Wikileaks to release new Iraq files 'seven times bigger than the first'

Wikileaks has announced it will release a third set of war logs which will be seven times bigger than the last batch.

In a defiant posting on its official Twitter account, the website’s founders said it was ‘under intense pressure’ over the disclosure but vowed to press ahead anyway.

‘The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined. Keep us strong,’ they added.

The Twitter post from Wikileaks which promises to redefine 'global history'

It is not yet clear what the new logs would cover but such a vast information dump would create another firestorm in Britain and the U.S.

Generals on both sides of the Atlantic are still furious over the last set of 400,000 classified documents which covered the war in Iraq, the biggest military leak of all time.

The new leak is expected to total as many as three million documents.They detailed what Wikileaks founder Julian Assange called 'compelling evidence of war crimes' by the U.S. led coalition and the Iraq government and sparked calls for a full inquiry.

A far larger set of war logs could contain even more damaging revelations about similar crimes, or throw up entirely new incidents involving coalition troops.

They also raise the possibility of individual officers being named as perpetrators of ‘war crimes’ and special forces agents in the field having their identities revealed.

On Wikileaks’ Twitter page, its founders posted a rallying call to its supports and vowed to press on with publication.

‘Next release is 7x the size of the Iraq War Logs. intense pressure over it for months. Keep us strong,’ it said.

Should Wikileaks go ahead with its promise, it will be the third time it has published such information in the face of opposition from military top brass around the world.

The first batch was about the war in Afghanistan and gave a grim picture of the day-to-day struggle against the Taliban and the frustrations of trying to train the Afghan police.

The second covered the period in the occupation of Iraq between 2004 and 2009 and contained revelations that America failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, rape, torture and murder by Iraqi police and soldiers.

The information also revealed that more than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents - U.S. and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.

British soldiers patrol on a street in Kabul. Officials have complained that the Wikileaks could be endangering servicemen's lives

In addition, the logs claim that in one incident a British rifleman shot dead an eight-year-old Iraqi girl as she played in the streets.

The information will almost certainly have come from the Bradley Manning, the dissident U.S. army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have leaked the first tranche, some 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters and civilian killings in Afghanistan.

Adding to the controversy is the international arrest warrant which has been issued for Mr Assange by Swedish prosecutors over allegations of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion.

The allegations, which the 39-year-old Australian has repeatedly denied, relate to two women he met while on a visit to Sweden in August.

Assange’s London lawyer Mark Stephens, has said the claims were 'false and without basis’.

A Pill To Block Out The Bad Memories

There are some things everyone would rather forget – and scientists believe they may be able to help us do just that, with a pill that would block out painful memories.

In a medical breakthrough, researchers have discovered that proteins can be removed from the brain’s fear centre to wipe out traumatic memories.

Their findings could be of benefit to soldiers who have experienced distressing events and victims of violence. They could even help us get over the hurt of a painful break-up.

The U.S. research has parallels to the plot of the science fiction film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, which starred Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey. 

In the 2004 film, a couple’s past is wiped in a fictional procedure called ‘targeted
memory erasure’. For the U.S. study, scientists at Johns Hopkins University used rats to try to focus on the part of the brain that copes with fear.

They discovered a ‘window of vulnerability’ when unique receptor proteins are created in the brain as painful memories are made.

Because the proteins are unstable, they could be removed with drugs to eliminate the memory forever.

‘When a traumatic event occurs, it creates a fearful memory that can last a lifetime and have a debilitating effect on a person’s life,’ said researcher Professor Richard Huganir. 

He said his findings ‘raise the possibility of manipulating those mechanisms with drugs to enhance behavioural therapy for such conditions as post-traumatic stress disorder’.

Although the scientists used mice in the tests, they believe the results would be the same in humans. 

Breakthrough: The idea of wiping out traumatic memories has parallels with the plot of the film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

The rodents were conditioned using electric shocks so they would fear a tone. The sound then triggered the creation of the proteins, which formed for just a day or two in the fear centre, or amygdala, of the mice’s brains.

The Johns Hopkins scientists are working on re-opening the window by artificially recalling the painful memory and using drugs to get rid of the protein.

Professor Huganir believes the window may exist in other centres of learning in the brain and the treatment may one day be used to alleviate pain or combat alcohol or drug addictions.

However, Kate Farinholt, of a mental health support group in Maryland, warned there are still many unanswered questions. ‘Erasing a memory and then everything bad built on that is an amazing idea,’ she said.

‘But completely deleting a memory is a little scary. How do you remove a memory without removing a whole part of someone’s life, and is it best to do that, considering that people grow and learn from their experiences?’

Paul Root Wolpe, of the Centre for Ethics, at Emory University in Atlanta, said: ‘Human identity is tied into memory. It creates our distinctive personalities. It’s a troublesome idea to begin to be able to manipulate that, even if for the best of motives.’

Facebook launches Email service

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said last night email would go the way of the letter because it is too slow and informal.

The 26-year-old made the claim as he launched the social networking site's new messaging service, which integrates all web and text-based communications and works instantaneously.

The service, perceived as a direct rival to Google's Gmail, marks a new front in the ongoing and increasingly bitter battle between Facebook and Google to gain the loyalty of users.

Domination: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg talks about the new messaging service rumoured to be a 'Gmail-killer'

Mr Zuckerberg revealed that, as rumoured, the 500million people signed up to Facebook will have access to a ‘Facebook.com’ email address.

Entire conversation histories going back years will also be saved into users’ accounts and Spam will be completely filtered out, he claimed.

'We don’t think that a modern messaging system is going to be email,'
Zuckerberg said at a press conference in San Francisco.

'We want people to be able to communicate in whatever way they choose: email, text or Facebook message.'

Speculation had been mounting that Facebook’s email account would be a ‘Gmail Killer’, in reference to Google’s successful email service

Facebook’s new email system is modelled on instant messaging and on-line chat and will allow people to simplify their communications regardless of how they choose to do it.

Texts, email or instant messages will all come into one ‘feed’ and users can respond in any way they want.

One person could text a friend, for example, who will see the message come up on their Facebook page instantly and respond via an instant message or email.

Battling Google: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, pictured earlier this year, has launched a new messaging service which could rival Google's Gmail

Mr Zuckerberg said that he was changing Facebook because young people found email was too much of a ‘cognitive load’.

He said of the new programme: ‘It’s not email. It handles email... along with all the different ways you want to communicate.

'It’s true people are going to be able to have Facebook.com email addresses but this is not email. Email is one way people are going to use this system, but we don’t even think it’s going to be the primary way.

‘The goal of this product is to make it that we can seamlessly integrate across all of these different products very easily.’

Facebook's director of engineering Andrew Bosworth said that, over the course of time, users could look back on their relationships with friends going back years in a modern-day version of keeping letters in a box.

The changes will be rolled out over the coming months on an invite-only basis before being offered to all users worldwide.

Commenting on the launch, Eden Zoller, principal analyst at Ovum, said: 'An email service from Facebook makes a lot of sense. 

'It has a huge base of 500 million users that already love to communicate and share, and Facebook is giving them richer ways to do this through virtual gifts, games, location and even voice thanks to the recent integration deal with Skype.

'Adding email to the mix is a logical step and Facebook could tap into user data to provide an attractive, highly personalised service. You would also expect it to push mobile features given its big move in this direction. '

Ease of access: Facebook aims to integrate text, web and email services for its 500million users

The move will certainly alarm Facebook's nearest rivals such as Yahoo and Google.

In recent months the relationship between Facebook and Google has become increasingly fraught amid the poaching of staff and efforts to throw up barricades to prevent users from easily shifting information, such as email contact lists, between the two platforms.

The changes to Facebook have been under development for more than a year and will be rolled out over the forthcoming months on an invite-only basis before going worldwide.

Last week, Google began blocking a Facebook feature that allows users to automatically import Gmail contact data into the social networking service.

Google accused Facebook of siphoning up Google data without allowing for the automatic import and export of Facebook users' information.

They are also increasingly vying for engineering talent in Silicon Valley. This week, Google internally announced plans to boost salaries by 10 per cent, according to media reports, in a move viewed as an effort to staunch an exodus of engineers and managers to Facebook.

Google has banned Facebook from importing its users' email contacts, a move it says it made because Facebook refused to allow the export of contact and friend data from within user profiles.

A new style of messaging: Mark Zuckerberg unveils Facebook's newest feature in San Francisco

The expected announcement by Facebook comes as former internet big-hitter AOL is opening the doors to its new web-based email program, code-named Project Phoenix, for a limited number of users. Starting next year, anyone will be able to sign up for access to a beta test site.

The Project Phoenix inbox page was designed to make it easier to fire off a quick email, text or instant message with just a few clicks on a ‘quick bar’ at the top of the page.

People can also send short replies directly from the inbox page, without having to click on a message first. The new design displays thumbnails of recent photo attachments at a glance, and lets people toggle between several open emails at a time.

Israel to resume Ethiopian airlifts

 

Israel's cabinet has approved a scheme to allow into the country nearly 8,000 Ethiopians of Jewish descent.

Many members of the Falash Mura community are living in poor conditions in transit camps in northern Ethiopia.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israelis had a moral duty to resolve the "complex humanitarian crisis".
The Falash Mura's ancestors converted to Christianity under pressure in the 19th Century and so are not eligible to emigrate under Israel's Law of Return.
Thousands who were deemed eligible by Israel have arrived in smaller groups in recent years, but the flow was largely halted in 2008.

At the weekly cabinet meeting, Mr Netanyahu said the remaining Falash Mura would be brought to Israel over the next three years. Six hundred would arrive as soon as next year, and in the three years that follow 200 would make the move each moth, he added.

"These are the seeds of Israel - men, women and children - that currently find themselves in the worst living conditions"

"The government of Israel wants to solve this problem, because there is a difficult humanitarian crisis there," the prime minister told ministers.
"These are the seeds of Israel - men, women and children - that currently find themselves in the worst living conditions," he added.
Ethiopia's last remaining Jewish community, the Falash Mura trace their roots to the biblical King Solomon.
But they are not eligible to enter Israel under the Law of Return, which guarantees a place in the country for every Jew, because they have largely been unable to prove they are Jewish.
Ethiopian Jews who kept their faith throughout centuries of adversity were flown to Israel by the thousands in the 1980s and early 1990s.
The last mass immigration was in 1991, when Israel organised an airlift of 15,000 people who had fled fighting at the end of Ethiopia's civil war.
More than 100,000 Jews from Ethiopia are believed to live in the country. They make up one of the poorest sections of Israeli society.

Green Float: The bizarre new concept that sees humans in the future live in giant skyscrapers on floating water lillies

Humans in the future could live in mini floating cities that drift across the Pacific as if on giant water lilies.

The startling new concept has been dreamed up by Japanese technology firm Shimizu and is designed to be a way of harnessing green technologies and creating carbon-neutral cities.

The Green Float concept involves a number of cells, each one kilometre wide, that house between 10,000 and 50,000 people.

The majority of people on the cells would live in huge towers 1km high surrounded by lush green fields

The majority of people on the cells would live in huge towers 1km high surrounded by lush green fields

Each individual cell would be free to float on the Pacific Ocean near the equator but could also be joined together with other cells to form larger towns and even cities.

A group or modules, a collection of cells, would become a country in its own right.

Most people in this brave new world would live in a 1 kilometre-high ‘City in the Sky’ at the centre of each cell. More people would live in residential areas around the edge of the cell.

The central towers would be surrounded by grassland and forests and be self-sufficient in terms of food, while livestock and other farming would take place in 'plains' also surrounding the tower - all built on a lattice of 7,000-tonne honeycomb pontoons.

The towers would be built from super-light alloys with the metal deriving from magnesium in seawater.

The imaginative plan is designed to create a future carbon-neutral society and the Shimizu developers claim that living on cells in this way would cut carbon emissions by 40 per cent.
The floating cells

The floating cells, each with a City in the Sky structure at its centre, can join together to form larger modules

The City in the Sky skscrapers are designed to be carbon negative

The City in the Sky skscrapers are designed to be carbon negative with extensive environmental technologies and recycling facilities built in

The cells would create zero waste and recycle every product and covert waste into energy using new green technologies. Islands of waste would drift around the ocean and could be ‘harvested’ to provide energy

The location of the islands is key to their success too, the designers claim.

Each group of cells would be near the equator where the climate is at its most stable and a range of technologies would be used to protect the floating cities from tidal waves and extreme weather.

To protect the inhabitants from large waves, strong elastic membranes would be attached to the lagoons around the outer edge of the cells, with the shallows above the membranes standing 30 feet above sea level.

Shimizu scientists calculate that the water pressure difference between the lagoons and the ocean would limit the movement of the membranes and buffer the force of the open sea waves.

Seawalls as high as 100 feet could also be constructed. And tsunamis in the open sea are far less dangerous than those that hit coastal areas, the designers say.
Enlarge A country consisting of one million people would be formed after modules joined together one by one

A country consisting of one million people would be formed after modules joined together one by one

Lightning rods would be fitted around the circumference of the towers and mesh lightning conductors will be placed on the exterior walls to protect against lightning strikes.

Shimizu wants to develop the first cells by 2025 and is concentrating on developing the technologies to make it happen. The concept was displayed at a recent Japanese university conference.

This is the not the first outlandish idea that Shimizu has come up with. The firm also proposes encircling the moon in a belt of solar collectors that would collect solar energy and transmit it to Earth.

YOUR CELLPHONE RISKS YOUR LIFE

WARNING: Holding a cellphone against your ear may be hazardous to your health. So may stuffing it in a pocket against your body.

Enlarge This Image

San Francisco officials voted to require retailers to display how much radiation each cellphone emits. A supporter of the rule wore a button at City 

I’m paraphrasing here. But the legal departments of cellphone manufacturers slip a warning about holding the phone against your head or body into the fine print of the little slip that you toss aside when unpacking your phone. Apple, for example, doesn’t want iPhones to come closer than 5/8 of an inch;Research In Motion, BlackBerry’s manufacturer, is still more cautious: keep a distance of about an inch.

The warnings may be missed by an awful lot of customers. The United States has 292 million wireless numbers in use, approaching one for every adult and child, according to C.T.I.A.-The Wireless Association, the cellphone industry’s primary trade group. It says that as of June, about a quarter of domestic households were wireless-only.

If health issues arise from ordinary use of this hardware, it would affect not just many customers but also a huge industry. Our voice calls — we chat on our cellphones 2.26 trillion minutes annually, according to the C.T.I.A. — generate $109 billion for the wireless carriers.

The cellphone instructions-cum-warnings were brought to my attention by Devra Davis, an epidemiologist who has worked for the University of Pittsburgh and has published a book about cellphone radiation, “Disconnect.” I had assumed that radiation specialists had long ago established that worries about low-energy radiation were unfounded. Her book, however, surveys the scientific investigations and concludes that the question is not yet settled.

Brain cancer is a concern that Ms. Davis takes up. Over all, there has not been a general increase in its incidence since cellphones arrived. But the average masks an increase in brain cancer in the 20-to-29 age group and a drop for the older population.

“Most cancers have multiple causes,” she says, but she points to laboratory research that suggests mechanisms by which low-energy radiation could damage cells in ways that could possibly lead to cancer.

Children are more vulnerable to radiation than adults, Ms. Davis and other scientists point out. Radiation that penetrates only two inches into the brain of an adult will reach much deeper into the brains of children because their skulls are thinner and their brains contain more absorptive fluid. No field studies have been completed to date on cellphone radiation and children, she says.

Henry Lai, a research professor in the bioengineering department at the University of Washington, began laboratory radiation studies in 1980 and found that rats exposed to radiofrequency radiation had damaged brain DNA. He maintains a database that holds 400 scientific papers on possible biological effects of radiation from wireless communication. He found that 28 percent of studies with cellphone industry funding showed some sort of effect, while 67 percent of studies without such funding did so. “That’s not trivial,” he said.

The unit of measurement for radiofrequency exposure is called the specific absorption rate, or SAR. The Federal Communications Commission mandates that the SAR produced by phones be no more than 1.6 watts per kilogram. One study listed by Mr. Lai found effects like loss of memory in rats exposed to SAR values in the range of 0.0006 to 0.06 watts per kilogram. “I did not expect to see effects at low levels,” he said.

The city of San Francisco passed an ordinance this year that requires cellphone retailers to post SARs prominently. This angered the C.T.I.A., which announced that it would no longer schedule trade shows in the city.

The association maintains that all F.C.C.-approved phones are perfectly safe. John Walls, the association’s vice president for public affairs, said: “What science tells us is, ‘If the sign on the highway says safe clearance is 12 feet,’ it doesn’t matter if your vehicle is 4 feet, 6 feet or 10 feet tall; you’re going to pass through safely. The same theory applies to SAR values and wireless devices.”

The association has set up a separate Web site, cellphonehealthfacts.com. Four attractive young people are seen on the home page, each with a cellphone pressed against the ear — and all four are beaming as they listen. By this visual evidence, cellphone use seems to be correlated with elation, not cancer.

The largest study of cellphone use and brain cancer has been the Interphone International Case-Control Study, in which researchers in 13 developed countries (but not the United States) participated. It interviewed brain cancer patients, 30 to 59 years old, from 2000 to 2004, then cobbled together a control group of people who had not regularly used a cellphone.

The study concluded that using a cellphone seemed to decrease the risk of brain tumors, which the authors acknowledged was “implausible” and a product of the study’s methodological shortcomings.

The authors included some disturbing data in an appendix available only online. These showed that subjects who used a cellphone 10 or more years doubled the risk of developing brain gliomas, a type of tumor.

The 737 minutes that we talk on cellphones monthly, on average, according to the C.T.I.A., makes today’s typical user indistinguishable from the heavy user of 10 years ago. Ms. Davis recommends keeping a phone out of close proximity to the head or body, by using wired headsets or the phone’s speaker. Children should text rather than call, she said, and pregnant women should keep phones away from the abdomen.

The F.C.C. concurs about the best way to avoid exposure. It is not by choosing a phone with a marginally lower SAR, it says, but rather by holding the cellphone “away from the head or body.”

It’s advice that I find hard to put into practice myself. The comforting sight of everyone around me with phones pressed against their ears, just like me, makes the risk seem abstract.