Tuesday, 20. December 2011

30.000 Französinnen sollen Brustimplantate entfernen lassen


Der Skandal um defekte Brustimplantate nimmt immer größere Ausmaße an. Jetzt kommt es offenbar zu einer beispiellosen Reaktion der Behörden in Frankreich: Laut einem Zeitungsbericht sollen 30.000 Frauen dazu aufgerufen werden, ihre Implantate wieder herausoperieren zu lassen.

Seit mehr als einem Jahr leben Tausende Frauen in Frankreich und auch in Deutschland in Angst: Sie haben sich ihre Brüste mit Silikonkissen vergrößern lassen, bei denen eine erhöhte Gefahr von Rissen und Brüchen besteht. Die Folgen können Entzündungen sein, inzwischen ist sogar die Rede von einer krebserregenden Wirkung der Implantate.

Jetzt ergreifen die französischen Behörden offenbar drastische Maßnahmen: Wie die Zeitung "Libération" berichtet, sollen 30.000 Frauen im Land dazu aufgefordert werden, ihre Implantate wieder entfernen zu lassen. Der Aufruf solle noch vor dem 24. Dezember erfolgen. Das hätten Agnès Buzyn, Präsidentin von Frankreichs Nationalem Krebsinstitut, und Jean-Yves Grall, Chef der französischen Gesundheitsdirektion DGS, bestätigt.

spiegel.de Rückruf von 30.000 Brustimplantaten - auch Österreich betroffen

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Afghanistan to Hollywood: Best Newsy Viral Videos of 2011


Compiling this year's list of the best viral videos proved a slightly more difficult task than just finding cute kittehs and epic fails. In 2011, it seemed, viral videos weren't just watched as a fun distraction from the more somber daily news — they were the news.

From uprisings in Egypt to the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," online video did about as much to inform us about what was happening outside our cubicles as anything.

For example, anyone could read any of a dozen news stories about Occupy protests popping up around the country (and around the world), but do those reports spark the same reaction as watching Lt. John Pike pepper-spray students on the campus of the University of California at Davis? Did anything symbolize the relief of LGBT servicemen and women at the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" more completely than Air Force airman Randy Phillips finally showing his face on YouTube? Most likely not.

wired.com

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The Top 10 Fox News FAILs of 2011


A list of the biggest, most epic Fox News FAILs of the past year. While even Fox admits that most of their shows are not actually "news", viewers still expect them to get their facts straight. Unfortunately for the network (and the IQs of those who watch), this does not always happen. Perhaps this is why polls indicate that FNC fans know less about the news than people who watch no news at all? Just throwing it out there...

1 2011 Study Finds Fox News Actually Makes People Dumber

2 Fox Announces Death of President Obama...Twice

3 Bill O'Reilly Calls Elementary School Science a Mystery

ranker.com

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Tea party fears U.N. intervention in 2012 election


The tea party has added another item to its list of reasons to fear the United Nations: Some in the movement say the U.N. is planning to intervene in the United States’ upcoming elections.

This week, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced his speech on voting rights, the Texas group True the Vote called for a protest of the event because “Holder is for NAACP Plans to involve the United Nations in US Elections.” [Their emphasis.]

True the Vote, a voter integrity initiative launched by the Houston tea party group King Street Patriots, held a national summit this year featuring some of the right’s most incendiary speakers, such as Andrew Breitbart, The Texas Independent reported. According to the Independent, “representatives from more than 25 states attended the two-day national summit in Houston to receive training and information about the conservative organization’s efforts to combat voter fraud.”

americanindependent.com

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Tip for Bad Guys: Burn, Don't Shred


To most people, 10,000 slivers of shredded paper are as good as trash. To three coders in San Francisco, they’re a challenge—especially when the jumbled mass of paper once made up five classified government documents.

The trio were not hackers trying to steal state secrets, but participants in a contest run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the government group that funds high-tech military research. In October, Darpa offered $50,000 to the first group to piece together the shredded documents or the one that made the most progress by Dec. 4. In previous Darpa tournaments, participants have been asked to build robotic cars or use the Internet to find balloons scattered across the country. The goal of the paper shredder puzzle was to unearth technologies that could be used for national security.

businessweek.com

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CIA Releases Documents on Reagan, Intelligence, and the End of the Cold War


In early November, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Information Management Services (IMS) declassified and released more than 200 documents highlighting intelligence the CIA provided to the Reagan Administration on key Soviet issues. The documents covered:

    high-level arms control summits between former US President Reagan and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev,
    Soviet attempts to revamp an increasingly inefficient and failing economic system, and
    evidence of widening fissures in a Soviet society which was becoming increasingly difficult for Party leaders to control.

Highlights of the collection include video briefings** produced by the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence on such topics as the Soviet space program, the Andropov succession, the Chernobyl disaster, and the Soviet media portrait of America. These briefings represent the first time the Agency used videos on a regular basis to deliver intelligence to policymakers. The entire collection marks the first substantial release of such historical material.

cia.gov

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Oscar für die besten Nebendarsteller geht an


Kim Jong Il ist tot - und sein Volk weint. Von "unbeschreiblicher" Trauer berichten die Staatsmedien, das Fernsehen zeigt Hunderte Menschen, die sich auf den Boden werfen und laut schluchzen. Die Frage ist nur: echt oder inszeniert?

Das Regime lässt wehklagen Kim Jong-il death - reaction as it happened Our Unseen Holiday Photos from Kim Jong-il's North Korea Inside North Korea Kim Jong Il's bizarre life as a pop culture icon Nukes, Missiles and Porn: Kim Jong-Il’s Awful Legacy Remembering Kim Jong-Il's Victims Science Explains Why Kim Jong-il Was Just So Crazy 20 Ridiculous Things You Never Knew About Kim Jong-Il Kim Jong-il was an "Internet Expert" Kim Jong Il’s “feminine” son once wrote a poem about getting rid of nukes Things That Made Kim Jong-Il Smile And Frown old shit

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Monday, 19. December 2011

Forensic Examiner Found No Match of Cables on Manning’s Laptop to WikiLeaks’


A day after a government forensic expert testified that he’d found thousands of diplomatic cables on the Army computer of suspected WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, he was forced to admit under cross-examination that none of the cables he compared to the ones WikiLeaks released matched.

Special Agent David Shaver, a forensic investigator with the Army’s Computer Crimes Investigations Unit, testified Sunday that he’d found 10,000 U.S. diplomatic cables in HTML format on the soldier’s classified work computer, as well as a corrupted text file containing more than 100,000 complete cables that had been converted to base-64 encoding.

Six months after Manning was arrested for allegedly leaking documents to WikiLeaks, the site began publishing 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables that ranged in date from December 1966 to the end of February 2010. But Shaver said none of the documents that he found on Manning’s computer, and that he then compared to those that WikiLeaks published, matched the WikiLeaks documents.

wired.com

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Is Berlin Still in the Nuclear Power Business?


The German government may be getting out of the nuclear power business at home, but it is still active internationally. Berlin is currently reviewing applications for federal export guarantees for four nuclear projects abroad. Environmentalists are furious, saying the phaseout must also apply to the sale of atomic energy technology.

Chancellor Angela Merkel was adamant. In a June speech to German parliament on her government's decision to phase out atomic energy in the wake of the March nuclear disaster in far-away Fukushima, Japan, she said "radioactivity is still rising into the atmosphere. ... Fukushima changed my attitude towards nuclear energy."

In the weeks after the disaster, Berlin ordered the immediate shut down of eight reactors. Not long later, her government resolved to decommission the rest by 2022. Now, though, it would appear that German industry is relying on government assistance to pursue the construction of nuclear power plants abroad.

spiegel.de

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Newt Gingrich star fading in Iowa, nationally


Presidential nominee Newt Gingrich's status as Republican front runner is fading after weeks of attack ads from rivals and intense media exposure of his political history and personality.

A Public Policy Polling survey of likely Republican caucus-goers in the key state of Iowa released on Monday showed the former House speaker dropping to third place there from first in the space of a week.

His lead also has evaporated in national poll.

reuters.com Gingrich Implodes in Iowa

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North Korean State Television Breaks the News of Kim Jong Il's Death w/ Crying News Anchor


North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has died of a heart attack, a tearful state television announcer dressed in black reported.

She said that the 69-year-old "passed away from a great mental and physical strain" while on a train trip, on his way to give "field guidance".The news agency said he died at 8:30am on Saturday (local time) of a "severe myocardial infarction along with a heart attack".

abc.net.au cnn.com Timeline: 17 years of Kim's rule

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As the Drug War Goes Underground, Feds Call in the Robot


Suppose, for a minute, that you’re Joe Garcia, the deputy agent in charge of the San Diego office of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. You’ve just got word that your Border Tunnel Task Force has found a drug smuggling tunnel that’s clearly coming from Mexico. What you know about the tunnel: Somebody spent close to $1 million to build it -– tunnels usually turn up after neighbors have alerted police to truck traffic at unusual hours — signs that bales of marijuana are being loaded onto trucks and moved out of warehouses on the U.S. end. You know that it’s the work of a drug cartel –- these days mostly Sinaloa -– so you can assume dangerous people are involved.

As the Drug War Goes Underground, Feds Call in the Robot

wired.com

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