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Private security guards hired by Alaska GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller handcuffed a progressive blogger and claimed that the blogger was “under arrest” after the blogger asked Miller a question about why he was disciplined in a previous job

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Harvard University neurobiologists have created mice that can “smell” light, providing a potent new tool that could help researchers better understand the neural basis of olfaction.

The work, described this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience, has implications for the future study of smell and of complex perception systems that do not lend themselves to easy study with traditional methods.

“It makes intuitive sense to use odors to study smell,” says Venkatesh N. Murthy, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. “However, odors are so chemically complex that it is extremely difficult to isolate the neural circuits underlying smell that way.”

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With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother—it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak—‘child hero’ was the phrase generally used—had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.

And in real life…

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Imagine if, an hour from now, a robot-plane swooped over your house and blasted it to pieces. The plane has no pilot. It is controlled with a joystick from 7,000 miles away, sent by the Pakistani military to kill you. It blows up all the houses in your street, and so barbecues your family and your neighbours until there is nothing left to bury but a few charred slops. Why? They refuse to comment. They don’t even admit the robot-planes belong to them. But they tell the Pakistani newspapers back home it is because one of you was planning to attack Pakistan. How do they know? Somebody told them. Who? You don’t know, and there are no appeals against the robot.

Now imagine it doesn’t end there: these attacks are happening every week somewhere in your country. They blow up funerals and family dinners and children. The number of robot-planes in the sky is increasing every week. You discover they are named "Predators", or "Reapers" – after the Grim Reaper. No matter how much you plead, no matter how much you make it clear you are a peaceful civilian getting on with your life, it won’t stop. What do you do? If there was a group arguing that Pakistan was an evil nation that deserved to be violently attacked, would you now start to listen?

no, “when his lips are moving” is too simple…

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Words To Watch Out For: ‘We’ And ‘Our Team’

Checklist:

• Pedophile priests? Good catholics who have simply made mistakes.
• Nuns who offer abortion counsel when the alternative is the death of both the mother and the child? Automatically Excommunicated.
• Anglican priests who want to preserve their own religious freedoms while denying the same to women and gays? Welcome aboard!
• Fictional character on a cartoon, who identifies as protestant, whose family was widely considered the counterpoint to family values and who basically uses the seven deadly sins as a checklist? True Catholic!

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A man accused of being a ringleader of the vandalism seen during the G20 summit protests in Toronto this summer was forced to sign strict bail conditions that bar him from speaking to the media, nearly two dozen people and members of several organizations, his family says.

Alex Hundert, 30, faces three counts of conspiracy pertaining to G20 activities. His family says Mr. Hundert initially refused to sign the stringent bail conditions —the likes of which one expert says he’s never seen before.

[..]

On Tuesday, Justice of the Peace Inderpaul Chandhoke clarified Mr. Hundert’s bail terms, including the no-demonstration rule, which forbids him from speaking to the media, planning, participating in, or attending any public event that expresses views on a political issue.

Mr. Hundert, who is under house arrest, also cannot post “anything public” on the Internet, Mr. Norris said.

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Many of the most popular applications, or "apps," on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook’s rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure.

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This is how the U.S. government and American media jointly disseminate propaganda: in the immediate wake of some newsworthy War on Terror event, U.S. Government officials (usually anonymous) make wild and reckless — though unverifiable — claims. The U.S. media mindlessly trumpets them around the world without question or challenge. Those claims become consecrated as widely accepted fact. And then weeks, months or years later, those claims get quietly exposed as being utter falsehoods, by which point it does not matter, because the goal is already well-achieved: the falsehoods are ingrained as accepted truth.