General strike sparks violence in Athens
Police in Greece have clashed with demonstrators protesting against government plans to solve the country's debt crisis with tax increases and spending cuts.
A 24-hour general strike grounded flights, halted public transport and kept schools closed across Greece.
About 20,000 protesters marched through Athens, while groups of anarchists smashed shop windows, damaged cars and hurled petrol bombs at public buildings.
The march was called to protest against the government's latest austerity measures, which include $7 billion of cuts that will hit public sector wages and pensions.
Speaking on a visit to Washington, Greek prime minister George Papandreou said that demonstrators had the right to protest, but added that the financial crisis was "not this government's fault."
Unions say ordinary Greeks are being called upon to pay a disproportionate price for past fiscal mismanagement.
The hidden victims of Mexico’s femicide
When Rubi Hernandez realised her 14-year-old daughter Iris was missing, she did not wait the mandatory 72 hours before going to the police.
In the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, mothers of the "disappeared" have learned to move quickly.
Ms Hernandez went on a one-woman PR campaign to publicise her daughter's disappearance.
"We called all the local radios. We used the internet. People were putting up posters," she said.
Iris disappeared on May 2, 2005. Two days later police handed her mother the young girl's earrings.
The police had not bothered to remove the charred pieces of ear still attached to them.
Phantom kangaroos spotted in Japan
It may seem odd, but the locals swear it is true. People in a Japanese mountain region have reported a number of kangaroo sightings, and journalists are now trying to stalk the marsupials.
The descriptions given by the apparent eyewitnesses seem close enough. For years they have spoken of a beige animal with large ears, one to 1.5 metres tall, that stands by the roadside and then hops away.
The sightings were all reported in the Mayama mountain district of Osaki city in Miyagi prefecture, a community of 441 households, located about 350 kilometres north of Tokyo.
The city has received about 30 reports of "kangaroo-like animals", including three cases since December, when the mountain area was often covered in snow, said local official Tetsuya Sasaki.
"People aged in their 40s to their 60s have said they have spotted what looked like kangaroos while travelling to and from work in the early mornings and evenings," said Mr Sasaki.
Rumours about kangaroo sightings started about seven years ago, and television crews and newspapers have set up hidden cameras in the district, but have so far failed to capture an image of a kangaroo.
As a joke, "some people have put up 'kangaroo crossing' signs on their roadside properties," Mr Sasaki said.
Kangaroos are on show at many Japanese zoos and can be imported by individuals.
- AFP
Swiss vote down lawyers for animals
Switzerland has voted against assigning lawyers to defend animals in court cases.
The Swiss Animal Protection Group says unlike humans, animals have no rights and cannot prosecute people who cause them harm.
The group initiated a Swiss referendum on whether a law in the Zurich region - which requires lawyers be named for animals during court cases - be extended to the rest of the country.
But 70 per cent of voters have defeated the idea.
Switzerland already has comprehensive animal rights laws. People cannot flush a live goldfish down the toilet: it must be knocked out, killed and then its body disposed of.
Household pets like birds and hamsters cannot be left alone in cages and even sheep and goats must at least be able to see their fellows.
The lawyers-for-animals poll is the latest example of Switzerland's "direct democracy" in which any citizen who collects 100,000 signatures from eligible voters can force a nationwide referendum on their chosen cause.
- ABC/AFP
Woman becomes first prosecuted for failing to report treasure
Published: 8:00AM GMT 26 Feb 2010
The woman, in her twenties from Ludlow, kept hidden a rare piedfort - a 14th century coin-like object worth £2000.
She took the silver artefact to Ludlow museum to be identified in January last year claiming she had found it in her garden.
But after being informed she must register the find with the coroner under section 8 of the treasure act she continued to keep the treasure hidden.
South Shropshire coroner Anthony Sibcy eventually contacted the police in April 2009.
After an investigation by West Mercia police the woman was summonsed to appear at Ludlow Magistrates Court on February 17th.
The case was adjourned until Wednesday February 24 when the woman pleaded guilty to the offence of finding an object believed to be Treasure and not reporting it.
She was ordered to hand over the piedfort, was given a conditional discharge and ordered to pay £25 court costs.
Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linked to IQ
(CNN) -- Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds.
Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.
The IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not stunning -- on the order of 6 to 11 points -- and the data should not be used to stereotype or make assumptions about people, experts say. But they show how certain patterns of identifying with particular ideologies develop, and how some people's behaviors come to be.
The reasoning is that sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans' evolutionary past. In other words, none of these traits would have benefited our early human ancestors, but higher intelligence may be associated with them.
"The adoption of some evolutionarily novel ideas makes some sense in terms of moving the species forward," said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study. "It also makes perfect sense that more intelligent people -- people with, sort of, more intellectual firepower -- are likely to be the ones to do that."
Bailey also said that these preferences may stem from a desire to show superiority or elitism, which also has to do with IQ. In fact, aligning oneself with "unconventional" philosophies such as liberalism or atheism may be "ways to communicate to everyone that you're pretty smart," he said.
The study looked at a large sample from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), which began with adolescents in grades 7-12 in the United States during the 1994-95 school year. The participants were interviewed as 18- to 28-year-olds from 2001 to 2002. The study also looked at the General Social Survey, another cross-national data collection source.
Kanazawa did not find that higher or lower intelligence predicted sexual exclusivity in women. This makes sense, because having one partner has always been advantageous to women, even thousands of years ago, meaning exclusivity is not a "new" preference.
For men, on the other hand, sexual exclusivity goes against the grain evolutionarily. With a goal of spreading genes, early men had multiple mates. Since women had to spend nine months being pregnant, and additional years caring for very young children, it made sense for them to want a steady mate to provide them resources.
Religion, the current theory goes, did not help people survive or reproduce necessarily, but goes along the lines of helping people to be paranoid, Kanazawa said. Assuming that, for example, a noise in the distance is a signal of a threat helped early humans to prepare in case of danger.
Russians find forest of snow-covered tanks
Some Russians were amazed to discover dozens of T-80 battle tanks seemingly abandoned in a forest, but army officials insisted there was nothing unusual about it.
The tanks - nearly 100 in all - were found near the Elanovskaya railroad station about 100 kilometres outside the Urals Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, the Kommersant Daily reported on Saturday (local time).
Their presence was revealed after a local news website posted a video of the tanks, covered in a deep layer of snow and resting peacefully between the railroad and the woods with no military personnel in sight.
"There are tanks all over the forest, abandoned. If you need one, come and get it," an unnamed person behind the camera says in the video posted on E1.ru, as the camera spins around to show dozens of unguarded tanks.
A spokesman for the Volga-Urals Military District, the branch of the Russian army which oversees the area, said the tanks were being transported to a storage site as part of a routine logistical operation.
"Work on their transport to the storage base is going according to plan. All the vehicles are under guard by military patrols consisting of officers and soldiers," the spokesman, Dmitry Burdakov, told Kommersant.
"It is entirely possible they could have been filmed on video. This is not a military secret, and placing a guard next to each vehicle is impossible."
- AFP
What’s smaller than a bread box and as effective as a Radpack?
The Bloom Energy CEO is finally unveiling his entry in the fuel-cell arena after years of playing it close to the vest.
By Paul Keegan, contributor
K.R. Sridhar looks nervous. The CEO of Bloom Energy, the much-hyped fuel cell start-up, sits in a conference room preparing to show off his magical “Bloom Box” for the first time in public. The 49-year-old scientist-turned entrepreneur has raised $400 million in venture capital for his Sunnyvale, California company, but until now Sridhar has revealed almost nothing about what his company has actually produced since it launched eight years ago.
“In our eight-year history, this is the first time I’m sitting down with anybody who’s not wearing a Bloom badge,” he says with a laugh. “So it’s a big deal.”
Thus begins the opening salvo of a full-bore media assault by this soft-spoken mechanical engineer that will soon be followed by a 60 Minutes segment on CBS on Sunday and a big press event on Wednesday in Silicon Valley. On the dais at Bloom’s coming-out party will be board member Colin Powell, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers, the blue-chip venture capital firm that jump-started the Bloom bandwagon back in 2002 (New Enterprise Associates and Morgan Stanley were also early believers). The event will be held at eBay (EBAY) headquarters in San Jose, one of its first customers – along with Google (GOOG), Wal-Mart (WMT), FedEx (FDX), and Staples (SPLS) – and CEO John Donahoe is expected to rave about the potential of these little black boxes that Sridhar claims will “change the world.”
Those dark spots on photos of earth taken from outer space? Ablaze with light. That old, unreliable grid mostly powered by dirty coal? Obsolete, since Bloom boxes are basically tiny power plants installed right in your back yard, next to the dumpster at your corporate campus, or at your local electric-car charging station – though they can also be connected to an electrical grid just like your PC connects to the Internet. Hydrocarbons such as natural gas or biofuel (stored in an adjacent tank) are pumped into the Bloom Box – ceramic plates stacked atop each other to form modules that can be assembled into a unit of any size – and out comes abundant, reliable, cleaner electricity. The company says the unit does not vibrate, emits no sound, and has no smell.