NEW INFORMATION

Badawi demands sanctions on Israel

2009-01-08T23:17:00.000-08:00

Malaysia's leader on Thursday called for sanctions on Israel for conducting lethal military strikes on Gaza, saying the international community has a "moral duty" to save the Palestinian people.
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Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said in a speech to Malaysian and foreign diplomats that international sanctions have been applied for various breaches of the code of international conduct, and should be expanded to include violation of moral standards.

"On the issue of morality, Israel has to be sanctioned," Abdullah later told reporters. He denounced as "absolutely immoral" Israel's "excessive deployment of military power" in its air and ground offensive on Gaza since Dec. 27 that has left at least 688 Palestinians dead.

More than 3,000 people have been injured and some 5,000 people have fled the border area in the operation aimed at snuffing out Hamas militants who have been firing rockets at Israel. Ten Israelis have been killed in the Hamas attacks.

Muslim-majority Malaysia is a staunch critic of Israel.

Abdullah did not elaborate on whether the sanctions should be economic or military, saying it is up to the United Nations to decide. Still, the proposal is unlikely to see the light of day s any sanctions must be approved by the UN Security Council where the US, Israel's main ally, has veto power.

The Security Council has so far failed to agree on action to end the escalating crisis in Gaza, but Egypt plans to host separate talks with Israel and Hamas on a cease-fire proposal. Abdulah said any cease-fire effort must include Israel withdrawing from Gaza.

But in a moderate success for Malaysia, Indonesia and other Non-Aligned Movement countries' efforts, the president of the UN General Assembly has agreed to its proposal to hold an emergency special session on the humanitarian situation in Gaza later Thursday. However, any resolution adopted by the 192-member world body would not be legally binding.

But in Jakarta Indonesian legal experts said that the UN General Assembly's emergency session will not be effective in ending the agony of thousands of civilians in war-torn Gaza.

"World leaders will assemble at the UN emergency meeting and issue a resolution condemning Israel and beseech the country to stop its illegal offensive against Gaza. But that is all. It will not be effective," University of Indonesia professor of international law Hikmahanto Juwana said on Wednesday in Jakarta.

Indonesia's well-known human rights activist Todung Mulya Lubis agreed with Juwana, saying there was no guarantee the resolution would settle the escalating Israel-Palestine conflict.
AsThe Jakarta Post, , Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta | Fri, 01/09/2009

Happy New year...2009

2008-12-30T02:11:00.000-08:00

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all his friends, age does not feel that the more we grow, year 2008 has been through quickly at the end of this year hopefully we can be the best plan which we hope ... we hope that in the new year 2009 with increasing age also increases in knowledge, provision , and lengthen age ... hopefully god with us forever .. successfully make all his friends ... happy new year.

The return of Elektro, the first celebrity robot

2008-12-25T20:11:00.000-08:00

WHEN Jack Weeks first saw the racy comedy in the 1960s, he was taken aback to see his childhood friend in a leading role. More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that his buddy was actually a golden 2.5-metre-tall humanoid robot called Elektro.

Elektro was one of the world's first celebrity robots. Built by electrical manufacturer Westinghouse, and with electrical controls that were remarkably advanced for the time, he drew huge crowds at . During the second world war, the robot was stored in the basement of the Weeks's family home in Ohio, where he became 8-year-old Jack's playmate. After the war, Elektro went back on the road, touring the US to adoring crowds, but his star soon began to wane. Shortly after 1960 and the release of Sex Kittens - in which Elektro starred alongside blonde bombshell Mamie Van Doren and a chimp called Voltaire - the robot's career hit a low. Not long after that, Elektro disappeared entirely.

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But Weeks never forgot his golden friend and thanks to a series of lucky breaks, he eventually managed to track down and acquire Elektro's head, torso and limbs. Now in his seventies, Weeks sees the robot as a monument to Westinghouse's pioneering work, and is close to returning his long-lost playmate to full working order. This is their unlikely tale.

Elektro was built in 1937 at Westinghouse's plant in Mansfield, Ohio, as a promotional aid to advertise its household products. By pouring all its electrical know-how into the robot, the company created a machine that could walk, talk, smoke and perform counting tricks. Elektro rapidly became a star, and received a rapturous welcome at the New York World's Fair in 1939.

The incredible ingenuity of Elektro's design was topped off by his sleek exterior. There was no remote control. Instead, the robot relied on a combination of motors, photoelectric cells, telephone relays and record players to perform 26 preprogrammed routines, each one initiated by voice commands from a human co-star. These were spoken into a telephone connected to the robot's chest, where circuitry converted each syllable into a pulse of light and transmitted it to a photoelectric cell. A second circuit added up the syllables and triggered relays to operate the corresponding electromechanical functions: a command with three syllables, for example, would start the robot's routine, and four syllables would stop it. As part of these routines, Elektro would raise and lower his arms, turn his head, move his mouth, count on his fingers and even smoke a cigarette and puff out smoke.

The robot could also respond to questions by using relays to switch between a bank of phonographs playing 78 rpm voice recordings that were hidden behind a curtain. This gave Elektro a vocabulary of 700 words and an extensive repertoire of banter: "I am a smart fellow as I have a very fine brain of 48 electrical relays," he would tell the crowd. "It works just like a telephone switchboard. If I get a wrong number I can always blame the operator. And by the way, I see a lot of good numbers out in our audience today."

By 1940, Westinghouse had beefed up its show with an electric dog called Sparko that performed tricks under Elektro's command. However, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, Westinghouse cleared its factory for war production and Elektro was sent home with John Weeks, one of the engineers who maintained him. In 1942, his son Jack discovered the giant mechanical man in the basement and did what any 8-year-old would do: he dressed the gold robot in hats or feathers and rushed home from school every day to play with him in games like cowboys and Indians. But when the war ended, his friend disappeared. "I came home from school one day and the basement was empty," Weeks recalls. "I never imagined that I would see it again."

For the next decade or so, Elektro was kept busy on promotional tours all over the US in a truck dubbed the Elektromobile. Weeks grew up and, like his father, became an engineer and even worked part-time at the Mansfield plant. But by the late 1950s, Westinghouse and the public had grown tired of Elektro and he was shipped off for display at an amusement park in Oceanside, southern California.

The next time Weeks saw Elektro was in (tag line: "You never saw a student body like this"). Elektro played Thinko, "the greatest electronic brain in the world". In one scene, Thinko shares a bourbon with Voltaire the chimp while watching a succession of strippers, including Brigitte Bardot's sister, Mijanou. Elektro, with jaunty hat and tight sweater, moans repeatedly and flashes his eyes. "The film's a riot," says Weeks.

Elektro eventually returned to Westinghouse, but with the advent of modern computers, the company lost interest in the robot, and its body and legs were packed in their crates and forgotten. Sparko disappeared too, and, sometime in the 1970s, Westinghouse executive Harold Gorsuch, their creator, was given Elektro's head as a retirement present.

This turned out to be a stroke of luck for Weeks. By coincidence, his brother moved into Gorsuch's house a few years later and they found Elektro's head discarded in the basement. Boyhood memories flooded back and Weeks kept Elektro's head on his coffee table for years, always hoping that he might eventually recover the robot's body. He had to wait almost 30 years.

In 1990, Westinghouse closed its Mansfield plant and Weeks lent the company Elektro's head for the farewell party. A photo of the head in a local paper brought a man called John McDivitt to Weeks's workshop. McDivitt claimed that he had bought the Elektromobile at a Westinghouse auction in the mid-1980s and in the back he had found two crates containing limbs and a torso. Weeks was amazed, and rushed to McDivitt's cluttered shed where he delved among the crates. Disappointment soon set in: he didn't recognise the torso - it was in very poor condition and was silver rather than gold. McDivitt wanted a fortune for it, so Jack reluctantly walked away.

That disappointment lived with Weeks for a long time and in 2004, after a local museum asked whether it could borrow the head for an exhibition, he decided to take a second look at the robotic body he had rejected. It turned out that McDivitt had died some years earlier so Weeks tracked down his brother-in-law. By chance he still had the crates, and this time Weeks was able to get another look at the objects. By now the silver paint had worn off revealing a gold finish, as well as some of the other features that had appeared to be missing on first sight. It was Elektro after all.

This time Jack bought the parts for $500 and restoration began. Eventually, Weeks moved Elektro to a small museum in Mansfield so that others could share the robot, and some of those who worked on Elektro in the old days, now in their 80s and 90s, came to visit. So far the robot's arms and head can move, but Weeks doesn't have the voice systems, and the drive unit is missing from the legs. In fact, he has almost given up hope of finding these parts. And now, just four years after reuniting Elektro's head and body, Weeks is preparing to part with his treasured companion once and for all: he wants Elektro to go to the in Dearborn, Michigan, where he could be seen by up to 1.5 million people each year. Yet he still holds some hope that Elektro won't travel alone: the robot's trusty friend Sparko may still be crated up in someone's garage, he suggests, and it could suddenly show up, mechanical tail wagging. "Who knows," he sighs, "but wouldn't it be great? It would make me really happy to see them together again."

Noel Sharkey is professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, UK

Communication and Information

2008-12-25T19:42:00.000-08:00

Overall Objective

UNESCO's overall objective through its current programme of work, Major Programme V on Communication and Information (CI) is to promote the free flow of ideas by word and image, while broadening access to this information in order to:
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Ensure the free flow of information conducive to advancement of societies and their democratic functioning
Help ensure equitable access to opportunities for sharing knowledge and promoting the creativity that technologies provide
Assist countries in building up their skills in communication and information; to improve infrastructures - media, libraries, archives, information services and networks - and to promote the training of professionals

Strategies

In striving to reach the programme goal, Communication and Information (CI) pursues the following strategies:

Promoting meetings for the cooperative development of projects and programmes

Fostering education and sustainable training in information science

Promoting Freedom of the Press - building on the advances in the region

Providing a visionary evaluation device

Forging institutional networks for research, workshops and seminars

Promoting electronic equipment for information service handling

Madoff Dealings Tarnish a Private Swiss Bank

2008-12-24T06:47:00.000-08:00

Now, as the links between and elite private banks like Geneva-based Union Bancaire Privée emerge, this well-polished reputation has been tarnished by the $50 billion that Mr. Madoff has been arrested for and accused of running.

L’Affaire Madoff, as it has become known here and in Geneva, has cast an unwanted spotlight onto the normally shadowy world of private bankers in Switzerland and other cozy hiding places of offshore wealth, like the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg.

And while there are many Swiss victims in terms of total exposure, UBP is the best-known private bank to get hit, with $700 million of its clients’ money invested with Mr. Madoff.

Founded in 1969 by Edgar de Picciotto, UBP quickly became a giant in the conservative world of Swiss banking, where partnerships like Pictet and Lombard Odier stretch back more than 200 years.

With assets of $125 billion and a client base of wealthy individuals, families and institutions that reach from Qatar to Uruguay to Russia and throughout Europe, it is one of Switzerland’s biggest pipelines for channeling client money into hedge funds worldwide.

About six years ago, that business, known as a fund of funds, began to rake in larger fees when it decided to set up a vehicle called M-Invest Ltd to funnel cash to Mr. Madoff’s firm.

Through this relationship, UBP claimed it was able to gain close insight into Mr. Madoff’s investment operations, through copies of trade tickets and an unusual degree of access granted by Mr. Madoff himself to UBP’s representatives, according to a confidential internal letter sent to investors on Dec. 17, obtained by The New York Times.

The memorandum, while seeking to reassure investors, could raise questions about why UBP, unlike others who claimed to have seen red flags, did not use its access to delve more deeply into the unusually consistent annual returns that Mr. Madoff’s funds were reporting.

According to the memo, “We have met with Bernard Madoff and various principals several times at Madoff’s office, twice within the last year, and have had numerous conversations in between.” The letter stated that several of UBP’s senior investment professionals met with Mr. Madoff in 2004 and 2007, and that UBP’s structured risk analysis unit “had a full review in 2006 and recently in 2008 with Madoff himself.”

The UBP letter acknowledges some concerns over how Mr. Madoff’s firm combined investment management and brokerage services. But the Geneva bank said it “found comfort” in the fact that the firm was subject to “routine” audits by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Finra, another securities regulator, as well as “Madoff’s longstanding reputation in building Wall Street’s markets infrastructure.” M-Invest was regulated by the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, where it was incorporated.

UBP was also closely tied to Fairfield Greenwich Group, the New York investment company that was the single biggest gatherer of money for Mr. Madoff, sending $7.3 billion his way and collecting more than $500 million in fees as a result.

Michael de Picciotto, a nephew of the founder and a top executive of UBP, is a close friend of Andrés Piedrahita, a son-in-law of Walter Noel, the founder of Fairfield Greenwich. Mr. Piedrahita played a key role in raising much of the money from Europe and South America that ended up with Mr. Madoff.

UBP was the also main investment adviser, custodian and leverage provider to Fairfield’s huge fund of funds business and Mr. de Picciotto in turn was a key adviser to Fairfield, according to an internal document prepared by Fairfield last year for a potential buyer of the firm. In addition, UBP is listed as the sixth-largest investor in Fairfield’s funds, for which the bank provided “qualitative and quantitative research and operational due diligence,” according to the letter.

At one point, the letter boasted that Mr. de Picciotto could provide insight into UBP’s investment and asset allocation strategy. Through these connections, UBP became entwined with Mr. Madoff’s investments even as competitors like, which turned up a series of red flags during routine due diligence in 2003 at Mr. Madoff’s New York headquarters, steered clear.

“Ultimately, these people were blind to what was going on,” said Michel Dominicé, a veteran Geneva hedge fund manager with $200 million under management.

35 Iraq Officials Held in Raids on Key Ministry

2008-12-18T04:00:00.000-08:00

BAGHDAD — Up to 35 officials in the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior ranking as high as general have been arrested over the past three days with some of them accused of quietly working to reconstitute Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, according to senior security officials in Baghdad.

The arrests, confirmed by officials from the Ministries of the Interior and National Security as well as the prime minister’s office, included four generals, one of whom, Gen. Ahmed Abu Raqeef, is the ministry’s director of internal affairs. The officials also said that the arrests had come at the hand of an elite counterterrorism force that reports directly to the office of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

The involvement of the counterterrorism unit speaks to the seriousness of the accusations, and several officials from the Ministries of the Interior and National Security said that some of those arrested were in the early stages of planning a coup.

None of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the subject, provided details about that allegation.

But the arrests reflect a new set of political challenges for Iraq. Mr. Maliki, who has gained popularity as a strong leader but has few reliable political allies, has scrambled to protect himself from domestic rivals as the domineering influence of the United States, his leading backer, begins to fade.

Rumors of coups, conspiracies and new alliances abound in the Iraqi capital a month before provincial elections. Critics of Mr. Maliki say he has been using arrests to consolidate power.

But senior security officials said there was significant evidence tying those arrested to a wide array of political corruption charges, including affiliation with Al Awda, or the Return, a descendant of the Baath Party, which ruled the country as a dictatorship for 35 years, mostly under Mr. Hussein. Tens of thousands of Iraqis died or were persecuted, including Mr. Maliki, a Shiite Muslim, by the Baath Party. It was outlawed after the American invasion in 2003.

While most members of the Baath Party were Sunni Muslims, as Mr. Hussein was, those arrested were a mix of Sunnis and Shiites, several officials said. It was unclear precisely how many Interior Ministry officials were detained.

A high-ranking Interior Ministry official said that those affiliated with Al Awda had paid bribes to other officers to recruit them and that huge amounts of money had been found in raids.

He said there could be more arrests. Some of those under arrest belonged to the now-illegal party under Mr. Hussein’s government. Mr. Maliki’s office declined to comment. But one of his advisers, insisting that he not be named because he was not authorized to speak, said the detainees were involved in “a conspiracy.”

The Ministry of the Interior is dedicated to Iraq’s internal security, and includes the police forces. The ministry has a history of being heavily infiltrated with Shiite militias, though it has improved considerably over the past two years.

A police officer, who knows several of the detainees but spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said they were innocent, longstanding civil servants and had little in common with one another. Those who once belonged to the Baath Party were lower-level members, he said, insisting that the arrests were politically motivated.

Interior Minister Jawad Kadem al-Bolani, who has not been implicated and is out of the country, has his own political ambitions and has been expanding his secular Iraqi Constitutional Party. Iraq is a nation where leadership has often changed by coup, and as next month’s provincial elections approach, worry about violence is increasing. So are accusations about politically charged detentions.

The counterterrorism unit involved in these arrests is alleged to have conducted a raid this summer on the Diyala provincial governor’s office, during which an employee was killed and a provincial council member, one of the few Sunnis Arabs on the council, was arrested.

At a later protest against the arrest, several other Sunni politicians were detained. A number of politicians who follow the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, and who have set themselves up as political rivals to the prime minister, have also been arrested over the past months and charged with terrorist activities.

Anxieties about the government’s treatment of political enemies were also raised this week as the American military, as part of the recently approved security agreement, turned over to Iraqi custody on Monday 39 senior officials from the Hussein government. Some have been convicted already and others are scheduled to stand trial, the United States military said in a statement.

Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni lawmaker, charged that the safety of the prisoners was in jeopardy. “I think these people are not going to be treated well and that is the American responsibility,” he said.

Badeei Araf, a lawyer who said he represented 11 of those being turned over, said at least two appeared on the “most wanted” deck of cards that the United States publicized early in the invasion in 2003. But, he said, neither Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali and awaiting execution, nor Tariq Aziz, the public face of the Hussein government, were among those transferred.

On Wednesday morning, a bomb planted in a minibus exploded near a parking lot belonging to an Iraqi traffic police station in the Nadha neighborhood of Baghdad, killing up to 18 people and injuring scores, police officials said. Some Iraqi officials put the death toll at eight.

A small blast in a market of barbershops and butchers drew people out of their homes before the minibus exploded. The attack appeared to be directed at the police station; at least three of those killed were police officers.

Also on Wednesday morning, Gordon Brown, the prime minister of Britain, made a surprise appearance at a news conference in Baghdad with Mr. Maliki, where he confirmed that British forces would end their operations in Iraq by the end of May and would withdraw from the country by the end of June. (NY time)

Alcohol in the holiday season

2008-12-17T02:11:00.000-08:00

As the holiday season nears, Bali's tourism businesses are asking the government to provide some leeway on alcohol imports following the recent shortages.

As of December, certain products, particularly European ones such as whiskey, vodka and tequila, are still hard to find, even after all the complaints lodged by businesses from the alcohol scarcity of over three months ago.

Reasons behind the sudden shortage remain unclear. Customs officials said there had been no increase in duties on imported alcohol. Some experts blamed tightened bureaucracy.

Several businessmen went so far as to call the shortage part of an effort to weed out European brands to make way for Chinese brands.

Whatever the theory, tourism businessmen said Bali could only end up with the short end of the stick should the alcohol shortage last any longer.

Ngurah Wijaya, head of the Bali Tourism Board, said a prolonged alcohol shortage would pose a "major problem" for the island's tourism industry.

"The government must remember that alcohol products bring in up to 80 percent of Bali's tourism revenue.

"This means the industry is going to experience a major income loss due to this shortage, especially with the ongoing global financial crisis," he said.

He urged the government to provide some leeway, such as making trade deals to allow unrestricted traffic of imported alcohol from certain countries to the island.

"Europe, the United States and Australia remain our most trusted exporters for alcohol, we should be making trade deals with them soon for alcohol," he said.

I Gde Wiratha, chairman of the Bali Chamber of Commerce and Industry who is also the owner of a number of high-class night clubs, said the prolonged shortage showed a lack of government commitment and support of Bali's tourism industry.

"How can the government allow Black Label (a local alcoholic beverage) to sell for up to Rp 1.2 million? How are we supposed to make money? Who will want to spend that much money?" he said.

He criticized the government for allowing this to last through the holidays, calling it a snub to Bali's tourism industry.

"Just imagine, Singaporeans pay three times less than we do here for alcohol. How is that supporting the industry?"

Meanwhile, most restaurants, hotels and bars continue to struggle to supply guests with alcoholic drinks.

Aulianty Fellina, marketing communications manager from the Hard Rock Hotel in Bali, said the hotel was facing a 100 percent price increase in alcoholic drinks due to shortage.

"Right now we don't have a shortage because we have a good stock of alcohol, but I can't say that we won't be affected and we may end up raising prices, although we're still holding to the current prices," she said.

Jeanie Grace, a spokesperson for Sector Bar, said her establishment had also been struggling to find certain beverages, but was encouraged by the opportunity to introduce local drinks.

"Right now we're just looking at the bright side, it's still going to be Christmas, we have a lot of events planned and it's going to be a good time to promote some locally made drinks," she said.

Cases of religious violence up: Report

2008-12-16T10:57:00.000-08:00

Religious violence is on the rise in the world’s largest Muslim country according to a report by the Wahid Institute, which places the blame on the government for its failing to crack down on radical groups.

The institute, a moderate Islamic think tank founded by former president Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid to promote pluralism in Indonesia, reported that religious freedom-related violence had increased throughout the country, with 232 cases reported this year compared to 197 last year.

Many of the incidences of violence were perpetrated by state authorities, according to the annual report released on Human Rights Day, Wednesday.

“The acts of violence against religious freedom were 60 percent carried out by civilian groups and 33 percent by the state,” the report said.

It said the state perpetrators included local administrations, police, legislators, courts and the Religious Affairs Ministry.

Civilian perpetrators were identified as members of the Islam Defenders Front (FPI), the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) and the Communications Forum for Religious Harmony.

The frequency and severity of the violence increased from last year, the report said. It noted that the government had been weak in administering punishment, which it said set a worrisome trend for the future.

The institute said violations against religious freedom had come in the form of physical attacks, raids, destruction of houses of worship and accusations of apostasy and heresy.

The report recorded some 50 cases of violence this year, which were sparked by issuances of fatwa by the MUI against certain groups it branded “heretical or deviant”.

“MUI fatwa against specific groups are often used to legalize violence and stereotyping,” said Ahmad Suaedy, executive director of the Wahid Institute, which is headed by Gus Dur’s daughter, Yenny Zannuba Wahid.

Suaedy criticized the government for bowing to pressure from hard-liners to disband the Jamaah Ahmadiyah sect.

The government in June this year issued a joint ministerial decree banning Ahmadiyah from disseminating its doctrine.

“It is an example that the mobilization of masses can be used to force the government to take actions that can be conceived as constitutional violations. If (it allows) such practices to continue, the government is investing in a future disintegration of the nation,” Suaedy said.

In its report, the institute lists the “Monas tragedy” as the worst act of violence against pluralism in 2008, referring to an event in which activists from the National Alliance for Freedom of Religion and Belief were attacked by members of the FPI, injuring 70 people, including Suaedy.

National Commission on Human Rights chairman Ifdal Kasim warned that including religious affairs in state policies could lead to attacks against religious freedom.

“This contradicts the principles of human rights that oblige the government to protect its citizens, and (uphold) religious freedom,” he told a discussion on the report.

Students of Denpasar’s SMAN 2 state senior high school

2008-12-15T02:23:00.000-08:00

HONESTY MEAL: Students of Denpasar’s SMAN 2 state senior high school purchase items from the Honesty Cafeteria, a school canteen opened to mark Anti-Corruption Day. (JP/Wasti Admodjo)HONESTY MEAL: Students of Denpasar’s SMAN 2 state senior high school purchase items from the Honesty Cafeteria, a school canteen opened to mark Anti-Corruption Day. (JP/Wasti Admodjo)

The Bali Prosecutor's Office and Karang Taruna youth organization on Tuesday opened the "Honesty Cafeteria", a school canteen at SMAN 2 state senior high school, Denpasar, to mark Anti-Corruption Day.

The cafeteria is part of an ongoing effort to instill the traits of honesty and truthfulness into young Indonesians, traits that are expected to play a pivotal role in preventing the future spread of corruption.

Chief prosecutor Budiman Raharjo said Anti-Corruption Day was an important time to remind the public about the serious dangers posed by corruption.

Corruption could greatly disrupt the country's social, economic and political order, he said.

The Honesty Cafeteria, Raharjo said, was a model to measure students' truthfulness. Like any other school canteen, the cafeteria sells food, drinks, snacks and writing books. The only important difference is that the Honesty Cafeteria has no staff. Not even one adult is in the canteen serving the students.

Each item for sale in the cafeteria carries a price tag. Students can take any item they want and drop their money in a payment box, from which they can also take their change.

If a student chooses to take something without paying, there is no punishment -- it is all about honesty and, certainly, dishonesty.

"The seed money to establish the cafeteria was provided by the Bali Prosecutor's Office. The seed money was Rp 3 million," said Bali Karang Taruna deputy chairman I Wayan Suartana.

"The existing school canteen will coordinate with the prosecutor's office in managing the new cafeteria."

The cafeteria is the first of its kind on the island, although similar cafeterias have been established in schools in other provinces. Suartana said he hoped other schools in Bali would soon open similar canteens.

The principal of SMAN 2, Ketut Sunarta, urged his students to use the cafeteria as a chance to prove their honesty.

"This is the perfect time for us to prove who we are and what our school is made of," he said in a speech to students.

One of the students, Gede Indra Surya, said he was proud his school had been selected for the pilot project.

"It seems like a small thing, but the lessons learned from this cafeteria will create major impacts in the future," he said.

He was optimistic that he and his fellow students would be able to maintain the cafeteria.

Head of Denpasar Education Agency, I Gusti Lanang Jelantik, said similar cafeterias would soon be established at the city's junior high and elementary schools.

Bapepam didn’t bark

2008-12-13T01:27:00.000-08:00

The idea of getting ripped off in a scam is depressing enough, but to see regulators wash their hands of the matter as though they lacked the authority to detect and prevent the fraud is no less frustrating.

SHORTCHANGED: Bank Century customers gather at the lender’s branch in Senayan, South Jakarta, on Wednesday, demanding the bank take responsibility for the losses they suffered from their investment in mutual funds issued by the bank’s partner Antaboga Delta Sekuritas. (JP/Ricky Yudhistira)

Hundreds of people, hemorrhaging money through an investment product issued by PT Antaboga Delta Sekuritas and sold by Bank Century, protested Wednesday at the Capital Market and Financial Institutions Supervisory Agency (Bapepam-LK) office after storming Century’s headquarters earlier in the day.

“How come Bapepam and Bank Indonesia claim they know nothing about the product?,” said Budi, an investors who stands to lose more than Rp 5 billion.

He rejected a recent statement by Bapepam that Antaboga was not authorized to issue such a product, which usually comes in the form of a mutual fund. “They’ve been selling it for years, so how could Bapepam miss it all this time?”

Yolanda, another victim, was incensed over Century’s recent claims that it could not be held responsible because the product was not a “banking product” and the lender only acted as a reseller.

“As Century customers, we were approached by the bank’s staff about the product. So how could can they not be held responsible now this has been revealed as a fraud?” she said.

Antaboga is linked to Century through its 7.44 percent stake in the lender.

The Century-Antaboga case unfolded weeks ago after hundreds of investors were unable to redeem their investments from Antaboga, through the Deposit Insurance Corporation (LPS), following Century’s recent takeover by the government.

The investors later reported the matter to Bapepam, which in turn reported it to the police. On Dec. 4, the National Police announced Antaboga president director Hendro Wiryanto and two other Antaboga executives, director Anton Tantular and commissioner Hartawan Aluwi, as suspects in the case.

Anton is the brother of Robert Tantular, a key shareholder in Century.

The police said reports from Century customers earlier this month showed the three executives allegedly embezzled a total of Rp 233 billion (US$21.4 million). That figure, however, jumped to Rp 1.4 trillion on Tuesday as more investors reported losses.

While Bapepam is working closely with the police to resolve the case, protesters at Wednesday’s rally decried Bapepam’s, and to an extent Bank Indonesia’s, failure in detecting the fraud much earlier.

Protest coordinator Gunawan said the victims now expected the government to resolve the case immediately, saying, “If the government was willing to take over Century, they must be willing to guarantee our investments.”

“We just want our money back,” said David, a Century customer from its Makassar, South Sulawesi, branch, who flew thousands of kilometers to join his fellow victims in Jakarta.

Sardjito, head of Bapepam’s investigations and inspections bureau, told the protesters’ representative the agency would continue investigating Antaboga and Century thoroughly.

But even the police now question Bapepam’s supervisory role.

Dinosaur "ghost" fossil revealed

2008-12-11T02:34:00.000-08:00

MENLO PARK, Calif. — By the end of today, scientists hope that by using immensely powerful X-rays, they'll get pictures of a ghost. That is, the ghostly remains of a flying dinosaur bird that lived 150 million years ago.

When they're done, using new X-ray technology produced by electrons moving at or near the speed of light, they may have the clearest image ever recorded of what the creature's appearance and body composition. The 16-inch-long Archaeopteryx (pronounced aR-kee-OP-ter-iks) — or "ancient wing" in Greek — lived in the late Jurassic period.

An Archaeopteryx wasn't something you'd want coming towards you fast. Scientist started working late last week on a stone fossil originally discovered in Germany and now owned by the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. Within days, they had scans showing a creature with nasty sharp little teeth on its beak and two really pointy talons at the end of each wing.

"It's kind of like a bird stuffed up a dinosaur's butt," says University of Manchester paleontologist Phil Manning, one of the researchers.

When this particular creature died, it sank to the bottom of a shallow lagoon full of very salty water, where it was entombed in the limestone that preserved it as an amazing fossil. The Archaeopteryx is important because it's a crossover species, an example of evolution in motion, as one branch of dinosaurs was morphing into what would become the ancestors of birds. But only 10 Archaeopteryx fossils have been found, and of those only five are intact enough to tell us much.

The original idea of using new X-ray technology on fossils came from engineer and chemist Robert Morton of the Children of the Middle Waters Institute. His day job is doing chemistry for oil companies, which means he thinks about how to get information about things that might be hidden in very old rocks, such as oil. He heard a talk in the late 1980s and realized that the technique described could also be used to "see" the chemical ghosts of fossils.

Scientists at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy, are using this new method to tease out secrets that were embedded in the stone all those millions of years ago. The secrets may tell us more than we ever knew about how the Archeaopteryx lived and flew — and maybe even give us a few hints on how to store spent nuclear fuel as well.

The researcher are using synchrotron radiation, which produces intense X-ray beams, to build an elemental image of the creature. A single, intense beam is slowly scanned across the surface of the fossil.

As the X-ray bounces off the surface of the fossil, it creates a unique pattern that reveals the chemical composition of the remnants of the animal that are still preserved in the stone. Sometimes even those remnants are gone, but because other chemicals flowed in during fossilization to take their place in a fairly orderly manner, scientists can reverse-engineer what they see to imagine what once was there. The technique is called X-ray fluorescence imaging.

This enormous waterfall of data is then fed into a computer program that allows scientists to create an image of the leavings of a list of different elements — calcium, phosphorous, sulfur, zinc, copper and others. Seen alone or layered over one and other, they give an image of the "ghost" of a body that disintegrated millions of years ago, leaving only tiny traces of the elements it was made of behind.

Although the scan will be completed today, scientists will be working on the data for months. Then they'll submit it for publication in a scientific journal. By the conventions of the world of science, they can't release any images of anything new they've found before the paper comes out. So sometime late in 2009 or early 2010, keep an eye out for stories about the Ancient Feathered Dinosaur, and see what its wings really looked like.

Heart attack patients get 'big chill' treatment

2008-12-10T02:51:00.000-08:00

It took five mighty shocks to get Cynthia Crawford's heart to start beating again after she collapsed at Ochsner Clinic a few weeks ago. A dramatic rescue, to be sure, yet it was routine care she could have had at any hospital. What came next, though, was not. As she lay unconscious, barely clinging to life, doctors placed her in an inflatable cocoon-like pool that sprayed her naked body with hundreds of icy cold jets of water, plunging her into hypothermia.

"Like jumping in the North Sea," said the cardiologist leading her care, Dr. Paul McMullan.

Days later, Crawford was recovering without the brain damage she might have suffered.

For years, doctors have tried cooling people to limit damage from head and spinal cord injuries, strokes and even prematurity and birth trauma in newborns. It's also used for cardiac arrest, when someone's heart has stopped. In January, New York will join several other cities requiring ambulances to take many cardiac arrest patients to hospitals that offer cooling.

Now doctors will be testing a new and dramatically speedier way of doing this for a much more common problem — heart attacks, which strike a million Americans each year.

"It's extremely appealing" because the cooling system is non-invasive and can be used in an ordinary hospital room, said Dr. George Sopko of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which is paying for this first-of-a-kind study.

Animal research suggests it will help, "but we need the hard evidence" from human tests to know, he said.

Heart attacks occur when an artery gets blocked, depriving the heart muscle of oxygen and blood, and causing part of it to die. But the damage doesn't happen all at once — cells die off slowly, sending chemical messages that make neighboring cells do the same. Cooling the body to around 90 degrees from its usual 98.6 slows this down.

"Tissue that would have died, were it not cooled, can stay alive," McMullan explained.

Cooling has been around — you may have heard of it last year when it was used experimentally on Buffalo Bills football player Kevin Everett's spinal cord injury. Doctors pumped frigid saline into his veins to reduce inflammation and give things a chance to heal.

Half a dozen companies sell tools to do this — tubes that go into veins or the belly cavity, fancy ice bags and gel packs, blankets with cold saline inside, fans blowing cold air over patients, even a skullcap to cool the head.

Surgeons use cooling now during open-heart surgery, and promising results from a few studies several years ago led the American Geart Association to recommend it for cardiac arrest patients, whose hearts have stopped.

"The problem with all these trials is the cooling was too slow," taking as long as six hours with some devices, said the leader of one key study, Dr. Michael Holzer of Medical University of Vienna in Austria.

That's too pokey for treating heart attacks, where doctors must move at warp speed to open the clogged vessel and keep the initial injury as small as possible — the "time is muscle" message we often hear.

The only big study of cooling for heart attacks — 392 patients given cold saline through a big vein — failed to show benefit, said its leader, Dr. William O'Neill, executive dean of clinical affairs at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine.

However, the cooling was only a few degrees and took an average of 75 minutes.

"We believe the reason the trial didn't work is they didn't cool them fast enough," McMullan said.

His proof: People in the study whose temperatures were below 95 degrees at the time they had their artery-opening procedures wound up with only half the heart damage of the others, who were not cooled so much or so quickly.

Which is why doctors at Ochsner (pronounced OSH-ner) have high hopes for the ThermoSuit, made by Life Recovery Systems in Waldwick, N.J.,and designed by a former Air force flight surgeon, cardiologist Robert Freedman of Alexandria, La.

A pump rapidly inflates the pool-like suit until it puffs up tightly around the patient as doctors Velcro on a plastic topsheet. Tubes spray naked patients with frigid water as other tubes drain it away.

The clinic has not yet had the type of heart attack patients called for in the new study. But McMullan has used the suit on 12 cardiac arrest patients, like Crawford, and cooled them to around 90 degrees in as little as nine minutes, typically in about half an hour.

"That's fabulous and that is very quick. That's the kind of speed we're going to need" for this to be practical and useful, said Dr. Lance Becker, a University of Pennsylvania doctor and Heart Association spokesman who led cooling experiments in animals.

On the morning of Nov. 11, when Crawford went into cardiac arrest, she had just arrived for an appointment to see if her badly weakened heart qualified her to be on a transplant list. A doctor-in-training found her slumped near the elevators, and emergency workers shocked her with a defibrillator to restart her heart.

Soon, McMullan and 10 other doctors and nurses were furiously working on the 56-year-old patient as more staff huddled outside a small window in the hall, craning for a peek at the cooling suit spectacle going on inside.

"Isn't that something? Will you look at that," one of them muttered.

Crawford's temperature dropped to 90 degrees in about 40 minutes. Days later, her family marveled at how well she had come through.

"We called her an icicle," said her daughter, Sarah Crawford, a Tulane University student majoring in public health. "Her brain function is perfect. We were very grateful that that happened, and that she was at Ochsner," which is a 90-minute drive from her home in Brusly, La., near Baton Rouge.

Cardiac arrest patients usually are unconscious; heart attack patients will be given sedatives and a drug to limit shivering. The sedatives would be given anyway in preparation for the artery-opening procedure, McMullan said.

There are potential risks: Cooling could trigger a heart rhythm problem, cause loss of fluids, a blood pressure drop, an imbalance of essential body salts, even respiratory problems.

A ThermoSuit system costs a hospital around $30,000, and each single-use suit is $1,600. Federal officials have given previous grants totaling $1.3 million to develop the suit, and are spending $700,000 for the 20-patient heart attack study at Ochsner.

Results so far on cardiac arrest patients have impressed Ochsner's chief of cardiology, Dr. Christopher White.

"These are dead people, and they walk out of the hospital. One of them was a mother with six children," he said.

Another was Steve Benton, 52, treated with the suit in April.

"They came out and told my dad that I was dead," but he wound up being revived and survived without any brain damage. He is now back at work as a landscaping contractor.

Ananda named suspect for assault

2008-12-07T02:54:00.000-08:00

JAKARTA: Central Jakarta police said Thursday they had named Indonesian race driver Ananda Mikola as a suspect in an alleged forceful dispossession, kidnapping and offensive act on a man, named Agung Setiawan.

"We've named Ananda a suspect along with three other accomplices," Central Jakarta police deputy chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Angesta Romano Yoyol was quoted by www.kompas.com

According to the Criminal Code, Ananda could face 12 years in jail.

Yoyol said that police investigators were still questioning Ananda's younger brother Moreno Suprapto as a witness in the case.

Media reports said earlier that Ananda and other suspects, later revealed as employees of actress Marcela Zalianty, had tortured Agung after the he failed to pay off his debt to Marcela.

AS SAFE AS IT GETS

2008-11-29T03:05:00.000-08:00

Despite the obvious danger, several women hitch a ride standing up in the bed of a pickup car going at high speed in Burneh district, Bangkalan. Forced to take the risk because of an inordinate shortage of public transportation vehicles, the passengers were on their way back to their home village from trading at the Bangkalan traditional market.

Burn Her!Why it's dangerous to be a witch in a recession.

2008-11-24T03:11:00.000-08:00

Why did people murder suspected witches in Renaissance Europe? And why do they still do so today in sub-Saharan Africa? As someone whose main source of information about witch trials is Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I was fascinated to learn that witch-burning has its own grim economics.

Clearly, some of the fervor for murdering women—typically elderly widows—had cultural and religious origins. In the early medieval period, the Catholic Church dismissed the idea that witches had supernatural powers, and some church documents argued that it was heresy to believe in witchcraft. Without church support, it's easy to see why witch trials were not popular.

Yet when the trial and execution of suspected witches surged in the mid-16^th century and throughout the 17^th, it was a cross-cultural phenomenon. Trials took place in many countries and were conducted by both Protestants and Catholics, and in both secular and religious courts. Perhaps a million women were killed across Europe after being accused of witchcraft, and most of them died during this period. Why?

Poll: Who Do You Trust More, Google or Facebook?

2008-11-20T03:13:00.000-08:00

by Josh Catone

In general, 2008 was a very good year for tech companies in terms of building customer trust. In TRUSTe’s annual “Most Trusted Companies for Privacy” survey, the majority of tech companies improved over last year: eBay jumped six points to 2, Apple debuted in the top 10 at 8, Hewlett Packard jumped 10 points to hit 6, while IBM stayed firm at 3. Facebook and Yahoo! also cracked the top 20 most trusted for the first time, and even though Dell fell seven places, it still was among the most trusted companies. Even Microsoft improved over last year.

So with most tech companies improving, or holding onto top spots, why did Google drop like a stone from 10 in 2007 to fall all the way out of the top 20 this year? It could be that consumers are becoming more aware of their personal privacy, and as Google grows and spreads its influence, users are become more concerned about just how much Google knows about them.

A couple of weeks ago blogger Allen Stern wrote a great and eye opening outline of how much Google might actually know about you. Taken all at once, Stern’s list can really be somewhat alarming, so it would not be surprising if consumers are starting to grow wary of the company.

“Consumers feel they are losing control of personal information,” said TRUSTe in a press release. “Only 45 percent of consumers feel they have control over their personal information, down from 56 percent in 2006.”

Despite some mishaps last year (such as the Beacon debacle), Facebook has actually gone to great lengths to improve the granular privacy controls on its site — though they could still do a better job of promoting them to users, in our opinion. As users become more concerned about their private information being mined by big web companies, they’ll likely put the most trust in the ones that can make them feel more secure by putting them in control of how that information is used.

So we’d like to ask you, which of the following big web tech companies that appear on the list do you trust the most? Please vote in our poll and leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Helpful Hyperlinks with JavaScript

2008-11-18T03:17:00.000-08:00

Which links will receive an icon?

To define what type of file the link goes to, we’ll look at the file extension. The file types are split out into two groups: those that have unique icons, such as torrent files, and those that will share the same icon, but have different file extensions, such as Flash files (.fla and .swf).

Grouping file extensions that share the same icon saves you having hundreds of CSS classes and icons. To achieve this I have created two arrays.

The first array, IndividualClassArray, holds the file extensions of all the links with individual icons. The base of the CSS class name is the same as the file extension. That is, a text file is referenced with ‘txt’ and the CSS class name is the classPrefix (set earlier) and ‘txt’ the base CSS class name, making a CSS class called ‘iKon_txt’ in this case.

IndividualClassArray = Array('txt', 'xls', 'css', 'torrent');

The second array, classArray, is actually a multidimensional array, but don’t let that put you off. Basically, it’s a group of individual arrays grouped according to the kind of icon we’d like to use. The first item in this array is IndividualClassArray (this array must always be the first array). The following arrays are similar to the previous array with one important difference: the first item in each of the arrays is the name of the CSS class that will be used, and the following items are the file extensions which need that class. In the following example the .swf and .fla file extensions will be associated with the ‘flash’ CSS class.

classArray = Array( IndividualClassArray, Array('flash', 'swf', 'fla') );

Note: File extensions exclude the dot, that is, xls not .xls.

For maximum portability, the actual CSS class name used will have a prefix such as ‘iKon_’, which we configured earlier—but in these arrays we always exclude the prefix. So a Flash CSS class is always referred to as ‘flash’ rather than ‘iKon_flash’.

External Links

To figure out whether a link is an external site, we need to know the host name of the current page.

For this we use:

url = parseURL(qualifyHREF(document.location.href)).hostname;

This takes the current document’s location and gets the domain name using the qualifyHREF function to make sure we have a fully qualified address and the parseURL function to get the host name. (Both of these functions were written by our resident JavaScript guru, Brothercake, and covered in his blog post). Later, when we add the classes for the external links, we’ll use this host name to work out whether the link is external to our site.

The Code That Actually Does the Work

Now we need to get all the links from the page using document.getElementsByTagName("a"), and determine the file extension of the link.

We do this by using the functions parseURL and qualifyHREF again.

First, take the href value of the a element:
linkHref = aElements[iv].href;

Next, parse the value to gain more information about the link:
oUrl = parseURL(qualifyHREF(linkHref));

Then get the extension for the link:
fileExt = oUrl.extension;

Then, we need to loop through these links and work out whether they need an icon. This is where it starts to become a little bit trickier. We need to loop through classArray and each of the arrays it contains. We do this by running a loop within a loop. Yes, that’s a loop, in a loop, in a loop! This hairy piece of code looks like this:

aElements = document.getElementsByTagName("a"); iElements = aElements.length; for (iv = 0; iv < iElements; iv++) { iLen = classArray.length; for (ii = 0; ii < iLen; ii++) { iArr = classArray[ii].length; for (i = 0; i < iArr; i++) { // Do we need to add an icon? } } }

Does this link require an icon?

To find out if we need to add an icon, we’ll compare the file extension of the link with each of the extensions listed in our arrays.

if (fileExt == classArray[ii][i]) { if (ii === 0) { linkClass = fileExt; } else { linkClass = classArray[ii][0]; } bFound = true;
Now we know if the link needs an icon, and which class it needs. We’ll add that class using the addClass function we’ve grabbed from the Core JavaScript Library.

if (bFound && linkClass !== '') { addClass(aElements[iv], classPrefix + linkClass); }

Links to External Sites

Working out if the link is to an external site is just a case of comparing the URL host name we determined earlier with the URL we set in the configuration area.

if (oUrl.hostname.indexOf(url) == -1) { // not our url bExternal = true; }

If it’s true, we’ll append a new image element in the anchor, add a source and ID, and then add an alt and title attribute for the image. We add the extra icon rather than just assigning a class to clearly show that this link goes to another site, as well as adding title and alt attributes to the icon.

if (bExternal) { // an external link img = document.createElement('img'); img.id = 'Newimg' + iv; img.src = externalIconLoc; img.alt = 'external site'; img.title = 'links to an external web site'; void (aElements[iv].appendChild(img)); oimg = document.getElementById("Newimg" + iv); addClass(oimg, classExternal); }

The CSS Classes

Let’s move back to the CSS file now.

Here is our CSS class to add the icon to .doc files. Notice the class name is prefixed with ‘iKon_’ and then the file extension ‘doc’. This class basically puts a bit of padding in the top and bottom, and to the right of the link. It then adds a background image of the icon into that space.

.iKon_doc { padding: 5px 20px 5px 0; background: transparent url(icons/icon_doc.gif) no-repeat center right; }

For our external link icons, we’ll use a slightly different class structure. We add some padding top and bottom to make sure our icon is borderless.

.iKon_external{ padding: 5px 0 0 5px; border: 0; }

If you changed the classPrefix variable, don’t forget to alter these class names to match.

Limitations

The link must have a file extension to have an icon assigned to the link (unless it’s an external site). The script also doesn’t recognize query string- based navigation links. If CSS is disabled, then only the external link icon will display and if JavaScript is disabled, then there are no visible changes to the page.

Conclusion

iKonize is a quick and easy way to add visually meaningful icons after links. The script works in IE5.5+ and can work independent of CSS3 attribute selectors. As you might expect, the script degrades well and is easily configured. I hope you find it useful!