Bin Laden likely injured by strikes on Afghanistan: ‘ “He may have been wounded more than once,” one official said. The official said an assessment that bin Laden was wounded had become a “firm belief” by some military analysts.’ The Washington Times [Sounds more like a ‘leap of faith’ than a ‘firm belief.’ –FmH]

Navy report shows polar cap is shrinking fast

The polar ice cap has been shrinking so fast that regular ships may be steaming through the Northwest Passage each summer by 2015, and along northern Russia even sooner, according to a new U.S. Navy report.

Global warming will open the Arctic Ocean to unprecedented commercial activity. The seasonal expansion of open water may draw commercial fishing fleets into the Chukchi and Beaufort seas north of Alaska within a few decades. The summer ice cover could even disappear entirely by 2050 — or be concentrated around northern Greenland and Ellesmere Island.

For the U.S. Navy, this presents an unprecedented challenge: a new ocean.

The nation’s maritime military does not yet have the ships, training, technology and logistics in place to patrol or police a wide-open polar sea, according to the final report from a symposium on Naval Operations in an Ice-Free Arctic. Anchorage Daily News

And an arresting news report today dramatizes the rapidity of these changes: Large Ice Shelf in Antarctica Disintegrates at Great Speed:

A Rhode Island-size piece of the floating ice fringe along a fast-warming region of Antarctica has disintegrated with extraordinary rapidity, scientists said yesterday

(…)

While it is too soon to say whether the changes there are related to a buildup of the “greenhouse” gas emissions that scientists believe are warming the planet, many experts said it was getting harder to find any other explanation. NY Times

Facial expression of pain: an evolutionary account: Amanda C de C Williams, PhD, University of London —

“This paper proposes that human expression of pain in the presence or absence of caregivers, and the detection of pain by observers, arise from evolved propensities. The function of pain is to demand attention and prioritise escape, recovery and healing; where others can help achieve these goals, effective communication of pain is required. Evidence is reviewed of a distinct and specific facial expression of pain from infancy to old age, consistent across stimuli, and recognizable as pain by observers. Voluntary control over amplitude is incomplete, and observers better detect pain which the individual attempts to suppress than to amplify or to simulate it.”

And: Laughter? It’s a funny business: “We laugh more frequently than we eat, sing or have sex. So why do we know so little about it?” Telegraph UK

The Anti-Gun Male: Once I read that Julia Gorin is billed as a stand-up comic, I could grasp that her column was meant to be a parody, but it reads as a chilling, realistic depiction of how the very real NRA types out there think of their opponents.

Burn, Baby Burn!: Not clear why they restricted it to webloggers, but the first round of the Blogger CD Swap is garnering much attention. Basically you put your name into a (digital) hat and draw out five other names at random, each of whom receives a copy of a lovingly crafted CD of summer music you’re going to burn. In return, you receive five such CDs from the people who have drawn your name. Everyone is, of course, oblivious to everyone else’s musical tastes, the beauty of it; perhaps the conceit is that bloggers are all discerning people, so you can’t go wrong? [Read a random assortment of blogs and tell me if you’d agree… –FmH] I’d want to rig the drawing so I got to be one of Chuck Taggart‘s recipients, for sure…

As this page points out, they’ve closed registration for the first round, but other similar swaps are springing up, at Metafilter and the CD Mix of the Month Club and Midsummernight’s Burn. This phenomenon may or may not be “fair use” — there’s a discussion at the Metafilter blink above — but you’d be advised to watch your back for the RIAA. Or just keep using those anonymous P2P networks…

Actually, I would be curious to see postings of the music various participants end up choosing. I’ve already found a few new interesting things from Beck’s iPod.

Experts Argue for Mandatory Organ-Donor System: “Switching to a mandatory system of organ donation–one where viable organs are harvested from the recently deceased without the family’s permission–would alleviate the nation’s donor-organ shortages and prevent people from needlessly dying while waiting for an organ, according to two US and UK researchers. If nothing else, the idea should “at least” be discussed, they argue in an opinion piece in the March issue of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases.” Yahoo! News

FEC To Debate Rules On Net’s Role In Federal Elections: “The Federal Election Commission will hold a public hearing Wednesday to air concerns over its plan to apply existing election laws to online campaign activity. The proposed regulations would exempt from disclosure rules individuals who use computer equipment, software or Internet services that they personally own to advocate a candidate for federal office,” Washington Post

Forced Drugging Upheld By Eigth Circuit: “Defendants can be forcibly drugged even though they haven’t been convicted of any charges and pose no danger to themselves or others.

That’s the ruling issued March 7, 2002 by the Federal Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in the case of United States v. Charles Thomas Sell. The 2 – 1 split decision establishes government power to forcibly medicate a person with mind altering drugs even before trial.” This site, the Alchemind Society, “the international association for cognitive liberty,” is a provocative and interesting resource, it appears.

Lying to the public is all right, says Washington’s chief liar, errr, lawyer. Roundly criticized during pre-confirmation public debate as dishonest and unethical, Solicitor-General Theodore Olsen didn’t take long after appointment to show his true stripes, ‘…telling the US Supreme Court that misleading statements are sometimes needed to protect foreign policy interests.

“It’s easy to imagine an infinite number of situations where the government might legitimately give out false information…” Olson was arguing in the Jennifer Harbury case. Harbury is a US attorney whose Guatemalan rebel leader husband died in 1993 after a year in Guatemalan army custody during which US officials lied to her to conceal CIA involvement in his torture and murder. Sydney Morning Herald Although the events occurred years before, the court case’s most immediate relevance is to current dysadministration arguments regarding how much they can conceal from the American public in the interest of the War-on-Terrorism®.

Adam [thanks…] scanned in and sent me an excerpt from a recent New Yorker review of David Brock’s Blinded by the Right which bears similarly on Olson’s bona fides:

[Brock needs an authoritative voice to keep R. Emmett

Tyrrell, editor of The American Spectator, from

publishing lies about the death of Vincent Foster, a

Clinton White House aide who committed suicide]

…”For help, Brock turned to Ted Olson, an informal

but influential adviser to the Spectator. Olson had

been Reagan’s private lawyer; he was a sachem of the

Federalist Society, an association of conservative

lawyers and jurists whose membership included future

Justices of the Supreme Court; and he was a close

friend and former law partner of Kenneth Starr’s.

Olson, Brock thought, was ‘the model of a sober,

careful lawyer with impeccable judgment.’ Brock faxed

him the piece. Olson’s response was evidently not

what he was expecting. Olson, Brock writes, “told me

bluntly, in a tone of voice that I had never heard him

use before, that while he believed, as Starr

apparently did, that Foster had committed suicide,

raising questions about the death was a way of turning

up the heat on the administration until another

scandal was shaken loose, which was the Spectator‘s

mission.”

Pull Up a Chair: Thomas Friedman writes an imaginary dialogue with his readers around an incendiary proposition: “There is no way that America will be able to sustain a successful Middle East policy unless the U.S. is prepared to station American troops on the ground, indefinitely, around both Afghanistan and Israel.

…Israelis and Palestinians do not have the resources, or mutual trust, ever to find their way out of this problem alone — not after the collapse of Oslo. And the U.S. can no longer afford to just let them go on killing each other. It will undermine America’s whole position in the Middle East, as more and more Muslims will blame us for what Israel does to protect itself. It will spin off more and more suicide craziness that will land at our door. And it will make it impossible for the U.S. to take on Saddam.” NY Times

Review of The Haunting of L by Howard Norman: “…Norman’s novels are hard to like. Starting in 1987 with The Northern Lights, each novel has featured a taciturn, antisocial male protagonist, as disconnected from his own inner life as he is from the people around him. Norman’s landscapes mirror the emptiness of the characters who inhabit them: this American writer is unique in setting his books in the bleakest regions of Canada, from the expanses of northern Manitoba to turn-of-thecentury Newfoundland. And his prose is as inhospitable as the terrain. Bumpy in pace and flat in texture, it goes down awkwardly, like something hard to chew.” The New Republic

The Media and European Identity — “Even greater media concentration, writes Juan Luis Cebrián, could save Europe from homogenised cultural globalisation.”

Just a few years from now, less than a dozen companies will be able to control the majority of the contents of communications in the European continent. These groups will be British, German, French and, maybe, Italian. Smaller, but more advanced countries, such as Holland, may be able to defend themselves in this territory. But many of the so-called national cultures and local identities will submit their balance sheet to foreign boards of directors.

I am not criticising the phenomenon, merely describing it. On the other hand, this will be the only way of protecting ourselves (if we want to be protected) against the American invasion. The plurality of Europe, its multiplicity and diversity, which we all praise and promote, will finally be left in very few, and quite uniform, hands. One more of the many paradoxes with which we will have to live in the coming century. eurozine

Errant Stem Cells May Account For Symptoms Of Schizophrenia: “Neural stem cells are a ready supply of new parts for the constant wiring and rewiring of the brain’s circuitry as this complex organ responds to environmental stimuli so that we can learn new skills, interpret new data and rethink old ideas. But if those cells can’t migrate to the right place and morph into the right kinds of neural links, our cognitive and psychological functions fail.” ScienceDaily

“Scientists have created a new kind of matter: It comes in waves and bridges the gap between the everyday world of humans and the micro-domain of quantum physics… Bose-Einstein condensates (“BECs” for short) aren’t like the solids, liquids and gases that we learned about in school. They are not vaporous, not hard, not fluid. Indeed, there are no ordinary words to describe them because they come from another world — the world of quantum mechanics.” Science@NASA