Blog Heap of Links for the day 22 June 2009

As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding "secret energy meetings" with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama's "clean coal" policies.

killed at least 14 people earlier Monday, hours after gunmen fired rockets at local army bases.

A U.S. Navy destroyer is tailing a North Korean ship suspected of carrying illicit weapons toward Myanmar.... suspects the cargo ship Kang Nam is carrying missiles and related parts...

North Korea has accused US President Barack Obama of plotting a nuclear war on the communist nation... At a summit with Lee in Washington Wednesday, Obama warned that North Korea is a "grave threat" and vowed to defend South Korea....

"Which is why no one likes to hang with Tyrese," says his costar Kevin Dunn, mentioning the potential global embarrassment of candid -- and yes, possibly drunken -- photos being sent out to "everyone on the planet." "Here's me, with a glass of tequila on my forehead," says Dunn, as everyone laughs.

President Obama signed into law today the toughest new measures ever on the tobacco industry designed to stop young people from smoking, a powerful habit that the president himself started as a teenager -- and one he is still grappling with on a day-to-day basis.... [IMPEACH THE HYPOCRIT & FREE TOBACCO! (And I REALLY hate tobacco!]

In the first presidential address in 136 years to a joint session of France's two houses of parliament... President Nicolas Sarkozy... "The burqa is not a religious sign, it's a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement—I want to say it solemnly.... It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic...."

four dead from the collision, and officials say there are 67 people injured... may be as many as three more dead in the part of the train that was the most severely damaged.... trains were traveling in the same direction when one rear ended the other when one train stopped and the other did not

Bombings and shootings killed more than 30 people across Iraq on Monday, including high school students on their way to final exams, part of a new round of violence ahead of next week's deadline for U.S. troops to withdraw from urban areas.

Estimating the chronology of population migrations throughout mankind's early history has always been problematic. The most widely used genetic method works back to find the last common ancestor of any particular set of lineages using samples of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), but this method has recently been shown to be unreliable, throwing 20 years of research into doubt. The new method refines the mtDNA calculation by taking into account the process of natural selection - which researchers realised was skewing their results - and has been tested successfully against known colonisation dates confirmed by archaeological evidence, such as in Polynesia in the Pacific (approximately 3,000 years ago), and the Canary Islands (approximately 2,500 years ago).

Plastic containers should be rinsed out... Plastics should be separated into three types... [HOW TO KILL INTEREST IN RECYCLING]

Charges against a former Bartlesville Police Department reserve officer accused of attempting to stop a motorist on south U.S. Highway 75 in April were dismissed Friday

"When the human eye searches for an object it looks globally for the rough location, size and orientation of the object. Then it zeros in on the details," said Jiang, an assistant professor of computer science. "Our method behaves in a similar fashion, using a linear approximation to explore the search space globally and quickly; then it works to identify the moving object by frequently updating trust search regions."

Scientists have discovered that the original statistical model used to calculate dinosaur mass is flawed, suggesting dinosaurs have been oversized.... implications for numerous theories about the biology of dinosaurs, ranging from their energy metabolism to their food requirements and to their modes of locomotion....

radar to give them a 3-D close-up of the San Andreas Fault... will map the fault segment by segment, repeating the same radar observations in hopes of measuring deformations in the crust that might occur between observations...

The developers of the Blu-ray high-definition video format may have beat HD DVD on the technology, but both are losing the war for the hearts and minds of video consumers who look to cable, satellite and the Internet for video.

Iranian police massing in force broke up a demonstration over the disputed presidential election just hours after the Revolutionary Guards said they would crush further protest.... used tear gas and fired shots into the air... helicopters hovered overhead...

Physical violence permeated Scientology's international management team…. Staffers are disciplined and controlled by a multilayered system of "ecclesiastical justice….' the church muscled the IRS into granting Scientology tax-exempt status…. The defectors are liars, they say, bitter apostates who have dug up tired allegations from the Internet and inflated the importance of the positions they held….

A tiny radio chip is arousing fear — but also great enthusiasm. Is it a threat to everything that we know as personal data protection, or the optimal way of keeping track in a chaos of products?

a jet stream deep inside the sun is migrating slower than usual through the star's interior, giving rise to the current lack of sunspots.

first-ever comprehensive computer model of sunspots. The resulting visuals capture both scientific detail and remarkable beauty.

If it were in a position to do so, Al Qaeda would use Pakistan's nuclear weapons in its fight against the United States, a top leader of the group said in remarks aired Sunday.... [wearing a sign that said "SHOOT US!"...]

introduced the amateur color film in 1935 and it became the first commercially successful color film... sales are just a fraction of 1% of the company's still-picture film revenue... Kodak estimates that current supplies of the film - which is slide or transparency film, not the more familiar color negative film - will last until early this fall....

"Don't be afraid, Neda dear, don't be afraid," a white-haired man says desperately in Persian. Another man presses on her chest, trying to keep her alive. Scarlet blood gushes from her nose and mouth and courses across her pale face. Men and women scream in horror as they realize she is dead or dying. The death of the woman identified as Neda Agha Soltan was captured on amateur videos and spread around the world in less than 48 hours...turned the woman described as a 27-year-old music student into an instant icon of the clash between Iran's cleric-led government and the self-described "green wave" movement that claims hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole his June 12 re-election through fraud....

It was a dramatic weekend in the relatively small city of Shishou in Hubei province [China]. Tens of thousands of rioters torched a hotel and overturned police cars, after the authorities allegedly tried to cover up the murder of a 24-year-old man as a suicide.... It's a strange story, and it gets stranger...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has plans to crack down on blogosphere payola with guidelines that would impose penalties on bloggers who promote products without adequate disclosure.... [WHY?] first time a government agency is attempting to hold bloggers accountable for the content they produce...

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a narrow ruling related to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.... ruled that a small voting district in Texas can seek to be exempted from the law's requirement that any changes in voting procedures must be approved in advance by the federal government....

People make value judgments about others based on their facial expressions. A new study shows that -- after looking at a face for only 100 milliseconds -- we can detect expressions of happiness and surprise faster than those of sadness or fear.