copy of his five-year-old daughter. It looked like her, but its unsophisticated facial and body movements gave it an unnatural presence, like a "moving corpse".

Young children are particularly sensitive to the appearance of the robots and his daughter was very nervous meeting her spooky double, says Ishiguro, who is attending the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces at the Powerhouse Museum and University of Technology, Sydney.

Repliee Q2, which has a soft silicone skin, was unveiled in June at the 2005 World Exposition in Japan and is a copy of a Japanese television presenter. The robot's bigger size meant much more hardware could be inserted, making sophisticated movement possible.

It has to remain seated, but with more than 30 degrees of freedom in its upper body and lots of internal sensors, it reacts to being touched in a much more human-like manner than the child robot. Powered by an air compressor, it gestures, blinks, shifts its eyes naturally and its face and lips move in time with its speech.

Ishiguro says one of the most important aspects of building a lifelike robot is to make it appear to breathe and have it shift position slightly. "When you are sitting you never stop moving," he says.

Repliee Q2 cannot fool anyone for long. But the team's research shows that even when people know it is a robot they unconsciously react to it as if it were human, for example, by averting their gaze when it asks a question, to signal they are thinking of the answer.

Ishiguro says matching lip movement to the speech is also critical to avoid a spooky-looking android. For this reason he thinks some of the first models off the production line will be English speakers.

Japanese requires a lot of lip movement, he says. "And it's very hard for the android."

Calm Down . . . . .

Democracy, a faithful dog that bit Bush

Photo: AFP. The gun and the Koran ... Hamas supporters celebrate in the West Bank city of Nablus on Thursday.

Michael Gawenda
Herald Correspondent in Washington
January 28, 2006

WITH his democracy project in the Middle East having produced a landslide victory for Hamas in the Palestinian elections, the US President, George Bush, is hoping Hamas will renounce terrorism and recognise Israel. But analysts agree the chances of this happening soon are remote.

Mr Bush's response to the result was surprisingly mild, even conciliatory. He pointedly avoided calling Hamas a terrorist organisation, leaving the door open for US contact with a Hamas government that recognised Israel and renounced violence. Bush officials, including the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, will soon hold talks with European allies on a joint approach to the Hamas election victory.

The challenge will be to find a way of leaving the door open for Hamas to change its mind on terrorism and recognise Israel while making it clear that without such a change, the peace process and the so-called road map will be dead.

At a hurriedly organised press conference, Mr Bush avoided a direct answer to the question of whether Washington would refuse to deal with a Palestinian government dominated by Hamas, saying "peace is never dead because people want peace".

He said the election had reminded people of "the power of democracy" and, in a reference to the alleged corruption that had characterised the previous government, he said the result was a wake-up call for Fatah and for the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas.

"Obviously people were not happy with the status quo," he said. "The people are demanding honest government. The people want services. And so the elections should open the eyes of the old guard there in the Palestinian territories."

But Mr Bush said as long as Hamas was committed to the destruction of Israel, no Hamas government, not even a democratically elected one, could be part of a peace process.
"We will watch very carefully about the formation of a government, but I will continue to remind people if your platform is the destruction of Israel, it means you're not a partner in peace, and we're interested in peace."

Martin Indyk, the Australian-born and educated former US ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration, said the result of the Palestinian elections placed a big question mark over Mr Bush's foreign policy of spreading democracy. "Democracy has produced a Hamas victory and it may well have ended the peace process," he said.

Dr Rice left the door open for recognition, saying: "Anyone who wants to govern and do so with the support of the international community has got to be committed to a two-state solution and must be committed to Israel's right to exist."

Her challenge in the weeks leading to the Israeli poll in March will be to maintain the united front between the US and Europe on the need for Hamas to recognise Israel and renounce violence.

Petrol Prices

Says it All

The Revenge of Gaia

By James Button,
Herald Correspondent in London
January 17, 2006

Doomsayer … James Lovelock says billions will die.
Photo: Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy

THE world has already passed the point of no return on global warming, and efforts to slow it may already be doomed, one of Britain's best-known environmentalists says.

In what The Independent described as the bleakest assessment yet of the effects of climate change by a leading scientist, Professor James Lovelock said billions would die by the end of the century, and civilisation as it is known would be unlikely to survive.

"The few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic, where the climate remains tolerable," Professor Lovelock wrote in the newspaper.

Professor Lovelock, who in the 1970s coined the Gaia thesis that the Earth was a single organism, called on governments to start making preparations for a "hell of a climate," in which by 2100 Europe and southern Australia would be 8 degrees hotter than they are today.

The scientist makes his predictions in a new book, The Revenge of Gaia, which argues that the feedback mechanisms that used to keep the Earth cooler than it would otherwise be are now working to amplify warming caused by human CO 2 emissions.

"Sadly I cannot see the United States or the economies of China and India cutting back in time and they are the main source of CO 2 emissions."

Professor Lovelock is a controversial but respected scientist who gave a briefing on global warming in 1989 to the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Two years ago he caused a furore in the environment movement by urging greens to embrace nuclear power to reduce global warming gases.

Name your poison

Julie Robotham
January 13, 2006

It's so practical it couldn't possibly happen here.Canadian doctors have completed a controlled experiment to give alcohol-addicted homeless people limited quantities of grog while they are at a shelter. The aim was to see whether it reduced dangerous binges and crime and kept them out of the emergency department or the clutches of the law.And it worked! 17 long-term alcoholics, mostly middle-aged men in Ottawa, were allowed alcohol on demand, up to 140 millilitres of wine or 90ml of sherry hourly between 7am and 10pm.
After five months to two years in the program, they halved on average the frequency with which they had to be taken to hospital, and police reports were also well down for all but two of the participants.Their alcohol intake was also reduced, from an average 46 drinks daily (give or take - most used to drink until they passed out) before going on the program to an average eight drinks, according to the report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. A couple of them even detoxified after stabilising their intake on the program, a "formidable achievement" as Tina Podymow and Jeff Turnbull point out with justifiable proudness.Naturally, it's attracted some envy. "I believe the taxpayers (including myself) have paid for this wine," wrote hard-up student Yury Monczak to the journal's e-letters section. "If all citizens are equal in Canada, please let me know where I can sign up to participate in this program and get my free daily wine and sherry doses."And it won't go down well with abstinence-based organisations such as the Salvos.But it's a logical extension of harm-reduction programs in other addictions, such as methadone prescribing for heroin addiction. Odd, then, that it's never been tried before. Guess there's a different type of stigma around alcohol.

Snuppy - cloned dog real

Cloners faked the theory, not the dog: inquiry

January 10, 2006 SMH

Snuppy ... the first male dog cloned from adult cells by somatic nuclear cell transfer.

A team led by a once-heralded and now disgraced South Korean scientist faked two landmark papers on embryonic stem cells but did produce the world's first cloned dog, an investigation panel has found.

The panel at Seoul National University told reporters there was no data to support the papers produced by the team led by scientist Hwang Woo-suk.

The two papers were a 2004 report on producing the first cloned human embryos for research and a 2005 paper on producing the first embryonic tailored stem cells.

US Corruption of Language

Behind the US Government's corruption of language lies a far greater perversion,

writes Salman Rushdie.
10/1/2006
SMH

BEYOND any shadow of a doubt, the ugliest phrase to enter the English language last year was "extraordinary rendition". To those of us who love words, this phrase's brutalisation of meaning is an infallible signal of its intent to deceive.
"Extraordinary" is an ordinary enough adjective, but its sense is being stretched here to include more sinister meanings that your dictionary will not provide: secret; ruthless; and extrajudicial.
As for "rendition", the English language permits four meanings: a performance; a translation; a surrender - this meaning is now considered archaic; or an "act of rendering"; which leads us to the verb "to render" among whose 17 possible meanings you will not find "to kidnap and covertly deliver an individual or individuals for interrogation to an undisclosed address in an unspecified country where torture is permitted".
Language, too, has laws, and those laws tell us this new American usage is improper - a crime against the word. Every so often the habitual newspeak of politics throws up a term whose calculated blandness makes us shiver with fear - yes, and loathing.
"Clean words can mask dirty deeds," The New York Times columnist William Safire wrote in 1993, in response to the arrival of another such phrase, "ethnic cleansing".
"Final solution" is a further, even more horrible locution of this Orwellian, double-plus-ungood type. "Mortality response", a euphemism for death by killing that I first heard during the Vietnam War, is another. This is not a pedigree of which any newborn usage should be proud.
People use such phrases to avoid using others whose meaning would be problematically over-apparent. "Ethnic cleansing" and "final solution" were ways of avoiding the word "genocide", and to say "extraordinary rendition" is to reveal one's squeamishness about saying "the export of torture". However, as Cecily remarks in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, "When I see a spade, I call it a spade", and what we have here is not simply a spade, it's a shovel - and it's shovelling a good deal of ordure.
Now that Senator John McCain has forced upon a reluctant White House his amendment putting the internationally accepted description of torture - "cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment" - into American law, in spite of energetic attempts by the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, to defeat it, the growing belief that the Bush Administration could be trying to get around the McCain amendment by the "rendition" of persons adjudged torture-worthy to less-delicately inclined countries merits closer scrutiny.

We are beginning to hear the names and stories of men seized and transported in this fashion: Maher Arar, a Canadian-Syrian, was captured by the CIA on his way to the US and taken via Jordan to Syria where, says his lawyer, he was "brutally physically tortured".
Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Kuwaiti-Lebanese origin, was kidnapped in Macedonia and taken for interrogation to Afghanistan, where he says he was repeatedly beaten. The Syrian-born Mohammed Haydar Zammar says he was grabbed in Morocco and then spent four years in a Syrian dungeon.
Lawsuits are under way. Lawyers for the plaintiffs suggest their clients were only a few of the victims, that in Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria and perhaps elsewhere the larger pattern of the extraordinary-rendition project is yet to be uncovered. Inquiries are under way in Canada, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.
The CIA's internal inquiry admits to "under 10" such cases, which to many ears sounds like another bit of double-talk. Tools are created to be used and it seems improbable, to say the least, that so politically risky and morally dubious a system would be set up and then barely employed.
The US authorities have been taking a characteristically robust line on this issue. On her recent European trip, the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, more or less told European governments to back off the issue - which they duly, and tamely, did, claiming to have been satisfied by her assurances.
At the end of December, the German Government ordered the closing of an Islamic centre near Munich after finding documents encouraging suicide attacks in Iraq. This is a club which, we are told, Khaled al-Masri often visited before being extraordinarily rendered to Afghanistan. "Aha!" we are encouraged to think. "Obvious bad guy. Render his sorry butt anywhere you like."
What is wrong with this kind of thinking is that, as Isabel Hilton of The Guardian wrote last July, "The delusion that officeholders know better than the law is an occupational hazard of the powerful and one to which those of an imperial cast of mind are especially prone … When disappearance became state practice across Latin America in the '70s it aroused revulsion in democratic countries, where it is a fundamental tenet of legitimate government that no state actor may detain - or kill - another human being without having to answer to the law."
In other words, the question isn't whether or not a given individual is "good" or "bad." The question is whether or not we are - whether or not our governments have dragged us into immorality by discarding due process of law, which is generally accorded to be second only to individual rights as the most important pillar of a free society.

The White House, however, plainly believes that it has public opinion behind it in this and other contentious matters such as secret wiretapping. Cheney recently told reporters, "When the American people look at this, they will understand and appreciate what we're doing and why we're doing it."
He may be right for the moment, though the controversy shows no signs of dying. It remains to be seen how long Americans are prepared to go on accepting that the end justifies practically any means Cheney cares to employ.
In the beginning is the word. Where one begins by corrupting language, worse corruptions swiftly follow. Sitting as the Supreme Court to rule on torture last month, Britain's law lords spoke to the world in words that were simple and clear. "The torturer is abhorred not because the information he produces may be unreliable," Lord Rodger of Earlsferry said, "but because of the barbaric means he uses to extract it."
"Torture is an unqualified evil," Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood added. "It can never be justified. Rather, it must always be punished."
The dreadful probability is that the US outsourcing of torture will allow it to escape punishment. It will not allow it to escape moral obloquy.
Salman Rushdie is the author of The Satanic Verses, Fury and many other books.

Rugby Larger

Code's been in last-chance saloon plenty of times, but scandals keep coming
May 21, 2004 SMH

Despite official condemnation, rugby league still has a serious drinking problem that is damaging the sport's image. Darren Walton reports.

If the situation wasn't so serious, you could say it was enough to drive rugby league bosses to drink. But right now is not the time to be making jokes.
Mark Gasnier's obscene phone call scandal is the latest in a long, long line of alcohol-related public relations disasters for the code. Given that Gasnier's offensive phone call followed a NSW State of Origin team drinking session on the very same night the NRL launched a $1 million forum into players' behaviour towards women, it can be argued that his regrettable act might well be the dumbest of all of league's alcohol-fuelled social faux pas.
And there's been a lot since the foundation of the NRL in 1998, almost all of them the dubious results of team bonding sessions.
It seems the NRL and the ARL have lurched from one boozy calamity to another ever since Julian O'Neill defecated in the shoe of a teammate and made a mess of a Dubbo motel room in March, 1999.
That was the same O'Neill who was once ejected from Jupiters Casino on the Gold Coast for urinating under a gaming table . . . while drunk, of course.

The same week O'Neill couldn't find a toilet in Dubbo, four North Sydney players were embroiled in their own alcohol-inspired mischief on another pre-season tour in Wagga Wagga.

A month later, Australian hooker Craig Gower exposed himself to a female Irish tourist at the Coogee Bay Hotel following - you guessed it - a bonding session, for the Test team.
The same week, Brad Fittler was discovered heavily intoxicated outside a Sydney police station after a big night out.
One police source at the time described him as "the drunkest human being ever". Whether he was or not, one thing is indisputable is this: he was drunk and he was to be named Australian captain 24 hours later.
At the time, Nick Politis - the chairman of Fittler's Sydney Roosters - called for an alcohol ban across the code. The ban never eventuated and the problems continued.
If it wasn't John Hopoate turning up intoxicated to Manly training (1999), it was St George Illawarra forward Lance Thompson at the Dragons (2004) - or someone else.
There have been countless other drinking indiscretions in between. League officials could be forgiven for thinking they had documented enough of the dangers of its players drinking excessively on a team bonding session, although some observers might say such a stance was naive. The league might have learned after Chris Walker's exploits while breaking curfew at a Queensland State of Origin camp last month.
Capsicum spray was needed to rein in an intoxicated Walker in the early hours in Brisbane. He was later charged with assaulting police, obstructing police and being a public nuisance. Walker put his hand up, apologised and vowed to stay off the drink for the rest of the season.
In the wake of the latest incident, the Queensland players - sans Walker, who was sacked by the Maroons - will spend the next two evenings at their Gold Coast hinterland base some 20 km away from any major nightspots.
The Queenslanders will play cricket and golf and train, and probably drink and be merry - but they will only bother themselves. Maybe other clubs and players should also take the hint.