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  2,900-Year-Old Gravestone Reveals Ancient Belief System

  Posted: November 20th, 2008, 9:11pm EST by ralph

  Annalee Newitz, i09: A 2,900-year-old gravestone from the ancient kingdom of Sam'al, located in what is today southeastern Turkey, has shed light on an ancient religious belief heretofore unknown.The gravestone, called a stele, is in nearly pristine condition and archaeologists were able to translate all the writing on it. Now they've gained new insight into what people of the Iron Age believed about souls and death.A team of archaeologists from the University of Chicago will discuss their findings at a conference this weekend. The man who created the stele was named Kuttamuwa, and he describes himself as a "servant" of King Panamuwa. Kuttamuwa's stele, in pristine condition, was found in a suburb of the walled city, far from the palace - archeologists speculate it was probably the man's own house.Though the city of Sam'al was influenced by local Semitic cultures in many ways - including their language - Kuttamuwa and Panamuwa are names that show the Indo-European cultural influence. Also, Kuttamuwa was cremated, a practice shunned by Semitic tribes of that era.
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  Head of Interpol Mexico Arrested for Drug Ties

  Posted: November 20th, 2008, 6:30pm EST by ouranos

  MEXICO CITY (Reuters): Mexico arrested its head of Interpol on Tuesday for allegedly working for a powerful drug cartel and sent the military to take over police duties in the city of Tijuana in another step to flush out corrupt law enforcement.Ricardo Gutierrez was Mexico's representative to Interpol, the world's largest international police force, and the latest top police officer to be locked up on suspicion of working for drug traffickers.In October, two leading anti-drug agents were jailed for taking bribes of "up to $450,000 a month" from the Beltran Leyva crime group to leak intelligence about police operations.The Beltran Leyva brothers recently split from the Sinaloa drug cartel run by Mexico's most wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, and also were bribing Gutierrez, prosecutors said.
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  Snubbed Bush Wanders By Himself at the G20

  Posted: November 20th, 2008, 6:29pm EST by JacobSloan

  Watch as on the floor at the G20 Summit, the world's leaders greet each other warmly, shaking hands and exchanging words. Bush trudges head down, looking very much like a rejected third-grader. Aw!
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  30 Reasons For Great Depression 2 By 2011 (Updated)

  Posted: November 20th, 2008, 6:05pm EST by ouranos

  RROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) - By 2011? No recovery? No new bull? "Hey Paul, why do you keep talking about a bigger crash coming by 2011?" Readers ask that often. So here's a sequel to my predictions of 2000 and 2004, with a look three years ahead:First. Dot-com crashWe pinpointed the dot-com crash at its peak, in a March 20, 2000 column: "Next crash? Sorry, you won't see it coming." Bulls-eye: The dot-com bubble popped. The economy went into a 30-month recession. The stock market lost $8 trillion. And today, over eight years later, the market is still roughly 40% below its 2000 peak. See previous Paul B. Farrell.Factor in inflation and the average stock has lost well over 50% of its value. Stocks have proven to be a very big loser, a bad investment for Americans, thanks to Wall Street's selfish greed, plus the complicity and naiveté of politicians, press and public.Second. Subprime meltdown.
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  Indian Space Agency Takes On Google Earth

  Posted: November 20th, 2008, 6:05pm EST by majestic

  Emboldened by its first mission to the Moon, India is to take on a target closer to Earth: Google. The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), which is based in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of the sub-continent, will roll-out a rival to Google Earth, the hugely popular online satellite imagery service, by the end of the month. The project, dubbed Bhuvan (Sanskrit for Earth), will allow users to zoom into areas as small as 10 metres wide, compared to the 200 metre wide zoom limit on Google Earth.
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  Naomi Klein on the Bailout Profiteers and the Multi-Trillion-Dollar Crime Scene

  Posted: November 20th, 2008, 6:04pm EST by majestic

  The Bush administration has already handed out almost half of the $700 billion in bank bailout money authorized by Congress but has not even filled the mandated oversight positions to review how it is being used.Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, has described the handling of the bailout as "borderline criminal" because of this and other problems. Klein spoke to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! on Monday to explain her accusations."We were all reassured that there was going to be transparency, accountability, legality," Klein stated. "But now we're finding out that, in fact, Henry Paulson has achieved his original goal by stealth, because there is no accountability, and lawmakers are very hesitant to challenge this. ... Essentially, what the Bush administration has done is said, 'We dare you to challenge us and be responsible for the Great Depression.'"
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  A New Political Party Is Needed

  Posted: November 20th, 2008, 5:12pm EST by statusquobuster

  Without more political competition Americans really do not have political choice. Here is the case for a new national political party that would attract progressives, conservatives, independents and chronic non-voters.
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  Vice President Cheney and Former Attorney General Gonzales Indicted By Texas Grand Jury

  Posted: November 20th, 2008, 3:50pm EST by ralph

  Associated Press (McALLEN, Texas): A South Texas grand jury has indicted Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on state charges related to the alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County's federal detention centers.The indictment, which had not yet been signed by the presiding judge, was one of seven released Tuesday in a county that has been a source of bizarre legal and political battles in recent years. Another of the indictments named a state senator on charges of profiting from his position.Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra himself had been under indictment for more than a year and half before a judge dismissed the indictments last month. This flurry of charges came in the twilight of Guerra's tenure, which ends this year after nearly two decades in office. He lost convincingly in a Democratic primary in March.Cheney's indictment on a charge of engaging in an organized criminal activity criticizes the vice president's investment in the Vanguard Group, which holds interests in the private prison companies running the federal detention centers. It accuses Cheney of a conflict of interest and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees because of his link to the prison companies.
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  A Ron Paul Foreign Policy Barack Obama Should Believe In

  Posted: November 20th, 2008, 10:31am EST by ouranos

  COMMENT: This forum on Obama's Change.gov website is one place to present Obama & his crew with alternative proposals; like any other dropbox, the volume of response will be more telling than anything else.Marc Gallagher, Liberty Maven: Ron Paul has been rightly critical of Barack Obama's interventionist desires. It certainly seems the only foreign policy difference between our outgoing meddling President and our incoming one is the venue of destruction. Bush's crusade was Iraq. It looks like Obama's will be Afghanistan. Three or four years from now will Obama have plummeting approval ratings due to mismanagement of his coming interventionist crusade in Afghanistan?The real answer depends on the level of the crusade. By level, I could mean blood level. The most morbid yet accurate indicator of failure in such an effort is the number of body bags on planes bound for home. Will the American people give Barack Obama more breathing room than Bush on this horrific statistic? I certainly hope not.
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  Supercomputers Break Petaflop Barrier, Transforming Science

  Posted: November 20th, 2008, 10:01am EST by ouranos

  Betsy Mason, Wired: A new crop of supercomputers is breaking down the petaflop speed barrier, pushing high-performance computing into a new realm that could change science more profoundly than at any time since Galileo, leading researchers say.When the Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was announced at the international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second, the first two computers to do so.These computers aren't just faster than those they pushed further down the list, they will enable a new class of science that wasn't possible before. As recently described in Wired magazine, these massive number crunchers will push simulation to the forefront of science.Scientists will be able to run new and vastly more accurate models of complex phenomena: Climate models will have dramatically higher resolution and accuracy, new materials for efficient energy transmission will be developed and simulations of scramjet engines will reach a new level of complexity.
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  Can the GOP Win Over Generation Y?

  Posted: November 20th, 2008, 1:06am EST by ralph

  Ali Eteraz, The Guardian:Now that the election is over, it's interesting to look at how Gen Y compared politically to the generations before, largely because, if you do a little mental math, you are looking at a generation that by 2016, could represent slightly more than 30% of the American electorate. Indeed if you look at the voter breakdown in the 2008 presidential election you find that Gen Y chose Obama over McCain 68% to 30%.Dumbocracy: Adventures with the Loony Left, the Rabid Right and other American Idiots, is a book by Marty Beckerman, a Gen Y'er who was a former college Republican, and in 2000 was a great cheerleader for John McCain, but voted for Obama this year. The book is Beckerman's chronicle of the four years he spent hanging out with "foot soldiers" of the left and right: pro-choice and anti-choice, pro-gay and anti-gay, pro-war and anti-war. Beckerman immersed himself into the culture wars that are everywhere percolating behind the scenes in America (consider that California's anti-gay marriage Prop 8 was victorious despite an Obama victory) and came out completely flabbergasted.