Keys Corner

It has taken a long time, but finally respectable figures in the USA are talking in terms of members of Bush’s government being war criminals. See today’s Guardian:

Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, singled out Mr Cheney in a wide-ranging political assault on the BBC’s Today programme.

Mr Wilkerson said that in an internal administration debate over whether to abide by the Geneva conventions in the treatment of detainees, Mr Cheney led the argument “that essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions”....

...Asked whether the vice-president was guilty of a war crime, Mr Wilkerson replied: “Well, that’s an interesting question – it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is … an international crime as well.” In the context of other remarks it appeared he was using the word “terror” to apply to the systematic abuse of prisoners…

I wouldn’t surprise me if, when we have put more distance between ourselves and the events of the last 5 years, historians look on some senior members in the current US government in a similar light to members of the German government in the mid 1930’s / 1940’s. History has a way of catching up with people who bend the rules to suite themselves , as Augusto Pinochet has found out recently.

Winter has come here too – it has been snowing on and off since Thursday evening, and no sign that it is going to stop soon.

The current Iraqi government, installed as a result of the USA’s goal of introducing democracy into the Middle East, is now committing human rights attrocities as bad as those under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record says Ayad Allawi (the country’s first Prime Minister since Saddam’s downfall) in today’s Observer:

‘People are doing the same as [in] Saddam’s time and worse,’ Ayad Allawi told The Observer. ‘It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.’...

...In a chilling warning to the West over the danger of leaving behind a disintegrating Iraq, Allawi added: ‘Iraq is the centrepiece of this region. If things go wrong, neither Europe nor the US will be safe.’

Phenolic compounds in olive oil, which have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and anti-clotting properties, may explain cardiovascular health benefits associated with the so-called Mediterranean Diet, according to a new study in the Nov. 15, 2005, issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

A ten year project to develop genetically modified peas, by adding a protein from beans that causes them to be resistant to pea weevil pests, has been abandoned after it was shown that although the protein alone does not cause an allergic reaction in mice or people, the treated peas cause a lung allergy in mice. Researchers think the allergy is caused by subtle differences in the structure of the protein after it is introduced into the peas.

(A similar experiment had to be halted in the early 1990’s when researchers at a company called Pioneer Hi-Bred International engineered a more nutritious strain of soya bean for use in cattle feed by adding a gene taken from brazil nuts. It was considered possible that the nut protein could enter the human food chain and after it was discovered that the modification was likely to trigger a major attack in people with brazil nut allergies, the project was stopped.)

Did you know that Japanese years are counted using the name of the reigning Emperor followed by the year of his reign? To complicate things, the first year of a new reign is usually not a full 365 days long – the Japanese years increment by 1 every January 1st, not on the anniversary of the start of the Emperor’s reign.

Greenland’s glaciers seem to be melting down fast: the giant Jakobshavn glacier, which is four miles wide and 300 m thick is now moving towards the sea at a rate of 34 meters a year; the normal annual speed of a glacier is just 30 cm per year.

And the front of the Helheim glacier which has remained in the same place since records began, has retreated four and a half miles in the last four years. Previously scientists talked in terms of the Greenland icecap melting completely over the next 1000 years, but now experts think it could be gone within less than half that time. However, the most pressing issue is that the melting ice threatens to disrupt the Gulf Stream, responsible for Europe’s mild climate, which is driven by very salty water sinking off and drawing warmer water in to replace it.

Oil? Apples? Well, if you are in the group of 36% of the British children aged 8 – 14 who didn’t know, that could be what you think:

... a British Heart Foundation (BHF) survey found that 36 per cent of youngsters aged eight-14 could not correctly identify the main ingredient of chips as potato.

Nearly one in 10 (nine per cent) of the children questioned thought chips were made of oil, with others suggesting eggs, flour and apples.

More than a third of children (37 per cent) also failed to identify that cheese was mostly made of milk.

The BHF is worried that kids need better nutrition education, as they don’t understand the consequences of unhealthy eating. They are running a campaign to try and wean (well, scare) them off eating fast food, by showing photographs of images of burger rolls filled with gristle, connective tissue, bone and the other ingredients that go into burgers, chicken nuggets and hot dogs.

Some time ago, I bought an HP 2550L colour printer. I soon realised there was a problem – I couldn’t find the software (HP Toolbox), which HP’s product specification says is on the driver CD, to control the setup of the printer under Mac OS X.

I raised an issue about it in the HP support forum. For over a year there was no reply from HP, only further reports from others that they were also having this problem and also some people were additionally having a problem with slow black and white printing.

Today, one of the people, Mel Beckman, who has commented in the past on my posting reported that HP has recently told him that they never put the software on the CD and never completed development of it either. However, HP still state that the software is on the CD in their product specs and printer handbook. After escalating his problem to their management, HP has offered to take back his 2550N (the same printer as mine, but with a network card pre-installed) and sell him a different printer that works with the Mac (at list price) at a price over 60% more than he paid for his original printer, and having consumables which are twice as expensive as on the 2550N. Very generous.

Customer service and honesty like HP’s deserve to be rewarded – they are now on my blacklist. No more HP products in this household – ever.

Here is Mel’s posting in full:

Read the rest of this entry »

Forget BMI as a risk factor for heart attacks. A new study published in the Lancet shows that when other factors are are taken into account, the body mass index (BMI) is irrelevant as a predictor for heart attacks, but that the ratio of your waist to hip measurements gives an excellent warning of your risk.

Divide your waist measurement by your hip measurement. If you are a man, and the result is under 0.90 you are not at risk, if you are a woman, the factor to beat is tougher- you need to be under 0.85 to be considered healthy.