It’s Friday!

A lot in the news…..

Uh-oh:

The IDF has issued emergency call up orders to six reserve battalions in light of new dangers on the Egyptian and Syrian borders. And the Knesset has given the IDF permission to summon a further 16 reserve battalions if necessary, Israeli media reported on Wednesday.

China-related items:

The time to help Chen Guancheng is now:

Chen Guangcheng spoke live via telephone today at an emergency Congressional hearing today in the U.S. House about his situation and how he desires to meet with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

At the end of a hearing today, in which several top activists fighting for human rights and freedom for Chen and his supporters pressing the case against forced abortions, Bob Fu, the president of ChinaAid, got Chen on the phone for the members of Congress in attendance to hear.

After the witnesses had all testified, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) asked if anyone had been in touch with Chen since Wednesday. A short time later, Fu and CECC chairman Chris Smith (R-NJ) telephoned Chen and were able to have him speak directly to the hearing.

Chen, from a room at the hospital where he is getting medical care, told members of the panel that he wanted to meet with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and that he hoped he could get help from her and meet her face to face to talk about his situation. Chen said he did not realize the extent of the danger he faces until he left the U.S. Embassy.

“I want to meet with Secretary Clinton. I hope I can get more help from her,” he said.

Chen told the panel he is worried about the safety of his family, his brothers and supporters who helped rescue him from home detention. He said immediately after he was discovered missing, his daughter was banned from going to school.

The “Starbucks/backpack-wearing” crack won’t be so funny when India marches China into the sea:

One of China’s main official newspapers accused blind dissident Chen Guangcheng on Friday of serving as a “tool” for American subversion of Communist Party power and called the U.S. ambassador a backpack-wearing, Starbucks-sipping troublemaker.

The commentary in the Beijing Daily was the strongest Chinese state media condemnation yet of the U.S. administration in a standoff over Chen, who sought protection in the U.S. embassy in Beijing, then left, and has now said he regrets that choice and wants exile in the United States.

The paper, main mouthpiece of the Beijing city Communist Party authorities, accused the U.S. embassy and U.S. ambassador Gary Locke of engineering incidents intended to sully the Chinese government’s reputation and to foment social discontent.

It said the embassy’s sheltering of Chen was the most recent and most egregious example of this.

“This so-called ‘rights defence hero’ has been packaged by the United States and Western media and given an eye-catching political label, (and) set up as a representative figure against society and against the system,” the paper said of Chen.

“Chen Guangcheng has become a tool and a pawn for American politicians to blacken China,” it added.

Chen and his demands for protection, it said, “fully demonstrate just how desperate American politicians are in sparing no effort to cause trouble for Chinese society.” [...]

 

Trespassing is a crime, no matter what newspaper you work for.

David Menzies makes fun of Occupests ™.

Who is the worst premier of all time? I'd say Bob Rae or Dalton McGuinty. Both are pretty stinky.

 

There's a Harper/Santorum Axis now?  This is why people like Mark Steyn and Rex Murphy. They are upfront, witty and razor-sharp. This article is as imaginative and logical as any kind of fairy tale. Axis? Oil? Evangelical?  This kind of emotional idiocy distracts the reader from the real issues at hand:

Is it a coincidence that the Harper government referred to “radical environmentalists” just more than a week after Santorum did? Perhaps, but there are other interesting parallels between the Harper and Santorum approaches to opponents of increased fossil-fuel use.

Santorum went further than Harper in vilifying opponents. “It has nothing to do with a pipeline. It has to do with an ideology, a religion of its own that’s being pushed on the American public,” Santorum proclaimed in a message that was not widely reported.

Three weeks later, when Obama announced he was not approving Keystone – at least until he was safely re-elected – Santorum enlarged the “radical environmentalist” frame to include Obama himself. But Santorum’s remarks didn’t go viral until Feb. 20, when, at a campaign stop in Ohio, he accused Obama of believing in “some phony ideal, some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible.”

A biblical view, said Santorum, would be “about the belief that man is – should be – in charge of the Earth and have dominion over it and be good stewards of it,” whereas the “radical environmentalist” believes that “man is here to serve the Earth, as opposed to husband its resources and be good stewards of the Earth. And I think that is a phony ideal.”

So, what is the real deal, according to Santorum? On the third day, God raised the dry land up from the waters below the heavens, and commanded the Earth to bring forth all plants and create the bitumen. God saw that it was good.

On the sixth day, God commanded the Earth to bring forth all kinds of living creatures, and he saw that it was good. God then said, “Let us make man in our own image.” So God created man and woman in his own likeness and gave them dominion over all living things, as well as bitumen extraction.

For evangelicals like Santorum, it’s a simple proposition: Resisting bitumen extraction and transport by pipeline is a denial of God’s law.

Santorum is up front with his radical conservative religious beliefs. In contrast, though the influence of evangelicals and social conservatives in his government is a matter of record, Harper keeps his views to himself. Nevertheless, since 2006, Harper has been a member of Ottawa’s Eastgate Alliance church, which is affiliated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance...

Catholics aren't evangelicals, Harper isn't a social conservative and one is more than welcome to walk everywhere if ethical Canadian oil is beneath one's slippery morality.

There are real fanatics about, not lurking in the shadows but in the daylight. They are open and active because they know "writers" like the one who put out such drivel as above will never fortify themselves and write about the things that truly matter. Instead, they imagine things that just aren't there. Santorum isn't running for president any longer and Harper is as socially conservative as any Liberal Party member.

But why let facts get in the way?

(enormous thumbs up)

Write your own headline for this. The topic is quite an open field:

In eastern Paktya province, six Taliban militants were killed and two others wounded Thursday when the roadside bomb they were building in a mosque exploded, said Roullah Samon, a spokesman for the provincial governor. He said four of those killed were foreign fighters.

(with thanks)

Jesús is Spanish for Jesus just like Che Guevara is Spanish for “boy-killer” and “get stuffed” is English for “grow the hell up, you thin-skinned pantywaists”!

A Christian student suspended from a high school in Nova Scotia for sporting a T-shirt with the slogan "Life is wasted without Jesus" vows to wear it when he returns to class next week.

William Swinimer, who's in Grade 12, was suspended from Forest Heights Community School in Chester Basin in Lunenburg County for five days. He's due to return to class on Monday.

The devout Christian says the T-shirt is an expression of his beliefs, and he won't stop wearing it.

"I believe there are things that are bigger than me. And I think that I need to stand up for the rights of people in this country, and religious rights and freedom of speech," he told CBC.

Officials with the South Shore Regional School Board plan to meet with Swinimer to hopefully reach a compromise.

Nancy Pynch-Worthylake, board superintendent, said some students and teachers found the T-shirt offensive.

"When one is able or others are able to interpret it as, 'If you don't share my belief then your life is wasted,' that can be interpreted by some as being inappropriate," she said.

Just like the intellectual and emotional midgets who spell Christians “xtians” or cannot bring themselves to capitalise God or Jesus even though English grammar demands that you do it, these school board officials cannot bring themselves to be adults at any time.

(Muchas gracias)

How is embryonic stem cell research promising again?

Human embryonic stem cells give a whole new meaning to the phrase “taking one for the team.” Unlike any other known human cell type, hESCs are primed to immediately throw themselves on the sword if they experience any DNA damage, according to research published online today (May 3) in Molecular Cell.

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) form the early embryo and eventually give rise to every cell type in the body. Because of this, a rapid self-destruct mechanism activated by DNA damage may prevent potentially dangerous mutations from spreading through the developing organism, the authors concluded.

The data is “convincing,” wrote Christopher Navara, who studies stem cells at the University of Texas at San Antonio and was not involved in the research, in an email to The Scientist. “hES cells have adopted a number of unique cell cycle and cell death regulatory mechanisms” to balance their rapid proliferation with maintaining a stable, healthy genome, he wrote.

Four years ago, Mohanish Deshmukh and colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that neurons—which, unlike stem cells, do not divide—restrict apoptosis, or cell death, allowing them to survive through periods of stress or cell damage that might otherwise stimulate apoptosis. To explore apoptosis at the other end of the development spectrum, the researchers next analyzed human ESCs, which constantly divide.

They had two hypotheses: the hESCs would be highly resistant to apoptosis since there are only about 50 of them in the early embryo and thus each is valuable; or they would be highly sensitive to apoptosis since DNA damage in even a single cell would quickly spread through an embryo. “We figured it could go either way,” said Deshmukh. “We were very curious.”

First, the team doused hESCs in a chemotherapy drug that causes DNA damage. Almost 100 percent of the hESCs died in just 5 hours, compared to 24 hours for fibroblasts. The finding is “consistent with what we and others have observed regarding sensitivity to DNA damage in hES cells,” said Navara.

When Deshmukh’s team stressed the ESCs in other ways, such as damaging the cytoskeleton, the cells did not die as quickly, demonstrating their acute sensitivity to DNA damage. “DNA damage is the one insult these embryonic stem calls can’t tolerate,” said Deshmukh. “It’s catastrophic for them. Any mutations they occur will be propagated rapidly through the system.”

Apoptosis is traditionally a lengthy process that involves the activation of a protein called Bax, which travels to the mitochondria and initiates the release of caspases, or “executioner” proteins that cause cell death. To investigate how hESCs initiate the process so rapidly, the researchers tagged Bax with an antibody that lights up when the protein is active. They were surprised to find that Bax is already active in healthy hESCs, unlike every other cell type in which Bax is activated only when a cell is damaged or dying. “I was stunned,” said Deshmukh. “I thought something was wrong. We spent a lot of time convincing ourselves that these cells were healthy and not actively dying.”

This is Julia. Obama thinks Julia is useless without him. Others think Julia is a ploy worthy of parody. Enjoy. It’s Friday.

Related: the Chosen One has a rather poor resources and jobs record:

A month after the BP (BP) spill the agency debuted new safety rules, under pressure by green groups. The May 2010 announcement included a six-month gulf drilling ban, which shut 33 deep wells.

The decision arguably hurt the region worse than the spill itself, says Joe Mason, a senior fellow at the Wharton School. "Job losses were not too bad until the moratorium," he told IBD.

Interior's estimate was that well closures temporarily cost 8,000-12,000 jobs and $1.2 billion in economic activity. Mason put job losses at 13,000-19,000, lost wages at $800 million and lost tax revenue at $200 million.

When Interior said the engineers backed the ban, the engineers were shocked. The idea of a moratorium never came up in their sessions and was not recommended, five of the seven told IBD. There was no need to stop other wells, they said.

The panel members' colleagues thought they had lost their minds when the news broke, one said. "My phones started melting," recalled Robert Bea, a retired University of California at Berkeley professor.

They issued a joint letter to the administration and gulf-area politicians. "A moratorium was added after the final review and was never agreed to by the contributors," it said. "It will not measurably reduce risk further, and it will have a lasting impact on the nation's economy, which may be greater than that of the oil spill."

The administration said then, and continues to say now, that safety was paramount. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar recognized that the U.S. "could neither afford the risk nor respond to a second catastrophic spill in the gulf," department spokesman Adam Fletcher said. The oil and gas industry "needed to make immediate safety upgrades before resuming deep-water drilling."

But two of the seven engineers told IBD that the moratorium was actually the more dangerous option. "Starting and stopping operations is unsafe in itself," said Ford Brett, a drilling consultant.

(with thanks)

Police Cat SHOULD be a cop show and we all know it.

(paws up)