He was the fresh-faced young teen who wowed the public with his soulful voice on the 2007 series of The X Factor.
But now former winner Leon Jackson is virtually unrecognisable, as he showed while posting a saucy shirtless picture of himself on his Twitter page.
With a thick beard and donning a beanie hat, Leon, 22, looked more like Jude Law than his former clean-shaven self in the picture.
Who's that man? Former X Factor winner Leon Jackson looks worlds away from his former self in this saucy shirtless snap he posted on his Twitter page
He accompanied the shot with the caption: 'My birthday suit ;)'
Spitting image: Leon's beard and hat made him look just like Jude Law
Leon, who was mentored by Dannii Minogue on the TV talent show, has been fairly quiet over the past couple of years, and was last year named the 2nd biggest reality TV flop after another former X Factor winner, Steve Brookstein.
Despite winning thousands of fans with his appearance on The X Factor, Leon was dropped by record label Sony in 2009 after his debut solo album Right Now failed to set the charts alight.
Since then, however, Leon has been working on new material after teaching himself to play the guitar and piano. During a recording trip to Los Angeles, the Scottish singer teamed up with various songwriters in an attempt to reinvent his sound.
After performing a set of acoustic tracks at the Scottish New Music Awards in September, it is expected Leon will release his second album sometime next year.
In a recent interview Leon denied reports that he had called X Factor a 'curse' on his life, insisting: 'If it wasn't for the X Factor then I wouldn't be a working musician right now, so I owe a great deal to that show.
'I have obviously worked hard since then but I am thankful to the people who invested in me as a person on the show and have continued to support me since then.'
And asked how his musical style has changed since the show, Leon said: I think I am a million miles away from what people perhaps know me for. In my opinion, I was so new to music and I had never had any experience or any inkling as to what type of artist I wanted to be or where I wanted to go.
'I was pigeon holed into a specific genre that I felt deep down that wasn't me.'
Reality show star: Leon with former mentor Dannii Minogue on The X Factor back in 2007, and performing with her sister Kylie on the show's final
HONG KONG (Reuters) ? China this week reached a milestone in its drive to master the military use of space with the launch of trials for its Beidou satellite global positioning network, a move that will bring it one step closer to matching U.S. space capabilities.
If Beijing can successfully deploy the full 35 satellites planned for the Beidou network on schedule by 2020, its military will be free of its current dependence for navigation on the U.S. global positioning network (GPS) signals and Russia's similar GLONASS system.
And, unlike the less accurate civilian versions of GPS and GLONASS available to the People's Liberation Army (PLA), this network will give China the accuracy to guide missiles, smart munitions and other weapons.
"This will allow a big jump in the precision attack capability of the PLA," said Andrei Chang, a Hong Kong-based analyst of the Chinese military and editor of Kanwa Asian Defense magazine.
China has launched 10 Beidou satellites and plans to launch six more by the end of next year, according to the China Satellite Navigation Management Office.
Chinese and foreign military experts say the PLA's General Staff Department and General Armaments Department closely coordinate and support all of China's space programs within the sprawling science and aerospace bureaucracy.
As part of this system, the Beidou, or "Big Dipper," network will have an important military role alongside the country's rapidly expanding network of surveillance, imaging and remote sensing satellites.
China routinely denies having military ambitions in space.
Defense Ministry spokesman Yang Yujun on Wednesday dismissed fears the Beidou network would pose a military threat, noting that all international satellite navigation systems are designed for dual civilian and military use.
CATCHING UP WITH THE U.S.
China accelerated its military satellite research and development after PLA commanders found they were unable to track two U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups deployed in 1996 to the Taiwan Strait at a time of high tension between the island and the mainland, analysts say.
The effort received a further boost when it was shown how crucial satellite networks were in the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
While China still lags the United States and Russia in overall space technology, over the last decade it has rapidly become a state-of-the-art competitor in space-based surveillance after deploying a range of advanced satellite constellations that serve military and civilian agencies.
With the launch of more than 30 surveillance satellites over the last decade, according to space technology experts, the PLA can monitor an expanding area of the earth's surface with increased frequency, an important element of reliable military reconnaissance.
That coverage gives PLA commanders vastly improved capability to detect and track potential military targets.
Real-time satellite images and data can also be used to coordinate the operations of China's naval, missile and strike aircraft forces in operations far from the mainland.
"What we are seeing is China broadly acquiring the same capabilities in this area as those held by the U.S.," said Ross Babbage, a Defense analyst and founder of the Canberra-based Kokoda Foundation, an independent security policy unit.
"Essentially, they are making most of the Western Pacific far more transparent to their military."
In a recent article for the Journal of Strategic Studies, researchers Eric Hagt and Matthew Durnin attempted to estimate the capability of China's space network using orbital modeling software and available data on satellite performance.
China's most basic satellites carried electro-optical sensors capable of taking high resolution digital images in the visible and non-visible wavelengths, wrote the authors.
More advanced satellites launched in recent years carried powerful synthetic aperture radars that could penetrate cloud and cover much bigger areas in high detail.
Added to that, China was now deploying satellites that could monitor electronic signals and emissions, so-called electronic intelligence or ELINT platforms, the authors said.
"Next to China, only the United States possesses more capable tactical support systems in space for tactical operations," they wrote.
SARAJEVO (Reuters) ? The United States on Tuesday extradited to Bosnia a Bosnian female ex-soldier suspected of murdering six Croatians in 1993 during a war that ripped the region apart, the prosecutor's office in Sarajevo said.
Rasema Handanovic, a 39-year-old Muslim, was detained upon her arrival in Bosnia.
She is suspected of taking part in the mass murder of Croatian civilians in Bosnia-Herzegovina in April 1993, when she was a member of the Bosnian army special unit known as "Zulfikar," the prosecutor's office said in a statement.
More than 100,000 people were killed during the Bosnian war of 1992-95. Muslims and Croatians fought each other in 1993-94 even though they had entered the conflict as allies against the Bosnian Serbs.
"Rasema Handanovic is suspected of personally taking part in executing by firing squad three soldiers of the Croatian Defence Council who had surrendered and three civilians ... in the hamlet of Gaj, (in) the Trusina village," the statement said.
The attack on the Croatian village resulted in the deaths of 18 civilians and four soldiers. Several people were wounded, including two children.
Last week, a U.S. naturalized citizen, Edin Dzeko, was deported to Bosnia over his alleged participation in the crime.
The Bosnian war crimes court is currently trying six members of the "Zulfikar" unit for war crimes in Trusina, including the unit's commander, Zulfikar Alispago.
Handanovic is one of only a few females wanted for war crimes committed during the Bosnian conflict. One suspect, Azra Basic, is being detained in the United States awaiting extradition over war crimes against Serb detainees.
So far, the only woman to have been convicted over Bosnian war crimes is Biljana Plavsic, the former Bosnian Serb president who had been a member of the Bosnian Serb wartime leadership.
The Hague-based war crimes tribunal sentenced Plavsic to 11 years in jail in 2003 for persecution of Bosnian Muslims and Croatians and crimes against humanity. She was released after serving two-thirds of her sentence and now lives in Belgrade.
(Reporting By Daria Sito-Sucic; Editing by Alessandra Rizzo)
Neurodegenerative diseases may result from a nasal infection
By Stephani Sutherland
?|
December 28, 2011?|
Image: Patrick McDonogh/Getty Images
Neurodegenerative diseases were once considered disorders of the mind, rooted in psychology. Now viruses rank among the environmental factors thought to trigger brain-ravaging diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) and Alzheimer?s disease. Human herpesvirus-6 (HHV-6), in particular, has been linked to MS in past studies. Neuroscientist Steven Jacobson and his colleagues at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke have determined that the virus makes its entry to the human brain through the olfactory pathway, right along with the odors wafting into our nose.
The researchers tested samples of brain cells from people with MS and healthy control subjects and found evidence of the virus in the olfactory bulb in both groups. Infection via the nasal passage is probably quite common, as is harboring a dormant reservoir of HHV-6, but in people with MS, the virus is active. Genetics and other unknown environmental factors probably determine the likelihood of the virus reactivating once inside the brain, which can cause the disease to progress.
The virus appears to invade the brain by infecting a type of glial cell called olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs), which nourish smell-sensing neurons and guide them from the olfactory bulb to their targets in the nervous system. These targets include the limbic system, a group of evolutionarily old structures deep in the brain, ?which is where viruses like to reactivate,? Jacobson explains. He points out that olfactory neurons and their OECs are among the few brain cells known to regenerate throughout our life. This neurogenesis may keep our sense of smell sharp, but at the cost of providing the virus the opportunity to spread.
Seven towns in Germany have special post offices dedicated to answering children's Christmas letters, which letter writers see as a chance to undermine seasonal greed and instill joy and hope.
As Christmas approaches, children long for things: cars, laptops,?dolls, electric trains. The airwaves are bombarded with news of Christmas sales barometers. A stressed-out society rushes to consumption.
Skip to next paragraph
But in Germany, children still write to the Christkind?("Christ Child"), or to Santa Claus, in the hundreds of thousands ? yearning not for only gifts, but for a bit of comfort and joy.?
Since the beginning of the Advent season in late November, close to?75,000 children have written to the "Christmas Post Office" of Himmelstadt?("Heaven's City"). The tiny Bavarian?village of 17,500 is one of seven towns with special post offices dedicated to?receiving and answering letters with children's Christmas wishes.?
"I write a letter. I sign it 'Your Christkind,' and I give the?children a piece of advice. I send them a little angel, a drawing, a?poem," says Rosemarie Schotte, who, for more than 20 years, has been in?charge of the Christmas post office in Himmelstadt, working with 30 village volunteers to?answer every?single letter.
"We want to bring back the spirit of Christmas, which is a?celebration of love, not necessarily big presents," says Schotte. "One has to?look within one self, to remember how good you have it in life, be?grateful to have a family."
The letter-writing tradition all started decades ago when a letter?addressed to the Christkind ended up in Himmselstadt.?Postal workers, not knowing what to do with it, just answered it. The?following year, a few more children wrote. Over the years, what had?been a few isolated letters turned into a flood.?
In 1965, Germany's first "Christmas post office" opened in Lower Saxony's?Himmelsth?r, or Heaven's Door. Six other post offices?in places with names associated with Christmas popped up, including Engelskirchen ("Angels' Church"), Himmelpfort ("Heaven's Gate") and Himmelpforten ("Heaven's Gates").
The letters addressed to Father Christmas, who is known in?Germany as Saint Nicholas, end up in one of two places: Nikolausdorf?("Nicholas village") in Lower Saxony or St. Nikolaus in Saarland.?
The tradition is an effort to counter the encroachment of?consumption on the spirit of Christmas. Schotte says part of the?idea is is to get families closer together, by encouraging parents to?write with their children.
So far, children from 70 countries have written to the Christkind in?Himmelsfarhrt. This year, for the first time, children from?Mongolia and Vietnam wrote.
Christmas' wishes come in all forms and colors.?Children don't just want?iPods and laptops. In their letters, they?share a bit of their lives, and of their yearnings to have it better.
"We get to read about just about everything," Schotte says. "The children pour their hearts out."?Mostly, they talk about things like their parents fighting, illnesses, and separations. "We try to comfort them, to make them trust life?again," she says.?
Schotte will answer each letter with a personal note, sometimes a poem or a drawing.?She tries to?transmit her own childhood traditions of candles, the advent?crown, eating a few Christmas cookies, the family getting closer to?each other.?She wants to bring togetherness back into the lives of the children's?families.
''When things aren't working in small circles, how can you?expect them to work out in bigger circles? In politics, in the wider?world?" she says.
There is always a reason to keep on writing. Schotte received a candy bar with one letter. "Dear Christ Child," the?child wrote, "I am sending you this so (you) can get energy back when?you give me my presents."
He's a little like Bruce Wayne without the cowl, Thomas Crown without the thievery, Howard Hughes without the planes (or the weirdness).
Now Nicolas Berggruen is trying to do what even a superhero governor couldn't: Save California.
At 50, never married, childless and bored with a billionaire's usual trappings, Berggruen owns no home, instead living in fine hotels as he roams the globe for business and pleasure, his extensive art collection ensconced in museums, his annual pre-Oscar party at the Chateau Marmont still a must for Hollywood's elite glitterati. He has been called a "playboy financier," living a life most Californians can't imagine.
But for the past year and a half he has been reimagining how to run the state, and he's promising to spend at least $20 million to make it so.
Berggruen is the brain and bankroll behind the Think Long Committee for California, a panel of political and business A-listers, which last month issued a report amid much buzz urging an overhaul of the state's tax structure and creation of a citizen "super committee" to shepherd future reforms.
He said he will spend millions of dollars to persuade Californians to vote for these changes in November.
"It may cost much more than $20 million, and if it does, then it does - we'll just have to put in more money or raise more money," he said in a telephone interview. "I'm a facilitator. At the end of the day, this very much has been a group
effort, very much a bipartisan effort. And if my name disappears from this, it's perfectly good. It's not about me at all."
Fat chance. Politics get personal, and Berggruen's biography is so intriguing that many are suspicious that his mission isn't what it seems.
The Paris-born son of a German actress and a prominent art dealer and collector - his father was Pablo Picasso's friend and had a fling with Frida Kahlo - Berggruen studied finance and international business at New York University before launching a company to make investments that multiplied the family fortune.
Forbes says he "has holdings that range from a revitalization project in Newark, N.J., to Hydro Electric Power Plants in Turkey to a Spanish media conglomerate," and is worth about $2.3 billion.
Reforming California's political scene may seem like an odd sideline, but those who know Berggruen say it's in keeping with his newfound civic philanthropy.
San Francisco art dealer John Berggruen, 68, said the Think Long Committee's seeds might have been planted at his breakfast table a few years ago, when then-Attorney General Jerry Brown dropped by to meet Berggruen's younger half-brother and talk "about California's electoral process and the referendum process, about whether this state was governable."
By then, the elder Berggruen said, his brother had realized "there was more to his existence than creating wealth" and had begun studying political philosophy and practice with UCLA scholars.
"One thing led to another, by virtue of his innate curiosity and intelligence, and this is something that became intensely stimulating to him," John Berggruen said.
Seeking a better world
Nicolas Berggruen in 2010 founded a namesake Los Angeles-based think tank as a vehicle of that commitment, aimed at convening panels of experts to reach consensus ideas - more appealing to the public than one billionaire's own musings - to better the world. Among its projects is a "21st Century Council" of former heads of state, Nobel laureates and others pursuing global governance reform.
It also has a "Future of Europe" project seeking a way toward integration and out of debt, and a "Vision for Africa" project aimed at enriching and democratizing that continent.
Fixing California might seem easy by comparison - unless you know much about California.
Progressive Democratic activist Robert Cruickshank blogged that if Berggruen really wants to help California, "he would take the $20 million he is pledging to spend on this shockingly regressive proposal and instead invest it in an initiative to raise taxes on the rich, on corporations, and to fix the state's unfair property tax system. Instead he's using it to help himself and his friends get even richer."
California Republican Party Chairman Tom Del Beccaro issued a statement saying he's "saddened to hear that some believe that a massive new category of taxation is the answer to California's economic or budget problems."
Berggruen hoped to overcome this schism by assembling a diverse panel of the state's top political and business minds, unburdened by concerns of re-election or even popularity.
A positive environment
Former Gov. Gray Davis said he had met Berggruen only once before, briefly, when the billionaire came to him in February 2010 seeking "a couple of ex-governors to lead this operation." That didn't work out, but a heavy-hitting bipartisan panel was convened nonetheless.
"It was spirited at times, but basically ... a relatively amicable and positive environment, because we all realized what we were there to do," Davis said - to smooth California's boom-and-bust fiscal cycle, and reform its shortsighted, must-get-re-elected governance.
Of Berggruen, Davis said, "As far as I can tell, what you see is what you get - he wants to do his part to leave this world better off and he's willing to devote a lot of his time and a good deal of his resources to make that happen, with no guarantee of success."
Berggruen said he knew the report would meet with push back.
"Entrenched interests will always defend the status quo," he said. "Californians know the system doesn't work. ... People have to be in a state of mind where they know change is needed."
There are some third rails even a billionaire won't touch. Altering Proposition 13's property-tax strictures - perhaps a "split-roll" plan for commercial property reassessment, or modifying the two-thirds legislative majority requirement for tax votes - "obviously was discussed" but "could've made the overall plan less feasible," Berggruen said.
Davis said he expects Berggruen will have final versions of the proposed ballot measures by this week and then get them cleared for petition circulation.
Berggruen believes in letting voters directly decide the state's fate.
"At the end of the day," he said, "that's the ultimate way of giving citizens the real power."
After a quickie Blu-ray dropped in the fall sans-extras, Transformers: Dark of the Moon is getting a full fledged release January 31st complete with 3D and four hours of bonus features. There's actually two versions coming, first up is the $39.99 four disc Ultimate Edition with a 2D copy on one disc, a Blu-ray full of extras, a Blu-ray 3D copy, and a DVD with the film in standard def plus iTunes / Windows Media Player compatible digital copies. Even though it's coming with that old school digital copy disc, this flick will also be Ultraviolet ready, so if you're packing the correct assortment of logins and software it can be downloaded or streamed on other devices. The other release is a $99 seven-disc Limited Collector's Edition Blu-ray Trilogy set that dedicates two discs each to the first two movies, and three for DotM as well as a signed plaque from the director. We may have to wait to see Martin Scorsese's Hugo to see a Blu-ray 3D release to watch a good movie on the format, but the extensive work done in creating Transformer'svisual effects should definitely hold over AV junkies until Avatar gets a wide release. Check out the press release with a full list of extras and a picture of the LCE after the break.
This entry was posted
on Monday, December 26th, 2011 at 1:30 pm and is filed under CMB Main and tagged with Christina Aguilera.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
It is currently in the early stages but I am getting to the point where I need traffic. More traffic equals more click through's on the advertising on site which equals money for me!!
I am not an expert in driving traffic and that is where hopefully someone here can help. I would like 1000 unique visitors to my site. I also need references.
I am also only willing to pay once I start seeing results but.... if all goes well I will be back for repeat custom.
WASHINGTON ? Fighting to win over unhappy American voters, President Barack Obama and his Republican challengers are seizing on one of the most potent issues this election season: the struggling middle class and the widening gap between rich and poor.
Highlighted by the Occupy movement and fanned by record profits on Wall Street at a time of stubborn unemployment, economic inequality is now taking center stage in the 2012 presidential campaign, emphasized by Obama and offering opportunities and risks for him and his GOP opponents as both sides battle for the allegiance of the angst-ridden electorate.
For Obama, who calls boosting middle-class opportunity "the defining issue of our time," the question is whether he can bring voters along ? while parrying GOP accusations of class warfare ? even though he's failed to solve the country's economic woes during his first term in office.
For Republicans, Obama's potential vulnerability gives them an opening, but they also must battle perceptions that their policies favor the wealthy at a time when voters support Obama's call to raise taxes on the very rich. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has already made clear he'll resist Obama's attempts to capitalize on the issue, adopting the language of Occupy Wall Street in an interview with the Washington Post this month where he called the president "a member of the 1 percent."
For both sides, the question is how to find political advantage in light of a weak economy with unemployment above 8 percent. Since Obama is expected to run for re-election with higher unemployment than any recent president even if the economy continues to show signs of improvement, he must aim to set the terms of the debate in a way that helps him and hurts the GOP ? while Republicans will be working just as hard to deny him any advantage.
The president won a year-end victory Friday with the passage of a two-month extension of a payroll tax cut that had bipartisan support in the Senate.
The measure will keep in place a 2 percentage point cut in the Social Security payroll tax ? worth about $20 a week for a typical worker making $50,000 a year ? and prevent almost 2 million unemployed people from losing jobless benefits averaging $300 a week.
House Republicans had unsuccessfully attempted to push for further negotiations toward a yearlong extension, which allowed Obama to argue for the two-month extension of the tax cuts and prevention of a pending tax increase. The two sides resume discussions on the payroll tax cut early next year.
Obama's campaign pressed its economic argument Friday in an op-ed by Vice President Joe Biden in The Des Moines Register where Biden, taking direct aim at Romney, wrote that the former Massachusetts governor "would actually double down on the policies that caused the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression and accelerated a decades-long assault on the middle class."
Romney, campaigning in New Hampshire, quickly countered that it's Obama who is hurting the country and expressed astonishment that Biden would have the "chutzpah ... the delusion" to write such a piece. "This president and his policies have made it harder on the American people and on the middle class," Romney said.
It was a preview of an argument certain to carry through the 2012 race, as the Obama campaign, viewing Romney as the likely GOP nominee even before any votes have been cast, works vigorously to define him early on, and Romney does everything he can to resist.
And the dispute taps into a striking reality. After-tax income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007 for the top 1 percent of the population, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found in a report this fall. But for the 20 percent of the population making the least money, income growth over the same period was only 18 percent.
Obama "is viewed as more likely to help the middle class than is the GOP, so he can capitalize on this by playing on concerns about inequality and contrasting his positions and the GOP's on issues like tax cuts for the wealthy," John Sides, political science professor at George Washington University, said by email. "However," Sides added, "it's an open question whether that strategy would enable him to overcome a weak economy and win."
Aides say Obama has long been concerned with economic inequality given his background in community organizing. But he brought the issue into much sharper focus in a speech in Osawatomie, Kan., earlier this month, where he reprised a populist message delivered in the same town by Theodore Roosevelt decades ago, and decried a growing inequality between chief executives and their workers.
"This kind of inequality ? a level that we haven't seen since the Great Depression ? hurts us all," Obama said at the time.
"This kind of gaping inequality gives lie to the promise that's at the very heart of America: that this is a place where you can make it if you try."
The issue has become a rallying cry of the Occupy Wall Street movement that's swept the country, with activists proclaiming "We are the 99 percent" ? as opposed to the "1 percent" at the top. And Obama advisers have identified this sense of inequality as the strongest current running through politics, one that they will be focusing on through Election Day.
But some polling suggests a note of caution for Obama in pressing the inequality argument. Gallup found this month that a majority of Americans don't view the country as divided into haves and have-nots. The polling also found that more people thought it was important for the government to focus on growing and expanding the economy, (82 percent) and increasing equality of opportunity (70 percent) than on reducing the income and wealth gap between the rich and poor (46 percent).
"The middle class certainly believes that it's in trouble and rightly so, because it is," said Bill Galston, a former Clinton administration domestic policy adviser now at the Brookings Institution. "But they are yet to be convinced that going after the rich will go to the heart of the problems that now afflict them."
That may suggest an opening for some GOP attacks against Obama. Romney charged in a speech in New Hampshire this month that Obama is pursuing an "entitlement society," versus the "opportunity society" that the former Massachusetts governor said he wants to offer the country. Newt Gingrich, Romney and other Republicans also regularly accuse Obama of "class warfare."
Obama senior adviser David Axelrod called such criticism the "Republican cartoon" of Obama's argument.
"In some ways the race will be different depending on who the nominee is but in some ways the same because they largely subscribe to the same economic theory" of cutting taxes for the wealthy and paring back regulations, said Axelrod. He added that Obama's speech in Osawatomie, Kan., "was a very, very good statement of his values and vision and will help frame much of what comes in the next year."
I got a bad virus a little while back, the Windows XP Security Center thing, and now that it's gone it seems it left a few things out of whack. One of them is that whenever I try to paste files that I've either copied OR cut, Roxio Media Creator 7 pops up some sort of update/install box and interrupts the process. I can usually hit cancel on that, and after a brief freeze-up the files go where they're supposed to. But I'd say 1 out of 10 times, hitting cancel just freezes paste indefinitely until I turn off the computer and try again.
Is there some sort of way to stop Roxio from interrupting paste? I don't want to get rid of the program entirely, since it has an audio editor I use (though the rest of it is expired). But can I edit some registry, stop some process, do anything other than uninstalling Roxio to fix the problem?
I have tried letting Roxio go through with the install by the way. It asks for the original program disc to complete installation, but I don't have that.
(No. 389 - December 22, 2011 - 1:40 p.m. ET) The Honourable Ed Fast, Minister of International Trade and Minister for the Asia-Pacific Gateway, today issued the following statement on the Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia?s proposed trade restrictions on seal products:
?Our government remains committed to defending Canada?s sealing industry.
?The Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia has proposed trade restrictions on seal products.
?I have instructed Canadian officials to actively engage with their international counterparts to convey Canada?s concerns over these proposed restrictions and to examine options for ensuring continued market access for Canada?s sealing industry.
?The Atlantic and northern seal hunts in Canada are humane, sustainable and well-regulated activities that provide an important source of food and income for thousands of sealers and their families.?
- 30 -
For further information, media representatives may contact:
Rudy Husny Press Secretary Office of the Honourable Ed Fast Minister of International Trade and Minister for the Asia-Pacific Gateway 613-992-7332
Trade Media Relations Office Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada 613-996-2000 Follow us on Twitter: @Canada_Trade
The rapid expansion of India?s nuclear energy sector, which is expected to triple in size by the end of the decade, is stirring anxiety about insufficient regulatory safeguards, construction in quake zones and the displacement of farmers and other landowners. [The Sydney Morning Herald]
A Texas environmental agency has rejected a request from the oil company Valero for up to $92 million in tax breaks that would have come from school and municipal budgets. [Associated Press]
Researchers at Notre Dame have developed a ?solar paint? that uses semiconducting nanoparticles to produce energy from sunlight, the university reports. But it is not ready for commercial use; for one thing, it has less than one-tenth the efficiency of typical silicon solar cells, the researchers say. [UPI.com]
The 19th-century federal Treasury Department building in Washington has won LEED gold status. It is the world?s oldest building to achieve that rating. [The Washington Post]
I know that all of you have been waiting on pins and needles... refreshing the TechCrunch web page multiple times each day to see when the next batch of Crunchies tickets will be on sale. Well, today is the day! The second batch of tickets for the 5th Annual Crunchies Awards are available now. 200 tickets have been released for the annual event honoring the best achievements in tech brought to you by GIgaOm, VentureBeat and Techcrunch for general admission purchase. The first batch sold out in less than two hours, so purchase your tickets now, lest you have to wait for the next release in January.
? Boeing Case Is Over | Main | New NLRB Nominations ?
December 13, 2011
NYU Conference on China's Labor Market
NYU's Center for Labor & Employment Law is issuing a call for interested presenters for its upcoming Research Conference on the Chinese Labor Market. ?The conference will be at NYU on May 11-12, 2012. ?Those interested in presenting--and there will be a $1,000 stipend for all presenters--should send a 2-5 page summary of the paper they want to present, among other materials, by Dec. 15 (to get more details, Download NYU China Conference?announcement).? According to the announcement:, the topics will depend on the presenters, but they hope to get, among other things, empirical work on the following:
Change and Variation in Wages and Working Conditions
Migrant Workers' Rights and Working Conditions
Trends in Labor Unrest and Protests
Democracy in the Grassroots ACFTU Chapters
Collective Bargaining and Consultation
The Impact of International Labor and Global Civil Society
-JH?
December 13, 2011 in Conferences & Colloquia | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341bfae553ef0154383cbb41970c
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference NYU Conference on China's Labor Market:
Miley Cyrus seems to be head-over-heels for her Australian boyfriend Liam Hemsworth. The 19-year-old singer and actress thinks Liam, 21, could be “the one”! Miley [...]
Iranian exiles in Los Angeles use their musical talents to inspire change in the middle east. These world famous performers, considered revolutionaries among their fans, travel to the borders of Iran to sing about and inspire change.
COMMENTARY | On Monday, according to Yahoo News, NASA announced that it discovered the first planet in the habitable zone, an area with a distance from a star where temperatures will permit the existence of liquid water. This is an amazing discovery by the Kepler space telescope on board the Kepler spacecraft, and the first potentially habitable alien world that we know of.
The planet is 600 light-years away from Earth, and it completely orbits its star, strikingly similar to our own sun, every 290 days, just 75 days short of an Earth year. The planet's average surface temperature is even a comfortable 72 degrees, and its radius is 2.4 times that of our own planet.
Kepler program scientist, Douglas Hudgins said in a statement, "This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth's twin."
Scientists believe we are well on our way to discovering our Earth-like planets that are inhabitable. We may be just scratching the surface of what exists in the infinite world of space. This stretches our imagination to far-reaching possibilities. Can you imagine what our view of space might be by the end of the 21st century? The possibilities are endless.
2011 has been a year for some incredible discoveries. In September, the European Organization for Nuclear Research said is had defied the law of physics and Albert Einstein's time-tested theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
According to Mail Online, physicists at CERN research institute near Geneva, Switzerland, conducted an experiment in which they sent a beam of neutrinos 500 miles from their facility to a lab in Italy. The scientists discovered the neutrinos had arrived 60 billionth of a second quicker than the speed of light, possibly breaking the most fundamental law of the Universe: thou shalt not travel faster than light.
This finding could change everything we know about the basics of physics and essentially the way our world and the universe works altogether. What makes this especially interesting is that anything that goes faster than the speed of light also goes backward in time. Imagine the possibilities.
2012 may be another exciting year for space exploration and scientific discoveries, and our human minds may not even be able to comprehend what our future holds.
There are two main sets of characters in Michele Bachmann?s new memoir, Core of Conviction. On one hand, there are ?the big-city liberal mayors, the Saul Alinsky nostalgists, the ACORN activists, the taxpayer-subsidy-dependent green-jobs propagandists, and all the other moochers, hustlers, and rent seekers demanding a ?place at the table? when liberals control the White House.? Pitted against these villains are Bachmann?s heroines, America?s last best hope: flinty working women. One of Bachmann?s grandmothers worked in a meatpacking factory, raised seven children, and still changed her own snow tires at the age of 83. When Bachmann?s parents divorced, her mother had to go back to work, ?and work hard. We qualified for welfare, but Mom wouldn?t think of it.? As a teenager, Bachmann baby-sat and worked ??at a grocery store to save for college. One summer she cleaned fish and tarred roofs in Alaska, before going on to practice tax law and raise five biological children and numerous foster kids on a frugal regimen of Bible study and Goodwill shopping trips.
ROME ? Italy's new premier began trying to persuade a skeptical Parliament that his new plans to cut spending and boost growth will return Italy's ailing economy to health, as Europe entered a crucial week for the survival of the 17-nation euro currency.
Premier Mario Monti was briefing both Parliament chambers Monday on the package, which includes euro30 billion ($40.5 billion) in spending cuts and tax hikes and euro10 billion ($13.5 billion) to boost Italy's anemic growth.
Monti's government agreed Sunday to slap taxes on primary residences and luxury goods like yachts, high-performance cars and private airplanes, increase the age at which retirees can draw full pensions, trim the cost of Italy's political class and give incentives to companies that hire women and young workers.
"Without this package, we believe Italy would collapse, Italy would go into a situation like that of Greece, a country we admire but we don't want to imitate," he told the Foreign Press Association before heading to Parliament.
The package, passed as an emergency decree, takes immediate effect but Parliament must still approve it within 60 days. The Senate president has said he expected passage before Christmas, although lawmakers already were indicating they want changes.
Monti acknowledged Monday that some of the more painful measures might aggravate Italy's looming recession, with the government forecasting an economic contraction of up to 0.5 percent next year and followed by flat growth in 2013. But he said the measures were necessary and if they helped to bring down Italy's bond yields, that would give Italy more financial relief than any negative impact from individual measures.
Markets appeared to welcome the measures: The yield on Italian 10-year bonds was down 0.41 percentage points at 6.14 percent Monday, and the Milan Stock Exchanged traded in positive territory, with banks benefiting the most.
Unions blasted the pension reform as "socially unbearable" and two unions announced a two-hour strike for next Monday. Politicians on all sides called the measures severe but many appeared resigned to "holding our nose and voting," as Maurizio Sacconi, a labor minister under ex-Premier Silvio Berlusconi, put it.
Democratic Party lawmaker Vannino Chiti indicated center-left lawmakers would try to spread more pain to the well-off, favoring more taxes on the wealthy and higher penalties on money repatriated from overseas tax havens.
"They are stringent measures. We will try to distribute them better," Chiti told Sky TG24.
Monti, a former EU commissioner, has been under extreme pressure to come up with speedy and credible measures that will persuade markets to stop betting against the common currency. Italian borrowing costs have spiked since October, which could spell disaster if Italy is unable to keep up payments to service its enormous euro1.9 trillion ($2.6 trillion) debt, which is equivalent to 120 percent of its GDP.
Italy needs to refinance close to euro200 billion ($270 billion) of that debt by May.
Unlike Greece, Portugal and Ireland, EU nations that got bailouts after their borrowing rates skyrocketed over 7 percent, Italy is the eurozone's third-largest economy and is considered to be too big to be bailed out. An Italian default would be disastrous for eurozone and could send both Europe and the United States into recession.
Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, welcomed Monti's package as "a very important step to shore up the public finances and support economic growth, while preserving social equity and fairness."
He said the "timely and ambitious" measures showed new economic decision-making from Italy.
On Friday, eurozone leaders are holding a critical summit to prevent the collapse of the common currency; expectations are growing that they will agree to a tighter integration of the 17 EU countries that use the euro.
"We need absolutely to avoid one thing, that the euro ? which was born to unite the people of Europe even more ? divides them from a psychological point of view," Monti said.
He said his technocratic government, which has no politicians, was in a position to push through the painful reforms necessary to secure Italy's future because it did not have to worry about future elections.
"We want to save Italy, but we also want to be the technical figures, and then disappear from the scene, with the full trust of the world and of public opinion," Monti said.
Monti said his new measures were designed to be as fair as possible so the sacrifices are equally shared; he is renouncing his own salary as premier and economy minister.
And on Monday, he warned that more financial reforms were on the way: including opening up Italy's rigid labor market and reducing the duplicate functions of provincial governments.
The measures approved Sunday include a 2 percent increase in value-added tax from the second half of 2012 from 21 percent to 23 percent.
Other taxes include a new tax on first homes to replace one annulled by Berlusconi plus higher levies and second and third homes, and new taxes on boats over 10 meters (30 feet) long, luxury cars and private helicopters and planes. The measures left out any income tax increase on high earners, which had been opposed by Berlusconi's conservatives.
Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, chairman of luxury carmaker Ferrari, said the luxury auto tax doesn't "make me the happiest person in the world, but I think when you have to do something, it has to have an effect on everyone."
Church-owned buildings escaped being assessed property taxes; Monti, who has one of Italy's most influential lay Catholics in his Cabinet, said the issue hadn't been considered by the government yet.
At the same time, the measures cut employment costs, give fiscal breaks to companies that invest to grow their businesses and increase investments in local public transport.
The measures raise the pension age to 66 years for men in 2012 and for women by 2018, and also increases to 42 years and one month the years of service for a man to retire with full benefits, 41 years and one month for a woman. The reforms include a hold on inflation adjustments for larger pensions.
Unions and center-left politicians have been particularly critical of the pension measures, saying certain classes of workers, including those who do physical labor, shouldn't be forced to work extra years. They also complained that women who take time off to raise children will have to work well into old age to meet the seniority requirements to draw a pension.
"It is not easy, especially because these cuts hit heavily on the pensions," conceded Italian worker Massimo Gatti in Rome's historic center. "Let's just hope we can resolve the problem, and above all save Italy."
LONDON ? There's a Hollywood cast for Britain's Whatsonstage theater awards, with James Earl Jones, Jude Law and Kevin Spacey competing for best actor in a play.
Jones is nominated for "Driving Miss Daisy," Law for "Anna Christie" and Spacey for "Richard III," alongside Benedict Cumberbatch for "Frankenstein," James Corden for "One Man, Two Guvnors" and David Tennant for "Much Ado About Nothing."
The prizes, run by theater website whatonstage.com, are decided by public vote.
Best actress contenders announced Friday include Vanessa Redgrave for "Driving Miss Daisy" and Kristin Scott Thomas for "Betrayal."
In the musical categories, there are multiple nominations for the movie-inspired romance "Ghost" and Roald Dahl-based "Matilda."
MEXICO CITY (AP) ? Mexican army troops dismantled a telecommunications system set up by organized crime in four northern states, authorities said Thursday.
The Defense Department said soldiers confiscated 167 antennas and 166 power supplies that gang members used to communicate among themselves and to monitor military movements.
The operation also netted more than 1,400 radios and 2,600 cellphones in the border states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon and Coahuila and in the state of San Luis Potosi, a statement said.
The army hasn't said which cartel was affected.
During the summer, Mexico's navy dismantled a communication system used by the Zetas cartel in the Gulf state of Veracruz. The Zetas have a strong presence in all four of the states involved in the army's operation.
Elsewhere, soldiers confiscated more than a ton of marijuana hidden in a tractor trailer at one of the international bridges at Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas. The army arrested the driver.
Also on Thursday, the U.S. government delivered inspection technology and a surveillance plane to help Mexico's navy fight drug cartels.
The equipment is part of the Merida Initiative, a program for which the U.S. government has spent $1.4 billion since 2008 in helping Mexico and Central American nations counter drug trafficking.
Saturday, December 3, 2011 - 1:14pm Community comes out for Claymont Christmas parade
WDEL's LeAnne Matlach has more
High school marching bands and girl scouts marched down Philadelphia Pike in the Claymont Christmas Parade Saturday morning.
Aubrey Stevens attended the parade with her brother and helped her niece and nephew collect candy being given out.
Click here to listen
Many in attendance echoed her sentiment saying the parade keeps the community close.
Copyright ? Dec 03, 2011, WDEL/Delmarva Broadcasting Company. All Rights Reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Lead-ion collisions recorded by the Large Hadron Collider's ALICE detector during this month's run show up in green on this graphic. Oxford physicist Frank Close says the LHC could solve cosmic puzzles.
By Alan Boyle
In his new book, "The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe," Oxford physicist Frank Close reviews decades' worth of brain-teasing theories and looks ahead to puzzles yet to be solved.
Close traces the decades-long effort to find the deep connections between the fundamental forces of nature and resolve the "infinity puzzle" ? that is, the fact that the mathematics of quantum theory came up with nonsensical numbers. That puzzle was eventually solved, as Close describes in the book, but?an even bigger puzzle remains: Why is the cosmos built the way it is?
Some clues could emerge from Europe's Large Hadron Collider, where physicists are looking for a mysterious particle known as the Higgs boson. Close delves into the strange role that the Higgs plays in contemporary physics, but he emphasizes that his latest book is about much more than the science.
"'The Infinity Puzzle' is not just another story about the physics of the LHC," he told me this week. "It's focusing on the people. Science is a pure ideal, but the scientists who do it are people. And we all have the same desires and pressures. ... There are heroes and villains in science, as there are everywhere."
Close's tale illustrates that the course of true science doesn't always run smooth. It may well turn out that the long-sought Higgs boson?is a will-o'-the-wisp, and physicists will have to go back to square one. But even that won't render "The Infinity Puzzle" out of date.?
"If the Higgs boson turns out not to exist, and we have to completely rewrite everything, this book will show how we got to this conundrum,"?Close said. "And if it does exist, hopefully it will explain why it was so important."
The book is particularly timely, considering that?this year's?Nobel Prize ceremonies are due to take place in Stockholm and Oslo next week. During a wide-ranging interview, Close discussed his book?as well as the people and the puzzles that inspired it. Here's an edited version of the Q&A:
Cosmic Log: Could you explain what the "infinity puzzle" is?
Frank Close: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the biggest experiment that particle physics has ever set out to do. It's trying to find the answer to why there is structure in the universe. The buzzword you hear is the Higgs boson, and the question is, who is Higgs, what's the boson, what's it all about?
Well, what it's all about is what "The Infinity Puzzle" is trying to answer. In telling the story, the book focuses on the people who brought us to this remarkable point in history. And in particular it focuses on a group of scientists who discovered two separate things, half a century ago. First, how to unite the electromagnetic force, the force that holds you and me together and makes magnets work, with the weak force of radioactivity, which plays a very important part in how the sun burns. This is called the electroweak theory today.
The other part of the story is how to make a theory, which works beautifully if there is no mass in anything at all, work in a world where particles have mass. That has become known as the Higgs mechanism, and the consummate object we're looking for is the Higgs boson. The questions surrounding whether these things are named correctly, whether the people who won Nobel Prizes in the past were the right people, and whether there are going to be controversies over Nobel Prizes in the future for all of these things ? those?are the themes of the book. It's about the politics of science, the way that people are driven to want to get the big prizes. Scientists suffer the same emotions that everybody else does.
Q: You touch on many of those personalities ? some who received Nobels, and some who didn't but deserved to. Do those personalities actually shape the science? Are there things in the universe that we see in a particular way just because a scientist first described it in that way?
A: It's a very interesting question about the role of personality in being able to tease out the secrets of nature. There are some?people who are strong mathematical calculators but don't necessarily have great vision. There are other people who have got great vision, but aren't?particularly strong calculators. It's when these two types get together that rapid progress is often made.
Frank Close, author of "The Infinity Puzzle," talks about the story of the men whose breakthroughs led to the Large Hadron Collider.
Ultimately, there's a truth out there, and we're trying to find what it is. It's different for artists. If you're a Beethoven, if you're proposing some symphony and you don't publish it, the chance that somebody else will create the very same symphony someday ... well, that just doesn't happen. But in the case of science, nature has already constructed the symphony, and we're trying to find what it is.
The challenge is, suppose that you have uncovered a bit of the symphony, but you're not sure whether you want to go public with it, so you don't publish it. Then, a short time later, somebody else does publish it, a bit braver than you, and you realize that you were?right all along. You've lost the credit. There's a certain point where?you have to be brave enough to jump off the diving board and take the plunge, to mix in another metaphor. There are many examples of people who didn't take that last?step, for one reason or another. You know the names of the winners, but you don't know the ones who didn't quite make it.
Q: When it comes to the Higgs boson, the question has arisen as to whether it actually exists. One of my colleagues has joked that if it's found, that's worth a Nobel. And if it's ruled out, that's worth a Nobel as well. Is that the way it works?
A: The idea that has led to the Higgs boson is a piece of beautiful mathematics. Whether nature actually does it is a question that only experiments can answer. Although the theorists are the ones that get all the press ... the Einsteins and the other names that trip off the tongue ... it's ultimately the experiments that decide. That's where we are at the moment.
The idea that there should be a Higgs boson, or something else that masquerades as that particle, has been around for a long time. It's only now that are finally able to do the experiments that will tell us one way or the other if that is the case. And if it is?the case, we might find out exactly how nature plays?this particular?trick. When Peter Higgs?and a group of other people first put the idea forward, they were trying to solve a particular conundrum, and they came up with the simplest way of doing it?? that is, that there was a single particle known as the Higgs boson. That was 50 years ago. Since then, people have refined those original ideas, based on the discoveries we have made.
Basic Books
Oxford physicist Frank Close's book traces the decades-long quest to solve one of the biggest puzzles of quantum physics.
There are several possible ideas as to how nature might actually do this conjuring trick. It might be there's a whole family of particles called Higgsinos and other weird names. It might not be a simple particle. It might be a compound?? just as an atom has a nucleus that's made of protons and neutrons, which are made of smaller things called quarks, there might be new sorts of particles waiting to be found, called techniquarks, which collectively act as if they were a single boson.
It might be those, it might be something else. We simply don't know. And that's the exciting thing. Nature knows the answer at the moment, and we're trying to find out at last what it is.
Q: Is the Higgs boson the only door to new physics, or are there other routes to?going beyond the Standard Model of?physics?
A: We certainly know that the Standard Model cannot be the final answer. It describes everything that we currently have explored, but there are?many things we have to put in by hand. The mass of the electron is put in by hand. Why it is what it is, we don't know. But if it were different, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You start by putting in all these measured numbers, and then we can describe a vast amount of stuff. But there must be some richer theory out there that?will show why the Standard Model is?as it is.?
An analogy is Newton's laws of mechanics, which worked perfectly for hundreds of years. They were later incorporated inside Einstein's theory of relativity, which is a much richer, more powerful theory that includes Newton in it. We suspect there is a "theory of everything" out there which will contain the Standard Model. We are hoping we'll get close to the nature of that theory at the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is exploring regions of nature we've never been able to explore before. We've seen them from afar?? it's a bit like knowing there's somebody around the corner but you haven't seen them yet.
We are entering new territory. We're creating in the laboratory the conditions that the universe experienced about a trillionth of a second after the big bang. There are observations that have taken us to a billionth of a second after the big bang, so we've been pretty near. You might think, "Oh, why would we want to get nearer?" It's because the stuff that you and I are made of was created in that cauldron of the big bang's aftermath, and there are puzzles yet to be solved.
For example, why is anything left today? Antimatter is real, and matter and antimatter annihilate when they meet. So why didn't the newborn universe annihilate itself after the big bang. There must be something that tipped the balance. What that is, we don't know for sure, but some hints are beginning to emerge from the Large Hadron Collider.
The real thing is, we're exploring a new continent, and the LHC will show us what is there. That will then answer?many of these?questions ?and if I knew the answers now, I'd be riding off to Stockholm.
Q: You mentioned the?fact that some of the values in the Standard Model have to be put in by hand, and that scientists are trying to find out if there's a deeper theory that explains why those values are as they are. Some physicists have said that it might just be a lucky break that we have those values, and that our universe might be merely one of the "bubbles" sitting on the wider landscape?of the multiverse. Do you subscribe to that landscape view of the multiverse?
A: Well, of course, the simple answer is, I don't know. And to be honest, nobody knows. I feel sometimes it's a bit of a cop-out. The universe I find myself in is difficult enough to describe. The idea that it is one of a huge number of universes ... that might indeed be true, but if we cannot experimentally answer whether it is true or not, I'm not sure whether the question is actually scientific.?It's interesting philosophically. It's possible that someday we might be able to come up with an experiment that can answer whether there are other universes, but then you get into interesting tautological questions. The "universe" is presumably everything we can be aware of. If there are other universes that we cannot be aware of, then they're beyond the capability of science to investigate. But if they are investigatable through science, they are in a sense part of our universe.
The real question is this: Are the masses of electrons and other fundamental particles essential numbers in their own right, or are they no more fundamental than the radii of the planets around the sun??We don't know yet.?I can't imagine anything that the Large Hadron Collider will?discover that will give us a clear insight as to why?particles have the?masses that they do. But if we discover the Higgs boson, or whatever it is, we may well find out where mass comes from. And there may be some interesting quirk that comes out of that discovery that will give us a clue as to why the masses are as they are. The excitement of science is that until you've done it, you don't know.
Q: It seems to me that you were on a BBC program some years ago that?touched on this whole discussion over whether a particle collider could destroy the world.
A: Yes, and the world hasn't ended yet.
Q: Some people would say the controversy was actually good for physics because it was a "teachable moment" that got people interested in physics. How do you see it?
A: Well, to be fair, it was a controversy that no scientist really subscribed to. It was something that somebody dreamt up, and it created an interesting sensation. But it does give the opportunity to explain what the Large Hadron Collider is and is not. The idea that we are doing things in the Large Hadron Collider that have never been done before is not the case. It's the first time that we have been able to do them. But the universe at large has collided particles together at energies far in excess of anything we do at?the LHC or will ever be able to do. Cosmic rays in outer space are subatomic particles whipped into violent motion by magnetic fields in the cosmos ? and they hit the upper atmosphere at energies far in excess of anything at?the LHC.
Nature has done the experiments before, and we're still here. It's just the first time that we have been doing them under controlled conditions to tease things out. There are more things in life to worry about than that.
More about the puzzles of physics:
Close will make an appearance at Town Hall Seattle at 7:30 p.m. PT Friday to talk about his book and the Large Hadron Collider, and is due to visit Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, Calif., at 7 p.m. PT Dec. 6.
Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
Scheopner 
I know that all of you have been waiting on pins and needles... refreshing the TechCrunch web page multiple times each day to see when the next batch of Crunchies tickets will be on sale. Well, today is the day! The second batch of tickets for the 5th Annual Crunchies Awards are available now. 200 tickets have been released for the annual event honoring the best achievements in tech brought to you by GIgaOm, VentureBeat and Techcrunch for general admission purchase. The first batch sold out in less than two hours, so purchase your tickets now, lest you have to wait for the next release in January.
