By Roland Elliott Brown, Op-Ed @ ForeignPolicy.com, Feb. 1, 2013

[.....] Orwell provided the world a new vocabulary for modes of oppression. When, in January, Iranian authorities pressured Café Prague, a popular hangout for Tehran's students and intellectuals, to install cameras whose footage the state could access, the cafe's owners protested by closing down their business. Their explanation: "We take comfort in knowing that we at least didn't let Big Brother's glass eyes scan and record our every step, minute, and memory from dawn till dusk."

Meanwhile, on the western side of Orwell's bridge, Iranian journalists working for non-Iranian media -- in particular, BBC Persian -- accused their government of forging websites and Facebook pages in their names, built around salacious themes. Close readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four will recall not only the Party's fabrications and forgeries, but the cheap pornography it distributed to the "proles" of Airstrip One, Orwell's dystopian England.

As if to confirm Iran in its Orwellian moment, Washington-based opposition cartoonist Nikahang Kowsar, well-known for portraying Iran's theocrats as animals, generated fresh controversy by caricaturing Iran's former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, as Napoleon, the porcine leader and hypocrite of Animal Farm. "Comparing Orwell's story with the 1979 revolution," Kowsar explains [.....]

By Michael Schwirtz, New York Times, Feb. 3/4, 2013

The police identified the man who shot Chris Kyle, the retired Navy Seal who was known as America’s deadliest sniper, as a 25-year-old veteran with a history of mental illness who had served in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

By Adam Nossiter and Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, Feb. 1/2,2013

ALGIERS — To the Algerians, the desert warlord in the swirling blue robes was a man of his word — the key to managing the crisis next door in northern Mali — and for months they lodged his representative here in the Algerian capital in high style in one of the city’s finest hotels.

They were nurturing a viper. The warlord, as the Algerians well knew, was the leader of one of the militant Islamist groups holding northern Mali captive. That was not a deal-breaker, they reasoned. To the contrary, having tight connections with a powerful militant across the border, much as Pakistan does in Afghanistan, could protect their interests.

But instead of ensuring that the conflict remained outside their country, a longstanding imperative of the Algerians, the warlord, Iyad Ag Ghali, ended up bringing it right to them. His forces made a sudden push toward the Malian capital in January, enraging his Algerian patrons, bringing on a French military intervention and ultimately giving extremists a rallying cry to seize an Algerian gas field, leading to the deaths of at least 38 hostages. [....]

By Oliver Sacks, New York Review of Books, Feb. 21, 2013 issue

In 1993, approaching my sixtieth birthday, I started to experience a curious phenomenon—the spontaneous, unsolicited rising of early memories into my mind, memories that had lain dormant for upward of fifty years. Not merely memories, but frames of mind, thoughts, atmospheres, and passions associated with them—memories, especially, of my boyhood in London before World War II.  Moved by these, I wrote two short memoirs, [.....]

I expected some deficiencies of memory—partly because the events I was writing about had occurred fifty or more years earlier, and most of those who might have shared their memories, or checked my facts, were now dead; and partly because, in writing about the first fifteen years of my life, I could not call on the letters and notebooks that I started to keep, assiduously, from the age of eighteen or so.

I accepted that I must have forgotten or lost a great deal, but assumed that the memories I did have—especially those that were very vivid, concrete, and circumstantial—were essentially valid and reliable; and it was a shock to me when I found that some of them were not.[.....]

By Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 1, 2013

BEIRUT — A suicide attacker detonated a bomb Friday outside the U.S. Embassy in Turkey killing himself and a Turkish guard but failing to damage the main embassy building or cause serious casualties among U.S. personnel, authorities said.

Turkish officials later identified the suicide bomber as a member of an outlawed far-left domestic group.  The White House labeled the incident in Ankara a terrorist attack, and U.S. officials praised Turkish authorities for their quick response. [....]

News reports in Turkey identified the attacker as Ecevit Sanli, a member of the outlawed Revolutionary People's Liberation Party/Front, which espouses an anti-U.S. and anti-capitalist agenda. The bomber's motives remained unknown.

The far-left group — considered a terrorist organization by Turkey and the United States — has been implicated in attacks going back to the 1970s, authorities said, reportedly including several involving U.S. targets.

Sanli was imprisoned in 1997 for attacking a military guest house in Istanbul with a flame thrower . [.....]

By Natalie Angier, New York Times, Jan. 29/30, 2013

For all the adorable images of cats that play the piano, flush the toilet, mew melodiously and find their way back home over hundreds of miles, scientists have identified a shocking new truth: cats are far deadlier than anyone realized.

In a report that scaled up local surveys and pilot studies to national dimensions, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States — both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it — kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year [.....]

Photo credit/caption: James Morton/ A domestic cat with a European rabbit. Domestic and feral cats are significant predators of a wide range of prey species, including rabbits.

By Phillip Inman and Dominic Rushe, The Guardian, Jan. 30, 2013

Surprise drop in growth due to defence cuts and fiscal cliff, though jobs, housing and construction all improve

[....] Cuts in government spending sent the economy into reverse following a 3.1% annualised increase in GDP in the third quarter. Government spending fell by 15%, dragged down by a 22% cut in defence spending, the biggest fall since 1972 and the end of the Vietnam war. Private companies cut back orders to reduce their stocks after a spree in the previous quarter and a decline in exports.

The surprise contraction came ahead of the release of the latest official jobs figures on Friday. Unemployment has been steadily, if slowly, declining in recent months. [....]

Some economists warned against reading too much into the report. "Frankly, this is the best-looking contraction in US GDP you'll ever see," Paul Ashworth, an economist at Capital Economics, said in a note to clients. "The drag from defence spending and inventories is a one-off. The rest of the report is all encouraging."[....]

By Micah Zenko, ForeignPolicy.com, Jan. 29, 2014

The U.N. will pry America's drones out of our cold, dead hands.....

The Senate just confirmed John Kerry 94-3.

Pretty good huh?

Senator Kerry is a good man, got a raw deal in 2004.

Good luck to John Kerry

It's true, people who read newspaper and magazine reports on science “may be influenced as much by the comments at the end of the story as they are by the report itself,” a study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers says.

“Disturbingly, readers’ interpretations of potential risks associated with the technology described in the news article differed significantly depending only on the tone of the manipulated reader comments posted with the story,” wrote authors Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele.

http://www.jsonline.com/features/health/online-comments-hurt-science-und...

http://www.news.wisc.edu/releases/17723

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-around-the-clock/2013/01/28/c...

The stuff you find when you're out lurking on the Internets.

On the other hand, the antidepressant Buproprion (Wellbutrin for brand purposes) which is not an SSRI, does NOT seem to speed up bone loss and may even support bone density increases. It also may send Crohn's disease into remission and have some positive effect on ankylosing spondylitis.

A practical question--should I be posting this in news, or just putting it in the "from the readers" section? This article is a year old. Ramona or MM, could you let me know? I know MW is out because he's sitting in the information hot tub.

(Let's hope he doesn't get a virus.....hahaha, get it, computer virus!)

BBC News, Jan. 28, 2013

The United Arab Emirates has ordered 94 people to be tried on charges of trying to seize power.

The attorney general said the suspects had formed a group that publicly called on people to observe the teachings and values of Islam, but in secret sought to overthrow the state.

He said they had links to foreigners, including the Muslim Brotherhood [....]

Also see:

U.A.E. Sends 94 to Court for Planning Overthrow of State
By Zaid Sabah & Glen Carey, Bloomberg News, Jan 28, 2013

The United Arab Emirates sent 94 citizens to the supreme federal court, charging them with an attempt to seize power in the Persian Gulf state, the official WAM service said, citing General Prosecutor Salim Saed Kbesh.

The investigations showed that the defendants established a secret organization opposed to the basic principles of the state, WAM reported, citing the general prosecutor. They also tried to establish contacts with foreigners, including the Muslim Brotherhood, the news service said. [....]