A proposal for the World Summit on Sustainable Development's action plan calls for the use of the technologies to be increased to account for 15 percent of the world's total energy production by 2010.

Sources said delegates from the United States, Saudi Arabia and other industrialized and oil-producing states were lobbying to eliminate the provision.
The European Union also wavered on the agreement.

"We may have to bend if we can't convince all of our partners," said one EU official, Christine Day. "It's early in the negotiations."

...

However, the United States is seeking to erase specific targets and timetables on many topics throughout the plan, which includes 150 pages addressing biodiversity, food security, clean water and health care.
Instead, U.S. officials said they prefer voluntary partnerships with business and other groups.

"I don't know of a goal that has protected a child from a waterborne disease or provided energy to a village," a senior U.S. diplomat told reporters in a background briefing. "Goals do not by themselves bring about change or results."
from www.washingtonpost.com

{somewhere real close, real soon, there's a line, and after we cross it, all the remorse, all the awakening, all the sorrow and grief a human heart can contain won't be enough }

...Swedish scientists identified what may be a new form of life, a tiny particle in the spinal fluid of schizophrenics. In China, a vending machine was dispensing medicine to users who described their symptoms on a touch screen; more machines were expected to be installed in supermarkets. India's supreme court was investigating the painting of the Coca-Cola and Pepsi logos directly onto the rock face in the Himalaya mountains....

from Harper's Weekly Review.......

and further...Stockholm � Swedish scientists have found a tiny, mysterious particle in the spinal marrow fluid that could help explain the cause of schizophrenia.
"They may be involved in the development of the disease or may result from the disease process in brains of schizophrenic patients," the researchers said in an abstract of the study published Friday.
Schizophrenia is a widespread and debilitating form of mental disease with symptoms ranging from delusions and an altered sense of self to apathy and social withdrawal. It affects about 1 per cent of people.
Lennart Wetterberg, professor of psychiatry at Stockholm's St. Goran Hospital and one of the co-authors of the study, said the full significance of the findings is not clear and more research is needed.
"We have viruses, bacteria and prions � this could be an entirely new form of life," he told Reuters.
But he said this is just one theory, and it is still uncertain what form of life the particles, which are bigger than ordinary viruses but smaller than bacteria, represent.
The study, published in Neuroscience Letters, was made on the basis of spinal fluid obtained by lumbar puncture from 22 schizophrenic patients and 38 control patients.
The study found spherical particles � only 100,000th of a millimetre in size � in the spinal fluid of 20 of the 22 patients with schizophrenia against only two of the 38 controls, it said.
The particles did not include bacterial DNA material and had so far not replicated in culture.
"They are not any of the usual viruses or bacteria that have been found," Mr. Wetterberg said. "They are more like something like the prion, which is causing mad cow disease � but it took 15 years until it was found out what that really was."
He said it was too early to speculate whether the particles were a cause of schizophrenia or whether the disease caused them, and a bigger number of people would have to be studied.
"We have found the first link in a chain, and whether my excitement increases or decreases depends on the answer to the next step," he said.

The feds, Palast reported in the U.K. Guardian, weren't much interested in possible Saudi connections to Islamic terror plots. "There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis," one source told Palast.
"They said the restrictions became worse after the Bush administration took over this year. The intelligence agencies had been told to 'back off' from investigations involving other members of the bin Laden family, the Saudi royals, and possible Saudi links to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan," Palast wrote.
...
Rounding out the top 10, we have a pair of heavily footnoted essays by Michel Chossudovsky, director of the Centre for Research on Globalisation and an economics professor at the University of Ottawa.
According to Chossudovsky, U.S. spooks are meddling in the affairs of Macedonia by arming an array of guerrilla factions in an attempt to secure control of a still-unbuilt oil pipeline and fill the coffers of American corporations...
from Project Censored Top 10 Stories via robotwisdom

Gillmor points, I click

this is why I read girlhacker

Q.
I read that the last man in the United States to be branded for a crime was Jonathan Walker. In Pensacola, Territory of Florida, 1844, he had "SS" burned into the palm of his hand. What did the "SS" stand for?

A.
Slave Stealer.
L.M. Boyd

dead cow points

knees of glory, knees of shame

laboring, soldiering, bearing it up, carrying it on

The most dramatic drop in tax revenue since 1946 has put the government into deficit for the next three years and has shriveled the projected 10-year federal budget surplus by 60 percent in just five months, the Congressional Budget Office reported yesterday.

The CBO's influential midyear budget forecast underscores the deterioration of the government's fiscal health. As recently as March, congressional forecasters had predicted the government would run a much larger surplus -- $2.4 trillion -- than the $1 trillion total that the CBO now foresees between 2003 and 2012. That number has shrunk because of a plunge in tax receipts, the likes of which has not been seen since the repeal of World War II surtaxes 56 years ago, said CBO Director Dan L. Crippen.

Washington Post

These poverty-stricken residences scattered over a desert hillside hardly seem much of a threat to anyone, yet they are the reason that Julio Sandoval has been in prison for nine months, for helping migrant workers in Baja California settle in homes like these. Another housing activist, Beatriz Chavez, a well-known leader of similar efforts farther south down the Baja peninsula, has been in prison since May of 2001.

Their crime is an offense unique to Baja -- despojo agravado. Despojo, according to Tijuana attorney Jose Pe�aflor, "means using land or water belonging to someone else, without their authorization, in a furtive manner." This offense is on the books throughout Mexico. But in Baja the legislature created a new, more serious charge a few years ago -- despojo agravado -- the crime of leading or instigating others in committing despojo.....
"The government is afraid of the poor sections of the population, especially the migrant indigenous people from Oaxaca, and wants control over them," said Beatriz Chavez, over the phone from the Cereso prison. "They think their only way to ensure control is by throwing the leaders of social movements among them into prison."

For months the two cases have wound slowly through the state's court system, and Chavez and Sandoval now await sentencing. Rumor has it that the judge is preparing to give them five years apiece. Baja California authorities wouldn't permit a reporter to enter prison facilities to talk to the jailed activists, nor would they make any public statements themselves.
David Bacon in LA Weekly

tremble's got that wit thing

american margins illumined

crazy old lady blog

shame on you boy.

now if they only had one of these for fascism...

"We're hoping we will give people an additional tool that will help make the decision not to drive after drinking," said Capt. Jim Wolfinbarger of the Colorado State Patrol. "Traditionally, thousands of times a year, people are making poor decisions. If they're fortunate, they'll make it home. If they're unfortunate, they'll get arrested. If it's a tragedy, they'll kill somebody."

Perhaps the insanity of our social destructiveness � including the Bush Administration�s deranged declaration of a permanent war against the rest of the world � will bring about an examination of alternative ways of living together in conditions of peace and liberty. Our political systems cannot bring about such harmonious and life-sustaining ways because they are premised on a rejection of the principle of self-ownership. In a society of self-owning individuals, there would be no place for politicians, bureaucrats, and other state functionaries. Like the rest of us, they would have to confine their lives to minding their own business, and deriving whatever benefit they could from persons who chose to cooperate with them.

There is one person who can restore you to a state of self-ownership, however, and that person is you. To do so, you need only assert your claim, not as some empty gesture, but in full understanding of the existential meaning of such a claim, including the willingness to take full control of and responsibility for your life. While your claim will likely evoke cries of contempt from many, you may also find yourself energized by a life force that permeates all of nature; an �lan vital that reminds us that life manifests itself only through individuals, and not as collective monstrosities; that life belongs to the living, not to the state or any other abstraction.
post by Butler Shaffer in indymedia

hippy truth is still truth. miso is good food, and good for you

hard drive external docking simplified
via boing-boing(above)

Brown had signed a contract agreeing that DSC owned any "invention" or anything "conceived" on the job but said he actually began thinking about his high-level source code solution 12 years before he started work at DSC. [Law.com-Texas Lawyer, 8-12-02]

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Motiveless Crimes
Nathan A. Williams, 18, admitting that he robbed a convenience store in White River Junction, Vt., in July, told the judge, "I still don't know quite to this day why I did it." And Gerald Fitzgerald, 73, pleading guilty to a series of petty crimes in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in July: "I don't know why (I did it)." And Ms. Rie Fujii, 24, pleading guilty in Calgary, Alberta, in June to abandoning her children while she partied: "I don't know why." And Darlene Eva Gallant, 41, sentenced to two years in prison in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, in May for maliciously injecting her grandson with insulin: "I hurt someone more precious than my life, and I don't even know why." And pharmacist Robert Courtney, pleading guilty in Kansas City, Mo., in February to diluting customers' cancer drugs: "I keep asking myself, 'Why?'" [Valley News(Lebanon, N.H.), 7-3-02][Sault Star, 7-6-02] [Edmonton Journal-Calgary Herald, 6-22-02] [Edmonton Journal-CP, 5-28-02][Columbia Tribune-AP, 2-27-02]
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Cultural Diversity
The several African nations' soccer teams that rely on witchcraft to give them an edge were confounded at this year's World Cup when Senegal almost made it to the semifinals after supposedly rejecting that strategy and competing solely on ability.....
from News of The Weird AUGUST 25, 2002

Fourth, danger: Yes, now we have Amber Alert, and we think there is an epidemic of child abductions, but there isn't. Your child is more likely to play professional basketball than she is to be abducted on the way to or from school.
Jon Carroll at SFGate

The official environmentalists, like the Sierra Club, want the art gone and the dogs on leashes. They want a unified vision. Me, I like the glimpse of chaos and old-fashioned semi-clean fun, available daily at the Albany Bulb.
and again

Learning how to love is harder than learning how to hate.
and once more"