Millions of asthmatics and hay fever sufferers could be spared the misery of severe attacks by a new vaccine, which has been successfully tested on people with an allergy to cats.
A team of scientists from Canada says it has cracked the genetic code of the virus which is suspected of causing severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
Iraqi troops south of Tikrit handed U.S. Marines a stunning surprise Sunday: seven American POWs released in relatively good condition after three weeks of captivity. They said they were treated roughly when captured, but given medical care, and some believed they were doomed.
I'm glad to see that the original POWs that were captured have been found alive and in relatively good health. I really had a bad feeling about them, so it's a big relief to see they're alive and on their way home.
Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard—awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.
Oh man, does this story get my blood running. I first heard about this while listening to Rush Limbaugh on my lunch hour. Interestingly enough, a friend of mine also sent me the article via e-mail. Eason Jordan is the Chief News Executive and Newsgathering President for the CNN News Group. This means he has control over the direction CNN decides to report it's news. As you can read, he's decided to let you view the news as Saddam wanted to let you see it. He decided to become part of the Saddam Propaganda Machine. And you've just got to read this interview from October of 2002 where he claims CNN isn't hiding anything: Interview w/Eason Jordan October 25, 2002.
If this article is true, which I believe, then this means that CNN chose to be a propaganda machine for Saddam—in essence supported the regime. I thought a reporters first duty is to report the truth and to report the news. Mr. Jordan made a conscious decision not to report the news. If CNN would have had the stones to report on this twelve years ago, how many Iraqi citizens would have been spared their life? How many citizens would now be living free, in a democratic Iraq?
ZDNet recently published an article covering what the terms "encryption", "hashing" and "obfuscation" mean. If you're familiar with these terms, don't bother reading the article—you won't learn anything you don't already know. However, if you uncertain what the terms mean or simply unfamiliar with them, it does a good job of defining the words and provides some good examples.
A friend of mine (thanks Deron!) had forwarded me review. I've always found quantum science interesting, but I admit, it does make my brain hurt if I think about it too hard. :) The idea of "entanglement" is something I find extremely fascinating.
Quantum particles are said to be entangled when their fates are inextricably linked; if one is spinning clockwise, say, the other one has to be spinning counterclockwise.
Although not stated in the article, it's my understanding that once entangled, the particles can be seperated via both time and space and they remain entangled. This brings up interesting possibilities in communication.
This is the second part in a series on design patterns for use with CFMX. I posting this because the idea of using iterators in CF appeals to me. I'm thinking about throwing together a generic iterator object which will convert any CFMX native variable type (array, query, string [list] and structure) into an iterator. This would definitely simplify looping constructs in CFMX, as you could use the same looping syntax for every variable.
Here's an interesting presentation on the future of many web-based technologies. The presentation, written by Gerald Bauer, covers XUL, XForms, Curl, Rebol—just to name a few. If you're a web developer, or just interesting in where the web is going, this is an interesting read.
This has gotten very little press, but it's worth reading. As with any news item, read it with a grain of salt. If the findings are accurate, we should here more about it.
(Andrew Gilligan) added that after examining the scene he concluded it was virtually impossible for the US tank to have fired on the 15th floor room.
This goes along with a point I made yesterday about how little support you actually saw for Saddam via the media. The Saddam regime was really keeping a stranglehold on the images coming out of Iraq—but who didn't know that.
Now they tell us. When their "minders" from the Hussein regime didn't show up on Wednesday morning, three reporters conceded the minders had inhibited them from telling the truth about what was happening in Baghdad and the real level of support for Hussein.
[clip]
"There were people whipping up support for President Saddam Hussein in front of your cameras everywhere you went."
Carl Prine of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has reported on what appears to be storage facility for weapon grade plutonium. There's still testing that needs to be done, but local farmers in the area referred to this location as where the "missle water" was.
"It's amazing," said Chief Warrant Officer Darrin Flick, the battalion's nuclear, biological and chemical warfare specialist. "I went to the off-site storage buildings, and the rad detector went off the charts. Then I opened the steel door, and there were all these drums, many, many drums, of highly radioactive material."
However, Tannous Basil, a 47-year-old cardiologist in Sidon, Lebanon, said Saddam's regime was a "dictatorship and had to go."
"I don't like the idea of having the Americans here, but we asked for it," he said. "Why don't we see the Americans going to Finland, for example? They come here because our area is filled with dictatorships like Saddam's."
I read this article last night and found it very interesting. There's lots of good quotes from Arabs in the area (mostly from surrounding countries to Iraq.) We have to be very aware of the perception of the citizens in the area and they have to feel confident that this War wasn't about gaining American control. Will everyone in the Middle East change their opinion, no, but you can't expect them too. It takes a long time for society perception to change—but it can change, and we've taken the first step.
We (as Americans) also have to realize this is going to be long process. It's not going to be over today, not a month from now and not a year from now. It takes a long time for a country to adapt to a democracy—especially when the people have been living in poverty. The problem is the people who have money tend to have power and a introducing a democracy into a dictatorship typically affects the people who had money under the dictatorship—and nobody likes to give up their money or their power. This is going to take a while and their will be ups and downs. You just need to have faith that this is the best thing in the long run for the Iraqi people.
I just got back from lunch—I went home to play with the puppy for awhile —and got to watch a bit of the news. I was really struck by the shear number of Iraqi people celebrating in the streets.
I've mentioned this a couple of times in the past to friends and family. When you've watched the news coverage on Iraq over the past 30 days or so, you'll notice that anytime they show a group of Saddam supporters, it consisted of 20-70 people—most of which are fully armed and in some kind of military guard (not necessarily official military garb, but military non the less.) Even the recent footage of Saddam walking around the streets of Baghdad, there were were still less than 70 people surrounding him. Granted, the camera man would try to be creative by standing in the middle of the crowd making it look bigger, but really it was quite a small crowd of supporters.
Now all the sudden the streets are laden with thousands (and tens of thousands) of Iraqi citizens all cheering and celebrating Saddam's regime being brought down in Baghdad. This tells me that without a doubt, the citizens of Iraqi are glad we're there and are happy for this liberation operation.
"Let me remind the Americans. Those who are now greeting and kissing you in Baghdad are the same people who yesterday were burning Bush pictures and shouting support for Saddam," the bank director said. "Those same people, who were exhausted by wars and sanctions, will have another say when they will discover that the U.S. is an occupying force."
I think it's very important that the U.S. makes it clear that we're not an "occupying force." While I think we have to stick around to help Iraq out (we can't just leave like we did when we were in Afghanistan in the 80s,) we also have to be very conscientious about how we come across.
If the U.S. appears to be anti-Muslim or pro-Israeli, we will really ignite the fires of all the anti-Americans. If handled correctly, we have the opportunity to make ourselves appear in a better light to the people of the Middle East. If they can see we only came to Iraq to help the Iraqi citizens gain freedom, I think that may go along way to defusing the growing faction of anti-American propaganda.
I was on ProgGods.com today and they had some release dates listed for projects I'm interesting in. It looks like Trevor Rabin is releasing some re-workings of the tunes from Yes' 90125—I wonder what that's like. It's also interesting to see that Queensryche is re-releasing all of their albums. I think it's a shame that they added bonus live tracks to "Operation: Mindcrime" though—it ruins the flow of the album if you ask me.
April 8th: