A feature earlier this week on NPR led me to this coverage of the Aryan Nations’ plans to set up headquarters in remote Potter County PA, including a paramilitary training camp, under the direction of virulent racist August Kreis. Kreis may have wrested leadership of the far-right group from Richard Butler, 83-year-old Aryan Nations leader who lost the group’s former headquarters in Idaho in a court case brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center which the SPLC’s Morris Dees predicted had broken the back of the Aryan Nations. In radio and print interviews, Kreis is both brazen and savvy, stressing the importance of forging links with other far-right groups such as the World Church of the Creator. With cocky self-assurance, he states that the new degree of interconnectivity and fusion among far-right hate groups will push their activities to a new level. There are suggestions that recruitment to the Aryan Nations is once again on the rise.

Grassroots opposition groups such as the Education and Vigilance Network, to whose site the above link points, and Community Action Against Racism are raising the hue and cry. As readers of FmH know, I think there’s no more urgent cause than combatting virulent racist hatred from the far right. Consider supporting the Southern Poverty Law Center, which regularly litigates important anti-hate victories with courage and conviction. Disclaimer: I have no financial ties with the SPLC; just an interested contributor myself.

In Lost E-Mail, a Dividend: “Frantically, I started scrolling back, then back further. Finally, I realized that in the two hours I had been away from my desk, three years of saved e-mail messages had either disintegrated into babble or disappeared altogether. A chunk of my life had floated away before my eyes.” So she consults psychologist Sherry Turkle to understand how she’s feeling about it… NY Times

Lab-built bladders on the way “A leading surgeon in the US has told BBC News that he is ready to perform the world’s first transplant of an artificially grown organ.” BBC

Baby with selected gene born in Britain:

A joyful couple were celebrating at home in Britain yesterday with the country’s first – and the world’s second – baby to be born with a desired genetic characteristic known in advance.

The family say that their baby girl, who was born at 8pm on Thursday night in a British hospital, is not a “designer baby”, but a much longed-for child who brings with her into the world, as an extra gift, cells capable of saving her older brother if he suffers a relapse into leukaemia. Guardian UK

French Judge Gives Taliban Victory: ‘Despite making what most observers agreed were “obvious technical errors,” such as surrendering, the Taliban were awarded victory in the Afghanistan war last night after the French judge said they won on presentation.’ SatireWire [via David]

Can the US be defeated?

“Those who have argued that America’s war on terror would fail to defeat terrorism have, it turns out, been barking up the wrong tree. Ever since President Bush announced his $45bn increase in military spending and gave notice to Iraq, Iran and North Korea that they had “better get their house in order” or face what he called the “justice of this nation”, it has become ever clearer that the US is not now primarily engaged in a war against terrorism at all.

Instead, this is a war against regimes the US dislikes: a war for heightened US global hegemony and the “full spectrum dominance” the Pentagon has been working to entrench since the end of the cold war. While US forces have apparently still failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, there is barely even a pretence that any of these three states was in some way connected with the attacks on the World Trade Centre. What they do have in common, of course, is that they have all long opposed American power in their regions (for 10, 23 and 52 years respectively) and might one day acquire the kind of weapons the US prefers to reserve for its friends and clients.” Guardian UK [again, thanks, David]

PCs Are Incorrect on TV: Good guys use Macs, villains PCs. Wired

Humans may not be as aggressive and competitive as thought: “Is it human nature to be competitive? Aggressive? Violent? Popular and scientific literature says yes. An anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis who studies primate behavior says no.

Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and a colleague found that affiliated behavior — or friendly behavior like grooming and playing — is probably a hundred times more frequent than aggressive behavior in primates, and that aggressive behavior constitutes less than 1 percent of primates’ activities.” [But, oh, that 1%… -FmH]