The European Union has a Constitution!

After public rows and exhausting negotiations, Europe's leaders have agreed on a constitution for the EU. Now they must sell it to sceptical voters and parliaments.

IT WON'T be remembered as Europe’s “Philadelphia moment” but they got the job done. Late Friday June 18th, the leaders of the EU’s 25 member countries finally agreed on the text of a constitution for the EU.

The single document (strictly speaking, a constitutional treaty) will replace the series of treaties which have governed the EU to this point, and which were illegibly complex. With over 200 pages the new constitution is not exactly pretty itself. It is far from the elegant document that its champions hoped would reconnect the EU’s apathetic voters with the European project.

The constitution will give the EU a full-time president, serving for two-and-a-half years at a time, in place of the current system of rotating six-month stints between the member countries' heads of government. This president will work alongside a single foreign minister for Europe (a job currently divided between two people), as well as the existing presidency of the European Commission, the EU’s executive.

Economist.com | The EU Constitution

Bush told he is playing into Bin Laden's hands

Al-Qaida may 'reward' American president with strike aimed at keeping him in office, senior intelligence man says

A senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an "avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands.

Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, due out next month, dismisses two of the most frequent boasts of the Bush administration: that Bin Laden and al-Qaida are "on the run" and that the Iraq invasion has made America safer.

In an interview the "Anonymous" official described al-Qaida as a much more proficient and focused organisation than it was in 2001, and predicted that it would "inevitably" acquire weapons of mass destruction and try to use them.

He said Bin Laden was probably "comfortable" commanding his organisation from the mountainous tribal lands along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Pakistani army claimed a big success in the "war against terror" yesterday with the killing of a tribal leader, Nek Mohammed, who was one of al-Qaida's protectors in Waziristan.

But Anonymous, who has been centrally involved in the hunt for Bin Laden, said: "Nek Mohammed is one guy in one small area. We sometimes forget how big the tribal areas are." He believes President Pervez Musharraf cannot advance much further into the tribal areas without endangering his rule by provoking a Pashtun revolt. "He walks a very fine line," he said yesterday.

Imperial Hubris is the latest in a relentless stream of books attacking the administration in election year. Most of the earlier ones, however, were written by embittered former officials. This one is unprecedented in being the work of a serving official with nearly 20 years experience in counter-terrorism who is still part of the intelligence establishment.

Read the Guardian Article:
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Bush told he is playing into Bin Laden's hands

Beam me up, Scotty! Quantum teleportation is here!

Ever since the writers of Star Trek chose to have their characters beam down to the surfaces of planets using a cheap special-effects trick, rather than going to the expense of mocking up and filming a shuttle craft, scientists and sci-fi nuts have been fascinated by the idea of teleportation.

Although no one has succeeded in teleporting so much as a single sub-atomic particle, some have managed to teleport the quantum states those particles are in. These states describe the exact characteristics of a particle, so in theory a body could be reconstructed particle by particle if enough quantum states were teleported.

Until now, the only particles this has been done for are photons, the particles of light. But two papers in this week's Nature describe how to do it for electrons, which are rather more substantial.

Read the full article in the Economist:
Economist.com | Quantum teleportation: "Two groups have succeeded in teleporting quantum states in atoms

Pax Christi USA will bring international election monitors to Florida

Pax Christi USA, the Catholic peace movement, announced that it will bring international election monitors to Florida to monitor the upcoming Presidential elections in November.

Although they usually monitor elections in developing democracies they plan to take up posts at Florida precincts in November in hopes of averting another debacle when voters pick the next U.S. president.

Four years after Florida became the object of international ridicule, officials for the Catholic group Pax Christi USA will place monitors from 30 countries at polls in four Florida counties that were at the center of the 2000 U.S. presidential election dispute.


Pax Christi USA News: "Pax Christi USA announces it will bring international election monitors to Florida. "

Proba - The Little Satellite That Could



Just 60x60x80 cm and weighing only 94 kg, ESA�s Project for On-Board Autonomy satellite, better known as Proba, is one of the most advanced small satellites ever flown in space.

The spacecraft was launched in October 2001 as a piggyback payload on India�s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), from the launch station at Shriharikota - a small island 100 km from Madras. Since its launch, ESA�s Proba micro-satellite has been returning remarkable imagery of some of our planet�s major landmarks with a compact instrument called the High Resolution Camera.

Proba�s high-performing computer system and technologically advanced instruments have enabled it to demonstrate and evaluate onboard operational autonomy, new spacecraft technology both hardware and software, and to test Earth observation and space environment instruments in space.

Its main payload is the Compact High Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (CHRIS), a compact hyperspectral imager that returns detailed data on the Earth�s environment, seeing down to a resolution of 18 metres.

Also aboard is the compact High-Resolution Camera (HRC), which acquires black and white 25-km square images to a resolution of five metres.

Proba was originally created as a technology demonstration mission, and has a high degree of onboard autonomy.

Operators on the ground send up the raw inputs of a target to be imaged � latitude, longitude, and altitude � and Proba itself does the rest.

Visit the Proba Website to check out some spectacular images:
ESA - Proba

Genome of Sudden Oak Death bug cracked

The genome of the fungal pathogen that causes Sudden Oak Death has been sequenced by US scientists.

It is the first member of the Phytophthora family to be sequenced. The researchers hope that the map of P. ramorum's genetic code will pinpoint genes and their proteins that will allow them to detect, track and treat the disease.

The completion of the sequence coincides with heightened worries over the spread of the Sudden Oak Death in the US following the discovery in March that an infected California nursery had spread the disease nationwide through plant shipments.

Plant pathologists now fear that the East coast Appalachian forests could be infected. The infection would not show up for at least a year.

The disease has also been discovered in nurseries and some nature parks in the UK and the Netherlands.

New Scientist: "Genome of Sudden Oak Death bug cracked"

Free Subway rides for smoggy San Francisco days

Morning commuters will get free rides on BART, the San Francisco subways system, on particularly smoggy days this summer.

A new free-ride program aims to clean the skies by getting people to abandon their cars and ride public transportation.

This is the Bay Area's first attempt at a regional incentive program to use mass transit and reduce air pollution. Although other cities have tried something similar -- with mixed results -- local officials say it is the biggest free-ride experiment yet.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission will pay BART to throw open its fare gates and let everyone ride free during the morning commute for the first five weekday "Spare the Air" days of the year -- when the Bay Area is in danger of violating federal air quality standards.

Those days typically occur during the summer and early fall when meteorologists forecast a high pressure system bringing hot weather, long hours of sunshine and few breezes -- prime conditions for a buildup of polluting ozone.

Read the whole article:
Spare the air, open the gates / Free BART rides set for 5 smoggy days

Dialed in to social change

AT A TIME WHEN the headlines are full of greedy CEOs, suspicious offshore accounts and shady stock market deals, Laura Scher, CEO of Working Assets, is making a different kind of news.

Her $140 million company - providing credit cards and long distance telephone and wireless service - donates 1 percent of its profits to progressive nonprofit groups such as Planned Parenthood, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, the Children's Defense Fund and Doctors Without Borders.

Since 1985, Working Assets has donated $40 million to organizations working for peace, social justice, human rights, equality, education and the environment.

"My MasterCard spending alone may rescue a Third World country," comedian Paula Poundstone once joked. "It's the lazy man's activism."

Read the whole article here:

Marin Independent Journal - Lifestyles