Tag: united states

British Government warns that it intends to religionise Britain

Posted by – 17/09/2010

[via secularism.org.uk]

Baroness Warsi

Conservative Party chairman Baroness Warsi has insisted that the coalition Government not only “does God” but that faith groups should have a greater role in public services under the auspices of David Cameron’s Big Society.

Speaking this week to a meeting of Church of England bishops in Oxford, Baroness Warsi said that whereas the coalition intended to be “on the side of” faith, the Labour government had seen religion as “essentially a rather quaint relic of our pre-industrial history”.

Harvard profs trash ACTA, demand oversight, threaten lawsuit

Posted by – 27/03/2010

[via arstechnica.com]

Harvard Law School professors Lawrence Lessig and Jack Goldsmith took to the op-ed page of the Washington Post today to slam the Obama administration’s approach to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)—and to threaten a lawsuit if ACTA is signed without Congressional oversight.

The US has positioned ACTA as an executive agreement rather than a treaty. Such a move means that ACTA doesn’t need Senate approval, but it also means that the agreement should not alter US law, either. If you want to change the law, you go to Congress.

Secrets of Antarctica’s 15-Million Year-Old Lake

Posted by – 19/03/2010

[via dailygalaxy.com]

Researchers have thawed ice estimated to be perhaps a million years old or more from above Lake Vostok, an ancient lake that lies hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica using novel genomic techniques to determine how tiny, living “time capsules” survived the ages in total darkness, in freezing cold, and without food and energy from the sun.

Lake Vostok is located beneath four kilometers of ice in East Antarctica. The lake is approximately 250 km long and 50 km wide. The overlying ice provides a continuous paleo-climatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for as long as 15 million years.

US and Russia ‘near’ new nuclear arms treaty

Posted by – 14/03/2010

[via bbc.co.uk]

The Start treaty led to huge reductions in the Russian and US nuclear arsenals.

Russia and the US have both said it should soon be possible to conclude a new nuclear disarmament treaty.

Officials in Moscow and Washington said US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had a “good conversation” reviewing negotiations.

The two countries are trying to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expired last December.

The US says it has more than 2,000 nuclear weapons, while Russia is believed to have nearly 3,000.

Obama czar in ‘clean energy’ corruption?

Posted by – 13/03/2010

[via WorldNetDaily]

John Holdren

President Obama’s “science” czar, John Holdren, was co-author of a 2004 energy policy paper that recommended “cap and trade” legislation, including “clean coal” technology and $2 billion from the federal budget for construction of one or two new nuclear facilities.

WND has learned a co-author of the paper with Holdren is John Rowe, a financial bundler for President Obama’s 2008 campaign who serves as chairman of Exelon, the mega-utility owning 30 percent of all U.S. nuclear plants.