People's Daily Online -- US still dominates world arms trade: newspaper: "The United States still dominates global weapon sales, signing deals worth 12.4 billion US dollars last year, or 33.5 percent of all contracts worldwide.
Meanwhile, the share of US arms contracts with developing countries was 6.9 billion US dollars in 2004, or 31.6 percent of all such deals in the world, according to Tuesday's The New York Times.
The figures were revealed in a report newly released by the US Congress.
Russia was second in global arms sales, with 6.1 billion dollars in deals, or 16.5 percent of all such contracts.
In 2004, Russia signed arms transfer deals worth 5.9 billion dollars with the developing world, 27.1 percent of the global total.
Britain took the third place in arms transfer agreements to the developing world in 2004, signing contracts worth 3.2 billion dollars, followed by Israel and France.
The total value of weapons sales worldwide was nearly 37 billion dollars in 2004, according to the report.
That number was the largest since 2000, when global arms sales reached 42.1 billion dollars, and was far above the 2003 figure of 28.5 billion dollars. "

Gmail - FUTUREdition Volume 8 Number 12Thin Skin Will Help Robots Feel -- (BBC -- August 23, 2005)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4154366.stm
Japanese researchers have developed a flexible artificial skin that could give robots a humanlike sense of touch. The team manufactured a type of "skin" capable of sensing pressure and another capable of sensing temperature. These are supple enough to wrap around robot fingers and relatively cheap to make, the researchers have claimed.

FUTUREdition Volume 8 Number 12Food for Thought: Crop Diversity is Dying -- (International Herald Tribune -- August 23, 2005)
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/17/news/food.php
Historically, humans utilized more than 7,000 plant species to meet their basic food needs, says researchers. Today, due to the limitations of modern large-scale, mechanized farming, only 150 plant species are under cultivation, and the majority of humans live on only 12 plant species.

Gmail - FUTUREdition Volume 8 Number 12Placebos Trigger an Opioid Hit in the Brain -- (New Scientist -- August 24, 2005)
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7892
Placebos have a real physical, not imagined, effect activating the production of chemicals in the brain that relieve pain, a new study suggests. Placebos are treatments that use substances which have no active ingredient. But if people are told that what they are being given contains an active painkiller, for example, they often feel less pain, an effect that has normally been considered psychological. Now researchers have confirmed that placebos relieve pain by boosting the release of endorphins.

Gmail - FUTUREdition Volume 8 Number 12Baltimore Patient Receives New Heart Pump -- (Newsday -- August 19, 2005)
http://www.newsday.com/news/health/wire/sns-ap-new-heart-pump,0,3614059.story?coll=sns-ap-health-headlines
University of Maryland Medical Center surgeons say they've moved one step closer to developing the perfect heart pump after implanting the device into a 40-year-old Baltimore man. The pump is intended to help patients that need long-term heart assistance. Surgeons also hope the pump can be used as a "bridge" for patients awaiting transplants.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4166076.stm
Small but perfectly formed, 'Pelagibacter ubique' is a lean machine stripped down to the bare essentials for life. Humans have around 30,000 genes that determine everything from our eye color to our sex but Pelagibacter has just 1,354. What is more, Pelagibacter has none of the genetic clutter that most genomes have accumulated over time.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68578,00.html?tw=wn_2techhead
Students at Empire High School here started class this year with no textbooks -- but it wasn't because of a funding crisis. Instead, the school issued iBooks -- laptop computers by Apple Computer -- to each of its 340 students, becoming one of the first U.S. public schools to shun printed textbooks. School officials believe the electronic materials will get students more engaged in learning."

BREITBART.COM - Just The News: "A child-shaped humanoid robot that can recognize about 10,000 words and work as a house sitter will go on sale in Japan in September. "

Foreign Affairs - Can Democracy Stop Terrorism? - F. Gregory Gause III: "The more democratic the Arab world gets, the more likely it is that Islamists will come to power. Even if those Islamists come to accept the rules of democracy and reject political violence, they are unlikely to support U.S. foreign policy goals in the region."

Foreign Affairs - Can Democracy Stop Terrorism? - F. Gregory Gause III: "The trend is clear: Islamists of various hues score well in free elections. In countries where a governing party dominates or where the king opposes political Islam, Islamists run second and form the opposition. Only in Morocco, where more secular, leftist parties have a long history and an established presence, and in Lebanon, where the Christian-Muslim dynamic determines electoral politics, did organized non-Islamist political blocs, independent of the government, compete with Islamist forces. "

Foreign Affairs - Can Democracy Stop Terrorism? - F. Gregory Gause III: "History also indicates that legitimate democratic elections in Arab states would most likely benefit Islamists. In all recent Arab elections, they have emerged as the government's leading political opposition, and in many of them they have done very well. In Morocco, the new Justice and Development Party, an overtly Islamist party, took 42 of the 325 seats in the parliamentary elections of 2002, its first contest. (Only two long-established parties, the Socialist Union of Popular Forces and the Independence Party, won more seats: 50 and 48, respectively.) The same year, in Bahrain, Islamist candidates took between 19 and 21 of the 40 seats in parliament (depending on how observers classified some independent candidates). This success came even though the major Shia political group boycotted the elections, protesting changes in the constitution."

Foreign Affairs - Can Democracy Stop Terrorism? - F. Gregory Gause III: "The problem with promoting democracy in the Arab world is not that Arabs do not like democracy; it is that Washington probably would not like the governments Arab democracy would produce. Assuming that democratic Arab governments would better represent the opinions of their people than do the current Arab regimes, democratization of the Arab world should produce more anti-U.S. foreign policies."

Foreign Affairs - Can Democracy Stop Terrorism? - F. Gregory Gause III: "But many Arabs hold negative views of the United States. If Arab governments were democratically elected and more representative of public opinion, they would thus be more anti-American. Further democratization in the Middle East would, for the foreseeable future, most likely generate Islamist governments less inclined to cooperate with the United States on important U.S. policy goals, including military basing rights in the region, peace with Israel, and the war on terrorism."

Foreign Affairs - Can Democracy Stop Terrorism? - F. Gregory Gause III: "Al Qaeda objects to the U.S. agenda in the Middle East as much as, if not more than, democracy. If, as Washington hopes, a democratic Middle East continued to accept a major U.S. role in the region and cooperate with U.S. goals, it is foolish to think that democracy would end Arab anti-Americanism and dry up passive support, funding sources, and recruiting channels for al Qaeda."

Foreign Affairs - Can Democracy Stop Terrorism? - F. Gregory Gause III: "Well, maybe. But it is just as logical to assume that terrorists, who rarely represent political agendas that could mobilize electoral majorities, would reject the very principles of majority rule and minority rights on which liberal democracy is based. "

Foreign Affairs - Can Democracy Stop Terrorism? - F. Gregory Gause III: "belief that, able to participate openly in competitive politics and have their voices heard in the public square, potential terrorists and terrorist sympathizers would not need to resort to violence to achieve their goals. Even if they lost in one round of elections, the confidence that they could win in the future would inhibit the temptation to resort to extra-democratic means. The habits of democracy would ameliorate extremism and focus the anger of the Arab publics at their own governments, not at the United States."

Foreign Affairs - Can Democracy Stop Terrorism? - F. Gregory Gause III: "Comparing India, the world's most populous democracy, and China, the world's most populous authoritarian state, highlights the difficulty of assuming that democracy can solve the terrorism problem. For 2000-2003, the 'Patterns of Global Terrorism' report indicates 203 international terrorist attacks in India and none in China. "

Foreign Affairs - Can Democracy Stop Terrorism? - F. Gregory Gause III: "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Robert Pape finds that the targets of suicide bombers are almost always democracies, but that the motivation of the groups behind those bombings is to fight against military occupation and for self-determination. Terrorists are not driven by a desire for democracy but by their opposition to what they see as foreign domination."

Foreign Affairs - Can Democracy Stop Terrorism? - F. Gregory Gause III: "Even if democracy were achieved in the Middle East, what kind of governments would it produce? Would they cooperate with the United States on important policy objectives besides curbing terrorism, such as advancing the Arab-Israeli peace process, maintaining security in the Persian Gulf, and ensuring steady supplies of oil? No one can predict the course a new democracy will take, but based on public opinion surveys and recent elections in the Arab world, the advent of democracy there seems likely to produce new Islamist governments that would be much less willing to cooperate with the United States than are the current authoritarian rulers."

New Scientist Breaking News - Most scientific papers are probably wrong: "Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis. Assuming that the new paper is itself correct, problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.
John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false. But even large, well-designed studies are not always right, meaning that scientists and the public have to be wary of reported findings."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Once the gangs arrived in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama and Mexico, they quickly put the lessons learned in prison to work. The numbers are difficult to pin down, but estimates put the number of active gang members in Central America and Mexico at over 100,000. In El Salvador (population 6.7 million) there are more than10,000 core gang members, and 15 municipalities have been, or are, controlled by gangs. "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Central America's gang problem largely can be traced back to policy decisions made in the United States in the mid-1990s. There was a shift in the mid-1990s at the local and federal level toward deporting immigrants who had committed crimes or had a criminal record in the United States. While this helped continue the trend toward decreased street violence in U.S. cities, it left Central America vulnerable to a new community with few ties to the region but bound together by their gang affiliations."

KurzweilAI.net: "Researchers have dramatically increased the life spans of mice by up to 30 percent by genetically engineering them to overproduce a protein called klotho.

The gene regulates production of klotho protein, which the study team says works like an anti-aging hormone. Kotho is involved in the suppression of insulin-signaling pathways -- a process that has been shown to increase the life spans of worms and flies."

In the next 60 yearswe will see nanotechnology and biotechnology making impacts on our life that might seem like magic to us but will be quite normal to our children's children. The world is speeding up as each generation learns from their kids, and through knowledge sharing via the Internet, so who knows what the next 60 years will bring?

The Prudent Investor - seeing too many bubbles: Iranian Oil Bourse Could Kill The US Dollar: "And it would loosen the grip the USA has on OPEC members. Thinking of the rapid growth of hostilities between the USA and Arab nations in recent years a renunciation of the dollar appears to be more than just a wish in Arabic dreams.
As this development poses a very real and big danger to the superior status of the greenback and the interests of the USA the 'president of war' can be expected to steer a close reach against the winds blowing from the Middle East. One may be reminded that the Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein had entered into discreet talks with the EU, proposing to sell his oil for Euros. That was in the year before the first oil war of this century."

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "The permanent demand for dollar-denominated paper stems substantially from the fact that until now almost all resources of the world are quoted in it. While this led to the eurodollar (US dollar-denominated deposits at foreign banks or foreign branches of American banks) market in the 1970s, the new terms of trade could ring in the demise of the dollar as the premier reserve currency.

With the world economy depending so much on oil, the black gold itself can be seen as a reserve currency that will be handed out against only the best collateral in the future."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "the oil crisis -- and the subsequent high oil prices -- will last for a long time. Oil reserves appear fragile in front of growing demands from old and new great powers such as China and India, and the political tensions in the Middle East will continue for the foreseeable future."

FUTURIST UPDATE September 2005: "BRITAIN'S RELIGIOUS GENERATION GAP
SOURCE: The University of Manchester,
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/press/title,38696,en.htm

Religious devotion in the United Kingdom is declining even faster than
attendance at church services, according to research by David Voas of
the University of Manchester.

Children of two nonreligious parents are likely to 'inherit' their
parents' lack of faith, Voas reports. But a religious couple has only
about a 50-50 chance of passing on their beliefs. On the other hand,
religious parents tend to have more children than their nonreligious
counterparts."

Gmail - [PINR] 23 August 2005: Intelligence Brief: Rumsfeld Visits Paraguay and Peru: "Paraguay, which accepts U.S. military aid to modernize its army and hosts a U.S. military mission devoted to civil affairs and to helping the country in its efforts to police the tri-border region, presented the most favorable opportunity for expanding Washington's influence in South America. Asuncion, however, is not firmly in Washington's camp; President Nicanor Duarte Frutos pursues a dual-track foreign policy dedicated to maintaining cooperative relations with Washington, but also committed to integrating into the Mercosur trading bloc, led by Brazil, which competes with U.S. designs for hemispheric trade. The southern cone states composing Mercosur have been unwilling to follow Washington's call to isolate Caracas, and Rumsfeld was unable to drive a wedge into that stance in Asuncion."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "The July 7 attackers, for instance, were of Pakistani descent, while the July 21 attackers were African. Investigators have not ruled out a connection yet. More importantly, investigators believe that the two groups of militants had no organizational relationship with al-Qaeda. This development, if it is true, further highlights how bin Laden's rhetoric has emboldened Muslims across the world who agree with his argument of the need for a 'defensive jihad' against the U.S. and its allies."

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click Online | Supercomputer's key to the brain: "But at Switzerland's �cole Polytechnique F�d�rale de Lausanne, the Blue Brain Project aims to change this by simulating the structures and functions of the brain. "

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Daisy has all the digital answers to life on Earth: "Scientists have unveiled plans to create a digital library of all life on Earth. They say that the Digital Automated Identification System (Daisy), which harnesses the latest advances in artificial intelligence and computer vision, will have an enormous impact on research into biodiversity and evolution."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "The third fundamental problem is of strategic nature. The implications of space militarization are enormous, and its consequences can't be predicted. It is certain that -- in the short term -- U.S. financial and technological superiority would increase the already prominent gap in military power between Washington and the rest of the world. In addition, some of the new weapons could give the White House new effective tools to fight against symmetrical (states) and asymmetrical (terror networks) threats. However, in the long run, a military colonization of outer space could very well be started by other powers -- which would hardly tolerate Washington's quasi-private use of space."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "'Rods from God' is the evolution of a 1980s program. Basically, it consists of orbiting platforms stocked with metal tungsten rods around 6.1 meters long (20 feet) and 30 cm (one foot) in diameter that could be satellite-guided to targets anywhere on the earth within minutes, for the rods would move at over 11,000 km/hr (6,835 mph). This weapon exploits kinetic energy to cause an explosion the same magnitude of that of an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon, but with no radioactive fall-out. The system would function due to two satellites, one of which would work as a communications platform, while the other would contain an arsenal of tungsten rods. Each of the satellites would be about seven meters long (23 feet)."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "On the technological level, the Pentagon's planning is in the advanced stage: some projects -- aimed at space weaponization -- have already been in place for some time. Among the (partially known) Pentagon's new plans, the two most interesting projects are the 'Global Strike' program and the 'Rods from God' program. Global Strike involves the employment of military space planes capable of carrying about 500 kg (1100 lbs) of high-precision weapons (with a circular error probability less than 3 meters) with the primary use of striking enemy military bases and command and control facilities in any point of the world. "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "The Pentagon's plans to militarize space have definitely emerged. In mid-May 2005, the U.S. Air Force formally asked President George W. Bush to issue a presidential directive that allows Washington to deploy defensive and offensive weapons into orbit. "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "series of Pentagon initiatives aimed at space militarization and at the creation of new types of armament -- capable of precisely striking small targets in every corner of the world and to neutralize most of today's anti-aircraft defenses -- will likely result in a new power battlefield in the near future."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "The road to space weaponization is hazardous. The current U.S. administration appears confident that it can handle the issue successfully. As usual, when a new category of weapons sees the light, it is not clear whether newcomers will suffer from perpetual disadvantage.

If other powers succeed in implementing low-cost orbital instruments that could endanger Washington's sophisticated space weapons, the U.S. could rapidly find itself in need of financing hyper-expensive programs designed to protect the country -- a situation which could make the Pentagon regret having opened the space front to begin with. "

FUTUREdition Volume 8, Number 11Saving the World with Sunbeams -- (Wired -- August 7, 2005)
A U.S. chemist is trying to determine how the world will produce enough energy to supply 9 billion people by mid-century -- and whether that can be done without pumping off-the-charts amounts of carbon dioxide into the air. The plan involves using the bountiful energy in sunlight to split water into its basic components, hydrogen and oxygen. The elements could then be used to supply clean-running fuel cells or new kinds of machinery, or the energy created from the reaction itself might be harnessed and stored.

Mirror.co.uk - News - Top Stories - FUTURES MARKET: "FILLINGS will become a thing of the past. Using gene therapy, lost or diseased teeth will be regrown in the mouth from a few cells. Scientists have already successfully grown mouse teeth in a lab dish."

A global neural system – the Internet – is just now in place that can communicate ideas and images instantaneously throughout the species. We are on the verge of engineering life, as we know it – deciding what characteristics would be desirable in future plants, animals, and humans. Humans now have the ability to destroy all of
life on the planet with their weapons . . . and perhaps we are on the verge of discovering the means of producing unlimited amounts of energy for positive uses.

We are now at the first time in history where humans understand, in terms that are far more sophisticated than any time in the past , what has happened historically, what is going on at the present, and what the future implications of current events might be. We have learned more about how reality
works in the last fifty years than was learned in the previous 5,000 years. For the first time, we also have the technology to be able to consciously make the big changes that have transpired in seemingly random ways in the past.

The history of life on this planet is described by evolutionary biologists as “punctuated equilibrium” – long periods of relatively stable periods defined by major forms of life that rapidly shift to new ones. There is not constant evolutionary change; the shift comes quickly, punctuating the status quo. Early on, these evolutionary punctuations were biological: from single cellular life to multiple cellular life, and from vertebrates to mammals, etc. With the advent of homo sapien
sapiens, the major changes evolved to being cultural: from being hunter-gatherers to living in cities and towns, etc.
The periods of equilibrium have rapidly become shorter – each succeeding one being about one-tenth of the one preceding it – to the point where the latest era was about five hundred years long.

For some reason, we humans do not have much of a long view. The important things are those that are currently pressing. The current initiative against terrorism is a classic example: Bin Laden has been very public and clear about his feelings and objectives for years now, but even though isolated individuals within our institutions were raising a red flag, the leadership continued pursuing variations of the status quo. Only when the problem was mature (and present) did the system respond.

If the whole system is not addressed, the underlying problems will not be solved. At this point in time human institutions neither have the experience nor the inclination to understand and address these big issues systematically.

way humans presently operate on this planet.The problem with all of these issues is that individually – and certainly in the aggregate – they represent fundamental mismatches between potential solutions and the incentives and priorities that are woven within the way humans presently operate on this planet.
No systems approach - It is possible to visualize some solutions over time to individual issues (the education problem, for example, could be mitigated in time by some breakthrough wireless technology), but the reality is that in order to really resolve any of these issues, all have to be dealt with at the same time. We are talking here about a very complex system where all of these elements are interconnected to each other and therefore influence each other in very dynamic ways.
It is quite easy to see the interconnectedness between and among these areas: the population problem exacerbates the imbalance between the haves and the havenots; which impacts the environment and is not resolved by the present form of capitalism. Technological breakthroughs could help, but if they don’t, there could be significant shocks to the global financial system . . . etc.

A person born in 1950 and living a 70-year life will live through a tripling of the world’s population in his or her lifetime. Nearly half of most developing countries’ populations are under 15 years old. Furthermore, 90 percent of the world’s under-15s will reside in developing countries in the year 2005.

But, this is not just an economic issue. The new information technologies that are available in the developing world increase those societies’ metabolism and efficiency . . . and the rate at which they are distancing themselves from the lesserdeveloped world. Although on one hand technology offers the biggest hope for resolving the fundamental problems, on the other it nevertheless is exacerbating the underlying disparity. The “digital divide” is a significant reality.

Gmail - FUTUREdition Volume 8, Number 11In the case of Radical Evolution he has done a profoundly important job of bringing the discipline of scenarios to a spectrum of potential futures derived from the trends underway in GRIN technologies, genetic, robotic, information, and nano processes,
Each of these technologies is describing an exponential growth trajectory, called a curve of accelerating returns, that guarantees -- absent some extraordinary wild card, of course -- that capabilities will multiply many times over in short periods like a decade. When you weave them all together it makes it hard to breathe. At least, in reading this book I have again had my breath taken away by the obvious magnitude and significance of any of the alternative worlds that lie on our horizon.
Joel builds three scenarios, Heaven, Hell, and Prevail, and every one gets your attention - big time - and I think about this stuff all the time and am aware of most of the pieces of the puzzle. It's just that the synergy of combining it all always brings me back to the fundamental tenet of The Arlington Institute: that we are living in particularly extraordinary times and some of us need to be thinking about how we get from here to there without killing most of us in the process.

Gmail - FUTUREdition Volume 8, Number 11 Paul Volcker, the previous Chairman of the Federal Reserve, is putting the probability of "a dollar 'hard landing' at 75% within the next 5 years". Even in the US, a major dollar crash is now expected by many other monetary luminaries like Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Joseph Stiglitz, and Paul Krugman.

People's Daily Online -- A view on China's foreign trade and economic relations 1st half 2005 (II): "The US Congress proposed 11 bills asking the Bush administration for harsh measures against China on trade and economic exchanges. " ..The EU has shown increasing protectionism against China. It has consolidated its control over shoes import. One of its steps was the decision on anti-dumping investigations into Chinese shoes on June 12. China's home appliance export will face more pressure after the EU's two instructions on recycling of appliances....New frictions have been triggered in developing countries. Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Brazil are considering safeguard measures and India, along with other markets, is making more anti-dumping probes into Chinese products.

People's Daily Online -- A view on China's foreign trade and economic relations 1st half 2005 (II): "A conservative estimation set China's favorable balance of trade with US at more than 100 billion USD and 60 billion USD with the EU. That would provide new pretexts for trade protectionism on those markets. "

People's Daily Online -- Traffic jam in Beijing: "Traffic jam in Beijing"

TFF Transnational.org: peace, research, debates: "Today's nuclear weapons is the ultimate terror
Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not history only. It's your daily
reality in the nuclear age."

Vital Signs Facts: Planes Utilize Most Fuel During Takeoff: "The world's airlines use some 205 million tons of aviation fuel (kerosene) each year, producing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, ozone, sulfur dioxide, and methane. Jet fuel is the second-largest expense to airlines after labor and can amount to 20 percent of companies' operating expenses.
Planes use the most fuel, and produce the most harmful emissions, during takeoff. On short flights, as much as 25 percent of the total fuel consumed is used at this time. The most fuel-efficient route length for airlines is 4,300 kilometers, roughly a flight from Europe to the U.S. East Coast. About 45 percent of all flights in the European Union cover less than 500 kilometers. "

KurzweilAI.net: "Pig brain cells could be implanted into human brains by the start of next year if trials of a pioneering treatment for Huntington's disease are approved in the US. "...The injection of live animal cells into human brains is likely to raise ethical concerns and fears of pig viruses being transmitted to humans.

KurzweilAI.net: "Our nation's information technology infrastructure, which includes air traffic control systems, power grids, financial systems, and military and intelligence cyber networks, is highly vulnerable to terrorist and criminal attacks, according to an article in the August issue of IEEE-USA Today's Engineer. "

News - Press Reviews: "Not only are gains for developing countries from trade liberalization likely to be much smaller than consensus assumes, there are other changes to international regimes that might bring much bigger gains but are obscured by the focus on trade liberalization. One is moderation of the World Trade Organization's trade-related intellectual property (Trips) agreement in its application to developing countries. The agreement requires the WTO's developing country members to adopt US-style patent and copyright laws. Although clothed in the language of liberal economics, it is a massive protective device in favor of western companies, he writes.

It may seem obvious that campaigners should focus on getting rich countries to remove barriers to developing countries' exports and that in return, developing countries should open up to trade. Unfortunately, that would not solve much. On the other hand, neither is it right to leave the west's existing trade protection unchanged. Clearly, the issues of trade policy are too complex to be wrapped up in the slogan 'liberalize trade'. "

Aljazeera.Net - Interview: Fostering Muslim-West dialogue: "This is completely wrong. Muslims everywhere - and the polls underline this very clearly - reflect the same values: They do not hate our values, but they do hate our policies. "

Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report At the beginning of the first term of the current Bush administration, the majority of foreign policy efforts were poured into establishing a cordon sanitaire around the only country to recently pose a serious threat to the United States -- Russia -- and the only country that could conceivably pose one in the future: China.
The theory was that a bit of proactive work on Washington's part would weaken its past and potential foes sufficiently to prevent any re-emergence of Cold War power balances. If Moscow and Beijing could be prevented from acting as international pillars of power, then American hegemony would be secured for at least a generation -- and perhaps much longer. Put another way, the Rome of the modern age sought to deliver a death blow to Carthage and pre-emptively hobble a still-rising foe.

KurzweilAI.net: "'So now the controversy is focused on the algorithms. To understand the principles of human intelligence we need to reverse-engineer the human brain. Here progress is far greater than most people realize. The spatial and temporal resolution of brain scanning is progressing at an exponential rate, roughly doubling each year. Scanning tools can see individual interneuronal connections and watch them fire in real time. We already have mathematical models and simulations of a few dozen regions of the brain, including the cerebellum, which comprises more than half the neurons. It is reasonable to conclude that in two decades we will have effective models for most of the brain.' "

KurzweilAI.net: "We can meet the hardware requirements for 'strong' AI -- machine intelligence with the full range of human intelligence "

Foreign Policy In Focus | Discussion Paper | Now is the Time to Resist: "Thus, struggles against U.S. violence overseas should be recognized as extensions of struggles for social justice at home, and vice versa. With no Soviet Union and only a relatively weak United Nations (largely due to U.S. obstructionism), the only real checks on the Pentagon and corporate juggernauts today are the American people themselves. "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "As rising economic powers throughout the world become more competitive, the U.S. is bound to lose comparative advantage in many industries, setting off moves for protection that will be opposed by industries that gain or maintain advantage."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Signs of growing economic nationalism in the U.S. -- where mounting, though still inchoate, popular resistance to liberalization of global markets finds resonance in Congress -- do not portend a radical shift to protectionism, but a normalization of trade policy, in which internationalist and nationalist interests compete for influence in the state."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "In the case of the Byrd Amendment, the purely economic balance of power would seem to favor the forces for repeal, since steel consumers are more financially powerful and greater in number and political influence than steel producers. Organized as the Consuming Industries Trade Coalition, the consumer interests have made inroads in Congress, but have not achieved success. Their failure is another indication that sentiments of economic nationalism are providing added energy to protectionist interests, giving them victories on issues in which they would have lost or at least have had to compromise in climates of opinion more favorable to trade liberalization."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "The two most significant factors in C.N.O.O.C.'s failure were the intensity of Congressional opposition to its bid and the silence of the Bush administration throughout the fray. With powerful U.S. business interests on both sides of the issue, it is likely that the Congressional tilt to economic nationalism and the administration's acquiescence in it were fueled by the mobilization of popular sentiment against China over U.S. job losses, which made Congressional opposition to C.N.O.O.C.'s bid politically expedient and the administration's acquiescence in it politically prudent."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Long the major supporter of trade liberalization in world forums, the United States has recently had to adjust to growing economic nationalism in the U.S. that is likely to result in a slowing and perhaps a reversal of the thrust toward liberalized global markets."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Attempts to use the state to protect economic interests are normal, and success or failure is mainly dependent on the domestic balance of power, which in large advanced economies is determined by continual face-offs between winning and losing industries and sectors. More general shifts between liberalization and protectionism call into play public opinion, which can deepen and increase the scope of incipient tendencies."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "The majority of economists who argue that free trade increases wealth in the long run and on the whole through the operation of comparative advantage also admit that in the short run some industries and regions are disadvantaged -- often severely -- by shifts in production to more efficient and innovative enterprises. The inevitability of winners and losers in trade competition opens the way for the latter to seek state protection and subsidies, either to allow them to mature into effective competitors or simply to survive."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Since the emergence of globalized capitalist markets in the nineteenth century, the trade policies of states have cycled between support of liberalization and adherence to economic nationalism, depending on whether significant domestic interests are winning or losing in international competition."

People's Daily Online -- 'Harmonious but different', 'coexistence of civilization': "A 'policy of benevolence' 'running the country and bringing peace to the world' requires that a 'policy of benevolence', and a 'benevolent government' should be implemented, and 'rule by force of dictators' should not be practiced. The practice of 'policy of benevolence' and 'benevolent government' should be carried out, which makes it possible for the coexistence and development of different cultures. 'Rule by the force of dictator' will evoke the conflicts of civilizations, and thereby leading cultures toward unilateralism and forming cultural hegemony.
If Confucius' theory of 'benevolence' is used for handling the relations between different civilizations, then there will be no conflicts and even war between different civilizations, and the 'coexistence of civilizations' will be realized. "

KurzweilAI.net: "Research laboratories envision tools that could identify and track just about every person, anywhere -- and sound alarms when the systems encounter hazardous objects or chemical compounds.

Many such ideas seem to leap from the pages of science fiction: An artificial nose in doorways and corridors sniffs out faint traces of explosives on someone's hair. Tiny sensors floating in reservoirs detect a deadly microbe and radio a warning. Smart cameras ID people at a distance by the way they walk or the shape of their ears. And a little chemical lab analyzes the sweat, body odor, and skin flakes in the human thermal plume -- the halo of heat that surrounds each person."

In The Datasphere, No Word Goes Unheard: "Echelon is the global eavesdropping system run by the National Security Agency (NSA) and its counterparts in Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. For decades, Echelon's electronic ears have been scooping up all communications relayed by satellite, microwave towers, and even some fiber-optic and copper cables. Each day's intercepts -- phone calls, e-mails, and Web uploads and downloads -- would fill the Library of Congress 10 times."

KurzweilAI.net: "A Caltech team argues that 2.3 billion years ago, cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, gained the ability to break down water, which in turn released a flood of oxygen into the atmosphere.

That oxygen reacted with the atmospheric methane, which insulated the Earth at the time, and broke it down. While the oxygen-methane reaction created the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the protective nature of the barrier cracked.

Temperatures plunged to minus 50 degrees Celsius, and ice at the equator grew to 1 mile thick. Although this process took several million years, substantial damage to the methane layer could have occurred in the first 100,000 years, in a close call to a planetary destruction."

People's Daily Online -- US targets oil in Africa: "Meanwhile, new changes have been made in US policy towards Africa to gradually ease its relations with countries that have rich oil resources but stand opposed to itself, such as Libya and Sudan. Occidental Petroleum Corporation's being the first American company to resume operation in Libya is an obvious example. "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Ultimately, while the U.S.-India joint statement is bilateral in tone, its repercussions will be global. Nuclear weapon states and military suppliers like Russia, China, and France are carefully observing the outcome to guide their own future sales. Similarly, countries outside of the N.P.T. or contemplating violation of the treaty are also watching. If the agreements and changes in U.S. or international legislation that come out of the joint statement are not made with this understanding, India's gain may be the nonproliferation regime's loss. "

KurzweilAI.net: "The world's first cloning of a dog has raised concerns that scientists are one step closer to replicating human beings, despite the breakthrough pointing to treatments for currently-incurable human diseases.

Some experts say the cloning of a dog demonstrates that most of key techniques needed to clone humans are now available. "

KurzweilAI.net: "The theoretical price of having one's personal genome sequenced just fell from the prohibitive $20 million dollars to about $2.2 million, and the goal is to reduce the amount further--to about $1,000--to make individualized prevention and treatment realistic.

The sharp drop is due to a new DNA sequencing technology developed by Harvard Medical School researchers. "

Asia Times Online :: South Asia news, business and economy from India and Pakistan: "'As is known, Osama bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire, was an American ally when his band of fundamentalists fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. It is the cynical use of these countries by Washington that built up a reservoir of resentment among large sections of their people against the US.

'This anger may have become all the more intense because there were no democratic outlets - no parliament, opposition parties, a free press and a free judiciary - to let off steam.'' "

Asia Times Online :: South Asia news, business and economy from India and Pakistan: "'A basic reason why the military or feudal autocrats control these countries (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia) is that the US propped them up to serve its economic and diplomatic interests. It was either the presence of oil or their utility as frontline states against the Soviet Union that guided the Americans. "

Asia Times Online :: South Asia news, business and economy from India and Pakistan: "Analysts say that the main reason Indian Muslims have stayed away from international terror circles is the strong democratic tradition that exists in the country. Muslims have been able to give vent to their grievances and grow, unlike international hotbeds where democracy is not a norm. "

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs: "Muslim leaders must do more to expose the harsh reality of many Muslims throughout the world and speak for Muslim suffering; they must do more to pressure political and public-opinion leaders to address the roots of anger and frustration that breed militancy and give rise to terrorism. The key here is the foreign policy of Western powers, particularly the United States, toward Islam and Muslims. Ignoring legitimate grievances and applying double standards in dealing with Muslim societies and issues must stop if the war on terrorism is to bear fruit. "

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs: "As for the case of Egypt, veteran Egyptian journalist, Ayman El-Amir, writing for Al-Ahram Weekly articulated it best: Terrorism (as a consequence of political ostracism, not religious fanaticism) is fomented 'not in the mosque or the madrassas but in solitary confinement cells, torture chambers, and the environment of fear wielded by dictatorial regimes as instruments of legitimate governments.' "

inadaily.com | Article service: "All three of these historical state legacies are now challenged simultaneously throughout the Arab world. This is happening through peaceful and evolutionary forces of education, commerce, and globalization - and through violent or political contestation of long-ruling elites and their powers. We should keep in mind the important distinctions between state structures that are losing some of their historical relevance, and individual Arab leaders who are losing their current credibility or legitimacy. Sometimes these two forces converge, and sometimes they do not, but in any case they must be monitored in parallel."

inadaily.com | Article service: "The third fraying legacy is that of the modern Arab security state, in which armed forces, police, intelligence services and others who have a formal mandate to use guns to protect the interests of citizens have tended to focus on protecting the interests of the incumbent regimes - often extended families and tribes. "

inadaily.com | Article service: "The second legacy being challenged in this region is that of the modern Arab state that was also mostly crafted by the Europeans starting around 1920. The modern Arab state that has been in existence for less than a century is deeply pressured by its own erratic ability to meet the basic needs of its citizens - whether in the realm of security, education, health, jobs or international competitiveness."

inadaily.com | Article service: "First is the modern 'nation-state' that entered world history in Europe during the 16th century, and which was exported to the world through the colonial enterprise. This Euro-manufactured state system is evolving and weakening all around the world, due to globalization and other forces, with the evolving nature of sovereignty in Europe itself being the most dramatic example of this."

inadaily.com | Article service: "Arab governance systems are brittle and vulnerable because they are being challenged by two powerful forces simultaneously. The historical legitimacy of the state itself is under pressure - due to both local and global trends - and current leaders are under pressure from angry and concerned citizens (or subjects, as the case may be)."

RIA Novosti - Russia - Russia, China take relations to new level: "Nezavisimaya Gazeta wrote that the biggest concerns of the United States and other Pacific countries were that the exercise would be conducted under the aegis of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which comprises China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. While the organization used to be regarded as an anti-terrorist one, it is now beginning to show the signs of a military bloc. If India joins the SCO, a bloc covering Eurasia might emerge, which, no doubt, would bring an end to the unipolar world that emerged after the Cold War."

i-Newswire.com - Press Release And News Distribution - Will urbanization in developing countries in 2030 be less pronounced than model projections ?: "In a world that would be less intensively urbanized, the industrialized countries would still be the main producers of greenhouse gas emissions and the essential part of natural resources would remain located in the regions of the South. "

i-Newswire.com - Press Release And News Distribution - Will urbanization in developing countries in 2030 be less pronounced than model projections ?: "This theoretical threshold, which represents the maximum urban capacity of a country as a function of its economic development, is reached when the urban transition has finished. Ten large developing countries, with together 18.8% of world population, would alone contribute to more than half the world urban growth between 2025 and 2030. Most countries would already have reached their saturation threshold and would therefore contribute only in a small way to urban growth beyond 2030. "

i-Newswire.com - Press Release And News Distribution - Will urbanization in developing countries in 2030 be less pronounced than model projections ?: "UNO projections on population and urbanization are used widely as input for assessments of other global trends such as poverty, energy consumption and so on. However, they appear to have been overestimated in the past, especially figures for developing countries. An IRD demographer suggests using a model different from the UN one for measuring urbanization levels. This adopts a historical approach to development of these urban concentrations, applied to reflect the particularities of each country. Predictions from this new model indicate that UN projections for 2030 may well overestimate world urban population by as much as one billion. Populations in Africa and Asia could thus remain much more rurally-based than predicted. This points to a possible revision of environmental policies and the demographic tendencies envisaged for this date. "

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning."

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don't. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age of religion. Few world religions were born after this time. Similarly, the great personalities converging upon the American Revolution and the geniuses who commingled during the invention of modern science in the 17th century mark additional axial phases in the short history of our civilization. "

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.
You and I are alive at this moment."

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy."

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive? We will. In fact, we're already doing it, each of us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge."

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing."

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "Danny Hillis, a computer scientist who once claimed he wanted to make an AI 'that would be proud of me,' has invented massively parallel supercomputers in part to advance us in that direction. He now believes the first real AI will emerge not in a stand-alone supercomputer like IBM's proposed 23-teraflop Blue Brain, but in the vast digital tangle of the global Machine. "

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "Today, the Machine acts like a very large computer with top-level functions that operate at approximately the clock speed of an early PC. It processes 1 million emails each second, which essentially means network email runs at 1 megahertz. Same with Web searches. Instant messaging runs at 100 kilohertz, SMS at 1 kilohertz. The Machine's total external RAM is about 200 terabytes. In any one second, 10 terabits can be coursing through its backbone, and each year it generates nearly 20 exabytes of data. Its distributed 'chip' spans 1 billion active PCs, which is approximately the number of transistors in one PC.
This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion 'synapses' between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number - but brains are not doubling in size every few years. "

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds."

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "The Web continues to evolve from a world ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. How far can this frenzy of creativity go? Encouraged by Web-enabled sales, 175,000 books were published and more than 30,000 music albums were released in the US last year. At the same time, 14 million blogs launched worldwide. All these numbers are escalating. A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph"

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "Today, 52 percent of netizens are female. And, of course, the Internet is not and has never been a teenage realm. In 2005, the average user is a bone-creaking 41 years old. "

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "I run a blog about cool tools. I write it for my own delight and for the benefit of friends. The Web extends my passion to a far wider group for no extra cost or effort. In this way, my site is part of a vast and growing gift economy, a visible underground of valuable creations - text, music, film, software, tools, and services - all given away for free. This gift economy fuels an abundance of choices. It spurs the grateful to reciprocate. It permits easy modification and reuse, and thus promotes consumers into producers. "

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers - all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works. "

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone's 10-year plan."

Wired 13.08: We Are the Web: "The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's 100 pages per person alive. "

KurzweilAI.net: "In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing."

KurzweilAI.net: "The Web, a planet-sized computer, is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks.

That adds up to a trillion 'synapses' between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number - but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine is. "

Beating Hurdles, Scientists Clone a Dog for a First - New York Times: "South Korean researchers are reporting today that they have cloned what scientists deem the most difficult animal, the dog."

Where there's a will, there's a tactful way: "With $7.2 trillion in wealth about to be handed to the baby boomer generation from their parents, that's not a trivial issue. Of course, most of that financial legacy will be given by wealthy parents to children who are already financially secure. In fact, 30 percent of the wealth bequeathed to the boomer generation will go to 1 percent of the population. "

Future Survey -- Top Ten Trends, Forecasts, and Proposals: "For the overwhelming preponderance of human history, humans have lived in societies that were characterized by 80% continuities, 15% cycles, and only 5% novelties at best. Now I believe the figures are reversed: 80% of our futures may be novel, 15% cyclical, and only 5% continuous with the past and present.'"

Future Survey -- Top Ten Trends, Forecasts, and Proposals: "'The masculinization of Asia's sex ratios is one of the overlooked megatrends of our time, a phenomenon that may very likely influence the course of national and perhaps even international politics in the 21st century.'"

Future Survey -- Top Ten Trends, Forecasts, and Proposals: "'Over the last three decades a major cultural shift has taken place in the attitudes of Western societies toward the future. Optimism has given way to a sense of ambiguity�(which) threatens to stifle hope at a personal as well as a social level.'"

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "On July 5, the members of the S.C.O. -- China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan -- met in Astana, Kazakhstan to discuss the changing political situation in Central Asia. While previous meetings focused nearly exclusively on the 'three evil forces' -- terrorism, separatism and extremism -- and were dominated by China's desire to control the Uighur population in its Xinjiang region and protect its access to energy resources, this meeting demonstrated that the organization, which represents nearly 50 percent of the world's population, desires to be a serious force in international affairs. This can be seen in the granting of observer status to India (at Russia's request), Pakistan (at China's insistence) and Iran (to the delight of all members). "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Before the S.C.O. meeting, Russia's and China's leaders met at the Kremlin on July 1 to discuss their goals in Central Asia and the upcoming G8 summit. The meeting signaled a shift toward greater cooperation between the two states, completely solved their long-standing border disputes from the legal perspective, and laid the foundation for greater integration of their state-controlled oil companies and banking sectors. One reason that the atmosphere in the Kremlin was so unusually amiable was the perception that a shared threat loomed larger than their differences in policy goals; that threat was Washington's role in Central Asia."

Calling All Luddites - New York Times: "The world is moving to an Internet-based platform for commerce, education, innovation and entertainment. Wealth and productivity will go to those countries or companies that get more of their innovators, educators, students, workers and suppliers connected to this platform via computers, phones and P.D.A.'s."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Given the recent increase in Islamist terrorist activities -- which directly involve Pakistani radical circles -- and the country's inner political instability, Islamabad's position emerges as one of the world's decisive geopolitical pivots. At a time of intense competition between Washington and Beijing, coupled with India's rise as a regional power, Pakistan occupies a geostrategic space open to dangerous developments. "