Blog Heap of Links for the day 29 April 2009

Flying the presidential jet over lower Manhattan for a photo op, sending panicked New Yorkers running into the streets, was as "stupid a thing to do as one could dream up," the White House said Wednesday. And it cost far more than the $328,835 the Air Force says it spent.

Anyone in the White House ever hear of Photoshop?

Joe Scarborough, Glenn Beck, and others, on Obama's short, error-prone time in office

North Dakota woman, 26, is facing a child neglect charge for allegedly breast-feeding while drunk ... Since alcohol can pass from mother to child via breast milk, Anvarinia was arrested for neglecting her six-week-old infant ...

A new report from the Institute of Medicine calls for significant reforms to prevent financial conflicts-of-interests in medicine from hindering patient care or the advancement of medical knowledge.... For example, documents revealed in the course of drug marketing litigation recently revealed that a prominent Harvard psychiatrist promised to deliver positive results to major drug maker Johnson & Johnson before the start of some clinical trials.... from 2000 through 2007, the same psychiatrist received $1.6 million from the drug maker, with only a fraction of that reported to Harvard.....

China has dropped long-standing objections to Taiwan participating in the World Health Organization's annual assembly. The development marks a major victory in Taiwan's campaign for greater international recognition.

Taiwan has been pushing for an invitation every year since 1997, only to have their application be repeatedly blocked by China, which sees the democratic island as a Chinese province and therefore ineligible to participate alongside other sovereign states. "It's an inevitable development," says Political Scientist Yang Tai-shuenn of Taipei's Chinese Culture University. "The pressure from the international community has been accumulating. Health is a universal value China cannot continue to reject."

Serdar Tatar received a sentence of 33 years in prison and Mohammad Shnewer drew a life sentence from U.S. District Judge Robert Kugler in a Camden, N.J., courtroom, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. They joined Cherry Hill, N.J., brothers Dritan, Eljvir and Shain Duka, each of whom received life sentences Tuesday for their roles in the plot, for which they were convicted of conspiracy to kill U.S. soldiers after an eight-week trial.

The World Health Organization said on Wednesday the world is at the brink of a pandemic, raising its threat level as the swine flu virus spread and killed the first person outside of Mexico, a toddler in Texas.

The boss of Ryanair has claimed only people living in 'slums' will be affected by swine flu. Michael O'Leary's comments came as a four-year-old boy from a small Mexican village was identified as the earliest confirmed victim of the illness.

Alarmed by the spread of a new swine flu virus, airports around the world have rushed to install temperature scanners to pick out the sick, but the microbe is proving too clever for modern technology.

AirTran Airways Flight 85 from Cancun, Mexico radioed ahead to the airport about the two men, said airport spokesman Jonathan Dean. They had fevers and were sick to their stomachs.... the men just had too much to drink.

Egypt began slaughtering the roughly 300,000 pigs in the country Wednesday as a precautionary measure against the spread of swine flu even though no cases have been reported here yet ... The move immediately provoked resistance from pig farmers. At one large pig farming center just north of Cairo, farmers refused to cooperate with Health Ministry workers who came to slaughter the animals and the workers left without carrying out the government order....

A member of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has dismissed claims that more than 150 people have died from swine flu, saying it has officially recorded only seven deaths around the world.

It sounds like something out of a movie: Labor unions looking for payback from a president they helped elect squaring off against big business interests with deep pockets hoping to thwart a possible law they say would hamper their businesses. ... Here's what all the fuss is about: On March 10, a bill called The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA ) was introduced to both the House and Senate. The bill eliminates the veto power employers hold over the card-signing method of obtaining majority votes needed to unionize a work place. Since the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, employers have had the right to call for a private ballot vote. "They look at this bill and it makes their blood boil," says Brad Close, vice-president of public policy for the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) in Washington....

magniture 3.4 quake was centred 37 kilometres west-southwest of Bay Roberts, which is located on the island's Avalon Peninsula.

The Dynamic Designs Challenge will invite teams of students around the world to take part in a unique competition to design a building for an earthquake zone.

A Nielsen report this week revealed that Twitter has an uncanny knack for hemorrhaging users. In fact, some 60 percent of new users bail on the service within a month. For those of us who've been tweeting for a couple of years, this isn't exactly a shocker. Many longtime users have gone through that initial period of wondering what, if any, use Twitter might be. And maybe it's better for everyone if those who don't get it refrain from tweeting until they do.

Last year, a team of Swiss and Australian social scientists published a study concluding that the practice of self-Googling (or "ego-surfing," as it's sometimes called) can partly be traced to a rise in narcissism in society, but that it is also an attempt by people to identify and shape their personal online "brand." The authors of the survey no doubt returned to their cubicles and Googled themselves to see if the study was posted online. (It is.... To give people a bit more control over search results, Google introduced a feature this week it calls a "Google profile," which users can create so that a thumbnail of personal information appears at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. Once users create a Google profile, their name, occupation and location (and photo if they choose) appears in a box on the first page of the search results for their name. Next to the thumbnail info, there's a link to a full Google profile page that in many ways resembles a Facebook page.

"I would remind anyone who doubts the results that this is an Internet poll.... Doubting the results is kind of the point."

Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) noted this morning that more than half of federal inmates are locked up for drug-related crimes, including high ratios of African American offenders. In 2007, Durbin said, 82 percent of people convicted on crack possession charges were black, and only 9 percent were white.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

"X-Men Origins: Wolverine," premiering May 1, seems a straightforward concept. The X-Men movies were popular, and Wolverine was the most popular character, so make a movie about him. But there's really nothing straightforward about the history of the feral X-Man -- and the movie won't make it any simpler. Let me X-plain....

A prequel to the "X-Men" trilogy made between 2000 and 2006, "Wolverine" is silly and typical, not in spite of but because it bonds an undeveloped family feud onto the main character's renegade story.

The asteroid impact and dinosaur extinction, say the authors, may not have been simultaneous, instead occurring 300,000 years apart. That's an eyeblink in geologic time, but it's a relevant eyeblink all the same — one that occurred at just the right moment in ancient history to send the extinction theory entirely awry. ... "Not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact." ...

Once the province of shopping mall mavens, gum-snappin' waitresses and Amy Winehouse, bouffant was in and big hair was beautiful, if only for one night. The ladies — and one gent — of the International Fantasy Hair Competition proudly wore their hair hats high in the name of art and a good cause.

JAMES REAVIS (1843-1914) The Man Who Stole Arizona ... Ranchers from Scottsdale to Morenci, big-city bankers and merchants in downtown Phoenix, Papago Indians along the Santa Cruz River, Mormon farmers in Safford, and even cowboys in the Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico read and reread the legal notices that had been posted in public places across the territory.... said that all persons occupying land over the entire 18,750 square-mile territory under any and every title were "to communicate immediately with Mr. Cyril Barratt, attorney-at-law and agent general, representing Mr. James Addison Reavis, for registering tenancy and signing agreements, or regard themselves liable to litigation for trespassing and expulsion when the Peralta Grant is, as it must be, validated by the U.S. government."

probably the most ambitious seismological project ever conducted... USArray ... to run what amounts to an ultrasound scan over the 48 contiguous states of the US. Through the seismic shudders and murmurs that rack Earth's innards, it will build up an unprecedented 3D picture of what lies beneath North America. ... 400 transportable seismometers - will sweep all the way from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Having started off in California in 2004, it is now just east of the Rockies, stretching from Montana's border with Canada down past El Paso on the Texas-Mexico border. By 2013, it should have reached the north-east coast, and its mission end. ... "It is our version of the Hubble Space Telescope. With it, we'll be able to view Earth in a fundamentally different way..."