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Everyone seems to be jumping on the blog bandwagon so I thought I'd give it a go as well. Haven't really got a clue what I'm going to talk about, but that's never really stopped me from saying something, so . . .
In what is being hailed as one of the most spectacular paleoanthropological finds of the past century, researchers have unearthed the remains of a dwarf human species that survived on the Indonesian island of Flores until just 13,000 years ago. The discovery significantly extends the known range of physical variation in our genus, Homo, and reveals that H. sapiens shared the planet with other humans much more recently than previously believed. -- read the rest.
Scientists have discovered a new and tiny species of human that lived in Indonesia at the same time our own ancestors were colonising the world.
The three-foot (one-metre) tall species - dubbed "the Hobbit" - lived on Flores island until at least 12,000 years ago. -- read the rest.
Cats can suffer from stress-related illness like humans, a study by animal experts suggests.
Rivalry with another cat is the biggest source of feline anxiety closely followed by moving home or the arrival of a new member of the owner's family. -- read the rest.
Researchers in the Austrian city of Salzburg have dug up the bodies of relatives of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in a search for DNA samples.
The scientists hope to find out if a skull currently held at Mozart's memorial foundation in the city is his. -- read the rest.
rodomontade \rod-uh-muhn-TADE; roh-duh-; -TAHD\, noun:
Vain boasting; empty bluster; pretentious, bragging speech; rant.
Rodomontade comes from Italian rodomontada, from Rodomonte, a great yet boastful warrior king in Italian epics of the late 15th - early 16th centuries. At root the name means "roller-away of mountains," from the Italian dialect rodare, "to roll away" (from Latin rota, "wheel") + Italian monte, "mountain" (from Latin mons).
Little-known US actor Brandon Routh has been cast as the man of steel in the new Superman film, due out in 2006. The 25-year-old from Iowa will fill the role famously played by Christopher Reeve, who died earlier this month. -- read the rest.
A species of puffer fish has helped scientists identify 900 human genes that went previously unnoticed. -- read the rest.
President George W. Bush is on his way to one of the worst records for job growth for any president in more than half a century. Nearly 1.6 million private-sector jobs have been lost since Bush became president. -- see the graphic.
The diary of the dark days a Jewish teenager spent in a Nazi detention camp awaiting deportation has come to light in the Netherlands.
Helga Deen, 18, wrote the diary during the three months she spent in the camp in 1943 so her Dutch boyfriend could understand what she was experiencing. -- read the rest.
The living arrangements of parents at the time a baby is conceived may play a role in determining its sex, research suggests. -- read the rest.
On a shelf in a locked basement room underneath the British Museum, are kept 11 wooden tablets; they are covered in purple velvet. And no one among the museum's staff - including Neil MacGregor, the director - is permitted to enter the room.
The tablets - or tabots - are sacred objects in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the most important of the 500 or so priceless Magdala treasures, looted by Britain from Ethiopia in 1868 and now held in this country. For almost two decades, the only people allowed access have been Ethiopian church clergy; it is considered sacrilegious for anyone else to see them. -- read the rest.
TONY Blair was left isolated last night as his decision to send Black Watch soldiers into Iraq’s infamous Sunni Triangle to cover American troops was greeted with total opposition.
Even pro-war MPs refused to back the deal with the United States.-- read the rest.
Technical glitches and long queues took the sheen off the first day of early voting in the US state of Florida. -- read the rest.
JACKSON, Miss., Oct. 17 - What does it take for a man like Staff Sgt. Michael Butler, a 24-year veteran of the Army and the Reserve who was a soldier in the first Persian Gulf war and a reserve called up to fight in the current war in Iraq, to risk everything by disobeying a direct order in wartime? -- read the rest.
Early voting began this morning in Travis County, and the University Democrats want to be the first in line to cast their ballots.
Starting Sunday night at 9:30 p.m., the University Democrats sponsored an all-night slumber party in front of the Undergraduate Library called Voterama. The UGL is one of many early voting locations. -- read the rest.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." -- read all of it.
Throughout my tenure and beyond as the 30th governor of this state, I have been steadfastly aligned -- and until recently, proudly so -- with the Minnesota Republican Party.
It dismays me, therefore, to have to publicly disagree with the national Republican agenda and the national Republican candidate but, this year, I must.
The two "Say No to Bush" signs in my yard say it all." -- read the rest.
SCHIEFFER: Gentleman, welcome to you both.
By coin toss, the first question goes to Sen. Kerry.
Senator, I want to set the stage for this discussion by asking the question that I think hangs over all of our politics today and is probably on the minds of many people watching this debate tonight.
And that is, will our children and grandchildren ever live in a world as safe and secure as the world in which we grew up?
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This pilot fish is the lone IT person at a small manufacturing company. So when the music-on-hold system stops working, you know who has to deal with it.
"The music-on-hold player continuously replayed a CD and fed into the simple phone system we were using," fish says. "Eventually the player broke. Since I had a spare PC in my office, I wired the audio jack on the PC to the phone system, ripped the CD and set the media player to continuous replay.
"I gave myself a pat on the back for coming up with an immediate solution and made a mental note to order a new player the next time I made an equipment purchase."
A few days later, a buddy from another department drops by fish's office so they can spend lunchtime blasting each other in a multiplayer computer game.
"He used the spare PC in my office and I used my workstation," says fish. "We were well into destroying each other when the CEO's secretary frantically burst into my office, scared, panicking.
"She explained in horror that our music on hold had turned into death screams and hellish demonic noises!"
Fish knows instantly what the problem is -- the game's audio was playing on the music-on-hold system -- and he takes instant action. He leaps up, tears the old music-on-hold player from the wall, throws it to the floor and stomps on it.
Meanwhile, his friend quits out of the game on the spare PC, and the music-on-hold system goes silent.
"They bought a new player that day," fish says. "And for a long time, you could still hear them talk about the possessed music-on-hold player."
"Several American companies on the list, compiled from 13 documents kept by Hussein's vice president and oil minister, were given vouchers to purchase billions of dollars of oil at discounted prices. The U.S. companies are not named in the report because of privacy laws, U.S. officials said."
Hussein survived the most comprehensive embargo ever imposed by subverting the very U.N. program introduced in 1996 to help the Iraqi people survive it. Hussein's government made an estimated $1.7 billion between 1996 and 2003 by shrewdly but secretly manipulating the U.N. oil-for-food program, the report says.
The humanitarian program was backed by the United States as a means of controlling Hussein's oil revenue, which had to be channeled through the United Nations. The world body then had to approve the spending of profits on basic necessities for the Iraqi people. But the former Iraqi leader ordered his regime to come up with an array of plans to sell oil under the table so he could spend the money as he saw fit.
The number of countries and companies involved in the schemes to undermine or challenge U.N. sanctions increased dramatically from the time the oil-for-food program was introduced until Hussein's removal from power last year, the report added.
The Duelfer report concludes that Baghdad exploited the program "to give individuals and countries an economic stake in ending sanctions." Hussein introduced a system of rewards for illegally dealing with Baghdad, while also playing on international sympathy and "successfully arguing its case that the sanctions were harming the innocent."
The success of Hussein's regime in circumventing the U.N. embargo is "grossly obvious," the report says. "It is also grossly obvious how the sanctions perverted not just the [Iraqi] national system of finance and economics, but to some extent the international markets and organizations."
The Bush administration sought yesterday to highlight this aspect of the Duelfer report to counter the finding that Hussein probably had produced no new weapons of mass destruction since 1991, after the U.S.-led coalition forced Iraq to retreat from Kuwait.
Key findings in the report:
"The ISG has not found evidence that Saddam possessed WMD stocks in 2003, but [there is] the possibility that some weapons existed in Iraq, although not of a militarily significant capability."
"There is an extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial body of evidence suggesting that Saddam pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return to WMD after sanctions were lifted... "
"The problem of discerning WMD in Iraq is highlighted by the pre-war misapprehensions of weapons which were not there. Distant technical analysts mistakenly identified evidence and drew incorrect conclusions."
The ISG also published a list of people and groups to whom Saddam Hussein allegedly offered cheap oil in return for their support in trying to get UN sanctions lifted.
Many on the list - drawn from official Iraqi documents - are from Russia, France and China - countries which opposed the war in Iraq.
"DeLay, 57, elected in 1984 to a district representing the Dallas suburb of Sugarland, began his ascent after Republicans captured the House in 1994 successfully running for the No. 3 position as majority whip."
Surgeons were carrying out complicated skull operations in medieval times, the remains of a body found at an archaeological dig show.
A skull belonging to a 40-year-old peasant man, who lived between 960 and 1100AD, is the firmest evidence yet of cranial surgery, say its discoverers.
The remains, found in Yorkshire, show the man survived an otherwise fatal blow to the head thanks to surgery.
Many pictures of Jupiter reveal its cloud bands, the Great Red Spot, and other large weather features. But nearer to its poles, the gas giant planet takes on a different and inexplicable look.
This is one of the many images of Jupiter's Moon Io made by the Galileo spacecraft. Io is the most volcanically dynamic object in the solar system, with some three dozen active volcanoes. Some are nearly twice as tall as Mt. Everest, the highest point on Earth.
Images from the Hubble Space Telescope can provide astronomers a wealth of new information. Some of them allow for groundbreaking discoveries. Many, like this one, are not so dramatic science-wise, but the world seems a better place just for having them to look at.
The brilliant stars seen in this image are members of a cluster of about 1,000 stars known as the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters. The brightest of the stars are visible to the naked eye on dark nights from Earth and together make a popular target for backyard astronomers.
The Hubble Space Telescope has cast its eye on a fuzzy patch of emissions in space known as the Cat's Eye Nebula, revealing a series of concentric rings in new detail.
abulia, also aboulia \uh-BOO-lee-uh; uh-BYOO-\, noun:
Loss or impairment of the ability to act or to make decisions.
Abulia derives from Greek a-, "without" + boule, "will." The adjective form is abulic.