United Kingdom Education

[Daily Observer] Sharing in Nursery Education (SHINE) Africa, a charitable organisation based in the United Kingdom Thursday donated 250 chairs to the Gambia College.

Distributors of the new $35 Raspberry Pi PC were swamped with preorders from customers in Europe, the U.S. and Asia on Wednesday -- the diminutive computing device's first day of availability.

Created by a non-profit charity based in the United Kingdom, the credit-card-size PC is designed to run the ArchLinux, Debian and Fedora distributions of ARM GNU/Linux, which users can purchase on preloaded SD cards sold separately.

"This really came from an observation that people were coming to [university courses] perhaps with less skills than they used to have," said Raspberry Pi Foundation co-founder Robert Mullins. "The primary goal was to build a low-cost computer that every child could own, where programming it was the natural thing to do with it, and also something that could be built into larger projects."

Due to huge interest in the charity's new $35 PC, the Web sites of global distributor RS Components and the element14 community of Premier Farnell were overwhelmed with preorders on Wednesday -- even though preorders were limited to one per customer.

"With tens of thousands of customers looking to order on the RS Web site since the launch of Raspberry Pi earlier today, this is the greatest level of demand RS has ever received for a product at one time," said Chris Page, the general manager of electronics at RS Components.

A Great Opportunity

RS expects to receive the first batch of boards into warehouses at the end of next week, with the shipping of products on a first-come, first-served preorder basis.

"We clearly understand how excited customers are about this ground-breaking product and we are working closely with Raspberry Pi to satisfy this unprecedented demand," Page said.

Premier Farnell sees the Raspberry Pi as a great opportunity to engage a new generation of engineers and computer experts. "Through our element14 Community we...

The 80-year-old minister was admitted to the Aga Khan University Hospital on Sunday morning, only two days after arriving from the United Kingdom where he was undergoing ...

[Vanguard] Abuja - 89 Niger Delta youths will this week , leave for the United Kingdom and Cyprus to pursue various degree programmes under the Presidential Amnesty Office scholarship scheme, even as former deputy speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Chibudom Nwuche, advocated a programme through which a quota of oil company employment opportunities could be reserved for candidates from the Niger Delta.

[Ghanaian Chronicle] Former President John Agyekum Kufuor left Accra on Monday night for a one-week visit to the United Kingdom (UK), to address a high level forum on the linkage between Agriculture, Nutrition and Education.

By Richard Lightbown

The British media was full of sound bites last weekend from politicians expressing outrage against Russia and China for blocking a UN Security Council resolution based on an Arab League proposal for the Syrian crisis. This is the same Arab League that called for the no-fly zone in Libya which precipitated events leading to a death toll five times higher than the current total in Syria. It is supported by the same United States administration which has ordered drone assassinations in Yemen and Pakistan, along with widespread human rights abuses around the world. Along with the same United Kingdom government whose shadowy spooks in MI6 helped to provoke the Libyan uprising, and train Palestinian security forces in the black arts of torture. It is the same French government which armed and trained Libyan rebels; acts which, in the opinion of the chair of the Security Council's Sanctions Committee, were in breach of UNSC resolutions 1970 and 1973.
 
NATO was not mandated to train or arm the Libyan rebels, or employ any forces on the ground, or bomb hospitals, schools and infrastructure; it was mandated to protect civilian life. With the death toll at more than 30,000 and counting, this cannot be considered a successful operation that fulfilled its mandated task.
 
After the recent Security Council result US Ambassador Susan Rice had the temerity to declare "The US is disgusted". So why was it not disgusted over Fallujah, or Kosovo, or direct US involvement in Afghanistan which began with the widespread use of cluster bombs? Because the United States if the world's greatest rogue state, the world's greatest perpetrator of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the world's greatest hypocrite.
 
Western media however is loathe the admit this. On Saturday, 4 February ITN was implying that Russia vetoed the proposal simply because Syria is a major buyer of Russian arms and provides the Russian Navy with a friendly port on the Mediterranean. The BBC was still leading with the story of Western outrage over the vetoes the following night. In the Independent on Sunday, Joan Smith called for the support, training and organization of the Syrian opposition along the lines of the deployment of NATO Special Forces in Libya. She should keep herself up to date. NATO already has training camps in Turkey for opponents of the Assad regime. According to Italian sources used by Pravda NATO snipers have been transferred from Libya to Syria; while MI6, probably in conjunction with the CIA, already has forces there.
 
Despite the involvement of Western military, David Hearst in the Guardian and Dr Alan George in the Independent on Sunday both asserted that military intervention is not on the agenda. Neither justified their assertion, which did not concur with the UN’s own report on the session which specifically mentioned Russian fears of such an event. Reuters reported that a vote was forced on the Council while Russian diplomats were still seeking alterations to the Anglo-French draft, while both Russian and Chinese representatives spoke of the need to seek peace between opposing factions. This important point was totally ignored in statements by American, British and French leaders who were more interested in apportioning blame than in seeking consensus.
 
The real reason for the Russian and Chinese vetoes is that they were duped by NATO’s involvement in Libya. What should have been the enforcement of a no-fly zone and a total embargo on military goods for the protection of civilian life was distorted beyond recognition by the alliance. Without Security Council authorization, rebels were armed and trained, a stable prosperous society was bombed into poverty and insecurity, atrocities were committed, much of the infrastructure was damaged or destroyed, the regime was overthrown and armed bands were left on the streets to fight among themselves and to kill and loot with impunity.
 
Having been fooled once, Russia and China cannot, and will not allow any authorization which could serve as an excuse for a US-led colonial project in Syria. In reality the Western politicians expressing outrage and crying crocodile tears for Syrians are intent on overthrowing the Assad regime in Damascus in total disregard to any suffering or harm that might cause. With a population more than tenfold that of Libya, a death toll in excess of 100,000 could result.
 
Those promoting a NATO intervention should look at the track record of American-led interventions: through Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya; the story is always the same. High-tech super weaponry is used to destroy, kill, maim and pollute the local people and their environment, with minimum losses to the assailants. There is no positive aspect to this story for the victims. Following in the wake of NATO forces there is only destruction and death: devastation far in excess of the violence used to justify the attack.
 
Those who propose a NATO ‘solution’ in Syria should be able to justify their case by answering two questions.
 
One: If Russia and China had vetoed UNSC resolution 1973 (and assuming NATO had respected this result), what damage and death toll do they think might have resulted?

[It should be remembered here that no evidence has been produced to support the original allegations of “genocide” by loyalist forces which provoked the call for intervention.]
 
Two: If NATO gets sufficient excuse to attack Syria and carry out a regime change what damage and death toll might result (and how will this compare with current estimates of 6000 dead)?
 
The fact that nobody from the US administration has so far provided data which might answer these simple questions suggests that the answers might be inconvenient and embarrassing to those proposing yet another war under the guise of a humanitarian intervention.
 
- Richard Lightbown is a writer and researcher. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

[Daily News] TANZANIA and the United Kingdom have agreed in principle to channel all the £30 million (75bn/-) BAE system's compensation fund for air traffic control system to the Tanzanian education sector development.

By William A. Cook

'Men use thought only to justify their injustices, and speech only to conceal their thoughts.' --Voltaire: Dialogue XIV, Le Chapon et la Poularde

Voltaire's wit often illuminates truth. Consider this revealing 'thought' as expressed recently in Alert, the voice of AIPAC to its membership: “Some Americans believe if the Israelis strike Iran, the U.S. will pay the political costs anyway, so it would be better for the Americans to do the job and do it properly. Their clock is a bit different from the one the Israelis hear. Because of their vastly superior firepower, the Americans could strike Iran later, more devastatingly and more sustainably.” How just is it for AIPAC’s mouthpiece to declare that America should “devastate” Iran because it has “vastly more firepower” than Israel and could “do a better job” and “do it properly,” as though this were a clean-up “job” of a waste dump and not an illegal invasion of a member country of the United Nations that has done nothing under international law to threaten the U.S. much less attack it, while the Israeli government and its IDF look on happily content that it is American boys and girls suffering the consequences of the unwarranted attacks and not Jewish boys and girls? Has it come to this, that unnamed Israeli spokespeople, voicing AIPAC’s policies, determine what nation the U.S. should invade without consultation with the representatives of the American people?  

Not that this sentiment has not been expressed before. Netanyahu told Piers Morgan the same thing in an interview last year, as I have quoted in previous articles, noting Israel’s Zionist government’s desire to use America’s military as their own claiming that what is good for Israel is good for America. That protestation completes the wit contained in Voltaire’s quote: because Israel is America’s only friend in the mid-east, and the only Democracy, and the only nation in that part of the world aligned with the west, it alone deserves America’s “unquestionable” and “unbreakable” support.

Speech that conceals fails to mention that being Israel’s “only friend” has made the U.S. a pariah among nations in the world and made its touted “Democratic freedoms” a laughing stock as the other nations in the UN watch America “support” the Zionists’ agenda to attack Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza, abort international law as it, like Israel, commits extrajudicial executions in foreign states, equips Israel when it invades its neighbors to the north and attacks peace activists aboard vessels from peaceful nations including Turkey, and, ironically sits silently by as Israel dismantles what little of a democracy existed in that nation by creating new laws that deny full citizenship to anyone not a Jew. Thus have we become a nation supportive of a militaristic Theocracy while we continue to mouth the principle of separation of church and state, a principle founded on tolerance, concealing the truth that there are more than 20 great religions with well over a billion people who accept no religion (Adherents.com) all of whom deserve recognition and, as necessary, support from America.

Clearly Israel’s needs are not America’s needs if we mean by that more war in the mid-east.  Have we pulled our troops from Iraq just to move them into Iran? Does any sensible person believe that the Iranians have a “need” or desire to attack the people of the United States? Our forces completely surround Iran. We are the nation with atomic weaponry, not Iran. What possible good would Iran achieve by having a nuclear weapon? Hasn’t Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement while Israel, who damns Iran for its nuclear “ambitions,” has an arsenal of nuclear bombs and has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement. Which of these nations is to be feared? Iran has never attacked a neighbor; Israel attacks and occupies its neighbors at will.

Have the Iranians reason to fear control of the U.S. military by Israeli operatives using this nation as its power because Israel wants to devastate Iran the way Iraq has been devastated? Yes. Israel’s ultimate goal is control of the mid-east by surgically cutting it into small indefensible sections that can be dominated by Israeli money and American forces. It would appear, however, that Israel fears America does not desire to follow Israel’s advice to “take out” Iran the way they convinced the Bush administration to “take out” Saddam Hussein. Hence the constant barrage that characterizes Iran as a warlike state set on wiping Israel off the map and becoming the dominant power in the mid-east.

It’s time, I believe, for the U.S. and the UN to consider how to avoid yet more devastation in the mid-east, not by expanding military operations there but by seeking peace through negotiations and cooperative support for the people of the mid-east. Both Israel and the United States must confront the reality on the ground today that they no longer have control over the people of the mid-east, and recognize the colonial drives that Zionism had designed for Israel are no longer tenable.

While Israeli control of America in the form of Las Vegas billionaires buying the presidency continues in the United States, and Republican candidates crawl to the altar of Mammon to remove Obama, who has already sold his soul to the forces of Evil, the people of the world look on in disbelief, having witnessed for sixty years the dominance of Zionist deceit, treachery, and manipulation of America as it savaged the mid-east in the name of friendship, democracy and shared values. But now, they have moved to take control of their own lives as they watch Israel corrode from within as it metamorphoses into a tribalistic, superstitious people further isolating themselves from the community of nations.

Can they not see that the people in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and, arguably, in Yemen and Saudi Arabia have had enough of dictators imposed by the U.S. and Israel to control their governments; can they not see that Turkey broke with the Zionist forces that demanded compliance with their rule regardless of international law and due respect for neighboring nations; are they blind to the  Jordanian efforts to take seriously their role as a Palestinian neighbor; do they not see that the people of Egypt have made possible the opening of Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza, that the people of the world have given notice that they will not cease to break that siege with boats entering Gaza through international waters, that the Iraqi people have made clear that they will not cave in to America’s continued control of their country by proxy power, that the peoples of Britain, the United States, Canada, and Australia have openly condemned Israel’s injustices to the Palestinian people regardless of their governments paid presidents and prime ministers that claim otherwise; have they stood by blind to the French Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee issuing its recent report condemning Israel’s apartheid practices against Palestinians in the West Bank, blind to Secretary Ban’s clear call to Israel that it must withdraw from the occupied territories, blind to the European Union as it issued its recent report critical of the Israeli government’s on-going occupation and settlement of Palestinian land, blind as well as Russia, China, Iran and numerous other mid-east nations put into practice what they have agreed upon by resorting to other currencies than the dollar to be the international means of finance; unable to see that once the people of the world have had an opportunity to view the critically acclaimed, dramatically powerful, passionately presented film, The Promise, by director Peter Kosminsky of the United Kingdom, where the inhumane policies of the Zionist criminals erupts in all its unguarded ferocity, the veil of respectability will be removed from Israelis’ atrocities for all, and blind, totally blind to the United Nations as it acts upon a resolution to recognize the rights of the Palestinian people to a state of their own, must they not see, both Israel and its people, as well as all Americans, that they must accept the reality that no single nation can force its will on all other nations with impunity; that time is over.

Clearly Israel’s militaristic approach to neighborliness does not work. Israel fears “delegitimization,” it fears boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), and it fears total isolation from the world’s communities. Should the U.S. become financially incapacitated through the devaluing of its currency, should it not be able to create adequate jobs for its citizens, should its investment in Israel estimated at $8.2 million per day for a population that is approximately 7 million impair its stability, should the people of America awaken to the control AIPAC has over their President and representatives and the total disregard of America’s security as a result, then Israel could lose both the American veto that has protected it from world condemnation of its policies and America’s military support for its aggressiveness against its neighbors. That would leave Israel isolated, wrapped in fear, and psychologically unstable. Israel’s alternative can only be constant instability, never ending terror and war, hatred by their neighbors, innate, simmering self-hate, and mental anguish resulting from exclusionism that leaves open wounds of distrust and self-questioning, a state terribly close to insanity.

Is it not time for Israel to seek peace with its neighbors? Since no sensible person in the mid-east believes that the U.S. can act credibly as a broker for peace, Israel must seek other partners from the UN who can serve that purpose. It must be willing to accept as a premise for peace, justice as defined by the UN’s International Courts and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It must understand that the occupied territories must be returned to their native inhabitants, that the Partition Plan of November 1947 must be a basis for negotiations if only to provide a foundation for equitable land for both peoples. Modification of land distribution could follow as well as a means of providing for the rights of those displaced in the Nakba. The world peace body could serve to protect both peoples as generations come and go until a free movement of all is possible. Then perhaps we could say, men use thoughts to find justice and speech to communicate it. 

-William A. Cook is a Professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. His works include Psalms for the 21st Century, Mellon Poetry Press, Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy, The Rape of Palestine, The Chronicles of Nefaria, and most recently in 2010, The Plight of the Palestinians. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: wcook@laverne.edu or visit: www.drwilliamacook.com.

[allAfrica.com] What makes a young African doctor decide to devote her career to helping women fight HIV? Dr. Sengeziwe Sibeko is a 37-year-old medical researcher with a degree in obstetrics and gynecology from the University of KwaZulu Natal (UKZN) in South Africa, an MSc in epidemiology from Columbia University in the United States, and is about to take up a fellowship to study for her PhD at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. AllAfrica's Julie Frederikse interviewed Dr. Sibeko at the

[Daily Trust] The quest to turn around technical and vocational education in Nigeria took a delegation led by the Minister of State for Education, Barrister Nyesom Wike, to Portsmouth, United Kingdom. Highbury College, which was the epicenter of the visit, proved an outstanding example. Boco Edet reports.

This Day (Lagos)-Portsmouth, United Kingdom, is at the centre of the bi-centenary celebration of the greatest novelist of the Victorian period, Charles Dickens. The author of 'Great Expectations', 'Oliver Twist', among others, was born there on February 7, 1812. A Nigerian delegation, led by the Minister of State for Education, Ezenwo Nyesom Wike visited Dickens' place of birth, last week, not to be part of the celebration, but at the invitation of a college, to see the possibilities for Technical and Vocational Educat

From the Department of Cardiology, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands ; Department of Cardiology, Uppsala Clinical Research Center, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden ; Centre for Cardiovascular Science, Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, United Kingdom ; and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, United ... (more)

Fewer young people from Northern Ireland apply to go to universities across the United Kingdom in September 2012.

The Moment (London)-FOUR Nigerians have made the nation proud in far away United Kingdom, as Ogunsanya quadruplets were handed their well-deserved degrees from the same university on the same day.

Children view technology as being fundamentally human, as researchers aim to predict future needs for innovation.

Research firm Latitude's study, Robots@School, asked children around the world to write and illustrate a story answering the question "What would happen if robots were a part of your everyday life -- at school and beyond?"

The results showed how children, who are "digital natives" raised around technology, see robots as being almost human, fulfilling functions of friendship and even parenting, and reveals how technology blurs the line between education and playing.

"Education and learning are moving, at least in many children's eyes, beyond acts of knowledge transmission toward acts of exploration and creation," said Steve Mushkin, founder and president of Latitude.

Technology is already changing how children learn, and the mobile industry is responding. For example, Apple is reinventing easily worn, cumbersome textbooks with new digital textbooks featuring interactive, multi-touch capabilities, video, graphics, and built-in quizzes and reviews to offer "immediate feedback." Apple will offer the new materials through a new "Textbook" category in the iBookstore.

Computers have been a part of schools for several years, but the study showed that children would likely love to have robots in class with them as well. Nearly 350 children, ages 8-12, from Australia, France, Germany, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, participated in the Robots @ School study, submitting drawings and text-based narratives of their imagined experiences with robots.

Latitude is planning to expand the study to include children in Asia.

In the study, nearly two-thirds of the children took it for granted that robots would make excellent human-like friends, conceiving of their fictional robots as peers they can identify with. They even imagined robots would be socially successful because they were smart.

The children also imagined robots that were better versions of their parents and teachers and offered them limitless time and patience. Conversely, they envisioned robots as being machines that would take on boring tasks so the children have more time for interesting pursuits.

"While children imagine robots that are virtually human in many regards, it's their slight machine-ness that ultimately makes robots such effective partners for learning and creative exploration," said Ian Schulte, director of technology and business development at Latitude. "Robots support and encourage, but don't judge. They don't run into scheduling conflicts, and they certainly don't ostracize kids for wrong answers or unconventional thinking."

The study could hold implications about how education and technology can integrate further in the future. The more interactive or human-like the technology, the more likely children will identify with it, which may enhance how they learn.

Technology Is "Almost Human," Children Say originally appeared at Mobiledia on Fri Jan 20, 2012 10:46 am.

By Nath Aldalala'a

This is the world of Afghanistan now, a world in which blood blends with urine; Afghanistan reached into this world through the falling of bodies coupled with a fallen dignity. On the morning of 9/11 the skies were clear as the crash of the second plane into the South Tower, signalled what Martin Amis described as a 'defining moment'. The 'second plane looked eagerly alive, and galvanised with malice, and wholly alien. For those thousands in the South Tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future.' It was to be the coming future for the Afghani and Iraqi peoples, but what a future it turned out to be?

The recent release of the video of the U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters tells us much about the temporality of the War on Terror. The theory of Temporality, as J. P. Sartre maintains, is that it is an organised structure and the only possible method by which to study temporality is to approach it as a totality which dominates its secondary structures (the elements of time: past, present, future) and which confers on them their meaning.  Initially, the war on terror managed to create its own temporality, not only through its construction of a vague and undefined enemy, but also through its own rhetoric of justice versus terrorism. Yet, gradually, the war on terror has become clearer in the poverty of its mission, its endeavours, and its execution. 

The temporality of the war on terror is evident in its core actions; these, apart from the invasion and mass killings of civilians in both Afghanistan and Iraq, are illustrated by practices which have come to define the spirit of this war. For example, early in the war on terror were the images of Abu-Graib, and the use of various ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’, the secret prisons that were established throughout the world, ‘The Rendition Programmes’, non-combatant enemy(s), Haditha, Mohammadia…all the way to these recent images of Marines urinating on corpses.

Barack Obama pledged to close Guantanamo, and yet its continued existence ten years on, reveals how profoundly Guantanamo and torture are entrenched in this American temporality.  The war on terror in effect exists deep inside America’s own borders. It is very much a part of the American Zeitgeist.  Salman Rushdie has said that the British do not understand their own history because much of it happened overseas. It was not possible in those days to upload Youtube videos to view the first concentration camps where 27,000 Afrikaners died in an effort to end the Boer insurgency, or the gassing of civilians in Iraq in the 1920s. Nevertheless, the British do currently have an understanding of their history while the debate is on-going with regard to the role of their “MI6” in renditions and torture of Libyans.

The Americans also have a full understanding of their recent history, as the waves of returning soldiers, whether dead or alive, make visible their domestic involvement in and understanding of this war.  In addition, the recurring images of abuses of occupied peoples by their Marines are a reminder of “other” engagements with the enemy. However, the conventional U.S. rhetoric in response to the release of such images and videos is that “it does not reflect” American values, or as in the case of this latest video of the urinating military personnel, the U.S. Marine Corpse said “this is not consistent with our core values”. 

At the end of the day, blame will inevitably be apportioned to a particular individual, as happened during the Mỹ Lai in March 1968, when 504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam were massacred. Most of the victims were women, children and babies, and elderly people. Many of the women were raped, victims were tortured, and some of the bodies were found to have been mutilated.  For that massacre, the American justice system convicted one single individual- Second Lieutenant William Calley. He was convicted and given a life sentence, but actually served only three and half years under house arrest!

First reactions to the video of the Marines urinating on the Afghan corpses resonate with the now customary response. James Sanborn from Marine Corps Times stated “one sentiment that we have heard in several remarks is things get pretty tense there, they are [the Marines] under a lot of strain, well you have to show some level of sympathy, may be you don’t know exactly what they were going through.”

Admittedly, any theatre of war is very stressful, but over the centuries civilised societies have created rules which differentiate, in the very minimum, between war and urinating on corpses.

What the Marines are going through is ‘the’ war on terror, and this is not the first incident of this kind. It is almost certainly true that while we become privy to such videos, there is likely to be a great number of others that do reach the public.  However, the regular supply of videos and images that exhibit the abuses by American troops remain inconsequential to the course of the war. I argue that the simple reason for this is because the war on terror is entrenched within the American Zeitgeist, and this Zeitgeist is located in the reconciliation of the American understanding of its power, and the ways in which it is executed. This has led to a skewed understanding of American values, if they have any left. Note the current election campaign how Republican candidates heavily rely on the strategy of negative ads. Note also the prevailing rhetoric on Iran, on American Aid to foreign countries, on Pakistan, on the Palestinians- the list goes on. It is a discourse that emphasises the rule of the jungle; there is no sense of the ‘civil’ when competing to be the president of the United States, thus, that tells much about the spirit of warring in the American psyche.

The war on terror, while being propped up by the logic of fear, is also sustained by an ideology of American-ness. American popular consciousness does not acknowledge guilt about the invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq. Consequently, their reduction of the enemy to a form of nothingness is merely the diktat of this war. Yet, while prisoners, “not corpses”, are tortured by the most inhumane methods, there remains no change to the American political or cultural calculations. So, how should urinating on the dead make any difference? In another recent video American Marines pulled a helpless sheep into a room and beat it with a baseball baton until it was dead. The question arises of whether there is any more degrading image than that of an elite soldier- a Marine, of the world’s superpower with its constant exclamations of  “God Bless America” -  killing a helpless sheep in a most brutal and barbaric way?

This war on terror represents its own temporality and conditionality. The urination by Marines on Afghan corpses shows how notions of revenge and brutality are integral to this war. The image of those marines, in their uniforms, standing over dead bodies and urinating, is not really dissimilar from killing a helpless sheep with a baseball baton. It is also not far removed from the scenes and torture and general degradation of Abu-Graib prisoners or the killing of innocent civilians by remote drones. All these point towards a loss of ethics, rather than the characterisation of the war itself.

American temporality confers meaning on the American present and a future that is contingent on this war. Guantanamo is no longer a prison; it is an institution, a civil one, wherein the practice of power is a manifestation of the American understanding of its mandate. The American Marines are operating within a system called the war on terror. The GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagarei) was a system; the Concentration Camps were a system. However, the war on terror is different in that in addition to being a system, and an organised structure, it gradually becomes the war of urination.

- Dr. Nath Aldalala'a - School of English Literature, Newcastle University, United Kingdom – contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: n.aldalalaa@newcastle.ac.uk.

By Dr. Ismail Salami - Tehran

'I saw a motorcycle. They were wearing ski masks - black ski masks. They were two people. I saw the motorcycle speed by. I saw them. It seemed as if they had something in their hands,' this is how a female witness described the scene of the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan.

As the blade of blame is being directed against the CIA and Mossad for orchestrating the brutal assassination of the 32-year-old Iranian scientist in broad daylight in Tehran on Wednesday morning, the duo have preferred to feign ignorance as to the identity of the main perpetrator of the crime.

"I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran," US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters on Thursday.

Also, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the US had nothing to do with the assassination.

"We were not involved in any way -- in any way -- with regards to the assassination that took place [in Iran]," he said. "I'm not sure of who was involved...But I can tell you one thing: the United States was not involved in that kind of effort. That's not what the United States does."

The US is not the only party which has chosen to be in denial.

Israeli President Shimon Peres also denied on Thursday that Israel was involved in the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist. In an interview with CNN, Peres was asked if Israel was involved in the nuclear assassination, to which he answered: "Not to the best of my knowledge."

"I know that it is fashionable that whatever wrong happens in Iran, it is the United States and Israel. There is nothing new in this approach," said Peres.

What kind of answer would the viewers expect from Peres to such a question? The question is indeed as unwise in substance as the answer given by Peres.

In order to find out who really killed the Iranian scientist, one needs to put together the factual pieces.

Just two days after Iran sentenced to death  a convicted CIA operative of Iranian descent Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, two unidentified men on a motorcycle attached a magnetic bomb onto the car of Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a senior official at Iran's Natanz nuclear facility, and detonated it on Wednesday, killing the young scientist and his driver.

It does not seem unreasonable to say that there was a link between the two incidents.

And in comes a third party: Britain.  British Middle East minister Alistair Burt has recently visited Israel and demanded all nations intensify pressure on Tehran to stall its nuclear program. Proudly he announced that "a few weeks ago the British government imposed tough new financial restrictions against Iran. These new sanctions make it illegal for any financial institution in the United Kingdom to have any dealings with any institution in Iran. They are the toughest of their kind. And we will build on them, getting others to follow suit."

A close friend of Israel, Mr. Burt described the Iranian nuclear program as “the major issue at the top of our shared agenda," saying that Israel can serve as a partner in a common cause against a regime dangerously loose.”

Lavishing pearls of British wisdom on the audience while speaking at Bar-Ilan University's Feldman International Conference Center, Mr. Burt said Iran “does not just threaten Israel,” and described Israel as the “bastion for stability in the region.”

Also contributing to the shared agenda of Israel and Britain in nuclear assassinations and sabotage activities in Iran is the remark of the Israel Defense Forces' Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz who said on Tuesday in an address to a closed Knesset committee that Iran should expect more "unnatural" events in 2012.

While the hawks in Washington have already declared a nuclear war on Iran in a metaphoric sense i.e. the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientists, some of them avail themselves of a kind of literature in their reference to the nuclear assassinations which indicates the abyss of human degeneration. An impetuous example of this was reflected in a video circulated on the internet in which Rick Santorum, a politically bankrupt White House aspirant, has unfeelingly described the assassination of Iranian scientists as “wonderful.”

"On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly," said Rick Santorum addressing an election campaign in Greenville, South Carolina.

He added that, "I think we should send a very clear message that if you are a scientist from Russia, North Korea, or from Iran and you are going to work on a nuclear program to develop a bomb for Iran, you are not safe.”

All these facts aside, examples for the animosity of the UK, US and Israel towards the Islamic Republic are legion. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the myriad crimes orchestrated, funded and carried out by the trio.

There is no doubt that the recent assassination has caused a lot of intellectual anguish, emotional pain and political wrath in Iran.

In a stern warning, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, lashed out at the United States and Israel for orchestrating the assassination of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan. In a message of condolence to his family, Ayatollah Khamenei said the assassination was carried out under the unholy auspices of the CIA and Mossad.

“This act of cowardice, whose perpetrators and architects will never dare to confess to their foul and appalling crime or assume responsibility for it, has been engineered and funded by the CIA and Mossad [spy] services,” he said, adding, “The assassination shows that the global arrogance spearheaded by the US and Zionism has arrived at an impasse in their encounter with the determined, devout, and progressive nation of Islamic Iran.”

Central to the circle of the prime suspects in the nuclear assassinations is the IAEA itself. About two weeks ago, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan had reportedly met the agency inspectors.

Isn't it strange that the nuclear scientist was killed only two weeks after his meeting with the IAEA inspectors?

Another point which actually strengthens the speculation is that the names and identities of Iranian nuclear scientists who have so far been assassinated have been published in the list of sanctions issued by the IAEA.

Israel Defense Forces' Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz has said, Iran should be expecting more "unnatural" events in 2012.

Iran is certainly prepared for the worst but its enemies too should for their part expect similar consequences if they wish to persevere in their path of mischief.

- Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian writer, Middle East expert, Iranologist and lexicographer. He writes extensively on the US and Middle East issues and his articles have been translated into a number of languages. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

In the United States, the cost paid for statins (drugs to lower cholesterol) in people under the age of 65 who have private insurance is approximately 400 percent higher than comparable costs paid by the government in the United Kingdom (U.K.). These findings, from the Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program, are the first results of a comprehensive comparison of prescription drug costs between the U.S. and U.K. The study appears on-line in the journal Pharmacotherapy.

Graduates of medical colleges from nine Nigerian universities seeking to register or obtain a licence to practise in the United Kingdom (UK) have been barred by the General Medical Council (GMC) of the UK.

Roma students who migrated with their parents to the United Kingdom from the Czech Republic and Slovakia have fared relatively well in mainstream British schools despite having been placed in special-needs schools in their home countries, according to new research by the Roma Education Fund and Equality, a minority-rights organization.

Unless the University of Surrey, United Kingdom changes its mind, Nigerian atheletes going for the 2012 London Olympics will have to make alternative arrangements for their accommodation.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A new chemical technique for depositing a non-crystalline form of silicon into the long, ultra-thin pores of optical fibers has been developed by an international team of scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom. The technique, which is the first of its kind to use high-pressure chemistry for making well-developed films and wires of this particular kind of silicon semiconductor, will help scientists to make more-efficient and more-flexible optical fibers. The findings, by an international team led by John Badding, a professor of chemistry at Penn State University, will be published in a future print edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

By William A. Cook

'Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community…' -- (Newt Gingrich, Fox News. December 10, 2011)

Many “Newts” produce toxins, the rough skinned Taricha, for example, produces enough to kill an adult human, and while all “Newts” go through a metamorphosis from tadpole to lizard, few expected that metamorphosis to reach human form in the person of the front running Republican candidate for President, Newt Gingrich. This Newt avoided the Vietnam War draft while studying for his degrees, then accepted a position as an historian and geographer at West Georgia College, a position he lost when his colleagues denied him tenure. A resourceful man, Newt ran for a congressional seat numerous times before capturing the 6th Georgia district seat in 1979, when the incumbent retired. He resigned his position in 1998 following disciplinary action by his colleagues for 84 ethics violations, having served as House Speaker from 1995 to 1999. Today he’s back, metamorphosed into a presidential candidate willing to spread lies about a people who have lived for 63 years under the brutal occupation of the Israeli military.

Consider his statement to the people of Israel on Jewish Television this past week quoted above. “Remember there was no Palestine as a state.” Omitted was the second part of that statement if the first was to have relevance: “Remember there was no Jewish state.” What existed was a Mandate Government under the control of the United Kingdom that governed this area beginning in 1922 through the authority of the League of Nations following the demise of the Ottoman Empire and later under the continued authority of the United Nations. During the Mandate period, from 1922 to May 15, 1948, the British government attempted to meet its obligations as enunciated in the Balfour Declaration to help in the “establishment of a national home for the Jewish people.” The Command Paper 1922, from the Avalon Project at Yale Law School, underlines this intent: “His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare(s) unequivocally that it is no part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State.” It must be noted here that the Command Paper specifically marks the existence of a Palestine area to which the Jews were immigrating.

“I think we have an invented Palestinian people,” Gingrich continues, forgetting to mention that Dr. Shlomo Sand in his recent book The Invention of the Jewish People, according to Leon Hadar in his review, concludes by,

“Countering official Zionist historiography, Sand questions whether the Jewish People ever existed as a national group with a common origin in the Land of Israel/Palestine. He concludes that the Jews should be seen as a religious community comprising a mishmash of individuals and groups that had converted to the ancient monotheistic religion but do not have any historical right to establish an independent Jewish state in the Holy Land. In short, the Jewish People, according to Sand, are not really a “people” in the sense of having a common ethnic origin and national heritage. They certainly do not have a political claim over the territory that today constitutes Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, including Jerusalem.”

In an even more recent book, just published by Pluto Books, Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh in an historical review of the ancient lands of Palestine noted that “The kingdom of Judah lasted 341 years (927-586 BCE) while Israel lasted even a shorter 205 years (927 - 722 BCE).” In short, between the two recent studies, Gingrich could have found the truth; but truth is not what Gingrich needed for his interview: he needed a fabrication that would endear him to his audience both in Israel and in the United States as he groveled for monetary support for his campaign at the expense of the Palestinian people.

Consider the reality of the past two thousand years, when this area “between the Jordan and the Mediterranean,” which “has had a history of 6000 years of civilization,” known for a large portion of its history, as the Southern part of the Land of Canaan, has been called, for all these 2000 years,  Palestine. As Qumsiyeh reviews this period he concludes, “These people (known to the world as Palestinians) absorbed the religions and various philosophies and changed their allegiances to survive in an ever amorphous world.  This world, sometimes violent, sometimes symbiotic was always there.”

“Known to the world as Palestinians”; known to Newt Gingrich as “invented.” So how is it, this historian and geographer, could determine that the people of Palestine did not exist, that they could have removed themselves to “other” Arab lands and left all of Palestine to the Jews? In an unfortunate comment meant to deflect criticism about his reinvention of history, Gingrich made this comment: "Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth. These people are terrorists," he said. "It's fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, 'Enough lying about the Middle East." In four words, he turns all Palestinians into “terrorists.” And he justifies this slanderous and invidious judgment by assuming the chauvinistic persona of the brave man who condemns those who lie about the Middle East even as he omits the decision of the Mandate Government to hand over the resolution of the immigrant problem in Palestine to the UN, a decision that resulted in the Partition Plan (1947) dividing that land into two areas, one for Jews the other for the Palestinians who lived there, who had a 71% to 29% majority in the whole of Palestine. Since the Resolution created, numbered 181, divided the land into two, recognizing two peoples contending for the area of Palestine, it recognized as well Palestinians inhabiting the land with heritage going back two thousand years to the Roman era. At the same time, as immigration for Jews materialized through the 1940s, the contrast between indigenous inhabitants and newly arrived immigrants from foreign lands makes ludicrous Gingrich’s comments.

Even more ludicrous and perhaps more frightening, is this man’s willingness to undermine US policy since WWII, a policy that recognized the Palestinian people and their rightful claim to their own state. His convoluted logic would have the United States President negotiate peace with a people he has determined to be terrorists, all of them. He claims that what has been going on is a “delusional peace process”; true enough, but not because the Palestinians haven’t been willing to arrive at peace, but because Israel has had no intentions of recognizing a Palestinian state as the Likud Party Platform declares openly even now, “no state of Palestine west of the Jordan River.” But this fact, neither Gingrich nor the American press nor the Israeli government will acknowledge; it is rather the unwillingness of the Palestine Authority and Hamas to recognize Israel and cease their violence against Israel that prevents peace. But once again, had Gingrich taken the time to read yet another book on the subject, released in the summer of 2010, The Plight of the Palestinians, published by Palgrave MacMillan, he could have read about Israeli intransigence in negotiating peace, “The Problem with Israel,” by Dr. Jeff Halper, an article that recounts 19 different proposals rejected by Israel.

In that same volume, Gingrich could read about the Zionist stated reality that they had no plans to abide by the UN Partition Plan, but rather eradicate all Arabs from the land of Palestine, and that in Jewish documents from the Mandate period. “The challenge of Zionism was to create a Jewish state in a land already inhabited by natives who mostly practiced Islam and Christianity.  Early Zionist understood the challenge and contrary to their public pronouncements about "a land without a people for a people without a land" came to see that the natives posed an obstacle to their visions” (Qumsiyeh).

There are 32 chapters in that book that detail Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, all written in the first decade of this century, a veritable catalog of ethnic cleansing to complement Dr. Ilan Pappe’s volume on the same subject, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Let me close this recounting of Gingrich’s vitriolic commentary by remembering the Palestinians who suffered at the hands of real terrorists during the Nakba, an historical event he must immerse himself in if he is to understand how toxic his offhand commentary is to those who lived through these years awaiting justice. Here are the words of the Zionist’s general:

“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because Geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either … There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.” (Moshe Dayan, Address to the Technion, Haifa, as quoted in Haaretz, 4-4-1969) 

“Thus began in November of 1947 what is euphemistically called the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the combined forces of the Jewish armies, the Haganah, the Stern, and the Irgun as they drove more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes leaving them destitute, homeless and abandoned without a country in what is now the largest refugee Diaspora in the world.

More truthfully, the plight of the Palestinians that began so ruthlessly in 1947, and is now called the Nakba, was an intentional, calculated campaign to force the Palestinian Arabs out of Palestine, a systematic genocide of a people as defined by the United Nations in its adoption of Genocide Convention, Article II” (The Plight of the Palestinians). Now that Gingrich knows what to read, will he?

- William A. Cook is a Professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. His works include Psalms for the 21st Century, Mellon Poetry Press, Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy, The Rape of Palestine, The Chronicles of Nefaria, and most recently in 2010, The Plight of the Palestinians. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: wcook@laverne.edu or visit: www.drwilliamacook.com.

He was educated at Christ The King College Bo, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, University of Swansea, in Wales, United Kingdom, and Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fla.

Woe is us. According to a new study, the accelerating shift of workers to a more mobile lifestyle has a dark side attached to it, and that "overcoming the challenges of the dark side of mobility is essential for well-being and satisfaction in life and work."

The study, the "Well-being of the Mobile Workforce" from the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield in England, compares findings from quarterly iPass Mobile Workforce reports with academic research on the subject of employee well-being.

Not surprisingly, it found that many of us who work out of the office pay a price for being able to sport polo shirts and shorts around the clock... 47 percent put in 5 to ten extra hours each week, and 26 percent work an extra 15 to 20 hours each week.

And there are additional repercussions; among them:

• A difficulty in balancing work and personal commitments, and additional stress because of too much flexibility;
• 32 percent of us said we felt tethered to our smartphones, even when on vacation;
• We're more likely to work odd hours, especially late at night. That, obviously, costs us sleep; and,
• Those long hours, because they've worn us out, may actually be making us less productive.

"People should be careful to mentally detach from work and create strong work-home boundaries while their employers should find ways to enhance employee control, provide support and reduce the expectations on them to work long hours," said Dr. Carolyn Axtell of the Institute of Work Psychology.

But, the paper said, being able to schedule their own time--a third of mobile employees are able to work when and where they want--leads to higher job satisfaction, better psychological well-being, better work life balance and lower intentions to leave the job.

Another study, from the Journal of Business and Psychology, reported similar findings, and pointed out that telecommuting and mobility might even make parenting more difficult.

"When job and family are in the same place, some workers feel there is no chance for downtime--no respite or time to relax," wrote one of the report's authors.

Of course, for every cloud there's at least one silver lining.

In this case, it's all about UC, videoconferencing and collaboration.

A BroadSoft survey of some 400 IT professionals from the United States and United Kingdom revealed that enterprises are rapidly shifting to a mobile-only workforce. The bright note? They're prioritizing the expansion of their unified communications capabilities.

In fact, some 62 percent of survey respondents said they are expanding their UC use, and 72 percent of U.S. execs said they plan to deploy videoconferencing across their organization in the next year. And that's good news for our industry.--Jim

While our immediate neighbours like Rwanda and Kenya boast of hundreds of digital hubs, Uganda has only one established by the British Council, the United Kingdom's international organization for educational opportunities and cultural relations.

(This post is by Christine McCann)

Here’s the latest of our news bulletins from the ongoing crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

State of Nuclear Politics in Japan

A Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) memo has revealed a 2002 secret meeting between METI officials and Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO)’s Chairman, President, and Vice President, in which participants discussed abandoning the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant in Aomori Prefecture. METI was concerned about several problems with the plant, including major budget issues. Costs for the project were originally estimated at 760 billion yen, but estimates bloomed to more than two trillion yen (25 billion USD), plus another trillion in demolition costs. A follow up meeting was scheduled but never took place, because TEPCO’s president and chairman resigned over a cover up regarding damaged equipment. The Rokkasho project - combined with similarly crippled Monju fast breeder reactor - played a central part in Japan’s nuclear fuel plan, and these revelations may influence the Japan Atomic Energy Commission as it establishes new nuclear policies this summer.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda announced last week that Japan will continue to export nuclear equipment and technology to those countries that want it, in spite of a lack of popular support for the idea in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Japan’s Diet is set to approve nuclear accords next week with Jordan, Russia, South Korea, and Vietnam. The country is also in discussions with Turkey, India, and Brazil.

TEPCO

TEPCO has released an interim report on the ongoing nuclear crisis at its Fukushima Daiichi plant. The report claims that TEPCO employees made no errors in the handling of the disaster and attributes the cause of the meltdowns to the tsunami, not the magnitude 9.0 earthquake. The utility said that such a large tsunami could not have been anticipated, in spite of the fact that it ignored its own research from 2008 showing that a tsunami exceeding 10 meters was possible.

However, experts are criticizing the report and the company’s lack of transparency. They say the report fails to address questions about why workers shut down a cooling system that could have prevented meltdowns at the reactors, as well as why the utility has been unable to discover the source of continuing water leaks at the plant. Moreover, TEPCO was not able to explain the large spike in radiation levels on March 15, nor does it know why hydrogen explosions occurred at the plant. Tetsuo Sewada, an assistant professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, said, “TEPCO should not have had a system that doesn’t work in an actual emergency.”

Significantly, a majority of members of a government panel investigating the nuclear crisis doubt TEPCO’s claims that the tsunami caused the disaster, instead believing that the 9.0 magnitude earthquake contributed to the problems at the Fukushima plant, including damaging the piping responsible for cooling the reactors. This could have crucial impact on the decision to restart other reactors around the country, most of which are currently idled.

Japan’s central government and TEPCO could jointly announce that the utility has achieved cold shutdown status at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant as early as 16 December. Some experts have questioned the validity of that assessment, when the internal condition of the reactors is still unknown and the company is struggling to keep the situation at the plant under control. The plant has suffered numerous issues in the past month, including a large leak of radioactive water.

Reactor Status

TEPCO revealed this week that at least 45 tons of radioactive water have leaked from the Fukushima Daiichi plant, and may have flowed into the ocean, which is only 500-600 meters from the site of the incident. It took workers 21 hours to identify the issue, which occurred after water flooded a purification device and then poured through a cracked wall. The water was used to cool the plant’s reactors. TEPCO officials estimate that the contaminated water contained one million times the legal limit of strontium (100 million becquerels per liter) and 300 times the legal limit of cesium (45,000 becquerels per liter). Both substances can be absorbed by humans and are cancer causing.

The new admission means that up to 220 tons of contaminated water have reached the sea since March. The fisheries cooperative association in Fukushima Prefecture has filed a complaint against TEPCO, citing concerns about the effect on sea life and demanded details on which areas of the ocean were affected. Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) has ordered TEPCO to determine the cause of the leak and outline how it will prevent it from recurring. In the meantime, the utility insists that the incident will not affect efforts to establish cold-shutdown status at the plant. 

TEPCO said that it will replace part of the water decontamination system at the Fukushima plant this week, a move that it hopes will improve decontamination efforts and reduce waste generated by the process. US based Kurion built the current system; previously, it was used in conjunction with a system made by Areva. However, the Areva system has been plagued with problems and is no longer working.

Contamination (Includes Human Exposure)

The Japan Chemical Analysis Center said that the Fukushima nuclear disaster resulted in a release of xenon-133 that exceeded normal levels in Chiba Prefecture by 400,000 times. However, researchers said that the excessive measurements—which took three months to return to normal—did not pose a risk to humans. The Center revealed the new data at a meeting sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT).

Japan plans to establish three zones around the Fukushima Daiichi plant, signifying different contamination levels. In the zone with the highest radiation readings, the government may purchase land from evacuees. In other areas, decontamination and reconstruction plans will be implemented.

Rice Crisis

New bans were placed on rice shipments from Fukushima’s Watari District, 60 km from the Fukushima Daiichi plant, after officials discovered rice containing 590 Bq/kg of cesium. Japan’s legal limit is 500 Bq/kg. The move follows bans on rice shipments from the Onami District and Date City, and will affect 406 farms. Previously, Fukushima prefectural officials had said that all rice from the prefecture was safe to consume.

Decontamination Efforts and Waste Disposal

A scientist from Osaka University and a former professor at the Tokyo University of Science are calling for radioactive soil, contaminated as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis, to be dumped into the sea. The researchers, who were speaking at a study meeting at Osaka University, said they would submit a proposal to do so to the central government. Experts say that the proposal would violate the London Convention, which prohibits dumping of waste into the ocean. In addition, the move is expected to spark criticism from the international community.

Fukushima Prefectural officials have unveiled a white paper outlining decontamination plans for farms and forests in the prefecture. Officials plan to spray decontamination agents; remove topsoil, tree bark, and leaves; and employ water jet cleaners, in order to reduce contamination levels within two years. The prefecture will also assist local municipalities in drawing up contamination plans.

Compensation

TEPCO’s compensation office in Tokyo began accepting applications this week for a second round of compensation, covering September through November. The center, which employs 5,000 workers, receives approximately 700 applications each day, but already has a daily backlog of about 100 applications. Takashi Nakamura, who heads the center, apologized for the delay and said that TEPCO did not expect to receive so many applications. In addition, he said, the company is not accustomed to such work.

Other Nuclear News

The United Kingdom is planning to become the first county to bury plutonium stores in Cumbria, in an effort to reduce terrorist threats and reduce maintenance costs. Officials said they will encase the plutonium in concrete and bury it hundreds of meters underground. Disposal is scheduled to begin in 2040. By that time, the country expects to have over 130 tons of plutonium--enough to construct over 10,000 nuclear weapons should it reach the wrong hands. Each weapon requires only 8 kg of high-grade plutonium.

Mass strikes began across the United Kingdom on Wednesday, with up to 2 million workers walking out of jobs in schools, hospitals and police stations.

The University of Abuja has said that plans are underway to partner with the University of Reading, United Kingdom, on an exchange programme of mutual benefits.

Ghana's Deputy High Commissioner to the United Kingdom (UK), Mrs Elizabeth Nicol has said that Ghana has gone far in ensuring parity in education opportunities for females and males. She said this when addressing participants at a two-day gender conference at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education.

Open Hands The Gambia, a registered charitable organisation in the United Kingdom and The Gambia Wednesday presented science textbooks to 16 senior secondary schools in the country at a presentation ceremony held at the Palm Beach Hotel in Kololi.

Two University of Colorado professors are conducting research in Finland and the United Kingdom as Fulbright Scholars for the 2011-12 academic year, the campus announced today.

Site: http://european-lisp-symposium.org

The purpose of the European Lisp Symposium is to provide a forum for the discussion and dissemination of all aspects of design, implementation and application of any of the Lisp and Lisp-inspired dialects, including Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp, AutoLisp, ISLISP, Dylan, Clojure, ACL2, ECMAScript, Racket, SKILL, and so on. We encourage everyone interested in Lisp to participate.

The main theme of the 2012 European Lisp Conference is "Interoperabilty: Systems, Libraries, Workflows". Lisp based and functional-languages based systems have grown a variety of solutions to become more and more integrated with the wider world of Information and Communication Technologies in current use. There are several dimensions to the scope of the solutions proposed, ranging from "embedding" of interpreters in C-based systems, to the development of abstractions levels that facilitate the expression of complex context dependent tasks, to the construction of exchange formats handling libraries, to the construction of theorem-provers for the "Semantic Web". The European Lisp Symposium 2012 solicits the submission of papers with this specific theme in mind, alongside the more traditional tracks which have appeared in the past editions.

We invite submissions in the following forms:

• Papers: Technical papers of up to 15 pages that describe original results or explain known ideas in new and elegant ways.
• Demonstrations: Abstracts of up to 4 pages for demonstrations of tools, libraries, and applications.
• Tutorials: Abstracts of up to 4 pages for in-depth presentations about topics of special interest for at least 90 minutes and up to 180 minutes.
• Lightning talks: Abstracts of up to one page for talks to last for no more than 5 minutes.

All submissions should be formatted following the ACM SIGS guidelines and include ACM classification categories and terms. For more information on the submission guidelines and the ACM keywords, see: http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates and http://www.acm.org/about/class/1998.

Important dates:

• Jan 31st 2012: submission deadline
• Feb 21st 2012: acceptance results
• April 30th, 2012 Conference opens

Program Commitee:

Chair:
Marco Antoniotti, Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Milan, ITALY

Local organizers:

• Damir Ćavar, Eastern Michigan University
• Franjo Pehar, University of Zadar
• Damir Kero, University of Zadar

Members:

• Giuseppe Attardi, Università degli Studi di Pisa, Pisa, ITALY
• Pascal Costanza, Intel, Bruxelles, BELGIUM
• Marc Feeley, Université de Montreal, Montreal, CANADA
• Scott McKay, Google, U.S.A.
• Kent Pitman, Hypermeta, U.S.A.
• Christophe Rhodes, Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, United Kingdom
• Robert Strandh, LABRI, Université de Bordeaux, Bordaux, FRANCE
• Didier Verna, EPITA / LRDE, FRANCE

There is art beyond price in the caves of southwestern France. The paintings date back to the Paleolithic period and depict spotted horses, which, according to new research, may actually be how horses looked at the time. Guest host Linda Wertheimer speaks with Professor Terry O'Connor of the University of York in the United Kingdom about the ancient art.

There is art beyond price in the caves of southwestern France. The paintings date back to the Paleolithic period and depict spotted horses, which, according to new research, may actually be how horses looked at the time. Guest host Linda Wertheimer speaks with Professor Terry O'Connor of the University of York in the United Kingdom about the ancient art.

There is art beyond price in the caves of southwestern France. The paintings date back to the Paleolithic period and depict spotted horses, which, according to new research, may actually be how horses looked at the time. Guest host Linda Wertheimer speaks with Professor Terry O'Connor of the University of York in the United Kingdom about the ancient art.

Sub-Saharan Africa which is one of the regions furthest away from reaching the Education for All (EFA) goals by 2015 is likely to suffer more if the United Kingdom (UK) cuts back on its education aid as a bilateral donor.

The university has obtained its first truly international patent to span most of the industrialised world with coverage in over 30 countries. As part of an FP6 European project consortium called "Sensation", it developed a method for synchronising high speed cameras with exceptional accuracy. The method can be used for taking simultaneous digital snap-shots of an object, or event, from several different angles with a synchronisation error of less than a tenth of billionth of a second. This invention was initially patented locally, but then, through the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) it became the first truly international patent application of the University of Malta. The patent covers the United States, Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and Japan, among others. WIPO was created in 1967 by the United Nations as a means of harmonising the complex process of securing intellectual property around the globe. It currently has 184 member states reaching 99.9 per cent of the world's population and is headquartered in Geneva. The technology was invented and developed into a working prototype by Marc Anthony Azzopardi, at the Faculty...

Former United Kingdom Prime Minister, Mr. Gordon Brown, has expressed regret that it might be impossible to achieve the Millennium, Development Goals (MDGs) on education. He, however, said it was possible to cut infant mortality by half.

Sierra Leone's President Ernest Koroma has been invited to give a special talk to students at one of United Kingdom's most renowned schools, Globe Academy at Elephant and Castle, South East London. The school's Board of Directors had already written a letter to the Director of Open Government Initiative (OGI) Khadija Sesay, who is currently in London to prepare the grounds for the President's visit in London.

A survey conducted by the NSO has found that two-thirds of holders of a doctorate are employed by the government, and two-thirds are lecturers in higher education. The survey, for the reference year 2009 found that four out of five doctorate holders in 2009 were men. Athird were over 54 years of age. More than half were specialised in social sciences and humanities – 28.9 and 28.0 per cent respectively. Natural and medical and health sciences were less common, with shares of 15.9 and 14.6 per cent respectively. A significant share of doctorate holders obtained their degree from abroad, in particular the United Kingdom and Italy. A smaller segment of doctorate holders (6.2 per cent) obtained their degree in North America, namely in the United States and Canada. Only 18.3 per cent of doctorate holders received their degree from Malta. Nine out of ten doctorate holders were in employment and more than 90 per cent were employed on a full-time basis. Only 3.2 per cent of doctorate holders were found to be self-employed, while 8.5 per cent were engaged in temporary employment contracts. Over two-thirds of doctorate holders were...

Figures issued today by the European Commission show a significant drop in the average number of pupils per teacher n Malta's primary schools over a matter of years. The report shows that at primary level, the number of pupils per teacher varies significantly between Member States. In 2009 they ranged from around 10 pupils on average per teacher in Malta, Lithuania, Denmark and Poland to nearly 20 pupils per teacher in France and the United Kingdom. In the EU27, there were on average 15 pupils per teacher in 2009. The number of pupils per teacher in primary education fell between 2000 and 2009 in 18 of the 22 Member States for which data are available.

Leeds Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom in collaboration with the University of The Gambia, Friday organized a graduation ceremony for 18 Gambians who has successfully completed a two years masters degrees in Public Health, Health Promotion and Environmental Health, at a ceremony held Paradise Suites Hotel.

A United Kingdom (UK) based charity organisation, "Equipping Schools for the Future," over the weekend, donated assorted items worth GH ¢4,085 to three deprived schools and the district education office in the Dangbe West District Assembly (DWDA).

Ghana's Deputy High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Mrs. Elizabeth Nicol, has said that the key to the empowerment of the African woman is through education. She was speaking at a meeting with a delegation from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), UK Section, which visited the Ghana High Commission in London.

From the Department of Physiology and Centre for Molecular, Environmental, Genetic and Analytic Epidemiology , University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; Department of Cardiovascular Sciences , University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom; Murdoch Children's Research Institute , Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, Victoria, ... (more)

Internet leaders and visionaries will convene to share insights and new research findings regarding how to strengthen the Internet infrastructure at Verisign's "Building a Better Internet" symposium to be held in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 18.

The forum will spotlight how, after decades of exponential growth, the Internet infrastructure needs to be strengthened and fortified to support the needs of the next billion users. It will also look forward to the increasing complexity and internationalization of Internet-enabled technologies, and the evolutionary changes that must take place to meet those challenges.

"In the years ahead, we believe the world will welcome a billion new Internet users, and witness the development of businesses and services that have yet to be imagined," said Jim Bidzos, Verisign's executive chairman, president and chief executive officer. "That is why it is imperative to bring industry and technical leaders together to think through and plan for the challenges ahead. Verisign is proud to host such an impressive group."

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of "The Long Tail," will keynote the event, which will feature technology leaders from the academic, business and policy communities.

The event will also feature the winners of the four $75,000 infrastructure grants that Verisign awarded as part of its 25 Years of .Com commemorations in 2010.

The grant winners who will present their findings are:

• Professor Shlomi Dolev, Ben Gurion University, Negev, Israel (Techniques for Achieving Positive Anonymity)
• Anil Madhavapeddy, Cambridge University, United Kingdom (Constructing a "Functional" Name System)
• Professor Philip Brighten Godfrey, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Lifesaver: Enabling Responsive Web Applications)
• Professor Z. Morley Mao, University of Michigan (Enhancing Mobile Internet Infrastructure for Improved Performance and Security)

The infrastructure grant program, launched during the 25 Years of .Com commemoration, represents a continuation and expansion of Verisign's commitment to sponsoring research that supports the Internet's healthy growth and development. Through Verisign Labs, Verisign has sponsored numerous university research programs this year, in addition to the infrastructure grants.

As the steward of critical components of the Internet's global infrastructure — including the .com and .net top-level domains, and two of the Internet's 13 authoritative root zone servers — Verisign plays a leading role, in partnership with other organizations, in ensuring the security and stability of the Internet. The research being highlighted at the "Building a Better Internet" symposium exemplifies the creative thinking that should help the industry to stay ahead of mounting demands and new threats, and enable users to enjoy the full benefits of the connected digital world.

The medical community debuted an app store, demonstrating a growing need for tailored apps among healthcare professionals.

Happtique, short for "Healthcare App Boutique," offers medical and healthcare apps and organizes them by user groups, such as "physician," "nurse" and "pharmacist," and users can search for apps in a particular focus, such as "cardiovascular."

The store's apps are available on Apple and Android platforms, with plans for future Blackberry support.

Healthcare professionals are increasingly turning to tablets and smartphones, even using them at patients' bedsides to facilitate diagnosis and education, and the demand for healthcare apps is soaring as a result.

Apple recently acknowledged this need by adding a healthcare-specific area to its App Store. But, healthcare professionals complain the apps they need are buried behind consumer-driven and content on iTunes.

Happtique hopes to address the problem with apps "for healthcare professionals, by healthcare professionals," ensuring their offerings are customized for healthcare providers. Happtique's team includes a medical librarian, a physician and a registered nurse, who curate Happtique's apps before they are included in the store.

Healthcare organizations can also put their own apps on Happtique, giving large hospital associations and other organizations a chance to offer customized, branded applications without the expense and hassle of running their own app store or getting them approved by Apple for public iTunes.

Projects like this one may proceed unhindered for now, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is still determining how, and if, it will regulate medical apps and the use of mobile devices in clinical settings.

Happtique is beta testing at 11 healthcare organizations, 10 in New York and one in the United Kingdom. The trial will last eight weeks, after which more organizations can sign up for the service.

Healthcare App Store Targets Medical Community originally appeared at Mobiledia on Fri Oct 07, 2011 11:02 am.

Sir Walter Raleigh, or Jiminy Cricket, would be proud of England's male field crickets, who have startled evolutionary biologists by displaying chivalry. Despite the added risk of becoming bird food, the gallant bugs give their mates priority in crawling into safe burrows when predators come hunting for them, researchers report. The finding, a first among insects, has intrigued biologists looking into the evolution of cooperation between the sexes in creatures large and small. "The consequences of this chivalrous behavior are the same for men and crickets: Both can get more matings and increase their paternity," says lead study author Rolando Rodríguez-Muñoz of the United Kingdom's University of Exeter. Though evolution seems a selfish process, the finding points to cooperation even among a species as competitive as the field cricket where males fight over mates. "The success of this behavior seems to rely on the fact that it is also beneficial for the...

This is something that ended up in today's Superhero Bits [1], but it is really big enough to warrant its own headline. So for those who didn't see SHB today, Matthew Vaughn, the director of the film based on Mark Millar's comic Kick-Ass and other films such as X-Men: First Class, has picked up the rights to create a film based on Millar's comic Superior. The comic is about a young boy living with multiple sclerosis who is given the opportunity to transform into his idol, a superhero from the big screen. Millar told CBM [2], Basically, my kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn has bought the movie rights to Superior from me and Leinil Yu and Leinil and I am also teaming up with the MS Society, who want to use the character as it's the first superhero with multiple sclerosis. 2 big stories in one. Vaughn and I have hinted at this for about 18 months, but this is the first we've ever confirmed he's bought the rights. So that's the big development, or one of them, that Millar was recently hinting at [3]. Whether Vaughn will direct the film or limit his role to that of producer and/or writer remains to be seen. A press release followed, saying: New York, October 4, 2011 -- Award-winning comic-book writer Mark Millar is empowering people with MS with his envelope pushing latest character Superior, the first superhero ever to be diagnosed with MS. And he is sharing him with the National MS Society to help raise awareness for MS and the work of the Society. The hugely popular comic Superior, which is part of the Millarworld line, follows the tale of a young boy living with multiple sclerosis who's granted a magic wish. He asks to be transformed into his favourite big screen action hero and uses his new super-powers to right the real world's wrongs. Whereas most superheroes fight criminals and stop bank robberies, this little boy uses his abilities to end the war in the Middle-East, feed the starving, rescue people from natural disasters and anything else the public wants. But have these incredible powers and worldwide adulation come at a price? This dark, magical tale has been described by critics as Big meets Superman, a unique take on the superhero mythos with a magical element that appeals to Harry Potter fans as much as the traditional superhero audience. The movie rights to this book were snapped up by Kick-Ass and X-Men director Matthew Vaughn with a view to turning this into a Hollywood blockbuster. The MS Society helps people affected by MS by funding cutting-edge research, driving change through advocacy, facilitating professional education, and providing programs and services that help people with MS and their families move their lives forward. Over the past two decades, tremendous progress has been made in advancing research to stop MS, restore lost function and to end MS forever. In 2012 to further this mission the most aggressive research funding project ever undertaken is being launched, with a goal to raise $250 million over the next five years. To find out more about current campaigns and research. Graham McReynolds, Executive Vice President Marketing and Development at National MS Society, “We are most grateful to Mark for sharing Superior with us and are really enthused about our alliance. Through Superior’s innovative story, we hope to increase awareness about MS, the challenges it raises for people living with the disease and the importance of always following your dreams despite an MS diagnosis. We also hope to encourage the public to join the MS Movement and help speed the progress we’re making to create a world free of multiple sclerosis. We plan to spotlight Superior through the multi-channels of communication that the Society commands.” Creator Mark Millar explains, “I wanted to write about a superhero with a disability and I chose MS because it's something that touched one of my school-friends growing up. I'm acutely aware of the unexpected way the disease can strike anyone and the enormous difficulties it can cause. Superhero stories are essentially wish-fulfilment fantasies and nothing seemed more powerful to me than a little boy with a magic wish not only wanting to WALK again, but to FLY. I'm delighted to work with such an incredible institution as the MS Society and feel privileged that they approached me to use this character in a positive way. We're used to seeing characters with MS as victims and I wanted to do something where the kid is not only a lead, but the most powerful person on the planet. I'm really delighted people have taken this to their hearts as much as they have". Hollywood director Matthew Vaughn was also attracted by the humanity of the lead character and added, “I have always enjoyed working with Mark and his latest exciting project Superior is something that we are very much looking forward to making”. The two worked together most recently on Kick-Ass, which hit number one in both the United States and the United Kingdom, and they're both pleased to be working on another movie together. [1] http://www.slashfilm.com/superhero-bits-94/ [2] http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/rorschachsrants/news/?a=47617&t=Mathew_Vaughn_Buys_The_Movie_Rights_To_Mark_Millars_iSuperiori [3] http://www.slashfilm.com/wanted-screenwriters-hired-sequel-offer-vague-plot-direction/