Yaphet Kotto UFO

Credit: World Net Daily A decision from the U.S. Supreme Court means the federal government now has an open door to “detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker,” critics of the high court’s ruling said. The high court by its own order this week refused to review  an appellate-level decision that says the president and U.S. military can arrest and indefinitely detain individuals. Officials with  William J. Olson, P.C.,  a firm that filed an amicus brief asking the court to step in, noted that not a single justice dissented from the denial of certiorari. “The court ducked, having no appetite to confront both political parties in order to protect the citizens from military detention,” the legal team told WND. “The government has won, creating a tragic moment for the people – and what will someday be viewed as an embarrassment for the court.” WND reported earlier when the indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorizatio

Archaeologists digging in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. A team of Spanish archaeologists has unearthed what one expert says could be one of the most ancient images of Jesus, painted on the walls of an underground structure in an Egyptian tomb. The Egyptologists from Catalonia made the discovery in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, with the tombs said to date from the 6th and 7th centuries. Read more >> Source: World Net Daily

Credit: The Independent A genetic disease has been cured in living, adult animals for the first time using a revolutionary genome-editing technique that can make the smallest changes to the vast database of the DNA molecule with pinpoint accuracy. Scientists have used the genome-editing technology to cure adult laboratory mice of an inherited liver disease by correcting a single “letter” of the genetic alphabet which had been mutated in a vital gene involved in liver metabolism. A similar mutation in the same gene causes the equivalent inherited liver disease in humans – and the successful repair of the genetic defect in laboratory mice raises hopes that the first clinical trials on patients could begin within a few years, scientists said. Read more >> Source: The Independent

Ukraine crisis: Tortured politician’s widow mourns, as Russia vows to defend its interests Credit: The Independent ‘So many holes in his body’. Elena Rybak describes the terrible injuries suffered by her husband but refuses to blame pro-Kremlin militants The death of her husband under torture had played a part in thepresident of Ukraine’s decision to resume military operations against separatists. But Elena Rybak’s immediate feelings were very personal: devastating grief and numbing incomprehension about what had happened. There was the added horror of seeing the body of someone she loved with terrible injuries inflicted. The body of Vladimir Rybak – a town councillor and member of Yulia Tymoshenko’s Our Ukraine Fatherland party – had been found floating in the river, having disappeared after a confrontation with separatist militants.   Read more  >> Source: The Independent

Face-recognition software: Is this the end of anonymity for all of us? Credit: The Independent The software is already used for military surveillance, by police to identify suspects - and on Facebook. Now the US government is in the process of building the world's largest cache of face-recognition data, with the goal of identifying every person in the country From 2008 to 2010, as Edward Snowden has revealed, the National Security Agency (NSA) collaborated with the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to intercept the webcam footage of 1.8 million Yahoo users. The agencies were analysing images that they downloaded from webcams and scanning them for known terrorists who might be using the service to communicate, matching faces from the footage to suspects with the help of a new technology called face recognition. The outcome was pure Kafka, with innocent people being caught in the surveillance dragnet. In fact, in attempting to find faces, th

Philosophy Can Change Your Life by: Dr. Andrew Jeffrey The word 'philosophy' comes from two Greek words,philo, meaning love, and sophia, meaning wisdom or knowledge.  A "philosopher" in Ancient Greece was literally a "lover of knowledge."  Originally, all theoretical studies, from rhetoric to marine biology, were considered to fall under the scope of philosophy.  For example, one ancient philosopher, Aristotle, wrote on both of those two subjects, as well as logic, ethics, politics, physics, metaphysics, psychology, theatre, and zoology.  It is likely he wrote on mathematics as well, but many of his works are lost to us.  If you go far enough into the intellectual history of any theoretical subject you find philosophy and philosophers at its roots.  It was believed by nearly all philosophers in antiquity that a correct description of the self and the world would carry with it an implicit prescription concerning the way one should live one's

Credit: The Independent South Korea ferry disaster: Captain and crew committed 'unforgivable, murderous acts' says President Park Geun-hye South Korean President Park Geun-hye has condemned the captain and some crew members of the sunken Sewol ferry, saying they committed “unforgivable, murderous acts” by delaying the ship’s evacuation. During a cabinet briefing on Monday, Park accused captain Lee Joon-seok and his crew of telling “passengers to stay put but they themselves became the first to escape, after deserting the passengers." "Legally and ethically this is an unimaginable act,” she said. As the ship carrying 476 people sank on Wednesday,  Lee told passengers to stay in their cabins , and waited more than half an hour to issue an evacuation order - by which point the ship had tilted. Around 240 people missing people are still believed to be trapped inside.   Read More >> Source:  The Independent